19 Year Old Made $225K in 9 Months Vibe Coding (No Experience) - Ep. #318

What has your revenue been to date so far across all of these projects?

So to date, I think $225,000.

In like 9 months of building vibe coding apps without any coding experience.

Yeah.

Gosh, quarter million dollars. Most of that profit.

My goal is to hit a million in revenue before, uh, 20.

Before age 20.

Yeah.

And when do you turn 20?

Turn 20 next April. We did like $8K in the first week and I was like, holy— my dream was $10K a month at the time.

Yeah.

I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. I just did it because I wanted to see if it was possible. This is insane. Like, I don't know. I don't know what I'm doing. And like, I have a full business from software and I don't know anything about coding.

Yeah.

These two latest apps were able to scale both to $10K in 45 days.

What'd you do in December again?

So December we did $30K and then January we did $40K.

So we've talked a very specific playbook here, but if someone wanted to go out and start their own app like you've done, what advice would you give them?

So I have like 3 different apps that are generating revenue. The one that generated most of it, technically 4, but the one that generated almost all of it up to this date has been Wrestle AI.

And then, dude, I didn't even know you were wrestling.

This is awesome. Yeah. And then the last 2 months has been— I've really talked about them publicly, but it's like, they're like these 2 other apps I've been launching.

Okay. You can't just do one thing, huh? I can't either. That's not a knock on you.

So, so no, the reason I did it was wrestling, wrestling season ended and I have like a, I have a full, so I have a full-time job. So the way I got the full-time job is I don't know how to code, right? I built all these apps on Rourke and on Rourke. Yeah, Rourke. It's like an AI app builder, like Replit. Exactly. So it's like Replit except it does like Swift.

Okay.

So it does like, you know, Swift is for like mobile.

IPhone app.

Yeah, it's like, it's like fully mobile. Um, and I built my first app through them. And well, I built my first app called Fight AI, which was like, I just built it for myself and I like, it was like a test app. Then Wrestle AI was my first real thing. And from there I was like posting about them for free just because I was like, this is insane. Like, I don't know, I don't know what I'm doing. And like, I have a full business.

Yeah.

From software and I don't know anything about coding.

Yeah.

And they reached out to me and me and the founder, we would like talk. I would tell him, yeah, okay, I would like tell him like stuff I wanted, stuff we would just like talk about the platform. And he invited me to join the team for their growth team. Uh, so I joined.

Wow.

December, it was like, yeah, it was only like, it was like 2 months into Wrestle AI, less, that like I then just fully pivoted into like full-time on Rourke. And like when I, when I do something I wanted to go, like I still had focus on Wrestle AI, but thank God in those 2 months I was actually able to like create some systems so I didn't have to like work on it that much.

I mean, it's a different game if you have a job, like you have a responsibility to give them your 40 hours or whatever.

Of course, especially because I was like a founding team member. It wasn't like I was joining like a random— it wasn't a 9 to 5 either. It was like whatever, like when I woke up to when I went to sleep. Now I'm actually probably leaving.

Really?

Yeah, which is cool because in the next— like, so like the next stage in life, I'm hopefully either— I still have to talk to him, like we'll see. But I'll probably be leaving and then trying to focus on one big business to scale up to like hopefully like My goal is to hit a million in revenue before, uh, 20.

Before age 20?

Yeah.

And when do you turn 20?

Turn 20 next April, the end of next April.

What day?

April 26th.

Okay, my son's the 30th. Um, okay, so let's back up. I want to get to all that, but—

yeah, sorry.

No, it's all good. You're in high school in Long Island?

Yeah, yeah, last year.

Yeah, okay, so you were in high school wrestling? Yeah. Varsity? Yeah. Were you good?

Yeah, I mean, I was the captain. Yeah.

Okay, okay, so you're in high school, you're wrestling. What else are you doing through high school?

Uh, I was starting tons of different businesses. I've done like everything.

Let's list them off.

Okay, um, everything you can remember. Probably had like 4, 4 like YouTube channels like growing up.

What types of channels?

That— so I remember I was, when I was really young, I was into comics. I had like a comics thing. I had like, uh, like a— I think it was like we were doing like pranks, me and my friends, at one point. We were doing like trying to do everything.

Not faceless channels? You were like—

no, I was always in front of the camera.

Okay.

Um, actually, no, I had one animation channel from this, like, and I can't draw, it was like this like pre-made animation thing.

Okay.

Where I would do like, like stories and stuff like that.

Yeah.

Um, and then this was all when I was pretty young though. And then from there I tried e-com. So I've done like two different e-com. I did like a laser pointer where I was just straight dropshipping.

Okay.

And then I did a supplement company This, the supplement company was when I was a bit older. It was right before I started the first app. So I started the app and like the first app and the supplement company around the same time.

Fight AI?

Fight AI, yeah. And they both made around $2K total, uh, like in a month, within a month.

Dang. Okay, and you started them around the same time?

Around the same, like I started the supplement company first and I spent like tons of money on like inventory and all that. And, uh, and then I started the Fight AI was like for fun. I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. I just did it because I wanted to see if it was possible.

Did you use Rourke to build that?

Yeah, I used Rourke to build it.

And sorry, what was the premise of Fight AI?

It was like Wrestle AI, where it's like you upload a video of your, your match or your training and it gives you a breakdown on how to get better. Okay. Um, it gives like breakdown, uh, strengths, weaknesses, how to improve.

For boxing specifically?

For, for Fight AI, it was MMA.

Okay.

So it was everything.

So you take a— they would take a video of them doing MMA, shadowboxing, let's say, or like shadow sparring, whatever, upload it, and then your app would— it's just a rapper, right? Yeah. No, no, no, there's nothing demeaning. I have a rap— rappers are awesome. And it's just saying like, do this, your form is this, try this. And what were you charging for it?

Uh, $10 a month, $60 for a year.

Okay. And how did you even promote that?

So I just posted like, like me and my friend who was like, he was like, yo, I'll help you. I was like, all right, sure. And he has got like an eye for content.

Yeah.

And he just, we just posted about it. Like just post up like a few dumb videos on Instagram.

Just to your friends?

Yeah, just on our Instagram.

You didn't have like a ton of followers?

No, we had nothing.

Okay.

It was a new Instagram account we'd made for Fight AI and we posted about it.

Okay.

And then we saw that like people were like, we got like 40,000 views, 30,000 views.

Holy cow. On a brand new Instagram account?

Yeah. And like, we're like, whoa, like this is insane. And then it started fizzling out. And then from there we made like $500. It was like $500 MRR. And then I was like looking at it and I was like, dude, It's like, it's like a car. Like, yeah, it's like, this is insane. Like, it was like, it blew my mind. And the other supplement company I was running paid ads that were like losing me money.

Sure.

There was like this, there's zero margin. Yeah.

Uh, like, what am I doing with this supplement?

Yeah. So that's what I immediately like throughout this, I was like, screw it, let's just focus on this.

Yeah.

Because I also have a friend Zach, um, from Cali.

Oh, that's your friend?

Yeah, he went to my same high school.

No way. Yeah, yeah, he just sold it, right?

Yeah, he just sold it to MyFitnessPal.

Yeah, okay.

So I saw him and I was like, this guy's clearly onto something.

Yeah, he was your, like, a big inspiration? 100%. Yeah.

100%. Yeah. And from there, that's when I was like, okay, I'm just gonna go like all in on apps.

Yeah. What was he like in high school? Like, would you have seen him doing that?

So yeah, like we did know that he, like, he was a smart guy, 100%. But he's like, I don't know, I feel like he's human, you know what I mean? He's like, he's like a funny kid.

He's like one of your friends.

Yeah, he's one of my friends.

Like clearly he's smart, but he's also just doing dumb stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. My God.

Like you didn't look at him like that kid's gonna be a billionaire.

No, we kind of did. Okay, like we did have that feeling, but he was also like super like chill, like down to earth.

Sure. And like, where did that feeling come from?

Cuz he was also always starting stuff. Okay, so he was always had a business. Yeah. And like that was always the vibe, you know what I mean? Just like high energy, just start anything you can.

Yeah, that's how I am.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, so what type of supplement brand was it? What were you saying?

It was the Nootropics.

Okay. Where were you getting the ingredients for that?

So we sourced them all through like, like whatever, like different vendors. And then we did like, I forgot what it was called. It was like contract manufacturing or something.

Yeah.

Where we gave the ingredients to the person.

Uh-huh.

And they, uh, they assembled it.

Co-packing or?

Something like that. I forgot what it was called.

What was the form factor? Like a powder or?

It was a pill.

A pill?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's selling pills.

I know.

No one died though, right?

No, no, no, no. We did it all right. Like the, we had like a CGMP or whatever.

Okay.

And all our COAs and whatnot.

What, what gave you the idea to do that?

I just, I just really loved like messing around with supplements back then.

Yeah.

So like I was drinking like a bunch of energy drinks every day. I still kind of am, but less.

How many?

Not like crazy, but like 3, probably 2 to 3.

What type? What are your drugs of choice?

Uh, Ghost, Celsius. Okay, well this is those two.

Yeah, this is my number one, the Kiwi Guava. Go-to.

Have you had the, uh, have you had grape?

Yeah, it's good.

Really? Grape's my favorite.

Really? No, I like it. It's probably like number 3 for me.

Grape and Peach, the fizz-free one.

Fizz-free? I can't even try that. Really? Like, why would you not put fizz in an energy drink? Because it's flat?

It's like green tea. I don't know, it's like something weird.

I don't drink green tea, but have you had the Sour Ghost? Sour watermelon and sour green apple.

Those are too sour. I'm not like that crazy about them. I love it. Really?

That's like my number 2.

Mine are the Peach Ghost.

Okay. Those are like too sweet for me.

Yeah, I think now it's starting to get to me. Like when I'm like, I don't know, I feel like I like peach flavor. Past few months it's been getting like, those have been getting like too extreme.

Yeah, um, you're like, I'm almost 20.

Yeah, I'm getting old.

Okay, all right, so supplement brand, so you just, you quit that?

Yeah, we, we like just abandoned it. We just abandoned it.

Yeah, dude, all of, all the while you're learning how to vibe code, you're you're learning paid ads, which like vibe coding and paid ads, that's like it.

That's literally all you do.

That's like the two best skills a 19 to 99 year old could learn right now. Would you disagree?

No, I think it's like—

Or content and like how to make good viralable content.

Yeah, yeah, no, I fully agree. The ability to vibe code and like, and then just being creative. That's like it.

Dude, and like, it's not even accurate to say the ability to vibe code. 'Cause really what you're saying is—

That's true, anyone could do it.

The ability to speak English.

Yeah, exactly.

Or German or what, the ability to use a language, you can vibe code.

Yeah, the idea is you just need to conceptualize something. Like you just need to be able to think of something and like make it unique. Like I like things that are unique.

Yeah.

A lot of people with vibe coding like always recommend like copying like other successful apps.

Yeah.

When it's like, then you have to compete with those successful apps and they've been doing it much longer than you. But if you go into the, like for example, the wrestling space, I had no competition.

Yeah.

So I didn't need a perfect product. I didn't need it like whatever. I just needed people. Okay, but cam is smaller.

Yeah. Okay, so Phi AI, what month and year is this when you did the Phi AI and the supplement?

So it's actually exactly a year today, which is sick.

You just graduated? So yeah, so for your first summer—

yeah, first, first summer, college is coming, you're still in New York. Yeah, I'm freaking out because you've got all this time now.

Yeah, so you're just like—

and I was stressed.

600 milligrams of caffeine a day, Vibe Code supplements. Why were you stressed?

Because college was starting and I was always telling myself, like, I was always like full of myself. I was always telling myself I was gonna figure out something before college. Yeah. And then college came, and now I'm like starting my first semester in like late August.

What was—

damn, I got no motion.

Yeah. What was college? Where was that supposed to be?

Uh, St. John's.

St. John's. They have a basketball team, right?

Yeah, they do.

Okay.

Yeah.

And that's in New York?

Yeah, it's in New York.

Long Island?

Uh, it's in Jamaica. Okay. It's not— it's not— I mean, it's an okay school. I don't want to like hate on everyone that goes there.

End of the subway, right?

But yeah, it's like, I was like, yeah, I was not happy to be going.

Did you apply to other schools?

I applied to a few other schools. They gave me the most money and I never put that much of an effort on school, which I regret. I think everyone should.

Don't regret it.

I think everyone should.

Yeah.

Like, I don't think you should just be like, have an ego.

You should put effort towards something.

Yeah. And so, but I never did.

Yeah.

So it was always, so I was like, all right, they're giving me the most money. I'm just going there.

Okay. What were your— what was your GPA in high school?

I have no idea. I think it was like a 3 point— it was like I had like an 85 average probably.

The same, same as me. I was like 3.3.

Yeah, probably around something like that.

Yeah. But most of that was just from cheating on my assignments from my friends. I mean, and I could have done it. Like I had the brain power, but I was just lazy. I was just procrastinating.

Yeah.

Okay. What all schools did you get into or apply to?

Um, I applied to Penn State and got rejected and that's where most of my friends went.

Okay, it's good wrestling school.

Yeah, and I'm actually so happy I got rejected though, hindsight. Yeah, I'm sure, because like that's where all my friends from my hometown went. Yeah, and I'm not like a big partier. I like heavily like dissociate when I go out sometimes. Yeah, and if I was constantly in that environment and I had nothing going for me, I would have— I would have like— no, I would have lost it.

You'd be in the frat world, you wouldn't be building stuff. Yeah, I think it would be fun. I would have had a lot of fun, but you're having fun doing this too, right?

Yeah.

So it's like fun is, is subjective. Um, all right. So it was June or July 2025 when you were building these?

Uh, yeah. July, July, July, July 2nd, we released the first app.

Fight AI.

Fight AI. Yeah.

Okay. And your supplement brand was a couple of weeks old at this point or something?

It was like over probably 2 months old.

Okay. Okay. So you released Fight AI, you create a brand new Instagram account. So people started going to the App Store and just searching Fight AI.

Yeah.

And they found it. I bet your churn was crazy high.

It's actually, so So we did like 1,800 in the first month. We haven't marketed it since and it didn't mostly— so around the first 500 came from us posting. The rest came from us sponsoring meme pages.

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

So it works. Yeah, actually, because we found one guy with a cultic following.

Hmm.

So like in the space. Yeah, this guy Tony Has Died, absolute killer.

Okay. How many followers does he have?

He now has 100,000. I don't remember when we first started working with him, probably 50.

Okay.

But anytime he would post a sponsorship, his audience would get so angry at him. Like, he had this—

like, selling out?

He had this weird cultic following, so they would all be like, we're gonna kill Tony inside. They're starting like, like death chants.

That's just like the culture of his following because he, he made like—

he has like— he posts weird memes. So yeah, it formed this like sick culture.

Yeah, yeah.

But it shot our engagement up. So we would post like— we would post— we posted the first post we did with him. In my mind, I was trying to make a post that didn't look like an ad. And I was still new at this, so it looked extremely like an ad. It was an— it was like a kickboxer, and it was this kickboxer, because we were working with this other kickboxer, this kickboxer uses AI to train for his next fight, right? It was like a Twitter headline on top of it, and then everyone caught that it was an ad instantly. Yeah, right.

And everyone's commenting, but their hate made it perform better as an ad.

Exactly, it shot it up. So that's where the other revenue came. We made $1,800 in the first month. From there we tried some other stuff, but it didn't really work. We stopped, like, my, like, whatever. It was like, it just wasn't like continuing to scale. So we stopped focusing on it. And then that's when I met my partner for Wrestle AI. And, uh, we took around, like, he was a wrestling influencer. So from there, we stopped working on Wrestle AI entirely. We stopped working on Fight AI entirely. Still to this day, Fight AI does over $1K a month by itself. Just by itself.

Do you know what the churn is? Because like that could mean you churn everyone every month and you replace them every month, or it could mean no one new is joining and your churn is zero.

So I'm guessing it's probably around like 30-ish percent.

Okay. Per month?

Month one.

Okay. Okay. Yeah.

And then you like keep retaining them forward.

Yeah. Okay.

Um, but, but yeah, but it's also, yeah, we do also have like organically people coming. I have no idea how it's still making this like money.

Yeah. It's just like you're not supporting it or.

We haven't touched it. Like, literally, we haven't touched it.

What model do you use on the backend for that?

GPT.

Which one?

I think, like, 4 or something.

Is that a good one for, like, video, for analyzing video?

Yeah. And it was, like, the latest one that went when, like, we were making it. Yeah.

Okay. Where did you find your wrestling influencer partner?

So my first, like, thing whenever I made any money was, like, I hired a VA. Which I recommend everyone do, VAs.

Where do you find them?

Um, I source them through either Fiverr or Upwork.

Okay.

You just hop on a call with them and you just like, I just show them what I do, which is literally like I cater my For You page. So it's literally like just scroll on my For You page and outreach to everyone who has over 25,000 views on average.

Hold on. Outreach every— okay, so go to your For You page, anyone that averages 25,000 views on a video in your niche. Yeah. DM them and say—

and then I gave them like a DM script. So it's paid promo for paid promo for the app, sentence about what the app does, love the content, would love to work with you.

What are you paying for these?

We pay, so back then we were paying like $2 CPM, like for, so we really did this for Wrestle.ai. That's where like influencers blew up Wrestle.ai. It was only influencers, we never did paid. And we were paying basically a $2 CPM. We've increased it for some people since then.

Because they're proven?

Yeah, because they've been like, been killers.

Yeah.

This one guy we actually pay over a $5 CPM.

And it converts that well.

It converts decent, and then his videos, his paid ads are like insane. So, so taking out— yeah, he was the first one, he was the first one that we ever did paid ads on.

So he did a promo video for your app, it did well, then you pushed paid behind it, it did even better.

Yeah. Okay, we never pushed crazy paid for Russell, but he was like the only one because we were optimizing for installs. We didn't even know how to optimize for trials back then.

Mm-hmm.

It's so bad. I was learning as I went.

So that's kind of the playbook is optimize for installs.

No, I say always optimize for purchase. I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to code. So I was looking at this like black box and I was like, I had like a developer from Pakistan, this guy Usama, who also helped me out. Absolute goat. Greatest guy ever. And I don't think he knew how to set up the optimize for purchases either, or he did. Or he did and maybe I didn't tell him, right? So it was, yeah, it was literally just, we only knew who was downloading the app. So since I didn't know how to fix that, and I was like, I started a job too, so I was like, I don't have time to like figure this out, whatever. Now I figured it out and now I understand. It's actually super simple and I was being an idiot. But so we were just optimizing for installs. But if you want like to make your ads 10 times more profitable, you optimize for purchases.

Okay. All right, so let's back up. So you were accepted to St. John's, you're gonna start in August, you don't wanna start in August, You're stressed out because you put this artificial pressure on yourself to be a billionaire before you have to start college, whatever. And okay, so then you start Fight.ai in early July. Do you ever start college? What happens after that?

Yeah, I started college. So I, so Fight.ai started. I, my VA reached out to, was reaching out to a bunch of people in the niche. We talked to a few different people. We talked to, then I see this guy, one of the people that I reached out to was this guy, Caden Henshaw. Okay, right. Caden Henshaw is one of the biggest wrestling creators, right? He was my personal favorite wrestling creator, like, of all time.

Did he wrestle in college?

Yeah.

For who?

Uh, Parkside.

Parkside?

Yeah.

Is that D2?

Wisconsin? Yeah, it's D2.

Okay, okay. So that just happened to be someone that the VA reached out to?

So, no, actually, no, no, not even them. I'm sorry, I'm messing up my own story. He reached out to someone that knew him.

Okay.

Right? So they— it was a loose connection. And when I asked the guy, I said, hey, I see that you're mutuals with Caden Henshaw, right? It was— I met him once and like we exchanged.

Yeah.

And I go, oh, so he didn't know him? Not, not crazy well.

Yeah.

And I go, I'll like pay you whatever if you just send this DM, right? And, uh, he sent the DM, right? He said like, send the DM, which is basically like, I want to rebuild Fight AI but for just wrestling. Because we had a ton of comments, is this like for wrestling? People didn't trust it because we were everything, right?

Yeah.

So does this dude just wrestling? And I said, I like, he sent the DM and I sent this guy like 17 emails and 40 DMs on everything.

So you're going all in on Caden Henshaw.

I was going all in on everyone. Yeah.

So they send the DM, nothing really comes from it.

No, they sent the DM and he goes, I was meaning to answer this guy's email.

Wow.

And then he answers my, like, oh, like a few days go by. I don't see, I don't see him respond to my email. I'm like, hey, I need you to follow up. He was like, "All right, sure, follows up." Caden finally gets back to my email. And now I'm like sitting there, I'm shaking, right? 'Cause I'm like, this is like the first, this is the closest thing I've gotten to like somewhat of like a big win. My dream was $10K a month at the time. So I sent him my phone number 'cause like emails like are the worst. So I send him my phone, like the first email I sent him my phone number and I'm like, "Hey, my email gets like messed up. Can you just text me?" And I'm like, "Oh, he's not gonna text me. He's too like whatever, he's too big time." And then I get a text, hey, it's Caden. And now I'm like freaking out. Hop on the call. I show him Fight.ai. I go, look, this is what my conversion rates are, right? Because we had like a decent onboarding. This is what my conversion rates are. This is like what the app does. I want to rebuild it for just wrestling with your audience. Plus like the app, the funnels, the funnel will be good. Everything will be solid. I want to do this with you. We'll be partners, like 50-50. And he goes, and people always like, like rag on me, like, oh, like 50/50.

And I'm like, dude, it doesn't exist.

I was nothing without this guy before this guy. Like, I literally knew zero. Yeah, this guy gave me like a business to like learn with and like test with. Um, so what'd he say? So he goes, dude, this looks awesome. Like, I don't know if I'm ready to like commit or whatever. Um, he goes, because like, I don't know how this looks, but like I'm very interested. And I go, hey, I go, let's not do any commitments. I go, let me just build out the app. I'll show it to you next week. Um, like, I'll show you like something next week. Let's hop on another call and then from there we'll decide where to go.

Yeah.

So I spent the next week prompting straight, like literally didn't sleep. It was just prompting the whole time because I was trying to make it perfect. Back then the model, it was like Sonic 3.5. It was terrible.

Yeah.

You had to like, it was evil. Yeah. So I built out this MVP in a week. I showed it to him. He's like, well, this is insane. I go, now imagine what it's going to look like in a month. And then he goes, yeah, I'm in. So we did it. Then we had like some older guy, like we had a team of like these older people who were trying to do something similar on web and they threatened to sue us, but they didn't sue us.

They were just a competitor?

Yeah, they were a competitor who were trying to like stiff arm us, like whatever.

Did they have any justification?

They had nothing.

Yeah.

And their platform sucked and they kept, they had a USA Wrestling partnership.

Oh shoot.

And they were bragging about it on call. So I had a college class that I missed because I was on call with them for 2 hours and they were sitting there saying, oh, you're young, you're this, you're that. And like, we have a partnership with USA Wrestling. He goes like, I know you think you're gonna like do well, but like you're at an unfair advantage. And I'm sitting there and now I'm like, I've been on this call for 2 hours. They're not telling me any terms of their deals though. So they have a partnership. They could be their janitors. That's their partnership.

I have a partnership with Google, AKA have a Gmail email.

Exactly. Like we don't know what that means. So they're like, they're trying to get me to sign an NDA. I'm afraid if I sign an NDA and then I release the app, they're gonna say I stole their stuff, right? So I go, I'm not signing anything. And I go, look, I appreciate the fact that you guys think that you're passionate about your product and you think you have the unfair advantage. And their product sucked. And you think you have the unfair advantage. I go, but to be honest, and I look like, I look at Caden and I go, okay, like, I think Caden's one of the most influential people in this space. I think with just him, we could like take over the space. Yeah.

Um, and I was on this call too. Yeah.

And I go, and I fully believe in our product. And then I call Caden afterwards. I go, look, I don't want to work with these guys. They're being weird.

So they were kind of talking like, let's partner up maybe because they were trying to get at Caden.

They were mad that I got there first.

Yeah.

Um, and I call Caden. I'm like, look, um, like I don't want to, I don't want to work with these guys. And he goes, yeah, I fully agree. I don't think they like represent our like best interests. And that's when I realized I'm like, holy crap, I'm partnered with this guy.

Yeah. Yeah.

And then we released. And in the first week we did, uh, we did like $8K in the first week. And I was like, holy. And then like that guy got like obliterated. He disconnected the website.

Really?

He owned wrestleai.com.

Yeah. He still, does he still own it?

Yeah, he pulled the plug on it. So if you go, it's like 404 not found.

But he still owns the domain?

Still does own the domain.

Yeah.

We have wrestleai.app, but our AS, like our SEO is all above his.

You have, what is your domain?

wrestleai.app.

.app. Okay.

Yeah.

So they just, they never even got off the ground. So now you need to get a partnership with USA Wrestling.

Yeah, but USA Wrestling doesn't even like represent their athletes that well from what I've heard. So I don't even know how like they're just legit about it, right?

Yeah, whether they do or don't, like they're a big name. Um, all right, so what month does all this go down? You start college in August.

This was all September, so end of September, September 26th, we released the app.

Okay.

And I was working on it from like all through August and all through like September.

Like nonstop.

Yeah. So I released Wrestle AI and I released another app around 2 weeks later that I put like no effort in.

What app was that?

This, it was this like, it was like, it was called Green. This app, I hate, I hate, I had another partner. So another guy hit me up, uh, like this influencer I hit up and like they finally got back to me around once I released Wrestle AI. I was like, okay, maybe the strategy is you just partner with influencers. And this guy had like a million followers. So I'm like, all right, this guy is like—

in what space?

In like this like reaction space. So it was like joke, it was like, like he was like, he'd like react to videos and you'd make like a funny commentary on it.

Super low value audience then.

I didn't know what that meant at the time. So I'm sitting there, we're making this app, which it was going to be like, you know, have you ever heard of Riz GPT?

Yes.

It was going to be like that. It was like a clone of that.

Okay.

And this is also why I push back against clones. So he had a super like low intent audience and we were making like a slop app, to be honest. But we had no passion. Like, honestly, I had super— I was like super passionate about building. Because like I wrestled, so I wanted to build a tool that I really genuinely liked.

And it's a, it's a, it's an enthused community. Like wrestlers are different.

Yeah. It's awesome.

Yeah.

And I got to work with people I love.

Yeah. Um, so you launched this a couple of weeks after, how does that launch go?

So yeah, so they both, and I feel like I wish I'd bring this up because I feel like it's such an important lesson for like whoever's trying to like build apps and stuff like that. Both apps got a million views. So like everyone like obsesses over distribution. Both apps got a million views in its first month.

When you say a million views, like the app itself in the App Store got a million?

No, like total social media views.

Like impressions across platforms?

Yeah.

Or like a video that you're using to promote the app?

Yeah, TikTok and Instagram, let's say, both got over a million views in the first month.

Okay.

Right? Wrestle AI, the first month did $17K, right? Green did $35. Yeah. So I like every, every time someone's like distribution, distribution, distribution. You need to make sure what the right people and what you're distributing is actually valuable. Like if you're distributing something that no one cares about, no one's going to buy it no matter what.

Yeah. Um, that blows my mind.

That's what I always try to say. Cause like I, so some people come to me with these ideas and like, yeah, you have to like make sure it's like a good idea and you're passionate about it.

Right.

Don't try making another looks maxing app. There's been a million looks maxing apps.

Right. Well, like I've had videos that let's say they get a million views and they're so high value and high quality., then I'll get 40,000 followers.

Yeah.

From that one video. And I'll have other videos that get a million views where I'm kind of like trolling and I'm not as serious and I'll get like 40 followers, like 40,040 from the same amount of views. It's the same thing. It's like, is it high value enough? Is it the right audience?

Yeah.

And it makes, it makes all the difference.

Yeah. And like creative strategy too. So it's like, like a dollar CPM could be expensive and a $10 CPM could be cheap if you have the right creative strategy.

Oh my gosh. Okay.

So after that $35 launch, you're just like, no, I was so happy because I was really afraid that this was gonna make way more than Wrestle AI. Yeah, I was like, I was afraid. Yeah, I'm gonna be known as the Riz GPT— no, not even that. I just didn't want to be known as like the Riz GPT guy, right? I was like, I'm gonna be known as the guy who makes like, like this slop, right? Um, and then it made no money, so I was like, all right, we're done. Like, we just— I just instantly cut it. I was like, let's— I'm only focusing on Wrestle AI because I was, I was also only mainly focusing on wrestling. I was working on this Very little. Yeah. So then in Wrestle.ai month 1, the last week of month 1, we did around like $2K in revenue.

Okay.

Which was lower than all the other months.

$10K first week?

It was like $8K first week.

Okay. $8K.

I don't remember, like $6K, $4K, $2K, something like that. So it's like, it's going down a little bit. It's like it had a huge up and then it's starting to fizzle.

Okay.

And then from there, that's when I sat there and I was like, all right. And then my partner, like Caden, also started getting a bit busy. He was doing RAF, right? Which is like completely fair. It's like, like a wrestling organization.

Okay.

It's like, you know, it's like UFC for wrestling.

Okay.

It's getting big now too. It's sick.

I haven't heard of that.

Have you— you know Arman Tsarukyan?

No.

The UFC fighter?

No.

You know Khamzat?

No.

No?

I don't follow UFC.

So like a bunch of UFC fighters are going on there now.

Hmm.

Okay. So—

So he kind of lost focus a little bit.

Yeah. So he's, he's like pursuing other ventures as well, which is like totally fair.

I want you to do something right now. Open your bank statement and add up every single software subscription that you're paying for. Your CRM, your email marketing tool, text message platform, calendar booking app, funnel builder, review management, even a separate form builder or automation tool. I've talked to business owners paying $500 to $3,000 a month across 8 or 10 different tools, and half of them don't even talk to each other. So then they go pay for Zapier on top of that just to make things connect. HighLevel replaces all of it. CRM, email, SMS, funnels, websites, calendars, automations, reputation management, invoicing, One login, one dashboard, one bill, starting at $97 a month. A guy in my community was paying $347 just for ClickFunnels, $99 for Mailchimp, $25 for Calendly, $79 for a review tool, and $49 for Zapier just to glue it all together. That's $600 a month if you're not counting. He moved everything to HighLevel and cut his software costs by over 80%. But the best part isn't even the savings. It's that everything just works together natively. A lead fills out a form on your funnel. That creates a contact in your CRM, which triggers a text and email sequence, books an appointment on your calendar, and then asks for a review when the job's done. One workflow, zero duct tape, and then you can white label the whole platform to resell it to other businesses as your own software. Charge them $200 to $500 a month. Check out gohighlevel.com/tkopod. They'll give you a 30-day free trial to see what I mean. How many views did like that first launch video get?

I think like 100 and something thousand.

And he posted it to his account.

Yeah.

Okay. And did you push paid behind that at all?

No, we pushed no paid and like up only until like January we started pushing paid.

Okay. And what did you charge for this app for us?

Same, same price. $10 a month, $60 a year.

Okay.

Um, we recently added abandon yearly.

So like abandon yearly?

Like if you click like X, it'll give you like a discount offer.

Okay. Okay. What do most people choose between $10 and $60?

Mostly $60 because you really— we had the trial on $60. So it's like, look, if you want the trial, you have to do like, you have to commit to the year.

And is that the play, you think, for apps like this?

Sometimes. It's different for everyone, right? So like my friend, he just launched a new app and he's been only doing weeklies. Like his goal is to just maximize the total amount of recurring revenue. Mm-hmm. And that's what I would always try to front-load revenue. This way I had more for your growth. Yeah, I had more money to then grow, you know what I mean? So I was never bottlenecked by cash. Yeah. But if you, if you're not super growth aggressive, I would say push monthlies instead.

Yeah.

Um, cause your LTV will probably be higher on monthlies.

Okay. All right. So $17K second month, he starts doing other stuff. What do you do?

So that's what I'm sitting there and I'm like, all right, but like, like I, like we got to now figure out like what to do. So like the most obvious was like, all right, let's just get more people in the wrestling space posting about Wrestle.ai. So from there I was like, hey, whoever you have, like send them to me. Right? And then I would send DMs off of our brand account, paid promo for Wrestle.ai. And another thing I didn't realize is because wrestling's a small niche and we had Caden posting about it, our response rate was insane, right?

After Caden, because he's— he puts a, like, brand reputation.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, so now you're reaching out to influencers that have already heard of you.

Exactly.

Not just that, but from a trusted source.

Yeah. So it was great.

Yeah.

And the first person I signed was this kid Corey Zader. Another absolute killer. Shout out to that kid.

Okay.

Our first deal, me and Corey— now he's made thousands of dollars, he's doing well. Um, but my first deal between me and him was, uh, 4 videos. Was it 4 videos? Yeah, it was 4 videos for— it was either— no, I think it was 6 videos for $400. Yeah, yeah, 6 videos for $400, $70 a post. Okay. Right. And he was like very— he was pretty new as well. Um, and Call AI also sponsored him, right?

So what type of influencer is he?

He's wrestling influencer and he posts like day in the life content. Okay, right. Okay, so he, he makes this first video, right? So the first video costed us $70, right? Drops the first video. I watched the video. He doesn't say Wrestle AI up until like 30 to 40 seconds in, and he does a Call AI sponsorship before he does. No. Dude, right? And I'm looking at them, whatever, like, I'll tell him next time, like, you can't do that, this and that. The video crushed, hmm, 500K views, and we made over $5K off of it because no one cared about the Cal AI sponsorship. All they saw was, what do you mean this app can analyze my wrestling footage?

It did well for Cal AI too.

Yeah, maybe it probably did well for Cal AI, probably not the same though. Yeah, like, we were able to tell by the comments, like, that's why I was like, okay. Um, so everyone was going insane, like, what, what the hell, this app does this and that. So now I'm like, I don't care if there's a Kali Eye sponsorship or not, like, I'm riding high. I'm like, this is insane.

I just paid $40 to get 5,000.

Yeah, yeah, like, though, the return was insane. And the bigger return— this is why I say even on your first, it's okay to be unprofitable on your first few influencers because they're gonna start spreading your word to other influencers. So he— we also, because of him, a ton of different people like really respected Corey's content right? And we got even more brand trust. And then from there, we started just sponsoring a bunch of different creators, um, probably like a total of 10, maybe 10, 20, okay, around there. Then we cut down to like 6, 7, right? Like in towards like the end, 6 or 7 trusted great people. Like, absolutely, you just use over and over.

Yeah, okay.

And, uh, and yeah, and from there, that, that's, that was, that drove most of all of our growth.

How did his other, what, 6 videos do?

They all did great. Okay, so like, like, as well? No, no, not as well. Okay, that first video was a banger, but he got like 500K views. Yeah, but his RPM was great. Yeah, which made it worth it.

So $17,000 the first month. What did months 2, 3, 4+ look like?

So yeah, so Apple is holding all of it. Yeah, Apple was holding $17K. They were gonna get paid out in December. So all I had was like $1,000 in my bank account that I had to sustain growth with in October. Yeah, I had to sustain growth with and, uh, like to make sure that like we're not only relying on Caden. And like I just got super scrappy with this $1,000.

Constraints equal creativity.

Yeah. And, uh, and then we were able to do— we were able to do like, I think it was either like— it was like $19,000, like a little bit, $19,000 and a little bit the second month. So it wasn't crazy growth.

$1,000? Yeah, yeah, still. Yeah, we still were able to go trending downwards at the end of the first.

Yeah.

So turn it around.

We were able to turn it around. That's like 19.

Yeah. And how did you do that? More Caden videos, more other influencers, other influencers, like other influencers and Caden. So that's your only growth playbook for the first few months.

Yeah, it was just organic.

Were you paying flat fee per video like you did with, um, some flat, some CPM? And what CPM did you start with?

2, 2 and 2.5.

Okay. Now when is that paid out though? Cause a video can keep going for a while, right?

Yeah. That, that's One, like one thing that we did really well.

Yeah.

We would pay them out. We'd be like, let's keep it simple. Like we'll pay you a week after the video, but then it keeps going. So our CPM, our effective CPM was sub a dollar.

So an average deal would be like a video that gets 100,000 views a week later, you pay him $200.

Yeah.

But then it might get over the next 2 months, another 100,000.

Exactly.

Dropping your CPM in half.

Exactly.

Are these pretty evergreen videos? Like, are they like, like, are they likely to keep going for a while? Because some, I post some shorts and like they're dead in a week. Yeah, suckers, suckers, and they go for months.

Some would keep going, others would die out. Like we wouldn't put too much like thought into like making sure that all of the videos were evergreen.

Yeah. Were you ever concerned about people like paying for fake views to boost their?

Yeah, but the idea was we'd figure that out.

Like, so you could tell by like comment ratio.

If somebody has like a bunch of emojis in the comment sections, like there's like, you know, and like we were working with wrestlers, it was like trusted.

Yeah, they're not like marketers, like they probably don't really know that.

Yeah, and if we saw that like it wasn't driving engage— like we saw the video wasn't really driving sales, we would just cut the influencer.

But how are you able to always attribute it to sales if you've got multiple videos going at once?

A lot of it was just intuition.

Okay.

Being able to like just look at your charts and like kind of understand, like just keeping track of all the views and all the results.

What tools do you use to keep track of all this?

So I just built out like this sick internal tool.

Your own?

Yeah, it tracks I've run my entire business on it.

Really?

My Meta ads, my creators, like, literally, the dashboard contracts are sent through it.

That's cool.

Super easy. And then I have Claude, like, with PostHog as well.

PostHog?

Yeah. And then, like, it's all the data sources are in one. So I have, like, a Claude that I could literally talk to, like, an MCP. Yeah. I'll be like, Claude trained on all these data sources. And then I'll be like, hey, what are the numbers for today? What's my P&L? Like, what's this and that?

Sick. Okay, so you start doing CPM deals, $2 to everyone. Second month is $19K, but you still don't have any money.

Yes, I have no cash.

60-day runway.

Yeah, so that was— so the second month was November, third month's December.

Okay.

Now the first chunk just hit the account.

Okay.

So now I'm like, okay, now it's time to like go crazy. And one of them—

sorry, September was your first month or October?

End of September 26th. So basically October.

Okay. And so $17K October. $19K November, December the money hits. What do you do with the money and what are your sales in December?

Yeah, so the money hits, we just 10x what we're doing, get more influencers, right? Now we got up to like around 20 influencers in December. Okay, right. And from there, like 20-ish, 20 may be overkill, um, because there's just not— the biggest bottleneck for us was finding— like, we started running out of niche, we started running out of influencers.

Yeah, that's my next question was like, how many are there?

That, that was like our big thing.

A couple hundred?

Yeah. Um, and then—

sorry, are you reaching out to athletes too? Like, I'm gonna— I'm, I'm thinking like David Taylor, uh, like Bo Nickel. Yeah, D1.

We have a, we have a video from Bo.

Really?

Yeah, we have a video from Bo. This guy, we— I wonder— I really wanted to work with Daniel Zabita. Zabita, we were in talks, and then like, I think he just got busy. Like, okay, stopped answering. I followed up a few times, but we never closed the deal. Jax Forrest also. We were gonna get deals with all these guys. Yeah. Um, Jax Forrest, um, I don't know if he ever made the video for us because there's hundreds of current D1 wrestlers.

Yeah, there's thousands of like, you know, previous, you know, recent D1 wrestlers, and then there's probably hundreds of like wrestling influencers that weren't D1 wrestlers that were good at content. Yeah, because that's the, that's the difference.

So the ROI on like a, on like a really good wrestler that's not that good at content.

Yeah.

Isn't really as big as the ROI on, even though they have so much accolades.

What's stopping you from finding one of your influencers that's really good at content and then going to like, uh, like, uh, who's a current wrestler right now? Like a Penn State guy. Like, uh, what's that guy? Um, Roman Bravo Young or whatever. Like RBY.

He's really great at content. We tried getting him a ton of content.

Someone that like maybe has a lot of followers because they're a big wrestling name but are bad at content and saying like, hey, we're going to coach you how to do this. Just take a video like this. Send us the raw file. We'll send you back the edited version and you post it. You know what I'm saying?

The thing that stops us is the fact that it's wrestling season. Wrestling season is— the fact that wrestling season is our best season.

It was when you were doing this, you're saying? Like right now?

Yeah, right now it's not, but now it is.

Yeah, yeah, December is like—

maybe now would actually be the best bet to try that. Yeah, and then ask him if he'd hold off like a few months.

Yeah, like just take the raw video that looks like this you doing like takedowns or whatever, and then we'll edit it, send it back, and you just post what we send you, you know?

Yeah. So yeah, actually, that, that'd be the best strategy. Well, I have a— I was actually thinking about something similar. I, I want to hire one of our creators.

Yeah, just upload it to them.

Um, but I haven't offered him yet. I'm going to send the offer probably late July.

Okay.

Cuz right now we're like chilling cuz it's like we're out of season.

Cuz you'd probably rather have a, a 50,000 follower influencer, wrestling influencer that's really good at content, than 500,000 follower athlete that sucks at content, right?

Yeah.

But if you could have the best of both worlds—

you could have both, that'd be great. Yeah, 100%.

Okay, so December, what'd you do in December again?

So December we did 30, and then, uh, January we did 40.

So you kind of have— what you have going for you is it is wrestling season, everyone's excited for NCAAs, like it's the culture, like people are signing up more because it's wrestling season. But you have working against you is athletes are busy.

Busy.

Yeah. But I think it's a, it's still a net win. Like it's probably better to launch this all else equal in September than any other time.

Yeah.

100%. And so that was kind of lucky. Like the timing just kind of worked out.

Yeah. And that was, that was like, I mean, it wasn't the plan cuz I didn't meet Caden until August, but like I told Caden, like we gotta make sure like we're getting this for the peak point of wrestling season.

Okay. So January 30K you said?

January 40.

So 30 in December, 40 in January. Yeah.

And this is like, and January, by the way, January I was first month in my full-time job. I worked maybe 4 hours on it.

And this is like, um, we say revenue, but it's either monthly recurring or yearly recurring.

Yeah.

Like it's, so it's, it's recurring.

Yeah.

Yeah. Um, all right. $40K in January, which is wild. So you're October, November, you're 4 months in, $40K. February is crunch time. That's, that's like—

season's kind of ending.

Yeah. Um, conference championships.

Yeah. And like the begin— like the wrestlers who are like quitters, they're starting to quit. Yeah, but we still had a great month.

We still— you say quitters, you mean like mostly high school wrestlers? Is that like the biggest? Because there's a zillion more high school wrestlers in college.

Yeah, high school's our biggest.

Okay, so they're—

and peewees, like, shot— we had a lot of like little kids. Yeah, hit us up.

So in February, you have two things happening that are going against you. A, wrestlers are quitting, probably for good, and B, the seasons are just ending. These high school seasons are ending at the end of February, give or So what were your sales in February?

Uh, it was still like 30-ish.

Okay.

It was like 28, and it's a shorter month. Um, yeah, it was like 28, and we, uh, and like, it was— that was pretty much it. Like, it wasn't bad. We were still very profitable, like, because I think like our total, like, our expenses are very low.

How are you managing this 50/50 partnership and expenses? Like, are you making a cash distribution every month?

Yes. So each other, we started taking out in, uh, like December-ish. And it was, it was basically like I said in the beginning, I told him like, I want to scale this as much as possible. I never want to scale this because we want to take money, you know what I mean? And he was kind of on board, but it came to a point where we just weren't able to spend the money.

Yeah.

So every month I would send out the distributions.

Okay. And you're— but the distributions are coming after you're paying expenses, paying the influencers?

Yes.

Okay. Token cost, was that very high?

No, our most expensive month was January, was $2K.

And what model were using or are you using for this?

I don't even remember. It was the best OpenAI model.

Still 4.0, GPT-4.0?

I think this may have been 5.

I'm not sure. I'm kind of surprised that the tokens aren't higher. Is it just because the usage isn't that much?

Yeah, so what we did, what we found out is the analysis feature gets them in the door. You can only really use the analysis feature like 5 times.

And analysis being they take a video and upload it?

Yeah, uploading the wrestling match.

Okay.

That's like our viral feature. Right. But after you do that 5 times, it's like, okay, you're running out of matches and you're starting to get like, like you, you usually you do the same problems multiple times.

Yeah.

You know what I mean?

Yeah. Yeah.

So like you have a firm grasp.

Head up.

Yeah, exactly. You have a firm grasp of what the issues are. Um, so we, we did to combat that and we saw once we started adding this stuff, like our churn went from like, like this, like this. Um, adding what calorie tracker feature? To make sure like wrestlers are really—

Make some sticky.

Yeah, heavy. We were heavy on weight management stuff. Okay. And so calorie tracker, weight cut mode.

Was the calorie tracker similar to CaliEye and they just take a picture and upload it?

Yeah, we had like all the options to track calories. Okay. Like same as MyFitnessPal.

Okay.

Barcode, database, everything.

Was that hard to implement? Like tedious?

We did just APIs.

You're just plugging into a database of food and—

Exactly, we're just using APIs.

Image recognition.

Yeah.

Okay.

So the calorie tracker was big. And, uh, what— calorie tracker, weight mode. You'd upload your wrestling calendar, so you'd upload your match schedule and it would parse it into the app's calendar. And then it would keep track of your weight. So it'd be like, hey, you got to be— you got to make sure you're cutting.

Hey, it's Tuesday.

Like, yeah, exactly, you got match Wednesday.

Yeah.

Um, and then we also added like stance and motion mode where it'd call out for you and like do your callouts.

Like the app would tell you to do stuff?

Shots, brawl, circle.

Yeah, that's cool. People like that?

Yeah, people liked it because like if you don't have your coach and you're trying to like drill alone, you want like your kind of like stance in motion mode. It gives you like round times and stuff like that.

Okay.

And then we also had a practice mode which would teach you a move and then you would do the move and then it would analyze you doing the move. Mmm. Um, that I feel like that one was never as big because I feel like we could have made it better.

Kind of gimmicky?

Like yeah, we just didn't— so it was all voice. Voice and text, so we couldn't really— we didn't have videos.

Okay.

We should have had videos.

Yeah. But, uh, sorry, for the analyze feature, the one that you started with, is it really telling them unique stuff, or is it saying like, stop reaching back? Like, you know what I'm saying?

It's— so, uh, yeah, I tell people it's mostly, um, like the biggest thing is fundamentals. So it just evaluates it based on like most of the stuff that like, like the fundamentals of what you're doing.

Yeah. Like you shot in for this double leg, but your head was down.

Exactly.

Okay, yeah, it's not saying like— it's not getting like super granular, like when, when Kael does an armbar, he, you know, like it'll do that sometimes, so it'll catch some weird stuff.

Yeah, and it's like you could have rolled through. Yeah, it could have— you could have rolled through, you could have done this and that. Okay, um, but like the mo— the biggest thing I wanted to make sure I got down was the fundamentals, because that's why— that's why I was able to like start beating my friends, was because I got really good at the fundamentals.

Well, that's the most broad.

Yeah.

And if you're getting really technical, then it goes over the head of 90% of us.

Exactly.

Okay. All right. So February hits, revenue drops. March is like, that's crunch time. Like what happens in March?

March, we're still doing okay. It was about, uh, it was like March was like 20. Um, April was like 15.

Okay.

Now we're stagnating at around like 10, but that's our floor.

Did you see churn?

That's all monthly.

Like shoot up in February, March, April. When the season ends?

I thought we were gonna— not really. It was just we stopped getting that as many new yearlies. Okay, that's what caused the revenue decline.

Yeah, yeah.

But it did like— yeah, it increased. Yeah, but it wasn't like I was expecting February 1st hits. Yeah, zero subs. That's what was in my mind. I'm like, all right, like, this— it is what it is. Like, I knew that this was gonna happen. I like braced myself for it.

Yeah.

Um, but The churn kind of went like that, and then it kind of just stayed the same. Okay, but our new— we just started getting less new yearlies, and most of our revenue is coming from yearlies.

Gotcha.

Um, so like the 10 is basically just all renewals now.

Are you slowing down your, your outreach playbook during this time? Yeah, we stopped just because it's not as effective.

We stopped. Yeah, and like there was a lot less influencers we really wanted.

Okay, so because you learned what a good influencer looked like.

Yeah. We stopped really signing influencers. We kept the team we currently have. We were experimenting with paid, but we were never going crazy with it. So we kind of cut paid a little bit. And then, and then we were just like, we were just coasting. Like for the next few months now until August, we're just gonna be coasting and rebuilding the product.

Okay.

So like I'm thinking about hiring now someone to just rebuild the product.

Yeah.

And make it all nice.

So do you know what your lifetime value is?

Like our LTV?

Yeah. Of a user?

I don't really. I know our month 1 LTV is like the average, the average user purchases is around $25 for their first purchase.

Yeah, because it's like half are doing $60, half are doing $10.

Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so your LTV is probably closer to like $50, I would think.

Like, yeah, I would say, I would say, um, yeah, I would say around there.

Okay, so if you spend $1,000 on videos, like $2 RPM for 500,000 views. You spend $1,000 on like normal times. How much in revenue do you expect that to return to you? Like total revenue?

We spend $1,000 on influencers and, um, we'd probably expect back. So if I spent $1,000 at $2 CPM, $2 CPM should yield back like a $5 to $10 RPM. So we should see back like $2,500 to $5K.

Okay, let's say so 2 to 5x return on ad spend. Yeah, give or take.

Now I scale things differently though. So for these latest two apps, um, I especially— because the way I run these latest two apps, I part— instead of like an influencer or whatever, I have like, like just a kid I trust who like I could basically tell what to do and they'll do it.

Okay.

Because like since I'm working too, I only have like, let's say, 3 hours. Yeah, right. So I'll tell the kid exactly what to do, he'll do it, and then I'll just fund the project. And I've started like learning how the Meta ads algorithm worked. So these two latest apps are like able to scale both to $10K in like 45 days, and it was solely through just creators and Meta ads.

Same playbook plus paid ads?

Same playbook except paid ads just made it 10 times faster. So I didn't need to sign 10 creators and I didn't need to saturate the niche to really have an effect.

Couldn't you do that for Wrestle AI?

Now I, I didn't know how. Yeah, exactly.

Especially when the season starts.

Yeah.

Okay. So is the playbook find the right influencer, find out what, uh, so like the new app launching playbook, right? Pick a niche, find creators in that niche, figure out what type of creator is the most effective, triple down on them, find their best organic technically producing videos, push paid behind those.

Or, because sometimes— so Corey Zader, his videos don't work well as paid ads, right? Because of the fact that the integration is super subtle. So it's a day in my life.

He's more subtle than you'd like.

No, no, for organic, that's amazing.

Okay.

That's why he does really well.

But for paid, it's too subtle.

For paid, you need a direct CTA within like— like you need some sort of a CTA within 15 seconds.

In the first 15, is that what you're saying?

Like roughly, you need to say like, this is the product, you need to show the products within the first 15 seconds for paid. Organic, you have at least like 30. Paid, maybe you even have a less window. Yeah. And that's when like I started just realizing, like I started just looking on Meta Ads Library, studying the best converting ads. And then from there, I'll find a creator that I like and I'll like just say, hey, can you just make these videos for me? I'll pay you for the videos. You don't have to post them. And they're like, oh, if I don't have to post them.

Yeah, it's like user-generated content.

Exactly.

For apps.

Yeah. And then, um, they make the video. It'll be something super simple that like gets to the point of what the app does.

And it's like an overt ad.

What?

It's an overt ad. It's very clear that this is an ad for Wrestle AI is what you're saying.

Somewhat, yeah. So it's like, for example, yeah, like give me like the, like the boxing app, right?

Yeah.

How I landed this punch. Boom. Guy gets hit, right? Um, before my match, I threw his video into the opponent analysis. So, uh, I threw my thing into this app. I saw that after every time he threw like this, this, this specific exchange, he would drop his hands, right? Throws the specific to the app.

I now know.

Exactly. He would throw the specific exchange, bang, hit him. It will— because yeah, and he would actually throw the opponent's videos into the app, and that's how he would get like the screenshot. Yeah, right. Um, and that, that would be the— that's really the ad. That's the script.

How long is the entire video?

30 seconds, probably.

Okay. Um, the influencer will take this video. Will he edit it or you?

No, he edits it.

He edits it, sends it. He never posts it?

Never posts it. No. Now when you push it, sometimes they post it. Sometimes we take videos that they post.

They can.

They don't—

you don't need them to. It's just a bonus if they post it.

So most of the time, like, we— most of the time we work with influencers, we tell them to post it. Like, well, they'll, they'll make videos to post, and then we'll either take those videos and rerun them as paid ads But we'll also have like an influencer that'll, that'll post and will make paid ads for us.

Okay.

So they're like two separate deals.

Gotcha. Okay. So 30 seconds long, you mentioned it in the first 15. Yeah. And then you push paid ads behind it. Mostly Instagram, Facebook Reels.

Yeah. All Meta. But like we let Meta decide.

Okay.

Yeah.

Do you know what Meta ends up choosing? Like, is it heavy Instagram? Heavy? Because Facebook Reels are slept on.

They are exploding. We have like huge traffic on Facebook.

Okay.

Shocked.

But you don't really track where they're showing it. You just say Meta placement is—

I just give— Yeah, you just give Meta the spend.

Okay. So what do the unit economics look like on those paid ads then?

So for the boxing app, we have— we spend $400 a day. We make around $9 to $12 back.

Okay. Right up front or that's like LTV?

No, day one.

Okay.

Wow. I know. So I really want to scale it. But now—

and that's recurring though.

Yes.

Okay. So you spend $400 on a Tuesday and on Tuesday you make $900 to $1,200 day one. But that's also recurring.

Yeah.

So day one is like 2 to 4x return on ad spend.

Yeah.

Lifetime is much higher.

Yeah. So that's why we're now getting into RevenueCat payments because so I've been just funding the project myself. Right. So what we're doing is we're getting RevenueCat. RevenueCat has a thing called— do you know what RevenueCat is?

Never heard of it.

So RevenueCat is like the paywall provider for apps. So it knows all of your paywall statistics and stuff like that.

Okay.

Right. Um, what they also do is they have a program called RevenueCat Payments and it will pay you what you make day one up to 80% of what you made. Right.

They're fronting the payment and taking a percentage.

Exactly.

Okay.

Right.

So that way you can put more into it.

2%.

Otherwise you're taking 60 days to get that money.

Exactly.

Okay. So how much did they take?

2%.

Okay.

At the end of the month. It's not bad if you have that, if you have like heavy ROAS, like day one ROAS.

You have to be able to afford it.

And now I could take the $800 or let's say they pay 60%. So it'd be like what? They pay up to 80%. So it'd be, it's 20% like minus $160. So it'd be like $640. Now you have $640 to spend on ads. So that's what I'm really excited about scaling this app. Because it's like super low effort on my part, at least. Yeah, the other guy's working very hard. Yeah, thank you. He's a great guy.

This is the guy you said Osama or—

No, no, no, he's just a kid I know that's like— he's smart. Okay, so my— are you smart? I know if I tell him what to do, he'll like do it and he'll do it well. Okay, um, so, so we're scaling. So I'm really excited to scale that app up. And then we have another app that's a workout app.

Hold on, that other app— and I know we're editing out the name When did you start that?

Um, I started that around 45 days ago.

Okay.

It's done about $18K this month.

So wrestling season ends, you're like, all right, let's kind of put this on the back burner till August, September. We'll fire it back up.

And also, um, yeah, I'll say it. And also like, you know, like we want, I want more apps built on Rourke that are making more money, right? That's like Rourke's biggest.

You work for them.

Yeah, that's Rourke's, yeah, that's Rourke's like North Star metric is how much are their users making.

Okay.

And that's why Rourke is like, I don't like to say, but it's better than all the other platforms because according to like the, all like the paywall providers, right? RevenueCat, according to RevenueCat, out of all the AI app builders, Rourke apps are generating the most amount of revenue because they build the highest quality apps, stuff like that.

Other users, other competitors are focused on signups and like vanity metrics. And they're like, we want our customers to be successful.

That we're trying, it's trying to be the Shopify for that, for apps. Gotcha. I think that's the thing that wins. In my opinion, case studies are what wins long term.

Yeah.

Call AI was built in Rourke. That's a huge— I didn't know that. No, it wasn't. I'm saying if it was, it would be the biggest, like everyone would then try, everyone who would then want to get into apps would try to build through Rourke.

Yeah. Like you said, like Shopify.

Exactly. And then if gurus exist, that's like the goal, but gurus don't exist. You have to let gurus happen naturally.

I mean, gurus.

Info people are great at pushing stuff. Yeah, so like if you have an info guy pushing Rourke, yeah, and that being like a part of the process.

Gotcha.

But I mean, info is a bit scammy, but some people are, yeah, but some people are great. Like there's some great info.

Okay, so you launch the— is it, is it MMA? Is it boxing? Is it fighting? What is like the niche that you consider that?

The newest one? Yeah, so I launched two.

So I want to get to the second one.

Yeah, first one Well, around the same time, but boxing.

Okay, box.

That's like the newest one. And then, uh, the other one's a workout one. Okay, it's for, uh, yeah, which I would think that's a compre—

that's a crowded space.

It wasn't my idea. I'll say like what it does. Basically, you take a picture of your abs and it tells you how to get a better, better six-pack.

That's smart.

Is that like— I wasn't actually crazy about this idea, but I was like, when the kid told— so somebody hits me up on Twitter. Yeah, to do this. And I, I like always hop on calls with people, tell them what I think and stuff like that. So like, I hopped on a call with this kid and he's telling me, he's like, dude, look up abs, there's no competition, this and that. He's going crazy. I'm like, dude, you're telling me people are gonna take a picture of their abs, get a rating?

I think it's brilliant.

Well, it's been turning out pretty good.

We'll get to that.

I'm glad. But, uh, I sat there and I thought it was like so funny. Like, I thought the idea was funny, but the kid had so much passion about it that I just felt such a conviction.

How do you say no to that? Yeah, yeah.

I'm like, this kid's like sitting here, he's like, like so passionate. I was like, there's no way this kid's not gonna win. Like, there's no way he's not gonna win. Yeah, like, I know he's gonna win. So like, the way he's talking to me, I know he's gonna win. So, uh, it's my age.

Okay. Um, so he's super funny because like, an, uh, an app that will analyze your workouts, that's probably pretty crowded, I would think.

Yeah.

So he's saying let's unbundle that, let's niche down just to abs. I think, oh man, do you know how many like billions of dollars have been sold on infomercials for like ab gear.

100%. Yeah.

And that's what this is. It's the AI app version of that.

Yeah. I just couldn't— I think I just couldn't see it at the time.

Right.

But, uh, cause it was like, cause there's like a bunch of the looks maxing apps that kind of like gave a bad look to like the ratings style apps.

Okay.

Yeah. Right. So I was thinking of it as like, oh, it's another rating style app, but no, it's, it's a huge niche. Like I agree. And, uh, and so we started scaling it. We tried organic. Organic did pretty bad because we were sponsoring— we weren't sponsoring great people. So like we didn't have crazy results on organic. We started paid.

What kind of people were you sponsoring that didn't work?

It was like some of these, like what we found was when we would just show the cards. So when we would just show the ratings, right?

What do you mean ratings?

So you take a picture and it rates your six-pack. It gives it like a score out of 100.

Okay.

When we would just show the ratings, we got downloads and like churn would spike. Like it'd be quick churn.

So you would show like a picture of someone's abs with a rating above it.

Yeah.

As an ad for the app.

Yeah. So it'd be like, lock in, like the gym influencer lock in, takes a picture of their six pack, like, uh, whatever. And then that would be the ad, something like that. Like hook, hook, scan. That's it. Um, and we found that like a lot of people would sometimes people would download and they would subscribe, but then they would churn out quick. Right? And what the best type of videos were, the ones that would show the actual— it would be rating workout and then them doing the workout. So because it would show like the app actually teaches you how to get a six-pack. Okay, we never did like—

I don't know, like we didn't think about this till after the guy doing crunches.

Exactly. Instead of just a picture of a guy's abs, it would show the workouts tailored to your abs. Yeah, yeah, like design or whatever, right?

Um, I think that's an important learning point is like not all customers are created the same. Like you're getting these big spikes and you're like, this works. This is what we need to do. And then you see they churn, right? Whereas you might be able to spend more per customer. And so on the surface it doesn't work as well, but the churn is next to zero. So it works much better.

Exactly.

Right. It's kind of like me, like when I'm acquiring newsletter subscribers, I might get subscribers that open at 80% instead of 60%, but they're clicking at 2% instead of 6%. It's like, well, if they're never clicking anything, the open rate is just a vanity metric. I need them to click. So I'd rather have 40% open rate and 6% click rate than 80% open rate and 2% click rate. Right?

Okay.

Yeah.

100%. So then we started running Meta ads and then our Meta ads started like, it was like we would be spending $100 a day averaging around like $200 to $300. And then we just kept like, now we've been like slowly increasing spend.

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Both of them, roughly.

You started both around the same time?

Yeah, it was like almost the exact same, like, time.

Okay, and then what have the revenue numbers been for each?

So the workout one's at like 8 this month.

Okay.

Because it also had problems with like the co-founder started bragging about it on X.

Okay.

Started tweeting like our— because we have on the workout one, we have a crazy conversion. We have like over 20% like download to paid.

What is average?

Average is so like a good like average is like 5.

Wow.

Some people don't even get 5.

Yeah. You guys are at 20. Why do you think it's so different?

We have a good onboarding and good pricing.

Okay.

And obviously like we're targeting the right people.

Yeah.

But he was bragging about our conversion rate and what he pointed out in our paywall, which is like kind of compliant, like Apple, like Apple even admitted that for the most part it's compliant. We passed review and all that. We never hid anything from Apple review. But on Twitter, when you never post your app on, I mean, you could post it, but if you're doing anything that's anything close to being gray, never do that on Twitter because Apple's on there like a hawk. Yeah, so, and there's this one guy that quote tweets it and tries to report you. Uh, so he posted it, and if you look, it lists our monthly price and weekly terms. So it'd be like, it'd be like month on the top, it would say monthly subscriptions. It'd be like, it'd be like, uh, $10. It'd be like, what, monthly it was like $11.99. So it's like, I don't know, like $2 a week or something, or $2.40. So it's like $2.40 a week and then $10 a month, and that, that's how it was listed. Right? Because the weekly was— you could do that, but the weekly was above in hierarchy of like whatever.

Yeah.

Since the weekly price was above the monthly price.

Yeah.

And they were the same text size too, which is like, yeah, are you kidding me? Like it was the same text size, same everything. But just because, yeah, because the weekly was above and somebody reported us to Apple and Apple removed— and my— to be fair, what my friend also wrote in the tweet is he started saying like he was trying to like clickbait. So he was like a moral way to increase your conversion. Right? So it wasn't even the fact that we did it. This is like really weird. This is like the weirdest thing I've ever had with Apple. Yeah, they removed us for 2 weeks, right? And I'm like making fun of the kid. I'm like, look what you did, because like he's super amped up, he's like super hyped. Yeah, uh, he's like, dude, I've been like, whatever, I've been dreaming of this. I'm like, ah, look what you did. Uh, and then we've, we've spammed Apple, right?

That's why, like, to get reactivated.

Yeah. Never accept, and this is for everything, I feel like not enough people have this mindset. Never accept what somebody does.

Never.

My Meta account got locked in, got locked, I got locked out, like 2FA was broken in Meta.

Yeah.

Right? For my account, 2FA was broken.

Yeah.

So I couldn't log into my ads account, and this was when we were running ads for both.

Yeah.

Right? The way I got back in was I quick added everyone on LinkedIn that works at Meta and I spam DM'd them, like begging them to fix it. There's always this, there's always a way.

Like, don't accept anything at face value.

Never, never.

So people are like, people just— I like to call it the throw your hands up attitude. Yeah, dang it, well, I guess that sucks. I guess I'm not in business. Like, what?

Yeah, it's like, no, do anything in your power. I was, I was about to like drive to Apple headquarters and protest to get, uh, like reinstated. So we finally get in contact with Apple, they call us up, right? And I told them it's because the tweet— we still don't 100% know tweet. I knew for a fact.

They're never going to tell you.

No, they showed us the screenshot of the tweet.

Oh shoot. From this narc loser dude. This narc needs to go build something himself.

They showed us a screenshot saying you— his words were not— it wasn't the fact that you did anything wrong because this isn't true. This isn't truly against our guidelines.

Yeah.

You could argue it is, right?

Yeah.

It's the fact you made us look bad.

Yeah, I believe it. Because that's their— it's their pride.

Yeah. And especially on Twitter. Like, you have to understand, Twitter's where investors are. Twitters are where, like, consumers are. Twitter's the spot where anyone is accessible. Yeah, like, you could get in contact with a millionaire who has, like, 400 followers on Twitter.

Billionaire.

Yeah, billion. It, like, it's the best networking tool. Yeah, but you have to be careful what you say about the wrong people because everyone's watching. Yeah, so because we insulted Apple, a top Apple exec could go there and yell at his team right after. Yeah, right.. So they were like, you made us look extremely bad, this and that. We had to write an apology letter over email.

Like whatever it takes.

Like a page long.

You probably wrote that as fast as you could. Did you use AI to write it?

Boot it up, boot it up. Claude, Claude, make this the most deep apologetic essay ever.

My income depends on this.

We just wanted to say we are deeply— I think one of the lines were One of the lines were like, like, as a company we had to make— I forgot what it was. It was like, we took a step back, we took a step back and said that transparency comes first. Yeah, right.

Oh my gosh.

And then, uh, and thank God they approved. He like— the guy called us up after, he was like yelling at us, calls us up after, he was like super nice. You ever need anything, like, let us know.

Like, dude, I wrote that with Claude.

And then, uh, and then we went on like Twitter, like We just want to say Apple's a great company.

Dude, that's so interesting that like how much ego and pride still rule everything. Yeah, like reputation, how we look, like at any level, trillion-dollar company down to the individual, it rules all.

A random— like it wasn't even me, right? We're like, I mean, I don't even have a crazy amount of followers on Twitter, but like sometimes I'll have a tweet that gets like 20K views, something like that, right? It was a random kid on Twitter with like 400 followers that tweeted it.

Did that tweet do well?

He did get views, but he got views because the narc group tweeted it. I'm not gonna— I blocked him on everything. Gotta hide that guy. Can't have that guy snooping my stuff.

All right, so you launched these two apps at around the same time. What was the— and it's been 45 days since each of them launched. Yeah. And what's the revenue been for each of them since?

So lifetime, lifetime, like $23K is the, uh, boxing one.

Uh-huh.

And Around 15 is the workout one.

How high do you think all 3 of these apps could go? Like, what does like scale look like?

So my goal for the next— so I'm leaving, potentially leaving Rourke, right? Solely because I just want to focus on my own things. I think the company is still great and I have nothing but kind words to say about them. But for the next 6 months, I want one big company. So like, I don't want to be the guy with like like 10 different SaaSes.

You could have an app studio.

You could, you could. Yeah, that, that, and that's what like my dilemma is. Like, I know if I go and make a basketball app, I'll crush. I know, like, I, I feel like you have the playbook. I have the confidence that I'll go, I could go and crush in basketball, go crush in hockey. Yeah, I could just take over sports. Yeah, which is still something I'm considering. Um, but I also really have like a high desire to build one thing, to be like, like I have a higher desire to focus on one product, make sure that product's the best product possible. And make sure it's like making the most amount of money.

Yeah.

Um, and solve like a really hard problem.

See, focus looks different for different people. I like to say focus is overrated, momentum is underrated. Focus for you could look like making apps, like making niche apps with the same launch playbook over and over. It doesn't have to look like scale your wrestling app as far as it can go.

It could.

Focus can look different, right?

No, 100%.

I think what you could do, you could follow the exact same playbook as Flow Wrestling. You're familiar with them?

I don't know what their playbook is.

I know that, you know, Flow Sports. Yeah, Flow Sports started with Flow Wrestling and their thesis was, okay, everyone's covering, you know, basketball games, college. This is collegiate, collegiate basketball, collegiate football, whatever. But there's dozens of other collegiate sports that have rabid fan bases that ESPN will never care about. Not only do they not care about, but they will never care about. We need to do the hard, tedious thing and get boots on the ground in not just, um, colleges, not just D1, but D2, D3, and high schools to film wrestling matches, right? That was their thing. And it's like, we're gonna do this tediously. We're gonna have guys in Omaha, Nebraska, in Fresno, California, all over with a camera filming wrestling matches. Not just like any wrestling match, but starting with like the most popular high-profile ones. Yeah, like, like, uh, Beast of the East, for high school is like a huge nationwide tournament or basically any D1 match, you know, Iowa versus Iowa State, whatever. So that was their whole playbook. Paywalled from day one, $10 a month, $120 a year or whatever it was. And they started with wrestling. Their whole company was flowwrestling.com for years. And then they're like, all right, like we feel like we've got a good playbook now. Let's go. I think they went track and field next. They went cross-country, gymnastics. And now it's Flow Sports, and it's a multi-hundred million dollar company, and they just film and livestream and have a database of these collegiate and high school sports events. And now they make like documentaries, and like, they're like the Netflix for underappreciated sports, overlooked sports, both high school and college. So like, you could do the same thing with your apps, dude, you know what I'm saying? Like, you could roll them all up under the same, um, the same company, start with wrestling and go to other sports or other niches or other workout apps or whatever. Like, you could focus, still focus, but have dozens of different apps.

That's true. I mean, and that's something I've been like kind of like wrestling with.

Pun intended. Yeah.

Uh, but, uh, that's something I've been like in between. I don't know which one. I don't know kind of which path I'm gonna take.

Well, what are you wrestling between? Like, it's either— what are the options in front of you?

Either— so it's either— so I'm still gonna scale these apps that we currently have, right? Because it's like I have someone that like I— because I Like I could always hire, right? For Wrestle AI, I'm probably gonna hire. I'm gonna hire someone that could like just do the ops and stuff. And then like, kind of like how I have these relationships with these other two kids that are, one's doing the workout app, one's doing the boxing app, and then I'm gonna get someone to do the Wrestle AI app. And then all it takes for me is just like a little bit of direction and that doesn't, that's not a lot of work.

Yeah.

Right? A little bit of direction and like money.

Yeah.

So that's not a lot of work, and that's what I'm— that's what I'm thinking about. And then maybe then like scaling those, and then maybe trying to make like one app, like particularly maybe like— so one of the apps I was thinking about is— have you ever heard of Superpower? So it's a— it's like a— it's like a health analytics app. So it's like a— it's like a blood work app. Like you download it, it uploads all your blood work stuff to AI, and it like basically tells you like what you're like missing out on, what— what each means.

I use Function Health, and it seems like the same thing.

Yeah.

I pay $500, I get 2 blood panels a year. It all goes to the app and then they give me all this analysis. Yeah.

So I was thinking about maybe, maybe potentially because it's higher ticket, but I don't know. I'm not, I'm not sold on what, what, what I would want to do that could be bigger or just scaling this up to like 100 apps.

Yeah. So if I were you, like very specifically, I would create a parent company that you own 100% of.

Yeah.

Right. George LLC.

That's kind of what I have now.

Yeah. And then all of these apps you start should be independent LLCs.

That's what, yeah.

Some of them you have partners, right? Yeah. Like this, the first Hayden, what's it?

Hayden.

And you, you have different splits and like 50% is owned by George LLC. 50% is owned by him.

That's how it's structured.

Yeah. Right. And then everything, when you make a distribution for the wrestling company, it funnels up to George LLC. And then when you can afford it, you pay George from George LLC.

Yeah. That's how I do it.

Yeah. I would just do that at scale and just know every year you're probably going to be culling apps. You're going to be cutting them. Yeah, 100%. That's just— and that's not anything to feel bad about. It's just the 80/20 rule exists everywhere. Yeah. If you have 30 apps, I can already tell you that 20 of them will be okay, or maybe even 25 will be okay, and 5 will print all your money. Yeah, right. And so you're just going to have to cull them over time. I would like scale the crap out of that. Like that could be a publicly traded company. That could be huge. I don't see any reason why you couldn't and shouldn't do that. Like you have the playbook.

Yeah, I agree. I think my big concern is hiring.

What about it?

Being able to hire good people that could do it, that could like run them.

Why not? Why couldn't you?

Because I've like, there have— so I've done a few. So when before we launched, I actually had a few more that we were potentially launching and it was the 80/20 rule. Yeah, right. It was these two were actually great kids and the other two, the other few people I tried hiring just sucked.

That's just— it's the same thing with the apps. Like you just have to churn through people.

Yeah.

You do.

And so you find good hires.

80/20 rule is everywhere. It's a law of the universe, like gravity, literally. So you fire— you hire 10 people that appear to be rock stars. A year, 10 years from now, 2 of them will be rock stars.

Yeah.

The other 8, you filter through. But what you're going to learn is 5 years from now, you're going to have filtered through so many non-rock stars that your whole team will be rock stars.

And then you kind of have something to like, you know what to look out for.

Yeah. You just like your influencer strategy. Yeah. Then you're going to get better at identifying the rock stars so you don't have to churn through as many. That's what I would do. Like, that will make a lot of money if I were you.

That sounds sick.

Do you ever use YouTube or YouTube ads at all, or is it just TikTok?

I want to get into that now with the boxing one.

Okay. What about TikTok ads paid on TikTok?

Paid on TikTok?

We—

that's what we were doing for Wrestle when we were optimizing for downloads, but like never optimally.

Okay. All right. So we've talked a very specific playbook here, but if someone wanted to go out and start their own app, like you've done, what advice would you give them? What would the playbook be that we maybe haven't covered here?

Yeah, so like literally my zero to one is, well, obviously, obviously make the app maximize the most visually. So understand your app needs a gotcha feature, right? It needs one feature that you run advertising on.

Okay.

That feature, the job of it is to explain the entire app in 5 seconds.

Like it might not be the feature that they use the most, but it's the feature that's going to get them in the door.

Yeah.

Okay.

So visually, visually you should be able to look at your phone and understand exactly what it does. If you need to give your phone to your mom, if she doesn't understand what the app does, like it's not good.

Yeah.

Right. After you have that, I would then, and I get like flack for this, but like, this is what I would do if I needed to go from 0 to 1. I haven't done this for some of these other apps. Like I didn't do this for SAI, but I've done this before and it works. Bought up your Instagram account.

Bought it?

Yeah. Like when you're a brand, pay for the verification, pay for followers in the beginning.

Okay. You're— where do you go to pay for followers?

There's a site, Mowsa.

Mowsa.

Yeah, it's M-O-W-E-S-A.

And it costs next to nothing.

It's $1 per whatever, per 1,000 followers.

Okay, and you're saying it's worth it just for social proof?

In the beginning of your outreach, you're gonna get— so the biggest problem is when you're gonna be outreaching into the void in the beginning.

You're gonna be sending DMs.

They're gonna look at your profile. They're gonna click on your profile. You're gonna see, bro, this guy has zero followers. Why would I work with him?

Yeah.

If they see that you, you have The 3, so your first 3 posts should just be like shots of the product that look really nice. You should have like 15,000-ish followers.

Okay.

Pay for the verification if you can, right? And then once they see that, the likelihood of them working with you doubled.

Do you pay for views on those 3 videos?

No.

Doesn't even matter? No.

I mean, to be honest, I didn't really do the— I did the bot following before, but usually when you start collab posting with a lot of your influencers, that's the best bet. So once these influencers, once your first 5 influencers start posting, push for the first, like, their first videos to all be collabs because now your page looks even nicer. It's, I have a, I'm looking at a brand, I could see the videos, I could see other creators that have worked with them. I may know them, right? He's getting thousands of thousands of, like, hundreds of thousands of views. He has a lot of followers. His, like, account looks very neat and professional.

Yeah, yeah.

And you're a legitimate person. And when you're a legitimate person, right? So if I worked with 10 influencers that this guy knows and I offer him a cheap rate, he's just gonna think that that's the rates. Yeah, right. Yeah, he's gonna be like, okay, these are the rates. I either accept it or I don't, but these are the rates. I'm not getting gypped, right? I see these guys work with them, right? If I'm a no-name and I'm just some kid, right, which I've been just some kid, so I know this. Yeah. And then I offer you like $2 CPM and I get like laughed in my face. Oh, you're just a broke kid who like knows nothing about this.

Yeah.

Doesn't matter. It like doesn't matter. If your account looks professional though, they're much likely to take a deal.

Yeah.

For cheaper. And so that's my main strategy. The DM, you send as many DMs as you can. The DM should be paid promo and the paid promo for app name. That should be the first line always. Experiment with it. I would say because a lot of people are doing that now. But you just want to— because they're going to look at your DM through that little— yeah, like the preview, the first like 4 words.

Yeah, before they click on—

before it gets like cut off by the dots. Yeah, right. Some of them won't even click on it. So if they see paid promo, the likelihood of them—

I'm gonna get money.

I'm exactly— that's the first thought that gets like sent to their head. Oh, I'll make money off this guy.

Yeah.

Um, send as many DMs as you can. Um, I would say after you make your first $1,000, hire a VA instantly. The ROI is infinite on VAs.

Yeah.

And experiment with meta ads. But I wouldn't experiment if you don't have, I'm going to say $3,000. So like if you're not willing to spend $3K on ads, I wouldn't do it.

Just do this outreach stuff first.

I would do influencers and wait. Influencers, I would do influencers only. If you have over $3K, I would say yeah.

How many, what's like the minimum amount of followers you want out of an influencer?

I honestly don't care about followers. I care about average views.

Okay. What are you looking for? $25,000 average. So some are $5,000, some are $50,000, some are $100,000. Yeah. Okay. So if we were starting Basketball AI.

Yeah.

You're going to go reserve the handle on Instagram, Basketball AI. Is that what you're going to first start? Okay. You're going to seed it with 15,000 fake followers for $15 or $20.

Yeah.

Then you're going to make a few videos that look nice, post them. Doesn't matter how many views they have. They just need to see you've posted something. You're going to get very—

you need posts of your, like, like Product shots, basically. Gotcha. Like statics of your—

Gotcha. Then you're going to get Meta Verified, which is like $20 a month, $16 a month with the blue checkmark. Then you're going to start doing outreach that starts with paid promo for Basketball AI.

Yeah.

That's a playbook.

And then you just send as many DMs as you possibly can.

Okay. And then you, I mean, you, you vibe code the app. Use it for work or whatever.

Yeah. You just build out the app.

And you want to have one killer feature. You want to test all of your killer features in your ads or in your, your organic videos, but find the one that seems to resonate most and then triple down on that.

Yeah.

And that gets them in the door whether they end up—

I would say reverse actually. So you should have an idea of which feature was going to be the best and I would first only push that feature.

Yeah.

And then experiment.

Yeah. It has to be visually simple to explain.

Yeah. Like Wrestle AI, when we saw that like our influencers would saturate, like, okay, they kept posting about Wrestle AI and like the results weren't starting to like lessen per video, we would then have them introduce another feature of the app. And that's when then re-triggered the jumps.

Gotcha. It's like a brand new app.

Yeah, it's like, it's like another side of the app that they haven't seen before.

Yeah, okay.

And it educates them more.

So you started this less than a year ago. What has your revenue been to date so far across all of these projects?

So to date, I think $225,000.

In like 9 months of building vibe coding apps without any coding experience?

Yeah.

Gosh, quarter million dollars. Most of that profit. Yeah, a lot of time for sure. You paid a VA, you paid your influencers, but— and maybe if like whatever ate into your profit was just paid ad spend that will pay profits in the future. Does that make sense?

Yeah, exactly.

Like your percentage profit would have been much higher even if your revenue would have been lower had you not done paid ads.

So I used to be super worried about profit. Like I used to sit there and like try to max— like it's like you should do it and at times you should do maximize profit, right? But— and the reason I did that was because I was very— I had a lot of limiting beliefs when first started making money on Wrestle AI. I was like, all right, tomorrow the app's going to die. Tomorrow the app's going to die. How many wrestlers are there? I'm going to run out of wrestlers. I'm going to this and I'm going to that. That I hate. Like, I think that was the biggest thing that held me back.

Yeah, scarcity mindset.

Scarcity. Just think, I thought I was going to run out of wrestlers. I thought I was like, oh, that's it, I'm just going to run out of wrestlers. And then I would have spent all the money to acquire them and I would never make any more. I don't know, right? Yeah, it doesn't really mean— I was just like, it was just like a fear.

Right, right. It's natural now.

Like, that's why these new apps— I don't like— before, like, a 50% margin wouldn't like excite me. I would be like, like a 50%, like, 2x ROAS wasn't what I was aiming for, right? Especially because I only had $1,000. So at the time, I needed more than a 2x ROAS. Then once I got money, I would be like, bro, 2x ROAS, then I'm losing this money. And then I'm like, what? Now that I understand, like, okay, like, you should just try scaling things to be as big as possible. Like, now, 2x ROAS, I'm like, alright, dude, I'm gonna scale this up until my CAC payback's like 90 days. Yeah, especially because I don't need the money now. Like, I have money set aside. Like, so like, now that I'm leaving this job, I literally set money to the side. This is what I'm gonna live on. I have like, this is my like, my personal runway is like 6 months to a year. Yeah, right. I'm in like, like, if I need be, I'll go to like Thailand and like, you don't have to. No, what I'm saying is like, any means necessary, right? I don't care at all. Like, I'm not even gonna think about profit. I just want to make the— like, I just want to grow the business to be as big as possible for these next 6 months.

Yeah. And the profit will come. Yeah. Any other tips of advice that you may have missed that people should learn?

It's really just don't have limiting beliefs and just keep, like, keep doing different things until it works.

Yeah.

Like, keep trying stuff.

I always say test everything except drugs.

Yeah, exactly.

That's my catchphrase on this. George, this has been amazing.

This is awesome.

Where can people find you?

Uh, I have, like, I have an X that, like, I post on sometimes.

Okay. We'll link to that.

Cool.

Um, thank you.

Thank you. I was, I've been dreaming about my first, uh, in-person podcast since I was first live coding my first app. This is what I was thinking about. Dude, this is awesome.

Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because you haven't had a chance to take your AirPods out. You're still mowing the lawn. You're still driving. What have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a 5-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. It would mean a lot if you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.