The Exchanges

Q Alright, so you started Greek House in your dorm room, or your college basement, uh, with like 500 bucks. What did that look like at the time?

A Yeah, so, um, we were basically at our fraternity, um, house, and so we would literally meet in the common areas and, and basically get a sales plan going, and, um, you know, a lot of what we did to start our business was, I mean, we're just savvy college kids, and this is before, you know, we had Instagram and, and different ways to reach the, you know, different folks there. We would just go out and start texting Our friends and in different sororities and fraternities, trying to figure out who's making the decision to buy t-shirts and just were out there hustling and kind of working through our networks, meeting people on campus, going to different, you know, the student organization meetings, going and pitching to them there on, hey, you should use us to, to buy your shirts. And that was kind of our edge was we were these young hustlers that could go out and just, you know, we were, we were sharp. We really liked sales and really just going out and pitching people. And, you know, we probably sucked at sales in the beginning, but, you know, over time you get better and better, your pitch gets refined, but, you know, putting yourself out there and just going for it, it's the best thing you can do as a college student. So I always tell students to just go for it. If you're in college, you know, there's no reason you can't be starting a side hustle or a business while you're in…

AI assessment note: “we would literally meet in the common areas and, and basically get a sales plan going”

Q Well, before we get into this business that you built, I do want to go back. What was it like building an audience-based business and being a huge influencer in the space?

A Um, it's kind of the dream that a lot of people have growing up and watching Jake Paul or like all these influencers, like just blow up and become famous and make so much money and live in these cool places and hang out with cool people. Anything I did would make money and would do well, as long as I was talking about it. But there was sometimes like a little bit of a mismatch, right? Like people would think that you're this person, but deep down you're really actually this person. And sometimes those would deviate and you wouldn't feel so aligned with like your internet personality, but It was cool all around. It was a great experience. Like I look back and I don't regret it at all. It was really fun.

AI assessment note: “It was cool all around. It was a great experience. Like I look back”

Q have a personal brand and you can launch an app and you can do 10 K a month, 20 K a month, but you launched something and did 300 K per month, pretty much right out of the gate. So clearly this idea was good. This manifestation app, how did you come up with this idea? And how'd you know this is something that could be a multi-million dollar app?

A I'll start off by saying I don't think most men would have come up with this idea, right? And so I think that's actually the unfair advantage of being a woman in this space is there's so many of these problems that we experience as women that we're like, I wish an app existed like this, but a man would never think to build an app like that, right? The reason I was able to create this app was, you know, I listened to meditations and visualizations, and I saw that there was nothing on the market that created Custom visualizations or meditations for a person. And I was like, it would be really cool if there was a way to like customize these visualizations specifically about the exact goal that I want. And I was like, well, we now live in a very unique time in human history where we can literally create an app to do that for you. Right. You can use AI to customize, um, something like that. And so that's how the idea came to be.

AI assessment note: “I listened to meditations and visualizations, and I saw that there was nothing on the market”

Q Okay, cool. Super cool business. A lot of people watching the channel want to see that this is a real business that's making over 10,000 dollars a month. Could you show us some of the analytics, Stripe, or whatever you look at on a daily basis?

A So this is our Stripe dashboard. This is our MRR. The majority of it here, the rest is over on Lemon Squeezy. We recently migrated. You can see our net volume since we migrated about a month ago. The majority of our revenue is through subscriptions. So our trial rate right now is around actually about 30%. This is adjusted because we recently migrated over We've got about 60 active trials right now, and our churn is close to about 30% as well, but we're trying to get it down right now. Since I started using Super X properly back in about April, you can see the majority of my impressions have started to skyrocket, and since then I've been able to keep about 100,000 impressions a day, and this is where 95% of the traffic and most of our users have come from. Since I started posting about two and a half years ago, I never in my wildest imaginations expect To get numbers like this. And it's only really happened since I started following the data before that. And I was posting randomly. I was getting, as you can see, completely inconsistent impressions. And now we're looking at about a 100,000 impressions a day.

AI assessment note: “So this is our Stripe dashboard. This is our MRR.”

Q are. Click the first link in the description to grab it, brainstorm your next idea and start building. Thanks to monday.com for supporting the channel. Now let's get back to Leandro's story. Let's talk about the launch of this. So you built it and then what happened? Did you put it on the marketplace and how many users did you get? Tell me about what the launch process was like.

A Yeah. So the first step was to publish it to the Google workspace marketplace. And then I started to spam a lot of famous groups related to Notion and Reddit as well. So I searched keywords related to the product and started to have conversations with users, both in the groups and in personal DMs. So that way I got some, some first users to try the application and the same with the marketplace. Once the application is in the marketplace, if there's someone looking for something notion related, they're going to find it and they're going to try it. Also something that really helped was having a chat interface in the landing page at the beginning, because that way you can have real conversations with customers and with users and try to understand what they need.

AI assessment note: “the first step was to publish it to the Google workspace marketplace.”

Q Okay. So we talked about how to finding a market. Now, how do we validate that there's demand for this market or what do we do next?

A When we first pick a market, we, we don't know if it's a good market to go in, and that's what the step two is all about. We use Google as well as a Chrome extension, which is keyword everywhere, to quickly find the volume of search and all related keywords that can orientate us until we find something that is interesting to go further, to dig deeper, and then we look at the list that we have. For example, let's say, Swedish massage. It's still a big one. And then I could find potentially another sub-niche by looking into the different programs. What do we have? Best massage technique, massage therapy description, Swedish massage history. Okay. If I go down, I have Swedish massage near me. Okay. 20, 20,000, uh, search. This is a very interesting query, and then we use Google Trends, which is one of the best tools to use when it comes to market research, to know if we have a trending market, or at least a stable market. And now we have switched message, and we want to understand the difference between search term and topic. Topic will basically take all the related search term on Google, and also in all different languages. So when you have a topic, it's already like, it's a big thing. Sometimes you only have search term, but when you have topic, you just use the topic. And for this sake, ah, we can see that is the trending market, actually. It's not too bad. There is some kind …

AI assessment note: “We use Google as well as a Chrome extension, which is keyword everywhere”

Q Okay, so if you do this, you're gonna find like a million ideas. How do you sort through all those ideas? And find the right content formats to try.

A So firstly, you can get a lot of ideas from step one, where you have the list of influences that your users watch. So you could think about what type of content are these influences posting? What sponsored content have they posted before and which of these videos have popped off? Like, why do you personally think that they did well? And then you could take these hypotheses and, you know, try them out. If you're talking to your users, you could ask them what other tools that they use that are similar to your tool or tangentially related to your tool. Do those tools have social media accounts? What type of content are they doing? You can learn a lot just from what your competitors are posting. And if your angle is similar to them, then you could get inspiration from what they're doing. You could scroll yourself on the TikTok account that we talked about earlier, the TikTok account you created just to see what the algorithm serves you and just keep scrolling until something naturally grabs your attention. And that can give you ideas. Either you could try to emulate that hook or you could build upon that hook and say, okay, this is the reason why I think I stopped. And I think that our users might like it if we, if I tweak that hook a little bit and you can kind of start from there.

AI assessment note: “which of these videos have popped off? Like, why do you personally think”

Q Yeah. Double click on the, the quality of service thing. How did you make sure that the service was so good? Specifically, what did you do to ensure that this was the best service possible so that it could scale?

A In terms of how to deliver an incredible experience, just think about what happens in your daily life. If you send an email to someone and they get back to you in five minutes, that feels amazing. If you have a problem and you get on the phone with somebody and they're like, you know what? I totally understand. That's our bad. Let me comp you a month of service because this is not the experience I want you to have. Just keep going with this. Going in day by day with these EAs, helping them touch up their emails, helping them do their Canva work. There's so many pieces of low hanging fruit out there in terms of delivering exceptional customer experience. That people can do if they're just willing to be on for a pretty long period of time in that initial stretch. Even though I wanted a great, you know, easy lifestyle, I knew the first 20, the first 50, you gotta really lean in, you gotta be there, you gotta pick up the phone, you gotta call people, and you just gotta go beyond the bounds of what you might do when the company's large.

AI assessment note: “Going in day by day with these EAs, helping them touch up their emails”

Q So after you started to get more paying customers, was there a specific pricing strategy you used to monetize the product to its potential?

A Pricing it was a bit tricky at the beginning. I mean, I knew it wasn't beta, so I launched it at a nine 99. Now I, after adding so many features and the product has matured so much, it's, uh, And I want to be seen as an affordable tool, not a cheap one, right? And when it comes to Resume Maker Data Online, I started with a one-time purchase model, which made total sense for the type of product. But after I relaunched it as a SaaS early this year, even though the churn is high, the revenue is much more predictable. It's really nice because yeah, with one-time purchases, you go back to zero. That's a bit scary each time. Yeah.

AI assessment note: “I started with a one-time purchase model... relaunched it as a SaaS”

Q Okay, so right now TikTok organic is the bread and butter of marketing mobile apps, but are there any other marketing channels that have worked well for you?

A The beautiful thing about organic TikTok is if the video does well organically, it's a great indicator that it's a great creative in general. You can put them on paid ads and click the spend my money button. That's literally all you have to do because as long as the creative is good, the algorithms on Facebook ads or TikTok ads or whatever, they will optimize around that solid creative and they will find you customers. What you can also do is you can find Influencers on these platforms and you can pay them to make content for you. In my experience, it's tough to, you know, work with influencers. They always want a ton of cash and they don't really care, you know, how the videos perform for you, but you can find those diamond in the rough creators and you can reach out to them and get pretty cheap content and you can use that and scale that way, uh, as well.

AI assessment note: “You can put them on paid ads and click the spend my money button.”

Q link in the description, and we're going to give you 52 micro SaaS ideas just like Steven's so you can get started on your journey right now. Ok, so scratching your own itch is definitely the way to go if you want to find a painful problem. But what do you do after you get the idea for your app? How do you actually validate it's an idea worth building?

A I did market research. I looked at sensor tower, looked at other, you know, quit drinking or quit smoking cigarettes apps. And I saw that they were crushing it, looked at Google trends, saw that vaping was on the rise. And then probably the most important part was I looked on Tik Tok. I saw that vape videos were going super viral on Tik Tok, but I think where a lot of young entrepreneurs, especially fall short is they They give up on the idea too quickly. If you have a good idea and it solves a problem for people, like, commit to it. Just like me for puff count. The first four to six months, I didn't make any money. It was only after I locked in the marketing. Like, marketing is 90% of being successful and validating an idea.

AI assessment note: “I did market research. I looked at sensor tower, looked at other”

Q All right, Colin, tell me a little bit more about your backstory. How did you come to the point where you wanted to start your own company?

A I've been fired twice and I've been laid off once. Um, and it sucks every time. No last week's pay, have to buy back your laptop, lose your health care. I was like, shit, man, like all my friends are in New York working at banks. Like, I can't believe I was just done with it. I was, I was super done working for other people. I was so tired of having to take orders that I disagreed with. And my friend gave a phone call. It changed my life. She said, Hey, we're, we're doing a Kickstarter for my wearable tech idea that I have. Do you want to help with it? I said, yeah, sure. I threw a launch party for her in Seattle. That changed my life because the mentorship I got there is completely life changing for someone, especially in their twenties, who's kind of directionless or, or feels like they're directionless. My best advice I can give people is Do you think someone's gonna be a good mentor? Say, hey, do you have an hour a week that I can maybe spend with you and buy you lunch every week and ask you questions? And that's exactly what I did. I had three people that I bought lunch every week, and I asked them as many questions as I could. I've been working for myself for six and a half years, and it's the best gift I've ever given myself.

AI assessment note: “I've been fired twice and I've been laid off once... done working for other people.”

Q A CEO runs each of the companies within your personal holding company. How do you find great CEOs?

A Basically, I look for a few qualities that I consider to be the unteachables. I look for someone who has an obsessive brain. I want someone who goes to sleep thinking about the business. I want someone waking up thinking about the business because it means they enjoy what they're doing so much. I want someone who's a great critical thinker. I want them to think about How are they informed by their previous experiences, but also how is this situation different and how do they need to behave differently? I want someone who's value aligned with me. Like I want someone who is high integrity, strong communicator, like the things that really matter, no matter what business you're working in. And the final piece is a great work ethic. Every day of the week, I'd bet on someone who is less talented, but has more humility and self-awareness because I believe If they also have good work ethic, like they will just grit their way to a higher ceiling, and they will also always be willing and have the humility to call out their blind spots, but I really think it's almost impossible to teach good work ethic, and so I need that in a site CEO that I bring on.

AI assessment note: “Basically, I look for a few qualities that I consider to be the unteachables.”

Q Let's dive in Steph. Can we go over what is the first step of the framework?

A So the first step is to find a market to explore. The idea is to start with what you have some edge or what you are interested in within the three core markets, which are health, wealth, and relationship, which are markets, which for sure people are okay to spend money. So you are already reducing the risk. So let's take an example, and we would only open the health market. Within these markets, we have a lot, a lot of Categories and subcategories and niches and sub niches and sub sub sub sub niches. We can go very, very deep in this market. But for now, let's say, for example, you are, you are really into stress management, but you think like, okay, that's not enough. I want more stress management. Fine. In this case, we are going to use a prompt. It's the market idea expander. And the goal is that if you put a sub niches, any sub niche or subcategory, it will continue expand in the category you want to dig into. And this is a little trick. Markdown is a language that needs to be used as much as possible when we talk with LLM. So instead of just copy and paste, it works as well. But it's really better if we copy as markdown, so we keep the structure of the prompt. The LLM we work with doesn't matter. You can pick the one you like. I tend to prefer working with Claude for different reasons. The first is that I think it's the most human like LLM. Yeah. So the copywriting is good…

AI assessment note: “the first step is to find a market to explore.”

Q it is literally 90 Three, 94% men, like actually, and if you look on our channel, you'll notice that it's always men. It's all men. When we talked earlier, you had some interesting opinions about this, the future of entrepreneurship. Hopefully there are a lot of young girls or ladies watching this that can get inspired. What do you think the future of building apps, being online is for women?

A I would say women are going to dominate this app space and men should prepare for that because women dominate Distribution. And the only thing that was standing in the way of women building the number one app on the app store and an app that makes 300 K MRR is the fact that many women just don't know how to code. And there was a technical barrier. And now with AI and tools like cloud code and cursor, that technical barrier has been eliminated to a large degree. Right. And it's only going to get better from here. And majority of influencers are women. I also think it's important to note, like biologically women command attention. We also know how to have Community. Like, we just have this sixth sense about it, and that's ultimately what's gonna determine the people who win in this space, as well as the fact that, like, the best product doesn't win, the best known one does. When I talk to women, there's actually a huge demonization of AI amongst women. I don't even know if men know this, and I think some men are demonized for using AI, but, like, when women use AI in their products, or just in general, they're, like, completely, like, canceled online, oftentimes. For me, when I was first getting hate online or criticism, it really affected me and I wanted to quit social media. However, I love to reframe. And so when I started getting hate online, I actually started viewing it as …

AI assessment note: “women are going to dominate this app space and men should prepare for that”

Q Interesting. I mean, on that note, I would love to hear about the transition. I mean, you went from LTD Strategy, uh, that sort of kickstarted the business, but then you transitioned it to a subscription. I think a lot of people watching would like to hear what worked for you in terms of that transition and what advice would you have for other people trying to do the same?

A One of the biggest thing that we did just after launching LTD was we actually make sure our customers were happy. So we were really obsessed with our LTD customers. We used to spend like one or two hours every day on intercom, answering the question, helping them through content creation. Like we sometimes used to help them manually and then used to convert those workflows into features inside Supergrove. So we did this for a couple of months. It actually helped us a lot in improving the product. We also added these tools called clarity and mix panel to really understand what these customers were doing. So we used to basically see which feature set they are using, which feature set they are not using. We did this like for a couple of months, but then we created this plan of launching our product on product home. So what we did, we actually launched it on product and we were able to become like product of the week in product and actually give us 50 customers also. So one of the key things, these LTT customers actually helped us make our product and launch better because they actually evangelized our product everywhere. I was not the only person talking about my product that day. We had like 10 to 15 really happy LTT customers who actually talked about us on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Product Hunt, and they also shared about our product On these platforms, like WhatsApp groups and …

AI assessment note: “these LTT customers actually helped us make our product and launch better because they actually evangelized”

Q Okay. So let's dive into the first step, which is the ingredients. How do you know what platforms and what content ideas are going to work?

A Yeah. So to create a truly viral video, you have to understand what your viewers want to see, which you have to ask yourself, like, who are your viewers? What are their interests? What are they currently watching? Why are they watching it? And how can you create content even more engaging than what they're currently watching? This is the most boring part of the process, where they save you months of work and increase the odds of viral video, in my opinion, by a significant margin. To do this, you can even explicitly ask them for their Instagram handles, and you can just check who they're following. What do they enjoy watching in their free time? So once you find a few of these influencers that your ideal user demographic follows, you can then use Instagram or TikTok's own algorithm to help deliver you Who you can sponsor or bring in house. You can go to these influencers profiles and click suggested similar accounts or see what are the hashtags that they mainly post on. And you'll get an easy list of hot leads that you can also follow. Once you have these, this list of influencers, you can create this new Instagram. This new Instagram is basically just going to be delivering you new people that you can either sponsor or work with. One of the biggest risks that come with influencer marketing is you basically, you pay for a post and it really does not do well at all. Or maybe the…

AI assessment note: “ask them for their Instagram handles, and you can just check who they're following”

Q So let's talk about scale. You built this to a million dollars a year, and then now it's doing over ten million dollars a year. Talk about that timeline. How did you scale this business?

A This was the most interesting thing for me that I learned and fucked up is there's a real gap when you go from the first five to eight people doing everything where one person has all the knowledge. They don't have to share that knowledge because the person who made the process is doing the process and everything works well to now we're an organization. Now we have a team. Now someone who comes in needs to be able to learn about how to do this. Everything breaks. Getting the knowledge out of people's heads and into processes was one of the biggest challenges for us as we grew, and it was painful. So, that for me was the hardest thing. Hiring, you know, we hire three, 30 to 40 people a month. My biggest thing is I like to hire, um, from non-traditional places. I think there is a wealth of incredible talent that exists outside of New York City, Silicon Valley. I mean, that's the foundation of my business, obviously, but even for our hires that were in the US, um, our first outside hire in the US, she was the head of children's summer camps at Mass Audubon, and I wanted her to take sales calls, and I was like, Man, if you can deal with, like, coordinating a bunch of screaming kids at summer camp and then, like, 20 to 30 angry parents every week coming and yelling at you, you can do this job and it's gonna seem like a vacation.

AI assessment note: “Getting the knowledge out of people's heads and into processes was one of the biggest challenges”

Q Let's talk about how you came up with the name for Sheets and Giggles. How'd you come up with that?

A Well, so I have four rules to a good brand name. It has to be spellable, shareable, and memorable. That's one rule. Spellable, shareable, and memorable. Rule number two, it has to connote or denote what you do. Cheats and giggles. We denote what we do. We sell bed sheets. Rule number three is that you have to have good SEO around it. Try not to pick words or combinations of words where they find not you or worse a competitor. And rule number four is that if you're going to sell to Americans, you got to have a .com because Americans don't buy from anything that's not a .com. Those are my four rules. And if you have four for four, you're a bullseye. And if you're three for four, go forward. If you're two for four, two and a half. Nope. Try again.

AI assessment note: “I have four rules to a good brand name.”

Q awesome. Congrats. Last question that we ask all founders who come on here, what would be your advice if you could go back in time before you had this successful app that was making money, maybe after you had that first app that didn't really work out, what advice would you have for your younger self? Or for anyone watching this that wants to build a profitable app like you.

A Yeah. My biggest piece of advice and the advice I've given myself this entire time is just literally never giving up on myself. I've always been very like an entrepreneurship type of person. And I've always wanted to have my own company building apps or video games. And so it's always been my dream. And so once vibe coding became a thing, I knew I could actually do it. And so I've just never given up and I was literally never going to stop until something became successful. It just happened a lot faster than I thought it would, but I still want to scale. Even farther. I want to make this a one million dollar a month app. And so I got to keep telling myself the same advice. Just never give up fully believe in yourself. I've had literally a lot of my friends that I'm really close to that have just make fun of my app ideas. Even what it is now, they still think it's funny and not a serious thing, but I have a vision and I know where I want to be. So it's just never given up on what you really believe in.

AI assessment note: “My biggest piece of advice... is just literally never giving up on myself.”

Q Yeah. If you could just give me a breakdown of, you know, how long this took, how much did you actually spend to get this prototype put together? What did that look like?

A With the student developer, what I did was I just put in all my savings, you know, as a non-technical founder, it just took a few months once I actually had the developer. And that's because all of the content, all of the wireframes before then were already created. I did want to learn enough to at least be able to communicate what I wanted better. I just sort of focused a lot on the design, making sure all of that was really simple. The first prototype of rooted was essentially the panic attack button that would walk you through a panic attack. And that actually hasn't changed a ton over the years because it's really the core of rooted. It's the aha moment that really resonates with users. What's changed is the design and the way it looks right now. But that core idea of how to stop a panic attack is still there and rooted after all these years. So I launched with that, a simple breathing tool, and then the lessons on how to understand panic attacks and anxiety and where they're coming from.

AI assessment note: “I just put in all my savings... it just took a few months”

Q So you decided to build this software business. But how? Did you vibe code this? Did you hire a developer? How did you actually build this thing?

A I had a co-founder. Neither of us were technical. You know, we've hired a lot of developers. A lot of them weren't very good because we didn't know what we were doing. But every time we made a good hire, the boat lifted for everyone. You know what I mean? And then in January of this year, I literally chucked myself into the deep end of the water. I bought out my co-founder for a lot of money at the time. And that was when we were at like 13 or 14 K MRR. It was extremely scary. And I remember putting it in my notes. I put on January sixth, I bet everything on myself. I also wrote like a revenue target and funny enough, the revenue target right under that note was, you know, exactly what you need to do to get to 250 K a month in of recurring revenue. So just lock in and do it one thing at a time. And now we've gotten to a point where we're pretty lean team, but All of the engineers. They're all like the best we've ever seen. They're really, really good. And that being said, it still is incredibly hard to find talent. And so if anyone is watching this, we're always willing to work with talented people. So if you're a designer, if you're a developer, even if you're good at CRO, any sort of value you think you could provide in that area, definitely reach out to us. We'd love to talk to anyone.

AI assessment note: “Neither of us were technical. You know, we've hired a lot of developers.”

Q Alright, so you got this one successful business. Now you're thinking of new ideas. Can you tell me how you, Approach new ideas, and how do you validate them?

A First of all, the best way to think of business ideas is to never just sit on a couch thinking of business ideas. That is the worst way to do it, right? Be a magnet for problems, so be incredible at finding and hoarding people's problems, and then thinking about what are novel solutions for solving those problems. If I wanted to launch another business today, I would, but I want to focus with StoryArm first, so if anyone wants to steal one of these ideas, they can. The first idea is what I call workflow automation agency. I think the next big one will be basically like notion or air table or different forms of automation agencies using these no code tools like Zapier and make as well as using AI and offshore talent. And I think every business you want to finding people working on manual tasks that can be automated or outsourced. So if I was to build my next business in the hold code, it would be that. I think there's so much opportunity to build it, so your audience should feel free to steal the idea and take it and build it themselves.

AI assessment note: “Be a magnet for problems, so be incredible at finding and hoarding people's problems”

Q All right, let's talk about building. As a developer, how did you take this idea from zero to one?

A So you should have a very good idea of who you're building for and what problem you're solving, and you should just solve that problem, but you should solve it really fucking well. Because if you don't have a great solution, you're not going to break into the space, but you should tightly scope What you're building. I see this mistake all the time too. The idea of just packing on new features, solving different problems. You should only be listening to what problems your customers have, and then you should be filtering out any problems from customers that aren't exactly the type of customer that you want to serve. In my opinion, the most dangerous thing you can do. Is try to serve multiple customer personas.

AI assessment note: “So you should have a very good idea of who you're building for”