How I Code Apps SOLO That Actually Make Money (Idea Build Marketing Guide)

in this video I'm going to be going over everything that you need to know to think of an app idea build it and sell it and Market it on the internet to make your very first dollar off of an app that you built now in terms of why I think that you should listen to me on this topic is the fact that over the past 3 years I've built probably over 14 different apps but it wasn't until last year where I started making a few small changes to start actually making a couple hundred bucks now

a couple thousand bucks with my latest products a month of recurring Revenue off of the apps that I've built and often times when I'm getting business or entrepreneur advice I find that a lot more help ful more actionable when there's someone that's a lot closer to me in that entrepreneurship game and I would argue that I am much closer to you than the other people on the internet that are making 30 50 $100,000 a month of recurring Revenue I'm not claiming to be an expert on this I'm literally just a random guy on the internet

that loves to build apps make money off of them and Market them on the Internet so I hope you find this video useful and enough of me trying to beg you to watch this video let's just get into it so step number one coming up with an app idea I'm going to be very straightforward with this you don't need to come up with a new idea just copy what already exists out there one of the most common question that I get asked in my YouTube comments or in my Instagram DMS is how do you go

out and validate your idea and if you watch a lot of other startup videos particularly from channels like y combinator that often tell you to go out and talk to your customers do user interviews iterate quickly see what they want does your product really solve a problem and that's all really good advice especially if you're trying to build a billion dooll company that has huge room for growth but I'm going to say this that if you are struggling to make your very first dollar on the internet you don't need to go through all that because

you should just go out and build out a product that already exists out there by just building out an idea that already exists out there the other people have already done the hard part of validating that market for you you don't need to validate your product you know that it's validated and I know some of you are going to have a little bit of an ego just like I did in the beginning where you're like um but it's not original how am I going to differentiate it from all the other products out there no stop

wait stop stop you're done you're done okay you're done you're so cooked right there drop the ego that doesn't matter originality is dead it does not matter especially in the early stages something that I always found really funny in software businesses compared to other business is that whenever you say that oh I'm going to build XYZ app someone's always really quick to say um that actually already exists and then I'm like okay why can't there be two apps to the same existing Solution that's almost like saying if someone wants to open up a hamburger restaurant

and someone's like actually McDonald's already exists you actually can't make them anymore no there can be multiple restaurants that provide hamburgers similarly if there's one problem there can be multiple apps that solve that problem sorry tangent over let's get back on topic to the video I am personally a big fan of copying an idea first and then iterating it and differentiating it later on with your features and in fact my current app which is called mon. a it is an AI powered meeting recording tool that records meetings for you and transcribes them and I'm going

to be very honest and own up to the fact that the reason why I built Monty in the first place was because I saw a lot of other AI meeting recording apps and tools out there making a ton of money and I was like okay clearly there's a big market for this so in the beginning I kind of just rebuilt what the other apps were already doing and now over time though I slowly differentiated it by adding particularly a meeting co-pilot feature which like listens in on meetings in real time and answers there's questions from

those meetings based off information that you upload so that's a brand new feature that the other apps don't have but that differentiation didn't really come until I built out that base version of the app and started making money and the results of me just copying an idea that already exists was the fact that on launch day I was able to scale to $1,000 a monthly recurring Revenue within like one or two weeks because the market was already validated I knew people wanted to buy this product because the other people have already validated that market for

me I would say go out on the internet go to like Twitter Reddit or even just scrolling through your Tik Tok Instagram or YouTube feed you're going to see certain apps marketing towards you and if you find those particular apps interesting and you think that you can rebuild them yourself just get after it and rebuild that same particular app number two is how to build your application now I know some of you are going to have a little bit of coding experience watching this video some of you are going to have no coding experience watching

this video so while the experience level of the people watching this video might vary in terms of their development skills I do think that the advice I'm going to give applies to literally anyone from all skill levels from beginner to expert I will say in terms of building the apps out there there's so much confusion of what's the best textt de oh should I do remix should I do spelt should I do nextjs is nextjs too much hype okay there's so much noise and Nuance around that topic I really think you should just ignore all

of it my personal two cents on this topic is when you're picking your text stack just pick a text stack that has the most developer support out there you don't want to be using a Tex St that you know not that many developers use and then when you run into a bug no one can really help you out even the llms can't help you out because they are trained off of the data out there on the public internet and if it's not that popular you're going to get less developer support so my opinion the most

by far the most popular Tech stack out there for building web applications is nextjs yes is nextjs perfect no I really don't think so but it is one of the most popular if not the most popular web development framework for full stack app development and that is what I use to build all of my applications so don't get lost in the weeds don't get stuck in analysis paralysis of trying to pick the best framework or best tchack out there and then to host your next JS application I recommend using ver versel once again versel is

not perfect it's expensive as hell but it is the easiest path forward and I really think that you should just optimize her ease of use rather than the quote unquote best solution right now is not the time to be a tech nerd you can save your tech nerdiness for another time all right and then if you want to build a mobile application I personally recommend using Expo which is based off of react native you can build crossplatform apps off of IOS and Android using one United codebase I do know some of you nerds out there

are getting your pitchforks being like well actually capacitor JS is the better solution or actually you should build two separate native applications in cotland and Swift stop you're done get out of here you're cooked chat I don't get them out of here get out get out of my Channel right now all right I don't care what's the best I just think that Expo has a really great developer community and often times most people just want to build an app for both Android and iOS and I think Expo is the easiest solution to do that but

then if you're building an app just for iPhones or just for Android then I think building with swift or cotlin is pretty valid as well it's a good option but I think Expo is more than enough and then for your backend provider for both your mobile application or your web application I personally recommend using superbase as your backend provider of choice the reason why I recommend superbase is the fact that it has a ton of products built into one it's almost like an all-in-one solution because it helps handle authentication for you handles databases for you

it handles storage for you those three things right there is going to be the vast majority of your application and it is really convenient and also very affordable just to have one platform handle all of those aspects of your application for you but really the biggest reason why I recommend using subid base is the fact that it is really popular in the developer community so there is a ton of support the community is Super Active so you're going to be able to find solutions for common bugs that you might run into and then in terms

of how to handle Payment Processing I would just go with stripe is is the most popular one it is very straightforward to use probably has the best developer documentation the best developer tooling out there I really wouldn't worry too much about using other providers like paddle or lemon squeezy I know people are like oh but it's a merchant of record you want to do good tax liability for international sale of goods okay let's be honest is that really your biggest issue is international tax compliance really the thing that is top of your mind no probably

not so just stick with stripe trust me it's easy great developer tools all right so just a quick recap number one if you're building a full stack web application build it using nextjs and deploy it on verell if you're building a mobile application build it using Expo to build on both IOS and Android at the same time for your backend storage authentication use superbase for payment processing use stripe and then a last bonus tool that isn't necessarily required but it's very very helpful is post hog post hog is a really useful tool that lets you

track events to see how your users are actually interacting with your application so when users click on a certain button or take a certain action you can track that event so you can see are users actually using certain featur features of your application or not and then it also has other really useful features like session recording which lets you see exactly how users are really using your application also it has support for letting you do experiments AB testing between different experiments or new features you're launching to see how improves or it hurts or app So

eventually when you get to that stage where you do want to experiment with tracking how your users are using your app or running experiments I really think you should use post hog as your default for that last but not least how to Market and sell your product all right so this is where most developers get tripped up because a lot of developers can build a product they don't know how to Market and sell a product there's literally an infinite number of possibilities of ways to Market your application and I definitely won't be able to go

over every single one of them out there but I'll go over some of the most popular ones so first off I want to talk about social media marketing particularly organic social media marketing kind of like how I said in the first section of this video in terms of how to come up with an idea for your application I said kind of scroll through media see what apps are being advertised to you and just rebuilding those apps similarly if you want to go out and make social media content to Market your app I really recommend going

through social media finding other accounts other app accounts that are marketing their app and literally just copy their format chances are if the format works for them it's also going to work for you it's a viral format be Shameless about it don't have an ego about originality that doesn't matter it really doesn't matter once again do not care about the ego put the ego away you don't need to be original just copy the content that works for other software app accounts and literally remake them repurpose them and just do the same format for your app

another nice form of social media marketing is Reddit advertising this one is really interesting where you kind of just lurk around Reddit to see where are people posting about their problems and you can just go in and then add type in your product or the app that you built as a potential solution to that problem when it works well it works really really well but at the same time Reddit is usually pretty strict about moderating these communities or the community mods are really strict about making sure like self-promotions are not allowed so they might delete

your comments and you might get banned from certain subreddits tell me how I know yes I've been banned from certain subreddits for trying to Market it them in the past but it is still a very valid solution and I know a lot of people that do do it very very well there's actually certain tools that exist out there that actually help you monitor Reddit for certain keywords such that if you are looking for a certain keyword for your application that you want to Market on they will then send you every single post that pertains to

that particular keyword and then you can go in comment your solution try to help out there really useful now with Reddit I personally haven't had a lot of success with it but I know a lot of my other founder friends have had a ton of success with Reddit so your mileage may vary I'm personally much more skilled in the social media aspect of things like making videos on Tik Tok and Instagram but I will say Reddit is really nice because it has a much lower barrier of Entry it's literally just a text post whereas with

Tik Tok and Instagram and social media marketing it requires video editing video production which can get a little bit harder compared to just writing a post on Reddit and the great part about Reddit marketing is the fact that it still has very big viral potential if one of your posts goes viral on Reddit and at the same time you can comment on a lot of other posts that already exist out there that aren't necessarily viral but because Google and other search engines love Reddit so much often times what's going to happen is you can to

find certain threads on Reddit being recommended on Google for a particular problem asking for a solution to a particular problem and as long as your comment exists in there there's going to be a chance that someone goes to that Reddit post sees your comment with a link to your product and then they're going to visit your website from that Reddit post so Reddit is super super powerful I highly recommend doing something where you leave a lot of comment on a lot of posts promoting your tool plugging your tool such that sure people that are on

Reddit will natively find it there but even more importantly people that go search that problem from Google and end up on the website can then see that solution as well from your comment and on this topic of Google loving Reddit and recommending them in the search results is a good transition into the marketing topic of search engine optimization search engine optimization is basically figuring out ways maybe writing blog posts or doing guest blog posts or commenting on Reddit post to make sure that your app comes up on Google and other search engine results now I'm

not the biggest expert on this field and I'll probably make a completely separate video talking about this but search engine optimization is a great marketing solution just the only downside is the fact that it has a lot less viral potential compared to Reddit marketing or Tik Tok and Instagram marketing and it's definitely a much longer longterm investment that can be super useful for you but you're not going to get as many short-term rewards in the future now kind of going back to social media another great example of social media marketing is influencer marketing basically just

doing brand deals with influencers now be careful this is very very expensive because some influencers can ask for a ton of money and it's going to take a lot of time to find the influencers and negotiate back and forth with these creators but I will say when you find the right influencer it can really take your product from Z to 100 really really fast but it's also really difficult doing these brand Partnerships and these influencer brand deal because it's really hard often to find the right Creator product fit for your product but it is a

very valid marketing solution and if it works well you can go from 0 to 100 super quick and often times you'll be able to see results instantly the minute the creators make a video that advertise your product once again there's no one solution fits all for all types of products out there but I will say if I had to choose just one or two marketing tactics to advertise certain software products on the internet I would really index super heavily on short form video on Tik Tok and Instagram to Market your product as well as Reddit

I personally think that those two marketing strategies are going to be the ones that provide you the most return on investment in terms of time put into it it's going to be instant quick results often times because you'll be able to get a super quick signal to see is your post going viral or not and you can then validate your idea super quickly and hopefully get your very first customer and your very first transaction I'll probably make another video in the future where I go super in-depth into the various SAS marketing tactics but that'll be

a video for another time cuz this video is already super long anyways that is my video on a complete a toz guide on how to come up with an app idea build it and Market it on the internet to hopefully help you make your very first dollar with your very first app that you developed let me know if you have any questions or comments leave them down below I will try my best to answer every single one that I can but that is it for today's video and I will see you in the next one

peace