# AI-Powered Mobile App Scaling Strategies

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-06-15

## Transcript

There's this 19-year-old guy, George, and he used to work at TJ Maxx.
And today, he quit TJ Maxx because he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars building mobile apps using AI.
We go through how he does it, all the sauce, all the tactics, and he explains it in just a really simple way that by the end of this episode, you're going to really understand how you can build a consumer mobile app that makes hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a day with AI.
Now, I'm not saying that everyone's going to be able to do it, but I think that what you'll learn from this episode is that we are living through a time when it is possible now to come up with ideas, mobile app ideas that have AI integrated into it and build using AI that could actually generate real money.
This is the sort of stuff that could be a side hustle, it could be some passive income, and it could just be a cool little app that you build that doesn't make money, but is just fun to build.
Enjoy this episode with George.
I thought it was really interesting.
And I'll see you at the end of the episode.
George is on the pod and he's going to tell us how to scale your mobile app to 10K a month.
Easy mode.
You've got my curiosity peaked.
George, by the end of this episode, are people going to learn how to do this?
Are you being for real?
Yeah, so the goal is to give you the basic framework on how to get to 10K a month.
as easy as possible.
10K a month, all it really is when you break it down is like 333 bucks a day.
So to get there, all you really need to do is do one to two things right.
And you should be, you should get there relatively quickly.
All right, well, show me how, my friend.
Yeah, so first, a bit of like social proof for like why you should listen to me.
I scaled up, I built my first app.
or second app technically, Wrestle.ai completely in public.
It got over 100,000 downloads and made close to 200K in revenue.
And now I've been building two other projects in stealth and both of them are on track to hit their first, one of them's on track to hit 15K this month, the other's on track to hit its first 10K month this month as well.
And I've been working cumulatively about three to four hours a week on each of them.
It's not always time in that gets you the results.
It's by following a basic playbook that can get you there fast.
Okay, so the three things that make a successful app, in my opinion, are a good idea, a product that matches the idea, and then distributing that idea to other people.
So the idea is really important, and my advice to everyone is always solve your own problems and create something you're passionate about.
When you're sitting there and working for like 10 hours on your app, you know what I mean?
You want it to be something that you actually genuinely resonate with.
Otherwise, you won't have that same, like when you're talking to influencers, when you're talking to people about your app, they can tell whether you truly believe in your own mission.
And if you don't, it becomes harder to convince these people to kind of join you for cheaper rates, let's say.
So I'm really big on creating a product that you're very passionate about.
For me, it was wrestling.
I wrestled for like all my high school career and my middle school career before it got cut short by COVID.
I love the sport.
The sport genuinely changed my life.
So I wanted to build an app for myself when I was a freshman in high school.
What would I have loved to have on my phone?
That was the idea.
And your idea, it should be simple.
Have one clear problem, one clear solution.
It should be specific, built for a defined audience.
This way, once you know who your audience is, you could then reverse engineer how to find them.
For example, like I knew my audience was wrestlers.
So I reverse engineered my For You page on my phone to be only wrestlers.
So I knew exactly who I had to sponsor to get in front of the right audience.
And number three is it should be sellable.
People should be willing to pay for this solution today.
There's one thing missing from that, in my opinion.
You used the examples of WrestleAI, CalAI.
The question we have to ask ourselves is, what are ideas that now AI has unlocked?
People have been building mobile apps since 2008.
It became increasingly harder to...
to build something that people are going to download and pay money for.
Until two things happened, actually.
AI came.
Anyone could create something, but even more than that, you can create these AI-first experiences that just are better than the existing experiences, like Cal AI.
You can take a picture of your spaghetti and it'll tell you how many calories it has.
And then the second thing is, well, obviously it...
That's actually the main piece.
You're creating more value for the customer.
How important do you think that is to the idea?
I think that's huge.
I think AI has created so many creative ways to make engaging features.
Another thing I think it is is the fact that to create an app in the past, you used to need I don't know, like tons of developers.
You either needed a lot of capital or stuff like this.
But now that AI has kind of democratized creation, you could also get super niche in your apps.
Like when I was telling people my idea, they were like, okay, but how many wrestlers are there actually?
And it turns out there was a decent bit, but most people would have kind of scoffed at the idea of like a wrestling app kind of having like any sort of...
success.
You know what I mean?
So it allows people who are more niched down into things to create good products for these more niche communities without needing a ton of capital investment.
Cool.
Alright, let's continue.
Like, rest of the AI never needed to be a billion dollar company.
Anyway, yeah.
So here's kind of my process.
If I was sitting there and I was like, I need an app idea today.
How I would reverse engineer a viral app idea is I would literally just open up my Instagram or open up my TikTok.
I would scroll for like 15 minutes.
And every time I watched a video, I would ask myself the question, who watches this type of video?
What problem does this influencer's audience face?
And how could an influencer promote this app seamlessly?
So if you looked at like the wrestling content creators, I would say, how could they implement my app?
for five seconds within the first 30 seconds of their video and have it not feel like an ad.
So I would actually target a lot of Dana Life and Dana Life wrestling influencers, and they did great for us because of that.
So why is a good idea important?
So many people, especially on Twitter, love talking about this idea of distribution versus like product.
And I'm really big on having a solid idea because all your distribution is.
is you're distributing the idea and the mission of your product.
So if you have a bad mission, it won't go far, even if you get a lot of eyes on it.
And my one kind of proof towards this idea is a real-life experience I had.
So in September, October-ish, when I was launching WrestleAI, I was also working on this other idea on the side.
Now, WrestleAI, I'm a wrestler.
I'm super passionate about wrestling.
And I was really excited by the product I made.
And this other app, I kind of hated, to be frank, but I had an influencer who had two million followers that was willing to partner with me.
So this is where I kind of threw away my have a good idea and be passionate about the idea.
And I was like, I'm just going to make this AI Riz style app and it'll make a lot of money because this guy gets millions of views.
In that campaign, in the first month, Wrestle AI got around a million views.
And in the first month, this app Green, which was like an AI Riz dating assistant, got 1.8 million views.
And WrestleAI in the first month did 17K.
And Green in the first month did 35 bucks.
It was five weekly subscriptions.
That's all we got from 1.8 million views.
And I was sitting there looking at this app and just going, Like, okay, maybe it's because my marketing wasn't creative enough.
Maybe it was because this and that.
And then I really sat there and got true to myself.
And I said, it's probably because the idea just sucks.
And everyone's seen this before.
And that's why we're not really driving conversions.
Well, Wrestling AI is very unique in this niche.
So that's when I made the decision.
I'm only going to be working on ideas that I'm passionate about.
And I have fun actively working on.
So I just completely cut this app.
I regret ever building it.
But it did teach me a valuable lesson to just really go after what you're passionate about.
I have a question about the TikToker, what was his name, Young Cantaloupe?
How were you able to convince someone with 2.1 million followers?
I mean, just like a year or two ago, you were a cashier at TJ Maxx, and then all of a sudden you're convincing this multi-million...
you know, follower account to work on you, to partner with you on an app that has no validation or anything?
Yeah, I'm a DM wizard.
So I'll like, like if you look at my Instagram account, I was sending like probably like hundreds of DMs a day to just anyone who's willing to build an app with me.
And before Wrestle AI and this app Green, I also had this app called Fight AI.
So what got me really into apps was I was in chemistry class, or not chemistry, physics.
I was in physics.
I was scrolling on my TikTok for you page, and I saw an ad for Rourke.
And it said, build an app in minutes.
And I didn't really believe it.
I didn't know what vibe coding was.
So that was my first step into vibe coding.
And I built this app called Fight AI.
And it made me like 2K in the first month just for me posting about it and paying a meme page 50 bucks.
So that gave me proof that apps are the new way to make money.
And from there, I was like, okay, let me find a creator to...
partner with 50-50.
This way I don't need to manually grow from zero to 1K, zero to 10K.
That was my first idea.
So in that process, I talked to this guy, I got on the phone with him and you have to be a bit like outgoing.
You have to be, you have to be able to sell a bit, especially for influencer marketing.
I always say influencer marketing is like 90% sales.
You're like convincing people like to, to take cheaper rates than other people because you're selling them the idea of a long-term partnership with a product that should be genuinely good.
So the way I convinced this guy is I was literally showing my WrestleAI conversion rates.
And I was like, if I could do this at a small scale, imagine what I could do if me and you partner up.
That's what got him.
That's a good pitch though, right?
It's basically like all I need is...
more fuel on this fire.
I just need more top of the funnel people to come and use this thing because I basically built an incredible mousetrap.
And when you're building products, that's ultimately how you want to think about it.
You don't want to build a leaky ship.
bring in a lot of people and they're not converting, they're not retaining.
It's not valuable for them.
You want to build something that's a mousetrap, that keeps them in, that brings them in every day, that they see so much value that they can't get away with it.
So you're basically going to this guy and you're like, hey, I built an incredible product for this niche.
You have this big audience and I think a part of your audience are people would be interested in this.
let's partner up.
And what do you propose?
I don't know if you're able to say this, but what sort of deals could you propose?
I usually do, and a lot of people get on me for this.
If I would partner with an influencer, which now I don't anymore, typically, because I feel like the strategy kind of, it only really worked for like WrestleAI.
The rest of the apps I tried it with, it kind of didn't work, and it usually had me manually having to grow it a lot more.
What I did basically was I would be just 50-50.
I would be like, look, you take half, I take half.
Got it.
And sometimes you could also best equity.
I know a lot of people do it in different ways.
Some people best the person's equity.
To be honest, I was in college.
I just needed my first win.
I would give them 50% up front and see what happens.
That was kind of my idea with it.
You're saying like, For your new apps, you're not finding influencer marketing to be helpful?
Is that what you're saying?
No, no, no.
Not that influencer marketing isn't helpful, but the draw you get from just one influencer isn't as big.
So it's easier to boot up a nice Instagram account and just run Instagram marketing yourself and sponsor just tons of creators if you have the capital, right?
For people who don't have the capital, I always suggest, because I didn't have the capital back then.
So I really wanted a sponsor with an influencer because it was an easier jumpstart, right?
But if you do have the capital to throw a bit of money at some influencers, I would suggest just, we'll go deeper into it on how to set up an Instagram and get you a decent amount of responses.
But I would suggest you just do it like that without even tying up so much of your equity to an influencer.
But the right influencer is a game changer.
Like if you look at, you know, I think, you know, the manifest app, Stella?
Yeah.
Just her alone.
I mean, you can check it on Sensor Tower, so I'm not going to be doxing her.
Just her alone brought in like 300K a month to that app, right?
Like she's an absolute killer.
And she worked with like a dev shop.
Just her alone is driving like 99% of that business.
And now they're getting into net ads and maybe other influencers, right?
So the right influencer could be.
Game-changing.
But you should probably have some system where you could maybe test out their content prior.
I know a lot of people who do this where they test out the person's content, see if it converts high, and then they decide maybe they want to bring them on as equity partners.
But it's hard to do that if you have no ethos.
So maybe get ethos first and then do that.
That's my idea.
One thing you can do is literally just ask them what their ad rates are.
and be like, hey, I'll pay your ad rates, whatever it is, and then you test the content.
And then based on that, you're like, okay, that worked really well, worked better than expected, it worked as expected, or it didn't work at all.
If it didn't work at all, it's like, great, you just saved yourself whatever percent equity.
I think that's a good way to do it if you have the capital.
Yeah, or you could probably use that idea to negotiate cheaper rates with them as well.
So you'd be like, look, I'll pay you.
I know your typical rates are like $2,000 a video.
I'll pay you $1,000.
But if it goes well, you'll have the opportunity to get equity in this project.
And as long as it goes back to this, as long as you're building something cool and you're building something you're passionate about, it should be very easy to convince people that your product's going to be the next big thing.
You know what I mean?
That's at least been my experience when building.
products that I genuinely resonate with.
I was going to say, what else do you want to show?
So design and UX is very important as well.
You should be able to hand your phone to your mom and she should understand how your app works without you having to tell her how to use it.
This is kind of my litmus test.
If your mom's technical, maybe don't do this.
My mom still doesn't even know how Siri works.
So this is my test.
I literally text my mom my app and I go, can you figure this out?
Right.
Like, can you use it?
Can you tell what the app's for?
Can you tell how it functions?
And if she can't, which a bunch of times she's been like, oh, it's too cluttered.
You know what I mean?
So I've been like, OK, that's like that's insanely valuable feedback.
So if your mom can't use your app, you have to redesign it and you have to make the UI look a lot more simpler and easier to use.
How to build.
I personally don't know how to code.
All my apps have been created with AI.
I built all my apps through Roark.
And my framework for building is I dedicate like 14 days to actually building out the main functionality of the app.
What's that, what like core functionality and branding?
What's the app going to do?
How's it going to look?
Then I spend a few days perfecting the onboarding, right?
So like the onboarding is really like, I go more into it later, but it's educating the user on what your app does.
personalizing the experience, and then causing FOMO, what they would do if they don't have your app.
What would happen if they don't have your app?
And then I would spend, and then after, I add in RevenueCat and backend integrations if needed.
Okay, so this is one of the biggest things your app needs, and this is one of the features that you should spend probably 90% of your time on.
So as I was saying earlier on how to make a good idea and a good product, you need to have a clear solution to a clear problem, right?
This is what I like to call the gotcha moment or the gotcha feature, right?
So Cal AI, it was taking a picture of your food and getting the calories.
For Wrestle AI, it was throwing your wrestling match into the app and it told you what you did right and what you did wrong in your match, right?
These were the only two features that we were pushing 90% of the time.
And if we had other features we wanted to push, we would basically push it after we began saturating an influencer's audience.
So if I took one of my influencers, let's say Corey Zader, right?
This kid was an influencer.
He posted day-in-a-life videos and he would always subtly integrate our app into his content.
If I saw that the return from his videos started lowering, I would then tell him, okay, push this feature instead, right?
To see if we could re-get the uptick, even if it's like less than the original, right?
However, the biggest uptick from your app should come from marketing this feature.
This feature is what should easily convince everyone to come join your app.
And what you need to do with this feature is you need to, this feature needs to be so simple to understand that anyone who looks at this feature for five seconds instantly understands the entire thesis of your app, right?
Cal AI, it's three seconds.
Take a picture of your food, get the calories.
Wrestle AI, it was throw your wrestling match, get the feedback, right?
And within three seconds of looking at the phone, displaying that, users understood without it having to be said, right?
So this is a really important feature that you need to nail.
This is 90% of distribution, is nailing the gotcha feature.
Yeah, I mean, another way to think about that gotcha feature, which I agree, it's like so, so important.
is you're sort of like reverse engineering the TikTok or the Instagram reel.
Yeah, exactly.
And you're building the product around that.
So that's one framework that I use when I'm trying to come up with startup ideas, especially in the consumer mobile app space.
I'm like, okay, here's my niche.
There's a bunch of different primitives or product ideas I can go after.
And sometimes I use AI to kind of help me brainstorm these ideas.
What would be a TikTok that would go viral?
What is that one feature that it would show?
What's beautiful about these gotcha features, as you call it, is it's the best products you can explain in a sentence or less.
Think about it.
What is Hinge?
Or what is Tinder?
You swipe and you find someone to date.
Or what is Uber?
A car comes and picks you up.
Or what is DoorDash?
You press a button and food comes to your door.
These are the gotcha features that I think that when you're creating mobile apps, a lot of us have this tendency to overcomplicate the product suite when it's just one core feature that is what's going to help stop the scroll.
100%.
Yeah, I fully agree.
That's exactly like I think about it very similarly.
There we go.
All right.
Onboarding.
But yeah, anyway, onboarding.
So, so many people overthink and overcomplicate the process.
Onboarding has four functions, right?
Three main functions, one optional.
Educate the user.
What is your product and why do they need it, right?
Social proof.
This isn't 100% needed, but if you do have social proof, it's nice to show.
And then you want to personalize the experience.
The point of personalizing the experience is making the app better, and also increasing the time commitment they have to your app.
So if I go and answer 20 questions in your app, making the best experience for me, and then I'm going to get hit with a paywall, I now have like the sunken cost fallacy, which is like, I've already spent so much time on this app, let me at least get the free trial and see what it is, and maybe I'll cancel it, right?
And finally, is you want to institute FOMO right before the paywall.
So let's say I have like Rusty.ai.
I'm uploading my wrestling match.
It's going through this like analysis animation, right?
Where it's like targeting XYZ, calibrating XYZ.
And then after it finishes, it then shows you the paywall and it says like unlock your rating now, right?
So now they have a ton of FOMO.
What was my score?
What was this?
What was that?
And it drives them more to convert rather than if I just personalize the experience, like, okay, what's your weight?
What weight do you wrestle at?
And then you get hit with a paywall, right?
That mock film analysis is super important to increasing conversions.
But that's pretty much it.
I also wrote a docs in docs.roarke.com where I kind of go over everything in this presentation in much more detail.
So now the most important part, what everyone's here for is distribution.
Here's my actionable plan to 10K a month.
And I think it's relatively easy if you just nail a few things, right?
One of the more important things to nail is your Instagram page, right?
You need to set up your IG and you need to make it clean.
So the way I go about this is this is blacked out because this is one of the projects I'm working on now that's kind of in stealth, right?
But I first bought the amount of followers, right?
You go find one of these sites that you could buy followers for.
What this does is it gives you a ton of social proof, right?
And then if you can get it verified, I would pay for that.
And then I would get three product demos right here.
Try to make them as clean as possible.
Pay a designer in Fiverr if you need to or just design it yourself.
So have your three product demos right here and have like a really good bio with a CTA, right?
This is 90% of what you need to do.
And then the other 10% is anytime you work with an influencer, have them like in the beginning, every time you work with an influencer, have them collab post because now not only is your, does your brand account look professional?
but it also seems like you have a lot of motion and you're working with a lot of people, right?
This way, so this page serves two functions, right?
It's a sales funnel for your user because if I'm looking at WrestleAI, if I watch one of my favorite wrestling influencers, I see WrestleAI is tagged in the caption and I'm like, whoa, that seems like a pretty cool app.
I then click on the tag in the bio, in the caption.
It gets me to my WrestleAI page, let's say.
I'll then watch four more WrestleAI videos on the Instagram page, right?
And now we've went from a user who's slightly curious to very educated on the product, right?
Now they're primed to convert.
Then they're going to see the CTA in the bio.
They're going to click the App Store link, download the app.
They're then going to go through the onboarding.
So an already pretty primed user is going to get even more primed.
And then that's what should give you really good conversion rates, right?
So your Instagram is both a sales funnel and social proof for other influencers to join, right?
So on the other end, if I'm an influencer and I see a DM from some brand, right?
And I click on the page and I see that they have two followers and no posts, right?
I'm going to be like, okay, this is some like app that no one uses, right?
And like, I wouldn't even, I probably wouldn't even answer.
And if I do answer, when we hop on a call, you won't have any.
like ethos or credibility in the conversation.
So you lose all your authority.
So you have to pay whatever insane rates he asks for, right?
However, if I have a brand account and I'm showcasing that I'm working with tons of influencers, right?
Now the influencer sees it, they go, okay, he's working with a ton of influencers.
So he can't be paying $0.
He has to be paying something, right?
So I'm gonna then respond, yeah, what are your rates?
Blah, blah, blah.
The influencer will hop on the call with the person who has the, you know, high authority Instagram account, they're going to get on the phone.
And then as the brand owner, if I propose low rates, if I'm proposing like a $2 CPM, right, which is really low rates, or really good rates, if I'm proposing a $2 CPM to this guy, this if without the brand authority, he would originally think, okay, this guy's trying to like rip me off with the brand authority.
It's okay, let's try this guy's kind of trying to rip me off, but everyone works for these rates.
So maybe these are just the rates, right?
It's much easier to convince someone to do something if they see that 10 other people also did it.
So it's really important to just nail this Instagram page for closing influencers and using it as a sales funnel for your other consumers, customers.
The other thing is, what I must say, like, you know, I think, I think botting your account is against terms of service.
I think I could be wrong.
So do your own research.
Yeah, yeah.
Don't always listen to me.
You can do what you want.
This is what you've done.
Yeah, exactly.
But I mean, Wrestle.ai is actually not botting.
This account is blacked out.
I mean, you don't need to bot it too.
You can also just create content.
Yeah, you could also do that.
Create content that gets shared.
And do it the good old-fashioned way, it will take you longer, right?
Yeah, 100%.
And this is something I've only really been doing on newer projects.
Although I will say it does have a slight higher ROI.
Another thing I would do is I would tailor your...
This is arguably even slightly more important than the Instagram page, is I would tailor your FYP to be your ICP.
So what I mean by that is I would go on Instagram.
And I would scroll like your ideal customer.
You should have this detailed image of who your ideal customer is in your mind, right?
And you should think, how would they act on Instagram?
So I would literally just scroll, comment, like, share as my ideal customer.
I would try to hypnotize myself to be my ideal customer.
And for me, it was easier because I was a wrestler and I knew what type of content wrestlers watch.
That's another reason you should build for what you're passionate about.
So I'm scrolling through Instagram.
I then make my entire for you page only wrestling content, only wrestling influencers.
And then what you effectively just did is you now created a lead generation, like a lead generating thing, right?
So while I'm going through my for you page, I could scroll outreach, scroll outreach, scroll outreach.
It makes the whole process 10 times easier than having to go through like Instagram search and finding the right perfect influencers.
Okay.
So for my next thing, outreach, outreach, outreach.
Everything in this game is a numbers game.
How many influencers can you send messages?
How much content can you make?
It's all numbers.
And the more you do, the more you'll get out eventually.
So now that your FYP is fully tailored to your ICP, you can literally just scroll and DM as many influencers as you possibly can.
To be honest, I would replace yourself in this process, though, as soon as you possibly can.
If you had...
$2,000 to start this app, I would take like $800 and just pay a VA for a month.
I think I would be willing to do that.
I would be willing to spend almost half of my budget just on the VA because they're pretty integral to the process and it also leaves you more mentally clearer.
So what you do is you basically, now that you have a system of scrolling and outreaching, You can literally just hop on a call with a VA from Fiverr, Upwork, Founders Arm, whichever service you want to use, right?
Hop on the phone with these people and just pay them whatever you want because they're not going to ask for outrageous rates typically, right?
And you don't want to be negotiating for cents on the dollar for you.
You know what I mean?
100%.
They ask for like 800 a month, just pay it.
They're going to be working like, you're going to get way more than 800 bucks in value.
So when you hop on a call with them, Show them the process of literally just be like, hey, when I scroll, like just go through my For You page, scroll.
If the guy has over 25,000 views on average, outreach to him.
That's literally what I tell him, right?
You could also make, like you could also give a really good SOP for them.
And that's pretty much the whole process.
Then when a creator responds, get, hold on, sorry.
This is like misspelled.
When a creator responds, aim to hop on a call with them immediately, right?
So if, let's say, let's say I'm the brand, I text paid promo for XYZ.
And if you want to DM scripts, again, docs.work.com, you can find like all my DM scripts, my SOPs, basically everything I've done.
So once a creator responds, try to get them on the phone immediately.
say like, hey, are you around for an intro call with someone from our team?
You know what I mean?
From there, you could then, once you're face to face with them, it's much easier to sell them than over DMs.
Because over DMs, if I'm an influencer, I could be like, my deliverables are $10,000 a video.
It's much harder to say that to someone when they're right in front of you and they're basically, like you can basically show them on $10,000 a video for a creator that gets like.
20,000 views of video is not like ideal and you can't work long term.
So like there's so many sales objections you could kind of use to get good rates.
And as long as you're really passionate and they can see that you're not selling snake oil, they'll be much more unlikely to do cheaper rates for you.
They'll give you like the homie discount.
You know what I mean?
If you're just a charismatic, like if you try to be like nice to them, try to be friends with them.
And with all my creators, I try to be as close as possible.
Like I'll pay attention on their Instagram if they have any important events coming up and I'll text them like, we have a lot of fighters, so people who are going to fight, I'll text them, hey, good luck.
Like I'll try to be very on top of having really good personal relationships with my creators.
Then after you finish the call, try to get their WhatsApp.
I like WhatsApp because it's easier to keep them separate.
Right.
So when I go on WhatsApp, I know I'm going to be dealing with influencers or my VA, but I know on text messages, I'm not going to lose like my mom's text when she texts me.
You know what I mean?
Because that was like a big problem when I started.
I would like not be, I was like never responding to like my family or my friends.
And I was like, I was like, this kind of sucks.
Like I used to pride myself on my ability to respond to people fast and efficiently.
And so I was like, okay, let me just separate the two so it's easier.
Your mom could be giving you precious UX feedback and you'll never know.
Plus, like, you know, I love my family.
I would never want to like miss their texts and then get them on a contract.
And then the rest is kind of have them subtly integrate your app into their videos.
Try to subtly integrate your app into their most viral content style.
After that, it's pretty much smooth sailing.
90% like.
The hardest part is basically getting on the phone with them and pitching them the idea.
Then your app, if your idea is good enough, should sell itself in their content.
Okay, paid ads.
To be honest, I've only just recently started running paid ads, but I'm starting to fall in love with them and I'm starting to understand why everyone says that influencers aren't scalable past a certain point, right?
Influencers are great if you have not a crazy budget and you need to 10x your revenue.
Like you need to 10x whatever money you have.
But if you don't mind consistently two to three X-ing your money, right?
Paid ads are amazing.
So once you get about five to 15 creatives, make sure they're quality creatives, throw them all in a testing budget, run them at a hundred bucks a day.
And then after the first week, I'll separate the winners from losers.
Again, I'm not super optimal with it.
Like take everything I'm saying about paid ads with a grain of salt, but it's paid ads are pretty good.
So another method is if let's say you're working with multiple, multiple creators, you take five to 10, five to 15 creatives from them, throw them all in a testing campaign, right?
That's one end.
But if you don't have five to 15 creatives from, let's say, like, let's say you don't have five to 15 creators, right?
If you want, what you could do is you could pick one of your creators.
You can pick one creator overall, right?
As long as he has high agency and it's like cheap.
Have him basically not post content on his page, but have him just make paid ads for you.
And the way you could find winning paid ads is you go to meta ads library, look for people in adjacent niches or in your, or like one of your competitors, if you have any, right?
Look at their ads, understand why their ads work.
So here's, here's what meta ads library looks like, right?
So this is Strava.
So let's say I'm making a running app.
I'll look up Strava.
I would go through all of these paid ads.
I'd be like, okay, why is this paid ad?
You could filter by high to low impressions too, right?
So it's like, okay, why is this paid ad converting?
Why does this have so many high impressions?
Why are they spending basically so much money on this paid ad?
They're probably getting a return, right?
Why does it work?
How can I replicate it?
Those are like the two questions you need to ask yourself.
Then if you have a creator that has high agency, literally just send him the video and say, hey, can you remake this video one-to-one with my app?
I'm doing that.
That's literally been my only growth channel with one of my new projects.
We've only been running paid ads.
I have one creator who has high agency and he just makes all of our creatives for you.
And you'll be shocked at the paid ads that like make you a lot of money.
It'll be like literally a video of him saying like, go download the app.
Like paid ads don't need to be this like super high quality content.
all the time, as long as it's real and authentic, it'll drive decent conversions.
Now, let's say after all of this, your first month in business is starting to end.
That's when you'll probably want to do this a little bit earlier, actually.
But that's when you're going to want to start looking at your conversion rate after you have some decent traffic, right?
So if you're consistently getting over, I'm going to say 100 downloads a day.
Now you have some rough metrics to look at your conversion rate and see where you could optimize your onboarding or paywall, right?
Maybe start A-B testing pricing to see if you could boost your conversion rates.
I would also look at your ARPU.
This is also a really important statistic.
Depending if you're, depending how you market.
So people who do like this really top of funnel UGC, like girl on screen with like text, you know what I mean?
Their ARPU is going to be a lot lower because they're getting millions of views, right?
But the quality of the content isn't crazy.
But if you're doing like influencer posts, your ARPU should be pretty high.
You know what I mean?
Because it should be kind of directly explaining what your app does and it should be like high converting content.
So look at your ARPU, aim for a $2 ARPU at least in month one.
And then ARPU basically being like how much revenue you're making per download.
And then look at your retention.
So now that the month's like starting to be like close to being over, see how many people unsubscribe.
And then if your retention is really bad, it's probably because your app's not useful enough.
So try to figure out how you can make it more useful.
For Wrestle.ai, in the first month, our retention sucked.
And what we did was we literally just added a calorie tracking feature because a lot of wrestlers are always managing their weight.
They're always cutting weight.
So once we added the calorie tracker, we saw our churn cut in half.
And I was like, okay, wow, that's insane.
So people are coming for the viral feature and then they're staying because the app's helping them keep on track with their weight and stuff like that.
So we just added, then after that, we started adding a ton more adjacent features that are just strictly useful and non-viral.
And then what we saw was our churn, like solved our retention problem.
And at the end of the day, the TLDR is good product and good creatives.
And that makes your life so much easier.
So my newest project, it's really fun working on it.
I'm having a blast actually working on it.
And what we've seen is we've seen people actually hit us up to work with us.
So they've seen like one of our creators videos, this guy, 20K followers, hey, I want to collab with you.
This guy has 1.8 million followers and he hit us up.
We didn't even outreach to him.
And it's solely because the products actually, in my opinion, The product's actually cool and really useful.
We had a creator with like 50K followers make videos for us for free just because he wanted to actually try the app.
Like it's insane.
We had another creator with 3 million followers who averages like 400K to a million views a video.
And we have a four video deal with four stories for 2,500 bucks.
That's like our CPM is going to be maybe a dollar or something.
Like you only get these rates and this like...
and people hitting you up if your product's actually cool.
So if you can just make a good product and really focus in on that, it makes the whole other side of the distribution problem much easier.
And that's basically the TLDR of how to make a successful app or semi-successful app.
So a lot of people hear about these vibe-coded mobile apps and they're like, there's no way that people can make thousands of dollars, tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Sometimes millions of dollars with vibe-coded apps.
But here you are, someone who's non-technical.
How old are you?
I'm 19, just turned.
Exactly, like young guy and no real background in this.
And here you are in the field proving otherwise.
So what do you say to people who...
who say that it's not possible.
Yeah, it's so funny because people really hate on vibe coding.
They call it AI slob, this and that.
And as you see in the slideshow, I'm actually very big on product as a vibe coder, which is funny enough.
You know what I mean?
And it's because at this point with AI models, Opus 4.8, especially if you're building apps in Swift too, I saw the difference between Swift and React Native vibe coding as night and day.
And that's why I really love Roark and I talk very highly about them.
I'm also now working with them too because I was the first power user, so they brought me on.
But with Swift and with these new AI models, in my opinion, there's no such thing as AI slop.
There is, though, under-prompted, right?
If you keep prompting, that's why I said 14 days.
I'm not sitting here and you're not sitting there and one-shotting these apps, right?
But if you consistently manually tweak each thing, at the end of the day, code is code, right?
So with enough prompts, you could really make these really cool products.
Like there's some apps built by some of these like work users that like I've downloaded just like see what they were doing.
And I actually use this one workout app, CoreOS.
They just launched this guy.
I actually use this app every day because it's like one of the sickest health and wellness apps out there.
It's like it tracks your sleep, tracks your workouts.
Like when you walk in the gym, it auto tracks how much time you spend in the gym.
And I'm like, this is one of the coolest apps I've downloaded.
And it's fully made by AI.
It's like it's like insane.
So I'm very big on a I'm very bit I'm very against AI slop and like this like doomer look at vibe coding because not only did it change my life, but.
you can genuinely build really great products with enough prompts.
And with Vibe-coded products, have you ever encountered scalability issues?
That's another thing that people say is that, okay, you're going to use AI.
Maybe it's good enough to get to a prototype with a few thousand users, but once you start scaling and actually getting hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year in revenue, you're just going to have to rebuild the whole thing.
So I haven't hit it yet.
Maybe it's because I'm not big enough.
But I personally haven't seen any scalability issues.
It's also because I'm making a consumer app.
So maybe if I was making a social media app, it would be different and there would be like stuff like that.
But like people always come at me like, oh, what about the security issues?
Right.
I don't have access to any of your personal data.
I'm not collecting that.
I wouldn't.
I'm not putting myself in the risk of that happening to me because.
I'm not collecting any of the data to put my customers at a security risk.
I'm going to say it honestly depends.
Maybe if you're building a social media app, but personally I haven't seen any of that.
In your opinion, is this the heyday of building mobile apps?
Do you think there's just so much opportunity right now, so many different niches?
it's a window of time before it just gets too competitive?
How do you see it playing out?
100%.
In my opinion, this is the dropshipping boom.
This is the e-com boom.
Back in the day, meta ads, you used to boot them up for e-com.
I was never involved.
I actually failed at e-com and then went into apps.
But back in the day, 2015, people used to boot up these e-com sites, dropshipping, whatever.
threw a little bit of money into med ads and then see like four to five X ROAS, right?
Today with apps, it's very similar.
If you make an app and it's, again, if it's cool, the idea needs to be cool.
But if you make an app and just start posting about it yourself, this is what sold me on apps.
I made an app, had no app experience with Fight AI.
I made this app.
I literally would just post myself talking to the camera.
guys, I'm making like the future of MMA.
You could throw your like videos into this app and it'll tell you what you're doing right.
And at first I just made it for fun because I wanted an internal tool.
I was like, screw it.
I'll try making a few TikToks about it, right?
The fact that I was able to make like almost 2,000, and by the way, it's still consistently to this month, does 1,000 every month, which is insane, right?
Because I haven't marketed it since July.
It's like, I love seeing the subscriptions.
It like makes my day.
I'll see a guy who's been subscribed for like nine months.
He was like active like a week ago.
I'm like, what could this, what could this guy possibly be training for?
Anyway, so the fact that you could sit there and still make five TikToks and get like 10 sales, right, shows that the industry is not saturated, even though there are more people making apps than ever.
I don't believe it'll be saturated until three more years, probably.
And I'm finding adoption is still pretty slow.
Like you get caught up in this like Twitter mindshare where you're like, everyone's building an app.
In actuality, no one's building an app.
People still think you need to know how to code.
Like no one knows vibe coding exists.
15% of the world still uses, still hasn't even, 15% of the world like only uses ChatGPT.
Like compared to like 85% of the world still doesn't even use AI.
They don't know AI can actually build software.
So yeah, get started.
Best time to get started, though, is today.
Get on it right away.
Last question, is there one tip, piece of sauce that you didn't share today that you want to share that you think is going to be valuable for anyone who's interested in building a mobile app with AI?
One tip.
I mean, you shared around paid ads, you shared around creators, you shared around choosing an idea.
But is there anything else that you haven't shared today that you want to share?
Yeah, really focus on learning how to sell things.
So the ability to close influencers came from when I was like 16 and I had to do door-to-door sales for power washing.
Or like I was running garage sales.
So if you have good social skills, it does make selling to influencers just so much easier.
Because you could spend, like, I'll give you an example of my last influencer call.
The guy was Greek, right?
I spent 90% of the call talking about Greece.
And like me and him were just vibing about both being Greek.
And then at the end I go, okay, so look, your content, your views vary a little bit.
to not jip you out, why don't we do like a $2 CPM?
And since me and him were already kind of like buddies, he now doesn't want to say no to me.
You know what I mean?
So it just makes it 10 times easier to close stuff.
So social skills are very important, which is why Vibe Coding's great because the people who used to build apps didn't really have the craziest social skills.
George, thank you for coming on the podcast, sharing all this sauce with us.
Appreciate it.
Can't wait to see what you build next.
I'll include links for where to follow George in the show notes, in the description.
I'll also include a link to the docs that he had if people want to check that out.
And George, thanks again for coming on.
Yeah, thank you so much.