Speaker 1I launched like nine months ago and last month we made $25,000.
Speaker 2This is Ben. About nine months ago, he launched his very first app and just last month that app made $25,000.
Speaker 1I never like code one line in my life, so it was my first app.
Speaker 2But here's the thing, to no surprise, he is not a developer. In fact, he found this idea from just one piece of content and he turned that one piece of content into a very simple and very viral app idea.
Speaker 1It's an app where you can learn a language with songs. Train with AI and practice with people.
Speaker 2The app itself honestly is so genius that I knew I had to have him on the channel and break down exactly how he did it. So in this episode, we're going to dive into the app that he built that now makes around $25,000 a month, how he validated that idea from one Instagram post and the really simple playbook he follows to grow his app every single month. This one is going to be fun. Let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. All right, Ben, welcome to Starter Story. Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you share with us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Well, first, thanks for having me, I guess. My name is Ben and I'm building Canary.
Speaker 2That is amazing. Congratulations. Could you tell us just a little bit about Canary? What's the app? Who are some of your users? How does it work?
Speaker 1So yeah, you learn language with songs that you love. For example, like Treme for French or Bad Bunny for Spanish. And you also. You can like practice with people all over the world. Most of our users are people like trying to learn a language, but for some reason, like either like Duolingo is not working for them and they want something a little bit more like fun or exciting. So we got 50,000 downloads so far. We have 2,000 paying subscriber and the business model is pretty simple. We have a premium and also like a premium is like a subscription membership, 10 bucks a month, or we do a yearly 79 bucks and 60 percent of our users choose the yearly package.
Speaker 2If you've been watching the channel, you'll know that this is the year of consumer apps. And honestly, I really don't think this is going to stop anytime soon. If you've been wanting to build an app, but you don't really know where to start, we have something that I think is really going to help you out. It's a list of over 200 proven ideas in dozens of app categories. Once you download this database, you can pour through all the research, find your idea and finally start to build. If you're interested, just head to the link in the description and download it 100 percent for free. All right, let's get back to Ben. Ben, could you pull up your revenue dashboard just to show the audience that this thing is legit?
Speaker 1So we have like 25,000 bucks, let's say 28 days. Our MRR is almost like 14,000. It's less than the month because again, we're doing like yearly a lot. So we push for the yearly and yet 23,000 active customer for the last month.
Speaker 2I want to understand how do you get here? Tell us a little bit about your background. How do you get to a point where you build this $25,000 per month app?
Speaker 1So I moved to the US 13 years ago and then I started. I started a couple of businesses. I sold one three years ago and then I become like a digital nomad and also become like a content creator. I grew to like 1 million followers across the social media. So a year ago, I posted a video of me singing in French with the lyrics and the translation. And I got like a lot of engagement, mostly in terms of share, in terms of like people that following me after this video. So I thought there is something there. So I created a page just for that. The page really grow like really fast. Now it's like 200,000 followers. I say, okay, this is like a social proof that people want this kind of content and want to learn with songs. And that's how I'm like, I decided to make a MVP for that.
Speaker 2You kind of posted something mini viral and you kind of knew you had something potentially that could be turned into an app. One of the things we're going to see in the comments is, oh, well, of course, he had a million followers. That's why he's successful. Any thoughts on like someone who may have some skepticism about your app because you are a content creator?
Speaker 1I think it's super important. It's super helpful to have a community behind you. But my audience, I really use it as like a way to prove the concept. Then I created like a page and the page is not about me, was not using audience and the page just grow like faster than my own personal page. You got like 200,000 followers under one year. Like having an audience can help, but you can also like create an audience from scratch in order to see if your idea is good and it can go like really viral pretty fast.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, I think we get that comment all the time. People are going to say, oh, you know, he only had success because he has followers. But he also worked really hard to like get those followers. So like, you know, it's kind of chicken or the egg to some degree. Tell us about how you built this. What was kind of the build timeline build process for you to build this app?
Speaker 1I'm not a developer, so I am like a developer. And then about like four months ago, I start to buy code myself and it's been like a game changer for me in terms of like speed and just like making that feature quick or getting feedback and changing things on the app directly. The first MVP was maybe a month, but it was really ugly and really bad. But for me, my mindset. It's just like launch something and get like feedback as soon as possible.
Speaker 2Yeah, I mean, I think Claude and Codex and all these tools have made it so easy to build. You know, people like you, people like me who don't have kind of that technical background can actually build something that looks good and works. On that note, what is the tech stack or tools that you use to build this and then some of the tools you use to run the business now?
Speaker 1So I'm using Firebase for a back end is 200 bucks and RobinCat for subscription and pay what you'll be testing. It's a 360 post hoc for analytics and experimentation. It's a 250 cloud for live coding, 200 behave for the email 169 open AI on top for like AI feature in app. So it's 150 extra app flyers for install tracking 97 mini chat because now I do like some automation on social media and that's 30 bucks.
Speaker 2Super lean. I love it. So I want to talk about the early days. Now you're making $25,000 a month. But how did you first get it off the ground? What were some of the marketing growth things that you did early on to get beyond that initial validation and actually start to grow your app?
Speaker 1I'm a big believer in like AB testing and even like ABCDE testing, like I try to test a lot of things. So I was trying to post in every platform and different content, different format. I also spend a lot of time studying like other apps and listening to founder podcasts. Actually, one of my routine was when I was going to the gym, I was listening to you guys. Like status story every day and taking notes on things I should test. I tried like Google ads after hearing one of your founder talk about it. I even reached out to some of your guests like Nicole and pay her for like a consulting session to help improve the onboarding of the product. So basically every day I was trying to learn something, ship something and test something, you know?
Speaker 2Yeah. Well, that's super cool to hear that you got inspiration from Starter Story and even reached out to all those guests because they've come on Starter Story. There's a good chance they're like willing to share a little bit more. Maybe then other people. Okay. So you start to get a little bit of traction, improve the product, post about it everywhere. So then how do you go from that to now last month you made $25,000.
Speaker 1So you have to choose your platform because you don't want to be overwhelmed with every platform. My main was like Instagram and TikTok. And then for me was really like Reels that was really working for me. So I was like just doubling down on Instagram and you add some tools. Like for example, for me it was ManyChat to convert engagement into traffic. And what you can do is like when you see like a content that perform very well. Organically, you can always like boost it for socialize and meta is really powerful because you can test also a lot of different things like the creative, the audience, the caption, and you can just kill the winner and kill the loser ad. So that's kind of like the playbook, you know, you post a lot, you find the winner, you make some variation, you boost the winner with paid social, you kill the loser, and then you look at the number and you just repeat.
Speaker 2I love how like simple that, you know, framework is, you know, post a lot, figure it out, repeat, look at the numbers and just kind of keep going over and over. Again, what advice would you give to someone watching who's trying to find their first idea for an app to build?
Speaker 1Yeah, for me, it's in social media. I think it's a great place to look for idea because you can really spend time on content from your like the niche that you enjoy. Maybe you're not interested to do a product for and you can see what people complain about or what they're struggling with. For me, it was like a lot of my followers, they are like using Duolingo, but they didn't really like learn anything when I was asking them, OK, tell me something in French and they would blank. And the only thing they remember is like, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" It's not because they want to sleep with me, it's just they remember the lyrics of a song, you know, so I was like, OK, people remember lyrics, so maybe we should make like an app for this. So yeah, Show Me The Video is a great place to find ideas.
Speaker 2That is super smart. And we have so many founders who come on and say, I found my idea because I was just scrolling and it kind of occurred to them. After that, so for people who are scrolling, like just pause a little bit and like try to see if there's an idea hiding right there. I want to see the app in action. Could you show us a little demo of Canary and how it works?
Speaker 1So this is Canary. The first thing you're going to see is like a feed with a bunch of songs that you can enjoy and you can see the lyrics, the translation. You can type any words so you can like save it into your vocabulary list. You can do like some quiz, some gamification. You can do karaoke to practice. We have like this game that you can also like it's going to help you to practice like every words you're going to see, you have to translate it very fast. And then we also have the social angle or community here so you can practice with people that is going to speak the language you learn and learning the language you speak. So it's like kind of a match like this. That's pretty much it.
Speaker 2Again, I think it's just such a really cool and simple idea. That's why I wanted to have you on the channel. Our final question that we ask people who come on Starter Story is, you know, if you were standing on your shoulder, you know, a year ago or for someone watching who, you know, is just getting started, what's one big lesson you've learned or piece of advice you would give to yourself back then or again to somebody who's watching this?
Speaker 1video so i really believe that perfection is the enemy of good you just need to like launch something even if it's ugly even if it doesn't really work at the beginning just to get out there to get some feedback and then you improve it i have so many friends they are like way smaller than me like they have been working on a nap for like a couple of years and still not live i'm like why say no it's not like it's not perfect yet it's not ready and i don't believe in that i say like really is always a work in progress so just launch something
Speaker 2i love that that's really great advice ben congrats on canary super cool app thank you so much for coming on starter story and we'll be excited to have you back when hopefully you're at 100k per month or more thank
Speaker 1you so much yes thanks
Speaker 2for having me all right i just wrapped up with ben learning language with music i think it's like just such a really smart ingenious idea and that's one of the reasons i wanted to have him on the channel the wrong lesson to take from this video is oh he was just a content creator who had a bunch of followers and that's why he was successful obviously we've had a ton of people on the channel have big followings and of course that's a piece of the reason why he's successful but what i think is even more interesting is the fact that he was creating content for a long time before he came up with this app idea and it was from one of those pieces of content that he turned into with this app idea that is now making twenty five thousand dollars a month so for me the lesson is making content that people resonate with putting creative stuff out there i think is an opportunity to connect with people to come up with ideas and hopefully to come up with a business idea that could potentially change your life obviously not easy to do but simple enough to figure out so if you're interested in more simple consumer app ios app ideas we have a link in the description below with the database of proven ios app ideas you can go get inspiration from and then start building yourself all right that's it for this episode go ahead and leave a comment if you have one or a question if you have one i read every single one of them even the bad ones so don't worry it doesn't hurt my feelings but you know i would appreciate some really nice comments as well so that's it for this episode we will see you in the next one peace
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