Making $$$ with Mobile Apps ($100K MRR Formula)

0:00I'm going to show you how to build a 100k MRR mobile app. There are people today that are building this type of scale mobile apps, millions of dollars a year of revenue that have very little experience, but know how to create products that are niche enough, that resonate with people and that hit the right marketing channels. Now, I'm not promising by the end of this that you'll be able to hit 100K MRR. No, of course not. But what I am promising you is that by the end of this, you'll have the frameworks necessary, the thinking necessary, the sauce necessary for you to start something that could hit 100K MRR or more.

0:46so my hope is that it gets your creative juices flowing and and that you end up shipping something that that is valuable and that starts generating revenue for you and creates happy customers now there are literally kids now creating mobile apps that are hitting this amount of scale and it you know I think it's they've just have a good understanding of the lay of the land they understand creators really well they understand what makes viral apps really well they understand what makes viral social formats so if they can do it so could you I'm going to give the whole playbook here I have done consumer mobile in the past I've started and sold venture-backed consumer mobile apps I was an advisor to Reddit advisor to TikTok so I'm not just a Joe Schmo and And I, you know, have been in the trenches and I want to share this sauce with you.

1:36It is no fun keeping the sauce to myself. It's like, you know, eating spaghetti. It's no fun to eat spaghetti alone. You know, you want to invite your family. You want to invite your neighbors. You want to invite your friends. So you are my family. You're my neighbors, my friends here today. All that I ask is you like and comment on this. So I know to keep sharing the sauce with you. And also it'll spread to more people. So, you know, I think the world is a better place when we have products that people love to use every single day. So let's get into it. If you want to build a 100 camera or mobile app, you want to pick a daily habit to serve.

2:11Important word here, habit. The habit is because of the frequency of it. You know, habits are something that you do frequent. You're going to want to find a narrow wedge use case. So you don't want to create something. You don't want to pick this huge, huge competitive space. You want to pick something that's narrow and that wedges into something. And I will say having AI a part of that is important because that's going to AI obviously is very interesting to consumers right now. They want to use consumer AI products. You're going to want to prototype this in a relatively short amount of time. You can use something like Lovable or Bolt.

2:48You can use something. I think they integrate with Expo to create the mobile app. You can use something like Rourke and you can use something like VibeCode app. And then you're just going to want to do distribution tests. So you're going to want to focus on one channel with three formats per week. So the mistake a lot of people make is they're trying five different channels, 10 different formats. No, I think, you know, the people that really crush it here are focusing on one channel. think Instagram or TikTok, and then just different formats. What I mean by formats, I mean, you know, are you doing story, you know, like, I don't mean like an Instagram story, like a story where you're doing these.

3:28Let me tell you about the story of how, you know, I lost 65 pounds. Or are you doing like meme style stuff, different types of meme formats and content formats that, you know, hopefully resonate. and I can do a whole video on how to find formats in the future. Once you find something that starts to take off from a format perspective, you're going to want to onboard 100 true users. If you can't get 100, it's 12, 18, 25. Then you start monetizing them. What you see is people either do X dollars per month or week or an annual basis. And then you do this retention loop and referral. So once you have a group of people, you want to incentivize them to invite their friends.

4:15And then you start scaling via ads, ASO, App Store Optimization, and affiliates. Typically, I'm seeing anywhere between 15 % and 40 % affiliate cuts for these consumer mobile apps. And then you get to 100K MRR. It looks so simple, doesn't it? But it is more complicated than that. And in this episode today, we're going to go deeper in each of these different categories. And I hope to just give you a little bit more confidence around some of this stuff. Yes, I know that, you know, people are going to say in the comment section, you make it look so easy, you make it look so easy. I'm not trying to make it look easy.

4:53I'm just trying to distill it as much as possible for you. So I talked about the key word being a habit. And I want to just double click into that. a habit you know let's just say we're talking about in the wellness space the habit might be something like a sleep tracking nuance and you know and money it might be micro saving challenges and learning it might be 10 minute space drills in fitness it might be form feedback bursts and it even might be even more niche than that you know and it probably is it probably is like these are this is niche and it's not niche enough in my opinion the important thing is like if you want to build something in wellness let's say and you want to build something in sleep you want to look for an evidence of paid demand.

5:35That's, you know, a lot of people come up with ideas for mobile apps, consumer mobile apps, and they have a lot of demand, but people are not willing to pay for it. So that is a, that's like one of the biggest mistakes people make. Don't make that mistake. You want to look at a search volume within communities. You want to look for competitor gaps. You want to look at high frequency daily use case, not weekly. You know, if you're seeing weekly use cases or monthly use cases, kill it. One of the reasons why Cal AI works is the people in that, you know, in that, what is Cal AI? You take a picture and it tells you how many calories it is.

6:14People are doing that every single day. In fact, they're doing it multiple times a day. So they're thinking it's valuable to them. They're willing to pay for it. And they're selling the outcome of look fit, look good, and people will pay for that. So there's a few ways that you can find demand. One is you can go to Reddit and you can actually just go into different subreddits. What I like to do is I like to just sort by the top or the best. And then you can actually, you know, sort. Let's do top and maybe this year. I'm in the SaaS subreddit. and then you can just see like what people are talking about and just and it gives you validation to what you what it is you're building so you know if it's if it's health you're building something wellness like what are the 10 different subreddits that you need that you should be looking into how can you sort by top and best by the year by the week by the month and then just write notes around what people are saying how they're talking and that'll help you validate it one of my favorite features on idea browser is this market insights bit so it basically uses ai to scrape facebook groups and reddits all the stuff that i was doing manually basically going to you know subreddits and trying to figure out what are the different pain points uh what are some people whatever what are some products that people are asking for what are the different habits that these people have but i just auto i built this to automate the whole thing so for example you know i'm in this I can see the fractional executive marketplace in management OS.

7:51And I can see what are the different pain points and solutions and underserved segments and just literally go in and see how often are people saying, it's really hard to find fractional executives. And I can literally get quotes from people. How people are, you can see the current workarounds, people are using LinkedIn and Upwork and TopTool. And it's like, I never even heard of TopTool. And then willingness to pay signals. Someone said burnt thousands of dollars. Several users mentioned two to 10 ,000 engagement gone, you know, gone already. So I just love playing with this, going through this, seeing what the different solutions that people are asking for.

8:34It's crazy that people are literally on Facebook groups and subreddits being like, hey, someone go and like, I would pay for this. I would pay for this. They're asking for it. it also goes into these underserved segments and much much more um i just think that there's a treasure trove of data in facebook groups and subreddits and yeah that's what one that's why i built idea browser idea browser is a paid is there's a free component and there's a paid product what i showed you today was uh the paid paid product uh and then tiktok you know it's free to use tiktok and you can just you know if you're building something in sleep tracking what you can do is just go onto TikTok, search for sleep tracking.

9:20And I'm just going to do that right now, sleep tracking. And then once you search for it, you'll see in the top right, there's three dots. Click the three dots and you click filters and then you sort by the most amount of likes. and then you can just watch videos of people in your space to give you to give you a sense of like is there demand for this habit so step one is basically finding this habit usually it's related to a trend but find a habit you you know could use some of these tools to go ahead and do that once you've figured that out you figured out what you want to build you know this is sort of how I think about, you know, the experience of the app.

10:10So you create the app, the user basically discovers the app in the app store. There's a listing view in the app store. It's really important to have, you know, just a really clean, you know, name and app store previews that, you know, get people to want to download it, right? So the conversion rate on the app store is really important. You know, for example, like I think the name VibeCode app is a really good name for a VibeCoding app for mobile apps. So, you know, one of the reasons why this is now, you know, a top 10, I think developer app is, you know, the name is really good. So think about how you can optimize the name and the previews, include a video in there.

10:58So people are going to download it, they're going to open it. And then you basically have maximum 60 seconds in onboarding. And it's important to create value first. When you look at some of these apps that have a lot of virality to them, they basically have just a very short value first mentality for developing that. And then you're going to create an account. They'll have a starter plan for success. And then you create like a daily check in. And then you can create some sort of streak or nudge and progress within the framework of the app. So to just summarize what we figured out here is, you know, you figure out a habit, you figure out a micro niche in that habit.

11:48You validate that by things like Reddit, Idea Browser, TikTok. You optimize the app store previews. You optimize the name, create a really good brand. And, you know, you're off to the races. You know, you include things like leaderboards and streaks and progress because you want people to feel like they're, you know, making progress on whatever habit they are. There is. And by the way, there's so much like people, people, you know, see these examples of like Cal AI and all these apps and they're like, it's over. There's too much competition. There's so many different habits that and micro habits that there's opportunity for.

12:30So keep going. What I've seen in terms of pricing is there's usually a free trial between seven to 14 days. I'm actually seeing seven days to be a little more effective. And then what I've noticed is people are charging, you know, seven to, you know, I put$15 here, but realistically, all the way up to$40 a month for different core experiences. You can do something where you have a paywall after the first habit win. So you get them to basically participate in the habit, they win, and then it's like, okay, now you understand the value of this product, go and pay for it. Or you can do something like a$49 a year annual anchor, an add-on for a pro pack where it's like$5 a month or$10 a month.

13:20This is for your power users. You don't have to worry about this for your minimal viable product. This is like post 100K a month, but something to consider. Also, do you want to create a group or team plan? For example, CalAI for your company and stuff like that. That's a way to get a lot of seats really quickly. But again, that's post 100K a month. This is the way to think about pricing. So this is just helpful for me to think about. It might be helpful for you. this graph around, okay, so just around how to think about getting a stranger onboarded and how to get them become an advocate for your company.

14:03So they download the app, they're onboarded. You want to get that first success within 24 hours. And I can't tell you how important that is. If you can get success, like that win within the first hour, 30 minutes, two hours, that is actually so much. It's an order of magnitude better than 22 hours, 18 hours, you know, 40 hours, because it just, you might not be able to win them back. So you get them for the first win. So important. Your MVP is you're just focusing on the first one of the habit. And then you try to get them to engage back into the app. Think about like three sessions in seven days, building that routine, right?

14:42So you want to go from first win to building the routine. What ends up happening is people are going to go into different camps. So some people are going to go into the camp of they're not really using the app, they're idle. So you want to basically trigger a nudge or benefit. So I see that you're not taking a photo of your food today. How can you get the user to actually do that? And you want to position that as value for the user. the the mistake a lot of uh app builders make is they think about themselves they're just pushing the content they're like i need you to be active because i know if you're active you're going to be using this product more you're going to be spending more money but that's a mistake what you want to do is just position it as okay how how can let me let me put my my feet in the shoes of this customer how you know what can i what can i send them that's going to produce value that's going to get you to the win.

15:45So triggers and nudges are very important. Even if they're three days idle, you want to trigger and nudge them. And then you want to, for the people who do streaks, these are people that are going to be your active power, power users. And then you're going to want to basically get those people and prompt those people to share and refer the product because those people are going to be your advocates. They're using it every single day. So you're going to basically segment those people and then send them notifications um and communication on social and stuff like that that says like hey like you know if you share it you're going to get xyz so in this section i'm going to talk about how to actually get customers this isn't the only way to get customers but how i'm seeing a lot of these apps get customers um it's basically a mix of organic owned and paid so on organic what they're doing is they're have you know these tiktok pages sometimes it's multiple tiktok pages um and they're also using ig with many chat integration so i'm sure you've seen it it's basically like they'll do a reel and they'll say comment xyz for more and then many chat will automatically dm people um they're doing things like seo geo they're using platforms like X.

17:05I think even Roy from Cluely, the founder of Cluely, was saying how important X is in terms of getting customers. They use that to send them, to get them on a wait list of some sort. It could be a newsletter, could be just a wait list that's owned and operated. And they also use things like paid. So ASA, which is Apple's search program. So the paid search when you're actually searching on the app store. They're using Facebook and IG creatives and they're creating, you know, tens, if not hundreds of them. And they're using clipping. I actually think that clipping 97 % of it is like complete waste of money.

17:48But some of them are seeing success around clipping. I should have mentioned what is clipping. Clipping is basically when you take long form, you put it into short form. And then there are these agencies that you can pay that will say, for every million views you get, if you pay me$5 CPM, I'll go, would you pay me$5 CPM if I get you a million views? Absolutely. Because then you're looking at it and you're like, a million views, if I convert 1 % of those to my app, then I'm going to crush it. But the problem is a lot of those views just aren't converting from what I've seen. So we'd love to hear what people are seeing in terms of clipping in the comment section.

18:28but hard to find this working. I'm sure it does work in some cases, but for the most part, it hasn't been working or I haven't seen it work. Then in terms of owned, you also have the in-app share prompts. That's going to be a huge lever for you. And then you can do things like referral where it's like three for one month pro. So that's just a way to get your customers to have more customers. so um i i do think that you can get from like 30 days zero to 30 days to app revenue so you can do something like for the first few days you define your wedge then you define your you know wireframes and prototype and you create your core loop which is hard right that's around it's hard but you know at this point hopefully you can you understand the habit you've think you've used things like reddit TikTok and Idea Browser to validate some of it.

19:24Then you do the telemetry, the paywall, you do some onboarding and the ASO, then you do some channel tests, and then you work on retention. You could come up with an idea and build an app in 30 days and get to some revenue. You can screenshot this, but I do believe it's totally possible. Let's talk about the metrics that you should care about if you're trying to get to 100K MRR. So retention, churn, streaks percentage is kind of an underrated one. You want to get that as high as possible. D7 and D30, meaning day seven and day 30 retention. The revenue, obviously. The ARPU, average revenue per user.

20:09The trial to the paid percentage, that's going to be a huge one. And the annual mix percentage. the acquisition, the cost per install your organic installs, your ASA CTR all of that stuff is going to be really important these are all levers, you're basically a scientist and you're playing with all these levers in the referral camp you have invites per users and the K factor, K factor basically means the virality for every one person that comes into the app how many are they inviting so if you have a K factor above one that's what you want to get because that means every person is bringing another person.

20:49In the activation camp, what's going to be really important to you is your day zero to D1 success percentage, your signup completion, and your time to first win. I included this over here because a lot of people don't know how to think about new features and what to put on the backlog of feature development. So the way I think about it is when you're coming up with an idea. So let's say you've built your MVP, you've got your core loop, but it isn't exactly working. Some of these, the retention isn't as high as you want or the streak percentage isn't as high as you want. So at this point, you're going to come up with a bunch of ideas for how to fix that.

21:30But it's important to use the impact times confidence over effort and put it into a score. I call it the ice score. you know not all feature ideas are created equal so you have to you know you if you're working with a team you and your team have to come up with your best guess at what the impact is going to be if you create this what your confidence is that and how much effort is it going to take to go build that and based on that you can prioritize what you are going to ship this week and then try to aim to ship three things per week if not kill defer that other stuff right just like put it in the backlog don't think about it focus on your one two or three things this week if i'm building a hundred k uh mr mobile app one of my north stars is going to be weekly active paying users and the way to think about that is you're going to have your acquisition volume right how many people are coming in at the top of the funnel and you know how are you going to be able to you know get more of acquisition, well, you just play with how much you're spending on app store keywords, paid, ASA, creatives, that's your IG and creator budget, and then your organic, right?

22:49The activation rate, so your onboarding speed, the pay conversion, the pricing and the timing, and the weekly retention, which is streaks and notifications. So I think that, you know, just thinking about the North Star as your weekly active paying users, W-A-P-U, and then thinking about playing with the levers of acquisition, activation rate, pay conversion, and weekly retention is how you're going to start thinking about it. If, you know, anyone can go and create a mobile app that gets, you know, a few hundred dollars MRR, but the ones that get to 100k MRR really understand these levers quite well.

23:25the the monthly MRR you know because they're software businesses and there's not much cost your gross margin is going to be 80 to 90 percent before apple takes their cut um so I think you know you don't want to spend a lot of money on paid first in fact I would spend nothing really unpaid in the beginning I would be working just on organic um doing my organic stuff trying to get you know maybe some affiliate but you know mostly organic and then once you've figured out okay what's my LTV lifetime value then you can start playing with paid and then you should think about paid as a payback within less than three months you know the LTV how do you calculate LTVs is a common question it's your ARPU your ARPU average revenue per user times month retain and then you should think about trying to get an LTV over CAC of above three.

24:27The best apps, the best consumer mobile apps have an LTV over CAC above three. And that's what I'm seeing in these 100k plus MR consumer mobile apps is they just, they're spending a lot of money because, you know, it's, they're just getting paid back so quickly. So this is the framework for how you could create a consumer mobile app and how some of the best people are thinking about it, what I've observed. And without further ado, I'm going to actually give you four ideas that I think could fit in this framework around the habits and that are sorely needed. And this is just to get your creative juices flowing.

25:13This is really to get, I know you're going to listen to this and you might be like, I don't really like this one, but it actually got me thinking about something else. So the dog allergy scanner. So for owners of dogs with food sensitivities, so there's millions of dogs out there. Percentage of them have food sensitivities. People really care about their dogs, obviously. Snap a photo of ingredient labels at the store. AI flags unsafe food for your dog specific allergies. So what is the core loop? The core loop is you scan safe, unsafe feedback, save to favorites. You can monetize with a$5 a month premium.

25:44so you can do multiple pets you know vet q a custom diet plans things like that and then how do you grow this thing well you do it via vet partnerships and pet tiktok um so really simple one i think there's a lot of analogies here to like cal ai and uh there's a guy who has an app i think it's called i think his name yeah bobby and the bobby approved app and he he has like a YouTube channel and he just says, you know, is this a healthy, is this a healthy Bobby approved organic, no seed oils thing? And people, there's millions of people that scan in grocery stores, um, to see if it's, you know, healthy.

26:23Well, this is just sort of a similar idea, but for allergies. Um, and you know, there's the saying for a business, are you a vitamin or are you a painkiller? A vitamin business, you don't really want to be in a vitamin business means like you don't really need it but a painkiller you really need um and this is something that would fit into the painkiller because obviously people don't want to feed uh stuff that is going to make their dogs lives uh worse worse than you know or just not not fun right so um we don't want to hurt our dogs um the second one is um second idea is something that actually triggered uh affects me So I know, well, this is why I included this one.

27:08So I get migraines and I would pay for something like this. So it's called the Migraine Weather Guard. So for migraine sufferers who track triggers, which I do track my triggers, things like red wine, things like some red meats and stuff like that. It uses hyperlocal weather barometric pressure shifts to warn users hours before onsets. daily check-in logs at log symptoms builds personal trigger models monetize via seven dollar a month subscription affiliate with migraine products like cooling caps and supplements and then you can do niche distribution through reddit migraine groups neuro neurology clinics and migraine tiktok so another simple idea um you know uses ai to basically figure this stuff out that's the wedge people would pay for it it's a painkiller and that's the hook you're starting to get it i also like that it does the affiliate stuff so that helps you get your ltv a little a little bit up this one uh number three uh the silent study timer so for students in competitive exam prep like things like the mcat the cfa the bar and there's hundreds of thousands of the of them um you create something for them that's a study timer so it's not a generic pomodoro app There's hundreds of those apps.

28:26But you simulate a library vibe with a shared silent study rooms where avatars show up who's active. You can do gamified streaks, leaderboard for hours studied, accountability groups. You can monetize via$29 a year. Premium study rooms with advanced analytics that tells you how locked in you are. And remember we talked about names for apps, why certain apps are just crushing it. Cal AI. We talked about the VibeCode app. Well, if something like this was called like locked in, I think it would do really well. And then the growth would be via YouTube study with me channels and discord servers. Another kind of idea I would have for this is a lot of people listen to lo-fi studying music.

29:13So they create, you can create like a YouTube channel, put lo-fi music, make that music with AI, get people onto it, and then basically send them to this app. This is an idea that will work. This idea will work. So you're going to go, you create the organic via these YouTube channels, and then you send them to this app. I don't know why people aren't doing this. And you can also pay some of these other, you know, lo-fi channels to promote some of your stuff with a link in bio. How much would it cost, right? So this is a good one. The one downside to this idea, I will say, is students are less likely to pay than, for example, 37-year-old people suffering from migraines who have kids who just want to make sure they're not going to get it.

30:03But I do think this is a cool idea. And the last idea is a plant-watering AI coach. So we've all dealt with plants that we buy and they die and it sucks. So for urban apartment dwellers, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, uh, snap a photo and, and anyone really, um, snap a photo, but that's who you would target. I think, um, high disposable income, that sort of thing. Snap a photo of a plant. The app identifies the species, builds watering and sunlight schedule. You can send push reminders aligned with weather, skip watering if humid today, monetize via$3 a month premium. And then you do the affiliate thing, links to soils, pots, fertilizer.

30:45And then you growth via Instagram plant influencers and Etsy plant sellers. So I think I put this as the end. It's probably my least favorite idea because this is actually quite competitive. There are apps that are doing something similar that are making millions of dollars a year. But I do think that I've used some of them. They're not the best apps. And I still think that there's opportunity, even if there is competition, to have your own take on it with the right name with the right brand and with the right go-to-market strategy so this has been uh episode on just building consumer mobile apps um you know i think that for a while you couldn't build a consumer mobile app that got to this amount of scale and without raising tons of venture capital and and then taking it years of time but i do think that now right now as of recording this um there's just a remarkable opportunity because people on the consumer side want to try ai apps um it unlocks all these new behaviors like oh take a photo to do this and ai analyzes it um and then you have all these creators that could distribute your product and just you know i just think that's a it's a remarkable time to build and i think that people think that um it's getting saturated with consumer mobile apps but um i don't think that's the case that's my hot take i think there's going to be so so many examples of you know there's gonna be like a hundred you know mini versions of cal ai or or more um that are successful and my hope is that someone listening got a little bit of creative juices that helped them be like you know what i am going to start an app.

32:35I am going to start an app. And that's all I can ask for. So if you enjoyed this, please let me know. I hope it got the creative juices flowing. Have a creative day, friends, and I'll see you next time.