The Exchanges

Q Thanks for sharing all that, Umberto. That's amazing that you built this and crushed it on the launch. Let's go a little bit back to your background. How do you come up with this idea? How do you build this cool yoga app that's crushing it right now? What's your background?

A So my path to building an app was not linear at all. Uh, I'm not a developer. I study economics. I had a brief experience in the corporate world. Then in 2012, I raised seed funding for a startup that failed. And after that, I stepped away from tech completely. I became a screen instructor, worked as a fashion photographer. So I did a bunch of things. And then I came back into the startup world around 2016. And, uh, at the time I was working as an advertiser and growth strategist and I helped, uh, several companies scale. And that's where I learned how to launch and position, uh, Products. Then in 2020, during COVID, my girlfriend and I created PlayPose BA as a sidekick. Uh, it was a brand focused on the yoga decks of cards, uh, that help yoga teachers and practitioners build their sequences and practice them mindfully. We launched our first product on Kickstarter and generated over 200,000 dollars in the first month. And actually the, the, the whole brand was about mindful screen-free practice.

AI assessment note: “So my path to building an app was not linear at all. Uh, I'm not a developer.”

Q going to go start these B to B things because it seems more serious. But once you went All in on this and you just tried a little harder on it. That's when it started to really, really working. I want to jump back a little bit and just learn about how you built this, the design, the tools, the stack, coding languages. How did you actually build this site?

A It was definitely an incremental project. The first site was actually on Google sites, which is just this drag and drop. And I would just embed the games from online or wherever they were, frame it in the thing. It looked terrible, but it did work. After I got a few thousand People. I also had done my internship where I had learned to react and I was just like, Hey, react is pretty cool. I'm going to switch my entire site to react. So this was around the time when AI first started to come out and especially when vibe coding got big, I've really never touched the coding part anymore. It made it a lot easier to just focus on the marketing part for the design. I have never been a good designer. I just kind of copied what people were doing. So design is super simple. Later in time, I got into AB testing, To make sure people stayed the most amount of time on the site, but also making sure that they clicked as many pages as possible. Because another thing about ads is the more pages that they look at, the more ads that they see and the more money that I make.

AI assessment note: “The first site was actually on Google sites... switch my entire site to react.”

Q This is super cool. I think a lot of people watching this might be wondering, what is a successful piece of content that grows this business looks like? Would you be able to pull up one of your highest performing videos that got like millions of views and show me like why it worked and like what kind of impact it had on your business?

A So here's most popular video on the DuckMath main account. It got 2.1 million views on TikTok. This is not the normal type of content that you would think gets a business money. This video took me about 30 minutes to make. Honestly, pretty crappy content. I'm just filming things with my phone. The quality isn't great. I'm just filming my laptop, me playing something. It's basically just a really nice visual hook. After the hook, I show them, hey, go to this exact link. So here is it on Instagram. 3.2 million views. So actually more than tick tock, same exact video. I just had an automation platform literally upload this for me. So I'd have to do any more work. Five million views in total, which is crazy. So I found a working format and I kept pumping it out. So this might've been part of the series and I just kept trying different hooks. So while I don't have the exact number, my guess would be, I got a thousand dollars from the single video.

AI assessment note: “So here's most popular video on the DuckMath main account. It got 2.1 million”

Q out there that are making millions of dollars. Cursor, cloud code, that's like the big examples, but there's tons, tons of stuff out there doing well. For developers who are watching this right now, my question to you is how did you come up with this idea? How did you come across something that had the potential to have hundreds of thousands of downloads by developers? How did it start?

A In the beginning, Charlie B, we started, like, uh, with a different idea, and we thought about, like, trying, like, to build the database clients that incubate AI into them. So we started that direction, and we had, like, Big stop, because people don't really adopt that. That product needed to provide, like, access, they needed credentials to connect to your database, to run all those queries, and you need to install something on your machine. And without any credibility and trust from the engineers, we said, like, alright, it's too tough. So that way, we thought about, like, alright, I think let's start ChartDB. It's gonna take your database and make it into a chart. Uh, simple as that. The two things that I think made it work is, one, the product It's much more visual and easy to people to see the value right away, and it's giving like a better wow effect. And the second thing is reduction of the friction. So let's say you don't need to provide any access and you don't need to install and your software on your machine. So reducing that friction really helped to provide engagement from developers.

AI assessment note: “we started, like, uh, with a different idea... let's start ChartDB.”

Q bit more. I'm excited to talk about how you grew these apps. And I'm sure you can have a lot of cool stuff to share there. But before we do, let's talk about ideas. Before you had 19 different ideas. How did you find the first plugin idea to start? How did you find WordPress as this opportunity? How did this whole thing get started? How'd you find the idea?

A Yeah, that's the thing. We never had 19 ideas. We did not sit down and think, let's build 19 WordPress plugins and then launch a Shopify app. It happened much more organic than that. Our first plugin idea actually came from online research. There used to be a website called the WooCommerce Ideas Forum, and we chose an idea that lots of people were voting for. So we built our first plugin, WooCommerce Protected Categories, that's dead simple. It just lets you protect access to categories in your online store. And then our second plugin was Posttable Pro, which lists any type of content from a WordPress site in a searchable Table. And we got that idea from a client project. We kept adding features and released it as a premium plugin. So once we've got those plugins out there, customers started sending us requests for new features in that plugin. And sometimes it was best to achieve that, not through a feature, but a completely different plugin. So I would say, get a product out there and then keep your ears open to get those ideas From your users, because that's when you have that information coming into you without even needing to ask for it. And if you're smart and you think creatively, that can lead to more ideas.

AI assessment note: “Our first plugin idea actually came from online research. There used to be a website”

Q let's switch topics a little bit to growth. You have 20 different plugins, uh, that are all serving different types of use cases and 20 different software businesses. That's a lot. For someone that has this sort of portfolio of startups, it's definitely a different way of approaching growth. Can you explain what the biggest needle mover was when Comes to growth. Where do most of your customers come from?

A Most of our customers have always come from organic search. When we first launched our initial plugin, which was WooCommerce protected categories, it was the only plugin that did that. That's why we built it because we found on a forum that there was a gap in the market. So, uh, as a marketer, I started publishing blog posts and tutorials about how to password protect categories in WooCommerce. And because it was unique, we got to the The top of Google straight away. And we got our first sales within a few days. Now I know it's not that easy to find a unique idea, particularly 10 years later, but that's what we did. And we've always been very good at producing genuinely helpful, unique content about a wide range of use cases relating to our plugins.

AI assessment note: “Most of our customers have always come from organic search.”

Q what people are going to say about them on Reddit, none of it matters. Just like Roman said, block these people. Continue building your app, sharing your story, and everything will work out and it'll be worth it. But anyways, Roman, we didn't really talk a whole lot about your app and what it does. Could you give us a quick demo of what you built and how it works?

A Yeah, sure. So we built Goji Berry to find high intent leads on LinkedIn. So in intent can be many things. It can be someone liking specific posts, interacting with competitors, someone who has just fundraised, hired. And so every day our software is going to find the best leads with their signals. So for example, just engage with a competitor and every day we get the warmest lead on the market, and then we can launch campaigns directly from our software like this. And so this will automate the LinkedIn outreach. So connect with these people, send AI personalized messages, and the results we get in terms of acceptance rate and reply rate are way above industry, just because the leads are great and the messaging is really tailored to every lead.

AI assessment note: “we built Goji Berry to find high intent leads on LinkedIn.”

Q Okay, cool. You can build anything nowadays. This isn't news. I want to understand about the marketing. How did you get your first customers? And then how did you build this to something that makes over 10,000 dollars a month?

A So the way I did it is I hopped on a site called Discord.org, type in any keyword or any niche, and it will find you Discord communities with people in that niche. And what I did is at the time there was a server called Money Mind, I went to search bar and I typed in the word niches. But the major result that I found was people were searching How do I find a niche or how can I replicate this niche? When I saw that people were repeating, how do I find a niche? I was like, okay, that is the demand. I see the demand. So I thought, let me get a bit more validation. So what I used to do is I would go in that server and I would join a discord voice chat and I would share my screen, not talking, nothing, just me using my tool. And I was saying, at Sam, what are you using? At Sam, what is this? And I would respond to them being, oh, it's a tool I built. And I did this for about like a week straight. It even attracted the eyes of the discord server owner to the point that he created a YouTube long form promotional video on the tool. I didn't ask him. I didn't pay for it. I didn't do anything. And then after weeks of just sitting in the discord server and screen sharing, I thought, how can I get these people to convert to my product? And I saw the typical thing was for a SaaS to release a waitlist. And I was able to send that waitlist to those discord servers. So I would put in the disco…

AI assessment note: “So the way I did it is I hopped on a site called Discord.org”

Q Okay, cool. Thank you for sharing your metrics, pulling up your Stripe dashboards and being transparent with all that. I want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you even get into the idea of building a SaaS?

A All right. So I've been around the internet for the past, like three years, looking for different ways to make money. The first way I started was affiliate marketing. Me and my two best friends from home, we worked with a company called RizzApp and we posted faceless texting stories. About different like fake scenarios to help promote their app. And we did over 10,000 dollars in revenue with that company. However, it wasn't sustainable, but I took that money from RizzApp and I thought, okay, let me try different business models. So I went to something called YouTube automation, where you post videos online and make money from ad revenue. And I had a close friend called Mason who first introduced me into the idea of why doesn't someone build a way for us to find more short channels to run? Cause the more channels you have to run, the more opportunities to make money. And I was like, you know what? I'll try the idea. So I opened up a notepad and I blurted out on the chat to the voice mode, my whole idea. So I was given a bunch of code and I was just copying it back and forth into notepad. And then I Googled and I saw something called a visual studio code and I still didn't know what to do. So all I would do is just still copy back and forth, but instead of notepad, I did it on VS code and that's how I coded my first ever MVP. However, I showed that to my friend Mason and he was l…

AI assessment note: “I had a close friend called Mason who first introduced me into the idea”

Q Okay. So the breakthrough you mentioned, this is one of the big reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel, Rob, is this The whole idea of building in public. Obviously you hadn't created the SAS yet. Super X didn't even exist at this point. What was that breakthrough? Tell me that story. What happened there?

A After I'd had these five failures for me, money at that point was becoming this thing that was really, really scarce. And I was getting really, really anxious. I literally hadn't made any money in over a year. So I made this post and it shared all of my failures and it blew up. It got about 150,000 views on X. And with that came one comment. That said, I should start a development agency using my skills. So with the momentum of that initial post, I immediately announced I was starting this development agency and I got my very, very first 3000 dollar client from that initial viral post. From there, it started to go really, really well. And the wildest part of all of this was that all of these clients were coming through X inbound to my DMs through my viral posts. I started to post more and more, trying to get more and more clients and drive more and more revenue. So when I started to get these viral posts, everything in my life Kind of felt like it was clicking together because I felt like what I'd seen others do in the past on X was finally real and possible. In hindsight, that vulnerability was what made it reach out to so many people because so many people feel this way too. But I had no process to create this content to drive in these clients. So I built one and soon enough I was using AI data and analytics to systematically create viral content on X. And through that I was …

AI assessment note: “So I made this post and it shared all of my failures and it blew up.”

Q Okay, so you realize the power of building public. You build this sort of dev agency around it, which is amazing. Most people would probably stop there and be like, wow, this is like amazing money, and this is awesome. I get to travel the world and do this, but That wasn't enough for you. You wanted to take it to the next level. So what happened next?

A At the end of 20, 24, I had a few things going on. So I had problems with the employee that I'd hired. I had a relationship that was breaking down and I realized that actually building products for other people was completely unfulfilling. In January, 20, 25, I made this new year's resolution where I decided I'm going to start vlogging. That was then when I posted this post that a lot of people now know me for. I shared how filming in public was like. And this was while I was at the airport in Amsterdam, flying to Rio de Janeiro. And then when I landed in Rio de Janeiro, I opened my phone and this post had over a million views. And all of a sudden this was like another breakthrough, another viral post, but the scale to which this went viral was beyond my craziest imaginations. And the timing of everything just made sense. I'd started vlogging. I closed down my agency, and this was also when I was starting to build Super X. But those first seven months in reality were absolutely brutal. I got hospitalized in Guatemala with Food poisoning. A few months later, I got hospitalized again in Colombia and all the time X kept changing their API all the time. So that was causing stability issues in SuperX. And every day I'd open my inbox and see tens of messages saying that SuperX was down. But I kept building and I kept posting and I look back at this now and I realized that I was incre…

AI assessment note: “I closed down my agency, and this was also when I was starting to build Super X.”

Q All right. You shared earlier that you tried to work with developers before and build stuff. Didn't really necessarily work out super well, but now, as I understand you vibe coded this entire thing and you didn't have a crazy background in development or engineering. Tell me a little bit more about that. Did you actually vibe code this app yourself?

A Yeah. So this all started. Uh, six months ago around in June, I was scrolling on social media. I saw an ad for a vibe coding platform called for work. And it said I built seven apps in a week and I go, that can't be true. And I decided to try it out. I don't know how to code at all, but I do understand the systems and how to get conversions from these apps and how to build kind of viral ideas. So I used work for whoever doesn't know is a vibe coding platform. And I also leveraged a bunch of public APIs out there to build some of the functionality. It took me around a month from The idea to being live on the app store from June to July first, that's when I launched. And in that month, it was just a bunch of attempts with chat GPT and Rourke to build something that kind of works. Basically I would try to port the app from Rourke to test flight. And there was just a bunch of issues. So anytime there was an issue with expo, I would just copy the logs, throw the logs into chat GPT. And I kind of had chat GPT as my advisor and it kind of guided me Through this whole process. Now I had to hire out one developer to integrate payments and authentication. I spent the first week of June on Roark prompting nonstop until I got something that I like from there. I passed it onto the developer. If you need something simple as integrating a paywall, that's a super easy task. So I paid someone o…

AI assessment note: “I spent the first week of June on Roark prompting nonstop until I got something”

Q that. That's amazing. And it's absolutely insane that you vibe coded this in the last few months. I know a lot of people watching this are saying right now, okay, that's cool. You built it, but building doesn't matter anymore. It's all about distribution. So let's talk about it. How did you market your apps and how do you think about marketing your apps and getting users and making revenue?

A Yeah. So my whole strategy, when it comes to marketing these apps, it's all been from influencers, just influencer marketing, quick, Snapping the gotcha moment, just kind of keep going and scaling that up. I think influencer marketing is so valuable so much that my co-founder is actually one of the biggest people in the wrestling influencing space. So we launched with him. He was a great first push for us. When we released, we set up a pre-order to be on the top charts. So the day we released, we were like 18 on the app store just from his influence. And then going into month two, that's when we began to kind of saturate his audience, which you always have to be wary of. From there, I took about 500 bucks and I'm like, all right, now that we've saturated Caden's audience and we're a little bit known in the wrestling industry, we took the money, threw it into marketing and generated so far. Now we're at like 13 K for this month. I'm probably gonna have to invest another two 50 before the month ends, but influencer marketing has just been great for us.

AI assessment note: “my whole strategy, when it comes to marketing these apps, it's all been from influencers”

Q amazing. I think it's one of the best pieces of advice for anybody bootstrapping anything with their own cash. What I really want to get from you, and I think a lot of people watching this would be wondering, if you were to give advice to someone watching right now on how to do that, what would be your exact playbook if you had to start over from scratch today?

A Well, step one is you have to build an audience because if you don't have an audience, you don't have anyone to sell to. People buy because they trust you. And especially today when it's so easy to create products that there's a million products out there, people buy based on believing in a brand or a person. Post the raw, you know, build in public type stories of you with your thought process and what you're doing. And that will help establish trust with people. The way I did that was just by putting out Free things of value that took me time to create, but I knew would be helpful to other people. In addition to just showing up and being really authentic about who I was and why I was there, that alone can get you an audience of people that trust you and are engaged with you. And that really is the first step. Step two is you've got to set up an email list and start communicating with people at least once a week. So while your social media can be a great way to kind of interact with new people, Your email list is really where you're building that trust. And what's cool is that when you start emailing people, they will email you back and you start this dialogue and you can start to talk to them about your idea. You can even use your email list to put out your ideas, get the replies back as your feedback on how to improve your idea. Show up, do that weekly, because when it's time…

AI assessment note: “Well, step one is you have to build an audience”

Q If you were starting over today and everything you've learned with the apps that you've built, how do you approach this phase to know that you're building the right thing?

A Here's what we're going to do. We're going to pull out our phones. We're going to go to TikTok and type in any keywords related to our niche. And then what you can do, tap the three dots in the top, right. And then you can filter by most liked videos of all time. This is your market research. We'll take puff count. My previous app, as an example, you type in Quit vaping on Tik Tok. And then you go to videos and you can see that these videos, some of these videos have gone insanely viral. We have 1.3 million likes here. We have 3.7 million likes here, right? So this is our market research. Let's click into one here and let's see if we can find some similarities between this content and some of the content that I created here in this video, they're dropping their vapes in a glass of water. And if we go to the puff count profile, you can see that we were doing that. That was one of our bread and butter, 33,000 views. It's me dunking a vape into a glass of water. This is not my original idea. I was not the first person on TikTok to put a vape in a glass of water, but I did the market research. I understood that that content was resonating with my ideal target audience. And I use that concept and created my own videos. And then my next part of the process, it's very high tech here. So this is my market research strategy. I take exactly what I found on TikTok and I put them all into …

AI assessment note: “We're going to go to TikTok and type in any keywords related to our niche.”

Q I mean, that's great. Without a personal brand, how did you actually grow this business? How did you take this business from zero to 250 K in about nine months? What were the actual marketing channels?

A Yeah, the way we got it off the ground was we would share it with some people. People would use it in like discord communities a little bit to help out. We kept on improving it. We kept on listening to the customers and it grew to 10 K a month. Fairly organically as it got to a much better place and to a good place where we felt pretty confident. We reached out to a couple of people on YouTube to make videos about it. And then we started up with short form content. So at first we weren't getting any views, um, but we were studying like what others were doing. And then we created a system with content that would get a lot of views and go viral and bring a lot of awareness to the brand. And then eventually we started paid ads as well. All of these things started to reinforce each other together and they built like a flywheel of some sort where Somebody would make a YouTube video, and then, like, we would have shorts made of that video, we'd post the shorts, we would have ads made with that video, we would use ads, and then people would kind of start to see it everywhere. So, YouTube videos, short form content, and paid ads makes up 60 to 65% of our total traffic. Of course, we have affiliates, ChatGPT, if you ask the right questions, we'll get put up in ChatGPT. SEO, of course, it's ranking quite high now. Like, the App Store itself, Brings on traffic as well. People just searchi…

AI assessment note: “YouTube videos, short form content, and paid ads makes up 60 to 65%”

Q Okay, so the pricing is interesting. I'm also curious about the platform's role. What did they actually do for you? And also, more importantly, what percentage cut did they take of the lifetime sales?

A They actually do everything for you apart from the product. What Rocketer did was They marketed our product across a lot of different platforms. They did multiple things. They have a list of hundreds of thousands of customers who are ready to buy LTDs. The first thing they did was they sent email to all of their customers and they talked about Supergrove with them. The second thing which they did was they created ads for Instagram and Facebook. And the third thing which they did was they basically created all the marketing assets. Like they created screenshots, videos, which we still use. Some of these even today. So they created all these assets and they launched super for us. Essentially our role was build the product and the second was support, which is really crucial for entity because you are going to get a lot of queries and stuff. So those are the only two things which we did. Everything regarding marketing was actually done by rocket up. So for this rocket up to click, 40% of the cut, which translates to around a 40,000 dollars for us. Obviously it's a big cut. 40% is a huge cut. But if you think about it at that moment, we did not have like, we had only like one or two customers. Almost close to zero dollars, but just by launching our product through them, we were able to generate 40,000 dollars.

AI assessment note: “So for this rocket up to click, 40% of the cut”

Q Okay. So that's sort of interesting. You looked at the existing competitors in the market. You realized that their solutions just weren't all that great. That gave you the confidence to build something. Could you dive deeper into that sort of validation strategy?

A So one thing which I always tell indie hackers is don't try to create a new market, just work on the validated market. So what I suggest a lot of people is go for products or go for markets, which are actually generating revenue. Once you have identified the validated market, your next step should be to figure out what are your competitors. So deeply understand your competitors, use their product day in, day out, try to understand what are their core flows. Try to come up with a new way to Solve the core flows. So once you are able to come up with a sort of a one percent increment in the quality of the product, like you can just go ahead and just build an MVP after that. What I did was I did exactly this. So I actually studied my three competitors who were like the biggest competitors in my market back then. One was Tapleo. The second one was contenting. The third one was authored up. Tapleo was the, like the biggest in the market. They had like numerous features, but the Core feature, which is basically content creation piece was not that great. And after studying all these products, I realized the demand in the market is so much that even products like these are able to like earn revenue. So I realized that I can solve this demand really well.

AI assessment note: “deeply understand your competitors, use their product day in, day out”

Q Okay. Interesting. So yeah, I mean, definitely pros, definitely cons. What I think is cool about it is the early feedback. So I guess my next question would be for you is did that lifetime deal, those hundreds of customers join, did that actually help improve your product?

A Yeah, definitely. We had actually around more than two 50 plus LTD customers. So there is a churn in LTD customers. Also the only like 10% of these customers are really going to use your product after a certain period or around 20 to 25 customers. They genuinely use the product every week. They used to give us very brutal feedback because we were really new in the market. They were not really for life. So they used to message us on intercom. Some of the customers were able to get our numbers also From internet. Some of these customers were really good. They actually helped us shape the roadmap. So they gave us a lot of good insights into content creation on LinkedIn that actually helped us improve the product massively.

AI assessment note: “They actually helped us shape the roadmap. So they gave us a lot of good insights”

Q Okay, cool. I mean, the last objection that I hear is that Doing an LTD will kill your future long-term growth because you can't make any money from those people that you sold the LTDs to. What do you think about that?

A That's actually not true. What I've realized is you, uh, in future, you can actually upsell them. So that is another thing which you can do. And also at the same time, what I feel is you don't want to launch LTD for a long period of time. So for example, we launched LTD only for three days. So the very good way to ensure you are not overselling entities is just limit the timeframe and also limit the number of users you are going to like support. So we limited that to 300 users. So because we launched only for three days and, and also like we, we did a lot of upselling to these LTD customers that actually helped us build our subscription business as well.

AI assessment note: “That's actually not true. What I've realized is you, in future, you can actually upsell them.”

Q Cool. Well, I mean, I think that's super cool. If you're starting today, where would you go looking for more opportunities for this type of business?

A I believe Zapier is a good place to go and find those kinds of opportunities. So if you go to Zapier and you check, for example, the most common Zapps, you will see that pair of two applications, for example, and I will have some QuickBooks and Sheets. There's a lot of Companies and small businesses using QuickBooks for accounting, and they need to move that information to check the invoices, the payment orders, and everything, and work with that data. And doing that in Zapier is kind of messy. You need to create different subs for updates, for creates, deletes, and everything. So if you're able to build that in just one piece of software that does everything, you're gonna be solving a huge pain problem for customers.

AI assessment note: “I believe Zapier is a good place to go and find those kinds of opportunities.”

Q All right. So let's talk about growth. Uh, after you kind of launched this thing, you're, Posting it on a bunch of forums. What'd you do after that to actually start growing as a business and distribute and get your product in front of more people?

A Yeah. So the first source of insults was of course in the marketplace. That was super important. I realized I needed to do SEO stuff. And so I started to think about what kind of blog posts I could write that users could find interesting and related to notion and Google sheets. So that's right now one of our main traffic channels. And I also use rent a lot. I have a service called F Five bot. That is free. That lets you track different keywords on Reddit. So I set up some keyword tracking related to CSV, sheets, sheets in that subreddit. And every time I get an email with a notification that a new post or comment was added, I just go there and reply. Of course you need to try to be not spammy and really give value to the users. And if your product can be a solution for their problems. Then you recommend your product. You say you are the founder. I also did a launch on ProductHunt a year and a half after launching the product for the first time. So that's also was a really nice source of traffic, not paying customers, but yes, traffic and visibility. And I remember I also posted on Hacker News. I got to the front page. I was crazy. The spike you get in traffic is amazing. But again, the same. It doesn't translate into paying customers. It's just visibility, backlinks that improve domain rating, but that's it.

AI assessment note: “I realized I needed to do SEO stuff. And so I started to think”

Q Okay, let's talk about ideas. How'd you find this idea?

A Yeah, so I was a back-end engineering manager, and the impetus for the whole thing was I was trying to hire Go developers. This is back in 2020. I was having a hard time. Like, I'd open up, you know, a job position, and I'd get like five, six, seven people applying for the job. And so it really just seemed to be that people getting into coding were gravitating towards the front-end side and almost being pushed to the front-end side by online learning platforms. So it just seemed to me like there's this huge vacuum in the market where if you wanted to learn backend stuff, you want to learn databases, infrastructure, it's very hard to do it online.

AI assessment note: “the impetus for the whole thing was I was trying to hire Go developers.”

Q Let's go back. Let's, uh, if you can give me a little bit of a timeline of what it looked like, uh, how you came up with the idea for this and, you know, what were you doing before you're running this huge business?

A Yeah. So I was making about 200 K total comp at the time, leading just a small team of three at that time. I've always wanted to build a business. I've always wanted to get out of the, the nine to five employee work. The business, BootDev, had just started making about 2000 dollars a month. So multiply that by 12, it's like 24 K, right? And then take into account any expenses, like you're basically not making any money. So I'm talking to my wife about this. I'm like, you know, it's, it's making two K a month. Like that's, that's not so bad. And I really like it. And I feel like if I put more time into it, we could grow this thing. She was incredibly nervous about that idea. Cause obviously I'm earning 200 K a month. We've got our second child on the way. She did not like the risk. Frankly, I didn't even really like the idea of taking that much risk. So as it happens, uh, the CFO, the company I was working at, went to go work with an ex-CEO of mine, so a mutual friend, and I went and pitched him and his partner on the idea of investing in boot dev. And so he gave me the angel funding, it was 330 K, but it gave me enough of, like, assurance that, okay, we could at least have a couple years of runway to try this new business.

AI assessment note: “I was making about 200 K total comp at the time, leading just a small team”

Q So we talked a lot about finding content ideas, working with influencers, but what happens when we create content? It works. It gets a ton of views. What do we do next?

A As you kind of methodically track how well your content is doing it, it becomes pretty apparent that some ideas and some videos work way better than others. You want to basically kill the videos that don't convert. And explore variations of the better converting videos. And so I've been talking a fair amount now about how to actually get to a viral video and it'd be really tedious to restart the cycle every single time. But the good news is that once you have one viral video, you can basically milk that discovery into 10 X or even 100 X the initial views of finding that viral video. So when you find that video, your goal is to somehow turn that video into, into a series. Series is kind of like basically reposting the same video over and over with subtle variations. You might think this is unrealistic. Like, how could the same video continue to go viral over and over? But the unfortunate truth is that most people, even you and I, are creatures of habit, and we just like seeing the same things. So you want a video that you could basically slightly tweak and repost multiple times a week that's still fun for the audience. Some viral series that maybe you've seen is a guy tries to see how many sticks of spaghetti it takes to hold his weight. It's sticks of spaghetti one time, it's coat hangers another time. When he gets really rich, maybe he'll try with an iPad or something. But bas…

AI assessment note: “when you find that video, your goal is to somehow turn that video into, into a series.”

Q All right. So let's talk about deals. How do you structure these influencer deals and how do you get the most bang for your buck? If you know what I'm saying?

A So when you're structuring deals with influencers, one high priority that you want to set is you want incentives between you and the influencer to be aligned. So you should both want a great video that converts. The most obvious thing is that you should try to avoid paying upfront for the video, and most may pay half upfront. This is because most influencers are fantastic people, but some influencers will just try and drop a half-assed video once they get the money into their account, and also generally just lose all of your leverage once the payment is completed. You want to try to split some of the payment so that some percent of it comes from the number of conversions that they bring you. And you could track this via coupon code or UTM link. And if they don't want to do that, they could at least, you could at least give them some affiliate bonus. Like, oh, if the video gets X amount of views, then we'll give you an additional payment on top. Or if the video gets certain amount of clicks in the link in bio, we'll also give you another bonus. The other thing that comes with structuring deals with influencers is you want to pay the least amount price per video that you can. And one way to do that is you could actually purchase influencer partnerships in bundles. So you could say, oh, let's do a partnership of maybe three videos or 10 videos, right? And then say, how about inste…

AI assessment note: “purchase influencer partnerships in bundles. So you could say, oh, let's do a partnership”

Q All right. So let's talk about UGC. Instead of hiring influencers, you can bring people in house to create content. On your branded accounts or just on accounts with no followers. Can you tell me about how these deals work?

A Yeah. So UGC deals are as stable as it gets because you're posting like 20 to 30 videos a month, maybe more, right? So it's fine if really 10 videos flop and then just a few videos do well. Some people like that. Having to do a sponsored deal, having to really make sure that it goes viral can be stressful. Some people prefer like, oh, okay, so you will basically just give me the playbook of what kind of videos that I should be making and I just need to post like One video a day. Maybe it only takes them 20:30 minutes to make the video. And that comes with some base salary, which is like very stable and also comes with some incentives. So like if your coupon code gets more than X redemptions, then we'll give you a bonus or each, each redemption that you get will give you 20%, 30% of LTV of each of these users that come in. Or maybe we do a view incentive. There's no rigid way to structure it, right? You should just talk with the person that you're trying to hire for the UGC deals. And you can see when their eyes twinkle and then you want to obviously incentivize them. The way that they're excited to be incentivized. The industry standard is usually you pay like 2000 ish per month. It could be a little lower, a little higher depending on who you're targeting, but 2000 dollars per month, and then some incentive bonus on top of it. And it usually shakes out. Like you will probably …

AI assessment note: “The industry standard is usually you pay like 2000 ish per month”

Q Yeah. So tell me what kind of tools and software run this business?

A I, I'm a big fan of not spending on tools, so we don't have a lot. We use mostly G Suite for everything. I think that what you can get done in Google Sheets is incredible, and people should go on YouTube and realize you can run an entire company's dashboard in Google Sheets. And we use, um, Stripe for payments. We use Notion for a lot of, like, organization and, um, you know, sort of material reference guides and things like that. Um, and we use a company called TLDV, which is video recording and medium recording. And then of course we use HubSpot for our CRM. So we try to keep our tools pretty slim. You would be surprised how much you can get done in Google Sheets, Google Classroom, G Suite. Um, and then for the stuff that you can't get done, we use pretty popular providers like Notion and Stripe and things like that.

AI assessment note: “We use mostly G Suite for everything... Stripe for payments. We use Notion”

Q That's crazy. Honestly, to me, it seems like you're the type of person that never runs out of ideas, no matter how many things you build. So let's talk about that. What are your methods for finding winning ideas?

A I've used honestly different methods of finding the idea for each app that I've worked on. With Riz GPT, it was a very clear problem that I had observed with people that I know. People don't know what to say on dating apps, and you build an app to solve it. Umaxx, on the other hand, was identified a little bit more opportunistically. When people want to become more attractive, they're willing to spend money on it. They were spending money on skincare, haircare, gua sha, the whole nine yards, but there didn't exist any software to solve the problem that people were having. When you find a niche that's heavily monetized with physical products, that's a good indicator that the niche converts. It's also a good indicator that You can probably build a software or application to solve a problem within it. I think that there's still a lot of room for like an all-in-one AI glow up application. Umaxx was kind of like the first iteration, but if someone were to put real time investment into building a super valuable application here, that really helps people improve. I think that there's still a millions and millions on the table there.

AI assessment note: “I've used honestly different methods of finding the idea for each app”

Q Okay, gotcha. Putting yourself in your customer's shoes is how you know they'll buy. Now let's talk about actually building the app. What's amazing to me is how you're able to learn design, coding, and distribution in such a short amount of time and make millions with those skills. If you were to restart from scratch today, having nothing but the idea in mind, how would you build it?

A If I were to restart and build apps today, here are the tools that I would use. Number one, for design Figma. Learning how to use Figma will be one of the greatest unlocks in ensuring that the application that you put into the market is actually usable. Now, what I would recommend for anybody designing to do is to use references. I'm grabbing different apps that have similar functionality and design to what I'm looking to build. And then using that to inform kind of my design process, right? Even if you yourself don't intend to be a designer, you need to be able to work in Figma to work with designers, whether you hire them off Upwork or work with someone internally. Number two, when it comes to building, what I would recommend is that you build in React Native with the Expo framework using cursor as your IDE. And then finally, when it comes to marketing, the two primary methods that I would recommend Are influencer marketing and doing internal UGC. So influencer marketing is when you find somebody that already has a platform or an audience and you pay them to promote your product. Internal UGC is where you or someone that you hire creates content based around your application and then post that to accounts branded around your application. And if you are creating content yourself in the early days, you're going to want to use cap cut to do so. Faceless video content or content …

AI assessment note: “If I were to restart and build apps today, here are the tools that I would use.”