| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ktnhmapbkn1w4cwyy4dm6 |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ktnhmapbkn1w4cwyy4dm6 |
| Date | 2025-03-25 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qeY283nBhIA
i taught myself how to code and I built two apps that now make me 10,000 a month well the answer lies in how he spends his time i spend 1 hour a day marketing and I generated over 300 million views and made a,000 videos the secret is Jack Ficks started his journey as a kid working at McDonald’s saving up money so he could start pursuing his dreams of building online once he’d saved up
enough he quit his job dropped out of college and started building apps from his mom’s basement and within one year he started making money i think the biggest reason most people over complicate building profitable apps is because they’re not trying to solve a painful enough problem i spent almost 2 hours talking to Jack about his apps and how anyone can start building profitable products like him from scratch and on a budget luckily he shared everything how he finds profitable ideas how he
scrappily builds products and monetizes quickly and his 1hour a day marketing strategy that’s gotten him millions of views and thousands of downloads now let’s get into it i’m Pat Walls and this is Starter Story welcome Jack Frics to the Starter Store YouTube channel tell me a little bit about yourself and what you built my name is Jack Ficks i built two startups that make me $10,000 a month all from my mom’s basement the first thing I built was Curiosity Quench a consumer app that
helps people scroll less on their phones it took me 4 months to build it because I was learning how to code at the time that now makes me 60,000 in the last year the second thing I built was a social media scheduling tool called PostBridge after four and a half months it hit 40,000 in the first five months all right Jack can you give me a
further breakdown of the businesses that you built yeah so Curiosity Quench I built to help people scroll less on their phones by giving them hobbies to do it charges about $30 a year for the subscription with a 7-day free trial it has over 100,000 downloads and then that led me to build another business which is called PostBridge that helps people basically post social media posts quicker easier faster from one place it is a web application the starting plan
for PostBridge is $9 a month but now there is a few other pricing tiers cool okay tell me a little bit about what got you into building online give us a timeline of when things started for you as an entrepreneur yeah so 3 years ago I dropped out of college because I realized I did not want to work a job i really just wanted my own freedom my own autonomy to like do whatever I want on my own time it sounds dramatic but I would often tell my friends and myself that I would rather be homeless than work a job basically I quit my job at
McDonald’s i dropped out of school in the same few months to pursue a bunch of different businesses in 3 years making a book selling t-shirts having a crypto YouTube channel many other things i eventually landed on learning how to code i kind of just went into it head on the first thing I went to build was actually Curiosity Quench everything broke almost every single time I built it i just kept putting errors after errors into ChachiPT and eventually had
a working product but it didn’t go like skyrocket growth right away i still had to keep working on it and find new angles on how to market it how to get into people’s hands so that was still an ongoing process for many months even after I built it nice man let’s go on to ideas man i want to get a little bit into the dirty details here can you tell me a little bit about how you find ideas and specifically how you found the ideas for Curiosity Quench and PostBridge so I think the best way to find any good idea is to solve your own problems for
Curiosity Quench my problem was that I was scrolling all day on my phone or at least a few hours when I woke up and there wasn’t really any apps that to me were very great so I was trying to tackle it from a different angle and ultimately what I came up with was action plans on a bunch of different hobbies and that’s how it led to me making Curiosity Quench the app it is now nice okay cool so then tell me about the second idea postbridge and how you came across the problem for that and
then decided to what to build for it so postbridge came to be because I was spending an hour a day marketing curiosity quench and of that hour 30 minutes was spent posting the same content to every single platform so I went and looked around and there was options to do it for me but they cost like 10 times more than I want to pay so I thought I could make something better and then I just went and did it at a fair price nice okay let’s talk idea
validation what does that look like that process so to me validating ideas was first asking myself is it a problem that I would pay for to solve if I would pay for it I consider it a lot more valuable and a painful problem and if I wouldn’t pay for it I usually don’t build it and then for Curiosity Crunch as an example I posted a video 60 seconds on TikTok i just point and shoot recorded it talking to the camera and 15 people commented saying "I need this this is it this is
good." So I kept making videos the same thing happened and eventually I realized hey I should probably make this thing that hundreds of people say they want all right let’s talk about what everyone loves let’s talk about how you build these products what’s your step-by-step process to go from zero to one with a new idea so my process is actually pure chaos i basically jump into my code editor i bring up chat GPT or something similar and I just start asking how I
should go about building the thing and in terms of landing page I have just used like a boilerplate and I have made very small improvements i’d go back and edit one section at a time usually and just make it a little bit better week over week all right so we talked about how to go from zero to one but before we get into the growth I do want to talk about one very important thing that you cannot forget to do before you launch analytics and yes this is today’s sponsor but I’m actually kind of nerding
out right now because this is one of my favorite tools and I actually use it every day and I’m going to show you right now how I use it so this is Post Hog and by the way how freaking cool is their website with this crazy dinosaur thing but you can install it on your site with just one line of code and they have a really generous free plan once it’s installed you’ll get product analytics session replay experiments surveys and more but my personal favorite feature is AB testing and I’m going to show you a starter story AB
test in Post Hog right now that increased our conversion rate by over 300% check this out right here this is crazy and why I really recommend using Post Hog but what I think is also cool is that in Post Hog you can track the AB test going through the funnel and see how this AB test affects the entire conversion flow you can also even drill down further and look at conversion rates by source so I can see how people convert from Twitter YouTube ChatGBT and
a bunch of other places these AB tests are so important for our business and there’s just really not another tool that can actually do this so if you want to install Post Hog which I think you should do and it’s free just click the first link in the description and tell them you came from Starter Story all right now back to the video all right let’s talk about your specialty let’s talk about marketing how do you actually get users to these businesses and have them pay money so my core strategy and it still is this is to do everything
through organic to get Curiosity Quench to a 100,000 users was just finding a template that I can repeat over and over and over again a very funny simple 2x two images caption template it’s 6 seconds long and having the pinned comment be go download and try our app and then I would make a mistake even to drive engagement in the comments like astrology and astronomy if you get those mixed up people are really going to get angry originally I created my templates
by just making a Cap Cut project and copying and pasting it over eventually this became a bit too slow so I actually built in like a template creator into my SAS which is PostBridge i posted the 2x two template over now 300 times on two different accounts and they’ve driven 60 to 70,000 signups just through these simple templates that have brought in like hundreds of millions of views okay
let’s we’re going to do a little deep dive into your marketing can you walk through that step by step of just spending 1 hour a day marketing your app what does that look like so I think anyone can get thousands of downloads to their app or visitors to the website just with one hour a day of marketing with no ad spend that’s a very simple strategy first I would open account on Tik Tok and Instagram for my product or a personal page either one works and I would just scroll on those pages for 2 days 15 minutes a day each this is to
warm it up so the algorithms don’t think you’re a bot you’re a real human being while you’re doing this when you see videos that have went viral save them do not post content during this time comment and follow people in your niche so interact with posts and then after you’ve warmed up your account download Cap Cut it’s super easy you can learn it in an hour and you can start posting videos from proven examples that you’ve seen you spin them with your app either as a call to action at the end of the video 3 seconds or less or don’t even
put in the video make your caption and your first comment a call to action to go to your thing the algorithm loves watch time and the easiest way to get like 100% 200% watch time is to make your video 6 seconds long but what matters more than all that is to make content that people actually watch it has to provide some type of value some type of connection some type of laugh it could be entertainment it could be education but if it’s directly an ad people are going to scroll it’s not going to work so once you find a winning
format double down on it just recreate that video in a different way and post it over and over again milk it till it’s dry that’s great advice tell me a little bit about uh batching up this content are you just doing it every day or do you batch it up for the whole week or do you outsource any of this yeah so I spend 1 hour a day marketing i post the videos same day i usually don’t schedule them far out just because I can iterate way faster cuz every day I can try something new if I’m just batching I’m
going to have the same still content for the whole month that I that don’t even know if it works yet so every day means you can improve and iterate way faster and you can find a winning template way faster agreed tell me about the multiple accounts you said you had like four different accounts what does that look like yeah so I run three Instagram accounts to split up my videos because I want to try and spread all of them out by at least 3 or 4 hours i don’t want the algorithm to think I’m spamming it it’s always different videos because if
you do post the same videos with the same metadata nowadays the algorithms are good and they will notice it so I wouldn’t suggest doing that i want to go talk about the building in public thing because you seem to be doing a really good job of just sharing your story on Twitter you said you posted 300 videos what would be your advice for people that want to get their first thousand followers on X i think the easiest way to grow a personal brand is to not grow a personal brand at all it’s just to build cool things do cool things and
then like share them to me building cool things just means that you’re doing something that’s tangible so you can see like you have an output for me it was building an app and for many other people it might be something like writing a book or doing something even around their house like organizing stuff a certain way but most people aren’t sharing the things they’re doing in their lives they’re sharing like apherisms and quotes that no one really cares about if you just share what you’re actually doing in your life it’s probably going to be 10 times more fun for other people to see and they connect with you a lot more and one thing that I
see with people who want to build in public they’re they’re maybe a little afraid or fear of failure or fear of putting themselves out there is that something that you experienced honestly I made new social media accounts to get away from all the real life people around me but the only way you can get over that fear is to just do it and realize that no one really cares no one cares if you fail or win they just kind of are watching on the sidelines most of the time and they’re not really paying attention to you they’re paying attention to themselves they’re not
thinking you’re stupid you’re dumb they’re just thinking how can I succeed and they’re kind of scrolling past your post getting over that fear was really big for me to be able to just tweet whatever and people can really feel if you’re being authentic or not we talked a lot about marketing how to get actual eyeballs on your content how do you convert that to paying users so I think it’s very different when you’re trying to monetize something if it’s a mobile app or it’s a web app for my mobile app I made it a payw wall they can skip it
but it just offers them a trial for the premium version and obviously most of the great things about my app are behind that pay wall also in mobile apps what’s really important is onboarding basically before you get to showing that pay wall for them to pay tell them what the problem you’re solving is and how you’re going to solve it make them get excited about it cuz they’re going to be way more primed to actually spend money on your thing when they know it’s going to help them for web for PostBridge my SAS i did experiment a lot with yearly
pricing but what worked even better for me was a 7-day free trial there’s no free version you just put your credit card in if you want to try it you can cancel anytime that was really helpful for me free trials and 40% discount on yearly or a big discount are two really simple things that I did that drove revenue up a lot tell me about pricing for PostBridge specifically i mean there’s already a million uh social media scheduling platforms why did you win i just built it for myself all the
other ones to me were too expensive i priced it at what I think is fair and that fair price was something that I was willing to pay and I still at this price point make a very healthy profit so I can’t really complain let’s talk about retention insurance so now that you have paying users what have you seen works with actually keeping those users coming back every month the biggest thing for me was just making a product that is so useful they need it in their everyday life and that comes I think with the actual initial idea the problem you’re
solving initially kind of has to be sticky enough where they’re going to value it to pay monthly let’s talk about tech stack what have been the most useful tools and languages that help you run these products on a day-to-day basis what does your stack look like so my tech stack is Nex.js JS mostly and for mobile apps it’s react native with expo and I use also a boilerplate to start all my web projects called chipfast from my friend Mark Lou I use superbase for the database every time Apple notes some
like Trello board just for my own internal use and like a timer that I have right here to just track that I’m working actually inspired by Pat so every day I just start a timer and I block in I focus on the task one task task that I’m doing and I do that for either 1 hour 90 minutes or 2 hours at a time and that’s helped me a lot to build fast because when you’re focused you get a lot more done tell me a little bit about the costs or margins to run a
business like this if you could break those down it’d be cool my cost for running these businesses is Twitter API uh that costs 400 a month is what I pay very good margins like over 95% tell me about what a day in the life looks like you uh building two different businesses from your mom’s basement so most of my days I wake up pretty early get 8 hours of sleep i try not to sacrifice the sleep
usually read a bit and go straight to work probably 2 to 4 hours focused work then I take lunch and then I work 2 to 4 hours again in the last year I have developed a more stable routine where I will stop working at dinnertime because then I can sleep better then I’m excited to work the next day it’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last year and a half what are some of the key lessons you’ve learned in your journey looking back what advice would you give to a younger Jack if you could stand on his shoulder mainly to just keep going a
lot of the times in my journey I wanted to give up or I was doubtful of myself but then a few months later I would figure out that hurdle because I just kept going and also to solve real problems something I wish I really knew earlier was that the easiest way to make a successful business is really just to solve your own problems and that was the two things that I did that were successful were both things that I had the problem of and I needed a solution so I just went and built them now that
you made it you can do whatever you want every day you get to build your own products what would be your advice to someone who wants to own their schedule be a soloreneur build cool things i would say the best advice would just be to keep trying different things even when something doesn’t work so you can eventually get through the haze of this isn’t going to work out this is terrible and make it into something that eventually gets you to that $10,000 a month it’s not going to happen overnight it may take 3 4 years that’s probably the average amount of time it takes but
just the ability to not give up to keep going is going to be the number one thing beautiful all right thanks Jack for coming on Starter Story i think people are going to love your story i love what you built and it’s only going to grow a lot from here so thanks man jack is the perfect example of how a solo builder can turn a simple idea into thousands of dollars but that comes with knowing the right information and finding the right problem to solve now imagine there was a place that gave you all this painful problems to solve the
blueprints for building and the marketing strategies that turn simple ideas into million-dollar online businesses well at Starter Story we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can access this all backed by data from real entrepreneurs so if you’re serious about building a profitable side project like Jack head to the link in the description and we’re going to give you 52 micro SAS ideas so you can get started on your journey today much love and I’ll see you
guys in the next one peace