The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - 19 Year Old Made $225K in 9 Months Vibe Coding (No Experience) - Ep. #318

Episode Date: July 17, 2026

Get 30 days free on HighLevel only with my link: ⁠https://www.gohighlevel.com/TKOPOD⁠⸻Ride the AI tidal wave together. Join the community of consultants learning to charge $500–$5k/mo :⁠⁠���https://playmakersai.com/⁠⁠━Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━I sat down with George to break down how he generated roughly $225,000 in nine months building AI-powered mobile apps without any coding experience. He shared how he launched WrestleAI, grew it through niche influencers, and used paid ads to scale two newer apps to $10K in just 45 days. We also walked through his exact app launch playbook, including finding a strong visual feature, partnering with creators, testing Meta ads, and building recurring revenue through yearly subscriptions. Finally, we talked about his goal of reaching $1 million in revenue before turning 20 and whether he should focus on one major company or build an entire portfolio of niche apps.You can follow George on X at https://x.com/GeorgeLampro20Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn more about me: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Learn about my company: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Share this podcast: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---

What has your revenue been to date so far across all of these projects? So to date, I think 225,000. In like nine 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 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 who was going to go anywhere. I just did it because I wanted to see if it was possible. This is insane. I don't know what I'm doing. I have a full business from software. And I don't know anything about coding. Yeah. These two latest apps are able to scale both to 10K in 45 days.

What'd you do in December again? So December we did 30. And then January, we did 40. 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 three different apps that are generating revenue. The one that generated most of it.

it technically for it but one that generated almost like almost all of it up to this date has been uh wrestling i and then dude i didn't even know you're wrestling this is awesome yeah yeah and then the last two months has been uh i've really talked about about i'm like publicly but it's like uh they're like these two other apps i've been like 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 i have a full-time job so 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.

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 apps. Yeah, it's like fully mobile. And I built my first app through them. Well, I built my first app called Fight AI, which was like I just built it for myself. And it was like a test app. Then Ressly, I 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 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 them. Yeah.

I would like tell them 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. So I joined like December. It was like, yeah, it was only like, it was like two months into wrestling. I was like, I'd then just fully pivoted and. to like full time on Roark. And like when I, when I do something, I wanted to go, like, I still had focus on

RESTLAI, but thank God in those two 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, it wasn't like, I was joining like a ran. It wasn't a nine to five 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 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. Nice. Okay, so let's back up. I want to get to all that, but.

Yeah, it's all good. You're in high school in Long Island. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

So you were in high school, wrestling? Yeah. Barcity. 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? I was starting tons of different businesses. I've done like everything. Let's list them off.

Okay. Everything you can remember. Probably had like four, like, YouTube channels, like growing up. What types of channels? That. So I remember when I was really young, I was into college. I had like a comics thing. I had 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. 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. Bro do like like stories and stuff like that. Yeah. 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 drop shipping. 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 supplement company around the same time. Fight AI. Yeah. And they both made around 2k total, uh, like in a month within a month. Dang. Okay. And you start them around the same time. Around the same like I started the settlement 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 fun. I didn't think he 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 there. Sorry, what was the premise of Fight AI? It was like wrestling AI where it's like you upload a video of your match or your training. And it gives you a breakdown on how to get better. Okay. It gives you like breakdown, strengths, weaknesses, how to improve. For boxing specific?

For Fight AI was MMA. Okay. So it was everything. So you take a, they would take a video of them doing MMA. Shadow boxing, let's say. Or like shadow sparring, whatever. Upload it and then your app, it's just a rapper, right? Yeah, no, no, no.

There's nothing demeaning. I have a rapper. Rappers are awesome. And it's just saying, like, do this, your form is this, try this. And what were you charging for it? 10 bucks a month, 60 for a year. Okay. And how did you even promote that?

So I just posted, like, me and my friend who was like, he was like, y'all, I'll help you. I was like, I'll help you. And he has got like an eye for content. Yeah. And he just, we just posted about it. Like, just post a, like, a few dumb videos on Instagram. Just 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 made for FightAI and we post 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 bucks. It was like 500 MRI. And then I was like looking at it. And I was like, dude, it's like a car like. Yeah.

It's like, this is insane. 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, there's zero margin. Like, what am I doing with this supplement? Yeah, so that's what I immediately like throughout this thought.

I was like, screw it. Let's just focus on this. Yeah. Because I also have a friend, Zach, from Calai. Oh, that's your friend? Yeah, he went to my same high school. No way. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, he just sold it, right? Yeah, he just sold it to my fitness bill. 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%. 100%.

Yeah. And from there, that's when I was like, okay, I'm just going to 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 was a smart guy, 100%. But he's like, I don't know, like he's human. You know what I mean?

He's like, he's like a funny kid. He was 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. By God. Like, you didn't look at him like, that kid's going to 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 where did that feeling come from? Because 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. Like. Oh, I am.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what type of supplement brand was it? What were you saying? It was the neutropics. 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. I did like, I forgot what it was called, it was a contract manufacturer or something. Yeah. Where we gave the ingredients to the person. Uh-huh. And they, uh, they assembled it. 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. 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 three, probably two to three. What type? What are your drugs of choice? Uh, ghost, Celsius. Okay, well, those two, yeah. This is my number one, the Kiwi-Guava. Nice. Have you had the, uh, grape? Yeah, it's good. It really, it's my favorite. Really? No, I like it. It's probably like number three for me. Grape and peach, the fizz free one. Fizz free. I can't, I can't even try that. Really? Like, why would you not put fizz in an energy? Because it's like, it's like green tea. I don't

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 two.

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 this past few months. It's been getting like ghosts have been getting like too extreme. Yeah.

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, we like, we just abandoned it. Yeah. Dude, all of all the while, you're learning how to vibe code. You're learning paid ads, which like vibe coding and paid ads. That's like, that's it. That's really all you mean. 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, 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 because really what you're saying anyone can do 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 you like i 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. So I didn't need a perfect product.

I didn't need it, like whatever. I just needed people. Okay. But the cam is smaller. Yeah. Okay. So FI. What month and year is this when you did the FIAI and the supplement?

So it's actually exactly a year today, which is sick. You just graduated? So, yeah. So your first summer. Yeah. 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, man, six hundred milligrams 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 going to 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 emotion. Yeah. What was college? Where was that supposed to be?

St. John's. St. John. They have a basketball team, right? Yeah, they do. Okay. And that's, yeah.

And that's in New York? Yeah, it's in New York. Long Island? It's in Jamaica, Queens. Not a, not, I mean, it's, it's an okay school. I don't like hate on everyone that goes there. It's like the end of the subway, right? But, uh, yeah, it's like, I was like, yeah, I was not happy to be young.

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. Like, you, I think everyone should. Don't regret it. I think everyone should. Yeah.

Like, I don't think you should just be, like, like, have an ego. You should put effort towards something. thing. Yeah. And so, but I never did. Yeah. So it's always, uh, 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 three point. It was like, I had like an 85 average, probably. That's the same same as me. I was like three point three. Yeah, probably around there. Something like that. Yeah. But most of that was just from cheating on my assignments for my friends. I mean, and I could have done it. Like I had the brain power, but I was just lazier. It was just procrastinate.

Yeah. Okay. What all schools did you get into or apply to? I applied to Penn State and got rejected, and that's where most of my friends went. Okay, it's a good wrestling school. Yeah. And I'm actually so happy I got rejected, though. Hindsight. Yeah, I'm sure. Because 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, I would have lost it. You'd be in the frat world. You wouldn't be building stuff. Yeah.

I think it would have been. I would have had a lot of fun, but you're having fun doing this too, right? Yeah. So it's like fun is subjective. All right. So it was June or July 2025 when you were building these? Yeah, July, July 2nd, we released the first app. Fight AI.

Fight AI, yeah. Okay. And your supplement brand was a couple weeks old at this point or so? It was like over probably two months old. Okay. Okay, so you released FiveD 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 we did like 1800 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. So, yeah, it still works. Yeah, it actually, because we found one guy with a cultic following. So like, in the space? Yeah, this guy, Tony has died. Absolutely 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. Really? Just for like selling out? He had this weird cultic following. So they would all be like, we're going to kill Tonya's died. They're starting like death chance in the comments. That's just like the culture of his following. Because he made like he posts weird memes.

So it formed this like sick culture. Yeah, yeah. But it shot our engagement up. So we would post like, we 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? And 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 comment. But their hate made it perform better as an ad. Exactly. 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 with like my, like, whatever. It was like, it just wasn't working with like continuing to scale. Mm-hmm. So we stopped focusing on it.

And then that's when I met my partner for wrestling AI. And we took, like, he was a wrestling influencer. So from there, we stopped working on wrestling AI entirely. We stopped working on fighting AI entirely. Still to this day, Fight AI does over one KM on. By itself. Just by itself. Do you know what the churn is?

Because like, that could mean you try. turn everyone every month and you replace them every month or it could mean no one knew was joining and your turn 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 it's also, yeah, we do also have like organically people coming. I have no idea how it's still making this month like money. Yeah. It's just like, you're not supporting it or we haven't touched it. Like literally. What model do you use on the back end for that? Uh, GPD.

Which one? Uh, I think like four 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. Uh, where did you find your wrestling influencer partner? So for, so my first like thing whenever I made any money was like I hired a VA.

Mm-hmm. Which I recommend everyone do. VAs. Where do you find him? Um, I source them through either five 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

four 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 him like a DM script. So it's paid promo for the app. Pays promo for the app. Sentence about what the app does. Love the content. We'd love to work with you. Um, we pay. So back then we were paying like $2. CPM. So we really did this for us. Yeah. That's where like influencers blew up wrestling. He's only influencers we never did pay. And we were paying basically a two dollar 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 five dollar CPM and it converts that well. It converts decent. And then his videos is paid ads are like insane. So taking that out yeah, he was the first one. He was 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 push paid behind it. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. We never pushed crazy paid for Russell, but he was like the only, because we were optimizing for installs. We didn't even know how to optimize for trials back then. Yeah. It was so bad. I was learning as I went, but, uh. So that's kind of the playbook is optimized for installs.

No, I used to say always optimized for purchase. I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to coat. Okay. So I was looking at this like black box and I was like, uh, I was like, uh, I was like, I had like a developer from Pakistan, this guy Usama, who also helped me out. Absolute goat. It's the greatest guy ever.

And I don't think he knew how to set up the optimized for purchases either. Or he did. Or he did and maybe I didn't tell him, right? So 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 started the job too. So I was like, I don't have time to figure this out, whatever. Now I figured it out. now I understand. It's actually super simple and that's being an idiot.

But so we're just optimizing for installs. But if you want 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 going to start in August. You don't want to start in August.

You're stressed out because you put this artificial pressure on yourself. Yeah. To be a billionaire before you have to start college, whatever. Okay. So then you start Phi AI in early July. Do you ever start college? What happens after that? Yeah, yeah, I started.

So I, so Friday I started. My VA reached out to, reaching out to a bunch of people in the niche. We talked to a few different people. We talked to, um, then I see this guy, one of the people that I reached out to is 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. Okay. So that just happened to be someone that the VA reached out to. So, no, no, no, not even them. I'm sorry. I'm messing on 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 Kate and Henshaw, right? He goes, I met him once and, like, we exchanged. Yeah. And I go, I'll, like, he didn't know him. Not crazy well. Yeah. And I go, I'll, like, pay you whatever if you just send this DM, right? And he sent the DM. And he sent the

DM, right? He said like, send the DM, which is basically like, I want to rebuild Fight AI, but for 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 it does this do just wrestling? And I said, I like, he sent the DM. And I sent this guy like 17 emails and four DMs on every platform. So you're going all in on Caden Henshow. 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 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. Kaden finally gets back to my email. And now I'm like sitting there. I'm shaking, right? Because 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, like, my dream was 10K a month at the time. Yeah.

So I sent him my phone number because like emails like are the worst. Yeah. So I send him my phone, like the first email, I send him my phone number and I'm like, hey, my email gets like messed up. You just text me and I'm like, oh, he's not going to 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 by the eye. I go, look, this is what my conversion rates are, right? So 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, I want to do this with you will 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. So what do you say? So he goes, dude, this looks awesome. Like, I don't know if I'm ready to, like, commit or whatever. He goes, because, like, I don't know how this looks, but, like, I'm very interested. And I go, hi, 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. I'll show you like something next week. Let's hop on another call and then from there we'll like 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 sonnet 3.5. It was like terrible. Yeah. You had to like it was evil. Yeah. So we built. I built out like this MVP in a week. I showed it to him.

He's like, well, this is insane. I go now imagine like what's what's going to look like in a month. And then. And 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 two 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 going to, 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 two hours.

They're not telling me any terms of their deals, though. Yeah. So they have a partnership. They could be their janitors. That's considered a partnership. Right. I have a partnership with Google, aka I 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 going to 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 at Kaden. I think Kaden's one of the most influential people in this space. I think with just him we could like take over the space. Yeah. And I was on this call too. Yeah. And I go and I fully believe in our product.

And then I called Kaden 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 a Kaden. They were mad that I got there first. Yeah. And I called Kaden.

I'm like, look, like, I don't want to work with these guys. And he goes, yeah, I fully agree. I don't think they, like, represent our 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 like 8K in the first week.

And I was like, holy. And then like, that guy got. like obliterated. He de-connected the website. Really? He owned wrestlingai.com. Yeah. He still, does he still own it? I 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. Okay. We have wrestlingai.com. But our AS, like our SEO is all above his. You have, what is your domain? Russellai. Dot 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 legitimate. Right.

Right. Yeah. Whether they do or don't, like, they're a big name. All right. So what month does all this go down? You start college in August. This was all September. So end of September, September 26, 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 wrestling app. And I released another app around two weeks later that I put like no effort in. What app was that? It was this like, it was like, it was like, it's called green. This app I hate I hate I had another partner. So another guy hit me up. Like this influencer I hit up and like they finally got back to me around once I released wrestling I I was like okay maybe the striis 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 skit like you 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 yeah at the time so I'm sitting there making this app which it was gonna be like you know Have you ever heard of RISGPT? Yes.

It was going to be like that. It was like a clone of that. Okay. And this is also why I pushed back against clones. So he had a super like low intent audience and we were making like a slop app to be honest. And we had no pat. Like wrestling I had super.

I was like super passionate about building. Mm-hmm. Because like I wrestled. So I wanted to build a tool that I really generally 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 couple weeks after. How does that launch go? So yeah, so they both, and I feel like, I wish I bringing this up because I feel like it's so 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, yeah, yeah, 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.

Russell AI, the first month, did 17K, right? Green did $35. So, like, every time someone's like distribution, distribution, distribution, distribution, you need to make sure what the right people. Yeah. 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. That blows my mind. That's what I always try to say.

Because, like, I, some people come to me with these ideas and, like, yeah. You have to make sure it's like a good idea and you're passionate about it. 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 that I'll get 40,000 followers. 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 40,000 and 40 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. My gosh. Okay. So after that $35 launch, you're just like, no. I was so happy because I was really afraid that this is going to make way more than

Ressly Eye. Yeah. I was like, I was like, I'm going to be, I'm going to be known as the Ridge GPT. No, not even that. I just didn't want to be known as like the Ridge GBT guy. Right? I was like, I'm going to be known of the guy who makes like this. Slop, right?

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, I'm only focusing on Restle AI. Because I was also only mainly focusing on wrestling. I was working on this, like, very little. Yeah. So then in Wrestling Ai, month one, the last week of month one, we did around like 2K in revenue. Okay.

Which was lower than all the other weeks. 10K first week. It was like 8K first week. Okay. Okay. I don't remember like, six, four, two, something like that. So it's like, it's going down a little bit. It had a huge up and then it's starting to fizzle.

Okay. And then from there, that's when I sat there and it was like, all right. And then my part, like, Katie also started getting a bit busy. He was doing RIF, right, which is like completely fair. It's 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, know, Armin, Zerukian, the UFC fighter? No. You know who comes on? No. No?

No. Oh. Oh. Oh. 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 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 eight 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. High level replaces all of it.

CRM, email, SMS, funnels, websites, calendars, automations, reputation management, invoicing, one login, one dashboard, one bill, starting at 97 bucks a month. A guy in my community was paying $3.47 just for click funnels. 99 for Mailchimp, $25 for calendar, $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 high level 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 of 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 ask for 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 $2,500 bucks a month. Check out go highlevel.com slash TKO pod. 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 a hundred and something thousand. And he posted it to his account? Yeah. Okay. And did you push paid behind that at all? Now we pushed no paid and like only until like January we started pushing paid. Okay. And what did you charge for this up for us? Same same price 10 months, 60 year. Okay.

Um, we recently added abandoned yearly. So like, like if you click like X, it'll give you like a discount offer. Okay. Okay. What do most people choose between 10 bucks 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 working. Which 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. Because your LTV will probably be higher on Monfley's. 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, 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 wrestling a eye. 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 wrestling. And another thing I didn't realize is because wrestling is a small niche and we had Kden posting about it, our response rate was insane. Right? After Kate, because he puts a like a brand reputation. Exactly. Yeah.

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. That good. Okay. Our first deal mean Corey now he's made thousands of dollars. He's doing well

But my first deal between me and him was Four videos. Was it four videos? Yeah, it was four videos for it was either no, I think it was six videos for four hundred bucks Yeah, yeah six videos for four hundred bucks seventy bucks in post okay right and He was like very he was pretty new as well. Um and Calli I also sponsored him right? Mm-hmm so what type of of influencer is he? He's wrestling influencer and he posts like day and the life content. Okay. Right. Okay. So 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 wrestling AI up until like 30 to 40 seconds in. And he does a Cal AI sponsorship before he does. No. Dude. Right. And I'm looking at them, whatever. Like I'll tell him next time. Like he can't do that. This and that. The video crushed. Hmm. 500k views and we made over 5K.K.0.000. of it because no one cared about the CalAI sponsorship.

All they saw was, what do you mean this app can analyze my wrestling footage? Right. While we know, it did well for Cal AI too. Yeah, maybe it probably did well for CaliA, probably not the same though. Yeah. Like, we were able to tell by the comments. Like that's what I was like looking out. So everyone was going insane.

Like what the hell this app does this and that? So now I'm like, I don't care if there's a CaliI sponsorship or not. Like I'm riding high. I'm like this is insane. I just paid 40 bucks to get 5,000. Yeah. Yeah. 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 going to start spreading your word to other influencers so 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 around there then we cut down to like six seven Right? Like in towards like the ends. Six or seven trusted. Great people.

Like absolute. You just use over and over. Yeah. Okay. And yeah. And from there, that's, that was, that drove most of all of our growth. How did his other, what, six videos do? They all did great.

Okay. So like, as well? 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 in the first month. months two, three, four plus look like. So yeah, so Apple is holding all of it. Yeah, Apple was holding 17 K that we're gonna get paid out in December. So all I had was like a thousand bucks in my bank account that I had to sustain growth with in October. Yeah, I had to sustain growth with and like to make sure that like we're not only relying on Kden and like I just got super scrappy with this thousand bucks.

Constraints equal creativity. Yeah. And and and then we were able to do we were able to do like, I think it was either like it was like 19 like a little bit 19 on a little bit. The second month. So it wasn't crazy growth. 1000? Yeah, yeah. Still.

Yeah, we still were able to grow. Because you're trending downwards at the end of the first. Yeah. And you turn it around. We were able to turn it around and get to like 19. Yeah. And how did you do that?

More Kaden videos? More other influencers? Other influencers and Kaden. So that's your only growth playbook for the first few months. Yeah, it was just organic influencers. Were you paying flat fee per video like you did with? Some flat, some CPM.

And what CPM did you start with? Two. Two and two. Two and two. Okay. Now, when is that paid out, though?

because a video can keep going for a while, right? Yeah, 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 effective CPM is a sub a dollar.

So an average deal would be like a video that gets 100,000 views. A week later, you pay him 200 bucks. Yeah. But then it might get over the next two months, another 100,000 miles. 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. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Some, yeah. Some, some would keep going. Others would die out. Like we 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 and comment 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 like,

marketers, like, they probably don't really know that stuff. Yeah, and if we saw the, like, it wasn't driving in gate, like, if 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 those? So I just built out, like, this sick internal tool. Your own? Yeah, it tracks. I run my entire business. on it. Really? My med ads, my creators, like literally, contracts are sent through it. That's cool. Super easy. And then I have

Claude, like with Post Hog as well. Post Hog? 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 like, like a like Claude trained on all these like data sources. And then I'll be like, hey, what are like the numbers for today? What's my P&L? Like what's this? Yeah. It's 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. And 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... Sorry, September was your first month or October? End of September or 26. 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 maybe over to go. Because there's just not, the biggest bottleneck for us was fine. Like we started running out of, we started running out of influencers. Yeah. My next question was like, how many are there?

That was like our big thing. A couple hundred? Yeah. And then. Sorry, are you reaching out to athletes too? Like, I'm gonna, I'm, I'm thinking like David Taylor, like Bo Nickel. Yeah. D1.

We have a video from Bo. Really? Yeah, we have a video from Bo. This guy, we, I really wanted to work with Daniel Sabita. Zabita. We were in talks and then, like, I think he just got busy. Okay. Stop answering.

I followed up a few times, but we never closed a deal. Jack's Forrest. We were going to get deals with all these guys, yeah. Jack's Forrest, I don't know if you 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, like, 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 RBI White he's really great at content we tried getting him a ton of time 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 the fact that wrestling season there's our best season. It was when you were doing this, you're saying. Like right now it's not. Right now it's not, but now it is.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So maybe now it 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 would be the best strategy. Well, I was actually thinking about something similar. I want to hire one of our creators. Yeah, just upload it to them.

But I haven't offered him yet. I'm going to send the offer. probably late July. Okay. Because right now we're like chilling because it's like we're out of season. Because you'd probably rather have 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 did you do in December again?

So December we did 30. And then 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 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, like, I mean, it wasn't the plan because I didn't meet Kate until August. But like I told Kayin,

like we got to make sure, like we're getting this for the peak for the wrestling season. Okay, so January 30, you said? January 40. So 30 in December. 40 in January, yeah.

And this is like... In January, by the way, January, I was first month in my full-time job. It worked maybe four hours on it. And this is like, we say revenue, but it's either monthly recurring or yearly recurring. Yeah. Like it's, so it's recurring. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. 40 in January, which is wild. So you're October and November. You're four months in, 40 grand. February is crunch time. that's like season's kind of ending yeah um conference championships yeah yeah and like the begin like the wrestlers were like quitters they're starting to quit yeah but we still had a great month we still did you say quitters you mean like mostly high school wrestlers is that like yeah yeah yeah because there's a zillion more high school wrestlers

in college yeah yeah high schools are biggest okay so they're and peewee's 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 take. So what were your sales in February? It was still like 30-ish. Okay. It was like 28.

And it's a shorter month. Yeah, it was like 28. And we, uh, and like, that was pretty much it. Like, it wasn't bad. We were still very profitable. Like, because I think like our total, like, our expense are very low. How are you managing this 50-50 partnership and expenses? Like, are you making a cash distribution every month?

Yeah. So. So we started taking out in like December-ish. And it was basically, like I told, in the beginning, I told him, like, I want to scale this as much as well. 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 influx? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Token costs. Was that very high?

No. Our most expensive month. was January, it was 2K. And what model we're using, or are you using for this? I don't even remember. It was the best Open AI model. Still 4-0, GPT-40? I think this may have been five.

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 five times. An 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 five times, it's like, okay, you're running out of matches and you're starting to get like, like, 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. So we did to combat that. And we saw once we started adding this stuff, like our turn went from like this, like this. Adding what? Calorie tracker feature to make sure like wrestlers are really 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 Cal AI and they just take a picture and up there yeah we had like all the options to track calories okay like same as my fitness bell okay barcode database everything to implement like tedious we did just APIs you're just plugging into database of food exactly we're just using image recognition yeah okay um so the calorie tracker is big and And 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. Yeah, exactly. You got match Wednesday. Yeah. And then we also added like stance in motion mode.

We'd call out for you and like do your callouts. Like the app would tell you to do stuff? Shots for all circle. Yeah. That's cool. People like that? Yeah. People liked it because like if you don't have your coach, you're trying to like drill alone.

You want like you kind of like stance and 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. Hmm. That, I feel like that one was never as big. Because I feel like we could have made it better.

Kind of gimmicky? 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 analyzed 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, 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 kale does an arm bar, he, you know, like, like, 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. Surprises you. Yeah.

It could have rolled through. You could have done this and that. Okay. But like the most, 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. Well, yeah. Because I got really good at the fundamental.

Well, and that's the most broad. Yeah. Like if you're getting really technical, then it goes over the head of 90% of wrestling. 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. Uh-huh. But that's her floor. Did you see church? That's all monthlies. 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. That's what caused the revenue decline. Yeah, yeah. But it did like, didn't ring yet. It increased. But it wasn't like. I was expecting February 1st hits. Yeah.

Zero subs. That's what it was in my mind. I'm like, all right. Like, it is what it is. Like, I knew that this was going to happen. I, like, braced myself for it. Yeah. 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 was coming from yearlies. Gotcha. 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 we stopped. 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, like, for the next few months now until August, we're just going to 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 one LTV is like the average user purchases is around 25 bucks. 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. Yeah. Yeah, I would say, I would say around. there. Okay. So if you spend $1,000 on videos, like $2 RPM for 500,000 views, um, you spend $1,000 on like normal times. How much in revenue do you expect that to return

to you? So we spend $1,000 on influencers and, um, we'd probably expect back. So if I spend a thousand bucks at $2 CPM, a $2 CPM should yield back like a $5 to $10 RPM. So we should see back like 2,500 to 5K. Okay. So two to five X return on ads bend. Yeah. Give or take. Now I scale things differently, though.

So for these latest two apps, especially because the way I run these latest two apps, instead of like a influencer or whatever, I have like just a kid I trust who like I could basically tell what to do and they'll do it. Okay. Like since I'm working too, I only have like, let's say three 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 and like 45 days and it was solely through just creators and med 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 didn't know how you can't you can yeah yeah you can't you'll yeah yeah Exactly. Especially when the season starts. Yeah. Okay, so is the playbook, find the right

influencer, find out what, 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 organically 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 facts 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. For paid, it's too subtle. For paid, you need to 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. Okay. Okay. Organic, you have at least like 30. Um, paid maybe you even have a less window. Yeah. Um, 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 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 they make the video, it'll be something super simple that like gets 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 Russell AI is what you're saying. Somewhat, yeah. So it's like, for example. Yeah. Give me like the script. Like the boxing app, right?

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

Throws the specific exchange. I now know that. Exactly. He would throw this specific exchange. Bang. Hit him. Well, 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? And that would be that's really the ad. That's the script. How long is the entire video? 30 seconds probably. Okay. So the influencer will take this video.

Will he edit it or you? No, he edits it. He edits it, sends it to? He never posts it? Never post it. Now when you push it. Sometimes they post it. Sometimes we take videos that they post.

They can. You don't need them to. It's just a bonus if they post it. So most of the time, like most of the time we work with influencers, we tell them to post it. Like, well, they'll make videos to post. 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 we'll make paid ads for us. Okay. So they're like two separate deals.

Gotcha. Okay. So 30 seconds long, you mention 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 sloped 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 up to you. 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 day. We make around 9 to 12 back. Okay. Right up front or that's like LTV? No, day one. Okay. I know.

So I really want to scale it. But now. And that's recurring though. Yeah. Okay. So you spend 400 on a Tuesday. And on Tuesday, you make 9 to 1, day 1, but that's also recurring. Yeah.

So day one is like 2 to 4x return on ad spend. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lifetime is much higher. Yeah, so that's why we're now getting into Revenue Cat payments. So I've been just funding the project myself, right? Mm-hmm. So what we're doing is we're getting Revenue Cat. Revenue Cat has a thing called, do you know what Revenue Cat is?

Never heard of it. So Revenue Cat is like the paywall provider for apps. So it knows all of your paywall statistics and stuff like that. Okay. Right. What they also do is they have a program called Revenue Cap 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 we can put more into pay. 2%. Otherwise, you're taking 60 days to get that money. Exactly. Okay. So how much do they take?

2%. Okay. At the end of the month. It's not bad if you have that, if you have like heavy row ads, like day one row ads. 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, that'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. Like the other guy's working very hard. Yeah. Thank you. He's a great guy. This is the guy you said, Osama?

No, no, no. He's just a kid I know that's like he's smart. Okay. So my R.E. Smart. I know if I tell them what to do, like, do it and he'll do it well. Okay. 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? 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 like North Star metric is how much are their users making. Okay. And that's why Rourke is like, 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? Revenue cat. According to Revenue cat 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 competitors are focused on signups and like vanity metrics and they're like,

we want our customers to be successful. It's trying to be the shop effect for that after apps. Got you know what I mean? Gotcha. Like, I think that's the thing that wins. In my opinion, case studies are what wins long terms. Yeah. Calli.

I was built in Rourke. That's a huge. I didn't know that. No, it wasn't. I'm saying if it was. Oh, okay. It would be the biggest. Like, 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 actually. Info people are great at pushing stuff. Yeah. So if you have an info guy pushing Rourke and that being like a part of the process.

Gotcha. But I mean, info is a bit scamy, 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 can? 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, boxing. That's like the newest one. And then the other one's a workout one. Okay. It's for, yeah. Which I would think 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 six-pack. That's smart. Is that like what you thought of? See, I wasn't actually crazy about this idea. But I was like, when the kid told, so somebody hits me up on Twitter to do this. And 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.

Listen, he's going to crazy. I'm like, dude, you're telling me people are going to 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 I saw it there and I thought it was like so funny. Like I thought the idea was funny. But the kid had so much passionate about it that I just felt such a conviction. How do you say no to that? Yeah. I'm like, this kid's like sitting here. Like so passionate. There's no way this kid's not going to win. Like there's no way he's not going to win.

Yeah. Like I know he's going to win. Like the way he's talking to me, I know he's going to win. So it's my age. Okay. So he's super funny. Because like 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 think I just couldn't see it at the time. Right. But because it was like, because there's like a bunch of the looks maxing apps that kind of like they incorporate that. It gave a bad look to like the ratings style apps. Okay.

Yeah. Right. So I was thinking of is like, oh, it's another rating style app. But no, it's a huge niche. Like I agree. And,

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 ass six back. It gives it like a score out of 100. Okay. When we would just show the ratings, we got downloads and like churned with spike. Like it would 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. Yeah. Takes a picture of their six pack like uh whatever and then that would be that like hook hook scan what that's it. Um, and we found that like a lot of people it's sometimes people would download and they would subscribe but then they would turn 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-back. Okay. We never did like, I don't know, like we didn't think about this until after the guy doing crunches. Exactly. Instead of just a picture of a guy's app. It would show the workouts tailored to your abs 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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AI.com. So before we go heavy on the second app, tell me the, you said you're 45 days in to the fighting one. Both of Russell. 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 ones that like eight this month. Okay.

Because it also had problems with like the co-founder. Started bragging about it on X. Okay. Started tweeting like our converse. We have, on the workout one, we have a crazy conversion. We have like over 20% like download to bid. What is average? Average is so like a good, like average is like five.

Wow. Some people don't even get five. Yeah. You guys are at 20. Why do you think it's so different? We have 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 when 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 hit 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. 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, we'd say monthly subscriptions. It'd be like, it would be like, uh, 10 bucks. It'd be like, what, monthly.

It was like 1199. So it's like, I don't know, like two bucks a week or something, and 2.4. So it's like $2.40 a week and then $10 a month. And that's how it was listed, right? Because the weekly was, you could do that, but the weekly was above in a 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, are you kidding me? Like it was the same tech size name everything. But just the hierarchy of it. Yeah, because the weekly was above. And somebody had 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 click baits. He was like a moral way to increase your conversions.

Right? So it wasn't even the fact that we did it This was like really weird This was like the weirdest thing I've ever had with Apple Yeah They removed us for two weeks Right and I'm like making fun of the kid I'm like what you did

It's like he's super amped up He's like super hyped Yeah He's like dude I've been like whatever I've been dreaming this I'm like oh like what you did you And then we've spanned 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 two of a was broken in meta. Yeah. Right? For my account, two of a pay 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, it was like quick added everyone on LinkedIn that works at meta and I spammed them like begging them to fix it. There's always a there's always a way. Like don't accept anything at face value. Never. Never. So we people are like people just, I like to call it the throw your hands up out of it. 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 about like drive to Apple headquarters and protest to get, to get, like, reinstated. So we finally get a contact with Apple. They call us up, right? And I told him it's because of the tweet. We still don't 100% know it's the tweet. They never, 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 NARK? What's a loser, dude? This is a NAR used to go build some. It 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 her guidelines. Yeah.

You could argue it is, right? Yeah. It's the fact you made us look bad. Yeah. I believe it. And that's their, it's their pride. Yeah. And especially in Twitter.

Like, you have to understand Twitter's where investors are. Yeah. 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. followers on Twitter. Billionaire. Yeah, billion. 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. Um, so they were like, you made us look extremely bad, this and that. Um, 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. Oh, did you use AI write it up, moot 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, and thank God they approved. He like, the guy called us up after. He was like,

Ellen at us. He calls us up after. He's like super nice. You ever need anything like, get it? Let us know. I'm 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. Yeah. 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. I've found 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, 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, the NARC tweet. I'm not going to, I blocked him on everything. Got to hide that guy. He can't have that guy. It's just to 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 23 is the, uh, boxing on. Uh-huh.

And around 15 is the, uh, the workout. Workout one. How high do you think all three of these apps could go? Like, what does like scale look like? So my goal for the next, so I'm leaving, uh, potentially leaving work, right? Solely because I just want to focus on my own things. Mm-hmm. Um, I think the company's still great.

I have nothing but kind words to say about them. Mm-hmm. Um, but for the next six months, I, I want one big company. So, like, I don't want to be the guy with like, like, 10 different sasses. You could have an app studio. You could. You could. Yeah.

And that's what like my dilemma is. Like I know if I go and make a basketball out, I'll crush. I know, like I feel like you have the playbook. I have the confidence that I could go and crush in basketball or crush in hockey. Yeah. I could just take over sports. Yeah. Which is still something I'm considering.

But I also really have like a high desire to build one thing to be like, like, I have a high 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. 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 this same launch playbook over and over.

It doesn't have to look like scale your wrestling app as far as it can go. 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 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 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 going to do this tediously. We're going to have guys in Omaha, Nebraska, and 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 Beast of the East for high school. It's like a huge nationwide tournament or basically any D-1 match, you know, Iowa versus Iowa State, whatever.

So that was their whole playbook, paywalled from day one, $10 a month, $120 a year, whatever it was. and they started with wrestling. Their whole company was Flow Wrestling.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 live stream 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. school and college. So like you could do the same thing with your apps to. 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. Puntintended. Yeah. 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 going to take it. Well, what are you wrestling between? And like, it's either, what are the options in front of you? Either. So it's either, I'm still going to scale these apps that we currently have, right? Because it's like I have someone that like, because I, like, I could always hire, right? For wrestling I'm probably going to hire. I'm going to 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 going to get someone to do the wrestling 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 um a little bit of direction and like money yeah um 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 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 know function. I use function health and it seems like the same thing. Yeah. I pay 500 bucks. I get two blood panels a year. It all goes to the app and then they give me all this analysis.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think about maybe maybe potentially because it's higher ticket. But I don't know. I'm not sold on what what I would want to do that could be bigger or just scaling this up to like a hundred 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 LLC. That's what, yeah. Some of them you have partners, right? Yeah. The first, Hayden, what's it?

Caden. And you have different splits and like 50% is owned by George LLC. 50% is owned by him. That's how it's structured again. 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, 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 five 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. They could like run them. Why not? Why couldn't you? Because I've like, there, 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. So you find good hires. 80-20 rules everywhere. It's a law of the universe.

Like gravity, literally. So you hire 10 people that appear to be rock stars. A year, 10 years from now, two of them will be rock stars. Yeah. The other eight, you're filtered through. But what you're going to learn is five years from now, you're going to have filtered through so many non-rock stars that your whole team will be rock stars. Then you kind of have something to look after?

Yeah. Just like your influencer strategy. Then you're going to get better at identifying the rock stars so you don't have to churn through his buddy. 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? 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 to 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, 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 five seconds.

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 zero to one, I haven't done this for some of these other apps. Like I didn't do this for S-A-I, 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. Where do you go to pay for followers? There's a site Moses.

Moses. Yeah, it's M-O-W-E-S. And it costs next to nothing. It's a dollar per whatever, per thousand followers. Okay. And you're saying it's worth it just for social proof? In the beginning of your outreach, you're going to get, so the biggest problem is when you're, you're going to be outreaching into the void in the beginning. You're going to be sending DMs.

They're going to click on your profile. They're going to see, bro, this guy, zero followers. Why would I work with him? Yeah. If they see that you, you have the three, so your first three 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, do you pay for views on those three videos as well? It 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, when you start collab posting with a lot of your influencers, that's the best bet.

So once these influencers, once your first five influencers start posting, push for the first, like, their first videos to all be collabs. Because now your page looks even nicer. I'm looking at a brand. I could see the videos. I could see other creators that have worked with him. 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 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 going to think that that's the rates. Yeah. Right?

Yeah. He's just going to be like, okay, these are the rates. I either accept it or I don't. But these are the rates. I'm not getting jipped. Right. I see these guys worked 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. Yeah. And then I offer you like $2 CBM. I get like a laugh in my face. Oh, you're just a broke kid. You're 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. Um, for cheaper. And so that's my main strategy. Uh, 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

Experiments with it. I would say because a lot of people are doing that now But you just want to because they're gonna look at your DM through that little Yeah, the preview the first like four words. Yeah before they click on it 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 on it. I'm make money on it. I'm gonna be paid promo. I'm like Send to their head. Oh, I'll make money on it. off this guy. Yeah. Um, send as many DMs as you can. Um, I would say after you make your first thousand bucks hire a VA instantly, the ROI is infinite on VAs. Yeah. Um, and, and experiment

and experiment, if you don't have, I'm gonna say three grand to like, if you're not willing to like, if you're not willing to spend three K on ads, I wouldn't do it. Just do this outreach stuff first. I would do influencers and wait influencers. Influencers. I would do influencers only. If you have over 3k, I would say yeah. How many? How many? What's like the minimum amount of followers you want out of an influencer? I honestly don't care about followers. They care about average views. Okay.

What are you looking for? 25,000. Average. So some are five, some are 50, some are 100, some. Yeah. Okay. So if we were starting basketball AI, 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 seat it with 15,000 fake followers for 15 or 20 bucks. 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 product shots, basically. Gotcha. Like statics of your... Gotcha. Then you're going to get meta verified, which is like 20 bucks a month, $16 a month, with the blue check mark. 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 vibe code the app. Yeah. Ork 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. are in your organic videos, but find the one that seems to resonate the 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, Russell AI, when we saw that like our influencers would saturate, like, okay, they kept posting about us AI and like the results weren't starting at like

lesson per video. We would then have them introduce another feature. 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 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 nine 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've paid a VA. You've paid your influencers. But, and, and, Maybe if like whatever eight in 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 up. So I used to be super worried about profit. Like I used to sit there and like try to max like, like you should do it. And at times you should do max my profit. Right. But and the reason I did that was because I was very, I had a lot of limiting beliefs when I first started making money on wrestling.

I was like, all right. Tomorrow that 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 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 Roaz wasn't what I was aiming for, right? Especially because I only had a thousand bucks. So at the time, I needed more than a 2X ROAS. But 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 I, 2X ROAS.

I'm like, all right, do I'm going to 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 going to live on. I have like this is my like my personal runway is like six months to a year. Yeah. Right. And like if I need 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 going to think about profit. I just want to make the like I just want to grow the business to be as big as possible. Yeah. For these. six 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. I 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've, I've an X that I got post on sometimes. Okay. We'll link to that. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. I was, I've been dreaming about my first in-person podcast since I was first vibe coding my first tab. This is what I was thinking about. 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 mulling the lawn. You're still driving. What have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. 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.