| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2ks09dsdkygrmedj0db987 |
|---|---|
| Readwise ID | 01kt2ks09dsdkygrmedj0db987 |
| Date | 2026-05-17 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
\n\nSource: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32vqaJa90kw
A few days ago, I came across thisinsane post on X. My app hit 3 millionARR in 8 months. I had to know more. So,I sent a DM. Hey, want to share yourstory? And to my surprise, she said yes.
My first app, Glamma, got a millionusers in 6 months, and we were at peak150K MR.
Meet Nicole. She has built multiple appsto over $150,000a month each. And when she told me abouthow she grows them, I almost couldn’tbelieve it.
Late last year, we were doing an averageof 100 million monthly views through ournow we are doing around 4 to 500 millionmonthly views across Tik Tok, Instagram,and YouTube.
So, I brought her on to the channel toreveal everything. And in this episode,we’ll dive into the two apps that eachmake over $150,000 a month, how shegenerates millions of views on her appswith a simple system, and herstep-by-step playbook for growing.
Consumer apps in 2026. All right, this one’s going to be fun. I’m Pat Walls,and this is Starter Story.All right, Nicole, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what’s your story. Yeah.Well, my name is Nicole and I’ve builtfour apps in the past two years. Myfirst app, Glam, got a million users in6 months, and we were at peak 150K MRR.And my second app, Sprout, previouslyPrep AI, I grew it to around 250K MRR in8 months. And in the past 3 months, I’vebuilt two more apps. They’re currentlyin stealth, but they are at around 200KMR and growing pretty fast using thesame system. I do everything that’s notcoding related. So, when it comes to thedesign of the app, distribution, sowould love to tell you a bit more aboutthe repeatable system that I’ve builtfor all of my apps.
Okay, cool. Well, I’m excited to haveyou on specifically for all this growthstuff. We’re going to talk all aboutThat. But before we do, can you justexplain like some of the apps that youbuilt? What do they do? What’s thebusiness model? How do they make so muchin revenue?
All right. So, for Glam, this is our iOSgrowth and this is our Android growth.Not sure why this is zero here. Might bean error on the platform, but right now,I think we have around 2 million totaldownloads. We got the first millionusers in the first 6 months of reallygoing at it, scaling it. And Sprout, Irecorded this in October of last year.
We were at 250K MR on our RevenueCatand we have steadily been growing ataround 200K MR. And here’s the last 30days. I recorded this a few months ago,but this was at around 100 million viewsmonthly. We do mostly TikTok andInstagram. I think right now, we aresteadily growing at around 4 to 500million views across, you know, TikTok,Instagram, YouTube Shorts. For Glamob,our target customers are usually mostlyWomen who want to, you know, improvetheir makeup or skincare routine. ForSprout, usually they are collegestudents or post-college students looking forjobs on the market. So, we hard paywall all of our apps. When it comes toour business models, we do a weekly ormonthly subscription for these two apps.
Okay. Amazing. I mean, you built twoapps in the 100K MR category. You havetwo more apps in Stealth right now. I’venever seen anything like this before,and I think it’s amazing. So, how didyou get here? How did you even learnabout building apps? What’s your storyand background?
Yeah, so, um, I built GlamUp and PrepAIwhen I was still in college. During mysophomore year, I had an existentialcrisis, and I went backpacking and solotraveling in Europe. During that time, Istarted a podcast on TikTok. I got likesuper viral off of that. I got 10Kfollowers in the first 10 days.
Influencer, so I moved to SF. That’swhen, you know, I worked at a techstartup doing marketing and I met myco-founder Aaron there. He was in YC andhe was in HFZ at the time. We becamereally good friends. And when I wentback to LA to finish college, we had acall for 10 minutes. And in that 10minutes, we decided to start an apptogether. And that later became GlammaUp.>> I love everything Nicole is breakingdown right now. She figured out adistribution system that worked and thatshe doubled down relentlessly on it. Andthis got me thinking. AI has made it soeasy to build apps and build features.But marketing and distribution hasbecome harder and more important thanever before. So I decided to puttogether a free resource to help you getcustomers for your app. It’s called themobile app growth cheat sheet. Andinside, we’ll walk you through sevendifferent distribution tactics that areWorking right now for apps in 2026.
These aren’t some made-up ideas that Igot from AI. These are the tactics andstrategies that are actually working bythe founders that come onto this channelwho are building apps, making over$50,000 a month. This is the stuff thatworks, and it’s all right here for you tosee. So, if you’re ready to focus ongrowth and getting customers, just headto the first link in the description, andyou can download it for free. All right,let’s get back to the episode. I’mcurious here. I mean, it seems like itjust kind of worked right out of thegates. How did you find the idea forGlam Up? Did you know it was going to bereally successful when you first came upwith the idea? How did you validate it?
Had other founders building consumerapps. One of them was UMAX. It’s a looksmaxing app for guys, and we loosely gotinspired by it. We wanted to build aglow-up app for women and makeup, and werealized that there are no apps like thatexisting on the app store yet. So wethought that would be a really coolopportunity for Sprout. We actuallystarted when we were trying to pivotaway from the beauty space, and we weretrying to target more college studentsand post-college students because they havehigher purchasing power.
Interesting that these are the apps thatwork. They already had proven customersand playbooks for apps like these, whichI love. Let’s switch a little bit togrowth, which is why I wanted to bringon the channel. You mentioned that youfocus on the growth, the design. Howhave you been able to take four apps toover 100K per month?>> Um, at a very high level, I think it’sunderstanding consumer apps design.
Principles. For example, how to designthe welcome pages, the onboarding, howdo you prime users into convertingbetter. So, that’s on the design side.When it comes to the distribution, youneed to think of the design of the appas part of your distribution. So, youneed to design the app in a way that’sinnately viral for social media. Andwhen that does happen, you can juststart testing viral formats on socialmedia. Once you find a winning strategy,you can just double down and scale.
All right, let’s talk about thedistribution side of things. What aresome of those numbers look like? Like,how much reach and distribution do youneed to have an app to hit over $100,000a month? For Glamma. We built it twoyears ago. At that time, we were doingfaceless UGCs. At our peak in a month,we got around 40 to 50 million views onTikTok and I think around 200 millionviews on Instagram. For Sprout, latelast year, we were doing an average of100 million monthly views. We actuallyhad a 7-day period where we got a totalof 400 million views, which is insane.
And during our most like scaling era, Iwould say we were managing around 200maybe a bit more active creators at thesame time.
That is crazy. This is the reality ofbuilding a consumer app. You really doneed to reach an insane amount ofpeople. I’d love if you could just breakdown this sort of distribution strategy.
If you had to start over from scratchtoday with a new consumer app, which alot of people are watching our channelare building in consumer, what would beyour playbook? What would be your stepsto getting it to where some of your appshave been? So let’s break it down. Firstone is finding your viral distributionstrategy. I have a list of all thethings that you can try out. First isReddit marketing. Second is Tik Tok andIG faces content that includesslideshows, different variations ofCTAs. Third one is face UGC. When itcomes to that, you can do, you know, AIUGC or you can do actual UGC creators.
And everything that I’ve mentioned aboveare more social media driven. Butobviously if you have capital you can dopaid ads, influencer marketing. But Iwould say in order to find the viralstrategy, try all of these maybe around2-3 weeks at a time and every time youtry a new strategy, really milk the hellout of it. For example, if you are doingfaceless content, you can tryslideshows, you can try videos, you cantry different ways that you can do theslideshows. You know, there’s so manythings that you can try within onecategory and just keep iterating andkeep testing until you find one. Secondis the proper UGC system. One thingthat’s really important though, nomatter what you do, is you need to havea deeper understanding of your app andyour content more than your creators do.
To get started, either you can just beYour own UGC creator, but let’s say ifyou are uncomfortable doing that, thenyou can just onboard two to 10 creators,train them until they go viral. Once youfind that, then you can scale it andbuild out a proper system. So, in orderto build a system out, there are a fewsteps. Step number one is sourcing.
Whatever you do, you need to try to findthe creators that fit your contentstrategy. For example, if it’s talkinghead, you need to find creators that aregood at yapping, that are good attalking. If you’re doing reactionvideos, you need to find creators thatare really good at facial expressions.And over here, you have inbound andoutbound. For inbound, you can doapplication forms. Put out inboundapplication forms in UGC group chats, onInstagram, on Reddit, or on websiteslike Syift. For outbound, you can hiresome VAS to do outreach to microinfluencers. And step two, it’sonboarding. There are actually two
Substeps here. The first one isinterview. You want to get on aninterview with them, vibe check them,and make sure that they are taking thiscampaign seriously. And for the actualonboarding, I do a course for all of myapps. So, this is the creator coursethat I have built for Sprout. More than50% of the creators that go through thiscourse go viral within the first twoweeks, and this is completely tailored toour app. First, we have a Typeform, andthen I do a bunch of videos and modulesto train our creators. There is a littleexample of how a module will look like.
For example, when it comes to creatingcontent, I will walk them through thecontent bank that we have, and we alwayshave a quiz at the end of each modulejust to quality check the creatorsand make sure that they have completedthe course. The third step is themanagement. Some apps hireinfluencers to manage UGC creators. Othershire their topUGC creators. Bring them on morefull-time to manage the rest of thecreators. Some apps they will managethem via Discord chat. You can havebi-weekly feedback calls, monthlyfeedback calls, whatever it is.
Eventually you’ll have to figure out asystem that works for your working styleand the content strategies that youhave. And then step four is once you’rebig enough, it’s time for you tosystemize and optimize even more. Forexample, you can start a referral systemfor all of your UGC creators. You canhave dashboards to analyze the growthand analytics. So, there are a lot ofthings that you can optimize and playaround with when you’re at that point. Ithink all in all, it’s really importantto turn virality into a system and aprocess. It might be lucky at the startto get like a viral video, but tomaintain going viral, I don’t reallybelieve that it’s luck. I do see myselfas a very lucky person, but I thinkYou can always maximize the surface areaof your luck.
What I love the most about this kind ofsystem that you shared is like theeducation component of it. There’s awhole training element, and by kind ofsystemizing it into here’s what goodcontent looks like, here’s how to besuccessful. You had a lot more successlike that, and this is the future ofbuilding apps. It’s not about thefeatures that you build. It’s not about,you know, using AI to code it up. It’sabout distribution. Your system isreally, really cool, and I think peoplewatching this are going to love it. Iwant to switch topics a little bit andtake a look at your apps that you built.
Would you be able to give me a demo ofthese apps that make over $100,000 amonth?>> Yeah, for sure. So, when it comes toGlamUp, there’s the welcoming screen andthe onboarding questions. Afterwards,you are able to choose which scan youWant. You can click in and startuploading a picture of yourself whereyou can take a selfie. After that, ifyou become a paying user, we willbasically scan your face and give youcolor analysis or glow-up guides,different makeup looks on your face, andproduct recommendations. When it comesto Sprout, we have the welcome pages,the onboarding questions, and then youwill see different job postingsaccording to your onboarding questions.
They’re all tailored to you. If you tryswiping right, we will justautomatically apply for you on thecompany website. And if you swipe left,just skip that job title. And you can dotailor resumes, all that stuff, too.
Cool. And on a similar note, what do youbuild these apps in? And what do you useto manage all these creators and do tensor hundreds of millions of views for anapp that’s doing over $100,000 a month?>> We use React Native for app building.Revenue Cat for revenue tracking.
Superwall for paywall. You can usePostHog for data analytics. Side shiftis the easiest way to recruit UGCcreators. We use atio for CRM systemsand, obviously, you can build your ownportals depending on what you need.
All right. Well, thanks for sharingthat. Last question that we ask allfounders who come on Starter Story, ifyou could go back in time, stand onyoung Nicole’s shoulders before youbuilt anything. What advice would youhave for anyone watching this channelthat wants to build apps doing millionslike you? There are a lot of things froma business perspective. The advice Iwould give myself is to try to always enjoythe journey instead of the results.There are always bigger numbers tochase, more users that you want toacquire, but staying present with whoyou are and just simply enjoying being abuilder. I think that’s something that alot of the times people can overlook,but I think that’s the best part.
Well, that’s great advice. Thanks,Nicole, for coming on the channel.Congrats on all your success. Hopefully,have you back on the channel soon totalk more about growth, but thanks forcoming on.>> Thank you, Pat. Have a good one.
All right, Gus, producer of StarterStory. What do you think of this one? Myfirst thought is that there’s likelevels to the game. Like she has thisreally built out system. And I canimagine a beginner watching this feelinglike I’m just struggling to post onething, and she has like hundreds ofpeople on it. And I don’t mean that in adiscouraging way. It just, it reminds melike there’s a beginner level andan expert, and she’s playing on expertmode. Yeah. I think you said itperfectly. A lot of people think, okay,well, I’ll post one video on TikTok.Let’s see what happens. No, this is awhole different level. And I wanted herto talk about that because that is theLevel that you need to be at to be doinganything serious in consumer right now.
Like AI is getting easier to build,obviously, but it’s also getting easierto create content, whether that’sscripting, production, or whatever. Ifyou’re watching this right now, you needto get to a higher level than, hey, letme create one piece of content this weekor this month. If you want to be in thegame, this is the kind of mindset youhave to have.
Yeah. There, I don’t know where I heardit from. Probably some podcasts I listento, but it’s like when you finally seepeople playing at like the highestlevel, you sort of like, I, I’m havingan introspective moment of like, oh, Ithought I was trying, but I’m not reallytrying that hard.
And then I think it just, I’ve said thisbefore, is the most successful people itseems really have a system. We’ve talkedto dozens of people and they just havelike they’ve really broken it down intoLike the micro steps to take for growth,or building, or whatever the case may be.
It’s a whole system behind it, not justlike what’s on my mind today, what am Igoing to post today.
Yeah. Know that’s the difference betweenjust wanting to create content for funand build things for fun, which there’sno problem with that, and there’s lots ofpeople that are successful for doingthat. Uh, but then there’s people thatfind a system, they see it works, theyscale an app to 100K, and then they doit on three more apps. And in myopinion, that’s the entrepreneur. That’sthe true entrepreneur: when somethingworks, you keep doing it until itdoesn’t work anymore. And I think thatNicole is a great example of that. So,if you’re looking for a system thatworks, we put together something specialwhere you will see all different ways togrow a mobile app in 2026. I’ll put alink down there in the description. Youcan download it for free to find ways toGrow your app. Try a bunch of stuff. Seewhat works. When something does, doubledown on it. Think it’s worth checkingout. All right, we’ll see you guys inthe next one. Peace.