| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ks1m9hgvbw6vbzw81z94s |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ks1m9hgvbw6vbzw81z94s |
| Date | 2026-05-10 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4R_Hlw7sbo
This started as a fun side project, butwe turned it into a real business.>> Meet Brian. Him and his girlfriend builta really simple mobile app, and in lessthan 3 months, they grew it to over20,000 a month, why you should resistthe temptation to build anything untilyou hit this one number, and the newframework to validate business ideas inan AI world. This one is a great story.So, let’s dive in. I’m Pat Walls, andthis is Starter Story.
All right, welcome Brian to the channel.Tell me about who you are, what app youbuilt, and what’s your story.>> Hey Pat, nice to meet you. My name isBrian Shin, and uh, we built a disposablecamera app called Once. We launched backin December 2025, and fortunately, wewere able to hit 20K in monthly revenuewithin 83 days of launch. So today, Ireally want to share exactly how wepre-validated once before writing asingle line of code and also some of thegrowth playbooks that we had to growones from zero all the way to $20,000 inmonthly revenue.
Okay, cool. I mean, awesome to have youhere. Would you be able to just explainwhat your app does, who uses it, andpull up some of your revenue dashboardsto show that this is legit to theaudience?>> Yeah, for sure. So, ones is basically adisposable camera for events, especiallyfor weddings, birthday parties, andthese days even for some corporateEvents. So, anything where a group ofpeople can come together, have fun, andcapture all the candid moments once canplay a role there. And our pricing isbased on the number of guests that youwant to invite into your event. So ifit’s like a small birthday party withjust 10 people, it’s going to be just$2.
But if it’s like a bigger wedding,for instance, if it’s like 150 people,it’ll be 22,000.
And this is our internal dashboardcalendar where you can see all of ouractive users who have scheduled an eventthrough once. And, as you can see inFebruary, there are around more than 300events. And for March, we got around 700.
Events coming up real soon. Here’s whatI love about Brian’s story. It’s a greatexample of someone who focused on growthand then hit $20,000 a month in lessthan 90 days. And this got me thinking.We talk to dozens of mobile app foundersevery week right here on this channel.And I always ask them the same question.How did you actually grow your app?Well, since we talked to so many people,we decided to turn all of their answersinto a free guide that you can downloadright now. It’s called the mobile appgrowth cheat sheet. And inside you willfind the seven different marketingtactics that are working for realfounders right now making money withmobile apps. If you’re ready to focus ongrowth and actually grow your app, justhead to the first link in thedescription to download the entire guidefor free. I promise it won’t disappoint.
All right, let’s get back to theepisode. Okay, cool. I mean, this lookslike a really cool app. I can see why.
It’s popular, and why it’s growing. Iwant to understand a little bit aboutyour background. How do you get to thispoint where you’re building this coolconsumer app that over 300 people areabout to use this month at events?What’s your background?
So, before founding ones, I co-founded aventure-backed B2B startup. It’scompletely different from one’s. It wasmore of a heavy sales-driven 50-personcompany. So, building this venture-backedstartup really showed me what a realbusiness is and everything related tobuilding a fast-growth company. Andwhile I was at the company, I found thewhole bootstrap scene, which I didn’tknow existed before. I met all thesereally cool indie hackers and bootstrapfounders who are validating in a verysmall way. So, it’s rather a safer,smaller bet as opposed to betting yourwhole life on something that’s bigger.And I don’t think there’s right or wronghere, but I really wanted to try thisNew path of building a bootstrapcompany. And that’s why this time Ireally wanted full control over theproduct that we build. Hence, me and myco-founder, my girlfriend, we decided togo fully bootstrapped this time.
Okay, cool. Let’s switch topics a littlebit and talk about the idea. So, how doyou actually find the idea for this appthat eventually makes over $20,000 amonth?
The whole story comes from me and myco-founder, who is my girlfriend. Justlast year, we traveled to almost seven,eight different countries, and everysingle city we go to, we bring around adisposable camera. If you tried using adisposable camera, it’s such a simpleproduct, but it’s so magical in a waythat it has so many limitations. Youcan’t see the photo right away. You havelimited amount of shots. But I thinkthose limitations, it actually makes thewhole experience much real. So reallythe whole idea behind once was why don’tWe try to build a digital experiencethat almost replicates that traditionaldisposable camera was the whole ideabehind it.
That’s awesome. Let’s talk about how youbuilt this app. How long did it take tobuild this app, and what was that journeylike?>> So, the first version took around a weekor two. It was a web app that kind ofjust had the core features of what amobile app intended to have. We had aHalloween party hosted by my friend,coming up. So we built out this webversion. We printed out some invitationcodes so that everyone in the party canjoin in, take photos, and honestly, itbroke many times during the event. Butwe were able to validate the core ideathat the people loved taking photos inthat event into a singular album of eachother through an experience that mocksthe whole disposable camera experience.So it didn’t need to be perfect, but itwas perfect enough to validate what weWanted to check.
My other question is AI. I mean, youjust built this like 3 months ago. Didyou just build it with AI tools or whattools did you use?>> Uh, it might be a hot take, but after wevalidated with the web app, we threw outthe first version. And that’s because Ihonestly believe that consumer app isbasically a craft. And I use a lot of AIfor dev, for finance, for everything.But for design, we never use AI. Andthat’s because we really believe thatdesign requires taste. And we think thatthe more opinionated, the better designthat could possibly come out. But asidefrom that, I basically live on cloudcode. Yeah. I mean, I 100% agree withthat. Design is one of those things thatAI is not that good at yet. And when youhave a BTOC app like this, a consumerffacing app, you want it to feel thisisn’t just for utility. This is for fun,creativeness. So I agree on that. Let’stalk about the tech stack. What did youActually, what do you use to build this?
All of our designs live inside Figma.And for the dev part, I feel like I, I’mstuck with cloud code. And I started offwith just a single terminal instance ofcloud code max. But I was recommendedthis tool called Conductor, where you canrun several instances of cloud code towork on different work trees at the sametime, and we use Supabase for ourdatabase and backend. The web app usedto live on Vercel, but we still have itrunning, web aspects of the product.
Okay, cool. We talk a lot about buildingbut I think maybe the more importantthing here is validating. So tell meabout how you validated once.
I did two things to validate our productand to get our first customers. The mostobvious thing that you can do is just gothrough your personal network. And whatI do is I open up three different tabs.I have my X open, I have my LinkedInopen, and I have my Instagram orFacebook open. I have my friendsList. I just go through every single oneof them and see who might be a good fit.
So literally, I circled everyone who hada potential event coming up. And it wasfour friends who said, “Okay, I wouldlove to try it.” It was a Halloweenparty, birthday party, one wedding, andone networking event. So this is thesecond part. Now you have to go outsideof your inner circle and really try toreach out to everyone who could be yourpotential customers. So what I did wassince once could be used at parties, atevents, at weddings, I searched onInstagram #wedding #birthdayparty andcross-platform we had around 250 to 300
people listed out. I wrote down a verysimple cold message type of two to threesentences max that could grab theirattention and try to pitch our idea sothat they can try it out. Amongst the250 people, we got around 15 people whoreached back and we got around 12 eventsfixed for that single month. And that’swhen me and my co-founder decided, okay,This does have market potential. Let’stry to go all in and try to build outsomething that’s really cool.
This is awesome. I’ve never heard ofvalidation in this sort of framingbefore. So, let’s talk about this alittle bit more. You got your app fromzero to 20K in basically 83 days. If youhad to start over today, what would beyour playbook? Step one would be todefine your commitment metric. Andcommitment here means two differentthings. Commitment for yourself andcommitment for your potential users aswell. For yourself, set a specific dateand specific number of customers orclients or other metrics that you wouldlike to see within that date range. Andat least you know that this is a finitenumber of days that you are dedicatingand investing to validate your businessin a certain amount of time. And thecommitment metric of the client tosignal validation doesn’t always need tobe payment. So, for us it was event hostUsing our product within those events.
So, based on your vertical, based on yourproduct, there must be some type ofmetric that truly represents usage. Andyeah, once you have that commitmentmetric out, I guess, step two would be toexhaust your personal network. Just openup all of your social media profiles andtry to see who you can reach out to,whoever is relevant to your ideal customerprofile. And one of the most importantthings when talking to your friends andfamily is a very famous, um, concept, butit’s called the mom test, which is, ifyou try to validate a product with yourmother, she would probably be veryexcited about whatever you build. Andthat is, honestly, not the best way tovalidate your product. So, just be honestwith yourself so that you are sure thatyou’re validating the product as opposed
to trying to find encouragement for yourproduct. So, that’s step two. Well, stepthree is the real part, which is to builda quick mockup. Don’t spend more thanTwo to three days with this. Just go onFigma or just use any of these AI toolsthat’s out there. No matter how scrappyit is, just try to find that reallysimple product that you can present toyour users. And once you have that, stepfour is to go wherever your users areliving in and are active in. Just startfrom zero. Go to Reddit, learn the insand outs of Reddit if Reddit is theplace to be or if that’s TikTok or ifthat’s YouTube because this channel willnot only be used for validation, but ifthe validation works, it’ll be your mainmarketing channel in the future also.
So, do so much cold mailing, coldmessaging. Honestly, what I tell otherfriends and founders is that if youhaven’t been banned in these platformsat least two times, you haven’t triedenough. And step five is to set thatnumber that gives you enough signal orconfidence that this product haspotential. For us internally, the goalwas simple. Before writing a single lineOf code, I needed 10 events with anactual date with an actual commitmentthat they would like to try using outthe product. Having a commitment toactually use at an event where you haveyour friends, your family, your lovedones there. We thought that was alreadya big enough commitment that it wasalmost proxy to a payment. So, thiswould be the exact playbook that I wouldbe using if I had to start all overtoday.
Well, I love this validation playbook. Ithink a lot of people watching this, gorewind, start it over, watch it again.This sort of commitment metric, thisrestraint thing sounds scary. It soundshard, but it will save you so much timenot building the wrong thing. So, I lovethat. Let’s switch topics a little bit.I want to see your app. Can you give mea demo of your app that made over$20,000 last month?>> Our app is really simple and what youcan do is, um, create your own film. YouUm, name your own film. Let’s say Brian’sparty. And you can choose the date itends. Choose when your photos reveal,like a disposable camera, your,filters, some of the, invitation cardwhen you invite your guests, and you canalso choose how many participants youwant to invite and the shots per person.
You wait until your film is created.Once it is, you can start taking photos,and yeah, like a disposable camera,this will all be saved up, and based onyour reveal settings, this might reveallater, or it might reveal now. And youcan check everyone’s photos in thisalbum, where everyone’s photos all gatherup in one area.
Cool. Okay. Well, that’s an awesome app.I love apps like this. Super cool. Lastquestion that we ask all founders tocome on Starter Story. What would beyour advice to young Brian, or for anyonewatching this, who wants to come up witha cool app idea, like you make money, and doAdvice?
I think the most important would be tostop overthinking and just launch,because I used to be a person whooverthinks a lot. How do I do marketing?How do I do sales? LA. But I realizedthat those are really not the mostimportant things if you’re trying to gozero to one. Rather, just spend that timetalking to more users and just buildingout the very first version in like aweek or two maximum and just launch,because all of your assumptions and allof your guesswork may go to nothing onceyou launch and once users start usingit. You might be solving a whole newdifferent problem than what you wereinitially expecting. So really stopoverthinking and launch as fast aspossible.
Thanks for coming on, Brian, and sharing.Super cool app. I think it’s going togrow a lot. Thanks for coming on andsharing everything.>> All right, man. Thanks a lot.
All right, Gus from Starter Story. Whatdo you think of this business, this app?Once film, first thought is really cool product.A lot of mobile app founderswe’ve talked to, I feel like we’ve seenit before to some degree. I haven’texactly seen an app quite like this. Iknow that probably does exist, butthat’s my first thought is like just acool product and like a cool dude. A lotof people have weddings and want thissort of thing in this like social mediaorganic world that we live in. I had awedding. You had a wedding. I’m sure youget all these like professionalphotographs, but they’re like super lame
and you don’t even post those to socialmedia. You just post like the selfiesyou took or or whatever. So, I actuallythink this is like from a growthperspective, this app is going to behuge. Maybe we can have him back on thechannel when I think it’s going to growfast and hits, you know, a million dollarsa year or wherever it gets, and we canTalk more about the growth of that. So,let us know in the comments if you wantto see us talk more about how he grewthe app. I think his validation strategywas really smart. What did you thinkabout that?
Yeah, that it was really like compellingbecause, you know, I’ve tried to start likemy apps and stuff like that, and Itotally fall into the trap of likebuilding it first, and with cloud codeand all these AI tools, it makes it soeasy to do it and then avoid the hardpart. You know, when he wastalking about going through yourcontacts and reaching out to people, man, Icould feel myself sort of cringingup a little bit. Like, I can imaginemessaging a random person from 10 yearsago when I went to college and beinglike, “Hey, I built this. Like, what doyou think?” But I think that’sdefinitely like a beginner’s mindset.You’re spot on with that. Before, whenit was hard to build stuff, you had toAsk people and then decide you wouldbuild it. That would be like the naturalway to do things because you just couldn’tbuild it. Now, I think that AI tools aresuch a crutch in that sense is thatlike, oh, I have a cool idea instead oftalking to people. I’m just going to
build it. Then you build it, it works,and it’s awesome. And then you don’tknow what to do next. You’re scared. Itdoesn’t exactly look as good as youwanted it to. So then it, you know,maybe demotivates you from doing thisvery, very important thing, which issharing it with random people that youhaven’t talked to in 10 years. This isthe scary stuff. So, I hope a lot ofpeople watching this realize that, oh,in a world where anyone can buildanything in 1 hour, this is the secretsauce, going out and setting yourcommitment metric of I need 10 people tosay they’re going to use this thingbefore I finish it. So, if you’rethinking about doing the same, you mightEven built some stuff before, or you’rethinking about jumping into Cloud Codeand starting to build an app. Stop rightthere and instead go click the link inthe description to learn about how toactually grow and validate a mobile app.
We put together the top growthstrategies for growing a mobile app, aniOS app, a B to C app. You can click thatright down there in the description andget it 100% for free. All right, I hopeyou guys enjoyed this episode of StarterStory. We’ll see you in the next one.Peace.