Speaker 1Hi, I'm Vadim, I'm 19 years old and I built an AI app called Vogola that makes me over $10,000 every single month without any coding experience.
Speaker 2This is Vadim, he's 19 and five months ago he launched his very first app and today that app is making over $10,000 per month. But here's what I think is cool, this is not a story about clever growth hacks or tricks, he didn't have a big budget and he didn't really use any shortcuts. He grew his app by doing one thing every single day that took him about 45 minutes to do.
Speaker 1This is going to sound completely crazy.
Speaker 2So I brought Vadim onto the channel to break everything down for us and in this episode we're going to dive into the app that he built in five months that now makes over $10,000 a month, the 45-minute daily routine behind all of his growth, and the biggest mistake every app founder is making when it comes to growing their businesses and what you should do instead. I'm super excited for this one, let's dive in. I'm Gus and this is Starter Story. All right Vadim, welcome to Starter Story, excited to have you on the channel. Can you tell us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Hi, I'm Vadim, I'm 19 years old and I built an AI app called Vogola, which is an AI video editing platform that makes me over $10,000 every single month. And I built this app just in five months without any coding experience. All right Vadim,
Speaker 2I'm excited to talk about Vogola, how you built it, how you grew it. So let's talk about it. What is Vogola? Who are your users? How does it work? And then pull up your Stripe or revenue dashboards to show to the audience that this thing is legit.
Speaker 1Yeah, totally. So Vogola is basically an AI video editing agent that can turn any piece of content into like viral edited nice clips. And my target like customer and ICP is basically clippers, content creators, agencies, and long form brands. So this is Vogola and basically it's an AI video editing agent that can turn any like long form piece of content to viral clips that look exactly like this. In the last four weeks alone, we have generated about $11,200 in monthly recurring revenue. And roughly Vogola in the past, like I don't know, four weeks to a few months, we have roughly gotten over like a few 10,000 signups and we have about 400 paying users.
Speaker 2Man, I just love everything that Vadim is breaking down for us right now. His story is awesome. But it got me thinking once you have customers like Vadim is getting, they become the most valuable part of your business. It doesn't matter what you built. All that matters is who's paying for it. It's super important that you know your customers, what they need so that you can keep growing your business. But a lot of founders have this information scattered all over the place, emails, notes, apps, spreadsheets. And this is exactly why I'm excited to talk to you about HubSpot Smart CRM. With HubSpot Smart CRM, it puts all the information in one place so that you know what's going on with your customers and you can keep building and the best part, you can get started for free. Just head to the link in the description and check out HubSpot Smart CRM. All right, let's get back to Vadim. Cool Vadim. Thanks for kind of breaking that all down. How do you get here? What's your background? What were you doing before you built Bugola?
Speaker 1Yeah, totally. So I started working at like a top marketing like startup in my city back when I was a junior in high school. So I was like 17 at the time. And then that was going pretty well for me. But ever since I was a little kid, like I was selling lemonade, I was selling slime at like elementary school. So I was wanting to like make my own dollar. I quit that job to pursue building a web app completely with no coding experience. That's how I got into building my SaaS. So like burning all the bridges. And that's how I forced myself to start building a startup. I just like 18 years old.
Speaker 2That's awesome. So then, you know, how do you come up with this specific idea for Vugola? Yeah, tell us about that.
Speaker 1So the way I got this idea was literally, I just like I was doing scrolling one day, I just noticed dude, every time I'm scrolling, I mean, I'm seeing like a podcast clip, a gaming clip, a live streaming clip. So like when I figured out, you know what, like since there's already a proven market out there, video editing, clipping, I'm like, why not me just build another clipping tool? Like if I can get a tiny percentage of the total TAM of like the market, then I can be making like a ton of money for myself. So I already saw like there's a proven market, like show from content is always going to be there. It's going to continue growing. You know what, let me hop on this trend before it even takes off even more and start making like good revenue for myself. So that's how I got there.
Speaker 2That's cool. I like what you said about kind of you recognizing clipping is sort of huge right now. So that takes me to, you know, the builds. How did you build this? What, what was the process like? What was the timeline? How long did it take you?
Speaker 1Yeah. So this, this is going to sound completely crazy. Like I'm literally your vibe coder. So I have like a lovable subscription and I literally was like prompting lovable, which is like a cloud rapper. If you think about her, like a codex rapper, I was on that platform for about like four months trying to build the Vugola. So that's how I started building. And then over time I was, I was using lovable. I was watching more YouTube videos, more like tutorials and guides. Funny enough, I started asking Claude, Hey, I want to move off lovable and like actually learn how to like code and build a product. And then started recommending me tools like get hub or sell super base. Basically all these like all in one tools that lovable had. It's like, you can do the same thing for way cheaper. So that's how I kind of got into vibe coding. I went from lovable and then I moved to Claude and now I'm on codex and yeah, that's how I kind of got into it.
Speaker 2That's cool. What was the timeline of building Vugola? Like when you first started to when you kind of had the MVP tell us how long that was roughly.
Speaker 1Yeah. So I got the initial idea for Vugola back in October. I spent four months building it and then I just started marking it about let's say five to six months ago.
Speaker 2Nice. Cool. And tell us what's the tech stack that you use, the tools that you use to build this. And then you already mentioned some of them and maybe the tools that you use right now to run the business.
Speaker 1Yeah. So all the tools I'm using right now is basically codex. And then I use get hub. I use super base. Then I use Vercel. Then I use cloud flare post hog, and then I use data fast. And then we also use AWS, which is like the number one, like the video rendering, like infrastructure out there as well.
Speaker 2Cool. Awesome. Let's talk about the early days. So you said, you know, you kind of launched it in around March. Talk to us about that kind of first zero to your first couple thousand dollars in revenue. What, what did you do? What was that like? How did you get off the ground?
Speaker 1When I first started marketing my ad back in March, it was purely on X on Twitter. So I started building a personal brand on Twitter. And then step two, I slowly, like when I was in the Twitter space, I started noticing there's a bunch of these like AI tools and AI like trends that just boom and pop up. I'm like, you know what, what if I make like an open cloud plugin or like a, video relating Vugola, which is my AI video editing tools, like open clock, anything you would reference to open file go insanely viral. Basically I was leveraging already viral proven like formats and like topics. And I was basically plugging it in and connecting it to my software Vugola. So that's how I was like marketing it on Twitter. That was our first like zero to like 2000, $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue. That was purely just off Twitter.
Speaker 2So that's how you get your first, you know, a couple thousand dollars in revenue. And now, but now you're at 11 K per month and growing. What did you do differently? Take us through like that next level of finally hitting that $10,000 per month. What did you do?
Speaker 1Yeah. So this is the secret sauce. And honestly, like, I do not see anybody talking about this. Like people just water this down or like people, like, I don't know why no one's talking about this and this is super, super simple. And all it takes is going to buy like 45 minutes, like a day. So for step one, I'd got a brand new Instagram account. And then I also got a mini chat subscription and I connected those two. Step number two, I basically just analyzed and doom scrolled for like a whole entire day. I was finding my competitors viral formats and their viral UGC campaigns and their creators. And then when I would scroll down, I would see like, they're already proven viral formats that their creators already posting. And then step number three, I just stole everything. So obviously I leveraged the same textbook as them. So I'd record like my own face. And then I would just leverage the same exact textbook that they use the same audio that they use the same, like transitions, how long, so like is the hook three seconds, four seconds, how long is their demo? How long is their CTA? And basically I just micro-analyzed and copied their entire format to the T and I just changed it and iterated it for my own product. Step number four, I posted three to six times every single day on Instagram. As you can see, this is my brand new UGC account. I started posting for a few months ago. We're already at 10.8K followers, just a brand new UGC account. And the secret sauce is it only takes me 45 minutes a day because the true thing about these viral UGC formats is the only thing that you have to change is your hook. And then the sound, your demo and your CTA can literally be the, exactly the same. So this video got 132,000 views, 18,000 views, 20,000 views. I'm going to show you how I did it. 21,000 views. Like after you already find a viral proven hook and a format, what you're going to do then is you're just going to double it down on like the viral formats. You're going to spam that single format every single day until it becomes saturated. And then the last step would basically, you just like continue to scroll and then you would continue like following these like brands and whatever they're posting, I would probably just copy that because they already found a viral format. So just continuously be scrolling, analyzing, and finding other new content trends in the tech UGC space. Everyone rises the same trend wave until it becomes super saturated. And then a new trend comes up and then everyone's posting the same trend. No one really kind of says like, oh, stop copying me. Like they like help each other find viral formats.
Speaker 2Yeah, that's cool. What I want to ask is like, is this just costing you time? Like, you know, I think people worry about like, oh, I got to hire people or spend money before I, you know, talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 1Posting on Instagram costs you nothing. Editing the videos costs you nothing. The only thing that costs you this many chat subscription for $15 a month, this is all you need to cross $10,000 a month. If you're a B2C founder, your ICP is like a consumer that's scrolling. Why would you waste all this time trying to spend like money on these other subscriptions and tools when you yourself can like create six pieces of content, post it every single day for free on Instagram and like batches content three to six times every single day. And it only takes you 30 to 45 minutes a day. This is as simple as it gets. You just have to put a little bit of effort into it.
Speaker 2Cool. I love the passion there. I want to see this app that's making $10,000 a month. How does it work? Give us kind of the 30 second to one minute demo.
Speaker 1Yeah. So this is how Vogola works. So this is our dashboard right here and it's basically a video editing tool So all you would do is like get it like a youtube link I would paste it in here you would get clips it'll pull it up and then you can choose different Caption styles different kind of formats. So for this one, let's just do like no captions And then you can choose different kind of like ratios So the most common one is like a 9 by 16 and then you should start clipping and then that video will start getting clipped It'll upload right here. And then also we're launching a beta version We have basically have our own agentic video editor as well So basically you can just edit videos right here fully like end to end It's like a clipping tool and an ai clipper just combining to one so for long-term video editors content creators It's like basically the best tool out there that they can use to edit their videos.
Speaker 2Love it. I love it It's simple. Let's go to the final question that we ask all founders who come onto starter story You know if you were standing on your shoulders from a year ago or for someone watching who's just getting started What would be kind of your final advice to yourself or to them?
Speaker 1You know, what would be your final advice to yourself or to someone watching who's just getting started? What would be your final advice to yourself or to someone watching who's just getting started?
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