| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2kswawn7y50q1zjcd0fy5e |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2kswawn7y50q1zjcd0fy5e |
| Date | 2025-12-14 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kM-JcKpcDs
Yeah, I literally don’t know how to codeat all.>> Meet George, a college student who hadnever written a single line of code inhis life. That was until he discoveredcoding with AI.
I truly believe that anyone can build amobile app these days.>> In just a couple of months, he came up withan idea, he built it, and then helaunched it to the App Store.>> I went from idea to the app store in 1month. Now, that app that he builtgenerates over $17,000 a month. Georgeis proof that with a littledetermination, anybody can do this. AndI brought him on the channel to show mehow he did it.
In this video, we’lltalk about his six-step vibe codingprocess that helped him launch his app,the vibe coding tool he uses to ship hisapps quickly, and the marketing playbookhe followed to grow his app to over$17,000 a month.
All right, this is onethat you cannot miss. I’m Pat Walls, andthis is Starter Story.All right, realquick. You are about to hear a crazystory about how George, this collegekid, built and launched his app with AI.I think you’re going to love this story.
And if it inspires you, I also think youshould definitely check out StarterStory Build. It is our program where youwill learn exactly how to do what Georgedid and what he’s going to share withyou today. I’ll talk a little bit moreon that later. So, let’s get into theinterview. All right, George, welcome tothe channel. Tell me about who you are,what you built, and what’s your story.
Yeah, so my name’s George Lampropolis. Ilaunched an app that makes $17,000 permonth. I launched it within the last 6months and I’m excited to share how Idid it today.
All right. $17,000 a month with an appin just a few months is insane. What isthe app you built and how is it possiblethat you can make this much money insuch a short amount of time?
Yeah, so Wrestle AI is like an AIwrestling coach. We use videoanalysis where you can submit videosof your match and it breaks down whatyou did right, what you did wrong, andhow you could improve. It gives youdrills and actionable plans on how youcan actually improve your wrestling. Ourpricing is 59.99 for the year.
This is my revenue dashboard. We launchedWrestle AI on September 26th. So I look atour monthly recurring revenue, which is 8,000 from subscriptions,and then the rest are yearly subscriptions. We accrued a lot of yearliesbecause we attached the trial to theyearly option. Yeah. So we’ve done over2 million impressions on social media.In terms of downloads, I think we’re around17,000.
All right. So that’s insane that youcode this in the last coupleof months and you’re doing these kinds ofnumbers. Before we get into how you coded it and how you grew it,and how you did all the marketing, I need tounderstand your background. Tell me alittle bit more about you and how youeven got into building apps.
So I’m 18 right now. I’m a freshman incollege. I’ve always hated school witha burning passion, and I was alwaystrying my own things and ways tomake money. When I was 15, I had adecent amount of money saved up for a15-year-old. I told my friend, “Let’s go all in. Let’s make this socialself-improvement app.” Our app went viralon social media. We had 10,000 followerswaiting for our app. We had to hire likeThree development agencies. None of themgot it right. It took us a year and ahalf to finally release the app. And atthat point, the hype died and we lostall our money. I had to pick up ajob at TJ Maxx to get some money. And Ithink that was the catalyst of myobsession with startups because I alwayswalked around with a chip on myshoulder that I was meant to
succeed. And when I saw that my brainwouldn’t work, I thought, “All right, Ijust have to be absolutely relentless inhow I approach creating andstarting things, and I just have to keepgoing until something eventually doeswork.”>> All right. You shared earlier that youtried to work with developers before andbuild stuff. It didn’t work out super well. But now, as Iunderstand, you vibe coded this entirething, and you didn’t have a crazybackground in development orengineering. Tell me a little bit moreabout that. Did you actually vibe codethis app yourself? Yeah. So, this allstarted six months ago around June. Iwas scrolling on social media. Isaw an ad for a vibe coding platform.
I created an app called Foror that claimed I built sevenapps in a week. I thought that can’t betrue, so I decided to try it out. Idon’t know how to code at all, but I understand the systems and how to getconversions from these apps and how tobuild viral ideas. I usedRoric, which is a visual coding platform, and I also leveraged abunch of public APIs out there to buildsome of the functionality. It took mearound a month, from the idea to beinglive on the app store. On July1st, that’s when I launched. And in thatmonth, it was just a series of attemptswith Chat GPT and ROR to build something
that worked. Basically, I wouldtry to port the app from ROR to TestFlight, and there were a bunch ofissues. Anytime there was an issuewith Expo, I would copy the logs,throw them into Chat GPT, and kindof had Chat GPT as my adviser, whichguided me through the whole process.I had to hire one developer tointegrate payments and authentication. I spent the first weekof June on ROR prompting non-stop untilI got something that I liked. From there,I passed it on to the developer.
I needed something simple, like integrating apaywall; that’s a super easy task. SoI paid someone on Fiverr about 250 bucks.That took him about a week. And then thelast two weeks were just spent dealingwith Apple’s nonsense and rejections.
George is proof that vibe codingactually works. I don’t know how else Ican prove it to you guys, but the bestpart about this is that we are still soearly in this whole vibe coding thing. Itruly believe that learning to buildwith AI is the skill of the next decade.And this is why I think you should checkout Starter Story Build. It is ourprogram where we will teach you how touse AI to build anything. You’ll learnhow to find an idea, build it quickly,and ship it in just a couple of weeks. Ifyou want to get in on this and actuallybuild something, I’m going to put a linkin the description to our iOS boot camp.
In that boot camp, you will learn how todo basically everything George did injust a couple of weeks. Our next cohort isstarting soon, so just head to that linkin the description if you want toenroll. All right, let’s get back to thestory. The next question that I have foryou is if you were to start over today,Obviously, you did this in the lastcouple of months, but a lot of people aregoing to be watching this thinking, "Howcan I do this right now in 2025, in2026? If you had to start over, whatwould be your step-by-step process forcreating a somewhat viral app like youdid if you were to start over?
Yeah. So, step one obviously is the idea.I think that’s one of the mostimportant parts along with distribution.There’s a lot of talk now thatdistribution is the most important part.I kind of push back against that becauseif you don’t have a viral idea innature, distribution doesn’t matter. So,in my opinion, there are three pillarsfor a good idea: uniqueness,helpfulness, and the gotcha moment. Youneed uniqueness so it catches eyes. Youneed helpfulness so it has somestickiness. And you need that gotchamoment that’s built into the app thateasily conveys what your app does inabout five seconds. The gotcha moment isthe moment that’s going to stop someonefrom scrolling. Think, “I need to trythis app out.” That idea, the gotchamoment would be in the back of my headwhenever I’m designing apps.
It could be something that I couldseamlessly integrate into a TikTok,YouTube short, or whatever that will getsomeone to stop scrolling. Right aroundthe time I launched Wrestle AI, Ilaunched another app in collaborationwith an influencer who had a millionfollowers. This app, however, was not anovel idea like Wrestle AI; it was aconcept similar to RGBT and PlugAI. Both Wrestle AI and this app gotaround a million, close to 2 millionimpressions at the time. Except WrestleAI was getting conversions, downloads,and doing really well, whilethis app, Green, that I launched got, Ithink 100 downloads off about 1.8
million impressions, solely because thisapp didn’t follow the purple cowphilosophy. It wasn’t something that wasabstract and eye-catching. So now, goinginto the future, any app I build needsto be novel; it needs to besomething that hasn’t been seen before,or else your creatives won’t convert aswell. So step two is designing the app.You need to answer the question, whois it for? What type of UI would fit theprospective buyer? Then, you need tobuild out the framework first, and thenThe functionality: So I’m literallyanswering these questions. Who’s it for?
And what type of UI would fit them? AndI’m taking that answer and literallyjust giving it to RO. You also needto have in the back of your head howusers could organically share your app.This way, it’s not just all ad spendpushing your traffic. Step three:Building out the core functionality. So,whenever I’m starting a new app, I setaside a week to literally just sit at mycomputer and prompt ROR from morningtill night. During this time, you’regoing to have to figure out howSuperbase works if you want toimplement APIs or not. ROR does offer aton of APIs as part of their toolkit aswell. But if you want to add externalAPIs like a nutrition database, ifyou’re building out a calorie tracker,there are so many things outthere that don’t cost much money andwill make your app 10,000 times better.
So I highly recommend being on thelookout for some good APIs that you canintegrate into your app. Step four:Onboarding. This is the second mostimportant part of your app. You can havea great app, but if you can’t convertThe user, no one will know. Theonboarding, by nature, is designed toconvey what value you’re giving to theuser. So, the key to making a goodonboarding experience is copying what alreadyworks. I would spend hours just studyingother people’s onboarding processes andapplying the things I saw in their appsto my app. Some great onboardingprocesses are Opel, Cali; just look upwhatever apps that are high converting.
Copy their onboarding and apply the sameelements to your onboarding. If I had tosummarize the formula for my onboardingprocess, it would be first to educatethe user about what the app does.Second, personalize the experience withguiding questions that both set up theapp for them and guide them to why theyneed the app. Then, I would try toenact FOMO regarding not having the app.Lastly, show them the gotchamoment by having them do it but not giving the results beforethe paywall. The length of theonboarding process also contributes tohow many people convert. Although itdoes add friction, it also makes thepeople who go through it have the sunkcost fallacy, which causes users to atAt least get the free trial. Step five,hire out what you don’t know how to do.
The greatest return on investment thatI’ve had during this whole process wasprobably hiring my developer fromPakistan. A good hire can really changeyour trajectory. I got really lucky, toto be honest, finding good talent earlyon in the process. I think a big keyis to sell whoever you’reworking with on your vision and theywill work really hard to get youthere because they feel like they’re a partof something bigger. Another thingis that AI is now the great equalizerin education with tools like ChatGPT.
If you can hire someone that’srelatively smart and knows how toutilize AI to learn, not just code,they’ll probably be able to fulfill90% of your needs. If you’re going tohire someone, have them work on a smalltask that you think they can do. If theyexcel at it, then start giving them moreresponsibility. Step six, this is kindof where I’m at now, and it’s expandingpast vibe coding. Vibe coding isgreat to release quickly and validateideas by building on an MVP, but onceyou start moving past $5K a month, youYou should start investing in productquality. Now, I have contracteddesigners, and I have some people thatwork for us. Another thing is probablydiscipline as you start getting thesebigger numbers. I actually haven’t takena penny out of this business yet. AndI’m not going to take a penny out ofthis business until we’re at 100K MRR.
Yeah. That would probably be mywhole process. And now I’m currently instep six, kind of building out past vibecoding, and I’m just really excited forthe future.
Thank you for sharing that. That’samazing. And it’s absolutely insane thatyou vibe coded this in the last fewmonths. I know a lot of people watchingthis are saying right now, okay, that’scool. You built it, but building doesn’tmatter anymore. It’s all aboutdistribution. So, let’s talk about it.How did you market your apps and how doyou think about marketing your apps andgetting users and making revenue?
Yeah. So, my whole strategy when itcomes to marketing these apps has allbeen from influencers. Just influencermarketing, quick snapping, the gotchamoment, just kind of keep going andScaling that up, I think influencermarketing is so valuable. So much thatmy co-founder is actually one of thebiggest people in the wrestlinginfluencing space. So we launched withhim. He was a great first push for uswhen we released. We set up apre-order to be on the top charts. Sothe day we released, we were like 18 onthe app store just from his influence.
And then going into month two, that’swhen we began to kind of saturate hisaudience, which you always have to bewary of. From there, I took about 500bucks and I thought, “All right, now thatwe’ve saturated Kaden’s audience andwe’re a little bit known in thewrestling industry.” We took the money,threw it into marketing, and generatedso far. Now, we’re at like 13K for thismonth. I’m probably going to have toinvest another 250 before the monthends. But influencer marketing has justbeen great for us.
All right. So, I mean, what I’m hearingfrom you is influencer marketing is hugefor you. Your app maybe wouldn’t bewhere it is if you didn’t focus so muchon influencer marketing. And I have alot of questions about that.
What would be your playbook if you were startingover today? What would be yourstep-by-step process to find and landinfluencers so that your app cangenerate revenue?Yeah. So, I’ll break it down in a fewsteps. Step one, if you’re juststarting out, DM 100 people a day. Steptwo, the first words of your DM shouldbe paid promo, and then like questionmark or paid promo for your company,etc. Influencers get hundreds tothousands of DMs a day. They will skipyour DM if your first two words aren’tsomething that’s captivating to them.
So, what’s more captivating thanbasically, “I will pay you.” Step three,when starting out, I would bot yourpersonal Instagram account withfollowers and then pay to verify youraccount to establish more credibility.Once you start doing a few influencersdeals, that’s when I would switch fromyour personal account to your businessaccount, because then people will recognizeyour business account more. Step four,stop wasting your time DMing with them.I think this is one of the mostimportant parts to getting a profitabledeal.
When you’re on the phone with someoneand they can feel your presenceand your voice. So once they respond,text them your phone number and justsay, "Hey, let’s hop on a call soon."Sometimes they’ll call you literally inthat moment. Other times, they’ll belike, “Hey, when are you available?” Or,“I’m busy today.” If they say, “I’m busytoday. What’s your offer?” And they’retrying to hard close you. Don’tfall for it. Just say, “Okay, just hitme up when you’re not busy.” They’regoing to want your money. You’re payingthem. It’s not the other way around.
Step five, closing the deal. The bestdeals you can make are 20 to 50% upfrontfor four to five videos with a viewguarantee that’s based on a 5CPM. CPM is the cost per 1,000 views. So,when you scroll on your Instagram andyou see that they average, let’s say,25,000 views per video, you’re going tomake them an offer for videos for 225bucks. Then, you’re going to tell them,but you need to have a minimum viewguarantee of 100K views. Now, if youdon’t hit that guarantee, you could keepposting until you do, and then we’ll payyou the rest of the money.
You probably pay anywhere from 50 to 100 bucks up front. I would hire aVA. There are two stages when I would hire aVA: when you’re just getting started,and then when you’re hyper successful.So, people like Cali, they need a DM becausethe founder is not going to be DMingthese people. When you’re just gettingstarted, you need to DM many peopleto get your foot in the door. So, youmight as well pay the small amountto hire someone overseasto massively DM a bunch of people.
In the middle, kind of where I am now, I doall that myself because once your brandis established, your response rate isgoing to shoot up. So now that our brandis somewhat known, I DM off the businessaccount. I scroll for 20 minutes a day.Our for you pages cater to the wrestlingniche; I message as many people as I canin those 20 minutes. Then the nextday, let’s say I hop on the phonewith all of them and close the deals.
Okay, cool. Influencers. I mean, that’spretty amazing what you’ve done andthat’s a great playbook. We haven’treally talked much about the app thatyou built. What I think is super coolabout it is this really unique concept.
Niche space, wrestling. I don’t reallyknow a whole lot about the wrestlingworld, so I thought it would be cool ifyou could just show us your app, how itworks, and maybe how the businessmodel is. Could you show us?So, here’s our gotcha moment. This isthe most important part of the app. It’swhere you enter the video of yourwrestling match, fill out a little bitof information, and then you analyzethe video. It then scrapes the videofor the two wrestlers in the video. Youhave to pick who you are, and then itgives you a performance breakdown out of10. It gives you key observations,
stuff you did well, your strengths, andyour areas for improvement. It gives you abreakdown of your strategy,and it offers drills to improveyour actual wrestling that you can addto your training program in the app. So,after that, we have a calorie tracker.We just revamped this thing, too. It hasa nutrition database, a barcodescanner, and it has that calorie typefeature where you can take a picture ofyour food, and it estimates the calories.I love this because it almost has theexact same features as MyFitnessPal.
It’s half the price for their premium.Then we have practice mode. Here it’slive coaching, and the coach basicallyexplains how to do each move. It will giveyou a little tutorial.>> Here are the steps.>> After that, it’ll basically ask you, here’show to do the move, and you’ll take avideo of you doing the move, and it willtell you what you did right and what youdid wrong. You also have your trainingprograms and stuff like that. You alsohave a calendar to track your nextmatches. You have a weight journal. Thewhole idea behind this app was basicallycreating an ecosystem for wrestling.
All right, cool. Thanks for showingthat. That’s super cool. It has a lot ofcool features. I want to change topics alittle bit and talk about the tech stack.How did you build this app, and whattools do you use on a day-to-day basisto make it run?>> I know we mentioned this before, but byfar, the number one tool for vibe codingapps is Ror Bolt, the Vibe Code app,Replet. In my opinion, none of them comeclose to how good Ror is. And I launchedmy first app with the $25 a monthsubscription. I didn’t even have toUpgrade to their more premiumsubscriptions. Superbase is really easyto use as well. That’s what I use for mybackend and it’s around 30 bucks amonth. AI inference costs, we useOpenAI. It’s super cheap. I’m paying 40to 60 bucks a month. ChatGPT premium.
Now, I don’t use this in the actual techin the app, but if you’re not paying forChatGPT premium, you’re behind. I thinkit’s just the most valuable tool for 20bucks a month is insane.
All right. Well, thanks for sharingthat. Last question that we ask everyonewho comes on Starter Story, if you couldgo back in time to before you had thesuccessful app, maybe after you kind offailed a few times when you were alittle bit younger, what would be youradvice to young George or for anyonewatching this that wants to build appsquickly like you? What would be yournumber one piece of advice?
Don’t complain about having too much onyour plate when you prayed to eat. Backwhen we were first launching Wrestle AI,we were hyping up the launch. We hadabout 3,000 pre-orders, maybe 4,000. Theapp goes live at 12:00 a.m. Right beforethis at around 11:30, the API we wereUsing the AI was completely down.
So, I freaked out because our app entirelyrelied on this. Not only was it broken,not only were we going to have subscribersrequesting refunds, but I felt just so defeatedin that moment—probably one of themost defeated I’ve ever felt. I was upthe entire night working on this, tryingto figure out a solution. The API gotfixed at around 5:00 a.m. I clickedlaunch. I went to sleep. I woke up at like1:00 p.m. and we were number 19 on the appstore, and we made over a thousandbucks. We were flooded with comments onour Instagram page, like, “Yo, thisapp’s so cool,” blah blah blah. It wasawesome. That was agreat day. But existence is a pleasure,and the hard part is the fun part. Youknow what I mean?
"That’s beautiful. Well, congrats,George, on everything you’ve done. Imean, doing this in just a few monthsand having a really successful app thathits high on the app store charts isinsane. So, thanks for coming on. Thanksfor sharing all that. Thanks for beingtransparent, showing all your numbers. Ithink this is going to inspire a lot ofpeople. So, thanks for coming on.
Thank you for having me.I feel fired up after listening toGeorge.What a legend, man.But yeah, that was a reallyawesome interview. It was just sofun to hear, like you said at thebeginning, his determination tobuild this thing.Yeah. You know, there are a lot ofdoubters online. I’m sure they’re goingto be in the comments talking about howthis is impossible or he has some sortof special help, savings, or whatever.
But when I see someone like George, whois 18 years old, currently incollege, doing this in his dormroom, what more proof do you need thatthis vibe coding thing is huge? Thisis absolutely huge. And I hopethat watching stories like George showsyou that anybody can do this,right? And as you said, determination— it wasn’t easy.Hopefully, nothing in this video talksabout it being easy, but as he kind ofsaid, AI is the ultimate equalizer.Any answer you need, you can getfrom AI, and you can build stuff with AI.What do you think?
Yeah, my big takeaway is that anything ispossible to build now with AI, whetherit’s Ror, like you said, or cloud code, orcursor, whatever tool is outthere. You could do like baseball AI orlike pickleball AI, or whateverniche thing I’ve shared in ourbuild channel, like my mobile appbuilding process. So I’m like, oh, maybe I’llcheck out Work, maybe I’ll check out something else. Itkind of doesn’t matter. It’s just like,like I said, it gets me fired up togo build some stuff.
Yeah, fires me up too. If you arealso fired up, like Gus and I am, youshould definitely check out StarterStory Build. It will help guide youthrough the process of finding an idea,building it, and launching it to real actualcustomers, getting feedback, andbuilding. Look, it’s not going to beeasy, but the process is straightforwardwith a little bit of determination. I’llput a link in the description to ournext iOS boot camp, which specifically,if you want to launch an app to the AppStore, it’s going to be exactly how todo that. You’re going to do it alongsideother people, building cool stuff.
That’s it for this episode. I hope youguys enjoyed it. Thank you for watching.Let us know in the comments what youthought, what kind of questions youhave, or anything else. Thank you guysfor watching. We’ll see you in the nextone. Peace.