15,000 Installs on Day One… Can This Solo App Experiment Actually Work? (World Cup Kickoff)

Everyone says you need to pay for ads a grown app, but I’m going to spend the next six weeks proving that you don’t. The FIFA World Cup starts today, and over the past couple of weeks, I’ve built a free app for it. Hey guys, obviously I didn’t film this video today, but it’s the morning of the World Cup, and the numbers are going insane. You will want to watch this video. Trust me. Now, I’m running 10 different bets to grow it. Eight of them completely free, but there’s two that cost money, and I’m only running them to see if it even beats organic traffic. And to be honest, I don’t think it will. And I’m filming all of this before I have a clue what’s going to work. And some of these are actually kind of unhinged. One of them is me trying to get Chacha Beauty to recommend my app to millions of people. And another one is a QR code that turns every single fan into a walking billboard for me. One of them cost me $3,000 and might actually be the dumbest decision in this entire video. So stick with me because you’re going to see all 10. And in 6 weeks, I’m coming back and show you exactly which ones blew up, which ones flopped, and how much money the whole thing actually made. Quick note about me so you know where this is coming from.

I spent 15 years as a software engineer. a big chunk of it at one of the biggest tech companies in the world. And then I went solo, which means I can pretty much build anything I want every single day. But I’ve never done marketing in my entire life. So this whole thing is an engineer brute forcing growth with a pile of AI live with no clue if it’s actually going to work. Let me set the stage first because it makes the rest of this way easier. The app is called Bola 2026 and it’s a free companion app for the World Cup. You get live scores, you get a full schedule, group standings, and you can build brackets and pools with your friends. It’s in 31 languages, and there’s no login, no account. You just open it, and then you’re in. I’ll drop the link below. So, if you’re following the tournament anyway, grab it. It’ll make the rest of this make way more sense to you. I know the question a lot of you are already asking. How much money does this thing actually make? Right now, I have no idea, and that’s kind of the whole point.

But in 6 weeks, in the real video, I’ll show you exactly what it earned, every dollar. So, if that’s the part you care about, subscribe, and you’ll get notified the day it drops. Let’s start with the weirdest one and honestly the one I think you’ll find most interesting. My goal here is kind of simple but also kind of insane. I want chatt and co-pilot and other AI agents recommend my app. So when someone asked one of them, “What’s the best app for the World Cup or where can I build a bracket with my friends? I want the answer to point straight at my app.” So how do you actually get an AI to do that? Here’s what I learned. These models don’t crawl the web like Google does. They need clean structured context and they pull from pages that directly answer the exact question people ask. So I went deep on this. I studied what people search for around past world cups. And then I built pages designed specifically for AI to read with the facts laid out cleanly and in the underlying HTML structured the way these models like to pull from. Basically, I’m writing for the AI as much as for the person. The citation from AI isn’t a direct download because people rarely click on apps and chat bots. But two things make it worth it anyways. First,

the app stores can actually show me the installs that came from AI chats now. So, I can literally watch this paying off already. And second, even when nobody clicks the links, my app name is still inside that answer over and over again. So, I’m also betting on plain brand recollection. People see the name Bola enough times that eventually they just go and search for it. Bet is the whole search footprint I built around the app and it comes in two layers. The first layer is the website wrapped around the app and the real job of it is direct installs. It’s big, around 20,000 pages in 29 languages where every match, every group, every team, and every venue is its own page. But all of them are quietly pushing you toward the app with install buttons everywhere. So when you tap install on Android, it opens the Play Store. And when you install on an iPhone, it opens on the App Store automatically. Then there’s the second layer, and it’s a bet on one thing, just how much the whole world will search for the World Cup when it happens. I bought a whole swarm of domains with dead obvious names. Things like World Cup schedule.info, World Cupgroups.info, World Cup teams.info, info. You get the idea. 19 sites total across six languages,

English, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, and French. I’ve got an automation sitting on top of all of these domains that queries Google Trends twice a day, sees what people are actually searching for, and spins up a fresh page for it. It all pulls from the same live data the app uses, so the pages are never out of date. Most of them are evergreen, too, because a question like, “How many World Cups has Brazil won?” gets asked every single year, long after the tournament is over. So even if it does nothing this summer, it keeps quietly sending people to the app for years. Now bet three is one big idea that turned into my favorite part of this whole thing. And it started with all that SEO work. Digging through the data, I realized that World Cup bracket was a massive search query and something people really wanted. So I went and built the answer and it grew into a whole engine with four moving parts. First, we have the official bracket, a clean embedded bracket that I pitch to blogs and sites that drops straight into the articles that will earn me back links, which is the one thing Google actually cares about right now. And the bracket images themselves rank in image search. Second, we have the bracket builder itself. And this is the one

that came straight out of the data. I built a fully interactive World Cup bracket maker. And here’s a detail that really matters. It actually lives on the web and the app just references it so anyone can use it whether they’ve downloaded Bola or not. And that’s on purpose because the web version is the part that ranks and the part that spreads. Third, and this is the sneakiest part, the growth is built right into that builder. Every single bracket someone makes comes out with a QR code baked into it. So when they share, their friend just scans the code and lands straight in the app. That QR code is smarter than it looks because it points to an install link that does two things at once. It tracks exactly which bracket it came from and it can detect whether you’re on a web, Android, or iPhone, and automatically send you to the right store. One link, every platform fully tracked. Every share is basically an ad I never had to make.

That four gets physical and it’s one of my favorites. I built something called the Bola map. A live map of all the bars and restaurants showing the games around you. The way it works is a flywheel. A venue puts up a little QR poster. Fans at the bar scan it and download. And then a venue gets listed on the map so even more fans can find them. The venue gets full traffic. The fans get the app and I get downloads. Everybody wins. Bat 5 is content I didn’t even film and there’s three parts to it. The first part is a little system I built that posts soccer memes to Bola’s own social accounts automatically every single day without me ever having to touch it. The goal is that simple. A good meme gets people to the profile and then the profile gets them to download the app. The second part is the organic upsell where I get other faces football creators to feature the app inside their own content. I’m even seating the bracket to creators who have nothing to do with soccer. So, it turns up as a prop in couple videos, group chat videos, or even productivity videos. The name just stays in front of millions of eyeballs while I’m asleep, and I don’t have to appear in any of it.

And the third part is treating those posts like search, not just content. I load the captions, the on-screen text, and even the words I say out loud with the exact phrases people type when they’re looking for World Cup stuff. So, the posts keep surfacing in Tik Tok and YouTube search for weeks after I post them. This is the part most people skip, and it’s where a lot of the slow, free, quality downloads are coming from. Quick side note, because people always ask me this, a lot of these bats are really just AI agents running in parallel on my Mac for hours at a time. But my laptop kept falling asleep the second I stepped away for lunch, which would kill the whole run. So now I use a tiny menu bar app called Agent Awake that keeps the Mac awake, but only while the agent is actually working. It even plays nicely with co-work. So if you run long AI jobs, I’ll link it in the description below. Okay, quickfire run now because these next few are short, basically free, and almost nobody bothers with them.

Bet six, everyone ships to the Apple App Store and Google Play and then they just stop. But I’m also pushing the app onto alternative Android stores, places like Apptoid and the Samsung Galaxy Store. And before you write those off, look at the scale. Apptoid alone has done over 10 billion downloads. It’s got more than a million apps and somewhere around 400 million users, which makes it the third biggest Android app store on the planet. This is not a rounding error. It’s a giant audience that almost every developer completely ignores. Sure, it’s fewer people than Google Play, but it’s also way less competition because barely anyone bothers to publish there, and a lot of those users don’t even have the normal Play Store on their phone anyways. Getting Bola onto these stores cost me almost nothing. So, why wouldn’t I have a line in the water everywhere where they’re fans? Bet seven turned into a growth channel I honestly didn’t even plan for and it’s a tiny Mac app called Bullar. It keeps a live score sitting right up in your menu bar all day with a clean countdown to the next match when nothing’s on and even a no spoiler mode for when you’re catching a game on replay. The reason it’s on this list is pure brand recall.

Think about it. If you work on your Mac during the tournament, Bola is now literally always there in your top corner on your screen all day. You glance up and check a score a dozen times a day and then every single time you see the name Bola. So when you finally pick up your phone and dig into your bracket or check your group, you go straight into the BA app without even thinking about it. It’s a tiny thing, but I think it keeps the brand parked in front of exactly the people who go deep on the app and the links right below where you want it. Bet 8 is just going where the fans are already hanging out. And the first place is Reddit. Honestly, this is the one I’m most careful with because Reddit can smell like a marketer instantly. And the second you look like one, you’re done. So, I don’t do any of the spammy stuff. No driveby, check out my app post, none of it. I just actually hang out in a football subreddits. I answer real questions because I like talking about the stuff anyways. And here’s the wild part. That slow, careful approach has somehow already made Reddit one of my single biggest sources of traffic. second only to search, which when you think about it kind of totally makes sense because one helpful comment from a

real person in the right thread is worth way more than a thousand ads. It doesn’t scale. It takes real time and that is exactly why it works because almost nobody else is willing to do it. The other place is Facebook and I think a lot of people massively underrate Facebook. It’s still huge, especially internationally and it’s exactly where the office pool and the family pool crowd actually goes looking for a World Cup bracket. So, I spun up five bracket challenge groups, all run straight from my own Bola Facebook page. People find the group, they join the challenge, and to fill out their bracket, they head to the bracket builder on the web, which then walks them right into the app. Everything I’ve shown you so far has basically been free. Okay, Bet [clears throat] 9 is the first of only two things I actually pay for, and it’s so cheap it barely counts, but it needs explaining because most people have never heard of it. Here’s the thing. When you put an app on the App Store, App Store search indexing takes forever. So when someone is searching for Bola on the app store, it can be weeks before I actually show up where I should show up with my own app. So I run a tiny app on my own name,

just Bola and a couple of variations purely to the people who are already searching for me can find me while the store slowly catches up. And because nobody else is really fighting for my exact name, it cost me around 20 cents a download. Just for comparison, if I bid on a generic phrase like World Cup instead, it would be $3 or4 a tab against everybody. So this one isn’t really growth. It’s just me making sure that people who want to find me will actually find me. Okay, now the place where I’m spending the most money is actually kind of insane. I booked the digital screens on a New York City ferry for 6 weeks, thousands of commuters a day, a QR code, and my app right there on the screen. And the reason it makes sense is the audience because it’s huge, it’s captive, and it’s bored on a commute, which is exactly when someone will download something fun. I’m measuring the whole thing through direct QR code installs, so I’ll know precisely what it drove. And if the first two weeks actually work, I’ve already got a few more cities on a back burner ready to run some with the same play.

And honestly, I think the free stuff will win. I built myself a scrappy little dashboard that pulls all of it in one place. The installs, the store clicks, the QR scans, the AI citations, even the fairy traffic. Every channel is just sitting there side by side, so I can actually see what’s working and what isn’t. So, in 6 weeks, I’ll be able to look at one screen and say, “Okay, this one was magic.” And this one was a complete waste of my time. And the number I care most about is total installs. Because when you strip everything else away, this whole thing is really just one question. How many downloads can one person get for almost $0. That’s the whole reason I’m filming this before. After means something. Okay, so that’s all 10. There’s nothing clever hiding behind any of it. just a pile of small, mostly free bets and a dashboard tracking every single one of them. And honestly, this video is part of the experiment, too, because me on camera telling the real story in public in its own way is a way to grow the app. People follow people, not apps. Nobody shares a faceless ad.

Will share one person trying something a little insane and being honest about whether it worked. And honestly, the lesson learned so far is AI is crazy. One person with AI can outrun a marketing department’s worth of experiment at the same time. Because 5 years ago, this list needed a team. In 6 weeks, the final whistle blows and I’ll come back with the real numbers, what worked and what embarrassed me, what I’d never do again, and yes, exactly how much money the app actually made. And if you don’t want to wait for 6 weeks, come follow along on my Substack. It’s free to subscribe, and I’m posting the whole journey there as it happens. Then, for anyone who wants the real front row seat, there’s a paid tier where I open up a live dashboard so you can watch the real-time pulse of the app, the brackets, the scans, and the downloads. You also get the weekly breakdown of which bets are actually working and exactly why, plus a daily check-in from me in the chat. Free to follow, pay to go deep, and the link is below. And if you’re watching any of the matches, grab Ola. It’s free. The link is below and the World Cup starts right