| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2kt9zptbz1fncafx2rqf82 |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2kt9zptbz1fncafx2rqf82 |
| Date | 2025-07-26 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BtHk-oNlN0
My name is Samuel and I run three appsmaking $35,000 a month.You might think you need to come up witha completely new idea.But I just met aguy who does the exact opposite. Hisstrategy is simple: One, find an appthat’s working. And two, make it 1%better.If it’s already successful, I know it’svalidating.But don’t be fooled; he’s not justcopying and pasting.And in this episode, he breaks down his meticulousmethod for finding winning ideas andturning them into successful apps.We’ll get into where the best ideas are hidingin plain sight, how to validate fast soyou don’t waste months working on afailed project, and the playbook forresearching and replicating successfulapps that you can put into practicetoday. All right, let’s dive in.I’m Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story.
[Music]All right, welcome Samuel to thechannel. Thanks for coming on. Tell meabout who you are and what’s your story.So, my name is Samuel Rondo. I used tohave a full-time job, but I quit a fewyears ago and I taught myself to code onYouTube, and now I run three SaaS appsthat are making $35,000 per month.
Okay, cool. So, before we get into allyour apps and how they grew, you saidthat you actually taught yourself how tocode. How did you do that? And could youbreak that down for us? So, yeah,actually, I used to be an optician, and Ihad zero coding experience. At thetime, I wanted to rebuild a tool I wasusing for Instagram, but this time Iwanted to build it myself using code. Iended up following a 15-hour course onYouTube. And every time I learnedsomething new in the course, Iimmediately tried to apply it to that toolI was building. So if you just watch acourse, most of the time it’s not enoughbecause you end up losing yourself inthe languages that you will probablynever use, and you don’t really see whyyou are learning what you are learning.
But yeah, it all started like this:following a YouTube course, and itquickly became a passion for me.Cool. All right. Well, for anyonewatching this today who wants to learnhow to code, how to build apps, whatwould be your advice? What would be yourframework or playbook, or how you’d getStarted? If I were 18 years old now, Idon’t think I would learn to code thetraditional way. I would probably justuse AI coding tools. And with AI today,you can literally build like 90% of mostapps. So my framework today would beone, pick a real project. Two, ask JPTwhat you need to learn to build it. Sofor example, you go on Google or onTwitter and you find a product you like,and you take a screenshot of that pageand you ask JPT, “How can I build justthe landing page to start?” And three,build step by step, asking Chad GPT forhelp at each roadblock. I would, ofcourse, ask him to use moderntechnologies like Next.js and Node.js.
That’s awesome. What I really want totalk about is ideas and findingsuccessful ideas. You have multiplesuccessful products and you share withme your strategy for how you foundthose. Could you tell me a little bitmore about that?I’m someone a bit lazy and I don’t haveunlimited energy. So I have one rulethat is really crucial for me: tonever build something that doesn’talready exist and isn’t alreadysuccessful or at least getting some.
Traction. So this way I reduce my chanceof failure and I increase my chances ofsuccess. So usually, to find productideas, my number one source of ideas isTwitter, especially around communitieslike solopreneurs in the building public,etc. And then I look for things that areworking or products that I personallylike. Here are my four key filters.Number one, I will use it myself. Numbertwo, I can see that it already works.Three, they are not spendingthousands on marketing, meaning there isa true demand. And four, the product issimple enough to maintain. If yourproduct passes this filter, then usuallyI’m confident building it.
Okay, let’s go a little bit deeper onthat. When you come across ideas online,what is the actual criteria that you’relooking at? What are some of the numbersand websites and things that you look atto know if this is worth building and ifthis is validated?So first, the most important thing I lookfor is traction. The best signal you canfind on Twitter is when founders sharetheir MRR screenshot or Stripescreenshot. I know that sounds basic,but honestly, it’s the ultimate proof.
That the tool is working and that peopleare paying for it. Second, I analyze howthey are getting their customers. So, Iuse href to check their traffic sources.
So, are they getting customers only fromads or are they also ranking on SEO? Ifthey are growing with both ads and SEO,that’s a very good sign because it showsa strong demand and it’s usually easierto replicate their success. If they relymostly on SEO, it can be harder becauseSEO takes time, but it’s still doable ifI’m patient. And third, I check if theproduct is technically something I canbuild and maintain easily. I don’t wantto build a product that will make melose sleep maintaining a complex backend. Simplicity is very important forme. And, uh, finally, I asked myself, do Iactually like the product? Becausethere’s nothing worse than working on aproduct you don’t care about. If I don’tenjoy using it myself, I won’t have themotivation to keep going long term. So, inshort, uh, traction first, analyzetraffic sources, check if I can build iteasily, and make sure I like theproduct.
That strategy is cool, and it’s amazingto have it kind of all boiled down, butI want to hear how it actually appliedto your actual apps that you built. Howdid that strategy specifically work?
So actually the first real app I builtwas Usimus, and at that time I didn’t usethat strategy, and it was a mistakebecause I ended up building an emailfinding tool that had competitors,big names like Apollo, Limb List, andstuff like that, and it was so difficultto maintain. So after Usimus, I reallydecided to build something that would beeasier to maintain, and that’s how I endedup building Story Short. So I saw a postfrom a guy building a tool to automateposting faceless videos on YouTube, TikTok,etc., and the numbers were crazy. SoI started to investigate; is it hard to
build and where is the traffic comingfrom? The really good thing with thisone is all the traffic was from Facebookads, which means I can replicate itliterally in a week because Facebook adsyou just have to start it and you havethe traffic. So I went for it. I builtthe tool, launched ads, and Story Shortgrew very fast. So, Story Short, it was100% the process I described earlier. Ivalidated the idea, and I saw there was a cleardemand. It was a simple product, and it wasA market I was personally interested in.
All right, before we finish talkingabout how Samuel grew his apps to$34,000 per month, let’s talk aboutsomething a lot of solers struggle with:design. You’ve got a working idea. Youknow it solves a problem, but suddenlyyou’ve wasted hours taking screenshotsjust to figure out how to make your applook good. That’s where Mobin comes in.Mobin is the world’s largest library ofreal-world mobile and web app designs.
Over 1.7 million people, from Airbnbdesigners to indie devs, use it to findinspiration, study flows, and buildsmarter, not slower. You can searchthousands of actual product screens bykeyword, flow, or even style. Whetheryou need an onboarding flow, paywalllayout, or just a clean signup form,Mobin shows you exactly how the bestapps do it so you don’t have to startfrom scratch. Whether you’re buildingyour first app or your 10th, it’s amassive timesaver. Just click the firstlink in the description to check outMobin. Thank you to Mobin for sponsoringthis video. All right, let’s get back toSamuel. All right, so I mean on thatnote, can you break down the threeDifferent businesses that you built thatare all successful?
Okay, so I built us.com. It’s a LinkedInscraping tool that is making around20,000per month and has around 4,000customers. And Capacity.so, which isbrand new. It’s an AI coding tool thatis currently making $900 per month andhas around 50 users.
Okay, that’s awesome. So we talked aboutthe ideas, we talked about the frameworkfor finding ideas. Let’s talk about whateveryone wants to hear about, which isonce you find the idea, how do you growthe business? What growth strategies areyou using and how do you know which onesto do?So I always start by running ads. It’salways the first thing I do. So I do iton Google and Meta depending on theproduct. Sometimes it’s better onGoogle, sometimes it’s better on Meta.It’s the fastest way to validate andtest the market. And as soon as I getsome traction with ads, I move to thesecond part of the growth, which is SEO.
I think too many apps rely only on ads,and I never got a single visitor fromGoogle. Of course, SEO takes time, butonce it works, it’s almost free trafficand it compounds. I also use facelessYouTube channels to grow my apps. I evencreated a feature inside Story Short forthis. The idea is that Story Short willautomatically publish daily UGC stylevideos about your product on YouTubechannels, TikTok, and Instagram. You cancreate multiple channels that talk aboutyour product every day on autopilot. Sodepending on your niche, this can bringcrazy results over time. It works reallywell. And finally, I do affiliate
marketing. I did it for all threeapps, especially on Story Short. It’s asuper important strategy because not only does itbring clients at a fixed cost, but italso creates virality. I have manypeople doing YouTube videos about StoryShort, writing articles. This brings zeroresults initially, and people are more likelyto share your product if they earn acommission. So in short, my growth stackis: one, start with ads; two, build SEO assoon as there’s traction; three, usefaceless YouTube channels to driveattention on TikTok.
Instagram. And I run an affiliateprogram to boost virality and getcustomers at a fixed price.All right, cool. Well, on a similar note,let’s talk about tech stack. I know youdon’t come from a software engineeringbackground, but what stack do you buildyour apps in, and how do you deploythese? So, all my apps are built withNext.js and Node.js for the coding part. Iuse Href for the SEO analysis, and I useAI tools for writing articles. So,for SEO, I was using SEO which isreally great, but now I just switched toa new one called outrank.so. It reallyautomates the writing of articles posted
automatically on your blog, and I useVercel for deploying my apps, Stripe forpayments, and yeah, that’s it. That wasgreat. On a similar note, people who arewatching are probably wondering, "Okay,you’re telling us how much money yourbusiness is making, but what’s theprofit? What’s the cost to run thisbusiness, and how profitable are these?"Well, it costs me around 5,000 per month. So, it costs a bit lessthan us because Artemis requires you to runinstances to automate many things.
It’s quite expensive. And capacity, Ican’t tell yet, but it will be quiteexpensive because we have to runinstances to deploy a website each time.Cool. You built a bunch of successfulbusinesses. Some things have worked,some things haven’t. What did you learnwhile building those businesses thatsurprised you?What really surprised me, uh, is that youdon’t need to innovate. You just need tosee what is working on ex incommunities, on forums, and build yourown alternative, your own version of aproduct. If you like the product and seethat it’s working, just clone the idea,build an MVP in two weeks and launch adsimmediately. I think people are alwaysovercomplicating this, uh, but simpleboring tools are what makes the most ofmoney, I think.
Great. And the last question that we askeveryone who comes onto the channel: ifyou could go back in time and stand onSamuel’s shoulder when you were anoptician, what advice would you give himto get started to build apps and makemoney online? My first advice would beof course to use AI coding tools. Atthat time, there were no coding tools, butToday, you can use so many AI codingtools that I think I wouldn’t havelearned to code. Two would be to spend timelearning Google Ads and Meta, even X Ads.
There are many ads you can learn.Three, launch as soon as possible. Skipthe boring parts of building a SaaS, likethe password reset pages and settings pages.Just launch the minimal basic productand run ads to test demand right away.Once you get traction, focus on SEO. Itwill bring compounding free trafficover time. And even if one day you wantto sell the tool, having SEO traffic isalso very valuable. And automate as muchas you can; use automation tools, likeOutrank, StoryShort, etc., to automateposting and article creation as much asyou can. Finally, once you have growthand customers coming daily, I wouldfinish the product, bring new features,etc.All right. Well, that’s great advice. Ilove your strategy. I love the businessthat you’re building. Thank you forcoming on the channel, Samuel. And Ihope everyone watching this learnedsomething and you’re going to build coolstuff because of it. Thanks for comingon.
Thanks, bud.I love Samuel’s story because it goes toshow that you don’t need to invent abrand new idea. You can go findsomething that’s already working andjust make it a little bit better. Withthe right process and the rightapproach, anybody can build somethingsuccessful. And inside Starter StoryBuild, we’ll show you how to build appsthe right way. In just 2 weeks, you’llfind an idea, build it with AI, and shipit out into the world. Over 1,000 peoplehave already joined and shipped theirfirst apps. So, if you want to finallybring your idea to life, head to thelink in the description and check outStarter Story Build. Thank you guys forwatching. We’ll see you in the next one.Peace.