The age of AI apps is here. Brand-new

apps are launching every single day. A

19-year-old building a calorie tracking

app that sold for tens of millions of

dollars. Simple apps like Learna doing

$2 million a month. Lazy Fit doing a

million dollars per month. Impulse doing

700K per month. [music] My latest app

doing over 150K per month. We're seeing

it everywhere and it's because building

an app has never been faster and cheaper

because of AI [music] tools and vibe

coding platforms. Apps produce real

passive income every single month once

they're listed on the stores. And on top

of that, you are building a digital

[music]

asset, something that has real potential

exit value. So, anyone who is taking

advantage of this opportunity and is

willing to move fast enough can build a

life-changing business with mobile apps.

But, the window is closing [music] and

we already see it happening. More and

more apps are being submitted to the App

Store every single day. In 12 to 18

months, the mobile app space will be

saturated and the people who didn't move

quickly and take action [music] are

going to look back at this moment as one

that they missed. And that's why today,

in this video, I'm going to lay out the

step-by-step blueprint so you're not one

of them. For context, I've built

multiple apps. One of them was Puff

Count, a quit vaping app that I built in

college, which we then scaled to 45K per

month in recurring revenue before

exiting [music] the business. And now,

I'm working on my latest app, Posted,

which is a web and mobile app, which we

have scaled to over $150,000

per month in revenue. For all of my

apps, I didn't write a single line of

code. I'm not a developer. I'm not

technically talented. All I did was

follow a simple step-by-step process

that I'm going to be showing you today

in this video. That process consists of

three simple parts. How to find a

winning app idea, how to build it

quickly using AI tools and platforms,

and of course, the most important part,

how to market your app once it's live on

the stores. And make sure you stick

around because there is a bonus section

I'll be saving for last. [music] I'll

reveal the method that all the biggest

AI app founders are using to scale past

five figures and reach millions of

dollars in monthly recurring revenue.

And these companies aren't doing

anything special. They're just using

methods that most founders don't even

[music] know exist. I'll show you

exactly how it works at the end. So,

with that being said, let's get into it.

Here we have it, the blueprint showing

you exactly why and how to build a

successful mobile app in today's day and

age. First, I want to show you some

research that RevenueCat did last year

covering the entire app space, the state

of subscription apps from 2025.

RevenueCat has analyzed over 75,000

subscription apps and tracked over 10

billion dollars in revenue. So, this

report is probably pretty accurate. And

what you'll see is the gap between the

winning apps and the rest is growing.

Only 5% of apps ever hit even close to

10K per month and the top apps are

making 400 times as much money in their

first year as the losers. The bottom 25%

of apps make no more than $19.

And as you can see, the gap is growing

significantly year over year. AI apps

print money, but only if they stand out.

Churn hits hard and fast and price

testing keeps users locked in. Now, I've

linked the entire research document

here, but those top stats, those key

insights should show you that the

difference between those who win and

lose in the app space has nothing to do

with their products. It has to do with

their marketing and how they approach

not only their apps, but also their

onboarding, their pricing, their

retention, absolutely everything. And

we're going to be covering that here in

this video together. So, what does it

take to build a successful app? Three

simple steps. Step one, of course, is

idea invalidation. We need to make sure

that we're building something people

actually want. Step two, we're going to

build it fast and cheap. Getting your

MVP out there, getting your first

version out there is very important so

you can get feedback and build what your

users actually want. And then of course,

step three, marketing, the most

important step of building a successful

app business. Let's dive into step one,

which is idea invalidation. The most

important concept to keep in mind when

you're thinking about your app idea,

when you're approaching an idea to

build, is this painkiller versus vitamin

mindset. We want our app to be a

painkiller, solving a painful problem

for a large number of people. Let me put

that into perspective with my last app,

Puff Count. It had one simple feature

solving one painful problem, quitting

vaping. Same with the app that I'm

working on right now. We help brands get

content from creators. One simple

painful problem that a lot of business

owners are looking for. Here's the

cleanest way to think about your app

idea. If your app is a painkiller, your

users will think, I need this now. This

app solves an urgent or costly problem.

A vitamin type idea is a, wow, this is a

nice to have app. It offers an optional

improvement. It's not something that

your users need right then and there.

Painkiller apps have high urgency. They

solve real pain and they save you time,

money, risk, they improve your health,

anything that needs to be solved

urgently. Some examples are Uber. People

need a ride, they need to get around

right now. MyFitnessPal. They want to

lose weight or they want to gain muscle

right now. Puff Count. People want to

quit vaping right now. They're tired of

hurting their health. Vitamin apps are

the complete opposite of this. Again,

they are nice to haves and they have low

urgency. You want to build a painkiller,

not a vitamin. Now, I know the advice of

go find a good app idea isn't really

helpful advice, so let me show you

exactly how to research and validate

your app ideas before you start

building. And by the way, if you want

this entire document, I've provided all

the important links in here. It's going

to be in the description free to

download, so go check that out. First,

we can go to the Sensor Tower top charts

and we can look at the top grossing, the

top earning apps in any category. So,

find the category that your app idea is

in and go see which ones are making the

most. Of course, you have MyFitnessPal,

Strava, Flo, the cycle tracker, Calm,

Clue. Go through here and you can click

on any one of these apps and you can see

exactly how much money and how much

revenue they've done in the last month.

If your competitors or apps in your

niche are making a lot of money, that is

a good sign. To differentiate yourself

from the competition, we can build

unique features and take different

marketing approaches, which we'll get to

in a second. You can also go to Google

Trends. Is your problem trending? Is it

something that people are actively

searching for right now? We can type in

quit vaping, which was the concept for

my last app, Puff Count. We can go

search worldwide from 2004 to present.

And as you can see, the search term for

quit vaping is at an all-time high.

Probably a pretty good sign that people

want to solve this painful problem right

now. Additionally, we can go into the

TikTok Ads Library or the Facebook Ads

Library and we can see if our

competitors are actively spending on

their apps. If they are, this is an

amazing sign. Let's look at Learna, 450

active ads right now. If your

competitors or apps in your space have a

ton of active ads, that means they are

actively spending to acquire customers.

And these companies aren't just burning

money. They're spending this money

profitably. This is a great sign.

Competition is good in the app space.

You don't need to worry about the

competition taking market share away

from you because all you need is to

capture one, two, a fraction of a

percent of a total market and it will

still be life-changing money. Was Puff

Count the most successful health tool in

the world? No, but it still made great

money and I as a solo founder, it was

life-changing amounts. So, once we have

our idea validated, let's move to step

two, which is building quickly, building

fast and cheap. There are a handful of

AI app builders out there right now, a

handful of vibe coding tools. Use your

favorite, try them all. My favorite is

Vork, you can use Bolt, you can use

Emergent. If you're a little bit more

technical, you can open up Cursor and

edit the code directly with Cloud Code.

Take your pick, it doesn't matter. The

core concepts, the core thing to keep in

mind here is we need to build as quick

as possible. Don't spend months or years

building. You will burn out as a

founder. It's very important to launch

as fast as possible so you can start

getting real users, get real feedback,

and generate revenue that you can use to

improve the product. As I always say,

these AI tools will get you 70 to 80% of

the way there. And if you are a software

developer, yes, you can finish off the

rest by yourself. But, even if you're

not, I'm not. I use these vibe coding

tools to get 70% of the way there and

then I can go on to Upwork and you can

hire a talented developer to build the

last 20 to 30% for you. And yes, hiring

is scary, but I've dropped a full video

on my exact Upwork hiring guide so you

can be sure that you're hiring the

correct talented developer to finalize

your project. Build a team. You are a

founder at the end of the day. You

cannot do everything yourself. So,

outsource your weaknesses on Upwork. One

thing to keep in mind when you are

building your MVP, when you are getting

the first version out there as quickly

and as cheaply as possible, keep in mind

that you only need one core feature. And

once you have that one core feature, we

need to turn our app into a funnel. We

need to actually convert users. And the

easiest way to do that is through a long

onboarding and a hard paywall. You can

AB test your onboarding and your paywall

all through Superwall, of course. They

have AB testing for paywalls and your

onboarding flows. But, this is all you

need for a successful app. You need

strong marketing, which we'll get to in

a second. You need a strong onboarding,

a long onboarding, a hard paywall. And

once the user commits to a free trial or

they pay for your app upfront, you

provide them one valuable feature. And

you might be thinking, Stephen, what if

my users don't want to just pay for one

feature? One feature isn't super

valuable. My app isn't valuable enough

to charge for. I hear this all the time

from first-time app founders, but let me

show you something that is going to

completely pummel that mindset into the

ground. Check this out. QR code reader

making $10 million

per year. Storage cleaner app deletes

photos on your iPhone making $5 million

per year. Track your Instagram followers

making 700K per year. All of these apps

being sold right now on Acquire all have

one simple feature. Here's another one

from Sensor Tower, a QR code scanner

making 400K per month. You do not need

to build the next Facebook. You just

need to build one simple feature that

solves one painful problem. That is it.

Just ship it. Getting the app out there,

getting the app done, the first version

live beats perfecting it. Your app will

never be perfected. There will always be

something new to do, always a bug to

fix. Embrace that as a founder and

launch quickly. If you're building

anything online, an app, a brand, a

product, your design matters way more

than you think. And this is where a lot

of people mess up. They either try to do

it themselves which if you're not an

experienced designer can go very wrong

or just try to hire some random

influencer and hope things work out.

Doing it those ways you have no options

and no guarantee it will actually look

high quality. But that's why I use the

sponsor of today's video 99 designs. You

can go on to 99 designs and start a

contest for logos, app design, web

design, clothing, packaging, books and

magazines and more. By running a contest

on 99 designs you're not guessing

anymore. You get to see dozens or

hundreds of high quality professional

options and you only pay for your

favorite. Here's exactly how running a

contest on 99 designs works. You post a

brief, you explain exactly what you want

and professional designers from around

the world start submitting their

concepts. You have the chance to give

feedback, refine direction and pick the

one you like the best. It's basically

the fastest way to get a high quality

design without wasting time or money.

Whenever I'm launching something new

this is the only place that I go to get

designs. From Wordle to Puff Count to

Posted all of my projects have been

designed on 99 designs. So if you want

to check out 99 designs I'll leave a

link below and if you use my link you

get $20 off of your contest. I highly

recommend 99 designs for any design

work, logo, UI, app screen, clothing,

you name it. It is the best place to go.

All right, back to the video. Step

three, of course, the marketing. The

most important part of scaling a

successful app business. Doesn't matter

how good your product is, doesn't matter

how many features your product has. If

you can send more people to your app you

will make money than your competitors.

Now I want to break the marketing

formula down very simply for you and it

all comes down to this simple chart

right here. To be successful at

marketing you first need to understand

what is going viral in your space. You

need to conduct market research and

understand what types of formats you

should be creating. Then we post a lot.

We post in mass and especially in the

beginning this is where so many founders

give up. You have to do a lot of

marketing to find a winner. Whether it's

you posting, you're hiring creators,

you're building the content with AI, it

does not matter. But you cannot give up

after your third post. Likely you have

to post hundreds of times to find that

winning format and once you do find that

winner we'll scale it with paid ads

which I'll get to here in a second and

that is how we're going to be driving

traffic into our app. We're going to

test a bunch of different marketing

angles, find a winner and then that is

how we're going to get people into our

funnel, into our high converting app and

how we're going to make money. So how do

you conduct market research? It's very

simple and it's free. All you have to do

is go on to TikTok, go on to Instagram

and type in the keywords related to your

niche. Are you building a study app?

Type in study tips. This will show you

all the top videos from within your

niche. Type in getting into college.

This will show you all the top apps

within this niche. Think about all the

sub niches and the sub categories from

the app itself. I'll tell you how I did

market research and I found many

different viral formats for Puff Count.

I didn't go just type in quit vaping. I

typed in nicotine effects on sleep. This

was a different format that I use for my

mobile app. Think about all of the sub

niches that you can tap into when

marketing for your product. Find the

most viral concepts within each one of

these and start to test them all. Don't

just test one format. Look for multiple.

How many different ways can I market my

product? How many different ways can I

talk about my app and find one of these

and one of these formats will win for

you. And this is exactly what I did. I

tested so many different formats. None

of my videos were exactly the same. I

didn't just post the same AI slideshow a

billion times like so many people try to

do now. No, I tried it so many different

formats with real people in them so that

it hit harder for the viewers watching.

I tried nicotine miss. I tried exposing

different companies. I tried day one

quitting. I tried public interviews. I

tried taking apart vapes. We tried tips

to help you quit. We tried absolutely

everything and this is again where so

many founders fail. They are not willing

to do the market research to find unique

formats and put in the work, put in the

volume necessary to win organically on

social media. If you put in just a

little bit of effort you will win and

you will succeed more than 85% of the

people out there. This is where a lot of

you will fail and you will give up. I

promise you that. Even if you're

watching this video you will give up

here. And the most important part is you

sell the transformation. Don't make your

video feel like an ad. Make it feel like

a natural entertaining piece of content

and then pitch your product at the end.

This is especially important with

organic content. If you're running paid

ads your content can feel a little bit

more like an ad. But as a general rule

of thumb you want your content to be

engaging. Don't talk about your product

the whole time because that will feel

like an ad. And again, once you find the

winning content you simply run that on

paid ads and you click run. You can also

do market research for the best paid ads

again by looking at your competitors.

What are competitors running on paid

ads? Because we're paying for the reach

on paid ads these can be blatant

advertisements for our product. have to

be super entertaining. We don't have to

rely on the organic algorithm picking it

up because we're paying for the views

there. If you want to completely skip

the organic part of marketing which I

don't really recommend but if you want

to you can find one of your competitors

paid ads and you can start to copy these

formats. I did a full breakdown of my

entire paid ad strategy. Obviously it is

a little bit more complex to run

successful paid ad campaigns. I will

also drop that video in the description

somewhere. And of course, the bonus

section in this video, how to scale when

it's all working. This is what truly

separates the winners from the losers.

Following this process is how CoinSnaps

or how LearnA are able to scale with 500

paid ads. This is how LearnA, companies

like LearnA, are able to send millions

of installs per month to their products.

It's not because they have one guy

making TikToks. No, no, no. They've

turned this into a systematized process

and they are working with hundreds of

different creators testing hundreds of

different creatives and scaling them on

paid ads. So how do you scale this when

it's all working? First, you figure out

what formats work and again you will hit

a ceiling if you're doing all this

yourself. Once you find the content that

works hire other people to make that

content for you at scale. Hire

influencers, hire creators. The easiest

way to scale with creators is to launch

a CPM campaign on Posted. You can set a

flat rate per piece of content and you

can also set a CPM, a cost per 1,000

views and you can set a daily budget.

This is like scaling on paid ads but

with creators. You can track all of your

detailed metrics here. You can see all

of your creators coming in and on top of

that you own every single piece of

content. You can download the MP4 file,

you can copy the Spark Ads code and that

is how you scale organically and on paid

at the same time. Every creator is going

to be driving organic views and you own

these videos that you can scale on paid

ads like LearnA. Take your competitors

paid ad, copy it, build a brief around

that exact format on Posted and get

submissions on autopilot that stay

within your budget. Creators are going

to make those videos and you only pay if

the content actually works. And again,

they're going to post organically on

their own social media profiles, you

will own the footage, you will own the

Spark Ads code. The entire goal of your

paid ads, again I dropped a full video

on running successful paid ads so check

that out for sure. But the whole goal

being you will have a realized LTV per

install. Here was our realized LTV at

Puff Count. As you can see we were

earning anywhere from a dollar to

upwards of a dollar 50 per install. If

you're spending 50 cents per install and

you're making a dollar 50 on the other

side of that install you are printing

money. Again, this is how LearnA and

other companies like it are running 450

ads at a time. It's because the math

makes sense. It's a simple math

equation. And again, this is how I

scaled Puff Count. As you can see we

were earning about a dollar, call it a

dollar 50 at the very peak, per install

and here is our TikTok Ads campaign.

This is our installs campaign. As you

can see we got close to a million clicks

on this, 31 million impressions and look

at our cost per install. We got 60,000

installs from this one campaign alone

and it was 42 cents cost per install. I

was spending 42 cents to get an install

and on average those installs were

making me a dollar. All the way up to a

dollar 50. Sounds profitable to me.

Putting $1 in, getting $2 out on the

other side. This is how you scale.

Validate your idea, build quickly,

launch your MVP as soon as possible and

start marketing. That is the three-step

process and you should always be

iterating every part of this, improving

your onboarding, improving your paywall,

getting more marketing material, testing

new paid ads. This is an ever-going

process and as long as you put effort in

and you work harder than the next

founder you will win. If you want to try

out Posted for free and you want to get

content from creators and only pay for

results the link is going to be in the

description. And if you watched this far

until the end of the video I would

appreciate a like and subscribe to the

channel because I'll be dropping videos

just like this where I give value away

for free all the time. I'll see you on

the next one. Peace.