| Source | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr9kexf6g8321zsvq8rd6d |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kvxr9kexf6g8321zsvq8rd6d |
| Readwise ID | 01kvxr9kexf6g8321zsvq8rd6d |
| Date | 2026-03-04 |
| Author | Your Average Tech Bro |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
I’m a serial app builder that’s builtover 14 different apps in the past 5years, and my current app just recentlycrossed 5 grand a month of revenue. Andthe number one question that I get in mycomments is, how do I come up with anapp idea on what to build? So, in thisvideo, I’m going to break down my entireprocess about how to come up with ideasas well as how to validate app ideas orsoftware ideas for you to build, whetherthat be to build your own micro SaaSside hustle of a couple hundred bucks amonth while holding down your day job oreven if you’re trying to aim forsomething bigger where you can turn yourside hustle into your main hustle. Now,for full context, before we get intothis, I want to give a disclosure andsay I am not an expert. I’m a randomdude on the internet that just talks way
too much, who so happened to have built alot of apps in the past, who so happenedto have built a couple of apps in theLike one or $2,000 of revenue, and mymost recent one, yourby.ai, is at around$5,000 of revenue. But, I’m not anexpert by any means. I’m not a hundredmillionaire retired in the Bahamassipping on my margaritas. But, thatmight make me a little bit morerelatable to you than a hundredmillionaire billionaire giving youadvice on how to build a businessbecause I’m only a couple steps ahead ofyou, whereas they’re probably like abillion steps ahead of you and me aswell. So, that’s everything. Let us getinto the video and let’s first talkabout how to come up with good ideas.
Now, my biggest piece of advice foranyone, especially if you’ve literallynever built an app before, is to justbuild anything. But, build it reallyseriously. Like, build it with theintention to actually launch and toactually try to market and grow thatapp. And the reason why I recommend thisis just by building any app, like verySeriously though, not just as like a funlittle side weekend project, but likeactually very seriously, you’re going torun into a lot of problems and a lot ofannoyances that you face while trying togrow and market your own app. And thoselittle annoyances and pain points thatyou face along the building and growingprocess will seed new potential businessor app ideas that you can build, like,oh, what if I could productize this?
Like, I didn’t even know that this issomething that I could productize, butthis is a huge pain point that I foundwhen building and trying to grow my ownapp. Chances are there are going to beother builders and other people outthere that are going to run into thesame problems. And then most likely forthe first couple of apps, they’re goingto be pretty bad. Mine were absolute dog[ __ ] and they’re all dead now. So thenonce you shut down that app, you’regoing to have a whole new list of ideasthat you might want to tackle. So it’sReally just an endless flywheel of ideasbeing generated. The more you build, themore pain points you come across, themore app ideas and software ideas thatyou’ll come across as well. Now outsideof just building a lot, another way thatyou can approach ideation, the one thatI think is probably the most effective,is actually just scrolling a ton onTikTok and Instagram and social media ingeneral and to see what apps are trying
to target you with advertising. Becausethe thing is these days, the algorithmis pretty good that they know how totarget the target user and targetcustomer demographic pretty well. Sochances are any ad that you’re going tocome across on TikTok and Instagram orany form of social media is going to bean app that is kind of catered to youand or potentially people like you. Andthese apps that might look at you as apotential customer or user. Becausechances are you know people that aresimilar to you. So if an app is beingTargeted towards you, if you do end upbuilding that app, you will then be ableto share that app with your friends whoare similar to you. I’ll talk about thismore in the section of the video where Italk about how to validate ideas, butI’m a really big proponent of justcopying ideas and apps that alreadyexist out there. More on that later.
Another example of a really great way todevelop app ideas is honestly just to doa lot of side quests. I’m going to behonest, chances are that if you arewatching this video, you are somebodythat’s in your early to mid 20s, youwork in tech, you have a 9-5 job and youdon’t really do much else. It’s reallyhard to find other pain points orinteresting ideas when you do the samething day in and day out and nothingwithout any type of variety inside ofit. Because how do you discover painpoints if your life is so comfortable
and so chill and you’re not doinganything new. You’re not going toDiscover much pain points there. So tryto go on some side quests, do thingsthat are totally out of your niche ormeet people in other industries andother domains and see, just hang out withthem, and eventually you’ll start to seethe pain points that they’re runninginto as well. Let me give you a reallyinteresting example of someone who didthis really, really well. So once again,this is totally not a sponsored video
because this is really irrelevant toprobably all of my viewers, includingmyself, but I came across this app righthere. It’s called Freed. This isessentially an app built for physicians,people in the healthcare field, toautomatically listen in on any patientinteraction and produce notes or chartsfor these patients. Because, you know,if you go to a doctor, you talk tothem, they’ll write some stuff down inyour chart, keep track of whateverhealth issues you’re having. Like, for"Fuck, this guy is so good-looking. Holy[ __ ] Like, we’ve never seen someonelike him before, you know?" Normally,they would have to manually write thatdown and type it themselves. But, thisapp, it’s essentially an AI meetingnote-taking tool. It’s an app on yourphone or computer. It listens in on thepatient interaction, generates asummary, and creates a note, like apatient-physician note to save intotheir electronic health record.
And I believe the origin storyof this app goes that the person whobuilt it, their partner is in medicine,and they saw their partnerspending so many hours every single daydoing manual notes and manual charting.
The actual creator of this was in tech,and he was like, “Oh, we can just buildsomething to help make your lifeeasier.” So, this is an example ofsomeone who knew people in a differentindustry, saw another person’s pain pointreally, really intimately, and was ableTo help build a solution for that. Because,if you really look at this tool, like,it’s really not all that different fromlike a Clooly, if we’re being honest.
And it’s not all that different from aGranola. They’re kind of the same thing.But, because this is so hyper-targetedtowards physicians, and physicians don’thave as much bleeding-edge tech that thetech world does, when this came out,they’re like, “Whoa, I didn’t know youcan do this. This is crazy.” But, toeverybody else, it’s like, “Bro, it’s aClooly dupe.” Or, “Bro, it’s a Granoladupe, you know?” Not all that different.
But, that’s a really great example ofjust don’t going on side quests, knowingpeople in other industries reallyintimately, you know, and buildingsolutions for other people with yourtechnical background. Now, this doeshave some cons that I’ll talk about alittle later as well, in like thevalidation section. But, this is areally reasonable strategy that probablyA lot of people have taken to go out andbuild really successful apps out there.
One thing I’ve been thinking a lot aboutlately in terms of how to get an edgewhen you’re building an app that has AIin it is hyper-personalization. In thisday and age, where any app can be builtwith AI, and every app has AI in it, Ithink personalization is the mostimportant thing that will make any appstand out compared to the othercompetitors that it has. For example,let’s talk about my app that I’mbuilding, which is called Your Beat, andit’s a social media marketing tool. Ourbig standout feature right now is acontent remixing tool, which is a toolthat lets users get any video on theinternet, take that original viralvideo, and remix it to fit their brand,their niche, their audience more, whilestill maintaining that same viralformat. And right now, for users to dothis, they have to manually enter intheir entire business details into aPrompt to remix whatever video that they
want to remix to market their businesson social media. But imagine how magicalit would be if, duringthe onboarding process, the user enterstheir business name and what they do,and then we’re able to kick off likesome type of research flow to get allthe information about their business andcreate all these remix prompts andaudience ideas, and get all so manydetails about their business. And thenwhen they want to use our contentremixing feature, they don’t have totype in anything, and we already haveall that information about them, and weremix the video for them immediately. Wewould need to programmatically Google auser’s business and get all the resultsand create some really big researchreport, but unfortunately, Google doesnot offer an API for that, but thesponsor of today’s video, SerpApi, does.
SerpApi lets you conduct programmaticGoogle searches using any query and anyLocation, giving you hyper-relevant andeven hyper-localized results. Whetheryou want results from Google Maps orGoogle Search, or even search resultsfrom another major search provider likeYouTube, SerpApi probably has an APIendpoint for you. Think of the varioususe cases this unlocks. Number one isresearching a company to provide areally hyper-personalized productexperience in your app. Number two,fetching real-time data to train AImodels. It is monitoring price queriesacross major retailers like Amazon,
Walmart, eBay. A fourth use case couldbe automating copyright checks forwhatever proprietary tech that you arebuilding. They handle the headaches ofCAPTCHA and proxy rotation, so that youdon’t have to worry about scraping theweb. All you need to do is make a simpleAPI call, and SerpApi actually handlesall the data fetching and returns theresults for you. Just make a simple APIcall to SerpApi to get the data that youNeed. You can check them out at this URLright here. And once again, thanks toSerpApi for sponsoring today’s video.
I’m also really a big fan of actually justrecreating your own favorite apps. Don’thave an ego. Don’t try to be like, “Ineed to create something new. I’m anartist.” Like, no, dude. Just buildsomething that already exists and peopleuse and pay for it. So, chances arethere are a couple of apps that you usevery regularly and that you pay for aswell. So, that’s honestly a really greatstrategy to coming up with a really goodapp idea. If you are a power user of acertain tool, you can kind of justrebuild the same app or like in aslightly different way, but yeah, youpretty much rebuild and copy that app.
Make yourself put a slight twist to it.Great idea to build. And in general,when you’re coming up with a bunch ofdifferent ideas, I think a really stronghabit that I’ve reallyworked on over the past couple years isTo relentlessly write down every singleidea, whether it be an app or abusiness, somewhere on my phone. I’llcheck right now. I have a note in the AppleNotes app folder of probably over 150different apps. I have literally, I don’tknow if you see this, but I have over220 different ideas in my ideas folder.
And I’ve been doing this sincelet me see. Probably since 2020.
Since 2020. Like, for such a long time.And this is honestly harder than youwould think because there’s so manytimes, I’m sure you’ve been there, youhad a great idea in the shower, you hada great idea in bed, you’re about tofall asleep, your mind is wandering,you’re like, “Oh my god, that’d be sucha sick idea. Someone build that.” Andthen you fall asleep and you can’tremember the app idea forever again. ButI have really trained that muscle thatno matter how tired I am, no matter whatI’m doing, I will always write down thatidea to make sure I don’t forget it.
Now, 99.99999%of the apps that are in that note folderare garbage. They’re horrible. But it’sstill just a good habit to get into, justto keep track of things so that younever forget any potential idea thatcomes up. Okay, so that is some generalstrategy on coming up with ideas forthings to build. But once you do come upwith an idea, this is the step-by-stepframework that I personally use tovalidate whether or not I shouldactually build that app. The number onething I ask myself, the very first thingI ask myself before anything else is,can I market it? Do I know how to marketthis app? If the answer is no, there’sno use for you to build it. I have made
this mistake so many times in my past,and honestly, even though I say thismistake now, probably you’re going tomake the same mistake, too. It doesn’tmatter. It’s a process. It’sa rite of passage. You have to gothrough this as well. But there haveBeen so many times where in the past Ibuilt something, thought it was a coolidea, I built it to completion, I waslike, how do I, how do I get users? Idon’t I don’t know how to market thisapp. An example of this is that one ofmy very first apps that I built, it wasan audio journaling tool where youjournaled three things every single day.
Something beautiful, something annoying,and something surprising. Those threethings every single day. That’s it. Itwas something that I did for a longtime, for probably over a year or so. SoI was like, oh, let me digitize thisthis and productize this. I did it, Ibuilt it, no idea how to market it. Itwas a total waste of my time because Iwas just wasn’t the right person tobuild it, especially as a solodeveloper, you know, back then. So youneed to figure out can you market it?
And obviously there are so manydifferent ways to market it, but I’ll goover a quick little list of some of theDifferent ways that you couldpotentially market an app. I’ll probablymake a much more longer-in-depth videodiving into marketing strategies forapps, but I’ll give you a quick littlerundown of some general marketingstrategies that you could use and maybesome tools that you might find helpfulto pursue this marketing avenue. Fulldisclosure, none of this is sponsored.
These are all just products that I thinkare pretty useful that I’ve personallyused in the past, as well. So the firstone that I want to talk about is Redditmarketing. You know that stuff. It’slike you get on Reddit and you tryto comment or make posts to target orplug your app. Now, Reddit marketingdefinitely works. I know people thathave had success with it, but youalready know how those Reddit mods canbe. They can be a little aggressive andyou know, let’s just say I’ve been I’vebeen banned from a couple of subredditsfor trying to plug my product. So youGot to be careful with how that’s done.
But this is a really useful tool that Ihave used in the past and a couple of myfriends who have also done Redditmarketing have used to do Redditmarketing. Essentially, it’s this toolcalled F5Bot. It is a tool thatessentially monitors Reddit or HackerNews. I don’t know, Lobsters. Is thislike an open claw reference? I’m not toosure. But it’s essentially this toolthat helps you monitor for certainkeywords in Reddit or Hacker News, thesevarious websites. And then whenever newposts come up that have these particularkeywords, they send you an email alertand like, “Hey, these are some poststhat you might want to comment on.” Sothen you can quickly go in, leave acomment providing insights, providingvalue, and plugging your app as well.Very popular tool, and it works prettywell if you want to take Redditmarketing seriously. Reddit marketingpros, it works, it’s pretty much free.
It’s very, very low cost.Cons are thefact that certain subreddits are reallyparticular about what kind of contentyou can post and whether or not you canplug your product. So, be careful. Allright, the next potential marketingavenue I want to talk about is SEO. So,this is a tool I’ve played around within the past. We’ll talk more about itlater. But with SEO, it’s search engineoptimization, basically trying to comeup and appear on search results likeGoogle more quickly. And the pros ofthis is, is one of those things where ifyou can figure out SEO, it’s basicallyfree traffic every single month. Likeyou make something once, a piece ofcontent once, and it basically lastsforever, and you’ll always get freevisitors from it. The downside is thefact that SEO takes a long time. So,it’s hard to get really quickvalidation. I think with Reddit, you geta lot quicker validation of whether or not someone thinks your tool is useful.
SEO, in my opinion, is one of those morelonger-term plays that benefits frommultiple months of doing it over andover and over again and letting yourlink and your website build credibility.Not as great in terms of gettingimmediate feedback from users. But thisis a tool that I’ve used in the past,it’s called Outrank. It’s essentially anAI SEO tool where it’ll likeauto-generate content for you when youtalk about your website or theproduct that you’re building andauto-publish blog posts for you. It’s AIslop. I don’t know, I think AI slop is aderogatory term. I think AI can bereally good, too. When I used it, I didget a couple ofcouple of good results from here. I didget actual traffic from the posts that Ihave used from Outrank. Admittedly,though, I haven’t done it recently.
Haven’t really used it too recently,just because we’re investing in primarilylike organic social media like TikTok.
and Instagram for our marketing. But Ihave used this. It worked decently welland it’s a pretty good tool and it’ssomething that you might want to checkout if you want SEO done on autopilot.
Another really popular industry standardtool, Ahrefs. This is like the goatall-time best search engine optimizationtool to get insights on how yourcompetitors are doing search engineoptimization and what keywords thatthey’re going for. Really sweaty, not asmuch autopilot, but basically it’s theultimate sweat tool if you want to getsuper serious about it. So, SEO, itworks. It’s a goldmine if it works well.
Downside is just that it takes a kind ofa long time for it to work. Nextpotential marketing strategy is paidads. Paid ads in theory work great. Youput in $1 in and you can get $2 out.Holy [ __ ] that sounds amazing. But,paid ads can get very, very, veryexpensive. I’ve lost thousands ofdollars on paid ads just because it didn’tReally, it didn’t work out for me. But, ifyou do go down the paid ads route, youcould use a tool like Atria. It’sessentially an ad spy tool to see whatother people in your niche, competitorsare doing, and then you can like savethose paid ads posts, brainstorm, createads from within here as well. Overall,
I’m not super experienced with paid ads,but in general, when it works, it isreally good, and it’s like an unlimitedgrowth engine essentially. On thedownside, it’s really expensive. I thinkyou got to invest at least a couple ofthousand dollars to really get thatfirst initial run of validation on tofigure out what paid ad strategy worksfor you. And then the last marketingstrategy that I personally like to useis organic social media on post TikTokand Instagram. And this is actually thetool that I’m building, Your V.ai, whichactually serves to help that purpose.
And the primary way that we do this is withthis content remixer tool. AndEssentially, the way that this works isyou can find any viral video on theinternet, upload it onto our platform.
Like, this is a video that I posted forsome founder-led marketing. I reallylike the format of it. I thought itperformed pretty well. And then you canessentially tell your V to remix acertain piece of content to fit yourniche, your audience, your brand,specifically, while still maintaining thesame viral format of the original video.
So, it just makes marketing a little biteasier, where you don’t have to think ofnew content ideas. You just copy what’sworking for other people, just remix itto hit your brand, your niche instead.Organic social media is great becauseit’s low cost. You can get really quickand fast validation. And the biggest conis the fact that it’s hard. It’s askill. Making videos is a skill. Makinga good video, making a good video scriptis a skill as well. So, that’s just areally quick overview of the variousEarly marketing ideas and marketing strategies that I have applied throughout the apps that I’ve built.
Let me know in the comments down below if you want a more in-depth video where I go really in-depth of like ranking, deep diving, analyzing all of the various marketing tactics that you can use to market your app.So, after you validate that you know that you can market that app, the next validation step that I take is, can you technically actually build it?I think that this is less of a concern these days because AI is so good, you can kind of build anything,but still something worthwhile to think about.
Like, can you actually build this technically? Honestly, not much more to say there.Can you build it or not?Is it a skill issue or not?You got to decide that.
Now, the next step, which I think is one of the most important steps in the validation process, is, does it have existing competitors in the space?I mentioned this earlier, but I think aLot of people, first-time builders, getinto the trap of wanting to be original.
Like, I’m a builder, I can’t copy. Like,I’m an artist, I need to be first. I hadthat mindset, for sure. But, my personaltake on this, which once again, I’m notan expert, I’m just a dude on theinternet that yaps a little bit toomuch, is, as a solo developer or areally, really small team, I don’t thinkyou really have the luxury of creating anet new product or a net new industry.That is something you got to leave forthe VC boys, the rich boys, the onesthat have millions of dollars to burnand burn cash for. It is not easy. And Ithink that you are way better off.You’re going to like 10x your chances ofsuccess and making your first dollar onthe internet, making a side hustle,making your own app that makes money, ifyou build an app that already has a lotof competitors in the space. The reason
for this is, if there are a lot ofIt’s an industry that has a validatedmarket of people willing to pay for asolution for the problem that you’retrying to fix. These days, in 2026, if acurrent idea you’re trying to buildtruly has no other competitors, I thinkthat’s more of a red flag than a greenflag. Like, that is a crazy uphillbattle, and if you’re not funded andyou’re a solo person, I don’t know ifit’s really worth trying to fight thatuphill battle. So, really look forcompetitive markets, look for validatedmarkets. That’s a really good signbecause then that means you can buildsome tool and get some customers andknow that customers are willing to payfor that, and it’s not a market risk.
There’s zero market risk, and instead,it just boils down to product andexecution risk, which is something thatyou actually can control a lot more. Andthen, the next validation that I wouldthen begin to think about is, can youdifferentiate your product from theOther competitors in the space? Iactually don’t think this is reallyimportant in the early stages. I thinkyou can straight-up copy a product. Youcan copy your V, like what I built, andyou can make at least a hundredbucks, probably at least a thousandbucks. I actually did this a lot in alot of my various apps. I built an appcalled Monty, a meeting transcribingtool, like a meeting note-taking tool.
Literally just copied the other existingapps out there. Zero differentiation.And it peaked at like fifteen toseventeen hundred bucks a monthlyrecurring revenue, which is prettyimpressive. Now, obviously, we peakedthere, and we had a hard time growingpast it because we didn’t differentiateafter that. But, once again, like that’sa separate issue. Like, going past yourfirst thousand dollars, that’s like whenyou start beginning to scale a slightlya bit a little bit. Whereas, you’restill first zero to a thousand dollars.
I am personally believer you can justcopy a product that already exists onthe internet, make at least a hundreddollars, if not at least a thousanddollars as well. But then after that, ifyou want to scale more, I think you dohave to think about how are you going todifferentiate from the competition outthere. But, I also think thatdifferentiating is a lot easier than youactually think because these days, Ipersonally think motes, true motes inlike the business sense in the classicalbusiness sense, don’t really exist thatmuch anymore. Because with AI, but youcan build anything. Technical moteshardly exist anymore. Yeah, I don’tknow. I just don’t think motes exist.
So, really, you can differentiate in alot more what some people might say likesuperficial ways, right? Your mote canbe a better designed app. Your mote canbe a better priced app. Your mote can bebetter customer support or a moredelightful and magical experience. So,In general, I think when you’re buildingan app, one way you could differentiateis focusing on your TTV/TTF,time to value or time to fun. And Ithink that’s honestly one of thestrongest ways that you candifferentiate in this day and age withso many different competitors coming outbecause software is so easy to build.
Often times, I think it’s the tools thatgive the best experience the fastest tobe the ones that win me over as acustomer personally. And the lastvalidation advice that I have is, areyou a user of your own product? I havetried both strategies. I’ve tried tobuild something where I was not a userand I thought that I saw an opening inlike a different industry and I willalso build the tools that I personallyand myself am a user for. And at leastfor me, once again, just doing on theinternet, I find it way easier to buildsomething that I am personally a userfor because in my experience I found
That no matter what you’re building,building a business period is really,really hard, and you’re going to havehard times. And I have found personallythat my motivation to continue onbuilding something that I’m not really auser of and that I’m building justbecause I see an edge or an opening for,it’s really hard to find the motivationto do that. So, I personally lovebuilding apps that I’m personally a userof. I’m constantly dogfooding andtrying out my own product. I think thathelps build a better product as well.
So, that’s one personal validation stepthat I have that I think is reallyuseful. Like, can you build somethingthat you are a user of? And that’s whyI’m kind of going back to one of myfavorite ways of ideating and coming upwith ideas is recreating your ownfavorite apps that you personally usebecause you’re building an app that hasa validated market because you’realready paying for it and you’re alreadyThe user for it and most likely you knowother people that also use that similarapp or who would find that app useful.
So, you know how to market it already.It’s kind of a winner right there. Iactually think that’s the best way toideate and validate an app all in onestep. So, that is my quick little videobreaking down how I come up with appideas and how I validate them to make alittle bit of money on the internet. Letme know your thoughts on the video. Ifyou enjoyed it, pros, cons, give me somefeedback both good and constructive aswell. Leave them in the comments downbelow. I’ll try my best to answer asmany of them as I possibly can. Butthat’s all I have for today. Thank youso much for watching, and I’ll see you inthe next one. Peace.