The 23-year-old That Made $2.4M with His FIRST App

in the past year I've made about 5 million in Revenue it really was as simple as asking chat GPT how do I build a mobile app there have been a lot of people that are like you can't just build an app with like 95% chat GPT and I'm like no you actually can those two videos generated almost 200,000 downloads in less than a week and shot us to $80,000 in monthly Revenue off the Jump when you build something with a very clear use case solving a very clear problem that people have it can be the

simplest product of all time there's massive upside dude how much money do you make um in the past year I've made about 5 million in Revenue over the course of the next 12 months I will make at least 10 million in Revenue uh but the majority of the profits are being reinvested into my next big Vision which is Apex you're quite young how old are you I'm 23 years old okay and what do you do I build consumer mobile apps okay so like apps on my phone yes exactly okay and then you say consumer that

means like what does that mean this is for the average person right we're not building for businesses we're not doing B2B sass right we're building apps for the average individual so you want let's go ahead and talk about your first app because you're a non-technical person and this was your first app and you saw pretty quick success with it so talk to me about RZ GPT yeah so I had done a little bit of coding mostly just like python writing basic four loops some data analytics but I never built software chat GPT came out uh

popularized in December of 20122 and as soon as I started using it I was hooked I was like this is incredible I wasn't immediately thinking about ways to capitalize on it more so just like this is an unbelievable technology fast forward about 6 months and I'm getting ready to graduate college and I don't really want to go the path of getting a full-time job so I'm like what can I do to make money I have a roommate at the time who was always using dating apps right and he would sometimes ask me like dude what

should I say to this girl and I was like I wonder if Chad GPT could just generate these responses and so I took his transcript I manually wrote it out I threw it into chat GPT and I was like give me suggestions and they were decent but they were very robotic in nature but I'd done a little bit of prompt engineering right figuring out how to hack the sort of responses that chat GPT gives so I fiddle around with the prompt I'm giving it all these instructions on ways to manufacture its output so that that

it actually sounds like a human and has Riz right and this is what led to the Advent of Riz GPT so this was the first mobile app that I built and what did it do it enabled you to upload a screenshot of your messages with a girl and then it would take the text using OCR or optical character recognition send that through chat GPT with one of our prompts and then it would produce responses and would send those back to you so they could see basically the OCR could see the text message from the girl

on Tinder yeah and then it would generate responses for you to send exactly so the optical character recognition scans through your screenshot if it's on the left side the message then that's probably from the girl if it's on the right it's probably from so pulls out this transcript and then it gives examp of what you could say in the of that conversation okay so it gives you options basically yeah so you could press generate response and you get one and then you go I don't really like that generate another go you know these These are

you know maybe not flirty enough you can pull up the spice meter make it spicier and it'll give you a more flirtatious me was it was it in the app like was it in tinder's app or were you just copying you would screenshot the message screenshot upload toz GPT and we produced the response and then they just copy paste it exactly oh that's so simple very simple incredibly simple how much money did this app make so we first launched just over a year ago the first couple of weeks we didn't really have the formula down

we did like a couple hundred downloads and then I found this Niche uh on social media it was Riz content essentially guys showing off how good their Riz is we paid $50 for two separate promos they just made their normal content and put our app in the middle and those two videos did a few million views each generated almost 200,000 downloads in less than a week and shot us to $80,000 in monthly Revenue off the jump from 50 bucks $100 two2 $50 promos but yeah holy [ __ ] um and then over the course of

the next few months we scaled up to a little bit over 200,000 a monthly Revenue Mr Mr and we've been steadily there for like 10 months so I think that we're about to hit two and a half million in total revenue what was their normal content you said that was their normal content they're literally just like showing off conversations between girls it's like imagine you you know you have your Tinder messages with a bunch of different girls right uh they would go through and they would show like look at how good my RZ is and

it would just be screenshots of their conversations with the girls with maybe little edits in the middle like let bro cook it's like a little meme um and so they would be like 10 image long slideshows and we would reach out to them and we're like dude we love your content want to use our app to show off your RZ and like put it in the middle like this is where I get my RZ from and so it was like the perfect hook people are watching this content because they're impressed by the guy's Riz or

game or their ability to flirt with girls and then this guy's like hey I'm using this app actually and everyone thinks like oh all I need to do is download this app and now I'll be able to attract more women and so they're seeing it work cuz he in the video he's showing him using or talking to these girls seeing him get the girl and then he just credits exactly it's not him just saying like hey guys by the way this Happ he's showing he's like this is what I do this is what I use

it's a piece of the puzzle to get that outcome of getting a girl it's the same way as an athlete being like you know we my Jordans right like Michael Jordan has his shoes he's like you want to play like me where are my shoes right it makes these uh like Larger than Life figures feel as if you can kind of replicate their success in whatever domain just need to do what they do exactly that's so interesting okay and then how many uh followers did these people have so what's interesting is they weren't I think

people often get this wrong about social media marketing they look to followers followers aren't actually what matters it's views right and engagement and so these guys maybe had like 50 ,000 followers 100,000 followers Max but they're doing millions and millions of views each video right whereas on the flip side you have maybe washed up creators or influencers that have millions of followers that generate 20,000 views a video and a lot of big Brands and agencies will pay on a follower basis but that's just I mean it's very clearly not the correct strategy the algorithm have

changed this year especially and so anyone can get massive views it's about consistency and compounding so I'm curious how come it's only 50 bucks if they're getting millions of views yeah um you often see it with new uh niches new spaces new content uh when they're capitalizing on a VI viral Trend one uh you can get you know you can do cheaper promos but two is like who else is going to do a promo in this space right it's like who else is able to monetize people just showing off their game and Tinder messages what

maybe like a dating coach but it's less High converting right I think that an important part about running uh even targeted ads or your own in-house content or whatever it may be it's like find the sort of audience that is going to convert best and where you have the highest comparative advantage for your application um and then double down on that did you go after how much is the app sorry how much is the app how much is it to use yeah so uh originally it was free to use and then after you used a

number of credits we would charge $7 a week now it's just $7 a week flat okay so did you not ever offer these people like affiliate deals it was just solely flat yeah attribution is very difficult with mobile applications it's like very easy to do an affiliate deal when you're a street wear brand for example people just use the code at check out attribution is like really messy when it comes to these mobile apps and so this how much did you scale as influencer Outreach too it's a numbers game right it's like it's weird you're

playing both for quantity and quality right it's like you simultaneously need to be reaching out to like hundreds of people a day but I think something that we did pretty well is if there was an influencer where I'm like I need to work with this guy I wouldn't just shoot them a message on Tik Tok or Instagram right I would go join their Discord I would spam [ __ ] every hour I would spam trying to get in contact with the guy I would message their mom I would message their girlfriend whatever be like get

me in contact with with Malik or whoever it may be um that was one guy that I specifically did it with um and you know obviously you don't want to go too far right I'm not like messaging weird things I'm just like hey would love to pay your son to do some work for me let me know if you can get me in contact um so I think you simultaneously need to play the numbers game while also recognizing like when there is and I think this applies to business in general when there's something you can

do that will really lever lever up your efforts you need to do everything in your power to make that happen um so in this case dming their mom and I love that though like being intentional with like if you find a quality person like going out of your way to make sure you get that person still do the mass Outreach everyone you can systemize that but like go extra effort exactly like you can't do this with every single person right just going to take too much time um but yeah I mean people people really over

complicate they're like I've dm'd 20 influencers and no one has responded and I'm like how long did that take you like 20 minutes maximum um so it's like yeah I don't know you just got to be willing to put in the time I guess and I think that's what most people skip past so I'm curious then how much like what was the message that you were offering these people like are you literally showing them the results of how these like first few people how much money they made be like hey these people made like 20

grand in the first month with a video like this an example video this is where I don't think that there's a one siiz fits-all universal answer it's really dependent on the niche so for Riz GPT we had one method for umax which we'll get into later we had a different method now for my most recent application Cal there's a totally different method so I think it's like it's it's a process of split testing right split testing is obvious to people when you're running paid ads meta does it for you right split texting is obvious when

there's like a clear it's very easy to quantify the inputs and outputs though split testing can also be done in a qualitative sense right you kind of split test what sort of messaging you want to you want to uh push onto somebody when you're trying to get them to do a deal right I think people who do sales they really understand this um they they test different sort of strategies different uh you know whether or not they're a little bit more direct and aggressive with their offer whether or not they slow play it that sort

of thing thing I think that it really applies here to um you know working with creators and whatnot what were a few different like angles you took so there's like the there's some cases in which you just want to out right like maybe in an industry where there's a lot of [ __ ] right you're getting a lot of DMS there's a lot to filter through which albeit it's probably the majority of Industries on this on social media be more direct be like hey love your content looking to pay you X for a promo let

me know if you're interested right like a lot of these people have their time wasted not just by people trying to do promos with them but by people trying to offer some high ticket sale or management or whatever it may be um so I think cutting through that is very I think that that is probably a pretty Universal there's like two liners like that yeah speed direct I think just for the first reply and I'm sure you've noticed this too like when people are reaching out I have so many people that are like hey man

like I think I could really really improve what you're doing to hop on a quick call here's my cly link I'm available in six days I'm like no I'm not going to do that but then some people reach out and they're like hey dude love what you're doing this uh X maybe should actually be y here's an example of how I would do it differently Maybe here's a new design for your logo or here's a new strategy for whatever it may be and they're like providing value up front or showing exactly what they can do

and I'm like okay this person's legit they're not going to waste my time this was your first app you said that you've ever built and you're not technical person so a getting on the Apple App Store seems like a hurdle that you might not have seen coming but also even just the technical build of it how did you build the app if you weren't technical yeah so like I said I had like a very high level kind of understanding of Technology but I was certainly no software developer so it really was as simple as asking

chat GPT how do I build a mobile app right and it had said you can either build in Swift UI for iOS or cotlin for Android or react native if you want to deploy hybrid Etc and I just I chose Swift UI there wasn't much uh method to it I was just kind of like this Mak sense so I downloaded xcode and you get hit with the hello world in the little Globe sign on the screen and okay we need to figure out what the designs are going to look like here so we hop in

figma one of my co-founders kind of LED that charge we're both working on it we get the general designs what we want it to look like and I'm like okay chat GPT I need a blue gradient background for the homepage and it tells me do background parenthesis linear gradient from blah blah blah to so now I have my background I want a button in the middle I go chat GPT I need a button button uh I need two buttons actually and I need a logo at the top it gives me the UI for that I

say okay now after I press this button I need to go to my camera roll to upload an image and it was it was this simple it was I need to do this chpd explain it to me then I Implement I need to do this explain to me Implement and now obviously there were times where I had to do debugging uh but anytime that that came up I just asked chat gbt I'm like hey you gave me this code why doesn't this work and the reason that I'm getting kind of specific here is there have

been a lot of people that are like you can't just build an app with like 95% chat GPT and I'm like no you actually can like I know for a fact I did it myself um and over time chbt essentially became my tutor right as I started to get a little bit more familiar um it didn't have to write all of the code I still hav it write the majority but I started to learn too I was like hey can you explain the difference between an observable object and a State variable right um and yeah

this took a little bit over a month R GPT relatively simple like two- function app um now I could probably build it in a day or two right but getting off the ground was uh it really wasn't that complicated it wasn't easy but it was not complicated building a website just got a lot easier thanks to durable durable is an AI website builder that allows you to build your website within 30 seconds created specifically for entrepreneurs and small business owners durable is the ideal solution for those seeking to create a polished website and make every

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can make easy and simple customizations with no coding or design skills required go to durable. wgmi to try durable for free and use code wgmi 30 to get 30% off any plan for 3 months that's durable. c/w GMI thank you durable for sponsoring to today's episode so you had the set goal then you're like all right I need to get this built naturally you're asking chat GPT and it's giving you piece by piece as you're solving the problem one by one and then really the product is just a GPT API ex the end of the

dayly we had no back end we didn't we didn't have user authentication the app was named Riz GPT D production so when you downloaded it that's what displayed on your home screen um yeah our apis were totally insecure we were originally making the API calls from the front end which anyone who's listening that's a developer knows how dangerous that is the API key was like if you had just opened up the app which is pretty you could just steal our API key and everyone charge you exactly for all the tokens that's funny that shows that

I I I think it's action focused if you just sat there trying to think through everything try to solve everything in your head first trying to look up videos on how to code you would have like psyched yourself out yeah there were there were probably there were things that reasonably now I could do in 3 minutes that took me 20 hours just because I would mess up some little uh part of the code and that would just make the system completely unfunctional or setting up the back end I did it through Heroku which like in

retrospect I would have just done like AWS MH um but yeah I think that the big lesson here is I know a lot of people that have ventured to build apps and then they get stuck on like some really small maybe like compiling error and it takes them 20 hours and they just can't seem to solve it and they just kind of give up but just keep pushing through yeah um now this especially applies to an app like chat GPT I don't think that someone without previous software experience could go build a social app right

in which you have like interactivity amongst users that's a different ball game start small right yeah but it's still insane that you built this first app without any technical experience just using chat GPT in a month and then you launch for 100 bucks you get $80,000 in Mr that's right that's nuts dude congrats by the way that's a [ __ ] awesome it's the action that uh that shows and gets you the reward so um was getting on the App Store difficulty uh no it really wasn't that bad you just kind of have to set

up an LLC create a developer account now albe it my co-founder handled the majority of it for R GPT but then I did it for umax um and Cal so or well C did it with one of their co-founders but no no it's it's really not much of an issue okay interesting I mean I think at the end of the day that really is how simple the story is like I think a lot of people like to complicate software think you need to be a tech super technical developer has to be some refined app you're

like there's a new trend right now with AI new product available to the market I see a problem that I can solve with it I see content that's working right now and so you kind of had like this like distribution that was like very clearly strategically seen and then he just launched something and people liked it yeah so now I don't think that this applies to you know actual large scale software but when it comes to these sort of like Indie applications people often over complicate it they try to build something with like this somewhat

convoluted use case they're like not to call this person out but somebody hit me up and they're like dude I just built this app I want your opinion on it and it's like a water drinking reminder application and it like just enables you to track how much water you're drinking and I'm like okay listen like can this provide some value to people that maybe aren't drinking enough water yeah and like often times these applications can work but there's no guarantee right whereas when you build something with a very clear use case solving a very clear

problem that people have it can be the simplest product of all time but if you just solve it in a better way than currently exists on the market or you distribute in a better way than it's currently done on the market um there's massive upside R GPT is as simple as guys don't know how to text girls the the clear example of this is people any guy that's been in group chat with multiple guys probably knows that that they'll send these sort of screenshots in the group chat right okay now let's build a product to

solve this instead of sending in group chat send through app produce response give to the user um and so yeah that's kind of been my thesis for the past three apps that I've built and they've all scaled very well yeah he's not a one- hit wonder so I want to I want to get into the next one but I guess last question I have on R gbt is how did because you were probably pretty early it was probably like right when the GPT API came out you took action really quickly and so you saw a

lot of early success you got to like 200k Mr did a lot of competition come into the market this is like a huge Market clarify here I set off to to build it having no understanding of what the consumer mobile app space looked like I had no idea that there actually was a formidable competitor on the market who's now actually bigger than I should also clarify here uh Riz GPT is now named plug AI so there was a competitor on the market I was completely unaware of them uh also this is over 6 months after

the GPT API came out so it wasn't that new um the competitor being the Riz app that's why we changed our name got uh threatened lawsuit you know how it goes um so yeah what IID said earlier like sometimes you don't have to uh build something super novel or solve in new sometimes there can be competition but if they're not Distributing well it's as if they don't exist right they had done less than 200,000 downloads at this point we did that in our first week right um so yeah I really want to harp on that

point I don't think people say this often I think a lot of people actually disagree but if your competition is not known it's as if they do not exist right if I've never heard of a product if the average individual has never heard of it then it doesn't exist in in the the uh you know in society right it only really exists once people know about it did you okay so that's interesting cuz it's like the brand name has to be established especially on social media in this day and age and their brand name wasn't

established do you I love that you just had like kind of horse blinders on and blind ignorance here and you just went forward solved the problem got an influencer and it's working without even looking at the market without looking and seeing how complicated it would be you literally just did it yeah awesome big believer in like shoot from the hip yeah right like I think people spend too much time trying to optimize everything that they do and now this is important for example if you're building consumer social where first impression really matters and if you

get a ton of people on your application it's not Built Well from the start that they're churned and they're never coming back right but when it comes to Consumer utility app it's like sh it's probably better to be slightly optimized from the start um but yeah I like to shoot from the hip I don't do like super in-depth Market Research in regards to like I I try to understand the market but I'm not doing like focus groups and I'm not having like a f Monon beta testing period like I build the [ __ ] app

and I put it on the market and I hope that it works it's pretty simple guys need help talking to girls everybody's trying to get girls huge Market this is a new Ab ability to do it and I can probably find a way to Market it yeah so okay let's go on to umax because umax is even bigger than this one so you took those lessons and then you kind of made a bigger and better app but I love your approach to how you chose umax so if you could kind of start there yeah so

um I split up with my co-founders from uh Riz GPT it was amicable kept My Equity still getting paid from it and so I spent the month of November hopping from couch to couch right we hadn't gotten paid out from R GPT yet the way the Apple payout cycle works and then it this big thing but I have no money and I'm kind of I stayed on my friend's couch for a couple weeks then my brother's couch and I'm like all right what should I build and I'm kind of scrolling through social media and I'm

like okay what's interesting what are people what's really popping right now and I come across looks maxing to me it's super fascinating because it seemed like the gym Niche weightlifting was kind of slowly declining and looks maxing was taking its place what looks maxing solved um that I think the weightlifting Niche was one step away from is the majority of guys want to you know for example lift weights because they want to be more attractive to girls look maxing Cuts right through that looks maxing is like okay you want to be more attractive to girls

let's improve your facial Aesthetics let's improve how you look and we can do this a lot quicker than spending 5 years lifting weights to try to get jacked and so I start to do more research okay I need to put myself in the mind of a looks maxer like what would I want and I find that on Reddit on Tik Tok on Instagram there are two common things that people are looking for they're looking for how can I become more attractive right like can you rate or or give me suggestions right what skin care should

I do what hair care should I do or hair styling what have you and any advice that they're getting through social media is not personalized to them right like an influencer can create a video saying if you have wavy hair do this if you have this skin care this skin type do this but it's not all just laid out in front of you now on the flip side or I guess second people want to know how attractive they are right and people want to be able to quantify their progress over time we see these like

sort of glowup videos like I used to look like this and now I look like this like now I'm really hot right but it's not Quantified and people don't know where they stand at the time GPT Vision API was about to be released and I started playing around with it in the uh you know web app and I was like I think that I can build an app to solve both of these problems so I'm uploading pictures of myself and friends and playing around figuring out how to make it work similar to what you were

saying about like when the chat GPT original API came out that there was so much opportunity I posted on Twitter I was like GPT Vision this was actually at the demo day before the API came out I was like somebody is going to make millions of dollars or there there will be people that make millions of dollars off of an opportunity that they identify as a result of this new technology GPT Vision um and for those those listening who don't know what it is GPT vision is essentially chat GPT but you can upload images and

get an analysis so I set off to build this app um I had seen that Sam Zia was really popping off on social media and I was like I think because this community is so tight it I think that having someone who's really at the Forefront is going to confer a lot of value here and I'd seen Sam in one of Lucas pactor podcasts I was like I think that this kid's smart he's a hustler I think that he would be a great partner so I brought on him and my older brother and that was

kind of the start of youx is is he like an influencer or something yeah Sam Sam is a looks magazing influencer there's kind of like the big three in the looks magazing space it's like K shami Dylan leam and Sam Zia how many followers do they have typically um I think all of those guys each have a few million across platform each video they're posting is getting how many views you think yeah so Sam at the time only had like 200,000 on Tik Tok but he was getting like million plus views a video and he's

teach people like mewing or like how to like yeah put your face in ice water exactly it's like here's how to tighten your facial skin or like sharpen your jawline yeah um that's so interesting so you saw that that was like a popular it was a trending topic on social media the content was getting a lot of views and so you saw that this was like a new upand cominging thing that had been there's nothing no infrastructure to be built for this yet but it's getting really popular and then simultaneously you saw a new chat

gbt Vision which you could upload a picture of your face and it could analyze your face yeah it was like Market X new technology timing was perfect chat or looks maxing was just starting to really become popular look at like the Google Trends it's like steadily increasing at this point like November December of 2023 um GPT Vision that just came out there's nothing like it on the market uh llama 3 just wasn't as good and in order to build something like this in the past you would have to like you can use facial Landmark detection

but that can only get you so far to get the real in-depth analysis you'd have to train a custom ml Vision model that could cost anywhere from 50 to $100,000 with no guarantee of having a high quality output whereas we could test this in real time for less than a scent in image gotcha so that is so fascinating so that's how you chose to make this app yes what is the revenue for umax right now yeah so first month we did about $100,000 in Revenue that's insane second month we did about 200,000 in revenue and

then that's when we went viral and since then we've been doing like over 500,000 a month so I think now we're at a little bit over like 5 million oh my God or excuse me sorry we're had a little bit over 3 million yeah but 5 million for your career I think and it'll be over 5 million in 2024 for umax that's insane okay so you had the idea that's how you built it that's why you wanted to build it how did you approach building this differently than yes so this one UMX was a little

bit more complicated um you know we actually built it decent from the start we had a user table we had some level of authentication T that's crazy you didn't have a user table Yeah Yeah GPT um pretty similar honestly this time we yeah Swift UI AWS back end um I was passing the images through an rest API as like base 64 encoded which like definitely is not best practice move to pre-signed URLs after that did you build it yeah yeah I buil it um so whereas chat GPT wrote like 95% of the code for R

GPT maybe it wrote like 90% for emx um yeah it maybe took about a month again to build could you break down like what your thought process was for what features you're building can you explain what the features are and like what the user flow is right now yeah yeah so I originally had started a series when I first started building it where I was going to document my like building in public and then very shortly thereafter I was like this is a waste of time now I do have some of the videos I think

one of them is on my Twitter if you want to like scroll down to a few months ago you can find it I think that disconnecting early on is very valuable I spent a pretty unbelievable amount of time just walking in the woods like no phone nothing just thinking through like all the different ways that I can actualize the sort of vision that I have and so this is where I think like really tuning in to to to your own conscious and subconscious um and your thoughts about the space is extremely valuable right kind of

set your general trajectory and then build fast right so I figured out I'm like okay we're going to do the ratings we're going to give the recommendations and I'm thinking about how I want the flow to look General ux and I'm just doing this all in my head right and then once it starts to come together and the vision becomes clear um I think another important thing here is like any project that I've worked on that has had real success as I think through it I become more and more confident about the probability of success

anytime that I've become less and less confident it generally doesn't work out if as you start to think through it becomes you become more confident um I think that that's an indicator that you're on to something so it starts to become clear I start to mock up the designs in figma uh playing around getting some advice from Friends input and the big thing here is like I want to make it as simple as possible give people what they're looking for as quickly as I can what are they looking for they're looking for their ratings and

their recommendations so they'd post a photo and you'd get like a rating out of 10 like how attractive you are yeah and then it would give you recommendations on what you can do to become more exactly so and a big thing that we focus on is like traits that you can adjust as an individual or things that you can change for example skin care hair styling grooming right uh strengthening your jawline right we're not focused on things like well you don't have strong cheekbones which you can't really change like you're [ __ ] you're ugly

right um so I'm a big believer of like an internal locus of control and that's something that we really feel strongly about empowering people so in addition like the overall score we also have the potential score like what would you be rated if you were to improve these malleable characteristics what do you mean my internal locus of control I think an internal locus of control in Psychology there's like internal external internal is if something happens in your life you attribute it to kind of your decisions and your actions an external locus of control you're going

to attribute things that happen to you know well uh just an unlucky day or maybe the weather was this or this person did this to me as opposed to I should have checked the weather in advance or I should have you know uh uh thought about what I was going to do before I did it right as opposed to saying like things happen to me like I create things or or I create the things that happen interesting so then how are you coming up with a person's rating yeah so we're essentially assessing for these various

characteristics do you have present acne is your skin somewhat discolored right um are you well groomed is your hair styled well according to your face shape um do you have B bags under your eyes right and so we're assessing for like 20 plus characteristics and then using these uh for different features for example with jawline if if we notice a strong jaw Contour which is as simple as saying to chat GPT like does the individual have a strong jawline and then you give a little bit more explanation to improve accuracy um so if you don't

have a strong jawline that'll decrease your jawline score right so is it like so you can like tell Chachi to identify these set variables and someone's facial like if they have acne if they have a strong jawline whatever it is contour lines and then are you just basically saying if they have one of these deduct a point or something like that yeah yeah pretty much we're we're it's like and you're setting a baseline that's it's primarily classification yeah uh because it doesn't do a very good job at quantification if you tell it give me a

drawline score it'll be like 70 someone else 70 else like you know uh whereas if you classify and then use that to adjust the you know Quantified output saying that like the highest if they have none of these highest score would be a 10 basically yeah exactly that makes a lot of sense then deduct points exactly that's so interesting and then you basically what does the app do from there once they have that score so it's basically setting that Baseline so and trying to get them to a goal yeah exactly and then along with these

classifications for example if the jawline isn't strong we give some recommendations eat food that is chewier or use these jawline trainers right cuz your jaw is essentially a muscle right or you have muscles along your jawline that are going to make it sharper um or lose weight right if the individual appears to be overweight that sort of thing the recommendations that we give are very straightforward like the majority of the recommendations if you look at it for any individual uh uh component is like eat healthier work out wash your face right we are not giving

things that are like really out there but we feel strongly about um helping teach people to take care of themselves better I think as a young man in society you know I think that girls are taught this kind of early on about like how to uh groom themselves well take care of themselves I don't think that it's as prevalent for young men like I have two brothers I was never told anything about skincare I never washed my face until after college yeah literally literally um and so just making these simple recommendations more popular and uh

well-known I think is a good thing so it's more like you're like telling them how much how good they look and if they did these three things this is how good they could look you're basically bringing awareness that hey facial care is a thing you could also strengthen your jaw which is a thing that people probably don't even know exists abolutely so you're kind of just pointing them in the right direction instead of giving them a fullon like eat this today eat this tomorrow yeah yeah exactly I think that society would be better off if

everyone took the time to take care of themselves right simple and so I think uh to me it feels like a good thing and so that's what the app is is just essentially doing it's pretty simple it's just giving them Baseline telling them their goals here's how you can reach that goal is their continuity like why would they continue using the app there's not too much you can get your updated recommendations but it's largely not going to change all that much um I guess progression pictures or something like yeah yeah you get progress pictures you

can kind of track how your score changes over time um it was certainly something we considered building into however it is not something that I'm super passionate about yeah like the actual way that it manifests like if we were to really double down and spend years on this thing I that we could get it to a point where we're providing a lot more prolonged value though as we'll get into later I have a vision that I'm more passionate about building so it was some somewhat opportunistic in nature like there's a a lot of opportunity to

provide value here and do well in this space so let's capitalize on that and sort of the success here will enable me to pursue the bigger Visions uh with a higher probability of success yeah this was just kind of seemed like there's a lot of value in the market to capture and it was like speed that you kind of took advantage of and you saw the trend you took the action and you captured that value but long term I could see how that wouldn't be like your billion dollar business and so it's kind of like

a Launchpad business to get your first set of capital and you can have like a more Mission focused approach I'm sure pretty much exactly the plan so this seems to be like the new approach to at least consumer apps and SAS in general is that you saw the trend and you partner with an influencer to launch it so you had that baked in distribution is that something that just tell me about that approach is that like was that really intentional yes like you called it social media businesses or entrepreneurship or something yeah yeah it's interesting

so I think that this Bas is kind of like the intersection of tech and social media right um but the approach to partner with an influencer to me I think is really dependent on the space that you work in for example looksmaxing was a very tight-knit um like ride or die Community right the people that were in it they loved it and there were small number of influencers that were re really leading all the messaging all the the look maxing Zeitgeist right um Sam was one of those guys so partnering made sense he's also a

great dude like super good to work with I don't think that's true for all influencers um and so there it made sense though for example with CI which we'll get into in a moment calorie tracking is like [ __ ] massive right there's no one individual who's leading this entire the entire Community or culture so in that sense partnering with an influencer right if if your goal is to achieve True Market penetration and like even dominance then no influencer will be able to provide their keep if you get there right maybe they can if if

they're a good entrepreneur right if them being an influencer is just like cherry on top they're good entrepreneur they have connections they know how to run a business beautiful do it right but when it comes to primarily partnering with someone on the basis of their influence I think that it is relative to your time Horizon expectations for the business as well as um the state of the niche in which they exist what was your approach to Cal yeah so I had the idea for CI while youx was really blowing up I was like I can't

really justify going all in on this meanwhile i' been in contact with these two uh entrepreneurial 17-year-olds they are unbelievably cracked for their age just so smart so mature uh technical skills what have you they hadn't had like major successes one of them Zach had had for his age a major success right he had sold a website that he got like millions of users on for like $100,000 right but they were new to the app space and they were really interested in it and so I hit them up and I'm like yo I think that

we can run this Playbook that I have for mobile apps um for calorie tracking app that said I just need you guys to understand that my number one priority right now is umax I'm going to give you guys the Playbook Capital um and to some extent take youall under my wing um and we'll go even split on this you guys are running it I'll essentially serve as a a resource for yall and they were like bet let's do it so I had the initial idea the designs um and the Playbook and then they built it

they get got the social media train running what have you um and CI has been doing so well I think in large part due to how well these kids have executed we're we've done over $300,000 in the past month so we're at uh I think like 3 million AR right now because not all of that is recurring right um and now the play here is within this kind of like team we're building out new applications leveraging the infrastructure that we have through designers social media marketers Etc and over the course of the next couple of

months I'm really helping to kind of ensure that we have a well-oiled machine here and going to continue to push the ball forward on this as I gear up for my next big play or I guess my biggest play now which will be Apex I know that I could continue building apps and I think I could do like 20 million in Revenue minimum next year if I'm all in on just building these sort of consumer apps now I don't want to be someone who maximizes for money right that I don't view that as a fun

way to live life right I think that that to me seems like actually really depressing where it's just all about how can I make more money more money more money um as opposed to doing things that you care about and the vision behind Apex is something I really do care about I agree 100% but I think you have to make your first taste of money to like it has to be a conscious Choice after you make the money so then be taken seriously it's a lot easier to pursue the grand Visions when you have the

safety net right um I didn't have the safety net before now I did yeah it's like the Launchpad business you need money to make take the bigger swings too so mus did zip 2 before he did PayPal right and did PayPal before he did Tesla and SpaceX so I want to I want to ask one more question on CI first off so for anyone listening they're going to think you're crazy for switching from a company that's making 500k a month but I assume there's a problem with like retaining people getting people to like the ltvs

probably isn't like years down the line I assume there's there was kind of a trend that you hopped on and so like the Market's not growing at the same there's other competitors so there's maturity and it's going to cash flow and it'll exist but for you to take bigger swings where you want to be like I sure I'm sure you want to be like an Elon mus level entrepreneur essentially right and build a mission that app is not going to get you there and so when you have a bigger Vision with Mission it makes sense

to just you're still contributing what you contribute you kind of built the machine so it's running itself it's a business and so and you've kind of Tapped Out the market and there's potential flaws in the long run so it doesn't make sense for you to commit and double down is that kind of yeah the right assessment I think another important note here for me specifically is I'm not the sort of person who can just will myself to do the thing that I don't want to do if I don't want to do something I wholly like

cannot [ __ ] do it self awareness yeah so I definitely optimize for doing things that I'm interested in um and with youx it was similar to what I said earlier it was like okay let's let's get this thing on autopilot so that it can continue to sustain itself sustain itself and make a good amount of capital that I can use for future projects um but like yeah there were ways in which I think could have grown youx and still can um the biggest issue issue is like I just don't find myself inspired when I

work on it and as a result I'm going to get way less out of my time that I put into it and so with CI I was like this will be a really fun thing to do we kind of build a studio here I can help these two 17-year-olds Zach and Henry who like I said are fantastic um can get them a massive win early on um and I can still see some upside from this meanwhile I pursue the things that I care about I think that should be like a way more accepted answer by

people by the way like I think that's 100% the right way to think about it like if you're not excited about it you don't feel like it's something that you want to be doing don't do it don't do it and then that should be the right answer and then you make the next approach better I know so many people that try to force thems to do something because they identify it as their highest Roi activity yeah per input but as a result that their inputs are just like in they put in eight hours they're only

really getting three hours of productive work done versus when you're really passionate about something you can put in 8 hours and you can get like 16 hours of productive work out of it right and then your next four hours just learning about it in general because it's fun for you that makes a lot of sense give me a little more context on CI though what do you mean by you created a studio and could you just explain like how you're building these so they're on autopilot yeah so I don't want to go too in depth

into like but high level it's we have ideas for apps right any good appdev knows that you always have like 20 ideas in your back pocket and you're just working on the best one with the studio model we're bringing in Engineers who maybe are interested in entrepreneurship or want to work in a small startup and having them really lead the charge on an individual app that we have an idea on right uh we'll do the designs we'll uh provide the infrastructure anything that they need uh we help them with and then they just get to

build right and and obviously participate on the product side of things what have you then we have also the social media infrastructure we're running all the paid ads we're doing the in-house content generation we're working with various influencers and kind of scaling it up on the distribution side as well interesting this is what we do we do like Venture Le or Creator Le SAS basically partner creators and then build them software yeah so we're not looking to like do the sort of like influencer Partnerships for the majority of these it's the dev side yeah yeah

exactly do you see with consumer apps there's like a ceiling that you've been hitting or is that what you mean like it's I think that it depends on the application like different applications are going to have higher and lower ceilings the amount of effort that you put into it a prolonged period um so yeah I think that often times it's very difficult to estimate ceilings so once you just start to see yourself plateau and you know that you're still doing all the right things and nothing seems to be working that's usually an indication that like

you've hit a ceiling or that it's just going to be super hard to penetrate through that uh maybe that's like a local ceiling it's not like the universal ceiling um so you'd have to add new features change the product yeah exactly like and with umax for example like I know that we're not at the universal maximum we at a local maximum given the state of the current product now in order to break beyond that it's just going to take time effort attention that I don't want to put into it passion exact it will take passion

and I don't have the necessary passion that's good that's great self-awareness though to be honest okay so one last thing on this you said that you got CI to a really good start really quickly could you just explain like what that what the process is because you're kind of so refined now like just like objectively like step one step two step three like okay have a app idea see trending in the market have developer you said social media manager or something like that could you just explain from your perspective like how you like break down

the roles and pieces you need to scale like that yeah um I think that there are a lot of people in this sort of like utility app space as I describe it tool apps uh that are doing it alls I think a distribution of responsibility across team members is very valuable I think that generally you'll see like greater than 2x outcome when you have two highly skilled people working on the same thing so long as the ceiling isn't like super low um and so that I think is a key component of success here it's like

someone takes lead of engineering someone takes lead on design product App Store Etc someone takes the lead on marketing um and then from there within the context of each individual role I think that the consumer app space probably more so than any space is just like rapid iteration you iterate on your distribution strategy you iterate on different designs on different engineering Styles ET um and because you can do it so fast and in real time like if you an Ecom product for example you have to wait for the new samples and then like there's just

a few week change a lot of waiting few weeks go by before you can change anything at all um whereas with uh software you can just and so I think you apply that to every uh you know sector of your business and yeah that's really what it's worth for us so it's literally just like have an idea get the design have a developer everyone owns their role have a marketer and the market just pounding Outreach cutting deals it's like some apps it's going to be paid platform ads some apps it's going to be influencers some

apps it's going to be in internal ugc right I know people that succeed with each of the above strategies influencer I think influencer strategy is the hardest to crack from what I've seen to be honest um but that's the one that has worked for me there's so much subjectivity to which Creator you work with right and like the density of their people are going to be able to run like they're going to run influencer promos and they're just going to be unprofitable they're going to take the first person that says yes they're going to say

5 5,000 followers 10,000 views that should work without really understanding how loyal Their audience is yeah yeah it's uh and there's like there's so much complexity to it like I'm trying to give like the universal transferable lessons here but in regards to like people all the time ask me like by the way like how do I do influencer marketing I'm like so much Nuance yeah so much Nuance it's why like anyone that sells a [ __ ] course on it I'm like highly skeptical I'm like DM people yeah to think that there's some Universal strategy

is to it's just like it's it's not how it works it's it's you have to iterate all right now let's talk about the big Vision okay because you're young in your early 20s still had multiple million doll consumer apps in the last two years and now you seem to be taking the big swing y explain your thought process behind this so I describe Apex as an all-in-one self-actualization ation ego system um self-improvement self-actualization similar but kind of came to this realization that we're more focused on actualization so I think to provide the proper context here

we can go all the way back to kind of ancient philosophy um a lot of ancient philosophy was very focused on practical wisdom stoics were uh really big on this philosophy is valuable to the extent with which it is applicable in your own life stoics focused a lot on developing your internal character virtue and what it meant to live a good life now nowadays when we hear the term philosophy we think of this sort of like study of the metaphysical abstract I think therefore I am I think that was D Kart um and it's like

that this just doesn't mean anything to the average person right so we hear philosophy and we're like this is very academic in nature no application to me I think that ancient philosophy is more similar to self-improvement as we know the term now um than modern philosophy now if we look at how self-improvement is characterized uh it's almost like this weird Voodoo term where it's like self-improvement what does that really mean because on social media we see people lifting weights just so that they can can get jacked and impress girls and guys and be high status

right and we see people talking about entrepreneurship of like you just need to make 10K a month bro to escape the matrix and now you can buy your Ry right or live in Miami um and I think that we see this across uh a lot of different domains of self-improvement on social media I think a better alternative world is like let's work out and eat well so that we can be healthy feel good think more clearly live a better life let's pursue entrepreneurship or or um learning or whatever it may be so that we can

contribute to the world and Orient our own life um in a way that we can live uh by our own terms and not fall into these like mimetic desires we see on social media you want to explain what mimetic desire is that's pretty core yeah a mimetic desire is essentially you're mimicking the desires of other people right we do it all the time I think more so than we realize um but instead of thinking things through through like first principles or getting to the ground truth and then deciding what you want to do you look

to what do other people want and that's probably a pretty good indicator that that's a valuable thing right it's like the social Norm if there's a fire it's like survival there's a fire in here you see people running it's probably better to start running instead of trying to see if there's a fire so it's like in us to behave that way and I think a lot of the times the majority of the time it's a valuable thing for humans right kind of offloads the responsibility of like thinking through things um and taking the time what

have you but on social media it's like you see everyone has a role you want one you see everyone's selling courses selling courses you want to you want to achieve this sort of uh life that they paint that you can so the vision for Apex is kind of fighting against this um it's to focus on doing things that are going to help you self-actualize to improve your uh the meaning that you're able to create in your life and your virtue as an individual um and so we're going to be getting a house between San Diego

and La uh hopefully a nice fun property where we can create content so this is one side this is kind of pushing against the social media angle and then two is a place that I really think I have domain experience is creating applications and tools to help people achieve their various goals and one of the issues with the consumer app space um is that the majority of developers and companies are just optimizing for LTV otherwise known as lifetime value so how much will your customers pay you multiply by the number of customers that you have

it's purely a game of maximization of profit and now the reason I say I have specific experience in this is because it's a space that I've worked in right like I I've done the consumer app subscription game um but it's it's not about like how much value can we provide to people and how can we improve as many people's lives as possible so being that we can do development in house for free we know how to code we're going to be building these tools 100% free to use we're going to have communities 100% free to

join we're going to put out content and help uh inform people of what we think can improve their lives 100% free and so the goal here is not to make money you know obviously in the future we will have to figure out how to generate Revenue maybe it's we uh produce physical products that help people right and we take a small profit on that um but rather how can we improve as many people's lives as possible and so the majority of the money that I've made from uh the apps that I've worked on up to

this point as I had mentioned earlier uh it's all going to be going into Apex so if you're like me you have a software idea and you want to get it started but you're just intimidated you don't know how to hire devel velers you don't know how to manage a project getting it designed you're just unfamiliar with the process so that's why I actually had my partner start our agency WGI Labs so we could help you bring your software to life it's a development agency where you get a full team dedicated to your project so

you'll get designer a developer and a project manager so all you have to do is list the features you want and kind of tell us how you want it laid out and then watch it get built week after week so if you have a software idea and you're ready to get started on it go to WGY labs.com and we're happy to help interesting so this is going to cost a lot of money though like I know you've made a few million bucks you probably have a few million bucks in your bank account but are you

going to raise money for this and if you do how are you going to convince people if there's not a clear-cut maximized shareholder value yeah it's a great question um so at this point we don't intend to raise in the short term I as I mentioned I will be putting at least a couple of million into it my own money um I should also specify some of my money is also going to my parents uh and then like a little bit for myself you know cuz I still need to eat um I view it as

like what FaZe Clan is to gaming what bar stool is to like degeneracy Entertainment Sports drinking gambling we will be to self-improvement it's like a brand exactly um and then yeah like I want to file as a b Corp which is uh C Corp you have a you need to maximize shareholder value right B Corp you are so if we were to raise investors and we have obligations to them uh we can actually act in the interest of the public good rather than just maximization of profit and shareholder value it's like a not for profit

is that different or yeah yeah yeah to me I when I a little bit over a year ago got into this base I was like I just need to make a lot of money and then I can decide what to do and I think in the process of making a good amount I've kind of realized that it does doesn't like really move the needle internally or does it move the needle societally um it definitely I think it's a safety net safety nets are really important but I think a lot of people fall into the Trap

of money then becomes your only indicator that's all that you optimize for in life and I think that that's a very shallow existence I agree so you're trying to build like this bigger brand of like culture and media around self-improvement self-actualization and then create like not create influencers but like the way phas Clan is it's like there are like you said FaZe Rain FaZe B I will be Apex Blake my uh co-founders will be Apex Jesse Apex Wy Etc interesting so those are centered around like a specific type of content yours will be centered around

self-improvement so you just like kind of create self you might become like a self-improvement like Creator influencer yeah essentially um and I think another important note here is I think that in the self-improvement space something that can be somewhat isolating is that you have all these creators like Brian Johnson for example and like to be clear I always respect people that are pushing the extreme of anything I think that's actually really cool um but it's isolating it's like you can never drink alcohol and never have fun and you need to do your or like Andrew

hubman like your three-hour routine when you wake up to optimize and biohack for the day and it's like okay it's cool I think that we should all engage in healthy habits um but it can make you neurotic like I had gotten pretty deep into biohacking um I actually had a company I started that was kind of in line with the original Apex Vision very briefly a couple years ago called opisy optimize science right uh like optimizing using science-based tools and whatnot and I found that in the process I became like neurotic about health to the

point where it like stressed me out so much if I I I was getting bad sleep because I was so focused on getting the perfect sleep yeah um and so I think the ability to find this balance of like caring about health and prioritizing living a disciplined life is very important caring about your career and what you do is very important but it shouldn't all be like it shouldn't be all or nothing you should be able to live a balanced lifestyle um so okay I'm very curious now I'm observing this from since you're telling me

firsthand it seems like your first app was like you partner with influencers like you pay them like 50 bucks for a plug in your second app you actually partner with partner like Equity partner with the top Creator and now it seems like you're going for a much bigger vision and so you're trying to create the Creator trying to be the Creator yeah you're trying to build like a whole media engine over time yeah first and then you'll figure out the monetization second yeah exactly um I think fazeclan for example here people might be like okay

you referen fazeclan they blew up yeah great to like $2 billion valuation and then they just got acquired for like 40 million or whatever it was recently like they crashed because they weren't able to build a business behind it um somewhat similar to bar stool they got acquired by pen gambling or whatever it is uh for this big valuation and then Dave porno bought it back for a penny right um and so this is where I I think that they're very good counterpoints this is where I have conviction that it won't happen to us because

I believe that we are businessmen first Creator second and we're going to learn the Creator side and that I don't think that I think that we will be able to figure out the business model such that it enables us to continue to provide value I think that'll be the easy part for you guys yeah yeah you guys have that part down the problem with FaZe I'm like I was like in that community so I've seen the come up from the start my whole goal is by a Counter-Strike team so I love Esports but they just

basically were so focused on the content trickshotting building the community they were the first like vloggers in in of them time but they just let the wrong people in and those people just followed maximized shareholder value get a biggest valuation and exit and barcel was a little different they were just like a uh what a funnel for a gambling company yeah at the end of the day it's true so you just got to nail the business model on the back end this time but you guys seem to have that no problem yeah yeah I think

that we'll be able to do it the biggest thing is that I never want to be a company like I want anyone who's listening to this to hold me accountable in the future I never want to be a company that's just like how do we extort the sort of trust that people have in us to make as much money as possible I think that is like so morally corrupt and abhorent um and so I don't think that that will happen although you know absolute power corrupts absolutely so uh it it's not impossible but how I

know myself I don't think that that will happen happen I believe in you I think you're business-minded I think the face clam people were just so focused on the media so focused on the content and they loved their audience and it was special and then they let the wrong people in who came in and they trusted them got screwed same with barol 20 years newspaper sports content building it up then Sports gambl becomes legal shiny object nothing wrong with it but that's what happened harnesses the brand you know yeah I'm gonna I think that there

is something wrong with I think I think there's something wrong with the faas clan side I definitely think that Sports gambling is a meth ethical moral dilemma for but I don't know if itar affected I don't know who knows their brand still seems to be doing fine from a business perspective but I'm curious uh this is a total side question did you feel some type of guilt for the type of businesses you're running no like the how you made money yeah people haven't asked me this um I don't because I mean I think there were

a lot of opportunities to engage in the immoral action like we'd found with pretty much all of the apps that I've worked on that you get like the highest LTV um just charging like an inordinate amount for subscriptions the most you could charge and like not responding to people when they ask how to cancel subscriptions this sort of thing they I've always acted in a pretty moral and ethical way when it comes to the amount that we're charging that sort of thing um and then I think like with umax for example we were always very

like I always felt very strongly about not doing unethical things within it and so there were a lot of practices that we could have engaged in that would have increased retention or had people coming back more and more um charging more money as well as I think big thing would have been going really hard in the female Niche there's a lot of stigma surrounding female Beauty we really could have capitalized on that I was like I I feel strongly about not doing this um I think some people would say well you're creating insecurities in men

I think that insecurities Drive change I think that the recognition that you should work on yourself and improve yourself is a good thing uh for society so my feeling is that the business I've built up to this point I think if anything moved the needle slightly in the positive but holistically probably haven't really moved the needle much MH um so this is why you want to go deeper on the umax like practical self-improvement selfa that's the whole Vision here it's like these have not really moved the needle much I wouldn't I've never done anything that

I think moves the needle in a negative direction right uh now it's obviously sub Ive and there will be people that disagree with me I think that the vision for Apex is pretty clearly only moving in the positive um and also yeah I mean like there's a question like do the ends justify the means right I don't think I've moved the needle much if you think that I've moved the needle slightly in the negative I think that at least to some extent the majority of the money that I've made will be invested into something that

is only moving in the positive right um so yeah I don't know like if it's there's an argument to be made that this is how I justify and rationalize it to myself I don't think that that's the case um I want to can I can I say something here because it's kind of what I talked about when you first walked in I'm curious that the thing that made you money was the vanity of looking good or trying to get girls at the end of the day like those things and that was a far end of

the spectrum right the same not the same category but like for example here on the internet Nuance is hard to portray on the internet so you have people on both extremes you have Brian Johnson screaming no alcohol you have to live perfectly and then you have the flexers get a make 10K a month you know looks get jacked have a Rolex look good and those are what captures attention on the internet because the Nuance is like the truth but it's not as entertaining and so I'm curious how you think about Apex as a media engine

because I love content this is my game as a media engine where you're in the middle yeah do you think that's going to resonate CU there's like a pendulum swinging back uh I think so I'm a big believer like reversion to the mean I do think you bring up a great point I think that I've always been kind of passionate about this General Vision for for Apex right I built the brand optii that was somewhat similar in nature maybe a little bit more to the scientific end of the spectrum um but I think that the

time that I've spent in the space has really enlightened me and opened my eyes um to the fact that I don't think that a lot of this is like extremely bad for society the messaging that exists but I know that it's not good right so the sort of ABS that I've worked on the messaging that it currently exist on social media um and I do think that there's some that's worse some that's better what have you talking about yours uh well I'm talking about the messaging of like just make as much money as possible I

think that like that is a little bit worse than like what we do with umax which is like take nothing wrong you're doing great stuff I I don't think I don't think you should feel guilt there at all yeah so anyways now that said um yeah I'm a big believer in reversion to the mean I think that the mean here is actually like the majority of people that I know that are living good disciplined lives live right they go out on occasion right they're not afraid to have a beer right like the scientific end would

say that you can't they also don't only prioritize the maximization of money they do things that they care about um they enjoy their work they prioritize giving back right and I think that social media often sensationalizes stuff right and so there's the argument that like maybe we're not going to do that well on social media because we're not pushing a sensational narrative however um I think that the truth at least should win out here and I think that pushing this narrative will resonate with a lot of people that are kind of sick of the of

the Allin on one end what will your content look like because I feel like the benefit of Andrew hubman and Brian Johnson is like at least you know where the North Star is and so you know like okay this is the right way to do it I'm going to not do it every day only but I will implement this every once in a all so it kind of cuts out the like so you know makees sense yeah I think that often times uh you can build a really strong Community just taking an opposition to uh

very prevalent or popular Anis yeah the antithesis so I mean not that I'm trying to replicate these people individually but just as some examples like uh Jordan Peterson right he is going against the sort of like liberal woke agenda what have you Donald Trump is like drain the swamp right um and I think here we're like cut the [ __ ] on social media right like let's actually uh let's do things that are going to make us feel and live a more meaningful life rather than just doing the uh like I mentioned sensationalized thing just

make money just because money's [ __ ] sick and get jacked because getting jacked is sick right let's uh let's prioritize self-actualization because this matters more than any sort of like quantitative materialistic metric that that we're currently seeing and so your plan here is to to build the biggest media engine you can possible by spreading the right message to attract the right people and so you're buying this big house or renting this big house in California to basically make it a Content house like the old faas house in a way yes exactly and the the

sort of person that we're looking for is the sort of person who maybe feels lost and feels like they haven't been super disciplined or maybe social media has led them astray and they're feeling like maybe they're not all that they can be and I think that we can provide message and sort of a philosophical framework to help them achieve what they want to achieve and have that internal feeling that they're doing the right thing I have a number of friends that are working like pretty normal jobs and maybe they're doing like really good things for

the world right and but they just feel like so insignificant because they see this [ __ ] online about kids their age that are making so much money and and I'm like I promise you life is not that much [ __ ] better on this other side especially when all you're prioritizing is money you're looking up at these guys like they've got it made but then these guys are just looking up like they've got it made right and there's no peace anywhere um and instead of looking at people being like this is a very virtuous

person who does Good by their community and lives a fulfilling life it's like we just have this sh shiny object syndrome uh where where we're just like just one this one more [ __ ] you know doubling my income then I'll be happy and it's it's just not the case yeah I think at least in my friend group out here everyone has reverted back to the mean we all made our first million at 23 24 maybe a little earlier lived out all those in social media projections very insecure there was a deep driver of that

then went through like a dark phase of like spirituality of like feeling empty and then completely reverting back on our own it's like an internal path I I can't tell if that's like naturally baked into us or if that's just the circumstances we're being put in because of social media version to the mean yeah we all revert back to the mean of how you're actually supposed to live but you have to you were my doing my medic desire once you had that money you just doing what you saw you're supposed to do once you make

money and and the danger here is that like I don't think like the reality is that the majority of people that want to try to like make the millions aren't going to be able to and as a result they're going to there will be a tendency to go through life like feeling as if they didn't achieve all that they could not knowing that like even making like a bunch of money when you're just looking for the pursuit of money isn't going to provide a fulfilling life right like if if you could just push this message

of like it's not as cool as you think it is do the things that are going to make you happy on a day-to-day basis do the things that are going to help you provide for your community be a good friend be a good family member work out to feel healthy and feel empowered like that is a good life at least to me um I am so torn on this advice so I would love to hear your perspective because you're in it too because it's like it's so hard because I made a lot of money but

not doing something that I was like deeply passionate about it's what drove me and then that money gave me the ability to not have to work to self-reflect and then now be like more like spiritual in what I pursue and that is directly affected how much money I make like I'm like scared to make money not scared but like I don't like push hard and so it's like did I get complacent cuz I made the money and then I went on a also a spiritual journey now is that a new excuse to not like be

a Savage business guy it's like a whole mind [ __ ] at both sides and so it's like then do you give the advice but now I'm happy and I'm working on a business I make a lot of money and I'm happy with what I do I'm passionate about it but then do I give that advice to the 21-year-old version of myself so yeah I think it's a great Point um I think about things from like the macro perspective not just you as an individual right CU you are not the same as the next person

without doubt um now I like the idea that like we should do things where even if we fail we come out on on top right so for example it's like if you work on something let's say you try to do only fans management right you're trying to manage only fans creators and you spend a year grinding at it if you succeed great you come out with money but it's like at what cost you're not going to feel good about the money that you made you're not going to have gain like really valuable skills right whereas

if you fail you come out with [ __ ] nothing it was a complete waste of time uh and you still feel like [ __ ] right now flip this if you you pursue something that you care about maybe you want to figure out how to maybe it's in the uh stem field right maybe you want to develop some new open source software maybe you just want to build a software that's really valuable for people or you want to uh figure out how to produce a novel chemical I don't know much about chemistry um or

it doesn't have to be stem it could be anything maybe you really care about pets right and you want to be a vet now these are Pursuits where like if you succeed great maybe you make money maybe Fame notoriety maybe you just feel really good about what you did in addition to the fact that it will have been a valuable Pursuit because you're P it's something that you care about right as opposed to the only fan side you succeed in you now hold on real quick if you fail in that Pursuit you will at least

know that you spent your time pushing for something that that you cared about to begin with right and so that's kind of how I View apex too I'm like there are other things that could make me more money um or other things where I might a higher probability of success but even if I fail here it will have been worth it because it's something that I really cared about to begin with but there is the upside of this being a multi8 figureure n fig potential play like that is on the plate oh yeah yeah like

that like obviously that's not the clear intent of like this is why I'm doing it but it is a variable that is in the mix for yeah I'd rather pursue a big play where I care about what I'm doing in the process and there are other eight n figure plays that I could pursue where I don't give a [ __ ] right yeah 100% even though this one has a lower probability to sex to success on paper to investors whatever if I were to just 100% prioritize building consumer apps using cash that's just like I

don't know uninteresting to me this is a personal question that just came up as you were saying it do you think there are people that only fans management could be their thing could be their genuine passion or do you think that's a literal moral ethical like in the universe not I think I think that they're I would wager that there probably exist people but I don't think that that's their most evolved form of self right like it might be their passion at this point in time I think that do you think someone could rationalize it

as being like good for the world you can rationalize anything yeah um my opinion is that it's not good for the world and kind of goes against like yeah I don't know there there are ton of ways to rationalize it we're actually providing guys that otherwise wouldn't be able to talk to girls they get to now speak to girls and I'm helping facilitate this and now not going to kill themselves right um so there's a way to rationalize pretty much anything I personally disagree with it I I agree with you I'm on the same page

you but I'm curious do you think that there's like a universal or ethical like uh karmic like I'm so this is like a super deep thought but like is there like a karmic consequence to doing that objectively even if you but if or is it simply based on how you feel about it like if you genuinely think you're doing a service you're helping these guys talk to girls like this is like nobody thinks this way but never lived any in anybody else's shoes right however what I have experienced and what I think other people experienced

too is that when you do something that you know is not good you feel that in your soul exactly right and maybe there are people that don't feel that in their soul and maybe there are people that like truly believe right and they're but in terms of like universally I'd like to think that like there is a universal good and that they are not in line with it but who who knows like I haven't I haven't lived their life in their body right that's very interesting like is it the subconscious way you feel about yourself

doing it that affects your karma or is it there is there a universal set of bad yeah that is a very interesting I like I like to believe the latter I agree I would also say that is not the best way to make money and there will be karmic results to it but besides the point okay so I'm curious then you're trying to build like this media conglomerate or group of people like a cultural brand of people with creators in there are you like going to like recruit specific influencers and like are they going to

come out and live with you yeah yeah it's a great question so the original co-founding team is going to be myself my older brother who would work with me on umax my uh very tight friend for a while Jesse Abed coming out from New York he's absolutely killing it in his B2B sales job um like I don't want to speak on his behalf but like high high six figures um and he's leaving to work on this and then we've got another person in the pipeline to be determined um so we're all going to live out

there create content together um we'll make content on like you know working out like various not just like weightlifting but like running and doing cardio and doing uh you know stretching flexibility Etc things that are going to make your body feel good and you feel high energy eating food that empowers you while also balancing this with like it's okay to have a [ __ ] sandwich sometimes right um and then yeah we've got I've got connection to a number of influencers I think that exist in the realm of this self-improvement space so hopefully going to

have a good number of them come out on occasion um kind of create content with us like a we get the Apex house that sort of thing um so yeah I think that that'll it'll be a lot of fun do you see people being like each person like just making their own style of content like everyone will be slightly different like this is the this is the podcast Guy this is the Vlog Guy this is the similar to like in stoicism how there's like the um or even in religion right um there's like the overarching

highlevel philosophy right and then in regards to our own I guess practice of it everyone's going to have their own form right maybe I really like to run and lift whereas someone else might be really into swimming right but like the core principle here is like we all like exercise maybe I'm really into studying physics whereas someone else wants to uh like I mentioned maybe they care a lot about pets they want to become a ve veterinarian right like different people have their own professions interests Etc and so uh I'm a Believer in all of

it like I think everyone should be able to practice however they like um so long as it's I guess you know you but it's not just like anyone do whatever they want sort of thing it's not like like some if someone on the team was like dude I feel really strongly that managing only fans creators is sick I'd like I feel like this is kind of not in self-improvement yeah it's like it's how religions philosophies work in general you have the high level uh that everyone kind of believes in uh but then practice how you

like so it's like the self- expression of their own exactly so long as like everyone is kind of in line with like self-actualization and trying to live the best life that they can uh Mind Body Spirit right uh and encourage everyone to do whatever whatever they like and so it's interesting how you're saying you're blending media with free apps what is the thought process behind the free apps yeah so I think that one of the issues with a lot of communities is that and similar to like kind of the what I was talking about earlier

with umax is you don't get personalization it's very difficult to get uh personalization right for example let's say that we have a a thousand people let's just take some system where there's a thousand people in a community and you have one person who's kind of the head of it I can't really provide the customized knowledge or uh you know recommendations whatever based on every individual circumstances but what you can do is you can build applications that can help the individual customize their training for example right we could have a fitness app where it's not just

optimize workout for hypertrophy but maybe you say okay I really want to prioritize my cardio but I also want to do some strength training and what have you and you take in all these different variables and then we can produce a custom fitness plan that's about making you feel better right most fitness apps right now are pretty F fragmented in it's like there's a running app there's a weightlifting app there's a yoga app right not a holistic exercise application and we can provide these custom routines I can build this right um or nutrition right uh

it's not just about calorie tracking or like not just about the health of the or the quality of the individual food right but given what you are looking to improve in your life life how can we help you build a custom nutrition plan um maybe you want to improve your skills or knowledge in some uh occupational domain right we can have you input what you're looking to improve and we can build this kind of custom uh formulation so it's not only obviously it's a good app that helps people but also it's a way for you

to like build up the media Empire then capture their contact info and like have them as users and yeah I mean it's less like strategic yeah yeah yeah it's more like just like I just think about apps that I would would want to use so many of these I mean all of these [ __ ] apps cost money nowadays everyone knows it you download any app and you're like all right I'm going to have to pay to use this this sucks uh people understand like Instagram social media and whatnot is free but any tool app

it's like you got to pay um so I'm like feel like it'll be cool to build this and just like give it to the people and then if they want to consume Apex content and engage with us engage with the community great if they don't that's okay the thing about notic is one you're really intentional like you like know why you're doing things but then you don't overthink it and you think very differently like you like like it's like this is like the mainstream way of thinking you take like a two two degree like different

angle to it and that gives you like over time a big gap between people is that something you like intentionally developed yeah I don't know I think that I've always been pretty curious I read a decent amount um I think thinking from like first principles is good I don't view myself as some like crazy Visionary um but I do think that I'm a fairly like uh fairly good at deductive reasoning beginning with the end in mind um I think that I I think a lot about mimic desire and how that applies to not just like

what we want but what we think right and and how we view the world and I think that if you go about your life taking like no uh nothing for absolutely right anything that you're told like don't take it at face value you need to uh kind of figure out how to come to these conclusions yourself guess when I was young I asked why a lot I was very rebellious like teachers did not like me um and I think early on that was pretty difficult chaotic but I think over time uh was very valuable in

I think informing the way that I think about things was it taught to you or has it always been in you yeah it's interesting um I don't know I feel like it's kind of always been in me it was definitely taught to some extent my father did a good job with that um but like even with my parents like they were you know I was difficult as a kid you're an independent thinker yeah you think PE that's so interesting cuz it's like it's almost like that's something that people that are I don't want to say

lesser evolved but like you're mentally less aware of your surroundings since like you have like this light bulb moment because you're taught by school to conform the whole point of the school system is to teach Conformity to be here at this time to listen be quiet when you're sitting raise your hand when you want to speak and you're a bad student if you don't follow that but all of the exceptional top performing people are like you in my opinion that I've met here on this podcast appreciate that yeah and so it's like if you don't

do well in school it could be an indicator of a different way of thinking I don't want to say it's an indicator of success cuz that's just bad grades but it is like that type of getting in trouble can be positive for your outcome in life and to trust that and to lean into that if you're a kid I think being intentional with everything that you do and having as I mentioned earlier an internal locus of control um believing that like you really do have the power to do whatever it is that you want and

to figure things out and to be willing to sacrifice and maybe um sacrificing that like after I graduated school I didn't have any income at all I was getting loans from my brother for groceries but that's what produced uh positive long long-term returns or long-term returns uh Now flip side I think thinking differently too it's like often times especially like in school is a great example of this when you think in line with everybody else uh you're going to get rewarded for that you get the good grades right whereas if you kind of won't accept

what the teacher has to say or you try to uh think differently might sacrifice in the short term grades for example here but then in the long term um it'll enable you to I think think more logically and rationally uh rather than just accepting everything that you hear as a foreground conclusion yeah I think the thing that helped me most was saying if you uh if you accept what everybody else accepts or do whatever they do you'll get the same results as exactly right yeah yeah whereas if you think the same way as everyone else

you will will have the same ideas right when you decide what to build but if you try to think differently then you can get the different ideas which produce the different results right d didn't you write like a book when you were seven or something yeah so when I was seven years old I wrote an ebook titled how to make money as a seven-year-old um from a very young age uh I've always been fascinated by entrepreneurship I've always been fascinated by systems right I really like figuring out how things work and then figuring out how

to produce uh positive returns and so I started like investing in the stock market when I was seven years old every day I would bring the Wall Street Journal I would uh they had like the stock prices this is when I didn't know how to use like technology really um or like I didn't have like a phone to search up stock market and so I would bring the little uh new newspaper on the bus and I would just go through my favorite stocks it was like msft Microsoft and INTC Intel um and I would track

them every single day and I was like I want to I want to make money to invest in the stock market so my dad would pay me like 10 cents a rock to pick up these rocks that we had in the yard and I would mow Lawns and I started doing all these different little things and I'm like what about the internet and so I uh I was watching I was consuming like the kind of like course Guru style content from the age of seven just like figuring out all the different ways that internet works

and I was like I stumbled upon ebooks and I was like how can I learn about how to make money so I start to find how to make money as a seven-year-old I search it up try to find this ebook and it doesn't exist and I'm like seven yearolds need to know this we need to popularize this information so I write a book how make money as a seven-year-old and I never ended up publishing it unfortunately but I'm like you can sell candy in school and you can mow Lawns like most seven-year-olds probably aren't allowed

to operate a lawn mower um but yeah that was that was really the start the reason I ask is because when you're seven this isn't like I feel like when you're in high school or college it could be there's greater there's like you want to get girls you want to look cool you want status when you're seven you're not really thinking about status by any means so what was the driver is is this like where cuz this is like this is a form of at that age it feels like that Purity is like a form

of self-improvement yeah 100% um I think the world has always been really fascinating to me figuring out how things work and although I didn't know exactly why at the time I knew that the world was run by money and that when we would go purchase things from the store we paid money and I would hear onine online they talk about the economy and the stock market and I always hear the term money money money and I'm like okay and it's mimetic in nature but I'm like okay if if money's so important um then if I

get money I can do the things that I want to do and I can uh live whatever life I want to live and I can have uh whatever I want and so very early on it became clear to me that money was important and over the years years I started to realize that it was really just a tool and an abstraction of resources and that if you acquire some of it then it enables you to kind of shift the world in the direction that you want it to um so yeah I mean from the age

of seven it took me a little while to start making my first real amount of money um but thankfully it's kind of all worked out I'm interested where the self-improvement have you ever read the book Mastery by Robert Green yeah I'm familiar with where did the self-improvement natural interest I feel like that is self-improvement yes money is a tool but at that age it's like unless money was like a problem at your house was when you were kid was something your dad was bringing up a lot like to your mom or something that you like

observed my dad was obsessed with self-improvement he would run five miles every day he worked out every day like lifting weights he went to Princeton undergrad and then Harvard MBA damn he was an entrepreneur probably the the hardest working person that I know he was dealt a bad hand he uh has a neurod degenerative condition spms secondary Progressive multiple sclerosis he's uh barely able to walk now impacts it's neurodegenerative he also has some other stuff going on that I'd rather not get into um around the age of 12 I kind of this is when the

condition really started to take hold um and it was for the past 11 years it's it's neuro degenerative kind of um and so I saw that the self-improvement mindset embodied in him from a very young age and I also saw what being dealt about bad hand does like he still gets to the gym every day even though it's very hard um and so yeah this really I think really opened my eyes what it means to to be able to live and what it means to be able to improve yourself and I think that we all

have an obligation not just to the world but to ourselves to do everything that we can to live the most fulfilling life that we can and to become the best version of ourselves I think it's Socrates has the quote it's like along the lines of um it's it's a shame for a man to not be able to experience the strength and beauty of which his body is capable something along those lines and I really believe that and I think that's what makes me so passionate about uh living it and also attempting to prophesize it or

preach it to the world so you saw it so early and how important to was and even now his resilience to be able to keep going exactly incredibly resilient incredibly hardworking um and so yeah like financially we had done pretty well up until I was 12 but then uh due to a number of factors kind of uh but then pretty good timing like right as I started where is we had to sell the house whatever um that is when the businesses started working so like when I moved home after college house on the market older

brother giving me loans for groceries um that's interesting timing yeah it was pretty crazy that make someone religious right there yeah so so you you kind of came up in a not necessarily like a privileged environment but like like say like taken care of financially exactly but then due to like physical health issues pretty wild you couldn't work couldn't whatever and so then you kind of have like this like not culture shock but like Financial like storm in a way your life is changing perfect time timing honestly so now I'm able to you know give

back to my parents um is that what you said you're doing with the money that you made yeah so uh decent proportions going to Apex another proportion is going to my parents it's probably like two fifths maybe a little bit over two fifths Apex uh twoth parents one me so You' kind of like accept it as like the Main Financial provider for your family yeah damn bro you think that that contributed towards your it's interesting that you were trying to make money when you were seven but do you think that contributed toward WS your like

like do you feel did you feel a sense of responsibility when you were starting in college like did you see that coming yeah it was like I said it was from when I was like an early teenager [Music] um yeah I saw it coming but yeah like I remember having conversation with my brothers being like all right we're going to have to like figure this out now that said my grandparents are like they have enough to be able to help as well uh so I and I don't want to push messes like we were like

really poor or like had it really bad because that's not the case um but definitely a period of struggle interesting it's very fascinating from a psychology perspective yeah yeah is but that is like the main driver of Apex now and kind of like the it's interesting that all your apps were still self-improvement based too oh 100% all of them talking to girls is still self-improvement like how to talk yeah in some sense it's uh I think that it's all along the lines of I think it's just something that I understand pretty fundament mentally and uh

so as a result I'm going to think through different ideas to build in the space as well as I think I'm going to have success uh seeing as I like to think of myself as somewhat of an expert on the topic yeah what's exciting you the most about this uh about what apex apex um I think what's exciting me the most is that I Success is Not Guaranteed right but as I mentioned earlier I've had the best results on on projects that I work on where I become increasingly confident as I think about it as

I begin to work on it Apex is this like to the max I I uh I like to say like if we can change a million lives and make zero dollars that's a much more preferable outcome to making millions of dollars and changing zero lives so I think that we have a really good opportunity to do the former um and and maybe it's somewhat egotistical but I like to think that I have like a that that my view on self-improvement and what I think that it should be I think that it is better than the

majority of what we see on social media right now and I think I've seen the context of my own life that any conversations I have with friends and whatnot I like to think that I'm able to offer valuable advice to help them improve and now doing this on a mass scale I think just enables uh outcomes of a magnitudes greater than what I've been able to achieve as a friend or family member you said that you uh we're building in public for a little bit you had a Minecraft Channel back in the day so is

creating content something you've always wanted to do I think yeah I I think that it's uh like I said like I've always liked to like help those around me in whatever way I can like trying to help them start businesses or like giveing advice for weightlifting or whatever it may be and to me like creating content is just the ability to influence on a mass scale um to be able to help people on a mass scale now doing like Minecraft and whatnot I think that that was like a little bit more fun in nature um

but yeah and that's why I say like it is I think just the idea of creating content as a whole is like somewhat narcissistic egotistical in nature I don't think that it's necessarily negative if you're pushing out a positive message but it is like my message is really valuable and there before everyone needs to hear it right so um I guess yeah I I definitely don't have like a like no ego at all uh and I'm like willing to accept that so long as I think I'm pushing out something that will help people and help

Society yeah that's like the checklist you have to hit first yeah yeah exactly like you like that's a I know people that are passionate about helping Society whatever but they've no interest in content they're like that's just like I don't really care about putting myself out there like that so what type of content do you plan on making for yourself at least yeah so I think a lot of content about there's like the basics which is I think I view Health as a pillar so I think this is exercising this can be running weightlifting whatever

giving recommendations this is nutrition and I think a really um something that doesn't really exist as much in this self-improvement Niche but I think is incredibly important is time in nature um like I had said when I was working on UMX when I work on any of my projects I spend a lot of time going on walks and forests and whatnot just thinking and I think that this is incredible for not only cognitive stimulation but mental health as well and so this is one of the reasons that we're getting a house like in between LA

and San Diego on the middle of nowhere is I think it can be very uh very valuable to thinking clearly and I think that it can improve health significantly is this from like a subconscious perspective like not taking in inputs and just like trusting your inner in the book deep work Cal Newport speaks about the study that was done you take two groups one of them you have them walk through a city while they're thinking through some difficult problem this could be mathematic this could be uh literature whatever it may be you have them walk

through a city while they think about it the other group you have them walk through a forest the people that and then you have the control group that does nothing the people that go on the Walk In The City outperform the control group by a little bit but the people that walk through nature significantly outperform both groups in their results I think that nature is healing it's de stimulating it gives us an opportunity to kind of reflect and our subconscious to uh expand and um it gives our subconscious opportunity to expand in its ability uh

that we don't get from just going on a walk in the middle of the city where we have all the stimulus lights people cars noises um so yeah I think that that is something that I want to want to preach a lot I I think it's like probably the number one belief I've come to now and it's something that you don't it doesn't do well on the internet if you teach people it doesn't like it's not popular amongst like the everyday person not flashy it's not flashy they think it's all about like they need more

they need to take more in when really it's like you just need to give like one command or two like ideas to your subconscious and just let it sit and then let it process and then reflect on it and then work towards it everything else is like noise and confusing your subconscious at the end of the day this is why I also think that working on things that you're passionate about is very valuable cuz your subconscious never lies to you right if you try to force yourself to work on something you don't care about like

you might be able to consciously work on it but your subconscious doesn't give a [ __ ] whereas when you work on the things that you care about it's always spinning it's like give me more of this it loves it it's Soul filling and you're not jumping around looking for anything else to do you're like only focused on that everyone's felt that way with homework like some subject it's like the numbing right it's mind numbing not in that consciously you can still do it but like your true mind like your subconscious just is just tapped

out you can almost feel like your body just wants to like push away from the page it's interesting exactly well dude you're one of the brightest Minds I've ever talked to so I appreciate you coming out here I don't think I'm deserving of that compliment but it's been a pleasure speaking to you too you're a clear thinker you articulate it well and I think that is like the sign of intelligence so I appreciate you coming on here sharing everything didn't really hold anything back where can people find you brother Blake Anderson W on Instagram Twitter

um yeah that's probably the best place to contact me if you want to send me an email uh Blake apex.nc this is the new company um and then if you want to check out Apex on Instagram it's apex.pro we do not have any content it just says coming soon but if you follow you'll be able to see what comes soon guys if you align with self-improvement self-actualization you want to be a content creator seems like a cool opportunity you're ambitious you're smart good on camera hit him up guys follow Blake on Twitter super interesting dude

thank you so much oh yeah