| Source | |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kt2kt0qw8rdf6ee21k9g4fd0 |
| Readwise ID | 01kt2kt0qw8rdf6ee21k9g4fd0 |
| Date | 2025-09-20 |
| Author | youtube.com |
| Category | video |
What if I told you that success hasnothing to do with coding? Well, whatI’m going to share with you today is thedifference between apps that makemillions and apps that die with zerodownloads. Don’t believe me? Well,here’s proof. Meet Steven, a founder whotook his mobile app from 0 to $40,000 MRand then sold it for a life-changingamount. Steven’s not a famousinfluencer. He’s an actual founder inthe arena who discovered a playbook thatchanged his life forever. You mightremember him from his last starter storyvideo. Well, that video got a millionviews, and I asked him if he wanted tocome back on the channel. I said, “Dude,why don’t you come on again, but thistime share the full story? Not the
surface level stuff, but the actualspreadsheets, the exact viral videos,and everything that took you from zeroto exit.” He said yes. And that’s whatyou’re about to see right now: his10-minute viral validation method.Exactly how to go from 0 to 50 millionviews for free from your apartment andhis simple strategy to turn 2in scale using paid ads. If you don’twant to end up on page 500 of the appStore, well, get out your pen and paperand enjoy the million-dollar app playbookby Starter Story. Welcome back to thechannel, Stephen. If you can remind theviewers of what you built and what we’regoing to be talking about today.
Thank you, man. It’s a pleasure to beback on the channel. I’m Steven. I havebuilt, scaled, and exited multiplemobile apps for millions of dollars inrevenue. Last time I was on the channel,I talked about how I built Puff Count,my quit vaping app, scaled it to $44,000in monthly recurring revenue beforeexiting the company and selling it to alarger mobile app studio in Europe. Andtoday, we’re going to be talking aboutthe most important part of buildingmobile apps, which is marketing.
Nice. A big reason why I wanted to bringyou back on the channel is that you weregoing to come on and talk about yourthree-phase marketing framework. First,before we dive in and get really intothe nitty-gritty details, can you giveme like the high level of what we’regoing to go over today?>> Yeah, 100%. Like I said, every mobileapp that you build should be approachedfrom a marketing-first standpoint.
Because as long as you can market yourproduct, you will make money. And ifyour product is not marketable, youcould have the best product in theworld, but if no one knows about it,you’re never going to make any money.It’s never going to be a successfulbusiness. Marketing should always comefirst. To do that, first we do marketresearch. We understand what’s goingviral in our niche, what content isworking in our niche and that we canalso use that to validate the product ingeneral. Once we have the productvalidated and we start building it, thenwe can go into the market research and
start to identify what type of contentformats we want to recreate. This isexactly what I did for PuffCount. Thisis the entire reason that I wassuccessful with PuffCount is because Idid market research in the quit vapingniche on TikTok and I simply tookinspiration from those videos. I postedthem organically and then scaled thewinners with paid ads. So, we havemarket research, post volume,organically, scale the winners with paidads. That is the three-step framework ina nutshell.
Cool. All right. Well, let’s dive intophase one, which is market research. I’dlove it if you gave me the step-by-stepplaybook if you were starting over todayand you are someone who’s looking forthe idea. I always like to startthinking of ideas and validating ideasby solving a problem for a large numberof people, right? Vaping was a problemthat I experienced in my daily life.When I was in college, all my friendsgot addicted to vaping. I got swept upin the habit. So, you know, I knew itwas a painful problem. And I also sawvaping going mega viral on TikTok. It’scontroversial. It’s viral. And I wassolving a problem for people. Thosethree points together make a killerproduct.
Cool. If you were starting over todayand everything you’ve learned with theapps that you’ve built, how do youapproach this phase to know that you’rebuilding the right thing?
Here’s what we’re going to do. We’regoing to pull out our phones. We’regoing to go to TikTok and type in anykeywords related to our niche. And thenwhat you can do is tap the three dots inthe top right, and then you can filter byMost liked videos of all time. This isyour market research. We’ll take PuffCount, my previous app, as an example.
You type in “quit vaping” on TikTok andthen you go to videos, and you can seethat these videos, some of these videoshave gone insanely viral. We have 1.3million likes here. We have 3.7 millionlikes here, right? So, this is ourmarket research. Let’s click into onehere and let’s see if we can find somesimilarities between this content andsome of the content that I created herein this video. They’re dropping theirvapes in a glass of water. And if we goto the Puff Count profile, you can seethat we were doing that. That was one ofour bread and butter. 33,000 views. It’sme dunking a vape into a glass of water.
This is not my original idea. I was notthe first person on TikTok to put a vapein a glass of water. But I did themarket research. I understood that thatcontent was resonating with my idealtarget audience. And I used that conceptand created my own videos. And then mynext part of the process, it’s veryhigh-tech here. So this is my marketresearch strategy. I take exactly what Ifound on TikTok and I put them all intoA spreadsheet.
That was great. So once you identifythat this is a problem we’re solving,I’d love if you could actually walk methrough documenting in that spreadsheeton a specific Tik Tok video. So let’s gothrough this process together. Again,step one is going on Tik Tok, typing inyour keywords, and finding viral videos.So we’ll take this one, for example, thatgot 3.7 million organic likes, right?So, what we’ll do is we will copy andpaste this URL into your spreadsheethere. And then what we really want to dois we want to understand why this videowent viral. And every viral video hasthree key points: the hook, the storyline, and the call to action. So, let’sgo ahead and watch this video today.
So, I just quit vaping like an hour ago.I made the decision.>> Okay. So, she starts off holding herphone. There’s a little bit of action, alittle bit of movement going. And shestarts off by saying, “I just decided toquit vaping an hour ago.” So, we’regoing to write that as the hook.And I think it’s always nice to takenote of the way she shot the video aswell. So, holding the camera, walking, thenSets camera down. These small details in the video are actually veryimportant. You want to replicate andtake inspiration from these as close aspossible. Right? There’s a reason shestarted this video while walking andthen set it down in front of her, right?
And it was part of the hook, and thisvideo went viral. So, we’re going to usethat. And as you can see, she sits downin front of six glasses of water. So, wecould even add that onto the hook,right? And then sets camera down infront of six glasses of water. We wantto take note of all of this stuff. Andnow she’s going to get into her story.So, let’s continue watching.
I have been vaping for seven years. And thisis very symbolic because I have sevenvapes.>> Okay. She’s talking about how she’s beenvaping for seven years, and she hasseven different types of vapes. She hasher emergency vape, her walking vape,her car vape, her work vape. Andobviously, she’s exaggerating here. Thisgirl is so good at making content. Like,every single shot and every singletalking point was clearly calculatedhere.
I’ve been wanting to quit for threeor four of those.So, she is talking about her quittingjourney, discussing her experience withvaping and dropping the vapes into glasses ofwater.She felt irritable and unmotivated. All she did waslay in bed and cry.She’s also discussing the pain points,how she would just lay in bed, vape, cry,cough, and feel terrible. This video istwo minutes long. I don’t think your TikToksneed to be two minutes long, but ifyou can make them that long, great.
I did this 15 minutes ago. I didn’twant to wait for it to deliver, so I gotthe audiobook.Here is the call to action. Mostimportantly, she got an audiobook.Okay. The Easy Way to Quit Vaping byAlan Carr. There it is: the call toaction of the video. So, in her call toaction or solution, she talks about chewing gum,eating mints, and theaudiobook by some author. Now, we knowthat this video was essentially an adbecause she is pitching this audiobookby Alan Carr, right?
Know that she was promoting this book inher video, and she crushed it. The callto action at the end of the video reallyquickly, really subtly makes it feelsuper organic; it doesn’t feel salesy atall. And those are the best ads. Soagain, you know, we could sit here forhours, and we could analyze these videos.And this is what you should do. Before Iposted a single video on the Puff CountTikTok, I scrolled for seven days straight.I saved all the videos for marketresearch, just like this. And after sevendays of scrolling, analyzing, andunderstanding what goes viral in yourniche and why it goes viral in yourniche, you will be so much better atcreating content. Cool. So we got ourfirst video research row of ourspreadsheet here. We’re going to gothrough and spend some days actuallyjust writing these out. We’re not goingto use too much AI; we’re going to writethis and really understand the problemsin our niche, content ideas, and thatsort of thing. This is the researchside, which I really, really like.
What’s next? How do we go from researchto actually creating content? Okay, nowwe’re going to get into phase two, whichThe actual creation of this contentand growing your channel, by followingthis organic growth framework, I grewthe PuffCount account to 120,000followers, over 50 million views, andhundreds of thousands of app storeinstalls, all for $0. So, when you’recreating this content, there is a provenframework to follow. That frameworkis hook, problem, solution, or call toaction. Obviously, the hook is the mostimportant part. You need to capture thatattention in the first 3 seconds. Ican show an example with one of my mostviral videos. This one got 5 millionviews. I’m shaking this glass bowl ofempty vapes. There are so many differentelements of this hook, and we did thisintentionally. First, there’s asound hook. We’re shaking the glass withvapes in it. There are some crazy soundsgoing on. Then boom, we hop rightinto the concept of the video. Thenyou need to present the problem or thestoryline clearly. So, what are wedoing in this video? We’re paying peopleto ditch their vapes. Why? Because vapesare unhealthy. At the end of the video,we’re going tohave a quick 2-second call to action.
The 2-C call to action, simply showingthe product in your video, works so wellbecause if people miss that, they haveto rewatch your video again, and itcreates an engagement loop. People onTikTok do not want to be watching ads.They want to be entertained. They wantto be educated. They want to beinformed. Your entire app is going to bea funnel, right? And at the very top ofthe funnel, we have your TikTok videoor your TikTok views. You don’t need toexplain every part in your funnel foryour video to be effective. All you haveto do is take the person from your TikTok video to the app store. That’sexactly what all these videos do, right?
There’s no—there’s no explanation of theproduct. There’s no explaining thefeatures. So, if you can do that withyour content and present a sly, organicfeeling call to action, you will crush.Steven is the perfect example of howsomeone can turn a simple app idea intoa million-dollar business. But that comeswith finding the right idea and knowinghow to validate it. Well, you’re in luckbecause I’ve studied thousands of appideas, making millions, and spent hoursobsessing over what works and what fails.
And what separates the winners from therest. And today, I’m going to share theentire database of ideas with you forfree: 50 plus validated AI app ideas,what problem they solve, how much moneythey make, and how they grew. All backedby real-life case studies. This isbasically a gold mine of profitable,simple AI apps on the internet rightnow. So, if you’re serious aboutbuilding an app that can make money likeSteven, hit the first link in thedescription and grab it for free.Hopefully, this helps you find your nextbig idea. All right, let’s get back toSteven. All right. Well, the nextquestion that I have for you is, youknow, once you start posting stuff,creating stuff, which is a big learningcurve for a lot of people, especiallyputting themselves out on short formvideo for the first time. What’s theposting strategy of this? You mentionedyou do videos one time a day. What wouldyou do if you were starting today? Whatdo you recommend? Is it what time topost, how much to post, and when to know
when to stop? The posting strategy—thisis where I see a lot of people fail,right? Because in the beginning, it’sIt’s going to be slow. In the beginning, it’sgoing to be hard to get that first viralpop. But the most important thing isstaying consistent. Whether you’reposting, whether you’re getting creatorsto post, you need to stay consistentwith it, right? Don’t worry about thetime that you post the content or all thesmall little details of the content. Donot be a perfectionist. Your goal hereis volume. Your goal here is knowinggenerally what direction your contentshould be going. You’re just looking forthat first viral video. The way to getthere is by posting volume. Volumenegates luck, right? So, you need to beposting as much as possible. And whenyou get a video that pops off, recreatethat concept. If you look at the mostviral people on TikTok, let’s forgetabout businesses for a second. Let’sthink about just creators and influencers.
The most viral people on TikTok and onYouTube do the same style of videoover and over again. There’s areason they do that. We can take apage out of their playbook, and we coulddo the same thing for our app. The mostimportant part is to stay consistent.Post every single day. Post based onYour market research will give you amuch better chance of going viral. Andthen once you do find a video that popsoff for you, continue to recreate thatvideo. It will become easier and easierfor you. An important thing, too, is once
you get that first viral video, thefloor of the amount of views that youget will increase over time because theplatforms trust you more and there’smore engagement to your videos, so theywill be shown more. All it takes is thatfirst viral video to get you out of that200 view jail. And also, if you’reposting on one platform, why not post onall of them? Download the videos, postthem on TikTok, post them on InstagramReels, post them on YouTube Shorts, postthem on Twitter. Twitter is so slept on.
Do not sleep on Twitter as adistribution platform. As you start to createmore and more content, you’re going tounderstand some formats don’t drive highintent installs. They don’t drive anyconversions for you. There’s one examplethat comes to mind. Yeah. So, this videohere got 11.6 million views, close to amillion likes, and it drove me close tono installs. Number one, because Ididn’t have a call to action, but numberTwo, you know, I’m not really talkingabout any pain points here. There’s nota lot going on. It was kind of a badvideo in terms of conversions. It wasgreat for the account and great fordriving views, followers, shares, andengagement and stuff like that. But thisdidn’t really drive installs for me. And Ithink it’s important to keep track of that.
You can see here, you know, there are twovideos. These were my two highestconverting videos in terms of installsand sales on PuffCount. So I pinnedthose to the top of my profile. Andyou’ll see these are very differentstyles of video. Again, these follow ourproven framework of hook, storyline,solution. I pinned these videos on myprofile because they drove the highestamount of conversions. Your profileitself will become its own funnel. So,everyone who visits my profile now isgoing to watch these two pinned videosfor sure because they’re the firstvideos that show up. And I chose to pinthese videos because they were thehighest converting videos. And what I’vecome to find is the highest convertingvideos for me personally were public.
Interviews, simple product demos likethis video. There’s trend hijacking aswell. And you can also have the problemsolution narratives like this videohere. All right, so we’ve gone throughthe content creation phase, which isprobably the hardest phase. If you canget through this and create viralformats that work, you’re pretty muchset. But you can’t create contentyourself forever. So, what’s the nextstep after that to really truly grow,build something that you can sell likeyou did for Puff Cat? Pat, I’m so gladyou asked. So, we finished phase two. We
have this library of organic content andnow we want to scale. There’s a coupledifferent ways to scale. You yourself,you can go beast mode. You could posta thousand videos a day, but that’s not verylikely. You can hire and outsourcecreators, which is easier said thandone. I think everybody’s going througha super distortive process to hirecreators right now. You have to email athousand of them. Only one gets back toyou and they give you some outrageousprice. But that is exactly why I builtmy next product, which is Posted.
On Posted, what we did was we madeConnecting with creators is as easy aspossible. So, this is the best way towork with creators. We have this featurecalled deals. For example, you create aproject brief. You explain what yourproduct is. You have some rules for thecontent you want. You could choose whereyou want the creators to be from. Andthen you have your inspiration contentright here. Going back to our marketresearch, this is where we give thecreators our market research. We tellthe creators what videos are going viralin our niche, what’s working in ourniche, and then creators will actuallysubmit videos to your deal for free. So,for example, this creator submitted thisvideo to my deal and I can watch it forfree. And this is what the creator wantsto be paid. I can approve this piece ofcontent or I can reject this piece of
content and I can ask for another priceor whatever it is. But you can see allthese creators made videos for myproduct for free. And there’s alldifferent types of bids, right? This onewants 50. This onewants $100. So, you can scroll throughthese, approve or deny; you only pay forYou do choose one and you do pay forone. You own the video itself, and youown the ad code so that you can scale itfurther on paid ads. For example, thiscreator right here who has 552,000followers made a post for us for110 bucks. It got 30,000 views. Thiscreator here with 2.7 million followersmade a video for 110 bucks as well, orthis creator right here who only had 768followers but made an amazing piece ofcontent for us that got 53,000 views.
And again, you know, we own these videos for life.Copy the ad code and scale further on paid adsusing Meta or TikTok ads.
The first thing that we need to do is start givingdata into these paid ad platforms becauseTikTok, Facebook, or any paid adplatform doesn’t have enough data onyour app yet. So, you will need an MMP,a mobile measurement partner to sendthese events into the paid ad platforms.Adjust is a great one. Appsfire is agreat one, but we need to feed the paidad platforms with enough data, right?So, your first campaign cannot be apurchase campaign. You can’t optimizefor those users just quite yet becauseTikTok and Facebook don’t really knowwho those users are yet.
Customer acquisition cost. So, with allof our content and all of our paid ads,our customer acquisition cost onPuffCount was anywhere around 24.And our lifetime value was anywhere from70 per conversion.So, that was profitable math for us. Weknew that if we put 2, sometimes even more, outon the other end. So, here you’ll seeour paid ads dashboard. We spent a totalof 3,000 to $44,000 in monthlyrecurring revenue. And you can see here,look at the cost per click: 3 cents, 18
cents, 21 cents, 15 cents, 35 cents, 9cents. We got these results almost likeday one of running ads because we hadthis library of proven content. We knewexactly what videos we were going toupload to the paid ads dashboard becausewe had validated it all organically. So,we were spending smarter. And this isour four-step scaling process in orderto optimize your paid ads. Everything isa funnel. Just like our TikTok videos,TikTok profile itself is a funnel. Soare paid ads. If you think of everythingas a funnel, it becomes so much easier.
Because you don’t have to go straightfrom a view to a sale. That’s so hard todo, right? Think of it as a step-by-stepprocess. Everything is a funnel. So atthe top of the funnel, we have our views,and then obviously we have our clicks.So our views on our paid ads and thenpeople who have clicked our paid ad,then people who have installed our appfrom our paid ad, and then people whohave purchased from our paid ad. Andyour views are going to be at the top of the funnel,and the sales are going to be at theabsolute bottom of the funnel. Andinherently there are going to be fewerpeople who purchase your productcompared to the number of people thatview your product. So, when you’restarting on paid ads, it’s veryimportant that you fill up each step ofthe funnel first before you start to
optimize for the bottom. So, first we’regoing to optimize for views, and thenwe’re going to optimize for clicks onthose ads, and then we’re going tooptimize for installs, and then trials,and then subscriptions. These are alldifferent events that you can optimizefor in your paid ads. Depending on whichThe cost and the return on that spend willchange a ton. So you fill the adplatforms with enough data so thateventually you can start to target yourtrials and subscriptions. As far asthe platform strategy goes with paidads, it really depends and it’sdifferent for every app, right? From myexperience with PuffCount, TikTok wasmuch cheaper traffic, but the quality ofthe traffic was a little bit lower.
Whereas on Meta, the traffic was moreexpensive, but the quality was a bithigher. Facebook and TikTok are reallythe only two places that you shouldstart running paid ads. Ultimately, youcan test both depending on your budget.
I think it’s important to lock down onepaid ad platform at first because, again,you need to fill these ad platforms withas much data as possible for them to bethe most effective. So, if you’resplitting your budget everywhere andyou’re spending 10 there,it’s not really going to work for you. Iwould try to focus on one platform inthe beginning until you lock it down,nail it down, scale your budget,and then you can shift to another paidad platform. For me personally, weWe scaled most of our spend on TikTok ads.
And that was because all of our contentthat we used on our paid ads was madefor TikTok. I was in my apartmentmaking TikToks all day. So naturally,where our content performed the bestwhen we scaled on paid. A lot ofpeople are scared of paid ads, and theydon’t want to do it. But Facebook andTikTok are some of the mostprofitable companies in the world for areason. It’s because paid ads work. It’sbecause companies are using this. It’llmake it so much easier for you to scale.
I’m a solopreneur. I’m bootstrappingthese products. I don’t want to waste mymoney on paid ads. And you don’t haveto. You just need to identify whatcontent goes viral organically, and thenyou can spend confidently on paid adsand feel way more confident that you’regoing to get a return on your ad spend.
And paid ads are so great because youcan optimize for certain events in yourvideos. This is really where yourcontent creation skills and validatingthe content organically come into play,because for our specific paid adstrategy, we are optimizing for thepeople who are most likely to purchase.
So, we’re tracking all these events onTikTok ads, on Facebook ads, and we aretelling Facebook and TikTok to go find usmore people who are most likely topurchase our product. With the killerorganic content library that we had,we told Facebook and TikTok to optimizefor certain events inside our app. Thoseare the two things we needed to crushwith paid ads. We were profitable almostinstantly while running paid ads. And wewere able to scale very quickly becausewe had done all the work up front.
Not only that, you can have a call toaction in your videos. My view toinstall rate skyrocketed. Obviously,running paid ads, because TikTok willgive you a call to action on the videoif you’re running paid ads in an organicpiece of content. If you’re not runningpaid ads, you have to rely on someonegoing to the app store, searching foryour product. That’s a lot more effort.Although you’re spending for this reach,the reach is much more effective on paidads. The campaign structure on your paidads is very, very important.
Again, we want to upload our best performingorganic videos and then we simply letthe platforms optimize.
You’re starting; you want to optimizefor the top of the funnel. And as you getmore data and more spend into these adplatforms, you can start to optimize forthe bottom of the funnel. And it’s veryimportant to track everything and useanalytics tools like Superwall orRevenue Cat. You can effectively trackyour cost per install, your trialconversion rate, your subscription rate,your retention rate, and mostimportantly, your lifetime value. Thelifetime value of every customer thatcomes into your app, because that is yournorth star metric. That is your goldenmetric. Because TikTok will tell you
how much it costs to acquire thosecustomers, but you need to understandwhat their lifetime value is. You wantto increase the lifetime value of yourcustomers so you can spend more toacquire those customers. And if you canget to a 3:1 CAC to LTV ratio,congratulations! You’ve built a moneyprinting machine. So that’s it in anutshell. That is our three-step processthat helped us scale PuffCount to$44,000 in monthly recurring revenuebefore exiting the business to a largermobile app studio in Europe. That’s it.
You start with market research. You giveyourself the best chance to go viral.You start posting consistently. Hirecreators and start to validate contentorganically. And then you take your bestperformers and put them on paid ads sothat you can scale.
Well, thank you for sharing your playbook, Stephen. This wasamazing. It’s super cool to have someonewho has actually done this. You showedall your examples from Puff Count. Youdidn’t hold anything back. This is abusiness that changed your life, and it’ssuper cool to see the behind-the-scenesof it. So, thank you for sharing.
And if you are watching this right now, we wantto bring Stephen back on the channel forhopefully a third time. So if you haveany questions for Stephen, put them inthe comments. Hopefully, we’ll have youback on for a third time.
Our next video is going to be in person,Pat.>> Oh yeah, we will make sure to do a videolive IRL.>> I’ll be back for the third one becauseI’m going to sell my third company.Maybe that’ll be our next video.>> And that’s what it takes these days. Sothanks for coming on, Stephen, sharing.
All this. You’re awesome, man.Absolutely, Pat. Thank you for havingme, bro.I hope you enjoyed this video and gotsome inspiration from Steven’s story.But real quick, I want to remind you that thewhole point of these videos is to helpyou find an idea and actually build it.Learning is cool, but action is whatwill get you that dream outcome. Andwith AI tools getting better and betterevery day, it’s never been easier to getstarted. You can spin up a working appin just a few hours and start turningthat into a real business. If you’relooking for a proven system or road mapto build with AI, then definitely checkout Starter Story Build. Our programswill help you find an idea, build itwith AI, and ship it to the real worldfast. Just click the first link in thedescription if you want to learn more.Thanks again for watching. We’ll see youin the next one. Peace.