The Exchanges

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 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.”

Q I want to double click into marketing because I see a lot of founders struggling to get eyeballs on their products. What are the mistakes that you see people making most when it comes to figuring out marketing?

A Yeah, I think that where a lot of people get lost in marketing is they think, okay, I will just DM influencers and expect a response within 24 hours. They'll DM 10 influencers and they get no responses. They go, oh, this is so hard. And I'm like, no, you're just, you're not getting creative with it. With Riz GPT, the creator is making the most profitable content. Most of them are like 1819 years old. They're just doing it for fun. And so getting in contact with him was really difficult. I would find that one of them had a discord link hidden in their Instagram bio or something. And I would join that discord and I would send a message every 10 minutes until the person responded. There were guys that I was DMing their mom saying, Hey, get me in contact with your son. I want to pay him money.

AI assessment note: “where a lot of people get lost in marketing is they think, okay, I will just DM”