The Exchanges

Q All right, let's, let's switch topics a little bit and talk about how you run this thing and what tools to use. I know you're kind of a one man show here, built this app, did a lot of the marketing in the beginning. What are all the tools? What's your whole stack to run an app that makes 50,000 dollars a month like this?

A Uh, yeah, solo founder, I have help now. I think it's inevitable in terms of running, uh, everything I use, Firebase, uh, for the database authentication and cloud functions within the app, uh, super wall for paywall and subscription management. I use OpenAI for AI API. I use Mixpanel for in-app analytics, and of course, Cloud Code, the absolute best tool for actually building the app. And then for marketing, Kuroi for influencer tracking and payments. SideShift for UGC Creator, sourcing, tracking, and payments. Instantly for emails. This is great for sending out mass emails for influencer outreach. Cal for booking meetings. Agree for contracts. And then Google Sheets, I feel like I have to mention sort of run everything through that. And then just general business tools. These QuickBooks for accounting keeps everything super clean. And then one password for password manager on a personal note, absolute life changer. Could not recommend any more to set up a one password.

AI assessment note: “everything I use, Firebase, uh, for the database authentication and cloud functions”

Q Well, thank you for sharing that. Looks like a super cool app. What's your background? How do you get to the place where you're building super cool consumer app that's doing over 10,000 a month?

A My origin story starts as a gym bro. So I launched a fitness chain in China. We scaled it to fifty million ARR across seven locations, and then I moved to Europe. I worked for a German scale-up. I took them from a forty million series B to two hundred million series C, and throughout this process, I learned a crucial lesson. I understood that distribution has become the mode, and that should be the focus of every founder out there. I moved to New York, which is where I launched Flame. The reason behind Flame was because I saw there were a lot of apps out there to help you find a partner, almost none to help you make the relationship better afterwards. Started building Flame with my then French girlfriend. We started using the app to build a relationship. I also used the relationship to build the app based on what I learned, and we're married, so I guess it worked.

AI assessment note: “My origin story starts as a gym bro. So I launched a fitness chain”

Q sharing this. I mean, what I think is super cool is the amount of like scale and experimentation that you're doing here. And you kind of mentioned this earlier before, but you had like a whole spreadsheet where you track all the content. I think that's super cool. Could you show me that spreadsheet and kind of explain how you use it and how people could maybe create something similar?

A So this is the beautiful spreadsheet. And what we do here on the leftmost side is we track all the accounts, what phones are on, and then the important work starts from here, where we are tracking what is happening with the account. Is it on warm-up phase one? Two? Is it paused? Is it healthy, unhealthy, stop, blog, etc. Then we switch to understanding what channel is it on. Does it have TikTok only? Does it have TikTok and Lemonade? Does it have TikTok and Instagram? So as you can see, Pat, some of them have reactions, some of them have slideshows, some of them have other kind of content. My team goes in every single day, and they track how many views are we getting on the videos, how many likes are there, and then they leave notes in the comments on what is working, what is not working. Why? Because this helps us understand what part of the video performed well, what should we try to replicate today, what should we not try to replicate today. Another cool spreadsheet we have is where we track the hooks and how they're performing individually. Based on this, if this is working, then we'll iterate on it the next day and the next day and the next day by changing small wordings or putting the placement differently. Um, one of the secrets we had is we were having a woman who was reacting on the camera. We discovered that if we put the text Right on her neckline. So not on her face…

AI assessment note: “So this is the beautiful spreadsheet. And what we do here on the leftmost side”

Q That's awesome. I just love how simple it is, you know, solve a small problem. Just helping couples connect in a small way can be an app that makes over 10,000 dollars a month. On a similar note, could we talk about the tech stack? What are the tools behind this 10,000 dollar per month app?

A For building, we have a simple set of tools, Claude Code plus Claude Design, OP. Then RevenueCat allows us to manage a monetization. Mixpanel, we're also using the free tier right now. Then TikTok Native Analytics, I think is the best. No other tool can compete with it. You can see the retention, you can see where people are dropping off, what's happening. Then we also use Hicks Field. And the last part is just having a portfolio of infrastructure, right? I mean, look at this. One, two, three, four, Five. Every phone has three to five TikTok accounts. You're looking at 15 to 20 TikTok accounts right now. This is the infrastructure we use to manage the distribution phase.

AI assessment note: “Claude Code plus Claude Design, OP. Then RevenueCat allows us to manage a monetization.”

Q Okay, so let's talk about the main reason why I wanted to bring you on this channel is that you built a boring or unsexy business in a boring and unsexy niche Taxation. Taxes. So let's talk about this boring business. Why do you think that this business specifically, this boring business worked and became a million dollar business?

A I think it works for, All competition for real demand. In unsexy markets, you often have fewer talented founders chasing very real problems. And the ratio of opportunity to competition is way better. Second, extremely high pay. Taxes, compliance, domiciles, people don't want to deal with them. They just want to hire somebody to pay somebody just to forget about this. Which is exactly why they're willing to pay. Third, the value is concrete and quantifiable. In a lot of startup categories, you're selling a brighter future or some vague promise. In Texas, you can say, here is a likely financial benefit, and here is what our service costs. It makes the customer decision rational and straightforward. So you need to sell less. Fourth, it matched our strengths as a team. So this wasn't just an unsexy market with opportunity. It was a market where our strengths were unusually complementary. That's why I think it worked.

AI assessment note: “In unsexy markets, you often have fewer talented founders chasing very real problems.”

Q competition on YouTube. You could probably even record a Loom video pretty quick and rank on something niche if you have a niche SaaS. That's super cool. Let's dive into the actual playbook here. If you were starting over with a SaaS or with content in 2026 and you wanted to actually create content that ranked In YouTube search engines that actually drove revenue. What would be your step-by-step playbook?

A I'd repeat the exact same process every single time for any product that I build or any business that I work with. The first thing that I think people really get wrong in SaaS is they're so obsessed with getting customers. They don't take the time to think about who those customers are and the problems that they have. The first exercise that I would put you through would be a breakdown of the awareness ladder for your specific customer. So I don't worry about not aware of the need, which is Typically the bottom. I go right to aware of the need, then there's aware of some solutions, then there's aware of specific solutions, aware of benefits, and then convinced and ready to buy. I used to just do this in my head, but now you could talk back and forth with ChatGPT and think about the questions that someone who would want to buy your product would be asking at every step of the journey along the awareness ladder. You then want to figure out how are they asking it? Because a lot of people can say, I understand that someone would ask this question, but how they would ask it? Very different story. So use something like vidIQ or what I use Keywords everywhere to type into the YouTube search bar and see how many people are actually searching for that per month. I would then put my strategy together for which videos that I want to make prioritizing based on the intent of the traffic. So…

AI assessment note: “The first exercise that I would put you through would be a breakdown”

Q Would you be able to show me, like, Like a video or a search keyword that you rank for that drives meaningful revenue for your business?

A Totally. So the example that I'll show you is a video called best Instagram unfollower tracker apps, and it's got 25,000 views and it was made seven months ago. So anybody who's searching this in, they obviously have the immediate problem and they're looking for a solution. As I mentioned earlier, our biggest problem is that people have been scammed by the other options. And so this actually gave me an opportunity to also educate people on why and how we're different. Which made the conversion for this way higher. Here's the analytics. So you can see that I made this thing seven months ago. It took me 20 minutes to make. And look, it's getting this many views every 48 hours of people that are incredibly warm and ready to buy. And then let's see here in terms of the keywords we're ranking for. We are number one for unfollower app Instagram. Not bad. Uh, best Instagram unfollower tracker number one. As you can see, there's a lot of ones here.

AI assessment note: “the example that I'll show you is a video called best Instagram unfollower tracker apps”

Q the headache, check out Delve at the link in the description or go to delve.co slash starter story. Thank you to Delve for sponsoring today's video. Let's get back to the story. Okay, cool. So number one source of traffic. That's cool. You do run 20 different products though. I'm curious if there's any strategy there in terms of having all these different products. How does this help you grow?

A It's really helpful having so many products, especially ones that are very closely related, because it means that we can cross promote them and get multiple sales from the same customer. And there are many ways that I would recommend doing that. We've got one plugin, And two plugin bundles. And this is a key part of how we benefit from having so many products. For each of our products, we have selected a closely related plugin that we try to upsell with it. We then do additional tasks such as after three days following the purchase, we send an email offering them 50% off their next plugin. On Black Friday, we have separate email campaigns for potential customers and existing customers. And for the existing customers, we will use language like discount off your next plugin. And I think the trick there is to target the customers and segment your list so that you are recommending very closely related products to the one that they're already using. And that maximizes the likelihood that they're going to buy. And then you can keep sending the message home, things like banners on your settings pages and constantly reminding them you have these complimentary products We should directly relevant to the one you're already using.

AI assessment note: “it means that we can cross promote them and get multiple sales from the same customer”

Q All right. Well, 20 apps, you run 20 different apps. That's crazy. Can you explain how this Even works. How do you run 20 apps? What kind of apps are these? And if you could pull up some of your revenue dashboards and show us would be awesome.

A Uh, 19 of our products are WordPress plugins. And the final one is our new Shopify app. Our plugins are fairly simple, which is how we can have so many. We've got one called Document Library Pro, um, which lets you add any kind of document library. And we've got lots for WooCommerce. They let you add product tables, product options. Protect areas of your store. They're typically, I would say, small to medium apps that let you add specific functionality to your WordPress website or WooCommerce store. So we have a choice of plans. We've got one site, five sites, or 20, where you either have an annual subscription or lifetime. This is our 20 25 revenue. You can see it's just over 1.7 million dollars. I know I said 1.8 million earlier. That's Because we have other revenue streams such as affiliate income, and we offer some development services. In terms of stats, our average monthly revenue is about a 150,000 dollars across all of our plugins. It's higher than that in busy months like November and lower in quiet months like December. Over the entire lifetime of the business, we've sold 9.8 million dollars worth of WordPress Plugins. Overall, we think that our plugins are used on over 90,000 sites. That's the premium plugins. And also we have free versions of some of our plugins. So that is the total number for paying customers. We have 17,000 on an active subscription. We do have m…

AI assessment note: “19 of our products are WordPress plugins... This is our 20 25 revenue.”

Q business, tech, and startups. Thank you to The Hustle for sponsoring this video. Let's get back to the story. All right, Roman, I want to dive into this Reddit post you have right here, this Y Combinator post. What do you think would be, like, the top three reasons why this post went viral that people watching this can learn from and try to do with their own Reddit posts?

A Sure. So first thing would be using AI. So how I write my post is really simple. First, I'm not an English native. So what I do is I tell my story to ChatGPT by voice, and then I asked ChatGPT to translate and correct my post. So that's something that works really well because you can dive way deeper into details than if you have to write everything. Second thing why it worked is the initial start. So you need to get as many votes as you can in the first five to 10 minutes. So what I do to make it work is I have a group of friends. Where we share each other's Reddit posts, and every time someone shares the post, we all go, like, upvote, and comment. And then third thing that's really important is never putting your SaaS directly in the post, and you can trigger curiosity by highlighting it, and as I said before, putting some proof, and the people reading this post know that it's real, and that we are not telling a fake story.

AI assessment note: “So first thing would be using AI... Second thing... And then third thing”

Q really excited to talk about this, especially Reddit, because Reddit is one of my favorite channels, especially for early founders. This is going to be a fun one. But first, before we get into that, I want to understand what is the business that you built? What's the business model? And then I want to walk through some of your dashboards and show off how much this business is making.

A Uh, yeah. So we are a SaaS business. We have three types of subscription. Most of our users are on the 99 dollar plan. So you get an unlimited amount of high intent lead and you can connect them directly Through our platform. So our users get better results than using regular outreach tools. One of our main ways to get users, or at least at the beginning was Reddit. So we got eleven millions impressions on Reddit, which is insane. If we would have paid for that, that would have cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so that way we got our, uh, let's say 101st customers and we are still getting customers today. So here you can see that's a 24 K MRR. So that's Around 30 K dollars and the growth is pretty good. So we are really happy with how it's going.

AI assessment note: “we are a SaaS business. We have three types of subscription.”

Q Okay, so what would be your playbook for starting over right now in 2026 in getting Reddit off the ground as a marketing channel in a way to get your first 1000 thousand users?

A So first you need a fresh account. You need one account per brother. So for example, I have one account on Chrome, one account on Mozilla, one account on Safari, and that's more than enough to keep it safe. And when you create an account, do not create it with a new email. So if you do the combo new email plus new Reddit account, You will get banned right away. Step two. Once your account is created, you have to add a profile picture. You link your SaaS in the bio, and you activate the secret feature that hides your feed. So when you do Reddit marketing and heavily post on Reddit, some people are going to go to your profile and see that you are always talking about the same SaaS, and they will say, is advertising way too much? So that's a really useful feature. Step three. For the first seven to 14 days, don't even think of doing marketing. You will just post comments. You will upvote. This will warm up your account and gets you the first karma. The more karma you have, the stronger your account is. Step four. Once you've done that, after seven to 14 days, you can start posting. And step five. Once you reach that stage, you can start doing marketing. So there are still some things to know. Some subreddits don't allow promotion. Like the Y Combinator subreddit, it's almost impossible to post anything. And so it's not worth posting there. Step six. With every post, you change the…

AI assessment note: “So first you need a fresh account. You need one account per brother.”

Q to switch topics now to the growth because everyone knows who's watching this. You'll read all the comments. They'll say, okay, you don't talk about the marketing enough. Building stuff is easy now, but as I understand, you were the builder. And the marketer and the growth person. You did all this by yourself. What I want to understand is how did you actually grow this thing and get users?

A In the beginning, I didn't know what worked. So I literally just tried a bunch of different formats and I started posting around 40 times a day on 12 different accounts. Volume really matters here. What ended up working for me was the classic, you know, GDC girl reaction video with a demo on it. That's what one of my biggest competitors was doing and they were just killing it with it. I was broke so I couldn't pay For clips, I couldn't pay for another creator, so I just told my girlfriend at the time, now wife, to help me record some reactions herself, and she honestly killed it. We started posting twice a day. It wasn't until after 40 posts that I finally found a hook that worked, and I knew I just needed to spam that in both TikTok and Instagram. When you start seeing that a format starts to work, put all your energies into that. That alone, with only that account, I was getting around 10 K views a day, which was all I needed To get to my first one K a month. With that, I immediately reached out to my friends and I wanted to scale this and I hired another UGC creators. It was honestly very hard to get her account. This other creators account going on both tick tock and Insta. But after 14 days, we finally cracked one video, which organically got around 20 K views. Knowing how views convert to downloads is very tricky. In my case, 10 K views A day was getting me around two to …

AI assessment note: “What ended up working for me was the classic, you know, GDC girl reaction video”

Q to get into all how you built this, grew this, and even a little bit of paid ads, which I'm excited about. But before, I know you started it this year, which is insane that it's grown this much. I'd love for you to give me a little bit of background on how you get here, how you decide to start building apps. How do you get to this point?

A I actually don't come from a tech background. I actually majored in finance, but I discovered the original Codex model back in 2022. When I saw that, I just completely fell in love with AI and technology, and I decided that's what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I taught myself about AI, about how to code. I've been building tech and AI businesses ever since. Back in January of 2025, I was actually building an adult content AI app, but when I finished it, I just felt completely like disgusted and disappointed with myself. So I decided to make the weirdest pivot in history and turn into the Christian space to try to reconnect with my faith. And after about three months of building apps, nobody wanted, I came across this app called pray screen that blocked your phone until you prayed. And with the new insights I had, I looked at the design. I looked at the features, the way they were executing their distribution. And I said, you know what? I can do a better job than them. And so that's how prayer lock came to life.

AI assessment note: “I majored in finance, but I discovered the original Codex model back in 2022.”

Q All right, cool. Thank you for sharing all that, Rob, sharing all those metrics, being super transparent about that. I love that. We're going to get all into the build in public thing, but I do have to understand about your background. How do you get into building on X, building apps and making money with an app online? What's your backstory?

A I went through the traditional route my entire life. I studied hard at school, got a good degree in computer science from a good university, and then I became a software engineer, and that was until my first employer laid me off, and with that, I decided I was done with corporate, and that's what led me to start my journey on X back in early twenty-twenty-three. Over the next two and a half years, I built and launched five products that made in total a whopping zero dollars, and while it sucked, it taught me three Three fundamental things. Firstly, that distribution matters. Secondly, that monetization matters from day one. And thirdly, that you need to focus on building painkillers, not vitamins. But the biggest thing of all of it was that through sharing the hard times along with the wins, I built trust within our community. I posted every single struggle and failure that I had along the way. And that is what led me to the breakthrough.

AI assessment note: “until my first employer laid me off, and with that, I decided”

Q So, I mean, what I'm hearing from you is influencer marketing is huge for you. Your app maybe wouldn't be where it is if you didn't focus so much on influencer marketing and I have a lot of questions about that. What would be your playbook if you were starting over today? What would be your step-by-step process to find and land influencers so that your app can generate revenue?

A Yeah, so I'll break it down in a few steps. Um, step one, if you're just starting out, DM a hundred people a day. Step two, the first words of your DM should be paid promo and then like question mark or paid promo for your company, et cetera. Influencers get hundreds to thousands of DMs a day. They will skip your DM if your first two words aren't something that's captivating to them. So what's more captivating than basically I will pay. Step three, when starting out, I would bought your personal Instagram account with followers and then pay to verify your account to establish more credibility. Once you start doing a few influencers deals, that's what I would switch from your personal account to your business account. Cause then people will recognize your business account more. Step four, stop wasting your time DMing with them. I think this is one of the most important parts to getting a profitable deal. Negotiating is 1000 times easier when you're on the phone with someone And they can feel kind of your presence and your voice. So once they respond, text them your phone number and just say, Hey, let's hop on a call soon. Sometimes they'll call you literally in that moment. Other times they'll be like, Hey, when are you available? Or I'm busy today. If they say I'm busy today, what's your offer? And they're trying to kind of hard close you don't fall for it. Just say, okay, just…

AI assessment note: “I'll break it down in a few steps. Um, step one”

Q is if you were to start over today, obviously you did this in the last couple of months, but a lot of people are going to be watching this thinking, how can I do this right now in 20, 25 in 20, 26, if you had to start over, what would be your step-by-step process for creating a somewhat viral app like you did if you were to start over?

A Yeah. So step one obviously is the idea that I think that's one of the most important parts along with distribution. There's a lot of talk now that distribution is the most important part. I kind of pushed back against that because if you don't have a viral idea in nature, distribution doesn't matter. So in my opinion, there are three pillars for a good idea, uniqueness, helpfulness, and the gotcha moment. You need uniqueness. So it catches eyes. You need helpfulness. So it has some stickiness and you need that gotcha moment. That's built into the app that easily conveys what your app does in about five seconds. The gotcha moment is the moment that's going to stop someone from scrolling, think, I need to try this app out. That idea, the gotcha moment, would be in the back of my head whenever I'm designing apps. I go, what could be something that I could seamlessly integrate into a TikTok, YouTube short, whatever, that will get someone to stop scrolling? Right around the time I launched Wrestle.ai, I launched another app in collaboration with an influencer that had a million followers. This app, however, was not a novel idea like Wrestle.ai. It was a concept similar to like RizGBT and Plug.ai. Both wrestling AI and this app got around over a million, close to two million impressions at the time, except wrestling AI was getting conversions, getting downloads and doing really well…

AI assessment note: “So step one obviously is the idea that I think that's one of the”

Q Well, I think that's super interesting that you actually attempted To build a business in an industry that you really didn't know all that much about. And that's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel is you had this interesting strategy on how to validate an idea that maybe you weren't fully deep into. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

A I did what anyone would do. I signed up for X. I opened up a brand new account, uh, with zero followers, and I started following everyone in the YouTube space from there. I, uh, You know, started finding opportunities to create things of value for people in that space using my skill set as a software engineer. So I started putting together little pieces of content and I would put it out there using viral giveaways on, on X. And from there I was able to build up an email list of over a thousand people. You know, every week or so I would just hit, hit up this list with new findings that I had. And in the background, I would reach out to Each person individually to talk to them about this idea for this app that I wanted to build. So I was getting feedback on this idea. And when I realized I had something, I knew it was time to monetize it. So I mocked up this idea and I, uh, then knew I needed to get validation on it. So I set up a presale. The presale was 50 licenses of the software that are basically lifetime subscriptions to it. And it was at kind of an absurdly low price. I figured if I could sell these, that it was validation that this is actually a product that people would want to buy. The first 10 licenses were super, super cheap. And then every 10 after that went up. So there was a little bit of FOMO for those early adopters. Pretty quickly it sold out, I think within two…

AI assessment note: “I set up a presale. The presale was 50 licenses”

Q So I want to dive into that first app that you built. Did you always have this idea that you were going to be building and flipping apps? How did that first flip go? What's the story behind it?

A How I got the idea originally was just obviously GPT came out. A lot of people were doing like Babel GPT, um, but a lot of people were doing like Q and A is kind of, you ask questions, you get something back about the Bible. And that wasn't really helpful. So I kind of flipped it to be more of an AI therapist, to be a little bit more emotional, ask questions after each response, then launched on WhatsApp. Um, cause again, I didn't have the technical skills, right? So I used like a third party at the time. And then I didn't realize WhatsApp charges an arm and a leg per conversation window. Then my costs would like balloon to like, 15 K a month. I was like, hell no, I need to move on to my own infra. Then hired engineer from Upwork. I mean, they moved it to like iOS and Android. And how I found the person that I sold it to was actually first originally listed on micro acquire. Then I was also active in my first million podcasts as well in a community they have on Facebook. And someone just happened to be in London at the same time that I also was, and he reached out, he was like, Hey, this seems interesting. And then he ended up acquiring it.

AI assessment note: “How I got the idea originally was just obviously GPT came out.”

Q I imagine a lot of people watching this are like, why would you give up that much of a product that you built? I'd love to hear from you about the pros and the cons of lifetime deals. I talked to a lot of founders. Some of them love it clearly like you, some of them regret it. So let's talk about it. What are the pros and cons? Yeah.

A So one of the, see the biggest benefit of Ltd is cash infusion validation and early feedback. Initially when you are starting a company, when you're starting a product, you essentially have zero customers. You are looking for people who can use your product and give you feedback through Ltd. We got both the things. There are a couple of downsides. So the biggest downside is high platform cut because in our case rocket up to 40% of the revenue. And the second downside is we got a lot of angry customers reaching out to you for feature requests. For, uh, missing features for bugs and stuff. And also when you launch equity, you attract a lot of cheap customers also. So, so that sort of gives perception your product is not that great. So these are the three downsides of, uh, Ltd.

AI assessment note: “the biggest benefit of Ltd is cash infusion validation and early feedback.”

Q next project, head to the link in the description to check out Starter Story Build. All right, let's get back to the episode. All right, let's jump into the growth side of things. I know that you grew this app from zero to four million plus downloads. What are some of the tactics or maybe the top three things when it comes to growing a mobile or an iPhone app?

A First, it was Active social media engagement, but I remember that I used to spend literal hours going through posts, writing helpful comments, leaving links back to rooted and really trying to be helpful in what I wrote. Secondly, I would say press releases in the early days. I didn't want to be even known as like the anxiety girl. I didn't want that to like define me. Then I realized, you know, once you actually put your name to a story, it does resonate better with the audiences. I would Find people online, journalists that wrote about mental health, and then I would read it, reach out to them either on LinkedIn or try to get their email and send pitches that way. It was a ton of work because not many people ever respond to me, but what ended up happening is every now and then we'd get featured in a pretty major way for small apps. So we were in cosmopolitan. We've been in woman's health. We were even in time magazine, which was the big one. All of that really happened from these organic Cold emails. And then the third thing would be a huge focus on app store optimization. So I focused a lot on making sure that the product matches what the users are looking for. They see on your product page, they download the app, they use it, and then they use the same keywords to describe their experience via the user reviews. That was like the holy circle. And if you can get that loop goi…

AI assessment note: “First, it was Active social media engagement... Secondly... And then the third thing”

Q Okay. Well, perfect segue on that. Let's talk about how you built that MVP, how you built the first version of that app. I understand that you don't have a technical background. You're not a programmer or a coder. How did you do it? How'd you build something worth using?

A I basically started taking what I thought would be helpful and I started drawing it out in a notebook. And I was thinking about the way I wanted the information to be presented. What would be most helpful for me in that moment of a panic attack? How do I keep things super simple in the app when somebody is really overwhelmed as they're using it? And so I took these ideas and sketches from my notebooks, and then I taught myself how to basically create them as wireframes in Photoshop and illustrator. And then I went to an agency and I could not afford to work with the agency. So that certainly sent me back time-wise, but then at one point, a student developer said that he would love to work with me. And so that's how I was able to finally launch that first MVP.

AI assessment note: “a student developer said that he would love to work with me.”

Q Okay. So beyond the tactics, which we talked a little bit about, I want to know now, you know, what's the bigger strategy? What does it take to build a successful app in 20, 25? What would be your playbook that you'd give to someone who was just starting out today?

A Right. So step one, build a product that actually delivers what your page promises. That'll lead not only to more positive downloads, AKA like people leaving positive experiences, but people will also then share it. And like the word of mouth engagement is quite important. Step two, listen to your users. So user reviews are super important. Oftentimes everything you need to know is written in the user reviews. And sometimes your own assumption of what a user needs might not actually be what they do need. Step three, optimize app store presence continuously. Doing a release frequently shows that you continue to work on the app. I do one once every week. And that shows that you're constantly working on fixing bugs, improving the user experience and step four partners strategically. So be that a wellness organization. Um, we've done a few B to B contracts as well. A ton of different therapy groups and psychologist offices are recommending and using rooted. And this has been something that's been helpful now in.

AI assessment note: “So step one, build a product that actually delivers what your page promises.”

Q That's great. All right. Well, let's get a little more technical here. Uh, I'd love to hear about your tech stack. What kind of tools and languages do you use and have you used to build these products?

A So TypeScript is my language. DS code, I use it as my editor. I have now started to use Cursor a little bit. All my infrastructure is in Google Cloud and Firebase. I use SendGrid for transactional emails and marketing emails as well. Mixpanel for analytics. I really love Mixpanel because you are able to know exactly what each user is doing with the application. I use Paddle as my payment processor instead of Stripe because Stripe is not available in Argentina. And I use Tidio as a customer support tool. Uh, to have the chat in the, in the landing page. It takes time, but it gives you like a lot of insights on direct communication with, with your customers. And I feel that even at the beginning is super important.

AI assessment note: “TypeScript is my language. DS code, I use it as my editor.”

Q Cool. Well, let's talk about that kind of co-maker strategy. I haven't seen that too much before or heard too much about that. So I'm curious, how does it actually work? How do you find great developers or product managers for this? And how does partnerships work for that?

A Finding a co-maker is really hard. Same as finding a co-founder. So I usually talk to other makers and I become friends with them and that runs for years or months. And then eventually when I'm looking for a co-maker, it's not that difficult for me to figure out who to reach out to because I see that I'm building a tool for social media. And there were these three founders building something similar in the past and they have failed. And now if I pitch them the idea that has passed the validation part, I have pre-sales done and I have some users, it's really easy to convince them to join. And we share the ownership of fifty-fifty. It's just regular co-ownership. Where I take care of all the operation, legal parts, accounting, and the co-maker takes care of the coding and support. If you want to be the co-maker people want to work with, the best thing to do is to build things in public because that makes it so easy for anyone else to evaluate you and to just see whether you have things in common, etc.

AI assessment note: “we share the ownership of fifty-fifty. It's just regular co-ownership.”

Q Nice. That's great. I would just love to hear a little bit more about your process for validating an idea. How did you know CodeGuide was validated?

A Yes. So Twitter is actually a really great platform to launch products. All you need to do is just share your screen, create a simple, uh, screen recording demo, and you just post it. And this type of content usually goes wild. So in this tweet, I'm just talking about like, what is my ideal cursor workflow? I just tweeted that out and I was just mind blown that how many people were actually struggling with hallucination problem with AI. And then I just turned this thing into a landing page in like 20 minutes at the max using bold and actual validation for me was when people starting to sign up. So I got more than 1800 waitlist emails in like two weeks. That was the first stage of validation for me that people actually want this, uh, solution. And then, uh, I was just talking to all the beta users. I was trying to DM them every single one that was commenting me just to asking them, uh, either they are using some other flow to remove or fix the AI hallucinations. And Nobody was actually tackling in a better way than what we were trying to do. So that was the second stage of validation. And then that was the moment when I decided, okay, now I need to take this and, you know, put all my effort into it and create like a proper tool that solves this problem.

AI assessment note: “actual validation for me was when people starting to sign up”

Q can do it this well. So if you want to install post hog, just click the first link in the description. You can install it for free. Just please let them know that you came from starter story. All right, back to the video. Let's get into how lane grew this business marketing and distribution. Uh, how did you get users to boot.dev and how did you grow this business?

A So from zero to about two K a month, we really grew from my blog. It was great for finding people that were really interested in the product. And we did a ton of product development over those first year to 12 months, but then we weren't growing, right? We were like, we started to feel a lot more confident in what we were building, but we just weren't getting enough people in the door for it to make sense as a business. And what we quickly found was that trust building, especially in the education space, Is extremely important. So working with influencers was like a cheat code because the influencers are already trusted by their audience. So if you can get an influencer to try your thing and like it, you kind of unlock a new little section of the market because now their followers will, will naturally trust you a lot more. So then from 10 K to 30 K, we really grew a lot off the back of these free code camp collabs, which was basically me recording an eight hour course Giving it to free code camp for free so they can publish it on their YouTube channel and us getting some exposure through that. So going from 30 K up to where we're at now, which is almost a million a month, we had to scale what we were doing. Like I wasn't going to be able to create all this video content that was going to drive that amount of traffic. YouTube integrations, YouTube marketing, we've been able to s…

AI assessment note: “from zero to about two K a month, we really grew from my blog”

Q This is crazy and why I really recommend using PostHog. But what I think is also cool is that in PostHog you can track the A-B test going through the funnel and see how this A-B test affects All right, now back to the video. All right, let's talk about Your specialty. Let's talk about marketing. How do you actually get users to these businesses and have them pay money?

A So my core strategy, and it still is this is to do everything through organic to get curiosity quench to a 100,000 users was just finding a template that I can repeat over and over and over again, a very funny, simple two by two images, caption template. It's six seconds long and having the pin comment be go download and try our app. And then I would make a mistake even to drive engagement in the comments. Like astrology and astronomy. If you get those mixed up, people are really gonna get angry. Originally, I created my templates by just making a CapCut project and copying, pasting it over. Eventually, this became a bit too slow, so I actually built in like a template creator into my SaaS, which is PostBridge. I posted the two by two template over now, 300 times on two different accounts, and they've driven 60 to 70,000 signups just through these simple templates that have brought in like hundreds of millions of views.

AI assessment note: “my core strategy, and it still is this is to do everything through organic”

Q Okay, let's, we're going to do a little deep dive into your marketing. Can you walk through that step-by-step of just spending one hour a day marketing your app? What does that look like?

A So I think anyone can get thousands of downloads to their app or visitors to the website just with one hour a day of marketing with no ad spend. That's a very simple strategy. First, I would open an account on TikTok and Instagram. For my product or a personal page, either one works. And I would just scroll on those pages for two days, 15 minutes a day each. This is to warm it up. So the algorithms don't think you're a bot. You're a real human being while you're doing this. When you see videos that have went viral, save them. Do not post content during this time, comment and follow people in your niche. So interact with posts. And then after you've warmed up your account, Download CapCut. It's super easy. You can learn it in an hour and you can start posting videos from proven examples that you've seen. You spin them with your app, either as a call to action at the end of the video, three seconds or less, or don't even put in the video, make your caption and your first comment, a call to action to go to your thing. The algorithm loves watch time. And the easiest way to get like a hundred percent, 200% watch time is to make your video six seconds long. But what matters more than all that Is to make content that people actually watch. It has to provide some type of value, some type of connection, some type of laugh. It could be entertainment. It could be education, but if it's di…

AI assessment note: “First, I would open an account on TikTok and Instagram.”

Q All right. So now we got the full framework. Thank you for sharing that David. Uh, but I wanted to just have you just touch on something really quick. Cause you mentioned it. Uh, the multi-account strategy and having multiple different accounts. Could you just really go into the details of that? Cause I think, uh, that would be really helpful for people watching.

A The multi-account strategy is once you find a viral series, you can start creating new accounts, but this time you don't actually need to work with big creators because you can just find charismatic UGC people that can just basically take this viral video that you've figured out and just have them remake it. In the past, we at one point had five different Genie accounts, all posting similar content. Five accounts across three platforms. So 15 videos going out every single day. Many of our accounts only have like tens or sometimes hundreds of followers, and there's a repost or recreate stuff from our main account. And in some cases, which is ridiculous, the account with 48 followers will get more views than our main account with 55 followers, even when posting identical videos. And this is why it's so important to make multiple accounts, in my opinion, because perhaps your video about how to use AI to help you do research only hit the engineering student side of TikTok. But the same video would be just as helpful to poli-sci majors or literature majors. By recreating multiple counts and recreating the content, you can increase the likelihood that you're squeezing as much of the upside as possible out of your piece of content and hitting all of these different pockets of TikTok.

AI assessment note: “The multi-account strategy is once you find a viral series, you can start creating new accounts”