The Exchanges

Q So, give me a further breakdown of the business. How does this business work? What kind of clients do you serve? How much do you charge?

A So, for us, we hire people all over the world, mostly in Sri Lanka, a few in South Africa and other places. We match them out full time, 40 hours a week, long term, to our clients. They're part of their team. They're at the all hands. They're on the calendar, on the slack, everything. They're doing real work. We charge around three to 4000 dollars a month per headcount. You know, if you're getting an EA, it's going to be a little less. If you're getting a financial controller, it's going to be a little more. Then we pay our, you know, we pay our people all their wages and everything like that, all their benefits, and we pocket the profit between.

AI assessment note: “We charge around three to 4000 dollars a month per headcount.”

Q to download it for free. This list was made by HubSpot, which is today's video sponsor. A big shout out to them for this free resource. HubSpot is awesome. That's crazy. I mean, all this AI stuff is just nuts, but what I want to know is a little bit more about how you got into resumes. And entrepreneurship. Can you tell me a little bit more about your backstory?

A Yeah, yeah, sure. So I started my career at the world's largest hedge fund, a place called Bridgewater Associates in Connecticut. I got fired in five months, ended up getting hired as a recruiter at the company that hired me at Bridgewater. And I adored recruiting, and I just had such a strong affinity and natural talent for it. And around February, 2018, I was just on Reddit. Somebody had posted their resume. And I gave them a bunch of feedback, and I was like, hey, this is wrong, this is wrong, you're not gonna get a call back with this, like, you gotta change this up. And I got like, 500 upvotes, and then I got a bunch of people replying to me being like, you know, hey, can you, can you look at my resume? Like, can you please check this out? That was kind of one of my first moments where I was like, man, no one knows how to make a good resume.

AI assessment note: “I started my career at the world's largest hedge fund, a place called Bridgewater”

Q Gotcha. So get good at something. Start helping people with that thing, and eventually they'll be willing to pay you for it. Once we've done that though, how do we go from zero to one in terms of actually building a product?

A How do you get going from zero to one? We'll first validate the idea by doing it for people in a way that either isn't for sale or doesn't scale. And then you can build a brand identity map to understand what the brand will look like, how it will talk to people, how it will engage with people, what the value propositions are, the demographics that you're going after. That's the document that I recommend everybody do first is a brand identity map, and Techstars actually has a wonderful one for free. Then I would probably build out a business plan, so like a little two-pager about what you want to do, why it's different than the products already on the market, maybe five or six or seven points of differentiation, and really flesh out the business idea on a two-page piece of paper. And people should not use AI for any of this shit. Any of it. Should not do that.

AI assessment note: “first validate the idea... Then you can build a brand identity map”

Q Alright, so you're back at your parents' house, borrowing money from your brother to buy groceries, but you set this crazy goal for yourself to make 50,000 dollars over the next year. I suppose this is where your first app, Riz GPT, comes into play, right? How do you get started with it?

A Yep. We had friends that would send in fraternity group chats or whatever group chats with guys saying like, what should I say to this girl? And we figured that we could build an app to help people respond to girls. I taught myself to code with ChatGPT in the month of May, June, 20, 23. And then we launched in July of 2023. The first version of the app was so bad. I built this myself. We didn't have notifications. We didn't have reviews. The design was a mess. The paywall was terrible. And the first few promos go out and it doesn't really do anything. Few hundred downloads. We're making a few bucks. And then I find these two underground kind of undiscovered creators. I pay them each 50 dollars for a promo. So 100 dollars total and overnight five, ten million views total. 45,000 downloads in that first big day. 200,000 downloads on that week. 500,000 downloads on the month.

AI assessment note: “We had friends that would send in fraternity group chats... I taught myself to code”

Q him, head to the first link in the description to check out the Academy. Now back to the video. All right, Blake, your story is insane. Mobile apps totally changed your life. Now let's talk about how our viewers could do something similar. Everything starts with an idea, right? What do you think are some of the mobile app ideas that could be turned into millions of dollars right now?

A Yeah. Number one, I think that there are a lot of fragmented tools. It's like AI LinkedIn image generator or like AI resume analysis. But I think that there's massive opportunity to build a career AI style platform Where you roll up all these tools into one platform and brand it as like, if you're a student and you want to get a job, this is the platform to help you do so. And you can build that in a mobile app as well as a web app. Next up, language learning, the ChatGPT advanced voice mode. It's pretty incredible. It's like actually a personal tutor. Duolingo is making thirty three million dollars a month. Multiply that by 12 and we get like four hundred million dollars per year. You capture one percent of that market and you have a Four million dollar annual application on your hands.

AI assessment note: “Number one, I think that there are a lot of fragmented tools.”

Q Awesome. Okay. So far, we've only talked about the positives of building apps, but surely there are some pitfalls, right? What are the main expenses you have of running AI mobile apps, and how can people minimize them to stay profitable?

A Yeah, so Apple charges 15%, but for whatever reason, it's really closer to 20% of revenue, up to your first million dollars in earnings. Beyond that, Apple charges 30, but really closer to like 33%, One thing that people significantly overestimate is like the cost of AI in the back end. Unless you're doing image generation or using advanced voice mode, AI costs are sub three percent. The bulk of the expenses are usually attributable to marketing and staff. If you're doing that content creation yourself, you can do it on your own. But one of the reasons that internal UGC is great is that you usually see somewhere around like 50 to 80% profit margins. People doing influencer marketing, you usually see somewhere in the range of like 25 to 70%. And then people doing paid ads, you generally see like zero to 30%.

AI assessment note: “The bulk of the expenses are usually attributable to marketing and staff.”

Q So after you get those first five customers, how did you continue to get more of them? What kind of distribution methods did you use?

A When it comes to distribution for both ResumeMaker.online and AI Carousels, the product hunt helped a lot to spread the word about it, especially with ResumeMaker.online winning first product of the week. It got spread so quickly and I got so many backlinks. But then SEO is the main channel and I'm definitely better at building that on marketing. So I started building a lot of free tools for both products. I think it's about 30. It just has to be something complementary to your main product, like a natural extension. It's a good way to bring in traffic, especially if you know you're not a SEO expert and the building public also helps to spread the word on Twitter or on LinkedIn. I think people like, especially when you try to make it personal, It can be a bit cringe sometimes, but that's LinkedIn. I also launched an affiliate program for both products, which is working okay. It's in progress.

AI assessment note: “the product hunt helped a lot to spread the word about it”

Q Okay. That's awesome. On the topic of technology, what are some other software tools you're using to profitably run your business?

A For the tech stack, so the backend framework is a PHP framework named Laravel. The frontend is built with a view framework named Nuxt. It's all the pages and make sure that everything loads fast. The database is PostgreSQL. We host everything on AWS. So of course, you know, since I worked there for a bit, it's just easier for me that way now. We use Tribe for subscription billing. We use amplitude to track Product analytics, you know, like the user behavior on the platform, what they use, that kind of things. We use crisp for the support chats. We use Sentry, you know, to track, uh, the errors that happens on the app so that we can, you know, like learn about them and fix them. We use a product called feature base for a roadmap, like a public roadmap where people can see, you know, what's going to be built next. And of course, feature requests and bug reports with three people full-time and one person that's part-time. So the total salary for them is five K. So that excludes me. Then there is one key that we pay for servers and all the SaaS tools that I mentioned earlier. We spend around three K per month on ads. Uh, so we only do Google ads mostly because I don't know how to do anything else. And then usually we spend probably like around two K per month with random freelancers. So it could be like UI designers, copywriters, sometimes some external developers, that kind of thi…

AI assessment note: “backend framework is a PHP framework named Laravel. The frontend is built with a view”

Q Let's dive a little bit deeper into the numbers behind this SaaS business. What do the numbers look like here?

A So yeah, we started the business last July. Right now is June, 2024, and we're about to just surpass 200,000 dollars in MRR. The biggest secret to all the success is my team of co-founders. I have four other co-founders. I have a CTO, I have a head of sales and I have two guys that focus on marketing and ads. And then what the team beyond the team of co-founders looks like is we have 20 people in CS and in sales. And then the rest of the team is on the developer team. The team cost is over a 100,000 dollars. Total cost to grow the business, including ads and marketing and acquisition is anywhere from 150 to 175,000 dollars a month to maintain.

AI assessment note: “we're about to just surpass 200,000 dollars in MRR.”

Q So you're working your dream job on Wall Street, making good money. What was your turning point that got you into writing online?

A I witnessed someone I worked with ask for permission to go to their son's Little League game, and he was probably 3738 years old, and his boss said no. So if I do everything right for 14 more years, I might be sitting here having to ask for permission to go to my kid's little league game. Uh oh. I gotta get out of here. I didn't quit right away, which I think is a big mistake a lot of people do, because then I would have been operating from a place of scarcity the entire time. Instead, I said, how can I look for ways to passively pursue new opportunities? I started a newsletter inside BlackRock as a way to Get my name out there more. After three or four months of doing that, I said, why am I capping myself with people working in this company when I could use social media and the internet, do the same thing and unlock millions of new eyeballs?

AI assessment note: “I witnessed someone I worked with ask for permission to go to their son's Little League game”

Q What's the day in life like for you?

A So what I realized is either be in a full build mode, which is my monk mode, five AM wake up. I have everything scheduled down to the minute, working out twice a day, every single meal is taken care of in advance, going to bed at nine PM. I know exactly when that's going to start, when it's going to end so I can sprint very hard during it. And there's a single outcome we're trying to accomplish. That only happens like three or four times a year now. So if I'm not in a monk mode, I call it maintenance mode. I take it down a notch. I try to sleep for like nine hours. I spend more time on the beach and take my foot off the gas because that's where those ideas actually start to percolate for the next sprint.

AI assessment note: “either be in a full build mode, which is my monk mode, five AM wake up”

Q I think when a lot of people think of writers, they think of, uh, not necessarily making a lot of money. You've been able to make a lot of money with writing. What's your recommendation for writers who want to make a lot of money?

A The fastest way to monetize is actually build the skill yourself and then Borrow someone else's audience and ghostwrite for them. That was how I earned my first 5000 dollars. I didn't have 20,000, a 100,000 Twitter followers at the time. I had a thousand, and I had one person reach out to me that I could charge 5000 dollars for. That's by far the most sustainable way too, because you can build an income stream that's five to 10 K a month. That doesn't take 40 hours to do. So you have enough to support yourself, and then you can go work on building your own audience on the side. So that's our advice to anyone who's looking to write as a career. It's figuring out first how to become a ghostwriter, And then you're operating from abundance of, I have enough money, I can then pursue my passion project or write about this topic that I know will take longer to monetize than, uh, starting right away trying to sell your own thing.

AI assessment note: “The fastest way to monetize is actually build the skill yourself and then Borrow someone”

Q You know, let's talk about monetization. You've built this blog. Now you need to monetize it. How do you make your first dollar?

A Made my first dollar with AdSense. My goal was to get Traffic to get eyeballs on the site so that I could make money from AdSense. It was the easiest thing I could do. Going forward, I moved away from AdSense because I didn't like the way ads looked. They were irrelevant to my content, and I took that off and focused a hundred percent on affiliate marketing for many, many years. In fact, that was the only way I made money, probably up until I started to develop products. The first product I created was a PDF. That I sold. At first for 50 bucks, no one bought it. Then I dropped it to 40 bucks, no one bought that. 30 bucks, some people bought it. 29, more people bought it. 24, a lot of people bought it. And I was like, okay, I found the price point. It took me years. The next product I created was the Pool Care Handbook, which did a lot better. I'd learned everything from the first one. It was much bigger. And I added courses to them. So then it became like a video course and e-book combination. And then I actually printed our book. Been the majority of like how we make money is through the course material and the, and the books.

AI assessment note: “Made my first dollar with AdSense.”

Q Alright, let's talk about tools and software that you run multiple businesses on. What are your favorite ones?

A Well, Slack is a must. It's just a great communication tool, especially now that we're all over the country. Underutilized is Loom. Like Loom is the best. You can just get your idea out one time and people don't have to stop what they're doing to know what it is that you need to tell them. Todoist Is great for me. It's the simplest task management tool, but I write down all the tasks that I need to assign. I record the videos, and then I assign them on Todoist, and then that's it. The rest of the day takes care of itself. Although it's the most expensive, HubSpot, in my opinion, is definitely the best CRM. It makes it easy to keep track of your leads, to keep track of your network, and then ClickUp. I think if you're running a real established agency, Todoist, Isn't gonna be enough. It's just not robust enough. And so Todoist is really where I manage my personal holdings company, but ClickUp is where Stadzi runs. That's like our, our real task management software. So Slack, Todoist, Loom, HubSpot, and ClickUp. And then of course, Google Drive. Like sometimes we laugh that basically every tool that anybody makes is just like a modified version of Google Sheets and Google Docs. And so like, Yeah, Google Drive is a must.

AI assessment note: “So Slack, Todoist, Loom, HubSpot, and ClickUp. And then of course, Google Drive.”

Q to get our free database of 102 digital product ideas that are making millions right now, just like Thomas's. And if you're serious about building a million dollar online business, consider joining us at Starter Story. Much love, and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video with Thomas. Peace. So tell me about your backstory. How do you get to this place where you built this business?

A Going into college, my thought was I have to be as competitive as possible just to get a job. What this led me to do was start reading blogs like Lifehacker, and crucially, there was another one called Hack College, which was Lifehacker for college students. I thought it might be fun to write for them when they put out a call for new writers, so I spent a whole night writing a guest blog post I thought would knock their socks off, and they rejected me. I'm glad they did, though, because I took that blog post I wrote for them, and I started up my own website, collegeinfogeek.com. I just started writing throughout a lot of my college years. It was purely for fun, just, I was, like, building up stuff. I wanted to share all the little life hacks I was kind of implementing myself, and then, um, We started YouTube in 2014. Again, a lot of just like, I'm imitating the people I admire. I was posting videos every single week. The channel eventually grew up to a million subscribers. Every video was sponsored. I felt pressure to get a 100,200 thousand views on every single video. It became the job, and it sort of had sucked a little bit of the creative freedom out of it for that reason. In 2020, I had made a couple of Notion videos for the main channel that did well, and I was getting so into the software that I wanted to make more niche videos. But I'm like, it just doesn't Fit on the ma…

AI assessment note: “I started up my own website, collegeinfogeek.com. I just started writing”

Q Let's talk about how notion templates work. What's your process for creating a great notion template that you can sell online?

A Uh, yeah. Notion template is a page in notion that you make public and you tick the little box that says able to be duplicated and that's it. So to create a notion template, you just make something useful either for yourself or for a client or for an audience, put the link out there, sell access to the link. Creators companion was just an evolution from 20 18 all the way to 20 21 of Everything we needed to make our YouTube videos, and then we just went to the process of polishing it up, adding a few more features, like a content repurposing dashboard and stuff like that, packaging it up and selling it. For Ultimate Brain, it was a similar thing where I had made a task management template for myself, and I'm just like, let's build on top of that. So note taking, getting things done, workflows, project management, goal tracking, all kinds of stuff like that, and packaging it up.

AI assessment note: “to create a notion template, you just make something useful either for yourself or for a client”

Q So let's talk about tools. What kind of software and tools do you use to run this business?

A Well, notion for one, definitely dog food, our own software and we use our own templates. Notion templates can be easily pirated since they're just a link. So what I am concerned about is maintaining paid access to our support So we use circle.so and we have actual customer logins for that. For a point of sale, we use lemon squeezy. I like them because they actually act as merchant of record. So they completely handle taxes for you. We use convert kit for email marketing. We've got a lot of actual funnels and automations and autoresponders as well as our newsletter. We use a lot of pipe dream actually. So pipe dream is automation software, kind of like Zapier, but sort of built for developers. That's all JavaScript and no JS.

AI assessment note: “Well, notion for one, definitely dog food, our own software and we use our own templates.”

Q Can you break down what the customer journey or the funnel looks like for a million dollar Notion templates business?

A Uh, yeah. So Thomas Frank explains is the main way that people find us right now, especially for notion templates, because we just have all of these videos teaching people how to use notion for free. So we have build guides. This is literally, I'm going to teach you how to build a habit tracker or task manager. Those build guides always include a free template as well. We also have notion new feature releases because people are searching for content about new features fundamentals content. So we have like a whole sort of free beginners course on how to learn notion from scratch. And then we have listicle kind of Like, fun popcorn content. Like, 10 ways that you're using Notion wrong. Things like that. Our videos will do one of three things. They will pitch a paid template. They'll pitch a free template. That's for the build guides. Or they'll just say, like, hey, we've got a resource page here with all of our Notion fundamentals content. Cheat sheets. We have all kinds of, like, cool resources you're gonna want. So get on our email list. And then from there, first thing I do is send them an autoresponder saying, like, hey, enjoy your free templates. Here's a link to all my other free templates. But if you want to upgrade to full productivity in Notion, you can get Ultimate Brain. Here's a discount code for being a subscriber.

AI assessment note: “So Thomas Frank explains is the main way that people find us right now”

Q Yeah. How about pricing? How did you decide on the pricing for your products?

A My thought was if you could run your entire creator business from idea capture to publishing, have like a full archive of all your scripts, everything in one tool, people will probably pay 1000 of dollars a month for that. So let's at least charge over a hundred dollars. Initially price creators companion at 99 and one 49 for the higher edition at launch. Right now we're at a, I think it's a 129 for ultimate brain alone. Two 29 for the full bundle edition. And that's what most people buy if they are getting creators companion sales do pretty well. We did a price increase last year and we saw volume dip a little bit, but overall revenue went up. All right.

AI assessment note: “My thought was if you could run your entire creator business... people will probably pay”

Q Tell me about your backstory. Uh, how do you get here?

A Out of college, I got a sales job at J and J selling medical devices. That job took me to Sacramento, California, decided I needed to make the move to New York. So, uh, did that. And that was my kind of intro point to the world of operating in early stage startups. So I ended up joining the company called Market Access Transformation, joined as the first employee, pre-launched kind of the stage of it's myself and the founder and kind of a concept that we're looking to bring to life. The company went on to have a really great outcome and exit, but before we got there and I was on the journey, I kind of felt that my net worth was heavily tied up in one single company. So in the process of trying to diversify some of my future net worth, I identified kind of syndicates and special purpose vehicles. I started out by backing Jason Calacanis' syndicate, and that was like a great opportunity for me to see some of the deals he was doing and get the opportunity to participate. Over, you know, a one-year period, I invested in a handful of startups. I started to ramp up deal flow. I started to meet other founders. That was kind of the, the point and inspiration to launch my own syndicate. At this time, I really invested a lot of time networking with other venture capitalists, right? Branded myself as kind of this deal flow hustle guy who would essentially get the opportunity to learn from…

AI assessment note: “Out of college, I got a sales job at J and J selling medical devices.”

Q So once you find the deal, what are all the steps that happen until this deal is finalized and all the investors have put their money in?

A The first part is Securing our allocation. So typically we'll be talking to the founder. They may have already had a lead VC lead the round and set terms. In that case, we're ready to secure our allocation and start sharing with our investors. What I would do from there is put together both my deal memo on why we're excited about the opportunity and want to invest and set up the SPV in parallel. This is typically about a two day process of Putting the materials together, getting the SPV set up. Once that's complete, I will then send the deal materials to our investor base. Typically give them about one to two weeks to make their decisions in terms of capital, um, to the particular deal. In between that one to two weeks will allow for, you know, any follow-up questions. Investors might want to know more about the founder's background or their business model, you know, five years out from now. And then from there, once we've got the capital Committed, which again, maybe a one to two week period, we would then close out the SPV and wire capital to the company.

AI assessment note: “The first part is Securing our allocation... we would then close out the SPV”

Q Alright, let's talk about why personal holding companies are becoming a thing. What do you think is the opportunity here? Why is it taking off?

A Yeah, so I think there's just a number of different trends that we're seeing. Some are, like, Macro, cultural, and global trends. Others are trends specific to entrepreneurship and the business landscape. The first, which is like a global trend, is there's just increased emphasis on the importance of, like, lifestyle, balance, and health in a professional's life. And so I think it's very much in vogue now to be thinking about how you're taking care of yourself. We're in a golden age of entrepreneurship right now because the cost of failure of entrepreneurship has never been lower. It is easier than ever before to ideate or test ideas with platforms like Product Hunt or Kickstarter. It is easier or cheaper than ever before to actually run your business. You have an e-commerce business, you have Shopify. You have a newsletter business, you have Beehive. And so I think it's inviting more people to start businesses with this different image of what a great business is, and for a lot of people, that's a cash flowing asset that maybe does six to seven figures a year, gives you a great lifestyle, and maybe you Do that over and over and over rather than trying to swing for the fences with a ten billion dollar company that you have .1% chance of actually succeeding.

AI assessment note: “cash flowing asset that maybe does six to seven figures a year”

Q Can you give us a timeline of how you get here?

A I dreamed of only one thing when I was growing up, and that was working on Wall Street. I went to college at the University of Michigan from 20 11 to 20 15. Studied business there, still on this path to have the world's greatest trader job ever. While I was at Michigan, week before my junior year, my dad passed away suddenly. He was 46 years old, died of a stroke, was in perfect health like me, and so, That feeling of obligation basically guided the next eight years of my life. It forced this perspective on me that every day could be our last, and we really should spend our time in a way that aligns with our values and fills us up. And so, I graduated from Michigan. I got the world's greatest trading job. I'm working on Wall Street, and I realize I'm not fulfilled in the slightest. While I was doing that, we had already started Morning Brew. And I was working on it on the side, and I realized I was so fired up by what I was doing from nine o'clock to midnight, far more fired up than what I was doing from six a.m. to nine o'clock. I quit my job when we had 30,000 subscribers. We had not made a dollar on the business, but I just had this sense of faith, and so did Austin, that we'd be able to figure out a way to make money as a business. So we sold the company in October of 2020 to Axel Springer. Almost six months later, I stepped down as CEO of the business, and that is Probably…

AI assessment note: “I went to college at the University of Michigan from 20 11 to 20 15.”

Q this. You kind of mentioned that there's one format you do over and over. And oftentimes when I talk to app founders that are crushing it, there's usually like one video or one format that has led to like the majority of the signups and the revenue. Would you be able to walk me through just one of those examples? of a video that has just crushed it for you.

A So, this is one of the most viral pieces of content that I ever put out. My mind is worth millions. I don't work for money. Money works for me. I am always at the right time. My name is spoken of amongst the most successful people. I get paid to exist, and it is always working out for me. How can I remember all these? You can actually get custom affirmations on your lock screen every single day using my app Stella. Boom! I say the affirmations and then the The guy asks me, how can I remember all of these? And then I'm basically like, just go use my app Stella. I would say the first thing is typically when I make my affirmation videos, I will start it with like repeat these affirmations for seven days or listen three times. When you see something like that, your first instinct is let me save this video. Because if you have to repeat it for seven days, like you're going to have to come back to it. When someone saves the video, then it increases engagement. There you go. And in general, this is very saveable content, right? People want to like listen to an affirmation another day. So if you can make Content that naturally gets shares or saves. That's going to make it go viral every time. Another thing is I would just say I'm really good at creating affirmations. So that also is why it goes viral. So if there's something that you are really good at, or you have like a unique spin o…

AI assessment note: “this is one of the most viral pieces of content that I ever put out”

Q but now you have this app it's crushing it. So I think one important thing is just the idea itself. This idea that you had where it's an alarm clock that makes You do pushups or makes you do something. It's a really cool idea. So I'm curious, how did you actually find this idea? How did you know it was something that could potentially make 50,000 dollars a month?

A So I was having trouble myself waking up early and I started texting my friend the night before, like, Hey, I'm going to send you a video of me doing pushups by six AM tomorrow. And that was to hold me accountable. And so every night I would send that text before, uh, it just held me accountable. It was great. And at that time, a lot of other apps were doing well. And I saw a lot of People on Twitter sort of doing well with apps. And I was at a point where I was sort of brainstorming my next idea and decided this would probably be a great idea. Uh, the MVP, the initial scope of the project was just an accountability app. So there was no alarm feature whatsoever. And I built the app in three weeks and then I realized I didn't know how to market. I thought influencer marketing could kind of maybe work with it, but it wasn't too viral of an idea. So I took a whole day just to kind of walk, think about it right on the direction I was going to take. And I had a few paths. And decided on the alarm feature. Uh, this was right before iOS 26 came out, and iOS 26 allowed you to connect your app to the native alarm system on iPhone using AlarmKit API, so you could build a real alarm app. Up until this point, uh, there were a lot of other alarm apps out there, but they were sort of gimmicky and not reliable because they used different, uh, like app sounds and workarounds to make the quote …

AI assessment note: “So I was having trouble myself waking up early and I started texting my friend”

Q an app idea Could be before you even come up with the idea, or even before you even start building the idea. So could you break down this framework for me? I think it would be useful for a lot of people watching this who maybe have an idea or want to find an idea of how to essentially predict or know that an idea will be successful in 2026.

A What we do to understand what is the right thing to build or what is the right thing to scale is going to TikTok and locate three things. First one is we. Viral. Has this format, has this kind of content, has this pain point, has it gone viral before? What we mean by virality is, has it hit over a 100,000 views on multiple pieces of similar content from accounts under 5000 followers? Now you'll ask me like, Ankit, why is 5000 important? You know, why could it not be coming from an account with million followers? It's because when it's under 5000 followers, the content goes viral Not because of that account's reach, but because of the content itself. Second is scalability. You need to grind, man. You need to put out volume. It's a volume game. It's about how much can you put out, how much can you understand what's working, what's not. At one point, we were putting out 150 pieces every day to test a single hook. And for this volume, I always say, pick something that can be scaled. Can you produce hundreds of these without burning out? How? Either you use AI-generated content, which has become incredible, You look at Kling.com videos. You look at C-Dance videos. The kind of content that's been created is really close to realistic videos. Or the second thing we also did is we hired UGC out of Eastern European countries and Russia, and it was literally one dollar for a 62nd video. Y…

AI assessment note: “What we do to understand what is the right thing to build... is going to TikTok and locate three things.”

Q same thing and implement the VSC framework and track all of their content. So I will put that down there in the description, if you're okay with it and you can download it right now for free. Let's switch topics. And talk about this app that you built. Could you just demo this app to me? Show me the app that you built that makes over 10,000 dollars a month.

A We're sitting on the homepage right now. As you can see on the homepage, we've got me and my partner put up there, and then we have the daily question. The question of the day is, do you prefer to be the little spoon or big spoon while cuddling? Moving out of that, once I answer this question, what happens is then the AI is training itself based on every answer it receives, right? So we've got a frame AI built into the app, which when you open, You have different modes of the coach you can employ. So there's a naughty coach. There's a gifting genie. If you want to give your partner something, some of the part which I love about the app personally is also the bucket list where we allow you to create a bucket list with your partner. You can plan your memories, things you want to do together. And my favorite is the memory, right? Now there's so many beautiful memories couples have, which they can cherish together. We allow you to keep track of those memories in a timeline, which is private just to you and her. And this is how the app works. The whole point is providing people with a daily ritual, a daily way to connect with their partner, keeping the love alive, keeping the spark alive.

AI assessment note: “We're sitting on the homepage right now. As you can see on the homepage”

Q Building on a growing trend. Let's dive a little bit deeper into that. If you were to start over right now, peptides are already Reach the top of their trend curve and you have to find a new idea. What would be your step by step? If you're starting over in middle of 20, 26, finding a new trend and building an app, what would be your process?

A I would probably just live on social media. Every free second I have, I would just go on there, scroll, tick tock, scroll, Instagram, and just find what everyone's talking about. This is what a lot of successful people have done is finding things that are just blowing up. But I would literally just step one is watch tick tock. Every single day and find out what people are just genuinely obsessed over. If multiple people are posting about it, it's probably going to be something that you can turn into a tool that people would use. Um, step two is to investigate whether these apps already exist in the space. And if they do, I think it's actually a good thing because it kind of validates that this is something that people want. If there is zero apps, it's still a hundred percent can be popular and done well. But I think if there are a couple apps, that's a good sign because they People have built it. People want it. Just no one's really marketed it like successfully yet. Uh, next step is what I would do is look for these other apps and come up with ideas off of it. I would literally go through every single review on all of these apps. Um, like I said before, find what people like, what they don't like, what they wish the app had, and then take all that and give it to Claude or ChatGPT and have them come up with your app idea so that you have at least a foundation of what you want t…

AI assessment note: “step one is watch tick tock... step two is to investigate whether these apps already exist”

Q is building a marketplace. Obviously that's really hard to do. It's hard to monetize. It's hard to get it to work, but an app like this, obviously it worked out pretty quickly. So let's talk about that. We're going to talk about how you grew it, but first I want to know how did you build it and how long did it take to go from idea to working app?

A Yeah, I didn't really take that long, honestly, because vibe coding makes it so easy. I, uh, started on replit, which was really easy because I would just explain what I wanted and it would build it for me. I also had Claude. As like my guide. So when it came to setting up revenue cat for in-app subscriptions, um, resend for sending out emails, anything that I have no idea how to set up, I could just ask Claude and it was like my senior developer. So using Claude and Replit, it took about two weeks to build out. Um, and then I used Firebase for the backend, which we just store all of our user data. The hard part though, is just Apple rejected it like a million times because they don't really want you to give medical advice. And a lot of this Features came off as that. So once we worked around it and found out how other kind of similar apps were doing it, we found, you know, the good spot where Apple was happy and they approved it. And now it's, hasn't been an issue.

AI assessment note: “using Claude and Replit, it took about two weeks to build out.”

Q That's awesome. Let's talk about how you built this app. How long did it take to build this app? And what was that journey like?

A So the first version took around a week or two. It was a web app that kind of just had the core features of what a mobile app intended to have. We had a Halloween party hosted by my friend coming up. So we built out this web version. We printed out some invitation codes so that everyone in the party can join in, take photos. And honestly, it broke many times during the event, but we were able to validate the core idea that People love taking photos in that event into a singular album of each other through an experience that mocks the whole disposable camera experience. So it didn't need to be perfect, but it was perfect enough to validate what we wanted to check.

AI assessment note: “So the first version took around a week or two.”