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

19-Year-Old's $225K in 9 Months: The Million-Dollar Goal 225,000. Speaker 2 In like 9 months of building vibe coding apps without any coding experience, yeah Oh my gosh. Quarter $1,000,000. Speaker 1 My goal is to hit a million in revenue before 20. Speaker 2 Before age 20, yeah. And when do you turn 20? Speaker 1 Turn 20 next April. We did like 8K in the first week and I was like holy, this is insane. I have a full business from software and I don't know anything about coding. Yeah my dream was 10 KA month At the time I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. I just did it because I wanted to see if it was possible. I also have a friend, Zach from Calais I. Speaker 2 Oh, that's your friend. Speaker 1 Yeah, he went to my same high school. No way. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, he just sold it, right? Speaker 1 Yeah, he just sold it to My Fitness Pal. So I saw him and I was like, this guy's clearly on to something. Speaker 2 Yeah, a big inspiration. Scaling Two Apps to $10K in 45 Days 100% And from there, that's when I was like, OK, I'm just going to go like all in. Yeah. These two latest apps are able to scale both to 10K in 45 days. Speaker 2 What do you do in December again? Speaker 1 So December we did 30 and then January we did 40. Speaker 2 O We've talked a very specific playbook here, but if someone wanted to go out and start their own A like you've done, what advice would you give them? How to Build Apps with Rourke AI (No Coding) OI have like three different apps that are generating revenue. The one that generated most of it technically for, but the one that generated almost like almost all of it up to this date has been Wrestle AI and then. Speaker 2 Dude, I don't even know you're wrestling. This is awesome. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the last two months has been, we've really talked about about them like publicly, but it's like they're like these two other apps I've been like launching. Speaker 2 OK, you can't just do one thing, huh? I can't either. That's not a knock on you. Speaker 1 So, so no, the reason I did it was wrestling. Wrestling season ended and so I have a full time job. So the way I got the full time job is I don't know how to code right. I build all these apps on Rourke. Speaker 2 On Rourke. Speaker 1 Yeah, Rourke, it's like an AI app builder. Speaker 2 Like Replit. Speaker 1 Exactly. OK, it's like Replit, except it does like Swift. You know Swift. Speaker 2 Is for like mobile iPhone apps. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like fully mobile and I built my first app through them. From Personal Project to Rourke Growth Team Well, I built my first app called Fight AI, which was like I just built it for myself and I like it was like a test app then wrestling. 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, I don't know what I'm doing it like it kind of 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 Wow, December. It was like, yeah, it was only like it was like 2 months into Wrestle AI less that like I then just fully pivoted into like full time on work and like when I when I do something I wanted to go like I still had focus on Wrestle AI, but thank God in those two months I was actually able to like create some systems so I didn't have to like work on it that much. Leaving a Founding Role to Pursue $1M Goal I mean. Speaker 2 It's a different game if you have a job like you have a responsibility to give them your 40 hours or whatever. Speaker 1 Of course, especially because I was like a founding team member. It wasn't like it wasn't like I was joining like a Rand. It was 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, 'cause in the next, like, like the next stage in life, I'm hopefully 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. Speaker 2 Before age 20, yeah. And when do you turn 20? Speaker 1 Turn 20 next April. The end of next April. Speaker 2 What day? Speaker 1 April 26th. Speaker 2 OK, my son's the 30th. Nice. OK, so let's back up. George's High School Journey: YouTube to E-commerce I want to get to all that but. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's all right. Speaker 2 It's all good. You're in high school in Long Island. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Last year. Speaker 2 Yeah. OK. So you were in high school wrestling. Yeah. Varsity. Yeah. Were you good? Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean, I was a captain, yeah. Speaker 2 OK, so you're in high school, you're wrestling. What else are you doing through high school? Speaker 1 I was starting tons of different businesses. I've done like everything. Speaker 2 Let's list them off OK, everything you can remember. Speaker 1 Probably had like 4 to 4. You like YouTube channels like Growing Up? Speaker 2 What types of channels? Speaker 1 So I remember I was when I was really young, I was into comics. I had like a comics thing. I had like, like, I think it was like, we were doing like pranks me and my friends at home, but we were doing like trying to do everything. Speaker 2 Not faceless channels. You were like. Speaker 1 No, I was always in front of the camera OK. No, I had one animation channel from this like and I can't draw. It was like this like pre made animation that OK road do like stories and stuff like that yeah. This was all when I was pretty young though. Why Fight AI Succeeded Where Supplements Failed And then from there I tried ecom. So I've done like two different ecom. I I did like a laser pointer where I was just straight drop shipping. OK and then I did a supplement company. This the supplement company was when I was a bit older. It was right before I started the first app. So I started the app and like the first app and the supplement company around the same time, AI Fight AI, Yeah, and they both made around 2K total like in a month, within a month. Speaker 2 Dang, OK. And you start them around the same time. Speaker 1 Around the same like I started the sellman company 1st and I spent like tons of money on like inventory and all that and then I started the fight. AI was like fun. I didn't think it was going to go anywhere. I just did it because I wanted to see if it's possible. Speaker 2 Did you use work to build? Speaker 1 That yeah, I used work to build there and. Speaker 2 Sorry, what was the premise of fight AI? Speaker 1 It was like wrestle AI where it's like you upload a video of your your match or your training and it gives you a breakdown on how to get better. OK. It gives you like breakdown strengths, weaknesses, how to improve for. Speaker 2 Boxing. Speaker 1 Specifically for for fight AI was MMA so it's everything. Speaker 2 So you take a they would take a video of them doing MMA. Speaker 1 Shadow boxing, let's say like shadow sparring, whatever. Speaker 2 Upload it and then your app would. It's just a rapper, right? Yeah, not no. Speaker 1 No, no, no. Speaker 2 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? Speaker 1 10 bucks a month, 60 for a year. Speaker 2 OK. And how did you even promote that? Speaker 1 So I just posted like, like me and my friend who was like, who was like, yo, I'll help you. I was like, all right, sure. And he has got like an eye for content. Yeah, we just posted about it. Like just post a a few dumb videos. Speaker 2 Just to your friends. Speaker 1 Yeah, just on our you. Speaker 2 Didn't have like a ton of hollow words. Speaker 1 No, we had nothing, OK? It was a new Instagram account we made for Fight AI and we post about it, OK. And then we saw that like people were like, we got like 40,000 views 30,000. Speaker 2 Views on a brand new Instagram. Speaker 1 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 MRR. And then I was like looking at it and I was like, dude, that's like, that's like a car. Like, yeah, I was like, this is insane. Like it was like it blew my mind. And the other subman company was running paid ads that were like losing me money. Sure. There was like, there's zero margin. Yeah. Speaker 2 Like what am I doing with this supplement? Speaker 1 Yeah, so that's what I immediately like throughout this. High School Friend's Success Ignites App Passion I was like, screw it, let's just focus on this. Yeah, because I also have a friend, Zach, from Calais. I. Speaker 2 Oh, that's your friend. Speaker 1 Yeah, he went to my same high school. No way. Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, he just sold it, right? Speaker 1 Yeah, he just sold it to My Fitness Pal. Yeah, OK, So I saw him and I was like, this guy's clearly on to something. Yeah. Speaker 2 He was your like a big inspiration. Speaker 1 100 percent, 100%, yeah. And from there, that's when I was like, OK, I'm just going to go like all in on apps. Speaker 2 Yeah. What was he like in high school? Like would you have seen him doing that? Speaker 1 So yeah, like we did know that, like 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 a funny kid. He's. Speaker 2 Like one of your friends? Yeah. Speaker 1 He's one of my friends A. Speaker 2 Clearly guy, he's smart, but he's also just doing dumb stuff. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. My God, you. Speaker 2 Didn't look at him like that. Kid's gonna be a billionaire. Speaker 1 No, we kind of did OK. Like we did have that feeling, but he was also like super like chill, like down to earth. Sure. And. Speaker 2 Like where did that feeling come from? Speaker 1 Because he, he was also always starting stuff, OK? So he was always had a business. Yeah. And like, that was always the vibe, you know what I mean? Speaker 2 Just like high energy. Speaker 1 Just start anything you can. Speaker 2 Yeah, like, oh, I am. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. The Rise and Fall of a Nootropics Company OK. So what type of supplement brand was it? What were you? Speaker 1 Saying it was the nootropics. Speaker 2 OK. Where were you getting the ingredients for that? Speaker 1 O We sourced the mall through like whatever like different vendors and then we did like I forgot what it's called. It was a contract manufacturer or something, yeah, where we gave the ingredients to the person and they they assume. Speaker 3 Packing or. Speaker 1 Something like that, I forgot what it was. Speaker 2 What was the form factor? Like a powder or. Speaker 1 It was a pill. A pill. Speaker 2 Yeah, he's selling pills. Speaker 1 I know. Speaker 2 No one died though, right? Speaker 1 No, no, no. We did it all right. Like the we had like a CGMP or whatever, OK and all our Coas and. Speaker 2 What? What gave you the idea to do that? Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 How many? Speaker 1 Not like crazy, but like 3 probably 2:00 to 3:00. Speaker 2 What type? What are your drugs of choice? Speaker 1 Ghost Celsius. OK, well, this is those two. Yeah, this is. Speaker 2 My #1 the Kiwi guava that I go to. Have you had the you? Speaker 1 Had a grape. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's good. Speaker 1 Really, Grape's my favorite. Speaker 2 Really. No, I like it. It's probably like #3 for me. Speaker 1 Grape and Peach the fizz free one. Speaker 2 Fizz free. I can't, I can't even try that really. Like why would you not put fizz in an energy drink? Because it's like. Speaker 1 It's like green tea. I don't know. It's it's like something weird. Speaker 2 I don't drink green tea, but have you had the the sour ghost, sour watermelon and sour green apple? Speaker 1 Those are two sour. I'm not like that crazy about them. I love it. Speaker 2 Really. That's like my #2. Speaker 1 Mine are the Peach ghost. Speaker 2 OK, those are like too sweet for me. Speaker 1 Yeah, I think now it's starting to get to me. Like when I was like, I don't know, I feel like I like Peach flavour. Past few months it's been getting like ghosts have been getting like too extreme. Speaker 2 Yeah, you're like I'm almost 20. Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm getting old. Speaker 2 OK. All right. So supplement brand, so you just you quit that. Speaker 1 Yeah, we'd like. Speaker 2 Just abandoned. Why Unique App Ideas Beat Copying Competitors We just abandoned it. Yeah, dude. Speaker 2 All of all the while you're learning how to vibe code, you're learning paid ads, which like vibe coding and paid ads. Speaker 1 Is literally all you do. Speaker 2 That's like the two best skills a 19 to 99 year old could learn right now. Would you disagree? Speaker 1 No, I, I. Speaker 2 Think more content and like how to make good viral able content. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. No, I fully agree. The ability to vibe code and like and then just being creative, that's like it. Speaker 2 Dude and like it's not even accurate to say the ability to vibe code because really what you're. Speaker 1 Saying anyone can. Speaker 2 Do it. The ability to speak English? Yeah, exactly. Or German or what? The ability to use a language you can vibe code. Speaker 1 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 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. 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. Speaker 2 OK. Speaker 1 But Kim is smaller. How Penn State Rejection Led to Business Focus Yeah, hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcast or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Speaker 2 OK, so fight AI, what month and year is this when you did the fight AI in the supplement? Speaker 1 So it's actually exactly a year today, which is sick. Speaker 2 You just graduated. Speaker 1 So, yeah, so. Speaker 2 For your first summer, yeah. Speaker 1 Free first summer college is coming. Speaker 2 You're still in New York. Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm freaking out because. Speaker 2 All this time now, Yeah. So you're just like. Speaker 1 And. Speaker 2 Best 600 milligrams of caffeine a day vibe code supplements Why were you stressed? Speaker 1 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. And then college came and now I'm like starting my first semester in like late August. What was like, damn I I got no emotion. Speaker 2 What was college? Where was that supposed to be? Speaker 1 St. John's. Speaker 2 St. John's, they have a basketball team, right? Yeah, they do OK. And that's in New York. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's in New York, Long Island. It's in Jamaica, Queens. Not a, not a it's an OK school. I don't know, like hit on, hit on everyone that goes. Speaker 2 There end of the subway, right? Speaker 1 But yeah, it's like I was like, yeah, I was not happy to be young. Did you? Speaker 2 Apply to other schools. Speaker 1 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 like, I don't think you should just be like, like have an ego you. Speaker 2 Should put effort towards something, yeah. Speaker 1 So I was like, all right, they're giving me the most money. I'm just going there. Speaker 2 OK, what were your what was your GPA in high school? Speaker 1 I have no idea. He was like, it was like I had like 85 average probably. Speaker 2 The same same as me. I was like 3.3. Speaker 1 Yeah, probably around. Speaker 2 Something like that. Speaker 1 Yeah. Speaker 2 But most of that was just from cheating on my assignments from my friends. I mean, and I I could have done it like I had the brain power, but I was just lazy. I was just procrastinating. Yeah, OK. What all schools did you get into or applied to? Speaker 1 I applied to Penn State and got rejected and that's where most of my friends went. Speaker 2 OK, it's a good wrestling school. Speaker 1 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 partnier. I like heavily like dissociate when I go out sometimes. And if I was constantly in that environment and I had nothing going for me, I would have I would have like no, I would have lost it. You'd. Speaker 2 Be in the you'd be in the frat world, you wouldn't be building stuff. Yeah, you got. Speaker 1 Fun. I would have had a lot of fun you're. Speaker 2 Having fun doing that too, right? Yeah. So it's like fun is, is subjective. All right? Leveraging Meme Pages for Fight AI's Early Growth So it was June or July 2025 when you were building these? Speaker 1 July 2nd we released the first app. Speaker 2 Fight AI. Speaker 1 Fight AI, Yeah. Speaker 2 OK. And you're your supplement brand was a couple weeks old at this point? Speaker 1 Or it was like over probably two months old. Speaker 2 OK, OK, so you release File AI, you create a brand new Instagram account. So people started going to the App Store and just searching file AI. Yeah, and they found it. I bet your churn was crazy high. Speaker 1 So we did like 1800 in the first month. We haven't marketed it since and it didn't mostly so around the 1st. 500 came from us posting, the rest came from us sponsoring meme pages. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 So still works. Yeah, we actually because we found one guy with a cultic following. So like. Speaker 2 In the space. Speaker 1 Yeah, this guy Tony has died. Absolute killer. Speaker 2 OK, how many followers does he have? Speaker 1 He now has 100,000. I don't remember when we first started working with him, probably 50. OK but any time he would post a sponsorship his audience would get so angry at him like. Speaker 2 He had to like selling out. Speaker 1 He had this weird cultic following. So they would all be like, we're going to kill Tony has died because they're starting like, like death chance. Speaker 2 And that's just like the culture of his following. Speaker 1 This it because he he made like he has like he post weird memes. So it formed this like, sick culture. Yeah. Yeah. But it shot our engagement up. So we would post like 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, right? And everyone's caught. Speaker 2 Their hate made it perform better as an ad. Speaker 1 Exactly. It shot it up. So that's where the other revenue came. We made 1800 in the first month. From there, we tried some other stuff, but it didn't really work. We stopped like my like whatever it was like it just wasn't like continuing to scale. So we stopped focusing on it. Partnering with Kaden Henshall and Fending Off Competitors And then that's when I met my partner for SLAI. Like he was a wrestling influencer. So from there we stopped working on Wrestle AI entirely. We stopped working on Fight AI entirely. Still to this day Fight AI does over one KA month. Speaker 2 Just by itself. Speaker 1 Just by itself. Speaker 2 Do you know what the turn is? Because like that could mean you turn everyone every month and you replace them every month. Or it could mean no one new is joining and your turn is 0. Speaker 1 So I'm guessing it's probably around like 30 ish percent. OK for month, month one. OK OK. Yeah. And then you like keep retaining them forward. Yeah. OK. Yeah. We do also have like organically people coming. I I have no idea how it's still making this like money. Yeah. Speaker 2 It's just like you're not supporting it or. Speaker 1 We haven't touched it. Like, literally. Speaker 2 What model do you use on the back end for that? Speaker 1 GPT. Speaker 2 Which one? Speaker 1 I think like 4 or something. Speaker 2 Is that a good one for like video for analyzing video? Speaker 1 Yeah. And it was, it was like the latest one that one when like we were making it. Yeah, OK. Speaker 2 Where did you find your wrestling influencer partner? Speaker 1 So my first like thing whenever I made any money was like I hired a VA which I recommend everyone do Vas. Speaker 2 Where do you find them? Speaker 1 I source them through either 5 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 4U page. So it's literally like just scroll on my 4U age and outreach to everyone who has over 2500 views on average. Speaker 2 Hold on, outreach every. OK so go to your 4U page. Anyone that averages 2500 views on a video in your niche, DM them and say. Speaker 1 And and then I gave him like Adm script. So it's paid promo for paid promo for the app sentence about what the app does love the content. We'd love to work with you. Speaker 2 What are you paying? Speaker 1 Back then we were paying like $2.00 CPM, like for. So we really did this for wrestle. Yeah, that's where like influencers blew up wrestle. Yeah, it's only influencers we never did paid and we were paying basically a $2.00 CPM. We've increased it for some people since then. Speaker 2 Because they're proven. Speaker 1 Yeah, because they've been like, been killers. Yeah, this one guy we actually pay over a $5 CPM and it. Speaker 2 Converts that well. Speaker 1 It it converts decent and then his videos as paid ads are like insane so. Speaker 2 So. Speaker 1 Taking out, yeah, he was the first one. He was the first one that we ever did paid ads on. Speaker 2 So he he he did a promo video for your app. It did well. Then you push paid behind it. It did even better, Yeah. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, OK. We never pushed crazy paid for us all, but he was like the only because we were optimizing for installs. We didn't even know how to optimize for trials back then. It was so it's so bad. I was like I was learning as I went, but. Speaker 2 So, so that's kind of the playbook is optimize for installs. Speaker 1 No, I used to say always optimize for purchase. I just didn't know how to do it. I didn't know how to code. So I was looking at this like black box and I was like, I don't like, I had like a developer from Pakistan, this guy Usama, who also helped me out. Absolute GOAT, greatest guy ever. I don't think he knew how to set up the optimize for purchases either. Or he did or he did and maybe I didn't tell him, right? So yeah, it was literally just we only knew who was downloading the app. So since 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 like figure this out, whatever. Now I figured it out and now I understand it's actually super simple and that's being an idiot, but sort of just optimizing for installs. But if you want like like to make your ads 10 times more profitable, you optimize for purchase. Speaker 2 OK, 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 to be a billionaire before you have to start college. Whatever. OK so then you start Fight AI in early July. Do you ever start college? What happens after? Speaker 1 That yeah, I started college, so I so Fight AI started. I my VA reached out to reaching out to a bunch of people in the niche. We talked to a few different people. Then I see this guy. One of the people that I reached out to is this guy Kaden Henshall, right? Kaden Henshall is one of the biggest wrestling creators, right? He was my personal favorite wrestling creator, like of all time. Speaker 2 Did you wrestle in college? Yeah. For who? Speaker 1 Parkside. Speaker 2 Parkside, yeah. Is that D2? Speaker 1 Wisconsin. Yeah, it's D2. Speaker 2 OK, so that just happened to be someone that the VA reached out to randomly. Speaker 1 So no, actually, no, no, no, not even them. I'm sorry, I'm messing up my own story. He reached out to someone that knew him. OK, right. So they it, 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 and I go I'll so. Speaker 2 He didn't know him. Speaker 1 Not not crazy. Well, and I go I'll like pay you whatever if you just send this DM, right? He sent the DM, right. He said like send the DM, which is basically like I want to rebuild fight AI, but for just wrestling because we had a ton of comments. Is this like for wrestling? People didn't trust it because we were everything right? Yeah. So it does this do just wrestling. He sent the DM and I sent this guy like 17 emails and four DMS on everyone so. Speaker 2 You're going all in on Kaden Henshaw. Speaker 1 I was going all in on everyone, yeah. Speaker 2 So they send the DM. Nothing really comes from it, no. Speaker 1 They sent the DM and he goes. I was meaning to answer this guy's e-mail. Speaker 2 Oh wow. Speaker 1 And then he answers my like like a few days ago by I don't, I don't see him respond to my e-mail. I'm like, Hey, I need you to follow up. He was like, all right, sure follows up. Kaden finally gets back to my e-mail 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 is like somewhat of like a big win. My like my dream was 10 KA 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 e-mail. I send him my phone number and I'm like, hey, my e-mail gets like messed up. Can 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 Kaden. And now I'm like freaking out, hop on the call. I show them by the eye. I go, I 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. We'll be partners like 5050 and people always like like rag on me like oh, like 5050 and I'm like, dude. Speaker 2 It doesn't exist. Speaker 1 I was nothing without this guy before this guy. Like I literally knew 0. This guy gave me like a business to like learn with and like test with. So, 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. Like, 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 the whole time because I was trying to make it perfect. Back then, the model, it was like Sonic 3.5. It was like terrible. Yeah. You had to like, it was evil. Yeah. 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 he goes, yeah, I'm, I'm in. So we, we did it. Then we had like some older guy, like, 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. Speaker 2 They were just a competitor. Speaker 1 They were a competitor who were trying to like stiff arm us like whatever did. Speaker 2 They have any justification. Speaker 1 They had nothing, yeah, and their platform sucked and they kept, they had AUSA wrestling partnership. Speaker 2 Oh, shoot. Speaker 1 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 like we have a partnership with USA Wrestling. And he goes like, I know you're think you're going to like do well, but like, you're at an unfair advantage. And I'm sitting there and I'm like, I've 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. They could be their janitors. That's their. Speaker 2 Partnership I have a partnership with Google. Akai have a Gmail e-mail. Speaker 1 Exactly, like we don't know what that means. So they're like they, they're trying to get me to sign an NDA. I'm afraid if I sign an NDA that in a, and then I released 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 like, I look at Kaden. I go, OK, like I think Kaden's one of the most influential people in this space. I think we're just him. We could like take over the space. Yeah. And I. Speaker 2 Was on this call too. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. And I go and I fully believe in our product. And then I call Kaden afterwards. I go, look, I don't want to work with these guys. They're they're being weird. Speaker 2 So they were kind of talking like, let's partner up maybe. Speaker 1 Because they were trying to get a Kaden. They were mad that I got there first. Wrestle AI's Explosive Launch and Competitor's Demise Yeah. And I call Kaden. I'm like, look, like, I don't want to. I don't want to work with these guys. And he goes, yeah, I fully agree. I don't think they like, represent our, like, best interests. And that's what I realized. I'm like, holy crap, I'm partnered with this guy. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 And then we released and in the first week we did, we did like 8K in the first week. And I was like, holy. And then like that guy got like obliterated. He deconnected the the website reallyheownedwrestleai.com. Yeah, he. Speaker 2 Still does he still own? Speaker 1 It I pulled the plug on it so if you go it's like 4 O four and not found. Speaker 2 But he still owns the domain. Speaker 1 Still does own the domain. Yeah, we have wrestle AI dot app, but our like our SE OS all above his. Speaker 2 What is your domain? Speaker 1 Wrestle AI dot app. Speaker 2 Dot app OK, so they just they never even got off the ground. So now you need to get a partnership with USA Wrestling. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 Legitimate, 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. Speaker 1 This was all September, so end of September, September 26th, we released the app, OK, and I was working on it from like all through August and all through like September. Speaker 2 Like non-stop. Speaker 1 Yeah. So I released Wrestle app, Wrestle AI and I released another app around 2 weeks later that I put like no effort in. Speaker 2 What app was that? Speaker 1 This it was this 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 wrestle AI and I was like, OK, maybe this stride is you just partner with influencers and this guy had like a million followers. Why Distribution Isn't Enough: The Green App Lesson So I'm like, all right, this guy is like. Speaker 2 In what space? Speaker 1 In like this like reaction space. So it was like joke. It was like like you like he like react to videos and you make like a funny commentary on it. Speaker 2 Super, super low value audience then. Speaker 1 I didn't know what that meant at the time. So I'm sitting there making this app, which it was going to be like, you know, have you ever heard of Riz GPT? Yes, it was going to be like that. It was like a clone of that. 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 pad like wrestling. I had super. I was like super passionate about building because like I wrestled. So I wanted to build a tool that I really really liked. Speaker 2 And it's a, it's a, it's an enthused community. Like wrestlers are different. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's awesome. Yeah. And I got to work with people I love. Speaker 2 Yeah. So you launched this a couple weeks after. How does that launch go? Speaker 1 Yeah, So they both and I, this is like, I wish I bring this up because I feel like it's so such an important lesson for like whoever trying to like build apps and stuff like that. Both apps got 1,000,000 views. So like everyone like obsesses over distribution. Both apps got 1,000,000 views in its first month. Speaker 2 When you say 1,000,000 views like the app itself in the App Store got a. Speaker 1 Million no like total social media views like. Speaker 2 Impressions across platforms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or like a video that you're using to promote the app. Speaker 1 Yeah, TikTok and Instagram, let's say both got over 1,000,000 views in the first month. OK, right. Wrestle AI the first month did 17K, Green did $35. Yeah. So I like every, every time someone's like distribution, distribution, distribution. You need to make sure what the the right people and what you're distributing is actually valuable. Like if you're distributing something that no one cares about, no one's going to buy it no matter what. Yeah. Speaker 2 That blows my mind. Speaker 1 That's why I always try to say because some people come to me with these ideas and like, yeah, you have to make sure it's 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. Speaker 2 Right. Well, I've had videos that let's say they get 1,000,000 views and they're so high value and high quality that I'll get 40,000 followers from that one video. And all the other videos that get 1,000,000 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, it makes all the difference. Optimizing Ads and Wrestle AI's Revenue Challenges Yeah, and like creative strategy too. So it's like like a dollar CPM could be expensive and a $10 CPM could be cheap if you have the right creative strategy. Oh. Speaker 2 My gosh. OK. So after that $35 launch, you're just like, no? Speaker 1 I was so happy because I was really afraid that this was going to make way more than wrestle AI. Yeah, I was like city. I was afraid. So 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 GPT guy, right? I was like, I'm going to be known as the guy who makes like like this slop, right? And then I made no money. So I was like, all right, we're done. Like we just I just instantly cut it. I was like let's I'm only focusing on wrestle AI because I was I was also only mainly focusing on wrest AI was working on this thing very little. Yeah. Then in wrestle AI month one, the last week of month one we did around like 2K in revenue, OK, which is was lower than all the. Speaker 2 Other 10K first week. Speaker 1 It was like 8K first week, OK. Speaker 2 8K642. Speaker 1 Something like that. So it's like it's going down a little bit, like it had a huge up and then it's starting to fizzle. OK. And then from there, that's when I sat there and I was like, all right. And then my my part like Kaden also started getting a bit busy was doing RAF right, which is like completely fair. It's like a like a wrestling organization, OK. It's like, you know, it's like UFC for wrestling. OK, It's getting big now too. It's sick. Speaker 2 I haven't heard of that. Speaker 1 Have you, you know, Armin Serukean, the UFC fighter, no, you know, comes out. No, no, follow UFC. So like a bunch of UFC fighters are going on there now. Speaker 2 So he kind of lost focus a little bit. Speaker 1 Yeah. So he's, he's like pursuing other ventures as well, which is like totally fair. Maximizing Revenue with Trials and LTV for Apps I want you to. Speaker 3 Do something right now. Open your bank statement and add up every single software subscription that you're paying for. Your CRM, your e-mail marketing tool, text message platform, calendar booking app, funnel builder, review management, even a separate forum builder or automation tool. I've talked to business owners paying 500 to $3000 a month across. Speaker 2 8 or 10 different. Speaker 3 Tools and half of them don't even talk to each other. So then they go pay for Zapier on top of that just to make things connect. HighLevel replaces all of it. CRM, e-mail, SMS, funnels, websites, calendars, automation, reputation management, invoicing, one login, 1 dashboard, one bill. Starting at 97 bucks a month. A guy in my community was paying 347 just for click funnels, 99 for MailChimp, 25 for calendly, 79 for review tool, and 49 bucks for Zapier just to glue it all together. That's 600 a month if you're not counting. He moved everything to HighLevel and cut a software cost by over 80%. But the best part isn't even the savings, it's that everything just works together natively. A lead fills out a form on your funnel that creates a contact in your CRM, which triggers a text and e-mail sequence, books an appointment on your calendar and then ask for review when the job's done. 1 workflow, 0 Duct tape and then you can white label the whole platform to resell it to other businesses as your own software. Charge them 2 to 500 bucks a month. Check out Go High le-vel.com/TKO pod. They'll give you a 30 day free trial to see what I mean. Speaker 2 How many views did like that first launch video get you? Speaker 1 Can click 100 and something 1000. Speaker 2 And he posted it to his account. Yeah. OK. And did you push paid behind that at all? Speaker 1 Now he pushed no paid and like only until like January we started pushing bait. OK. And what? Speaker 2 Did you charge for this app? For. Speaker 1 Same price, 10 months, 60 a year. OK, what we recently added abandoned yearly. So like abandoned yearly, like if you click like X it'll give you like a discount offer. Speaker 2 OK OK, what do most people choose between 10 bucks and 60? Speaker 1 Mostly 60 because you really we add 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. Speaker 2 And is that the play you think for apps like this? Speaker 1 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 and. Speaker 2 That's. Speaker 1 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, if you're not super growth aggressive, I would say push monthlies instead. Yeah, because your LTV will probably be higher on monthlies. From Kaden to Corey: Expanding Wrestle AI's Reach OK, all right, so 17 K second month he starts doing other stuff. What do you do? Speaker 1 So that's what I'm sitting there and I'm like, all right, but like, like I like we got to now figure out like what to do. So like the most obvious was like, all right, let's just get more people in the wrestling space posting about wrestle AI. So from there I was like, hey, whoever you have like send them to me, right? And then I would send DMS off of our brand account, paid promo for SLAI. And another thing I didn't realize is because wrestling's a small niche and we had Kaden posting about it, our response rate was insane, right? Speaker 2 After Kate, 'cause he's he puts a like a brand reflegation. Speaker 1 Exactly. Yeah, so. Speaker 2 So now you're reaching out to influencers that have already heard of you. Speaker 1 Exactly. Speaker 2 Not just that, but from a trusted source. Speaker 1 Yeah, so it was great. And the first person I signed was this kid Corey Zader, another absolute killer shadow that get our first deal. Me and Corey now he's made thousands of dollars, he's doing well. But my first deal between me and him was it was 6 videos for 400 bucks. Yeah, yeah, it was 6 videos for 400 bucks. 70 bucks a post, OK, right. He was like, he was pretty new as well. And Cali, I also sponsored him, right? Speaker 2 What type of influencer is he? Speaker 1 Wrestling wrestling influencer and he posts like day in the life content OK. Speaker 2 Right. Speaker 1 OK, so he he makes this first video, right? So the first video costed US $70.00, right? Drops the first video. I watched the video, he doesn't say wrestle AI up until like 30 to 40 seconds in and he does a Cal AI sponsorship before he does no? Speaker 2 Dude. Speaker 1 Right. And I'm looking at V. Oh my God, whatever. Like I'll tell him next time. Like he can't do that this and that. The video crushed 500K views and we made over 5K off of it because no one cared about the Cali I sponsorship. All they saw was what do you mean this app can analyze my wrestling? Speaker 2 It did well for Cali. I too. Speaker 1 Yeah, maybe it probably did well for Cali. I probably not the same though. Like we were able to tell by the comments like that's why I was like, so everyone was going insane. Like what? What the hell? This app does this and that. So now I'm like, I don't care if there's a Cali I sponsorship or not. Like I'm I'm riding high. I'm like, this is insane. Speaker 2 I just paid 40 bucks to get 5000. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 Like the return was insane and the bigger return. This is why I say even on your first, it's OK 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. Probably like a total of 10, maybe 1020 around there. Then we cut down to like 6-7, right? Like in towards like the ends. Speaker 2 6 or 7 trusted. Speaker 1 Great people. Like, absolutely. Speaker 2 You just use over and over. Yeah, OK. Speaker 1 And yeah. And from there that that's that was that drove most of all of our growth. Maximizing CPM and Evergreen Video Performance How did his other what 6 videos do? Speaker 1 They all did great. OK, so like. Speaker 2 As well. Speaker 1 No, no, not as well. OK, that first video was a banger, but he got like 500 K views. Yeah, but his RPM was great, Yeah, which made it worth it. Speaker 2 So 17,000 the first month? What did months 234 plus look like? Speaker 1 So, yeah, so Apple was holding all of it. So they Apple was holding 17 K, they were going to get paid out in December. So all I had was like 1000 bucks in my bank account that I had to sustain growth. Speaker 2 With in October. Speaker 1 Yeah, I had to sustain growth with and like to make sure that like we're not only relying on Kaden and like I just got super Scrabble with this 1000 bucks. Speaker 2 Constraints equal creativity. Speaker 1 Yeah. 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 or a little bit the second month that wasn't crazy growth 1000. Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1 Still, yeah, we still were able to. Speaker 2 Trending downwards at the end of the first, yeah. Speaker 1 And turn it around. We were able to turn it around for like 19, yeah. Speaker 2 And how did you do that? More Caden videos, more other. Speaker 1 Influencers like other influencers and Caden. So that's. Speaker 2 Your only growth playbook for the first few months, Yeah, it was just were you paying flat fee per video like you did with? Speaker 1 Some flat, some CPM. Speaker 2 And what CPM did you start with? Speaker 1 22 and 2.5. Speaker 2 OK, now when is that paid out though? Because the video can keep going for a while. Speaker 1 Yeah, that, that's one like one thing that we did really well. Yeah, we would pay him out. We'd be like, let's keep it simple. We'll pay you a week after the. Speaker 2 Video, but then it keeps. Speaker 1 Going so our C, our effective CBM is sub a dollar. Speaker 2 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, dropping your CPM in half. Using Claude AI for Business Insights and P&L Exactly. Are these pretty Evergreen videos? Like, like, are they likely to keep going for a while? Because some I post some shorts and like, they're dead in a week. Yeah. And they go for months. Speaker 1 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 are Evergreen. Speaker 2 Yeah, were you ever concerned about people like paying for fake views to boost their? Speaker 1 Yeah, but the idea was we'd figure that out like so you. Speaker 2 Could tell by like comment ratio. Speaker 1 If somebody has like a bunch of emojis in, in the comment sections, like there's like, you know, and like we were working with wrestlers, it was like trusted. Speaker 2 Yeah. Like marketers that they probably don't really know that. Speaker 1 Stuff, yeah. And if we saw that like it wasn't driving in gate, like if we saw the video wasn't really driving sales, we would just cut the influencer. Speaker 2 But how are you able to always attribute it to sales if you've got multiple videos going at once? Speaker 1 A lot of it was just intuition, OK, being able to like just look at your charts and like kind of understand like keeping track of all the views and all the results. Speaker 2 What tools do you use to keep track of all those? Speaker 1 So I just built out like this sick internal tool your own. Yeah, it tracks if I run my entire business on it really My my met ads, my creators like the dashboard contracts are sent through it. That's cool, super easy. And then I have clawed like with post hog as well. Speaker 2 Post hog. Speaker 1 Yeah. And then like it's all, 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 a like a 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 PNL like? What's this? Yeah, it's like. Scaling Wrestle AI: From $1K to $40K with Influencers OK so you start doing CPM deals $2.00 to everyone, second month is 19 K but you still don't have any money. Speaker 1 Yes, I have no cash 60 day. Speaker 2 Runway. Speaker 1 Yeah, so that was so the second month was November, 3rd month's December. OK, now the first chunk just hit the account. OK, So now I'm like, OK, now it's time to like go crazy. Speaker 2 Sorry, September was your first month. Speaker 1 End of September 26th, so basically October. Speaker 2 OK. And then SO17K, October 19 K November, December, the money hits. What do you do with the money and what are your sales in December? Speaker 1 Yeah, so the money hits. We just 10X what we're doing get more influencers now We got up to like around 20 influencers in December. OK, right, 20 ish, 20 maybe over we go because there's just not the the biggest bottleneck for us was fine. It like we started running out. We started running out of influencers. Speaker 2 Yeah, that's all. My next question is like how many are there? Speaker 1 That, that, that was like our big thing. Speaker 2 Couple hundred, yeah. Are you reaching out to athletes too? Like I'm going to, I'm, I'm thinking like David Taylor, like Bo Nickel. Yeah, D1. Speaker 1 We have a we have a video from Bo. Bo. Really. Yeah, we have a video from Bo. This guy I wanted, I really wanted to work with Daniel Sabita, Zabita. We were in talks and then like, I think he just got busy, Like, OK, stopped answering. I followed up a few times, but we never closed the deal. Jack's Forest also, we were going to get deals with all these guys. Yeah. I don't know if he ever made the video for us. Speaker 2 Because there's hundreds of current D1 wrestlers. Yeah, there's thousands of like, you know, recent D1 wrestlers and then there's probably hundreds of, like, wrestling influencers that weren't D1 wrestlers. Speaker 1 That were good at content. Speaker 2 Yeah, because that's the, that's the. Speaker 1 Difference. So the ROI on like a 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. Why Good Content Beats Big Names for Influencer ROI What's stopping you from finding one of your influencers that's really good at content and then going to like Roman, Bravo, Young or whatever, like RBY? Speaker 1 He's really great at. We tried getting him to time. Speaker 2 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? Speaker 1 The thing that stops us is the fact that it's wrestling season. Wrestling season is the fact that wrestling season is our best season. Speaker 2 It was when you were doing this, you're saying like right now. Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah. Right now it's not, but now it is. Yeah. The number is like, maybe now it would actually be the best bet to try that. Yeah. And then ask him if he'd hold it off like a few months. Speaker 2 Yeah, like just take a 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? Speaker 1 Yeah, Yeah. Actually that, that'd be the best strategy. Well, I've, I was actually thinking about something similar. I want to hire one of our creators. Speaker 2 Yeah, just upload it to. Speaker 1 Them but I haven't offered them yet. I'm going to send the offer probably late July, OK, Because right now we're like chilling because it's like we're out of season because. Speaker 2 You'd probably rather have a a 50,000 follower influencer wrestling influencer that's really good at content than 500,000 follower athlete that sucks at content, right? Yeah, but if you could have the best of both worlds. Speaker 1 You could have both. That'd be great. Yeah, 100%. OK, so. Speaker 2 December. What'd you do in December again? Speaker 1 So December we did 30 and then January we did 40. Speaker 2 So you kind of have what you have going for you is it is wrestling season. Everyone's excited for NCA as 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. Speaker 1 Busy. Speaker 2 Yeah. But I think it's, it's still a net win. Like it's probably better to launch this, all else equal, in September than any other time. Speaker 1 Yeah, 100%. Speaker 2 And so that was kind of lucky, like the timing just kind of worked out. Speaker 1 Yeah. And that was that was like, I mean, it wasn't the plan because I didn't meet Kate until August. But like I told Kate, like we got to make sure like we're getting this for the P Wing dressing season. Speaker 2 OK. So January 30, K, you said? Speaker 1 January 40. Speaker 2 So 30 in December, 40 in. Speaker 1 January. Speaker 2 And this is like. Speaker 1 In January, by the way, January, I was first month in my full time job. I worked maybe 4 hours on it. Maintaining Profitability as Wrestling Season Ends And this is like we say revenue, but it's either monthly recurring or yearly recurring. Yeah, like it's so it's it's, it's recurring, Yeah, All right. 40 in January, which is wild. So you're October, November, just you're four months in 40 grand. February is crunch time. That's that's like. Speaker 1 Season's kind of ending, yeah. Speaker 2 Conference Championships. Speaker 1 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. Speaker 2 When you say quitters you mean like mostly high school wrestlers? Is that like the biggest? Because there's a zillion more high school wrestlers in. Speaker 1 College, Yeah, yeah, yeah. High schools are biggest. OK, So they're and pee wee's like shot. We had a lot of, we had a lot of like little kids hit us up. Speaker 2 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? Speaker 1 It was still like thirtyish, OK, It was like 28. Speaker 2 And it's a shorter month. Speaker 1 Yeah, it was like 28 and and like that was that was pretty much it like it wasn't bad. We were still very profitable like because I think like our total, like our expenses are very low. Calorie Tracker, Weight Mode, and Stance Analysis Features How are you managing this 5050 partnership and expenses like are you making a cash distribution every month Yes so each other we. Speaker 1 Started taking out in like December ish. In the beginning I told him like, I want to scale this as much as 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 he came to a point where he just weren't able to spend the money. So every month I would send out the distributions. Speaker 2 But the distributions are coming after you're paying expenses, paying the inflation, OK, token cost was that very high? Speaker 1 No, our most expensive month was January was 2K. Speaker 2 And what model were you using or are you using for this? Speaker 1 I don't even remember it's it's like it was the best open AI model. Speaker 2 Still 4 OG PT4O. Speaker 1 I think this may have been five. I'm not. Speaker 2 Sure, I'm kind of surprised that the tokens aren't higher. Is it just because the usage isn't that much? Speaker 1 Yeah, So what we did we found out is the analysis feature gets them in the door, but you can only really use the analysis feature like 5 times. Speaker 2 An analysis being they take a video and uload. Speaker 1 It yeah, uloading the wrestling match. OK, that's like a viral feature, right? But after you do that five times, it's like, OK, you're running out of matches and you're starting to get like, like you, you usually you do the same problems multiple times. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So like you have a firm grasp head up. Yeah, exactly. You have a firm grasp of of what the issues are. What we did to combat that. And we saw once we started adding this stuff, like our turn went from like, like this. It's like this. Speaker 2 Adding what? Speaker 1 Calorie tracker feature to make sure like wrestlers are really. Speaker 2 Like some sticky. Speaker 1 Yeah, heavy. We were heavy on weight management stuff and. Speaker 2 Was the calorie tracker similar to Cal AI and they just take a picture? Speaker 1 And update, yeah, yeah, we had like all the options to track calories like same as my fitness bell, OK, barcode, database, everything. Speaker 2 To implement like tedious. Speaker 1 We did just AP is. Speaker 2 You're just plugging into database of food. Speaker 1 Exactly, we're just using image. Speaker 2 Recognition. Yeah, OK. Speaker 1 So the calorie tracker was big 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 apps 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. Speaker 2 Hey, it's Tuesday like. Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Got match Wednesday. Yeah. We also added like stance in motion mode where it'd call out for you and like do your call outs. Speaker 2 Like the app would tell you to do stuff. Speaker 1 Shots for all circle, yeah. Speaker 2 That's cool, people like that. Speaker 1 Yeah, people, people liked it because like if you don't have your coach and you're, you're trying to like drill alone, you want like you're kind of like stance and motion mode. It gives you like round times and stuff like that. 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. I feel like that one was never as big because I feel like we could have made it better. Speaker 2 Kind of gimmicky like. Speaker 1 Yeah, we, we just didn't. So it was all voice and voice and text. So we couldn't really. We didn't have videos. We should have had videos. Speaker 2 Yeah, For the analyse 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? Understanding Revenue Plateaus and User Lifetime Value So yeah, I tell people it's mostly like the biggest thing is fundamentals. So it just evaluates it based on like the most of the stuff that like like the fundamentals of what you're doing. Speaker 2 Yeah, like you shot in for this double leg, but your head was. Speaker 1 Down exactly. Speaker 2 OK, yeah. It's not saying like it's not getting like super grand. You're like when when Kale does an arm bar, he, you know, like. Speaker 1 It'll do that sometimes. So it'll catch some weird stuff and it's like, you could have rolled through. Yeah, it could have. You could have rolled through. You could have done this and that. OK. But like the, 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. It was because I got really good at the fundamental. Speaker 2 Well, that's the most broad, yeah. And if you're getting really technical, then it goes over the head of 90% of wrestling. Speaker 1 Exactly. Speaker 2 All right. So February hits, revenue drops, March is like that's crunch time, like what happens in March. Speaker 1 March we're still doing OK. It's it was about, it was like March was like 20, April was like 15. Now we're stagnating at around like 10, but that's our floor. Did you see That's all monthly like? Speaker 2 Shoot up in February, March, April when the season ends. Speaker 1 I thought we were gonna not really. It was just we stopped getting that as many new yearly's. That's what caused the revenue to decline, yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 But it it didn't like doing. Yeah, it increased, but it wasn't like I was expecting February 1st hits 0 Subs. That's what was in my mind. I'm like, all right, like this. It is what it is. Like I knew that this was going to happen. I like braced myself for it. The churn kind of went like that and then it kind of just stayed the same. But our new we just started getting less new year, year lease and most of our revenue was coming from year lease. Gotcha. So like the 10 is basically just all renewals? Speaker 2 Now, are you slowing down your your outreach playbook during this time? Speaker 1 Yeah, we stopped. Speaker 2 Just because it's not as effective. Speaker 1 We stopped, yeah. And like there was a lot less influencers we really wanted. OK, so because. Speaker 2 You learned what a good influencer looked. Speaker 1 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 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. OK. So like I'm thinking about hiring now someone to just rebuild the product, Yeah. And make it all nice. Speaker 2 So do you know what your lifetime value is? Speaker 1 Like our LTV? Speaker 2 Yeah, of a user. Speaker 1 I don't really. I know our month one LTV is like the average. The average user purchases is around 25 bucks. Speaker 2 For their first purchase, yeah, 'cause it's like half are doing 60, half are doing 10. Yeah, exactly. OK. So your Lt. VS probably closer to like 50 I would think. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's around there. Speaker 2 OK so if you spend $1000 on videos like $2.00 RPM for 500,000 views, you spend 1000 bucks on like normal times. How much in revenue do you expect that to return to you total revenue? Accelerating App Growth with Meta Ads and Influencers We spend 1000 bucks. Speaker 2 On influencers and. Speaker 1 So if if I spend 1000 bucks at $2.00 CPM, $2.00 CPM should yield back like a 5 to $10 RPM. So we should see back like 2500 to 5K? OK, let's see, SO 22. Speaker 2 To 5X return on ad spend, yeah. Speaker 1 Give or take now I scale things differently though. So for these latest 2 apps, the way I run these latest 2 apps, I instead of like a influencer or whatever, I have like like just a kid I trust who like I could basically tell what to do and they'll do it. Like since I'm working too, I only have like let's say 3 hours, 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 MET ads algorithm worked. So these two latest apps are like able to scale both to 10K in like 45 days and it was solely through just creators and met ads. Speaker 2 Same playbook plus paid. Speaker 1 Ads. Same playbook except paid ads just made it 10 times faster. So I didn't need to sign 10 creators. I didn't need to saturate the niche to really have an effect. Speaker 2 Couldn't you do that for Wrestle AII? Speaker 1 Didn't know how. Oh, you. Speaker 2 Do you can't. Speaker 1 Even. Yeah, exactly. Speaker 2 Especially when the season starts. Yeah. From UGC to Overt Ads: The Boxing App Example OK, 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 pay behind those. Speaker 1 Or because sometimes so Corey Zader, his videos don't work well as paid ads, right, because of the facts that the integration super subtle. So it's a day in my life. Speaker 2 He's more subtle than you'd like. Speaker 1 No, no, For organic, that's amazing. OK. That's why he does really well. Speaker 2 For paid, it's too subtle. Speaker 1 For paid you need to direct CTA within like like you need some sort of ACTA within 15 seconds in the. Speaker 2 1st 15 is that what you're saying? Speaker 1 Like roughly you need to say like this is the product you need to show the products within the 1st 15 seconds for paid organic, you have at least like 30 paid. Maybe you even have a less window. Yeah. And that's when like I started just realizing, like I started just looking on meta ads library, studying the best, converting ads. And then from there I'll find a creator that I like and I'll like just say, hey, can you just make these videos for me? I'll pay for the videos. You don't have to post them. And they're like off. I don't have. Speaker 2 UGC yeah, it's like user generated content exactly for apps. Speaker 1 Yeah, and then they make the video. It'll be something super simple that like gets to the point of what the app does. Speaker 2 And it's like an overt ad. What? It's an overt ad. It's very clear that this is an ad for Wrestle AI is what you're saying. Speaker 1 Somewhat, yeah. So it's like for example. Speaker 2 Like give me like this. Speaker 1 Like the boxing app, right? Speaker 2 Yeah. Speaker 1 How I landed this punch? Boom, guy gets it 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, this specific exchange, he would drop his hands, right? Thanks. Speaker 2 To the app I now know. Speaker 1 Exactly. He would throw the specific exchange, bang, hit him, it will cause, Yeah. And he would actually throw the opponent's videos into the app. And that's how we would get like the screenshot, right? That's really the ad. That's the script. Speaker 2 How long is the entire video? Speaker 1 30 seconds probably. Speaker 2 OK, the influencer will take this video. Will he edit it or you? Speaker 1 Now that he edits it. Speaker 2 He edits it, sends it, He never posts it. Speaker 1 Never post it, no. Now when you push sometimes they post it. Sometimes we take videos that they post. Speaker 2 They can, yeah. You don't need them to. It's just a bonus if they post it. Speaker 1 Most of the time we work with influencers, we tell them to post it like well, they'll they'll make videos to post and then we'll either take those videos and rerun them as paid ads. But we'll also have like an influencer that'll that'll post and will make paid ads for us. OK. So they're like 2 separate deals? Speaker 2 Gotcha. OK, so 30 seconds long. You mention it in the first fifteen. Yeah. And then you push paid ads behind it, mostly Instagram, Facebook, Reels. Speaker 1 Yeah, all meta, but like we let meta decide, OK. Speaker 2 Yeah. Do you know what Meta ends up choosing? Like, is it heavy? Instagram heavy because Facebook reels are slapped on. Speaker 1 They they are exploding. We have like huge traffic on Facebook. OK, shocked. Speaker 2 But you don't really track where they're showing it, you just say meta placement is. Speaker 1 Yeah, I just give. Yeah, I just give meta to spend. Speaker 2 OK, So what do the unit economics look like on those paid ads then? Speaker 1 So if the boxing app we have, we spend 400 day, we make around 9:00 to 12:00 back. Speaker 2 OK, Right up, up front or that's like LTV? Speaker 1 No day one. OK I know. So I really want to scale it. But now. Speaker 2 And that's recurring, though. Speaker 1 Yeah, specific. Speaker 2 You spend 400 on a Tuesday and on Tuesday you make 9 to 1200 day one, but that's also recurring. So it's day one is like 2 to 4X return on ad spend. Fronting Cash to Scale New Apps Aggressively Yeah, yeah, yeah. Lifetime is much higher. Speaker 1 Yeah. So that's why we're now getting into Revenue Cat Payments because so I've been just funding the project myself, right? So what we're doing is we're getting Revenue Cat. Revenue Cat has a thing called, do you know what Revenue Cat is? I've 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, right? What they also do is they have a program called Revenue Cat Payments and it will pay you what you make day one the up to 80% of what you made, right. Speaker 2 Oh, they're fronting the payment and taking a a percentage. Speaker 1 Exactly. OK, right. So then. Speaker 2 We put more into two. Speaker 1 .2%. Speaker 2 Otherwise you're you're taking 60 days to get that money. Exactly. Speaker 1 OK, so. Speaker 2 How much do they take? Speaker 1 2% OK at the end of the month, it's not bad. It's not bad if you have that, if you have like heavy row as, like day one row as. Speaker 2 You have to be able to afford it. Speaker 1 But and now I could take the 800 or let's say they pay 60%. So it'd be like what they they pay up to 80%. So it'd be it's 20% like minus 160. So it'd be like 640. Now you have 640 to spend on ads. So that's why I'm really excited about scaling this app because it's like it's like super low effort on my part, at least like the other guys working very hard. Thank you. He's a great guy. Speaker 2 This is the guy who said Osama or. Speaker 1 No, no, no. He's just a kid. I know that's like he, he's smart. He's smart. I know if I tell him what to do, he'll like do it and he'll do it well. So I'm really excited to scale that app up. Niche Down to Abs: A Surprisingly Successful Idea And then we have another app that's a workout app. Speaker 2 Hold on that other a when did you start that? Speaker 1 I started that around 45 days ago, done about 18K this month. Speaker 2 O wrestling season ends, you're like all right, let's come put this on the back burner till August, September, we'll fire it back up. Speaker 1 And also I want more apps built built on Rourke that are making more money, right? That's like Rourke's biggest you. Speaker 2 Work for them. Speaker 1 Yeah, that's Rourke's. Yeah, that's Rourke's. Like North Star metric is how much are their users making. And that's why Rourke is like, I don't like to say, but it's better than all the other platforms because according to like the all like the paywall providers, right, 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 and stuff like that. Speaker 2 Other competitors are focused on sign ups and like vanity metrics and they're like, we want our customers to be successful. Speaker 1 It's trying to be the shop effort for that after apps, you know what I mean? Gotcha. Like I think that's the thing that wins the thing. In my opinion, case studies are what wins long terms. Cali. I was built in Rourke. That's a huge. I never. No, it wasn't. It wasn't. I'm saying if it was, it would be the biggest. Like everyone would then try. Everyone who would then want to get into apps would try to build through through Rourke. Yeah. Speaker 2 Right, like you said, like Shopify. Speaker 1 Exactly. And then if gurus exist, that's like the, that's like the goal that gurus don't exist. You have to like gurus happen actually. Speaker 2 I mean gurus. Speaker 1 INFO People are great at pushing stuff, yeah. So like if you have a nympho guy pushing Rourke, Yeah. And that being like a part of the process. Gotcha. But I mean, info is a bit scammy, but some people are. Yeah, but some people are great. Like there's some great info. Speaker 2 OK. So you launch the, is it, is it MMA, is it boxing, is it fighting? What is like the niche that you consider that? Speaker 1 So I launched 2 so. Speaker 2 I want to get to the second one. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, first one well around the same time, but boxing, OK, Boxing that's like the newest one. The other one's a workout one. OK, it's for. Speaker 2 Which I would think that's a that's a crowded space. Speaker 1 It wasn't my idea. I'll say like what it does. Basically you take a picture of your abs and it tells you how to get a better better 6 pack. Learning from Churn: Ratings vs. Workout-Focused Ads That's smart. Is that like I see? Speaker 1 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, I like, I always hop on calls when people tell them what I think and stuff like that. So like, I hopped on a call with this kid and he's telling me he's like, dude, look up ABS, there's no competition this and that. He's going crazy. I'm like, dude, you're telling me people are going to take a picture of their ABS? Get a rage I. Speaker 2 Think it's brilliant? Speaker 1 Well, it's been turning out pretty good. We'll get to that. I'm glad. But I saw there and I thought it was like, so funny. Like I thought the idea was funny, but the kid is so much passionate about it that I just felt such. Speaker 2 A How do you get shit of that? Yeah. Speaker 1 I'm like this kids like sitting here, he's like, like so passionate. There's no way this kids not going to like, there's no way he's not going to win. Like I know he's going to win. Like the way he's talking to me, I know he's going to win. Speaker 2 So. Speaker 1 It's my age, so he's super funny. Speaker 2 Because like an an app that will analyze your workouts, that's probably pretty crowded, I would think. Yeah. So he's saying, let's unbundle that. Speaker 1 Let's niche down just to AB. Speaker 2 I think oh man, do you know how many like billions of dollars have been sold on infomercials for like AB gear? Speaker 1 100%, yeah. Speaker 2 And that's what this is. It's the AI app version of that. Speaker 1 Yeah, I I just couldn't, I think I just couldn't see it at the time, right. But 'cause it was like, 'cause there's like a bunch of the looks maxing apps that kind of like gave a bad, gave a bad look to like the ratings style apps. OK, Yeah, right. So I was thinking of it as like, oh, it's another rating style app, but no, it's it's a huge niche like I agree. And 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. Speaker 2 What kind of people were you sponsoring that didn't work? Speaker 1 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? Speaker 2 Do you mean ratings? Speaker 1 So you take a picture and it rates your 6 pack, it gives it like a score out of 100. OK. When we would just show the ratings, we got downloads and like churned with Spike like it'd be quick turn. Speaker 2 So you would show like a picture of someone's ABS with a rating above it as an ad for the app. Speaker 1 Yeah, so it'd be like lock in, like the gym influencer, lock in takes a picture of their six pack, like whatever. And then that would be the ad something like that, like hook hook scan, that's it. 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 they would show like the app actually teaches you how to get a six pack. We never did like I don't like. We didn't think about this till after. Speaker 2 The guy doing crunches instead of just a picture of a guy's. Speaker 1 ABS it would show the workouts tailored to your abs like design or whatever right? Speaker 2 I think that's an important learning point is like not all customers are created the same. Like you're getting these big spikes, you know, 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 0 so it works much. Speaker 1 Better. Speaker 2 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 in 6% click rate than 80% open rate in 2% click rate, Right? OK. Speaker 1 So then we started running Met Ads and then our Met Ads started like it was like we would be spending 100 bucks a day averaging around like 200 to 300. And then we just kept like, now we've been like slowly increasing spend. Start Your AI Consulting Business with Playmakers AI Guys, I want to tell you about something I've been building behind the scenes. You've been watching my videos about AI tools and asking the same question. OK, cool. How do I turn this into a business? Not just playing around with AI, but actually getting clients and getting paid. That's my community. It's called Playmakers. playmakersai.com. It's an AI agency program where we show you how to start an AI consulting business where you can charge local businesses 500 to $5000 a month to set up and manage AI tools for them. It's not a course you watch and forget about. We do three to seven live training calls every week taught by me and 23 other expert AI agency owners. You get plug and play templates, Claude code tutorials, AI voice agent frameworks, automation templates, and a 30 day road map so you don't fall off track. This is stuff you can just copy, paste and deploy for clients on day one. And of course how to find clients as well. We also have a five day first client challenge where we can walk you through landing your first paying client in five days. You also get my frameworks for cold e-mail, Facebook ads, SMS, cold calls. And then I had you, my leads galore spreadsheets with actual leads in your niche, in your area. We've already got over 200 people in there building real agencies. If you miss a live call, it's all recorded. So if you've ever thought about starting an AI consulting business or AI implementation business, go check out playmakersai.com. Navigating Apple's Compliance for App Subscriptions So before we go heavy on the the second app, tell me the you said you're 45 days in to the the fighting. Speaker 1 One. Both of them, roughly. Speaker 2 You started both around the same time. Speaker 1 Yeah, it is like it is almost the exact same like that. Speaker 2 OK. And then what have the revenue numbers been for each? Speaker 1 So the workout ones at like 8 this month OK because it also had problems with like the code the Co founder started bragging about it on X started tweeting like on the workout one we have a crazy conversion. We have like a / 20% like download to paid. Speaker 2 What? What is average? Speaker 1 Average is like 5. Speaker 2 Wow. Speaker 1 Some people don't even get 5. Speaker 2 Yeah, you guys are at 20. Why do you think it's so different? Speaker 1 Good onboarding, good pricing and obviously like we're targeting the right people. Yeah, but he's 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 hid anything from Apple review. But on Twitter and you never post your app on, I mean you could post it, but if you're doing anything that's anything close to being grey, never do that on Twitter cause the Apple's on there like a hawk. So, and there's this one guy that Co 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. It would say monthly subscriptions. It'd be like what monthly? It was like 1199. So it's like, I don't know, like 2 bucks a week or something and two 2.4. So it's like $2.40 a week and then $10 a month. And that that's how it was listed. You could do that, but the weekly was above in hierarchy of like whatever, since the weekly price was above the monthly price. And they were the same text size too, which is like, like, are you kidding me? Like it was the same text size thing every day. How a Tweet Led to Apple's Wrath and an Apology But just. Speaker 1 Because yeah, because the Weekly was above and some guy reported us to Apple. To be fair, what my friend also wrote in the tweet is he started saying like he's trying to like click bait. So he's like a moral way to increase your conversions, right? So it wasn't even the fact that we did it. This is like really weird. This is like the weirdest thing I've ever had with Apple. They removed us for two weeks. And I'm like making fun of the kid. I'm like, what you did? Because like the he's super amped up. He's like super hyped. He's like, dude, I've been like, whatever, I've been dreaming of this. I'm like and then we've we've spammed Apple, right? That's why I like. Speaker 2 To get reactivated. Speaker 1 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 2 if they was broken in meta, right for my account, 2 if they was broken. So I couldn't log into my ads account. And this was when we were running ads for both, right? The way I got back in it was like quick added everyone on LinkedIn that works at meta and I spam DM them begging them to fix it. Speaker 2 There's always a, there's. Speaker 1 Always a way. Speaker 2 Like don't accept anything at face value. Speaker 1 Never, never. So we people are like people. Speaker 2 Just, I like to call it the throw your hands up at it. Dang it. Well, I guess that sucks. I guess I'm not in business. Like what? Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like, no, do anything in your power. I was, I was about to like drive to Apple headquarters and protest to get to get like reinstated. So we finally get in contact with Apple. They call us up right And I told them it's because of the tweet. We still don't 100% know it's the tweet. I never I knew for a fact. Speaker 2 They're never going to tell. Speaker 1 You no they they showed us the screenshot of the tweet. Speaker 2 Oh shoot from this narc loser here. This narc used to go build some. Speaker 1 Of himself. He showed us a screenshot saying you. His words were not It wasn't the fact that you did anything wrong, because this isn't this isn't truly against their guidelines. You could argue it as right. Yeah, it's the fact you made us look bad. Speaker 2 Yeah, I believe it. And that's their it's their pride. Speaker 1 Yeah, and, and especially on Twitter, like, you have to understand, Twitter's where investors are, Twitters are where like consumers are. Twitter's the spot where anyone is accessible. Like you could get in contact with a millionaire who has like 400 followers on Twitter. A billionaire. Yeah, a billionaire. It like it's the best networking tool, but you have to be careful what you say about the wrong people because everyone's watching. So because we insulted Apple, a top Apple exec could go there and yell at his team right after, right. So they were like, you made us look extremely bad, this and that. We had to write an apology letter over e-mail. Speaker 2 Like whatever it takes. Speaker 1 Like a page long you. Speaker 2 Probably wrote that as fast as you could. Oh, I use AI. Speaker 1 Booted up, Booted up. Claude Claude, make this the most deep apologetic essay ever. Speaker 2 My income depends on this. Speaker 1 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's like we, we took a step back. We took a step back and said that transparency comes first. Speaker 2 Yeah, right. Oh my gosh. Speaker 1 And then and I thank God they approved us. He like the guy called us up after. He was like yelling at us, calls us up after. He's like super nice. You ever need anything like Kick It? Let us know. Speaker 2 Dude, I wrote that with. Speaker 1 Claude And then and then we went on like Twitter, like we just want to say Apple's a great company. Speaker 2 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 gone to the individual, it rules. Speaker 1 All a random, like it wasn't even me, right? We're like, I mean, I don't even have a crazy amount of followers on Twitter, but like sometimes I'll have a tweet that gets like 20 K views, something like that, right? It was a random kid on Twitter with like 400 followers that tweeted it. Speaker 2 Did that tweet do well? Speaker 1 He did get views, but he got views because the narc, the narc tweeted it. I'm not going to. I blocked him on everything. Got to hide that guy. Can't have that guy. It's just snooping my stuff. George's Dilemma: Single Focus vs. Portfolio of Niche Apps All right, So you launched these two apps at the around the same time. What was the and it's been 40-5 days since each of them launched. Yeah. And what's the revenue been for each of them since so lifetime? Speaker 1 Lifetime like 23 is the boxing 1 and around 15 is the the workout workout one. Speaker 2 How high do you think all three of these apps could go? Like what is like scale look? Speaker 1 Like so my goal for the next So I'm leaving potentially leaving work right solely because I just want to focus on my own things. I think the company is still great. I have nothing but kind rights to say about them but for the next 6 months I I want one big company so like I don't want to be the guy with like like 10 different sasses. Speaker 2 You can have an App Studio. Speaker 1 You could, you could, Yeah, that that. And that's what like my dilemma is like, I know if I go and make a basketball app, I'll crush. I know like I, I, I feel like you. Speaker 2 Have the. Speaker 1 Playbook. I have the confidence that I could go and crush in basketball, go crush in hockey. Yeah. I could just take over sports. Yeah. Which is still something I'm considering. 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. Speaker 2 See, focus looks different for different people. I like to say focus is overrated. Momentum is underrated. Focus for you could look like like making niche apps with this thing launch playbook over and over. It doesn't have to look like scale your wrestling app as far as it can go. It could focus can look different, right? Building a Multi-Million Dollar Sports Media Company No 100% I think. Speaker 2 What you could do You can follow the exact same playbook as Flow Wrestling. You're familiar with them I. Speaker 1 Don't know what their playbook is I I know that. Speaker 2 You know, flow sports. Flow sports started with flow wrestling and their thesis was OK, 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 D2D3 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, NE and Fresno, CA all over with a camera filming wrestling matches. Not just like any wrestling match, but starting with like the most. Speaker 1 High profile ones. Speaker 2 Yeah, like Beast of the East for high school is like a huge nationwide tournament or basically any D1 match, you know, Iowa versus Iowa State, whatever. So that was their whole playbook. Paywalled from day 1-10 bucks a month, 120 a year or whatever it was. And they started with wrestling. Their whole company was flowwrestling.com for years and then they're like all right, like we feel like we've got a good playbook now let's go. I think they went track and field next. They went cross country gymnastics and now it's flow sports and it's a multi $100 million 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 under appreciated sports, overlooked sports, both high school and college. So like you could do the same thing with your app studio, you know what I'm saying? Like you could roll them all up under the same, 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. Overcoming Hiring Challenges with the 80/20 Rule That's true. And that's something I've been like, kind of like wrestling with, pun intended. Speaker 2 Pun. Speaker 1 Intended, yeah, but that's something I've been like in between. I don't know what kind of which path I'm going to take. Speaker 2 Well, what are you wrestling between? Like it's either what are the options in front of you? Speaker 1 I'm still going to scale these apps that we currently have, right? Because it's like I have someone that like I because I like I could always hireright 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 rest 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, right? A little bit of direction and like money. 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 it like, so one of the apps I was thinking about is, have you ever heard of Superpower? Speaker 2 No. Speaker 1 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 don't function. Speaker 2 I use Function Health and it seems like the same thing. Yeah, I pay 500 bucks, I get 2 blood panels a year. It all goes to the app and then they give me all this analogy. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was thinking about maybe maybe potentially because it's higher ticket, but I don't know, I'm not I'm not sold on what what I would want to do that could be bigger or just scaling this up to like a 200 apps. Speaker 2 Yeah. So if I were you like very specifically, I would create a parent company that you own 100% off. Yeah, right. George LLC. Speaker 1 That's kind of what I have now, yeah. Speaker 2 And then all of these apps you start should be independent LLCS. Speaker 1 That's what, yeah. Speaker 2 Some of them you have partners, right? Yeah, the the first Hayden, what's it Hayden? I mean, you have different splits and like 50% is owned by George LLC, 50% is owned by him. Speaker 1 That's how it's structured. Speaker 2 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 Georgia LLC. Speaker 1 And then how I do it? Speaker 2 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. That's just, and that's not anything to feel bad about. It's just the 8020 rule exists everywhere. If you have 30 apps, I, I can already tell you that 20 of them will be OK or maybe even 25 will be OK and five will print all your money, right. And so you just think you're 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 you couldn't and shouldn't do that. Like you have the playbook. Speaker 1 Yeah, I agree. I think my big concern is hiring. Speaker 2 What about it? Speaker 1 Being able to hire good people that could do it. They could like run them. Speaker 2 Why not? Why couldn't you? Speaker 1 Before we launched, I actually had a few more that we were potentially launching and it was the 8020 rule, right? It was. These two were actually great kids and the other two, the other few people I tried hiring, just sucked. Speaker 2 It's the same thing with the apps. Like you just have to churn through people. Yeah, you do. Speaker 1 And so you find good hires. Speaker 2 8020 rules everywhere. It's a law of the universe, like gravity, literally. So you fired, you hire 10 people that appear to be rock stars a year. 10 years from now two of them will be rock stars. 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. Speaker 1 And then you kind of have something to like, you know what to look out for. Speaker 2 Yeah, you 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 as many. That's what I would do, like that will make a lot of money if I were you. From Gotcha Feature to Influencer Outreach: A Step-by-Step Guide That's not sick. Speaker 2 Do you ever use YouTube or YouTube ads at all or is it just tik? Speaker 1 T.O.K, I want to I want to get into that now with the Boxing 1. Speaker 2 OK, what about TikTok ads paid on TikTok? Speaker 1 That's what we were doing for wrestle when we were optimizing for downloads, but like, never optimally. Speaker 2 OK, All right. So we've, we've talked a very specific playbook here, but if someone wanted to go out and start their own app like you've done, what advice would you give them? What would the playbook be that we maybe haven't covered here? Speaker 1 Yeah, so like literally my zero to 1 is understand your app needs a gotcha feature, right? It needs one feature that you run advertising on. OK, That feature. The job of it is to explain the entire app in five seconds like. Speaker 2 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, OK. Speaker 1 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, I get like Flack for this, but like this is what I would do if if I if I needed to go from zero to 1. I haven't done this for some of these other apps, like I didn't do this for Sai, but I've done this before and it works. Bought up your Instagram account. You bought it. Yeah. Like when you're a brand, pay for the verification, pay for followers in the beginning. Speaker 2 OK, you're where? Where do you go to pay for followers? Speaker 1 There's a site, Moe's SMM. Moe's SMM. Yeah, it's MOWES and. Speaker 2 It costs next to nothing. Speaker 1 It's a dollar per whatever for per $1000. Speaker 2 OK. And you're saying it's worth it just for social? Speaker 1 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 out reaching into the void in the beginning. Speaker 2 You're going to be sending the profile. Speaker 1 You're going to click on your profile, you're going to see brother, this guy is 0 followers, why would I work with him if they see that you you have the three. So your first 3 posts should just be like shots of the product that look really nice. You should have like 15,000 ish followers pay for the verification if you can and then once they see that the likelihood of them working with you doubled. Speaker 2 Do you do you pay for views on those 3 videos? Speaker 1 As well. Speaker 2 Doesn't even. Speaker 1 Matter, 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. It's I'm looking at a brand. I could see the videos. I could see other creators that have worked with them. I may know them, right. He's getting thousands of thousands of like hundreds of thousands of views. He has a lot of followers. His like account looks very neat and professional and you're a legitimate person. And when you're a legitimate person, right, If I worked with 10 influencers that this guy knows and Ioffer him a cheap rate, he's just going to think that that's a rates, right? He's just going to be like, OK, these are the rates. I either accept it or I don't. But but these are the rates I'm not getting gypped right? I see these guys work to them. If I'm a no name and I'm just some kid right, which I I've been just some kid so I know is and then Ioffer you like $2.00 CBM. I get like laughed in my face. Oh, you're just a broke kid who like knows nothing about this yeah, doesn't matter. It like doesn't matter if your account looks professional, though they're most likely to take a deal Yeah for cheaper. And so that's my main strategy. The DM, you send as many DMS as you can. The DM should be paid promo and the paid promo for app name. That should be the first line. Always experiment with it. I would say because a lot of people are doing that now, but you just want to because they're going to look at your DM through that little yeah. Speaker 2 Like the review? Speaker 1 The first like 4 words. Speaker 2 Yeah, before they click on. Speaker 1 It before it gets like cut off by the dots right? Some of them won't even click on it so if they see paid promo the likelihood of them. Speaker 2 I'm going to get money. Speaker 1 I'm exactly that's the first thought that gets like sent to their head. Oh, I'll make money off this guy. Yeah, send as many DMS as you can. I would say after you make your first 1000 bucks, hire Ava instantly. The the ROI is infinite on VAS. Yeah, and experiment with met ads, but I wouldn't experiment if if you don't have, I'm going to say 3 grand. So like if you're not willing to spend 3K on ads I wouldn't do it. Speaker 2 Just do this outreach stuff first. Speaker 1 I would do influencers and wait influencers. I would do influencers only. If you have over three, Ki would say yeah. Speaker 2 How many? What's like the minimum amount of followers you want out of an influencer? Speaker 1 I honestly don't care about followers, I care about average views. Speaker 2 OK, what? What are you looking? Speaker 1 For 25,000. Speaker 2 Average giver, so some are 5, some are 50, some are 100, some, yeah, OK. 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? OK, you're going to see it with 15,000 fake followers for 15 or 20 bucks. 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 posted something you're going to get. Speaker 1 Very posts of your like like product shots basically got you like statics of your product. Speaker 2 Then you're going to get meta verified which is like 20 bucks a month. 16 bucks 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. Speaker 1 And then you just send as many DMS as you possibly can. Speaker 2 OK. And then you, I mean you, you vibe code the app, use the network or whatever. Speaker 1 No, you just build out the app. Speaker 2 And you want to have one killer feature, you want to test all of your killer features in your ads or in your your organic videos, but find the one that seems to resonate the most and then triple down on that. Yeah. And that gets them in the door, whether they. Speaker 1 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 and then experiment. Speaker 2 Yeah, it has to be visually simple to explain. Speaker 1 Yeah, like wrestle AI, when we saw that like our influencers would saturate, OK, OK. They're kept posting about Wrest AI and like the results weren't starting to like lesson per video. We would then have them introduce another feature of the app and that's when then re triggered the jumps. Speaker 2 Gotcha. It's like a brand new app. Speaker 1 Yeah, it's like, it's like another side of the app that they haven't seen before. Overcoming Scarcity Mindset for Exponential Growth Yeah, OK. Speaker 1 And it educates them more. Speaker 2 So you started this less than a year ago. What is your revenue been to date so far across all of these projects? Speaker 1 So to date I think 225,000. Speaker 2 In like 9 months of building vibe coding apps without any coding experience. Yeah Oh my gosh. Quarter $1,000,000 most of that profit. Yeah, a lot of time for sure. You paid Ava, you paid your influencers. But maybe if like whatever ate in your profit was just paid ad spend that will pay profits in the future. That makes sense. Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Speaker 2 Like your percentage profit would have been much higher even if your revenue would have been lower had you not done paid. Speaker 1 So I used to be super worried about like I used to sit there and like try to Max like it's like you should do it and at times you should do maximize profit, right? And the reason I did that was because I was, I was very, I had a lot of limiting beliefs. When I first started making money on Wrestle AII was like, all right, tomorrow the app's going to die. Tomorrow the app's going to die. How many wrestlers are there? I'm going to run out of wrestlers. I'm going to this and I'm going to that. I think that was the biggest thing that held me back. Speaker 2 Yeah, scarcity mindset. Speaker 1 Scarcity. Just think, I thought I was going to run out of wrestlers. I thought I was like, oh, that's it, I'm just going to run out of wrestlers. And then I would have spent all the money to acquire them and I would never make any more. I don't know, right? Yeah. It doesn't really mean I was just like, it was just like a fear, right? Speaker 2 Right. It's natural. Speaker 1 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 row as wasn't what I was aiming for, right? Especially because I only had 1000 bucks. So at the time I needed more than a 2X Ras. Then once I got money, I would be like bro 2X Ras and I'm losing this money and then I'm like what? Now that I understand, like OK, like you should just try scaling things to be as big as possible. Like now I 2X row, I'm like, all right, dude, I'm going to scale this up until my CAC paybacks like 90 days, 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 6 months to a year, right? If I need need be, I'll go to like Thailand and like. Speaker 2 You. Speaker 1 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 for these next six months. Speaker 2 Yeah, and the profit will come, Yeah. Test Everything and Keep Trying Until It Works Any other tips or advice that you may have missed that people should learn? Speaker 1 It's really just don't have limiting beliefs and just keep they keep doing different things until it works. Yeah, I keep trying stuff. Speaker 2 I always say test everything except drugs. Speaker 1 Yeah, exactly. Speaker 2 That's my catch phrase on this, George. This has been amazing. Speaker 1 This is awesome. Speaker 2 Where can people find you? Speaker 1 I've I've an ex that I got posts on sometimes. Speaker 2 OK. We'll link to that. Cool. Thank you. Speaker 1 Thank you, I've been dreaming about my first in person podcast since I was first by coding my first tab. This is what I was thinking about. Speaker 2 Dude. Speaker 1 This is awesome. Speaker 3 Hey guys, if you're still listening to this, it's probably because. Speaker 2 If you haven't. Speaker 3 Had a chance to take your Airpods out? You're still mowing the lawn, you're still driving, what have you. If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a 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.