743: $1,000 a Month with Simple Vibe-Coded Apps

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Steve Young, welcome back to the Side Hustle Show. It's been a little while, it's a decade, man. It's been crazy, Nate. I'm honored to consider you a friend and to be a listener as well, so I'm super honored to be back. I'm excited. Hopefully it won't be nine years before the next appearance here. You shared a couple examples of apps that on the surface look pretty straightforward making 500,000, 2500 bucks a month. A frequency generator app for, I don't know, binaural beats or healing or something like that. A JPEG to PDF converter seems pretty straightforward. Once I were relatively simple ideas, but how are you coming up with this stuff? It's like, I want to build what I want to build, but it's like, no, no, no, I want to instead want to go where there's some level of demand or assistance building something and putting it out there. Distribution is the name of the game. Nick, I love this quote. First time founders focus on features, second time founders focus on distribution. So to answer your question, I just look at what people are searching for. Look, I know a lot about ASO, which is just SEO for the half store. And so I just see, hey, what are, and I'm going to break down all the tools that you use that are free and you can do keyword research, figure out what people are searching for. Then you build the app because that's the quickest path to revenue. And that's all we're trying to figure out. And that's what we've discovered is distribution is just so hard that it should be the number one thing you think about versus like adding more features to an app. Yeah, less is more kind of what's the one single problem that it solves? It sounds like. Yeah, I mean, all the apps that I sent you, they solve just one single problem. The more niche you could be, the higher likelihood that people are going to pay for your app. And so for that frequency generator app as an example, like you can do a sleep sound app, like people use it for sleep sounds to sleep or either focus, you can go after those keywords or you can be more niche. So what I say is like, okay, sleep sounds or focus sounds, focus timer, or you can be more niche and go by neural beats, frequency generator. All you really need is a hundred downloads a day to have a six figure business in the app space. And I know you're only just trying to get to 1000. So you can just half that by 10% if you want to just get to 1000. Really? That feels very feasible. That feels like, oh, I can find 10 people out of the entirety of the internet. I can find 10 people a day. Yeah. It's that easy. A breakdown of the apps that we have. And I'll say how many downloads and how much revenue, but that's all you need. And with this app, we purchased it. A hundred downloads a day is only charging a one-time fee of like $2.99. And it did not have a paywall on the onboarding. All right. That's number one monotestation tip. During the onboarding process of any app, it's free to download, have a paywall. Yes. People are going to pay you before they actually use your app. All right. It's very different if you're coming from the web world. But yes, people who pay 80%. Yeah. It's like, oh, that kind of like makes me tighten up. Like, oh, isn't that like bait and switch? Next a very nice guy. So he doesn't like this type of stuff. But it works, Nick. Okay. So you have to have the paywall on the onboarding. Okay. You have to ask for it. So that app did not have it. What we did when we bought it was we then added the paywall to the onboarding. We increased the price because I looked at the market. People were charging $60 a year. So we just copied that price. We added that in there instantly went from one to two thousand with just $100 a day to eat to 10,000 down revenue just like that. And I have the charts to show you, but it went that quickly with just a hundred downloads a day. Okay. So the downloads stayed the same because it was already ranking in the app store optimization and it was just what tweaks can we make on the back end to squeeze more revenue out of it to optimize some of the other elements of it. No new features either. Nick, no new features at all. It was all the same features just a paywall on the onboarding with an increased price and went from one time purchase to a subscription of $60. Oh, okay. Okay. Now it was recurring. Yeah. We went to recurring. When we bought it, it was not even recurring. They just had it one time. Okay. Got it. Got it. Well, that's exciting. So let's dive into some of this research process and saying, okay, I'm excited. 10 to 100 downloads a day. That seems feasible. At least from the outside. Look again. Maybe it's much harder than that. But what goes into this? Okay. I'll start off with the JPEG one because that's doing about $500 a month. And I'll tell you why I want to start out with that one, Nick. I thought PDF converters were so saturated. Right. There's so many of them. There's some big ones that do PDF conversion, PDF generation, all this stuff. And I thought it was super crowded. But what we were doing, keyword research was like, hey, people are searching for JPEG to PDF. Like what? People are searching for PNG to PDF as well. I was like, oh, interesting. All right. Here are real numbers. I'm using ASO mobile. I'm not familiar with them at all. ASOMobile.net. They have a free plan that you can get started with. Right. And you want to find the different keywords. So I have paraphrase, which is one of our apps that's making about $2,600 a month, right, to be specific. Now, it should do more because we just got number one for these two tools. But you want to find keywords around 30. Right. And this app is not even ranking that well. You can see some of the keyword volumes that's ranking for paraphrase AI being number one, also paraphrase tool. And now those downloads alone are generating the $2,500 a month for this app. What is that a score of, is that kind of like the competitiveness metric or what is that measuring? It's a traffic score. So you want a traffic score of a lease, let's say 20 on the low end, but try to find 30. The app that we had 100 downloads a day, it was ranking number one. You want to be number one, if you can, for two keywords with a search score of around 30 is the sweet spot. We have another app that is doing way more now, but it initially launched with just targeting those two keywords and we were able to make $1,600 within the first month of launch. So it was just finding those two keywords. And I use ASO mobile, I go down to app keywords, you can put in any app that you're like, hey, what's an app? One of the best ways to do it, Nick, is obviously do a lot of keyword research or also look at the app store. See what apps are in the top grossing? Put that app in there. And for us, it was like Chatchy BT, right? Like, okay, people are using Chatchy BT, but what are they using Chatchy BT for? What's a functionality within Chatchy BT that people just want an app for? And we found that paraphrase was the one that people were searching for. And so we decided to build an app to target that particular keyword. Okay, so the play is to look at the apps that are super popular, they're doing well. And then almost an unbundling of some of their feature set, because people may not need the whole thing or they want, like, I want them go to source for this specific problem that I'm trying to solve. Yep, absolutely. So, if you think about Endel, right? Endel is an app that does focus and sleep sounds. Okay. I'll show you how much they're making. So I'm going to pull up Endel on a sensor tower. This is free, by the way. You guys can pull it up. It's making about a million dollars a month. A month? Super huge. A month. And so I'm like, okay, they're going after super competitive keywords, like focus and sleep sounds. What are some keywords that Endel is not focused on that I can start to target? And so, green noise, if you remember, calm was doing a lot of green noise ads. And guess what happened, Nick? People were searching for green noise. So there's another strategy. I'd never even heard of green noise. This is like nature sounds. Yeah. So this is one of our apps right here. We're number two for green noise. Okay. Calm was doing a lot of TV ads talking about, hey, this green noise, it's really good for nature and all this stuff. And so people started searching for it. So one idea is use keyword tools to see popular apps and what people are searching for. Or just look at the ads. Like there's the Facebook ads library now of the big apps and see like the really big apps, the calms of the world, the fitness, like the Peloton's of the world. What are they searching for? But really do keyword research and then build the app. And that's how we built this green noise app. As you can see, this one's doing about two, three hundred dollars a month, just purely based off of the green noise keyword. Okay. And so again, in this example, it says free within app purchases, but like are people going to be able to use it until they pay? Yes. For this particular app, you get the green noise for free, but everything else you're going to have pay for. So there's also pink noise, brown noise, blue noise, whatever color you like. Okay. So get like a freemium model in this case. Yes. Okay. Sometimes I don't like it. This goes straight into paid right away because we have seen that sometimes for niche apps, just going paid right away is better. Like there's no freemium option. You either pay or get out. And that's what I call a hard paywall. So if you were launching an app, that's how I would launch the app. Force them to pay you and see if people are willing to pay you and then start thinking about a freemium model later on. Okay. This is super cool. This is helpful to look at some of the biggest apps that are out there and trying to find their tertiary keywords that they don't really care about because they've got big marketing budgets. they're going after like really highly competitive terms, but I could I could unbundle a forgotten feature of theirs and hopefully rank number one be a big fish in a small pond. You've been doing this for a long time. You said it way better than I did. It's great. I'm still that one. Okay. Anything else on the market research side, it would be surprising to come up with something like never before seen. Like somebody else has probably beat me to this and that is going to be discouraging or like did you say well maybe there's some validation there or what level of competitiveness is like oh shoot it's already been done or I got to go one layer deeper down into the niche. Yeah. Here's another thing that I do. Okay. So let's just pick on green noise for now. Okay. Found the keyword calms ranking for it. ASO mobile says it has that traffic score that I need. Now look at the search results. ASO mobile will have their complexity score or other way of phrasing it. It's difficulty. It may not be as accurate, right? But it gives you some indication so you can see like okay I'm looking for 30 and I'm looking for a pretty low difficulty score. But I also look at the search results. And what I'm looking for is how many apps have it in their title. So if you know SEO, you know the title is the most important part or the app name. And if there's not that many. In this case it looks like two on the first page. Yeah. Then you know you got something there that you can be like okay not only is there search volume but I if as a new app, I can build it and get it to rank well because there's not a lot of competition for it. And so that's how you start breaking down. You unbuttled the big app and then you go all right what is the competition look like if you don't want to pay for a tool just look for it in the app store and just figure out which ones have it in their title. And then if they do have the title look about the ratings. So if you wanted to build a green noise app, Nick, I'd be like do it. And number two app only has 138 ratings. Like that's not that much, right? It's not in hundreds of thousands of ratings. Whereas meditation, you know, now we're talking about something different. Now you're talking about like apps that are sometimes millions of reviews probably. And this is too much like I don't go after that term. Yeah calm, headspace, all these huge brands. It's you're not going to compete. You're not going to rank come either. So go in the niche of this big app. Is there a rule of thumb to say like okay if too many people are targeting this in their title or there's too many too many entrenched reviews or players where it's like I don't want to touch it. It's just the number of ratings because if I feel like the ratings give me an indication of how much I can beat them. Let's say there's an app let's say we found one that was like green noise and there was a lot more right there's like five or six. So I'm like oh man, but they all had like a hundred. I'm like no problem. Go for it. You can probably beat them. There's no incumbent to beat like that has 16,000. Yeah, that's like the very clear market leader. Yeah. If longs that doesn't exist, then you'll be okay. Okay. How about on the JPEG to PDF converter? Like even figuring out that that was a keyword like some of the stuff I wouldn't even necessarily know about and it looks like some of these on ASO mobile maybe our brand names that people are searching for directly. Maybe a framework or two to come up with even seed keywords or broad topic ideas. Yeah. So one of the other things I looked at like paraphrase, I noticed that paraphrase AI was getting some ranking on Google, right? And Google is a good source for app downloads, especially if people search for let's say paraphrase app as an example, right? So you got 700. I'm using keywords everywhere as a Google plugin right here. So that's why I'm getting all these search results. Yeah. But another thing we can do and make like you know remember the SEO days we look at Google keyword tools. So that's another way that you can look for it and you're looking for things around app. So even if you let's say you're inspired to do something. We talked a lot about baseball and to block out music stuff and then we're like okay, it's inspirational. Great. One, is there somebody doing well in the app space? Good. That validated the market. There's demand for this meaning they're making money. Two, are people searching for it? Now I use search. But if you don't want to, you can run ads. But I don't want to spend money to make money. I'm cheap. So I'm doing search. So now I'm like, okay, well paraphrase when chat you be too as hot. I was like, what's something you can do within that? And then if you look at this, you see that it's 12,000 searches. So gave me some indication that yes, people are searching for this on the app store as well. And before we were able to even rank well for paraphrase itself, which is a brand new thing as of this recording literally just happening. We were able to make that much money. So if you had me on like a month or two later on, I think that paraphrase is going to get to $5,000 a month now that we're ranking well for paraphrase itself. And what's the use case? I'm having a hard time understanding what even like it's just like for article spinning like why are people wanting paraphrase stuff? You know, summarize this for me. What does it do? Let's say I'm a student. I had chat GPT created this paragraph. Now I want to make it sound more human so that it bypasses the G a GPT stuff bypass GPT another keyword. Then that allows you to do that. So it's same thing with paraphrase. The way I thought about it and we've added way more functionality now. Like you can literally talk within the app if you're a non-English speaker and it will paraphrase it to English for you. So I won't just do a normal translation. I'll actually paraphrase it for you. So if you wrote some stuff out and you're like this, I did it in funny mode. So I'll take this description. I'll throw it into paraphrase AI. I use it too. And I'll be like make it funny. And then it will make it funny. And I'm like great. Make it sound more professional. So it has different modes in there too. Got it. Yeah. I mean, I thought that's why I like the JPEG because PDF converter scanner. These are keywords that have been existence since I first started. And then now when I went deeper, I'm looking at my ASO spreadsheet that I have here. But I see document scanner, photo scanner, photo to PDF, the picture to PDF. So these are all keywords that you can target that is just beyond still the same niche of a PDF converter. But again, those big guys probably aren't going to go after these smaller keywords that you know, you and I can vibe code super easily. Yeah. A thousand bucks a month is an interesting to them. But for side hustlers, like a stack up for four or five of these different little tools and all of a sudden I'm doing good. Hey, after this episode, I hope to see a lot of apps called picture to PDF about that. Okay. Maybe that'll be the next thing. Coming up, Steve shares his greatest growth hack in the world. The one that took one app from 2000 to $7,000 a month without adding a single new feature. Plus some more juicy app, marketing, and conversion tips to make more money from your upcoming projects. When you're running your business, you're going to come to this crossroads. There's something that you need done that either you don't know how to do or you're not the best at or it's something you're really ought to be handing off to someone else. If you find yourself in that boat, think this is a job for sponsored jobs. When you sponsor your job on Indeed, you'll get matched with quality candidates who meet your exact criteria. So you can focus on what you do best. 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So you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. Think of it like cleaning out your virtual junk drawer. All that admin chaos that's been piling up all year and then installing a lean and clean system instead. You can automate your direct deposits, payroll taxes, health benefits, 401k contributions, and you can do it in a way that fits your budget with no hidden fees and no surprises. Plus, if you have any questions, Gusto gives you direct access to certified HR experts. It's no wonder why over 400,000 small businesses already trust Gusto for their payroll and HR needs. Try Gusto today at gusto.com/side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months free payroll at gusto.com/side hustle. One more time, it's gusto.gus.to Gusto.com/side hustle. So we've talked about ASO mobile, talked about keywords everywhere. There's different tools and resources to see what is out there and less looking at the volume but rather than this keyword score because that kind of gives you a sense of what you might be able to achieve and aiming for a 30 on their higher than that. My understanding is probably going to be too competitive for you even though it may be higher volume. Is that right? Well, yes and no. Like the JPEG to PDF is about 56 right now and it's 62 difficulty, according to my tools that I have. But also again, that's why I said look at the search results because this looking at the search results will tell you how truly competitive a keyword is. Whereas all these tools will come up with their own random score. And so when I do this, I'm like, okay, along is the score, traffic score matches what I want. Great. Then I can get it to start ranking. And like we seen that like having the keyword repeated in the first screen helps because people search for that keyword, you see that keyword in a screenshot, you're more likely to tap on this, having people, a human face in that also helps. We're using some of the best practices. On the first slide of these little sample screenshots, the marketing screenshots, yeah. Yeah, because where are you most likely to click on? Yeah, it definitely stands out. That's some of the best practice. The first screenshot show up in the search results, so you definitely want to have the targeted keyword in your first screenshot. For me, because I'm doing the long tail way of doing it, I don't need an app name. The app name is literally the keyword that I'm targeting. It is that simple. Don't need to come up with a full branding package for this. It delivers what it promises. You don't need more features. You can literally just do a one-featured product. And along you have distribution, that's going to be enough for you. I got so many examples of apps that are just doing bonkers in terms of revenues, with just simple features. You're like, "Really?" You did that a bunch of times today already, Nick. Really? This app? Yeah. That's what's maybe most surprising about it is. In my head, it's this very complicated and technical thing, but it's like if you can do one thing well and slice off just a piece of that market, I think there's definitely a path forward there. Especially if you're just sidelining, man. These are automatic, right? Alongs you get that ranking, then that's all you really need. From a monetization perspective, definitely have your paywall. From a pricing perspective, how to price different products, just look at your competitors and just copy it. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. None of this is reinventing anything. It's taking, like you said, taking a very popular product, unbundling some of their features, seeing if that feature has volume and if you can rank for that feature. And then literally charging the same price for the bundled product is what we did to take that one to $2,000 app to eight to 10,000. We just said, hey, end of the charging 60, let's just charge 60. And it worked. It was just like, okay. And so it was just a feature, but it'll add a lot more, but we just took the feature and just charge the same amount. And so if you want to charge it a little bit less, sure, go for it. That would be $60 a year is kind of the default price point. I mean, it depends on the category. These like one time usaps, like the JPEG to PDF. So this is interesting too, Nick, maybe in terms of pricing, it really depends. So that's why I said copy what's working. So JPEG to PDF, the most popular plan, Nick is a weekly plan. Okay, but still recurring. Yes. So like here, within sensor tower, you can pull in, so I have, I have Endel here. It's making a million. If you scroll down, Apple actually ranks the most popular in app purchase. So you can see their most popular one is 120 for the yearly. So now you're like, cool, I can charge 60 for the yearly. Okay. And for my paraphrase app, our most popular plan, and for most AI apps, is the weekly for most depends on the category. So we can see if you scroll down here, the top and app purchases, you can see my weekly plan of 699 is the most popular plan. That's helpful. Follow the leaders, see what everybody else is doing. And in leaning towards recurring versus, you know, one off payment, you know, follow it's being equal, you're going to pay me multiple times. Of course, that sounds more attractive. That paraphrase, dude, I launched it here. I'll show you this paywall change. We launched in October. We're able to rank it pretty quickly and get downloads, thousands of downloads. So we launched it with the A. We're promoting the yearly. So we have a seven trade trial in the year. These $50. And then we switched to B, which is the three day trial in the weekly. So if you're going to do weekly, generally three days is enough. You're going to do yearly at a very high level. It's different for all apps, but seven day generally works the best. Okay. This B made three times more sales and I'll break it all down for you. So the first three months we launched this, we only made $2,000. People bought the yearly. They activated the trial and they canceled. So we only made $800 within the first three months of launch. So when we moved it to this where we said, okay, yearly no, no more trial. Forget you. If you want yearly, you got to pay us up front. But if you want weekly, it's the three day trial and we're going to charge you seven bucks a week. Okay. And that's when it went up to $6,000 the next three months. So with one time use apps, what I would say is weekly tends to perform very well like JPEG to PDF converter paraphrase. It's going to be one time use. It's like a frequency app like that people would use every day. Go with yearly. But you can just see what the market is doing and just copy it. Got it. Got it. Okay. And then Apple or the app store is taking like their 30% cut on all the stuff. Yeah, they do 15 if you're under a million. But yeah, they'll take their cut, which sucks. Okay. But they're giving you the distribution in a way. They are. That's totally fine. I was going to ask if you have any best practices on the creation side, whether it's reverse prompting or asking cloud code or whatever your favorite tool is to go out and build the actual nuts and bolts of this thing before you can add it to the app stores. Yeah. I mean, cloud code is by far the most popular. Right now that's what all the developers are using. And they're going back and forth within chat GPT as well and code X and being like, okay, help me debug this or what's the right way to prompt this? I think for me, it's really just like, can this do this one thing very well? So hey, build me an app that just converts JPEG to BDF or takes a picture and takes it to a PDF. And it's an easy prompt. But that JPEG to PDF maybe took two or three days max for us to just get it out in the app store. We didn't even have the ideal user experience. We just wanted to see if we can get downloads for the app first, then if we could and get it to rank, then we start building on top of it and adding a proper paywall and all that stuff. And so that's how we kind of dissect it. Okay. Okay. So the first version may not even have a paywall. The first version is just like, let's get it functional and get it uploaded. Time is the most important variable. If it's going to take you a week to get that paywall in there, then just launching. If it's going to take you a couple of hours and you're really invested in this, then I would prefer ideally launching with the paywall because then you could really see if people are willing to pay for it. If you get that distribution, but if you don't have the time yet, then go ahead and launch it. Got it. So one of my favorite strategies, Nick, is to do what I call a lifetime growth hack. So I call this a great day's growth hack in the world. And it worked for one of the clients. So we took an app that was making about 200 bucks a month and made it to $7,000 a month with just doing the things that we talked about. Okay. One rating is prompting the first time user experience. Yes, that works. About 1% of all the downloads would leave a review for you. Because like I said before, reviews do matter in terms of how well you rank. Not the most important, but they are still important. Do ASO, which is a CEO for the app store, optimize your paywall, definitely have it during the onboarding experience. And then what we're going to do is make a lifetime offer and we're going to make it for free. And we're going to promote it. We do have this service that we acquired called Indiana, which is just Groupon for apps. Or apps, Zoom, or apps. Now, there was pushback because Apple was starting to email developers saying like you're doing something funky. That's probably because we're getting a boost in downloads. We're getting a boost in free and app purchases and we're getting a boost in reviews. So Apple's like, let's stop something abnormal is happening here. Yeah. Yeah. But we did a hundred thousand downloads for an AI app created a lifetime offer. We did the ASO first, right? We did the ASO. We changed his paywall a little bit. And then we added a ratings prompt during the first time user experience. So we did a hundred thousand downloads, 800 new ratings, 200 in the US, 600 worldwide. If I had to eliminate one step, it would be this. I would ask for a little bit later, like maybe day two or after they did something with the app, I would ask for the rating. So yes, we'll get less ratings, but we'll still get ratings out of this. Is this just kind of a notification? Or is this just part of like the user flow in the app that you would ask? You would ask Cloud Code to be like, put a little notification or request to leave a review after this step or something. It is built in iOS prompt. So it's just a default thing that pops up. Okay. Yeah. And something you can tell Cloud Code to do. So it will make $7,000 right after that because the ASO started kicking in. Because now we have ratings. Now we have a fully optimized keyword and title. So the app was just making a few hundred bucks and it launched in 2023. Just make a few hundred bucks for a long time. And then within the first month, we made it to 7,000, then to 6,000, the 5,000. The app went on to make 7,000 and ultimately 90,000 within the first year of us working with this particular app using that exact strategy. So Apple is starting to send emails because I believe because of these ratings boost. So if you just wait on the ratings boost, I think it'll be fine and you'll get the benefits of that initial boost of doing the lifetime offer. You don't have to do this. It's just an option. If you're like, Hey, keywords aren't sticking Steve. I followed this. Well, this is another plan B to it all. Okay. To kind of give it a little marketing push and then hopefully it sticks in the rankings. It's kind of the goal. I mean, similar to self publishing was I'm going to do this free launch or I'm going to do this discounted launch and just flex some marketing muscle and hopefully get the algorithm spinning in your favor after that. See, I have a fancy little soundboard that I can use for that. That's a correct answer. Ding, ding, ding. Nice. I wanted to give you more details like this is one app that just went from like $10 a day to $1,000 a month. So they're not always going to be $7,000 a month. And then, you know, like, here's some more knee shops that have done pretty well. Just kind of adopting the strategy here. Is there a world where somebody searches the app store for the problem that they're having? You know, PDF to JPEG converter. They download the thing. They get hit with this weekly paywall and then they just go back to chat GPT and say, can you turn this JPEG into a PDF for me? Absolutely. But my counter to that would be like, why did they even search for that? And I think, you know, when we're talking about these numbers, make like most people don't pay you, right? Like the average, like, For one of our apps that's doing about 35,000 MRR, we get 12% of the people starting a free trial. Of the 12%, 60% are actually paying us. So they did not cancel the trial, which is pretty high. So to give you some benchmarks, five to 10% is pretty good for people starting a trial. That's good. So that means in other words, 95 to 90% of people not paying you is good, okay? Like, and then the people who activated trial to actually paying you about 30 to 40% is average for most apps. So that's why I like the niche ones because you'll get a higher trial to paid. And if you do a hard paywall, which means no ex on your paywall, either pay us or get out, we've seen almost double the trial activation rates for one of the apps that we acquired. When we had a hard paywall, we saw eight to 10,000, and I'll show you this real quick because I'm a big proponent of hard paywalls and not, and I'm a big proponent of data. The app was making about $1,000 to $2,000 a month, which is 100 downloads, hard paywall with the increased pricing went up all the way to 8 to over 10,000. What happened here? Soft paywall, we had to put the ex. That little tiny ex, half our sales, that little ex on the paywall, and then we got the ex back, no ex again, we got it back up. And again, no new features, just pretty much. That's why I would force them to pay just to see if you got some traction. Is that just a split test that you ran or you were getting negative feedback or what was, why would you have to close it out if it was working? Apple forced us to do it. Apple is very inconsistent with their reviews. So sometimes they're okay with hard paywalls, like the 35,000 MR app that we have, they're okay with the hard paywall. Sometimes they're not. It was really finding the right reviewer, and one reviewer said no, one reviewer said yes, which is crazy. Is that just a factor of, like it says free to download customer expectations and what goes into that? - Really depends on your reviewer. A lot of big popular apps really have a hard paywall. And you're like, why did they get to do it? And we don't. And for this app, look, I'm not even doing a hard paywall and we're able to generate, you know, $2,500 with this app. And it's like, I don't need to, but like at the same time we've tested this, sometimes a hard paywall works better. This time I didn't want to do it because there are some repercussions off of this. That's why I would just do it in a brand new way of doing it. Like a brand new app because like I want to see just in the early stages if people are willing to pay or not. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, if it works, they will invest more money into split testing and building out the feature set and like doing everything else, that makes sense. Any other best practices that we should know about when we're submitting the app for approval or even like into the testing phase, kind of setting the thing up for success. You mentioned, well, I want to put the exact keyword that I'm targeting as the title of the app. I want to put it in the first screenshot that pulls up. I want to put somebody's face there to attract attention. Anything else we should know about to set ourselves up for success? - Steve's response plus how you can build these many time leveraged income streams that turn into pretty serious assets, not by swinging for the fences, but just by hitting singles. - When I find myself procrastinating, it's almost never about the work itself. It's about the decision fatigue surrounding the work, like how to reply to this message or is this person going to make a good guest, is this the right tool for the job, but if you want to sell products online, let me take some of that decision fatigue off your plate. There's a reason millions of businesses, including dozens of side hustle show guests, choose our partner Shopify. Think of it as this one decision that makes all future decisions easier. 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Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3000 reviews and it's built for how modern teams work. In fact, more than 90,000 businesses from side hustlers and solo operators to growing teams already rely on Quo to stay connected and stay on top of everything. If you're out growing using your personal cell phone as your business line, Quo makes it easy for you. Calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, AI summaries and contact deals all in one clean view in an app on your phone or on your computer so you and your team always have the full picture for a better customer experience. Money is on the line. Always say hello with Quo. Try Quo for free plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com/side hustle. That's Quoqo.com/side hustle. - So if you're just launching your first ever app, okay? One, that frequency app, we were able to make $1,000 just with ASO and the screenshots were but ugly. I'm telling you the best practices, Nick, but I wanted to prove to everybody that I can make $1,000 with the ugly screenshots. So they were literally screens of the app and that was it. So as the best practices, again, time is the most important variable. If you can't do screenshots, you'll be fine. Get distribution first. You're going to need terms and conditions and private policy, so you got to have that. And there's something like you can Google it or you can just have chat, you can be T-Ride it up for you. But those are things that you need to have before launching an app. Now, you can just launch as a independent developer or a business. Obviously a business you need a DUNS number and you need an LLC and all that stuff, but you can also just, we started this as a personal and I transformed it into a business. It was a hassle. So if this is something you're going to do, go ahead and start with personal. I've got clients that are doing like 20K a month just with a personal account. So it's not going to make that big of a factor and just know that you can always change it. So this started as a personal because time, right? And then we launched. - Okay, now it's under young aces. - Yes, sir. - Okay, got it. That's definitely something I would overthink. I'd be like, well, it's going to show up on the download page. What do I want people to see here? Like do I need a separate LLC for each thing that's like branded to the keyword? Okay, don't overthink it. - That's part two, Nick. I'll come back for that. Okay, once people have found success, but I do want to show you this one last thing on the paywall. Having the word free increased conversions by 11%. So you think buy a hamburger, get free fries. Right, you got to buy it to get the free thing, but adding that word free in front of a feature, a premium feature. If they bought it, increase conversions by 11%. - Okay. - Now, the word continue works the best on iOS. I know it's subscribe, but nobody wants to subscribe. I know you want to try like, start free trial. Start free trial works better on Android, because Android is, you know, people don't like to pay on Android. So if you had a launch on one platform, I would just launch on iOS. Most people make way more money on iOS than they do on Android, okay? - Okay. - 30% increase in conversions with the word continue versus subscribe versus anything else, it works better. Okay. The last thing is, well, second to last thing, no payment now, right underneath. If you have a trial, by adding that one word, increase the trial activations by 30% for another app that we work with. So have no payment now, right underneath your call to action, your continued button. The last thing is show some comparison. Yes, we can do math, but nobody wants to do math anymore. You have a paywall that shows a monthly plan as a yearly price, and then you have a weekly plan as a yearly price. When we showed it as a yearly price, versus showing nothing, letting the users do the math, right? It just says, 99 a month, or $60 a year. We saw a 38% increase in conversions when we just showed the prices in the same format. Make them comparable, just make it easier for the end user to see the comparisons in the same length of time. Right, right. Yeah, just like fractions. I need a common denominator if I'm going to be able to make a decision here. Yeah, exactly. You're way better at this than coming up. Common denominators, unbuttled, a very popular product. That's my takeaways from this. And I love this. I mean, this is gold, just the language of continue. It feels like I'm just going to the next step and the logical next step. Like, oh, I'm sure I can continue. And no payment today. OK, I can continue. I was going to ask, because you mentioned this indicating the similar functionality app to Google Play to the Android store. But you mentioned Android people don't want to pay. Like, why is that just a stereotype? What's the reputation there? Probably a stereotype, but also true. Android has way more users, but they have all these phones too. And so they can defer, they can change from like, I have this Android phone that I use for testing. It's 150, right? But this iPhone that we all have, you know, it's like a thousand bucks. And so what we've just found is more people are willing to pay on iOS than they are on Android. But more people, you have a bigger reach with Android. That's really interesting. I would have assumed, you know, a copy and paste or just ask, Claude code, hey, can you generate the Android version of this? And with the same functionality, the same interstitial screens, the same pay, well, like, leather, rinse, repeat, and essentially reach double the audience. But maybe not. not the quite that case. - You will reach a bigger audience, is just that audience is not gonna pay you. So even some of our big clients are doing six figures a month, they've sort of ignored the Android version. They're like, yeah, but it's fine. It's just there for those who want to use it, but we don't really focus a lot of their marketing efforts or not focus on the Android version. - How passive is this stuff? Once it's up and running, to what extent are you tweaking the software or tweaking the keywords, or like do other than any of the stuff on a monthly basis or a weekly basis? - Honestly, if I could just do this, the app side of things, that's what I would do. And we have multiple sides of our business, and it is pretty passive. Like that paraphrase, I can maybe work on it, you know, an hour or two a week. So I wanna get back to running just more app stuff, 'cause we have an agency too. Is that optimization or is that customer support? Like, where does the time go? - It's more optimization, man. I mean, I focus so much on distribution and monetization, customer support for these apps. The good stuff about apps is if people want to refund, you don't have to do anything. Apple handles everything. So Apple, that 15, 30% that you have to give up, you just say, like the app that we acquired, we get people being like, hey, I forgot to cancel the trial, like, can I get a refund? Like, I just sent them the same template of email. Like, hey, go to Apple, but we get that was very rarely. Like, it's maybe one or two a week. We get those emails. So it's not very common. And most people understand how to do stuff within the app. So the support is just not that much as you would think. - Do you set up a separate domain and help email for everything like here? You know, if you want something for the PDF converter thing, you got to email this. So it's like, it's all under, you know, app masters and all under the young ACES like Media Brand. I would just keep it under the same one because most people are not gonna email you. Like, I've seen people not even have websites for their apps and just like a Facebook page or an Instagram page. Apple allowed that. So again, back to my whole like, time is the most important variable, whatever gets you to launch and distribution the quickest, because that fixes everything Nick. If you get downloads, you can fix your monetization, you can fix your retention, you can fix all this stuff, but if you don't have downloads, you don't have crap. So it's sort of like, that's why I just link towards getting downloads. Number one. - Okay, you mentioned buying apps, mentioned selling apps. So it seems like there's a robust ecosystem around these as their own little mini businesses, mini assets, especially if it has recurring revenue and it has like traction. I could see how that would be an attractive asset. Is there a marketplace that you like? Like what's the typical multiple? Like how are these things valued? - I've acquired and sold a bunch of different apps. The way I think about it, I'm gonna use this analogy. I love baseball, I love softball. You know, I still play in a slow pitch mentally, and I started thinking like, I'm not a home run internet, like I'm 5'7", like I'm just, I'm like a buck 50, so I'm still going to wet. So like, I'm just not gonna hit home runs, right? Every time I try to, I pop up. And so I'm just a great single sitter. I will always get on base. Like I legit hit like 700 on a slow pitch, right? So. - Nice, nice. - So I started thinking like, all right, let's use this philosophy when it comes to building businesses. Let's just hit a bunch of singles. Let's hit a bunch of singles and doubles, and we can make apps and we can sell them. Flip-A is the easiest. Okay, we just sold an app for, you asked me something to arrange and I'll tell you the range, but let's just say five figures, under $50,000. I sold an app there, but above 10, right? And it was on Flip-A, the app that we acquired, it was through a broker that I know very well. Evelyn, her, and she's like, Steve, I've got this app that's exclusive to you before I even make a public. I wanna see if you want it. And I was like, Evelyn, I want this app because Nick, I already knew the keywords existed for this app. And the app was already doing half a million. Okay, you're looking at it, and your eyes get wide and be like, oh, there's already like three things I could do to double what it's doing. Well, I just knew that the keyword existed and I was like, what, they're already making half a million without even getting the traffic that they could be getting. They already getting decent traffic. So that this was the benefit. Okay, so when I saw it, I was like, okay, I knew that keyword, I knew that category. It's in the health of fitness space. And then it was already doing good revenues. So even better, like, you know, half a million to zero, it's gonna take me a lot longer to get to zero. But a thousand, two thousand, it's pretty quick. Like when algorithm change, your revenues might be screwed, right? So I already knew that too. And then I looked at the app and I was like, okay, I can change the paywall, the onboarding is good. And then no offense, I know we're talking about vibe coding. But I was like, it's harder for a vibe-coded app to come into the space in the health of fitness space because you need a trainer, you need real humans to do this stuff. So that's what I saw. - Yeah, I'm thinking of what is your moat gonna be if you get something because there's the next people, there's the people listening to this now doing their own reverse engineering research, be like, well, this seems to be pretty popular. Maybe I could have spit up my own version of this in a way you can and see what happens. - My opinion is distribution. If you can figure out a distribution channel. So why it's quiet this app too is only ASO and Apple ads. That was the only two marketing channels from a distribution perspective that they were utilizing to get to that point. So the, which means the opportunity is still huge. You know, I've been doing this for 17 plus years. And the opportunity is still there. And I'm still excited about this category. But I was like, okay, if I add on Facebook and meta ads, there's these new campaigns called Web2App, which essentially mean you get people to buy on the web. You have your whole onboarding and your whole purchase on the web, but you get, then they download the app. So that's why it's called Web2App. They download the app and so you offset apples like 15% and you get to use Stripe or Paddle to, you pay them the three to four percent. So a lot better margins for you, but the distribution is now purely, probably has to be all paid. So you can use Google ads, you can use Facebook ads to drive distribution. And that's where I saw the bigger opportunity for this app. So to sell an app, you always wanna leave a little bit more room for growth. Right, you don't wanna be like fully saturated. Hey, I've taken it everywhere I could. There's no room for growth. To sell an app, you have to show growth potential. And then for me, as an inquire, I got a seed act growth potential because then what's the point of me acquiring this asset? Is it just cash flows? Is it just to make my numbers bigger? Yeah, would it be typically like two to four X annual earnings or something? Yeah, it's roughly around two to four X. We've sold a bunch for two, we acquired a bunch for two. And then this one that we just recently acquired, pretty good chunk of change, but it was around 2.5 is where we landed. Yeah. What's your take on the in App Store ad like to promote your app? Like is that worthwhile for a new developer? If you've got some level of organic traction, you mentioned earlier, like, I don't want to spend money. I want to get the downloads are free. With Apple ads, which is what you are calling in App Ads, they are essentially like Google AdWords, but in the App Store. And so all you need are keywords. We've already done the keyword research, right? And Apple, to back to your passiveness, the Apple has this new campaign structure that we're really, we're seeing really good results on. It's called max conversions. And you can just start that. And that's just Apple saying like, I got you, Nick. Tell us how much you want to spend and tell us how much I'm going to, what's the cost per install that you want. And I'll take care of the rest. We're actually seeing pretty good numbers. Roas, return on AdSpend perspective, just running those ads. So if you have to spend money, I'd start with Apple ads, or if you're doing Google, even though we told you not to, I would do Google ads, Android, I'll do Google ads because Google ads, you can get a lot of cheap downloads, but they just might not pay you. Whereas Apple, you might be more expensive, but they're more likely to pay you. You literally just need keywords and you do exact match, right? And start with that, or you can do max conversions and you say, hey, Apple, I'm willing to spend $10, $20 a day. And Apple does not need certain metrics to make it smart because you're just selling it to bid on. So you say, hey, I'm willing to spend $20 a day. I only want a dollar to do dollars. You might not spend it though, but Apple is starting to get really smart with that stuff. - Is that a viable way to test your paywall, to test like, okay, I could spend two weeks driving some traffic here. If I wasn't ranking organically, I could see, does anybody want this thing? Is anybody willing to pay for this? - The way I do it is do keyword research and then building and changing, if I can get it to rank first and foremost, and then doing this growth hack, this lifetime free stuff that we talked about, like step two, that didn't work. Plan B is this growth hack, and then plan C would be run ads and then see what's going on. 'Cause I'm cheap, Nick. Step D, step four, go back to the dry point. It's a good work. Go come up with a new app idea. - Dude, what I say is, we're giving you the numbers, and I want to be very transparent with everybody. Like, these apps, I'm showing you the ones that are making money, but we also have a bunch. So my hit rate, if we're talking baddie average, softball, 70, 700. But with apps, it's about 400. Like, I need to launch 10 to get four right to generate money. So we have a tattoo generator, tattoo app, and it's not making that much money. And so you guys can see, as you check out paraphrase and all these other apps, there are other apps that we've tried, that we've vived coded, and we thought there was keyword volume, but sometimes those keywords just aren't gonna be sticky as much as the other keywords. So I'm about 40% hit rate, betting 400, from an app perspective. - That's super helpful, to know, I appreciate that level of transparency. And like, not everything we touch turns to gold, but if we touch enough things, there's gonna be enough gold. That's really cool. Steve, I've taken a ton of notes. I'm excited to dive back into Cloud Code and see if I can get a couple of these things shipped, 'cause I think that'll be a lot of fun. Yeah, but what's next for you? What's got you excited for app masters this year? - Just really get back to apps, building apps. I think there's a huge opportunity still with these web2app and with this vibe coding. Like, I think literally Nick like anybody can be an entrepreneur these days. Oh good. Well atmasters.com you can find Steve over there be sure to check out @masters on YouTube tons of cool tutorials and the kind of deeper dive stuff on everything we've been talking about today and I want to hear what apps you guys build, listeners build as a result from this episode. I think you we've opened up the playbook a little bit and hopefully demystified some of the stuff that you can go put out into the world and see what kind of traction that it gets. Steve let's wrap this thing up with your number one tip for side hustle nation 2026 edition and then we'll do a little rewind the clock back to 2017. I'll tell you what you came up with then. Oh that would be cool. I was at distribution Nick I was a think about distribution with any business how are you going to get eyeballs if you can figure out how to get eyeballs you can figure out the rest and I'm a living proof because I had eyeballs with the podcast first that turned into an agency that had turned to me being able to acquire different apps and so it led me to this great life that we have but distribution would be my number one to figure that apart out. Absolutely. Do you remember what you told me in 2017? No idea bro. All right it was connect with people and the best way to do it is to interview people that you admire that whole episode we did was about turning the @masters podcast which maybe at that time was like the app marketing show. Yeah into multiple streams of income it's a you know we had sponsorships and you had live events and you had the agency it was like it was really cool like oh we had seven or eight different income streams on the back of that podcast and like you said well it led to the distribution piece piece of the pie here today. Couple takeaways for me obviously we talked about following demand rather than trying to create demand for yourself so looking at different market research product research keyword research type of tools before you go out and build anything and then thinking really simple functionality like don't try and recreate the world's most complex tools like solve a single problem and go from there and like Steve said it might take a handful of swings before you find one that hits. If you're wondering what to listen to next go check out Steve's old episode from from way back when in the archives I think it holds up pretty well but in that of course you're free to you know choose your own adventure in the archives I think you'll find most of the 700 plus episodes that we've done are pretty evergreen but if you want a more curated approach I want to invite you to try my little playlist generator quiz at hustle.show just answer a few short multiple choice questions and it'll build you a personalized playlist based of some of our greatest hits episodes based on your answers so again that's hustle.adatshow totally free give it a try today big thanks to Steve for sharing his insight thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone site hustle nation.com/deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show that is it for me thank you so much for tuning in if you find and value in the show with the greatest compliment is to share with a friend fire off that text message to that friend of yours who who needs to hear this or maybe they've been dabbling with cloud code a little bit already until next time let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side hustle show hustle on