The Exchanges

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 You mentioned earlier that before getting hit with the paywall, the user is being walked through the onboarding process. What's your experience with that?

A The onboarding is super important because this is an opportunity for you to walk the user through their own problems. So for example, on PuffCount, my onboarding is extensive and I ask the users a lot of questions. And some people say that's annoying. I don't want to do that. I just want to get into the app. But the data has told me that if I walk the users through the onboarding, they commit time and I'm able to walk them through their problem that puff count is solving. So when they hit the paywall, they've thought about their problem a lot. And they're like, wow, I actually really do need to quit, or I really do need this product. And they're much more likely to convert.

AI assessment note: “So when they hit the paywall, they've thought about their problem a lot.”

Q Okay, and what about turning that design into an actual working app? How do you build it with no coding experience?

A You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer. You can price it based on, like, the complexity of your app. For an app like Puff Counts, fairly straightforward. Couple main features. You get that done for less than five grand, right? You can get the MVP out there. I recommend only hiring developers from Eastern Europe. They're going to give you the best quality code for a cheaper price. Once you have your developer that you'd like to go with, you do it on a per project completion basis. So I don't pay anyone per hour. I pay them when the app is complete. It's on the store. There's no bugs, but 100%, you can build an app for less than a thousand dollars. You can go to a website called theme forest and you can download pretty decent starter template for any app out there. And again, you know, just launching an MVP, like, keep it simple. And if your budget is tighter, like, the simpler your app, the better.

AI assessment note: “You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer.”

Q Okay, and what about turning that design into an actual working app? How do you build it with no coding experience?

A You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer. You can price it based on, like, the complexity of your app. For an app like Puff Counts, fairly straightforward. Couple main features. You get that done for less than five grand, right? You can get the MVP out there. I recommend only hiring developers from Eastern Europe. They're going to give you the best quality code for a cheaper price. Once you have your developer that you'd like to go with, you do it on a per project completion basis. So I don't pay anyone per hour. I pay them when the app is complete. It's on the store. There's no bugs, but 100%, you can build an app for less than a thousand dollars. You can go to a website called theme forest and you can download pretty decent starter template for any app out there. And again, you know, just launching an MVP, like, keep it simple. And if your budget is tighter, like, the simpler your app, the better.

AI assessment note: “You go on to Upwork and you look for a developer.”

Q And how do we trust the developer? What if they steal the idea for our app?

A It's never been a problem for me. And also your ideas are worth absolutely nothing. And more likely than not, the idea that you have for this app already exists. So like the idea is out there. You just have to trust someone. I always take like a 15 minute interview call with, with the people that I like from the applicants on Upwork. I get their vibe. I see, are they coming to the table with more ideas for my app? Do they seem excited about it? How do they present? But you have to get past that fear of hiring someone online that you don't really know. Like that's part of being a founder is finding great talent, trusting them. And iterating as you go.

AI assessment note: “your ideas are worth absolutely nothing... I always take like a 15 minute interview call”

Q Got it. Okay. Let's talk about how you can actually build something like this step-by-step. Everything starts with an idea, right? Can you share your ideation process?

A I take mental notes of problems that I experience in my day to day life. If you're building an app from the position of solving a problem for yourself, you become the ideal user, and that makes you so much better at creating the product and making it useful for the people you're trying to reach. If you can solve a problem for someone and you can kind of take them through this transformation, whether it be weight loss, dieting, quitting vaping, if you can improve someone's life, they are going to love your product. And the marketing becomes much easier as well, right? Because you can be like, Hey, you have XYZ problem. Here's the solution. So everything becomes easy if you're solving a problem for someone.

AI assessment note: “I take mental notes of problems that I experience in my day to day life.”

Q For anyone looking for ideas, I want to ask, what do you think is the most lucrative niche to build an app in right now?

A When I look at like the most profitable niches in mobile apps, I think a lot of them do have to do with helping people be better, lose weight, quit vaping, quit drinking, anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush. And of course, like there are already apps that are doing really well. Like in fitness, you have like my fitness pal and you have all these weight training apps, but it comes down to the marketing. Can you get in front of people at a cheaper cost in these mobile apps, right? Being a young founder, you truly do have an advantage. Because all these old heads in the industry, these big, slow moving companies that never iterate on their idea, a small, nimble entrepreneur can take them out. All it takes is one viral TikTok.

AI assessment note: “anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush”

Q For anyone looking for ideas, I want to ask, what do you think is the most lucrative niche to build an app in right now?

A When I look at like the most profitable niches in mobile apps, I think a lot of them do have to do with helping people be better, lose weight, quit vaping, quit drinking, anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush. And of course, like there are already apps that are doing really well. Like in fitness, you have like my fitness pal and you have all these weight training apps, but it comes down to the marketing. Can you get in front of people at a cheaper cost in these mobile apps, right? Being a young founder, you truly do have an advantage. Because all these old heads in the industry, these big, slow moving companies that never iterate on their idea, a small, nimble entrepreneur can take them out. All it takes is one viral TikTok.

AI assessment note: “anything in the health space, I think will absolutely crush”

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 start posting stuff, creating stuff, which is a big learning curve for a lot of people, especially putting themselves out on short form video for the first time, what's the posting strategy of this? You mentioned you do videos one time a day. What would you do if you were starting today? What do you recommend, uh, is what time to post, how much to post and when to know

A The posting strategy. This is where I see a lot of people fail, right? Because in the beginning, it's going to be slow. In the beginning, it's going to be hard to get that first viral pop. But the most important thing is staying consistent. Whether you're posting, whether you're getting creators to post, you need to stay consistent with it, right? Don't worry about the time that you post the content, all the small little details of the content. Do not be a perfectionist. Your goal here is volume. Your goal here is knowing generally what direction your content should be going. You're just looking for that first Viral video. The way to get there is by posting volume. Volume negates luck, right? So you need to be posting as much as possible, and when you get a video that pops off, recreate that concept. If you look at the most viral people on TikTok, let's forget about businesses for a second, let's think about just creators, influencers. The most viral people on TikTok, on YouTube, they do the same style of video over and over and over again. There's a reason they do that, and we could take a page out of their playbook, and we could do the same thing for our app. The most important part is to stay consistent, post every single day, post based on your market research, It'll give you a much better chance of going viral, and then once you do find a video that pops off for you, conti…

AI assessment note: “Don't worry about the time that you post... Your goal here is volume.”

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”