He Made $10M with 3 iPhone Apps

I taught myself to code with chat GPT and my apps have made over $10 million to date how did this guy make over $10 million with three iPhone apps after learning how to code less than 2 years ago well two letters AI now with the Advent of chat GPT and the popularization of AI there's so many different problems that you can solve either in different ways or a decreased cost in order to solve it I spent over an hour talking to Blake to figure out the truth behind how we actually built these million dooll AI

apps and how other builders can take advantage of the same opportunity and he shares it all including his process for finding million dooll AI ideas and validating them his blueprint for building an app from scratch as a complete beginner and the marketing strategy that is making him Millions Tik Tok and Instagram are very solvable right now you can figure out the various influencer strategies to funnel millions of people to your product now let's get into the details I'm Pat walls and this is starter [Music] story welcome man it's nice to have you tell us about

who you are and what you built yeah absolutely my name is Blake Anderson in one year I taught myself how to code with AI the first app that I built was called Riz GPT it's at 2 and2 million in annual revenue the second app that I built was called umax once again came up with the idea designed and built the application and led the majority of the marketing in the past year we've done almost $5 million in Revenue then the third app that I co-founded was called CI this one I also came up with the

idea for though I did not build the actual application I helped with the designs but I have two amazing co-founders that lead operations on that CI uh was launched about 6 months ago and is now doing over a million dollars in Revenue per month okay so you built not one but three successful AI apps that are doing almost $20 million per year tell me about this opportunity in apps right now okay this is a great question there are two primary reasons that apps are so lucrative right now the first is the Advent of chat GPT

and the popularization of AI there's so many different problems that you can solve either in different ways or at a decreased cost in order to to solve it with Riz GPT it would have been virtually impossible to build a AI dating assistant without the use of llms and number two is novel distribution techniques Tik Tok and Instagram are very solvable right now you can figure out the various influencer strategies the user generated content strategies organic account growth strategies to funnel millions of people to your products and I don't think that the algorithms were as optimized

for new accounts to be be able to generate millions of views a few years ago but now that they're all in bloodbath competition with one another they have to incentivize new creators and so they'll push more views to new accounts than they did previously all right so essentially apps have become way easier to build and Market recently which is why they're a great business to start for anyone that's watching this right now but let's go back I want you to actually share the story of how you got started with this whole thing I've always been

fascinated by entrepreneurship always hustl throughout childhood figuring out new ways to make money mowing lawns raking leaves shoveling Drive waves then in high school I was still hustling like I built an ethereum mining machine back in 2016 or 2017 scaled Instagram meme pages but to be honest I drank way too much alcohol did too many drugs really just prioritized like partying and living a relatively degenerate lifestyle after college so senior year I'm graduating all of my friends have great jobs in New York City making six figures and I had nothing you know I had moved

back home family isn't doing well financially house is going up on the market my older brother is giving me loans for groceries I was like okay I got to figure something out I do not want to get a full-time job and I set a goal for myself right as I graduated college I was like over the course of the next 12 months I will figure out a way to make $50,000 on my own all right so you're back at your parents house borrowing money from from your brother to buy groceries but you set this crazy

goal for yourself to make $50,000 over the next year I suppose this is where your first app Riz gbt comes into play right how do you get started with it yeah 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 chat gbt in the month of uh May June 2023 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 pay wall was terrible and the first few promos go out and it doesn't really do anything few downloads we're making a few bucks and then I find these two underground kind of undiscovered creators I pay them each $50 for promo so $100 total and overnight 5 10 million views total 45,000 downloads in that first big day 200,000 downloads on that week 500,000 downloads on the month we're at 80k Mr from the jump that's

pretty much all profit we ended up scaling it to a little bit over 250k Mr and then it kind of dropped down in plateaued to like 150 to 200k Mr consistently and that's where it's at Now Blake is proof that you don't need the perfect app or website to start making thousands of dollars off an idea all you need is an an MVP in a smart marketing strategy but you also need to make sure that you're working on a solid idea that's why I created the starter story Academy a place that helps you find an

idea validate the idea with real feedback and shows you how to execute on that idea so you can get those first users so if you're curious about building a software product like Blake and hundreds of other Founders just like him head to the first link in the description to check out the academy now back to the video all right Blake you're story is insane mobile apps totally change your life yeah 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 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 uh and you could build that in a mobile app as well as a web

app next up language learning the chat gbt advanced voice mode it's pretty incredible it's like actually a personal tutor Duolingo is making $33 million a month multiply that by 12 and we get like $400 million per year you capture 1% of that market and you have a $4 million annual application on your hands 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 I've used honestly different methods

of finding the idea for each app that I've worked on with Riz GPT it was 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 umax 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 skin care Hair Care 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 glowup applic umax 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 uh millions and millions on the table there all right man

thank you for sharing that now that we have not only the exact ideas that could be built right now but also your methods for coming up with more winning ideas do you have a specific process for validating these ideas my validation process primarily looks like a deep dive into the uh Niche on social media so what I'll do is I'll create an account say Cal and then purely consume nutrition and dieting and calorie counting weightlifting content essentially becoming the target market or Target demographic and then thinking about what it is that I want and then

just build that okay gotcha putting yourself in your customer shoes is how you know they'll buy now let's talk about actually build 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 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 us 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 EXP Expo framework using cursor as your IDE 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 and you can do a combination of slideshows and faceless video content or content where you're speaking directly to the camera the most important note here when it comes to marketing is constant iteration be ruthless about how you iterate try out different strategies and as soon as you find something that is able to produce profitable returns for the company based on the time and or money investment you double down and double down and double down on that 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 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 with Riz GPT the Creator is making the

most profitable content most of them were like 18 19 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 a contact with your son I want to pay him money all right now let's talk about how to make money once

you have those it balls how should people watching this right now actually monetize their app the primary monetization model for most apps is subscription everybody that I know that makes a lot of money on apps uses subscriptions generally I try to go with lower price points for a couple of reasons one I want as many people as possible to be able to use my applications people are more likely to tell their friends about it get generally more positive user sentiment on social media but then it also is more sustainable for long-term growth and you know

a lot of apps charge significantly higher price points which leads me to the most important point which is you should use super wall super wall enables you to split test different offerings so different price points whether it's weekly yearly monthly at different points in the app being able to test these different offerings and different placements within the app can take you from making x per user that downloads to 1.5 or 2X 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 yeah so Apple charges 15% but for whatever reason it's really closer to 20% of Revenue up to your first million dollar in earnings beyond that Apple charges 30 but really Clos 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 3% 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 0 to 30% so in-house organic content might be the way to go if you don't want to spend all your profits on marketing and on that same topic are you comfortable sharing your profit margins so after influencer marketing after Apple's cut

after server processing that sort of thing Riz GPT I don't think I can talk about unfortunately cuz it's run by my other co-founders umax does a little bit over $100,000 profit a month consistently used to do more k I uh does a few hundred th000 in profit a month okay another sensitive question sorry about it but I'm just curious what made you leave the Riz GPT team left because one of my co-founders and I were constantly going head-to-head about like who's at the Helm of the company essentially what I said to him was like okay

we can't work together anymore either you run the company and I keep my Equity or I run the company and you keep your equity and he wanted to continue running it which I was like great I'm going to go work on new projects all right thanks for being transparent about that now I'm going to go a bit easier on you let's talk about technology what's the tech stack honestly my stack looks like figma cursor cap cut Mercury for banking that's actually pretty big Mercury is the best platform for startup banking in the US upwork for

occasional contracted work one upwork method I would recommend for anyone considering hiring off of there hire like five to 10 guys to do an hour or two of work and then stick with the best guy that tends to work very well coding languages react native and no JS yeah pretty pretty straightforward nothing special all right man let's talk about some personal stuff what are you up to these days I've always been so passionate about self-improvement about doing everything one can in order to improve their health to become more successful and find more purpose in their

life and so that's why I set off to build what I'm currently working on which is Apex which I describe as is an all-in-one self-improvement ecosystem where we're starting to create content build a free community build free mobile apps to help people and sell low margin highquality physical products it's something that I'm very excited for and passionate about and I wake up every morning just like so amped to work on it it's going well we started this a little bit over a month and a half ago hell yeah man that's exciting I think it's awesome

to be able to wake up every day and work on something that you're actually passionate about another question I want to ask you is what's the biggest lesson that you've learned in your entire Journey arguably the biggest one is creating a sense of urgency I found that my most productive and successful periods have come when there's a lot of risk and a lot of urgency to get done quickly so when I was building Riz GPT it was like I'm at home making 0 while my parents house is on the market meanwhile all of my friends

are making these great sixf figure salaries living up Life After College and I felt like I had a fire under my ass to get something done and to begin succeeding when I was building UMX I had obviously just split from my previous team and I felt like I had something to prove I was on my brother's couch I spent Thanksgiving alone I had some sliced turkey while I was coding and now with Apex everyone looks at me and they're like dude you you did so well in the app space and now you're building what like

you're making content you're trying to be a influencer I feel that like I feel the pressure and it fires me up and if you feel like you have that for lack of a better word like you have that dog in you create a sense of urgency 100% agreed now the last question that I want to ask you we ask all founders that we interview on starter story what would you say to entrepreneurs we're just getting started yeah I think one of the things that has helped me most succeed is trying to abstract myself away from

what you hear on social media and what others are telling you to do you have to be able to think on your own and think from first principles as opposed to constantly just doing what others say there's a naval quote that a friend recently reminded me of if you want to make the wrong decision ask everybody love it man well Blake I appreciate you coming on starter story and sharing all of this value I can't wait to see what you build next I'll be watching take care man cool appreciate you brother okay recapping this episode

what I think made Blake so successful is how hard he went on content marketing I've done a lot of research on businesses and nearly every really really successful bootstrapped BC app like this purely got traction from content I think the most successful BC Founders or people building iPhone apps they truly understand that product is just not as important as distribution as distribution and attention wins the game if you want to win in BC especially if your app is not Niche it's like a calorie tracking app like this then you must be ready and excited for

the content game you must already be thinking about what Tik toks you're going to try all the channels you can try and even validating your idea in the first place through content online before you even build something this is why I created the starter story Academy to not only have you focus on building an idea but most importantly figure out how to get attention on that idea how to get your first customers how to get feedback from the customers so you can build a better product that will resonate with thousands if not millions of users

if you're serious about taking the first step then definitely check out the starter story Academy just head to the first link in the description if you want to learn more much love and I'll see you guys in the next one peace [Music]