| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2m6zgm9btm4xjrjtkzakfj |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2m6zgm9btm4xjrjtkzakfj |
| Date | 2025-11-09 |
| Author | Starter Story |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmyXmpkTIdc
I build apps and flip them. I’ve donethis four times and made over $500,000.This is Lots, a London-based founder whotreats apps like real estate. He buildsthem fast, grows them to about 20k amonth, and then flips them for all cashdeals. My philosophy is to stack cashand achieve financial [music] freedom.
Since 2022, he’s done this four timesand made over a half a million dollars.But, here’s what makes his approachdifferent. Most founders get obsessedwith their idea, but Lots doesn’t. Hebuilds to sell. I’d rather take two tothree years of profit up front thangrind for a decade. His philosophy, cashout fast and move on to the next one. Iasked Lots to come on the channel tobreak down his entire build-to-flipplaybook, and in this video, we’ll diveinto how he builds and grows his apps injust a few weeks, his exact frameworkfor finding ideas [music] that can sellfast, and why building to sell beatsbuilding to scale for most businessIdeas that are started today. This oneyou cannot miss. Let’s get into it. I’mPat [music] Walls, and this is StarterStory.
All right, Lots, welcome to the channel.Tell me about who you are, what youbuild, and what’s your story. Yeah, myname’s Lots. I’m from London, movedthere recently, and I build apps toabout 10 to 20k MRR and flipping them.I’ve done this four times now and[music] racked up a total sales of overhalf a million dollars since 2022. Okay,before we get into this whole strategyaround flipping apps, what were the appsthat you built and sold? So, Bible Buddywas my first one. So, that was an AItherapist for Christians. Then MagicMusic, which was a wrapper around Ceno
AI, which is an AI music generator. ThenToxic Traits, which is basically justscreenshot chats that you have withpeople, and then you get the personalitytraits from them. And then Pray Screenwas the last one, which was essentiallyIt blocks your apps and you have to prayfor you to be able to unlock them. Youcan probably see that there’s kind ofChristianity thread going through all ofthem as well. And we’ve scaled to over amillion users across all the apps thatwe have. [Music] Revenue-wise, I’ve done500k, of course, as well. Okay, cool.
Well, thanks for sharing that. Before weget into the kind of build, flip, andsell strategy, I want to understand howyou even get here. How do you get tothis point where you’ve flipped fourapps? Yeah, it actually comes from aplace of pain, actually. So, I wasactually in banking originally, and thenI started my own VC-backed startup. Youknow, everyone thinks they’re going tobe Mark Zuckerberg, so I also thought Iwas going to be from London. Ran it forabout 3 and a half years, ended up failing,and I was kind of like to lick mywounds. I was like, let me just kind ofcreate apps and see how that goes.
Luckily for myself, this was 2022 whenGPT was first commercialized, so I wasable to ride like loads of waves andlearn a lot super quickly. So, I want todive into that first app that you built.
Did you always have this idea that youwere going to be building and flippingapps? How did that first flip go? What’sthe story behind it? How I got the ideaoriginally was this. Obviously, GPT cameout. A lot of people didn’t like BibleGPT, but a lot of people didn’t likeQ&A. It’s going to be ask a question,you get something back about the Bible,and that wasn’t really helpful. So, Ikind of flipped it to be more of an AItherapist to be a little bit moreemotional, ask questions after eachresponse. Then launched it on WhatsApp,because again, I didn’t have the technicalskills, right? So, I used like a thirdparty at the time, and then I didn’trealize WhatsApp charges an arm and a
leg per conversation window. Then mycosts like ballooned to like 15k amonth. I was like, "Hell no. I need toMove on to my own infra,then hirean engineer from Upwork, and then move itto iOS and Android. And how I foundthe person that I sold it to was that Ioriginally listed it onMicroAcquire. Then I was also active inthe My First Million podcast as well, and inthe community they have on Facebook, andsomeone just happened to be in London[music] at the same time that I alsowas, and he reached out. He was like,“Hey, this seems interesting.” And thenhe ended up acquiring it. Okay, cool.
So, you sort of sell this business as anaccident, but then you go and flip threemore. What did you learn through thatprocess, and why are you so intoflipping apps and doing this over andover? Yeah, I see that there’s like twokey trends I’m riding here. There’s thewhole consumer coming back. The marketis like trending and is highly liquid.So, what I mean by highly liquid, itmeans that right now tech isn’t a hardthing to build at all, which meansThere’s a lot more buyers out there whocan feel like, “Hey, I can just takethis product on and just market itbetter than you and then get more moneyand more profit margin.” So, I thinkthat’s the first thing. Number two camefrom a personal perspective. So, Iraised VC originally for my first
startup, but I was still broke, right,at the end of the day. And with this, itwas kind of a much clearer route to beable to get some cash in. And I thinkthere’s a lot of my dream sold topeople, which is kind of like, “Hey,raise VC, you know, raise, raise, raisefor the next 10 years, and then, youknow, hopefully there’s that 0.0001%chance you’re going to become a abillionaire through there.” I wouldrather, you know, build something, andthen in the 6 to 12 months exit it forlike a cool 250k. Okay, cool. A lot ofpeople that watch this channel, theyhave this one big idea. They get really,really attached to this idea, and theyCan’t even imagine what it would be like to just build something just to sell it.
How do you approach ideas? Do you get really attached to your ideas, or how do you approach ideas?Yeah, so for me, before I kind of start working on anything, I always tell myself, "Is this going to be my legacy or is this cash flow?"And that then dictates all further decisions going down the line.And a lot of the things so far have been things that have just been cash flow.So, that actually dictates on how I build things [music] itself. What people normally get wrong is I’ll say two main things.First one is that they make their apps way too complicated. And when I say complicated, I don’t mean the actual app itself, but more so the operations behind the scenes,and they don’t make it clean enough when you want to then get something acquired itself, which then normally like kills a lot of deals going forward, especially if, like,Questions, and you can’t answer it orjust too long-winded an answer, theyjust think, “Oh, you know what? This isnot for me.” So, I think that’s the
first thing. Second of all, when they’realso looking for buyers, I would say theissue is that everyone wants to go forthe highest price, and the highest pricetends to take the longest and also fallthrough the most itself. And the longerit takes, the more likely it could havebeen a fall through. So, even when I’mactually selling my app, I don’t like to
sell to the highest bidder. I normallylike to sell to the third highest bidderand tell them that they have two otherbids on top of them, but if they’re ableto close in like 3 to 4 days, I’llchoose them. And they normally kind oflike feel lucky, and they kind of like,“You know what? Let’s just wireeverything now, and then let’s geteverything else sorted afterwards.” Iwant to tell you about a new tool thatmakes it even easier and faster toBuild. Rocket. Rocket lets you go fromjust a few sentences to a full-stackapp. Just describe your vision, and in afew minutes, you will get a completefunctional app. Back-end integrationsand production-ready code, everything.
With rocket.new, you can import designsfrom Figma, integrate with Stripe andSupabase in just a few clicks. 400,000users from around the world are buildingwith Rocket because it’s the simplestway to turn ideas into apps in minutesand not months. So, if you’re ready tofinally build your idea faster thanever, check out Rocket at the first linkin the description. Thank you to Rocketfor sponsoring this video. I love whatyou guys are building. All right, let’sget back to the video. Okay, cool. Iwant to get a little bit more tacticalhere. I want to understand yourplaybook. You’ve done this for over fourapps. What is your actual playbook forfinding an idea, building it, marketingit, and selling it? Can you walk meThrough this step by step? Yeah, forsure. So, I’d say like step one isspotting trends in the App Store. Andhow you do that is actually pretty
simple. You just essentially go to theApp Store and be able to see, okay, whois currently number one in the differentcategories. And then once you do that,you’re able to then see are there otherapps also, let’s say in the top 20, whoare doing exactly the same thing, butmaybe for just slightly differentniches. Then I go to Sensor Tower to beable to see, okay, what’s actually therevenue numbers of each. And if I seeall of them are doing, you know, over100k MRR or over 500k MRR, then I know,okay, cool, there’s something here forsure. And once I’ve actually spotted thetrend that I’m seeing, I then think tomyself, okay, how can I make my appunique? So, for me specifically, I lovethe Christian market itself, normallybecause obviously I’m Christian myself,but also the edge is most technologyGets to faith or religion last, and I
want to be the one to kind of likepioneer that on the end. And then stepnumber three, I would say is make theapp a single player. So, whenever Ispeak to people, a lot of people try todo this whole kind of socialness for theapp, where it’s kind of all you needsomebody else to be able to come in foryou to be able to get value. But, Ialways say like make your app singleplayer, something that someone could doon their own without having to inviteanyone else in to get that initialvalue. Yes, you can do it afterwards asan added extra later on, but it justmakes things too complicated, and thenyou kind of have to start marketing totwo people at the same time. And thenI’d say number four, a key thing for meis like is either you make it highlyshareable or super high retention. So,[clears throat] no one on this earth
shares apps, all right? No one’s goingto randomly be like, “Hey, yeah,Download this app, right?” But, whatthey tend to do is actually share anasset within the app, so they don’t evenknow that they’re sharing the app. Agood case of this was Magic Music, and Iallowed people to share songs with otherpeople, and it opened up a web viewwhere they could actually listen to thesong without downloading the app. But,then there was a big green button thatsaid, “Create your own song.” So, whatwe kept seeing is that people would, youknow, make a song about their friendcussing their friend. Their friendlistens to it and is like, "Oh, you knowwhat? I’m going to create my own one."And then they then downloaded itthemselves, and that actually made likethe shareability of it like super high.
And then high retention, I mean, PrayScreen is the best one I’ve seen this.So, Pray Screen had a 60% day 30retention, which is kind of like unheardof. And what helped with that was twothings. Number one, of course, weLiterally blocked your apps, so you kindof had to use us for you to unlock yourapps. But, also number two is somethingreligious, so there’s also another pullfactor to bring people in. And thennumber five, I’d say, making the techstack simple and plug-and-play. Whenyou’re trying to sell something tosomeone else, you need to make it lookas simple as possible, just so that theydon’t need to come in with, liketechnical know-how per se to be able tooperate this thing. cuz, step six, Iwould say, now you have kind of like youridea ready. Now, of course, the majorpart is obviously growing it for it to
be attractive to a buyer. I have a veryspecific route that I go down, and it’snormally UGC first. So, I have multipleUGC accounts, and I like to createcontent that is kind of rage baiting,where it’s kind of like you showsomething, and people have to maybescroll back or watch it again to justmake sure that I just see that or theyJust end up arguing with everyone in thecomments as well because all TikTok seesis that, oh, that’s engagement. Let’sboost that to other people. Once I havethe right hook, then I then launch onMeta Ads, for example, and that way Iactually get really low CPIs. CPI beingcost per install. [music] So, for PrayScreen, we were getting between 30 to 50cents cost per install in the US market,which is like unheard of. That’sactually how I normally grow things.
Then, number seven is around, I guess, thefinale, which is how to sell it. For me,I love to get them to about 10k to 20kMRR before then looking for a buyer. Onething you want to do is that your lastthree months, you want it to be like anuptick, right? You don’t want it to belike, oh, it’s currently failing and nowyou’re trying to sell it because it justlike, you’re trying to empty [music] backto somebody else. Where I’d list it,MicroAcquire is a great place for you tolist this. Also, just posting on Twitter.
As well, I’ve seen does really well. Interms of valuations, they vary dependingon the buyer, but I’ve seen between liketwo to four X EBITDA, I would say. EBITDAwould be just essentially profit. Butagain, the kind of app side build aren’tsomething that’s like so deeplytechnological that another company wouldbe like, well, we need this for sure. Ittends to be more of a cash flow thingfor the other company’s purchasing.
But normally, between two to four XEBITDA for the ARR that you have. Okay,cool. Well, thanks for sharing thatentire playbook. That was amazing.You’ve already built and sold four apps.So, I imagine you’ve seen a lot of ideasthat didn’t work, and obviously you’vehad some ideas that worked really well.If you were starting over today andbuilding stuff, what would be some ofthe ideas you’d be working on right now?Apps that you think you could build andsell just like you’ve done. First onesounds funny whenever I say it but ifYou’ve been dating or have a girlfriend,you don’t— we have this issue where theykind of like, oh, you know, I’ve got aheadache. I don’t really feel welltoday. And you just find out theythree times a day. I’d build an app
where it just tracks that they’ve eatenthree times a day. For especially like,around, let’s say, the 18 to 30 age group,for sure. And the reason I do kind ofthis is because there’s a specificaudience. So, that means targeting is alot easier. And then, this is somethingI’ve already seen adjacent apps do, whichis more like, you know, calorie trackingspecific women. So, I’ll just do somekind of version of that. Second idea,I’ll do would probably be somethingaround Korean skincare, a thing that theladies love. Again, I’ll just make thiskind of like a tracker. You can take apicture of your face, kind of like thelooks maxing, but just more specificallythat, the Korean glass skin, just becausethere’s already a big trend around it.
People already spending real money onreal procedures. So, you would alreadyknow the capacity to spend already isthere. And then I call this Chill Guy AIbut probably doesn’t really make sense.So, I always kind of thought, yo, thereshould be like an app, uh, where I canjust type in stuff about my girlfriend.For example, and then it just reminds meand it just says, hey, you haven’t had adate in, I don’t know, three weeks.[Music]Here’s a place. Just click this buttonto book, or like, you haven’t sentflowers to her in, like, three months. Idon’t have to think about it. Just clickthis button to book straight to heraddress, right? And like, any littlething she’s told me before, I can justwrite it down in the kind of likejournal, [Music] and then it just kind ofuses that to find gifts, and I justclick a button, and it does it for me.
And I just kind of think that wouldabsolutely kill it. Um, especially, like,Revenue model-wise, you can have asubscription base on that. So, I thinkthat’s something that’d be super cool.
If you build that, I’ll be one of yourfirst customers. I promise. So, let meknow when you do build that. To talkabout that idea that you were justtalking about, I want to know about techstack. Let’s say you were to just go andbuild that idea right now. That was yournext big idea. What would be your techstack in terms of building the app andthen also tracking analytics and andrunning the business? Yeah, for sure.
So, I tend to build in React Native. So,that’s what I’ll do on the building sideof things. In terms of like themarketing, which is what really matterson that end, I use something calledShort Term Eyes. That is basically likeyou’re able to track TikTok views overtime for the different accounts. There’salso another product calledappstoretracker.com and that’s able tobe able to see different apps and howQuickly, they’ve gone up in the appstore. So, you can also track yours andsee if there’s any changes in like thebios or the titles, etc. Which canobviously help with ASO. And then theCreator Check. So, this is somethingthat me and my girlfriend were actually
working on. Just think of it as like aGusto but specifically for UGC creators,where we do the calculations andpayouts. Okay, and on that same note, forif you were to build Chill Guy AI, whatdo you think some of the costs andmargins would look like for that,business, if you were to get to say 10k amonth? I would say all in all, you’relooking atat max $1,000 a month. I think theballoon costs come from the UGC side ofthings, and that depends on the amount ofUGC creators that you get on board. So,you could have 10 UGC creators. Maybeyou’re paying 5 to 10k a month for them.
And then what you get is 10 differentvideos every single day, which is super.
Cool. And then on the margin side ofthings, you’re looking to have somethingthat’s at least 70% profit margin. Iwould say for something to be superhealthy. Last question I always askeveryone who comes on Starter Story.What would be your advice for someonestarting over from scratch in 2025?Building apps to sell? What would beyour advice to someone watching?
For sure. Like my thing I say now is onlyplay games [music]. You can win andalways have an edge. And what I mean bythat is like only play games you can win.It doesn’t mean you always win, but at leastwhen you lose, you know it’s your fault.If I was to build another app,unfortunately it wouldn’t be Chill GuyAI. I just don’t think I have an edge inthat. But I would build anotherChristian [music] app, but for maybe adifferent niche. Um, just because overtime I now have an email list of 1.2million Christians. Uh, and you know,Meta has this beautiful thing calledLookalike audiences make it so much easier for me to get low-costper install whenever I want to build an app there.
And operationally, it’s just so much easier.
Just kind of create a new app and put it into thesame funnel that you have.And then you can also cross-sell within yourapps.Well, I can actually sell ad spaceto another one of your apps for free.I think that’s great advice. Thanks forcoming on. Lots sharing your entireplaybook.Hopefully, people reallyenjoyed this video.If you guys have anyquestions, put them down in the commentsbelow.But otherwise, thanks for comingon, man. You’re inspiring. Thank you somuch. Bye. I want to thank Lots againfor coming on the channel and sharingeverything. I think it’s amazing thathe’s done this over four times, and hehas plans to do it over and over again.
That’s the power of being able to comeup with an idea and build it fast.And this is exactly why we launched Starter.
Story Build. [music] It’s our programwhere we will help you take your ideaand turn into a real app using only AItools. If you’re ready to get off thesidelines, build that app and launchinto the real world, then head to thelink in the description to check outStarter Story Build. Our next boot campis starting this week. So, get in thereand save your spot. I would love to seeyou in there building. All right. Thankyou guys for watching. That’s it forthis episode. I hope you enjoyed it.I’ll see you in the next one. Peace.