| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sqopVyCWzYo |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42vjz40nzc0pd2q9ds4sar |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42vjz40nzc0pd2q9ds4sar |
| Date | 2026-05-15 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/sqopVyCWzYo/sddefault.jpg?v=6a03ea3d |
I’m just kidding. >> [laughter] >> Yes, I know. I know, I’m tired. >> [music] [music] >> What is up App Nation? It is Steve P. Young. Hopefully, my voice is back. Founder of appmasters.com. This is the place that you go when you want action-packed content related to helping grow your app downloads and more
importantly, those revenues. And today is a solo episode, just you and me. I’m going to answer all your questions, kind of break down how to take apps to just product market fit to beyond and kind of give you insights. So, it’s going to be a little bit different. It’s going to be more like a let’s work together type of vibe. All right, without further ado, let’s get going. >> [music]
All right. Okay, my trusty co-host is not going to be here, but he’s in the back and we will be sharing he’ll be there to kind of answer your questions too. H, you know, that’s what I’m talking to you. I’m talking to you. All right, guys. I want to say hi to a few people. I like these solo episodes a little bit better. All right, to where what’s happening? Good to see you.
What’s up? Bijo, okay. All right, Bijo. [laughter] What’s up, Leo? Good to see you, man. All right, if you guys guys got some questions, put them. And then if you got me you got like app links cuz that would help out. I would say let’s just email them. Just email me Steve at appmasters. I’m going to check my email right now. And so, if you got app links and you want me to take a check at let me take a look at your app, then I will check my email. Just put Steve live stream. Look at this email right now.
And I’ll do that. All right, Katia. Katia, what? Kate, why are you always here now? Thank you though. Appreciate you. What’s up, Adam? Good to see you, dude. Is anybody going to be at MAU Vegas? Let me know in the comments. All right, let’s get to some of the questions you guys had for me. Thank you, H, for putting all this together from the YouTube comments. We love them YouTube comments, right? All right. Hey. Hey, Shayan. Thanks for the awesome insights. We’ll create UGC. We’ll give you create UGC a try. Distribution and distribution
is going to be the biggest problem right now, especially in the age of when you can code anything your heart desires. You can code anything. Distribution is the most important thing. So, I have a question. Would this tool work for organic social media posts like Instagram and TikTok? If we warm up accounts, mass create videos using this tool, and mass post, would I have a chance? Absolutely. And I wouldn’t say it’s the tool. Obviously, the tool helps. Find the tool that makes the most sense for you. We like the folks from Create UGC. They reached out to us. The tool is really awesome to easy to
create. But at the same time, Shayan, don’t get so fixated on the tool. Just do anything that would work for you. And I I’m the same way, so I get it. It’s a lot easier for me to say this and then execute it myself. But if you are an expert at this, and we have seen apps do well using this organic social media strategy, then you’re going to have to post every day. I just talked to somebody and you know, hopefully she’ll come on to the podcast yesterday, but like she talked about how
she grew her downloads and got to that 1,000 milestone mark just using organic social media. So, it works. But hopefully you know a little bit to make it work for you, because I don’t know how to do that, right? I kind of figured this out with YouTube, but yeah. So, let me retweet this. Join me live solo, baby. Okay. There, H. Retweeted. All right. Adam, I already got an email,
see? Can do this one. There you go, Adam. Just to let you know I’m here. All right, I will do this one. Track Cannabis. Adam. Email sent. There you go. All right. This is not Adam. Who is this one? John. Are you John? Yeah, this is John. John, I am I’m on your See? I’m checking my email, guys. All right, enough. I’m having too much fun. Crypto Bibliotech says, “Launch my app yesterday. Any ideas how to grow it?”
Okay. Look, if you already launched your app, you’re going to have to find a distribution channel, just like we talked about. My favorite distribution channels to start off with from and I want to do this, guys, like this. I’m going to open up my Canva. Let’s work together, okay? I’m going to put up my whiteboard. Personally, okay? This is my personal opinion. My favorite channels to start off with are
ASO plus Apple ads. You don’t need much. Now, and if you want proof, we just bought an app for that’s, you know, that’s doing about 30 5K MRR. And the main strategies primarily actually is ASO, but we do have some Apple ads in there, too. And in my opinion, you can get to This can get to Whoops.
100,000 a year ARR. Easy. Easy. To I would say 1 million. ARR. It can You can be done. So, if you are just Look, and you can do any channel, right? I’ve heard people go meta ads. But, to get to this level, you just need one or two channels. It’s either this A
ASO and Apple Ads. It’s either meta, you know, if you know TikTok a bit, great. But, I’ve seen so many apps get to this range on ARR with just a few channels. And just one of them. It’s not all three. It’s just one of them. So, what I would do is just focus on one of these channels and move forward, and that’s the best way to go. Stick with your If you know what nothing about marketing, this these ASO and Apple Ads is the best way cuz all you got to new do is know
keywords. And that’s not hard. Meta, you got to know creative, you got to set up SDKs. There’s just so much more complexities. And if you don’t know about marketing, well, you keep it simple and you start off with these Apple Ads and ASO, and that’s easy to learn. Anybody can learn that pretty quickly, right? You might not be as good as me, but you’ll get there. You’ll get there. All right, let’s move on. How did I do H? Is that okay quite answer?
Okay, he likes it. He’s in the background. I get it. We did with Google Ads only. There you go. Thank you, Ryan. There you go. All right. All right, are there any free free alternatives to the ASO mobile servers service or can we get data from Apple directly on App Store Connect? No, but you can get Apple the the data directly through Apple Search Ads. So, there’s a Chrome extension from SplitMetrics. If you do SplitMetrics Chrome extension,
extension, you’ll find it here. And what this does is here, I’ll pull up a screenshot. Let me get this bigger. When you’re in the Apple Ads and you have this Chrome extension and you’re starting to keyword research, it will start showing you the search score from there. So, that’s exactly That’s the free way of doing it.
Personally, I like to use ASO Mobile. I thought there might be a free plan where you guys just do keyword research. All right. I mean, it’s only $47 a month. It’s great for just keyword research. I mean, it tells you a lot of keywords. App Follow used to be my favorite. They’re you know, I’ve been telling them, “Please fix it.” But that what used to be my free way of doing it. And it’s still kind of works. I just recently used it in
I saw them in London and it’s still kind of works. It’s not the best still, but hey, uh let’s see. I don’t know. Uh let’s do Let’s do Adam’s app, yeah? Cannabis for an example. All right, Adam. Adam sent me this email. He said, “Hey, I’ve got this event right now.” So Adam says, “Hey, what did you say?” Adam, all right. All right. Okay, thank you. You’re too close, right? Too close. Link I sent for Canna Control, was it
for in-app event? Free lifetime? Yeah, yeah. Cool. Yo. All right. I don’t know if I even say that publicly, but I am all about this free lifetime thing now cuz I think the dust has settled. Apple has moved on. The internet has moved on. It’s time to redo reuse the free lifetime. So, let’s say cannabis for Adam’s app, right? So let’s try cannabis. Oh, wait. Bright’s cannabis, right, Adam? It just says weed. Let’s try it.
Maybe there is less competition. Okay, fine. We need Okay. So, I’ll hit the little star icon. Right? And yeah, see, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. This used to be my favorite way. See? App follow like they need to change it, but it used to be my favorite way. If you can pay a little bit, pay a little bit for ASO Mobile. It’s still It’s my favorite way right now. I think you might be able to get away for free, but
I’m not sure cuz I have the They hooked me up with the max plan. Uh sorry. Okay, let me see. Somebody had a question in here. Leo says, “Which ASO platform is best for reaching out about particular keywords? Keyword data top ranked.” So, I use App Radar. I think App Radar has the best difficulty scores, but ASO Mobile Mobile Action, they all have great traffic scores. So, I would say like
Mobile Action for traffic, App Radar for difficulty. Is usually how I get there. Can you hit the link on iOS device? Yeah, I will, bro. Rayan says, “If anyone sees or spot the app, I would also suggest doing ASO and ads, even if it’s a small amount.” Absolutely. Thank you, Rayan. I don’t know how big your app is, but I think I remember you said telling me, but anyways like I’ve just seen so many apps reach this level
of revenue with just one of these channels. Like ASO and Apple Ads, Meta, or These are all ors, or TikToks. So, in the early stages, just focus. That’s what I would say, just focus. Oh, you don’t see your screen. I know. Okay, fine. These. Okay. Thanks, Eshan. All right, we got a good number of people here. I like it. Hence why we need to join the community. Yes, Adam. All right. Guru.
Gupreet Gurupreet. Thank you. Amazing you as always. Thank you. Appreciate it. All right. Oh, yeah, Renan. Okay, reach out to me, bro. I think you’ve done pretty well with the Desire Land. Do you have any content on how to get acquired? So, I do. I can talk about that for you. I will create content. I mean, we just did one H and I did one in the community. We We talked about how I was acquiring apps and then how we’ve
to acquire. So, the easiest way and you know, we were on the I was on the podcast for Flippa. Is the Flippa, right? We just recently sold an app for, you know, I would say under 50,000, above 10,000. Okay? And that’s my range that I’m giving you guys. Don’t want to be too public about certain things, but like we sold our app and that was through the buyer found us on Flippa and we decided to do that deal and I gave him a pretty decent deal on that app, but that’s one way. There we
I’ve sold another app to Rounds and I don’t know if you guys have gotten emails from Rounds, but what I would say is like number one, my number one thing about how to get acquired would be, okay, look, let’s try this again, H. How to get acquired. So, number one. You need to be a motivated seller. Cuz deals time kills deals. If you’re
not motivated to sell and you’re going to be lackadaisical about it, you ain’t going to get required, all right? Two, this is a motivated buyer. Again, time will kill any deal. So, you need to be a motivated seller and then you have to have a motivated buyer. Otherwise, your deal is not going to go through. Now, I’ve done pretty decent size deals at this point, six, seven figures and you know, this is what I’ve learned. Now, the other thing, if you want to get acquired, you can reach out to these
brokers. You know, there’s Evelyn, who I just bought our app from, Evelyn Herrera. We’ve done some podcasts with her. All right, there’s appbusinessbrokers.com. com. That’s another broker. And then there’s Flippa. com. So, that’s Flippa is the easiest to get going. If you got something bigger, I actually prefer it. Right now, I think Evelyn’s an amazing job, and so I’d reach out to her and just see if she might be able to list your app for
there. But, that’s what I would do, and that’s I mean, depending on your range, if you’re looking at anything, I would say under six figures, like in the anywhere in the Yeah, under six figures, like my app, we just sold it, right? Like, so and who cares? We sold it for 20k, okay? So, we sold it for 20k. The I just listed on Flippa. So, anything around, let’s say, 10 to 50k, I think Flippa is just fine. If you
want to get closer to that six-figure, seven-figure range, then go talk to a broker, cuz they’re going to help you kind of not be so crazy about your your multiples, right? And the apps I have sold, it’s again, I wasn’t delusional. I was just more like, one, I want to get focused on a few of the apps that are doing well, right? That’s my That’s the reason I wanted to sell it. I just wanted to kind of like Steve Jobs when he came back to Apple, eliminate a
lot of the distractions, and then two, like, don’t be delusional. Like, you’re going to get two two Let’s just say five X. And then if you’re okay with getting two to three, dude, it’s going to be great, right? So, there’s always reasons for selling, but that’s I would don’t be delusional as well, what I would say. Hopefully that answers your question. Screen share, please. Great. All right.
Okay. All right. Keyword research, I kind of talked about this. How do you do keyword research? Literally, there’s two ways, okay? I I’ve obviously talked about ASO mobile. Here’s another strategy, okay? I’m going to give you my all my secrets. I don’t care. Google Trends, look it up. All right. Google Keyword Tool is another one. Keyword Tool is another one, right? All right. [snorts] The other thing I would suggest
is think about the top top advertisers, okay? So, I’m talking the Calms of the world, the health and fitness apps of the world, okay? You can look at just their Meta Ads Library, or you can pay for a tool, you know, there’s Social Peta, which is one of our sponsors, that have this, and you can see what they’re advertising. Now, here’s why I’m telling you this is because I know Calm was advertising a lot about green noise.
And so, green noise became a search term within the App Store. This is our app, right? So, that’s how I build my apps. That’s the other strategy. It’s like, you do a lot of keyword research. Now, I didn’t know what came first, but I knew there was people searching for green noise, and so I decided to make an app. The way I make apps is I look for demand first, people searching for it, and then I build the app. And the way that I’m thinking about this, this is a way more advanced strategy, is if these
advertisers are talking about, and I’m not going to give you too many secrets here, but the app we acquired is sort of that in that realm. If these big advertisers are talking about green noise, and they’re spending a lot of money, people are then going to search for green noise, but it’s Calm that actually is running it. But thank you, Calm, for making green noise a thing, right? So, I hope that makes sense to you. Okay, let me see if I can H, does that make sense?
Lots of ads lead to searches. And if you do get data on those searches, right? And the data needs to be around Don’t worry, guys, I’ll fix all this. Right? If that keyword, let’s say green noise, is greater than, let’s say, 25 search score. Again, don’t ask me what the
search score is, then you have a viable business, right? That’s your quickest way to revenue, and that’s what we found. So, thank you, Calm. You ran a lot of ads about green noise. People were searching for green noise in the App Store. That green noise had ended up having volume, right? And then we built an app for green noise to get it going. So, that’s my approach, and that’s how I would do keyword research. So, you can do keyword research if you already have an app, use
ASO Mobile. If you don’t, and you’re discovering, you’re like, “What should I vibe code this weekend?” Well, this is how I start to do it, right? Use Google Keyword Tool. So, here, let’s go again. Google Keyword Tool. ASO Mobile .net. Or look at a lot of ads. See what they’re talking about. Look at Calm. Look at Headspace. Are they coming up with new categories for sounds that
haven’t existed? If so, is there enough search volume? If there is, build the app. That’s what you can do. All right. Man, H, I think we should hide some of this stuff. We got charged for some of this stuff, you know what I mean? That’s what we should do. All right, which nine localizations do you recommend? Easy, US, Spanish Mexico. I don’t think anything else makes that big of a difference. Now, you can utilize the Arabic and Vietnamese and Demetri, I
think you’re talking about the US localization that is supports nine other localizations supports the US one. So, I would just use Spanish Mexico. We have yet to see Vietnamese, Korean, all that stuff that much better than Spanish Mexico. So, that’s all I would use. All right. Demetri says, cuz he’s he’s greedy, he wants another question. Say, Steve, quick question. For each localization, English UK, English Australia, and English Canada, should I also stay away from duplicating keywords I already have
in the English US and other localization, or does Apple treat each storefront independently? Yes, it does. So, the app we acquired we rank really, really well in the UK, really, really well. And we also rank really well in the US. But, like for the main terms, now we’re starting to rank really well in the US for the main terms as well. Anyhoo, treat them differently, have the different localizations. If you don’t have English British or Australian, then it defaults
to the US, but different terms, there’s different search volumes in each every English localization. Australia being tiny. Okay, huge country, tiny search volume, but that’s what I would say is like treat it differently because it is it is good. All right. Let’s see. Nope, that’s it. All right. Well, if you got any questions, feel free to leave a comment, a real comment. These are These are like live comments. They’re not going to live on YouTube forever. I need you to leave it on the
real comments, okay? All right. Let’s get to some of these questions. Since Adam sent this, Adam, you’re making me Okay, let me download this app on here, Adam. All right, let’s give me another question, H. Is there someone here that I haven’t answered? Thank you. Any suggestion on the ASO these days? Yeah, I mean, look, AE taps. Did you build the app already or did you not? Cuz if you didn’t build
the app, just do keyword research first. I literally found a new keyword that I’m like, okay, and I told tell my team, let’s vibe code this one pretty soon because this is an interesting category. So, I would say look at the top charts, look at what apps are trending, and then just do a bunch of keyword research, dude, and then you build that app. So, that’s what I would do. All right. Adam’s laughing about something. I’m glad, Adam. Thank you. Leo says, "Any comments about the state
of Apple Search Ads?" Great stinking question, Leo. Great stinking question. Look, there’s one campaign that I’m very, very bullish on right now, and it’s the Apple Ads Max Conversion campaign. We have a client where we’re spending over $70,000. We had one that was doing 60,000, and I really thought I really thought that our basic plus campaign I made this up would outperform max conversions, but it’s not right now based off of data we have. So, I’m very honest, okay? I’ll
tell you when I’m losing, but this is a really good campaign. It is very similar to our basic plus campaigns, but H, can you write this down for me? That he’s not in the I want to create a new video for Apple Ads, Leo, and I’m going to break down how to set up this campaign and how to scale it with this campaign, too. I’m not going to share our basic plus. That’s in the academy, but max conversions, anybody should be able to set it up, but that’s one that I would start to utilize. And again, the app
that we acquired 35K MRR, it’s it’s just using Apple Ads and ASO. So, I’ll show you the basic plus setup and then H, I’ll probably do the SCAG setup. So, we’re going to do an Apple Ads walk-through and workshop for you guys. Maybe we do it in another live stream on H or we we will create a dedicated video about this. He’s going to decide. Look at him. He’s He’s already thinking about all this stuff. All right. Robert says, he’s on YouTube live on his AppMasters account right now. It’s further ahead.
Don’t watch on LinkedIn. Thank you, Robert. All right. Uh what’s the estimated timeline for acquisitions? So, John, John Ball. Okay, John. It really depends. That’s why I say You remember my first two topics? Motivated buyer, motivated seller. Look, obviously the bigger the deal, the longer it’s going to take. You know, when I’ve been involved in six- and seven-figure deals, it’s taken me a lot longer, like months, versus doing a $20,000, 30 like $50,000
deal. These are all deals I’ve done, by the way. The I’ll go deeper. The What I would say is that those happen quicker. They they They can happen within a month or two. They’re really done. So, that $20,000 deal we just closed, like I think we literally once we decided on the price, I was like, “Fine.” Then we closed it in about like a couple of weeks. Okay. Renan says, “What about apps doing 6 million AR?” A little humble brag. Just asking, "What’s the expected deal size if you grow if your growth is your
over year growth is 200%?" So, Renan, like that’s a great question. If you’re doing 6 million AR, congratulations. It’s also profit, right? There’s this term called EBITDA. So, it just means earnings before interest, tax, and whatever amortizations or anything else. Just how much you’re making. So, I that even if that like the app we acquired is doing like how let’s say half a million, it’s not making half a million, it’s making about 350 after all the costs. You have server costs, you have
With apps, you don’t consider people costs, which is kind of nice, but the you have server costs and maybe some engineering. How many people in the on the engineering team? They want to know. And then any ad costs. So, what is the actual profit on that 6 million cuz I’m pretty sure it’s not 6 million, right? And then you take the profit, multiply it by two to five generally speaking that multiple. And then you should And then there’s different deal structures. So, I can talk about this and I talked about it in the academy, but we can get
into more in-depth about how do you structure a deal properly? And then the two I would say the most popular ones are the obviously cash up front. So, there’s usually a percentage cash up front. There’s also an earnout that’s based off of performance. And there’s also a seller note, which is essentially you’re taking a loan from the seller. And you’re saying, "Hey, I you know, let’s say it’s a Let’s make it math simple. It’s a $500,000 You’re going to give them the seller 350 up front. So, that’s the bulk of it up
front and then you’ve got Let’s make it a million-dollar deal. Okay, actually the numbers will work better. So, let’s make it a million-dollar deal. You give them 700 up front and say, "Hey, look, I’m going to give you 70% of that up front. Great on cash on close. And then I’m going to save 200,000 on an earnout. And as an example, like if the business continues to grow 200% year over year, you should get that. And then the 100,000, hey, I want a seller note because I’m going to pay you. I want a loan from you
essentially and I’ll pay you interest on that. So, that’s a way to It’s a It’s a smart way to structure a deal that way. Hopefully that helps. But you can expect depending I’m going to just assume like a profit margin of half, let’s say 3 million, you can get anywhere from six to nine to 10, you know. I’ve had friends who sold their businesses and I asked them how long for let’s just say a pretty good amount like over 20 million. So, it’s pretty crazy.
All right. What’s this? What’s your opinion on metadata ASO updates based on search results data? How frequently should apps be checking their metadata and updating, especially early on launch? So, Rob, I do it like we had an app that and I I want to do this case study. So, H, we have this thing and then maybe we can put this into the the comments, but we’re doing a road to 1K that we’re officially launching pretty soon and this is geared towards our community members, our app founders, but it
essentially what I’m going to do is weekly syncs and it’s going to turn into a full-on course, but weekly syncs on how to help you get to 1K a month. And why kind of talk about 1K so much is only 17% of apps make at least $1,000 in the App Store. There’s a lot of apps that have been five-coded, that have been created, that are doing nothing in the App Store, all right? So, Rob, in the early days, literally almost every 2 weeks cuz you have a hypothesis and I’ll kind of train
you guys, teach you guys on how to do this, but you have a hypothesis of keywords. And what I told everybody on my team and how I’ve been executing, you find six to 10 keywords that you want to quote unquote focus on. And those are the keywords that you’re like, I’m optimizing for these keywords in the title and subtitle in the US and Spanish Mexico. Now, I’m going to do everything I can and that’s some secret hacks that I have from an ASO perspective that I’m about to share with my community members. So, you got maybe an hour or so before we meet, but
that are working really well today and I’ve been able to get my apps number one for a lot of great keywords right now. Ones I’ve been working months on for and now we’re number one. So, you want to do it frequently because you want to keep testing your hypotheses. That’s why I like to do it a lot. All right, let’s go into I’m glad I’m getting all these questions. I love this. We should do this more H, okay? All right, Adam, I’m going to go into the App Store, go to your app. I know you
sent an email. Let’s go, all right. Okay, what do you want me to do Adam? Adam, what do you want me to do here? You want me to check out the app? What do you want me to do? And then I got John’s email and I’m going to check out John. So, Adam’s got Track Cannabis right now. Post 420 reflection. I like it. Is it Yeah, it is after It’s in May, what am I thinking? Okay, that’s funny.
Join and redeem. Brilliant. So, look, what this is what Adam is doing. Uh where is this 420 reflection? Okay. What Adam is doing is using an offer code that is embedded in Apple. So, I’m going to get this lifetime free offer. Very cool, Adam, for showing it off. I’m going to take screenshot. You know what Adam, I’m going to do this cuz I like this so much.
Nice. Oop. Oop. Okay, he’s doing a lifetime free offer. Adam, why don’t you do it on Indie App Santa, man? Like, don’t tell Apple, but I think lifetime campaigns, lifetime free campaigns are going to be back. So, don’t tell Apple, though. Swipe to continue. All right, looks good.
Track your habit. So, look, Adam, like don’t worry about habits, okay? Onboarding screenshots turned on, thanks H. Don’t worry about habits. Just Like, I don’t know if this is that important, but it’s like, why do I actually want to track it? All right, like, is Are you wondering like, is weed getting in your in the way of your life? Is it preventing you from reaching your goals? You want to understand your users. And Mike talked about this in last week’s live stream, where you want
to uncover that pain point, so you can turn your app into a painkiller than a vitamin. Right? So, for me, it’s more like Hey, is weed preventing you from reaching your goals? Are you feeling sluggish the next day? Or are you just doing fine? Right? Good. This is what you’re talking about. Great. You know, what are some goals? You know, where do you want to be? You know, of the goals you have, what How soon you want to get there? So, now you understand that, and you’re
like, okay, great. Now, with CannaTrack or CannaFlow, then you start to start bridging the where the the pain points with where their outcome is. Right? And that’s sort of what Mike was talking about yesterday, cuz there’s books about this already. I forget what they call it, but it’s like just bridging the gap. So, you have their pain points, Come back here. Actually, here. Let’s This is what we’re doing today. That’s what I feel like about your day.
Okay. You have your pain points, doop. And then you have the goal. Right? And guess what? This is your app. So, by understanding your pain points, then understanding the goal, now you can bridge the gap and insert your app
in between the two. Right? Why do you think I always say, "Hey, watch. We’re here to help you grow your app downloads and sales cuz I know that’s all that really truly matters, right? When we’re working with clients, am I going to download, am I increasing my downloads? Yes, okay. Now Steve, how do I increase my sales? Like literally that’s all they say all the time. Can you get Can you get more downloads or can you get more sales? That’s all people care about. So that’s what I’m saying. And get What’s the pain point?
No time. Not an expert. Hate marketing. Right? And so their goal, I know my clients and my goals, make more money, get more downloads. They These are their pain points. So I try to come up with things that don’t require a lot of time, that I am an expert in and I do love marketing, but you want to understand that and that helps you and that’s what I’m kind of feeling with your
onboarding flow right now cuz I think this will help. Okay. Helps me stay consistent with my guilt. Now look, there elements of a paywall. Looks like there’s no trial. No, there is a trial. So there’s elements of a paywall that you need to input, Adam. And I’ll I’ll kind of break this down right now for you guys too. And I’ve shared this in the App Founders community. You know what? I won’t share too much, but
Start free trial doesn’t work as well as continue. So just start go continue and then like And there’s other things that I would add to this and maybe I’ve shared this publicly or not. The other thing I would add is no payment now to this. So underneath, change this button to continue and then underneath that just put no payment now given that you’re doing a week for free, right? Having the word free helps out. And so for me like I think this is good, but this you have free. I try to make this a bit bigger,
the first word free. And then I might just try to play around with the plans. Try 20. I don’t know if 24 works better, but 24 is fine. But I think overall like I just wasn’t like Take Take me through this pain points cuz you are honestly trying to solve this, right? You can turn this weed tracker into a pain point into a pain killer if you just follow this philosophy. Okay. Lifetime pro, yeah. I know. I was like, “Bro, I just got my lifetime plan. Why are you asking me on this?” Okay. Great
call messaging uplift to pain killer. Let me know how it goes, Adam. Like I could be just talking out of my ass, too. All right. Sweet. All right. Drop in a review. Would love a review. John says, “Okay, John, email me again. Wait, don’t review my app. I forgot to add subscription. Ugh.” >> [laughter] >> Sorry, John. Uh And then Adam says, “I should be able to have pro.” Whoops. That’s not a good view. Now, let’s go back. Personalized consumption. Right.
Edibles. Uh I don’t know. Grams, I guess. Yeah. Oh, okay. So log time since last use. I guess I had, let’s say, I had 5 mg. I need to get rid of this, Adam. Five. Get rid of the keyboard, bro.
Five. Tap to confirm. All right, there, Adam. Uh okay. I wonder if I can tell you like, “Hey, I took this last night.” I don’t know if I can or anything. All right. Uh And then says, "Hey, I just stumbled on this awesome Oh, yeah. I do have a community. If you’re not a scammer or spammer, it’s at founders.co,
okay? Hey, do you coach? Oh, let me help you. I have a system of well, blah, blah. If you want our community and a mastermind all about app founders, these are like six, seven figure app founders. It is at founders.co. That’s where we’re meeting. And at 11:00 a.m. Pacific time today. We meet twice a month and then we kind of go through I kind of break down some of the the most up-to-date strategies. And share some of the secrets that I
can’t share live on here. All right, H, what else? Okay, John, I’m going to skip you then, bro. Sorry. Let me see if I got any other more emails. H, throw me a question, H. Throw me a question. Throw it up there. There you go. Do you use ASO to make ASA to make money or do you just ads to feed ASO growth hack and okay to lose money? How much can I spend a day on a tight budget? No, I mean, you’re here to make money, okay? Like look, I think it’s both. What
we have tests where we’re starting to test is could ASA help impact, like just you getting you indexed. And it doesn’t work all the time. So, really I think about running ads as a way to make money, essentially. So, what I would say is on a tight budget, if you can do $30 a day, I would try to start off with $30 a day, but you want to try to make money right away. And we were able to do that within with one of our apps. I’ll
show you the exact details here. But, we were able to do that. And so, you want to essentially make money. And ASO, there’s other ways to get it going versus using ASA. Like I don’t think Apple Ads would do that well for that. So, let me show you this real quick. This is one of our apps and this is a few years ago and then this was the if I’m not sharing it. This was similar Anyways, you don’t need to know details.
I was able to get to $1,400 just with organic ASO, right? And I was able to get make $1,000 and the screenshots were pretty ugly. Then I ran an Apple device campaign, did a free and I started running Apple ads. I was like, wait, the hell? I’m negative. Just kept running Apple ads. I’m like, damn it. And again, I’m keeping things simple. I know I’m making this and I’m spending this. So, I was like, I need to be closer to a $1 range. So, I started really tailoring this down and you can see I made a
little bit more profit. So, where’s my profit? Right here, right? Went from this profit. And then I started basic Apple search ads basic campaign. I spent $800. I made $3,000. I was like, holy cow. And I told basic and this is what max conversion is. I was like, yo, get me some downloads but only get it if it’s under a dollar. They’re like, okay, heard Steve, let me do this. And so, it started really growing. As you can see like I was making just about a little bit more from a profit perspective than the first month but the ads certainly helped me get to a bigger profit number
and a bigger sales number. Now, I eventually turned it off but I should have kept it on cuz it was working so great but it had diminishing returns. So, it started diminishing and I started started saying like, hey, I’m going to make a thousand dollar profit anyways, why not just run ads? But that’s the mistake that I made. Meaning I stopped running ads because I was like, I’m going to make a thousand dollar profit without running ads anyways. So, why even spend a thousand dollars? But the hard part is if you stop running ads, as long as the profit
is the same, right? Organically and non-organic, it’s a lot easier to go to zero from a thousand than it is from two thousand than it is from five thousand. So, as your sales grow, even if your profit remains sort of the same and hopefully it’s growing a little bit, it’s a lot easier to go have a $1,000 in profit organically and then go to zero and it’s a lot harder to do that when you have 10, 20, 35,000. It’s harder to
go down to zero. So, you should continue to grow your sales as long as your profit is in range. Hope that makes sense, right? Like that I wish I did not turn it off. There. All right. Steve, taking screenshots, good sign. It was on Indie Hackers last week. Yeah, oh great. All right. Where are we? H back up here. If an app has no revenue but over 500,000 monthly active users, how can we price this? And the app is a popular app
for rating alcohol of certain kind and I would like to figure out if one of the large collaborates would be interested in acquiring it. So, look, the way I would do this then is how I Okay, monthly active users. How active are those users? And then the way I would pitch it is like, "What is your normal like cost per acquisition? Right? Or what is your normal cost per click or cost per lead? Right? Then so, cost per lead and you’re like, “Okay, well, cost per lead, you know, our normal cost per acquisition is, let’s say, $3.” And then
you know like, “Okay, how many people of a lead convert?” Well, that’s 50%. So, you know, your cost per lead is $6. I have 500,000 monthly active users. What if I could sell you these monthly active users for $3?" So, that’s the way I would start pitching this if you were trying to sell it cuz that’s assuming That’s what my assumption is that you’re trying to sell it right now with that question. Right? All right. Leo says, "What are your 2026 tips for getting press, influencers coverage, especially related to learning
apps for kids?" So, Leo, like reach out to a bunch of influencers, just DM them. That’s the best way to do it. It is literally to DM them. And some Some just don’t want anything, especially if it’s a learning app for kids. They might just want access. They might be okay with just getting access for your particular app. So, the best way forget all the different platforms is literally doing a search, finding those influencers, and DMing them. Okay? That’s the best way. For press, if you’re trying to get press on like a
major publication, I do a search on YouTube, but I have talked about this. It’s a cold email strategy that I love to do. I will have to disable my blocker. Okay. So, let’s say I’m trying to get on to TechCrunch, right? And what I’m trying to really find is somebody who just started there. So, like here, Vaibhav Mehta, okay? Covers tech development. He’s based out of India. Great. Here’s his email address. Here’s his LinkedIn.
Right? Here’s his X profile. So, I’m like, okay. I know a little bit about him now. Right? I know he writes about AI. I’m going to do a little bit more research. He wants to Dharmsinh Desai University. All right, sorry. I’m screwing up everything. He speaks Gujarati. Right? So, now if I’m going to pitch this guy, I’m going to figure out like Google
translation. And then I’m going to be like, okay. Gujarati. Oops. What What’s up, Vaibhav? H, tell me if this is right. You speak Gujarati? Yeah, it’s it’s nice to chat with you, Vaibhav. That’s right. So, I might do off of this
when I pitch him. Right? Cuz then that shows Vaibhav that I’ve done a little bit more work than anything else. And I’ll be like, okay, what else is here? This is me. And I’ll be like, okay. Dude, engineer to reporter, all right, I like that transition. Right? I just said, what is up? Yvonne in Gujarati. Then I said, I made I let him know that I know that he was once an engineer
to reporter. Then I’m going to make my pitch to him about whatever product I want. That took me literally 2 minutes, and that pitch is 100 and 200% better than any other pitch that Yvonne has gotten. Guaranteed. And that’s how we’ve been able to Now, is it going to land you press? No, cuz if your product sucks, he’s going to refuse it anyways. But at least it’ll get his attention, and that’s all you want to do. And the subject line I would use is this. You can use
exclusive to Yvonne. Or you can do this. Exclusive to Yvonne. H, what do you think? Is that good? Yes. Thank you, H. That could be my subject line. That will get anybody’s attention. It shows that I did a little bit of homework on you, and that only took 2 to 3 minutes. I just did this live for you guys right here, not even knowing that I was going to do this, right? That is 300% a better email
than any other email you can send. There you go. All right. That I should get applause for this. Where’s my applause? Anand and Oh, sure. Good. All right. I think my my father-in-law’s my father-in-law’s Gujarati, too. Yeah. >> Okay. Let’s go into the map auto teach you. I think we’ve got to go We’re running out of time. I appreciate all of that. >> Fine. Joseph, all right, my man Joseph.
Hey Steve, always appreciate your live streams. At present, we have an RPI. Nice, revenue per install. All these acronyms I got to know. Of $6, new customers only, not rebuilds for Apple users in US. Would this be Hell yeah, Joseph. Hell yeah. So, Joseph says, “I got a $6 revenue per install. Would this be strong enough to start Apple ads?” Heck yeah. Joseph, my app that we acquired had a $6 revenue per install, easy math. I just take how much I made divided by the downloads. I know
there’s rebuilds and Joseph’s done a lot better job of knowing those not the rebuilds, but okay, great. So, I know if I can get an install for $3, I’m going to make If I spend $1, I’m going to make two. So, Joseph, like start a max conversion campaign. We can help you, bro, if you want it, but start a max conversion campaign with some of the keywords that you know. All you need is a five or six keywords and say, “Hey max, Apple, give me an install for only $3.” And it’ll start working for that and you can start tracking it there, too.
All right, boss, can I go to the live streams now? Or can I go to the audits now? Uh he’s on mute. He said yes. All right, guys, let’s get some dad jokes going then. >> [music] >> Hey, no offense to you guys that are still on live stream. I’m going to get to your questions. I’ll go a little bit longer if we need to. Okay? But, if I could, I would send a heart reaction to this video. Thank you, bro. You can. You just like it or just
tag me on social media. You know, that’s what you can do, Leo. Put me on LinkedIn. Yo, this live stream’s on freaking fire and tag my butt. That’s what That’s what you can do. Rob, thank you for the max support. Mm, do you work for Apple? >> [laughter] >> All right, you’re welcome, Ron. Okay. Let’s get some app audits and I will If you want your app and I got to know there’s some questions featured in a future live stream, go to
appmasters.com/audit. You can also book a call with me if you want to sit an hour with me. That is a paid one. The free one, there’s a 6-month wait. All right, let’s get into this because, you know what, we promised that we would do it, and I hate saying no after we promised. So, Adam’s app, we got Adam’s app right here. Steve, [snorts] that joke is Oh, yeah. Thank you, H. Oh, H wants to fight me on this. Is that why, H? All right, H.
H, all right, you want me to go first or you want to you want to >> Yes. Yes, you go first. Yes, yes. Okay, you hear that, right? There you go. Let’s make it a little bit louder. H, I got gas yesterday for only 99 cents. How? Unfortunately, it was at Taco Bell. >> [laughter] >> There you go. All right. Okay, Steve. All right, H. >> What do you What do you call an iPhone that sleeps too much? What, H?
Dead Siri-ous. Dead Siri-ous. Yeah. Got it. Got it. There, one more time. All right, put A’s if you thought my joke was better, and put H if you thought H’s joke was better, and then one of us has to do push-ups. 10 push-ups, H, okay? Loser does 10 push-ups. Okay. You okay? All right, to the to the song of our choice, okay? I got a song for you already. Okay, come on, put a lot of A’s, please. We want H to do the push-ups. You don’t need to see me do push-ups.
All right. Which you we should get you should do it right now, H. You know what I mean? Thank you, John. Okay, that’s a I won already, H. The first vote. >> [laughter] >> Nobody needs to vote. All right, let’s take a look at Adam’s app right now. Thank you, Kate. Adam says monetization feedback and user experience. Okay, so it’s a fitness board exercise on your own city. Every rep counts. See owns a city. I like it. You know, it’s one of these maybe like workout apps where you can go to a park
and start doing the some stuff there. So, let’s get into the app. I think this is a hard one from a distribution perspective. But yo, it’s Adam’s app, not mine. All right. Let’s get into it. Check in. Okay, time to check in. The global fitness game. Get started. Ooh, I like these animations, Adam. Pick your team. I will do
Let’s do a run cuz it’s a lot easier. Although I just jog these days. Okay. 7.5 km run equals five territories. Okay, that’s cool. What is it doing? Okay. Man, I ain’t trying to show off where I live.
I don’t know what’s happening here, Adam, but maybe I should have I screwed that up with the location stuff. So, let me figure out the location. Oh, okay. I just got to zoom in more. Dang, bro. Why can’t you zoom in for me already? Okay. Confirm battleground. What is this like risk meets real life? Choose your base. I don’t even know what any of this
means. Let’s go monkey. Let’s check in. I don’t understand the app too much. But okay. Do you understand it, H? You’re on mute. It’s a video game.
So, Adam, I don’t know if when you’re going to show me your paywall and how you’re going to make money, but if most people are signing up here, that’s fine. We’ve typically found that asking for money before you make them sign up works a little bit better. Oh, this looks like a paywall that we know very well. So, I would try to If you’re not If you’re getting most of the people signing up,
great. All right? But if you’re not, then try to switch Get them to potentially try to pay you first, and then if I hit X on this, then ask me to sign up, because that generally works a bit better, especially for the for fitness apps. We tested this with the fitness app right here, all right? Overall, looks really good. UX/UI wise, looks really good. I still don’t understand what the app does, but that’s just That’s just maybe because
I’m stupid. I miss kind of what the the app kind of does. I figured I’d have to go run to claim this territory, and that’s what it is, but like not sure that’s what you’re trying to get me to do. But it sounds fun. Seems like a game that I’d have to play to understand and start using the app, too. All right. All right, H. Cool. All right. That’s it for mine. H, give
me Give me the I just I can’t I’m distracted. I only want to know who wins. I only want to know who wins. Moyo didn’t even hear the jokes. Moyo, what the hell, dude? Thanks, Moyo. Oh, man, bro. Why you got to do me dirty like that? All right, H. If I lose because of Moyo’s vote, I’m just going to be unhappy. I ain’t talking to him no more. Stevie won and I lose. Yay! Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Exceptional App Studios, perfect. Got to go S. Yes, I think I won by four. Four to
and one. Got the one. Moyo joking. He he just threw you a bone. Oh, Adam, too. Okay. Yes! All right, H, 10 push-ups. I got the I got the song for you, okay? I want It should be me by Justin Bieber. I want you to do it. 10 push-ups. Post it onto Slack. And then Hey, I want to know if the audience wants to hear it, see it, too. Then you have to post it to our internal Slack. >> [laughter] >> Okay. You got to post it to our internal Slack. You can just post it to me. Okay?
How about that? All right. No, post it to everybody. Post it to random. That’s what you get for being on these live streams with me. All right. We got Vishal’s app, Rank Higher for Monthly Budget Planner, Get More Sales. Yeah, great. Look, I do actually like the Monthly Budget Planner a name. Like, you could just call it monthly and just go after that particular keyword. I do like the Monthly Budget
Planner because people do search for that. So, here’s what I would do. Like, obviously, I can’t give away all my secrets, but there is a way to get a so to rank better for you if that’s the main keyword. That is in the academy, that is a part of our services if you want help with that. It’s not a difficult keyword because you can see and this is where I do this. Nobody that’s in the top, whatever, is has it in the title. So, it should be a
keyword that you should be easily be able to beat, especially this guy up here. And you’re fully optimize it. So, Vishal, can try an Apple Ads campaign first and do it that way to see if it starts indexing well, or you know, you can work with us or join our community to kind of figure out other ways of doing it. But, I would just run some Apple Ads and see if you can get it to rank a little bit better for that particular keyword. That’s the white hat way I want to see.
All right. And then Adam says, “For Cannacontrol, sounds like you understood what it did. The product Thanks for your feedback. We’ll update ASAP.” It looks good, Adam. Like I I I just more of like I wanted to see I think you could do it that way and I think it’ll do better for you. I think. So, let me know if it doesn’t. You’re the man. Out of the country, want to reach you when I can. All right. Joseph. Uh, where are we in terms of questions? Right here? H, what is your strategy to achieve positive ROAS on an app on Apple Ads? Can you share steps and tactics?
So, yeah, it’s pretty easy. The I’m going to pick [clears throat] without giving you too many details. So, what you got to do is you can you either use RevenueCat for this and I was going to pull up my RevenueCat, but the you got to use RevenueCat to kind of figure out what your average average revenue per install is, right? And RevenueCat can do that prediction. So, an easy one would be just to kind of figure out, “Okay, how many downloads am I getting? How much am I making from this?” And then you would just use LTV. So, let me see if I can pull up certain things here.
All right, here we go. Budget. H, you stop me if this is too much, but you know what? Let’s do it. Let’s have some fun. All right, so I’m in RevenueCat. This is one of our apps right now. I’m going to go predicted LTV over customer, and customer is just an install, right? And yeah, you can see like month zero, I
don’t actually make that much. All So, I need to be around a dollar. But then month, let’s say two, I’m at a dollar 73. And then, depending on how much budget you have, certain months by month 11, right? A whole year LTV, I can spend up to $3 per install because I’m going to make that much for certain cohorts, right? So, I know I can probably get there, but if I really wanted to play it safe, I probably need to aim for maybe a dollar per install, which is very low. So, I can either
increase the monetization, try to work on the ASO, or I can tell Apple with the max conversion campaign, “Hey, I can only get a dollar. Like, can you get me a dollar per install? If you can’t, then I’m not going to be ROAS positive, so I need to think about free distribution models or work on my onboarding to see if or in pricing to see if I can get this LTV up a little bit.” So, that’s how you start kind of thinking through all that stuff. And you can It’s just a math formula, right? There’s a spreadsheet that I have right here,
that I’ll show you guys. This. And a buddy of mine copied this. He just like took a screenshot and just copied it, so I’m going to let you guys do that, too. But, don’t ask me for it. All right. I want to make sure nobody has access to it. H restricted. There. It’s restricted. You know, people will copy this whole thing, right? H. People
will copy all that URL strings. I’m going to copy No, you don’t get access to any of this. All right. So, you got downloads. You got your trial activation, which you can pull from RevenueCat easily or, you know, App Store Connect. You got your trial to paid, again, through RevenueCat. And then you got what most people pay, right? Which one’s their plan? You So, this could be your LTV or just, “Hey, if I get weekly” or Weekly is a little bit harder, but if I get yearly and I’m, you know, pick people are paying $40 for my yearly plan, then you got that, right? So, now you have
your revenue per download, which is 140 in this case, and then $14 per trial, $40 per subscriber, which is your CAC, right? So, now I can say, “Hey, if I’m running meta, I need to get to $14 per trial. If I’m running Apple Ads, I need to get to $1.40 or $1.20 for to be ROAS positive.” Then you just tell max con max conversions to do it that way. So, that’s the simple way of doing it. All right. Can you re-review my app? Eshaun, I can.
Maybe in a future day. All right, you’re too late, bro. In a future day. atmasters.com/audit atmasters.com/audit. Great advice. Thank you. Thank you, Adam, for being here. Hey. Dharmit I like this new We use StreamYard. I like this. I like this. Love the approach for early apps. The keyword focus on establishing ownership and metadata is great advice. Uh I know you. I know who you are. Uh Shh. I’m going to start way up here.
Age, man. What are your go-to SEO tools of 2026? Oh, I don’t get asked about SEO very much. I like this. Thanks, Leo. Look, I use Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends, and I keep it simple, Keyword Everywhere. So, I have Keyword Everywhere. And I just got budget. You know what? I’m going to give you mood. I’m in a loopy mood. So, when I started thinking about building that app, Paraphrase AI, that I just showed you the revenue cat stuff, I really started thinking about
Apple Ads. So, I have this Keyword Everywhere tool right here. This is Chrome extension that’s on. I pay for it. I’ve got some credit. So, I can see that there’s 12,000 searches for Paraphrase AI, right? Right here. Because of Keyword Everywhere. Now, you can actually put this in there in Google Keyword Tool. So, I knew that there was good web traffic. Now, obviously, I can’t get SEO to rank well because we have paraphrase ai.net, but that app was is doing well. So, when you put for search for paraphrase AI, you
get my app. And so, that’s one way we started really thinking about how we do not just the tools, how we leverage those tools, and how we get keywords to rank. And so, that’s doing about $3,000 a month, but that’s This is Keywords Everywhere, Google Keyword Tool, Google Trends is what I look at. All right. When the app is already built, but not much traffic, keywords available is grabbing competitor keywords the best bet with Apple Ads? Yes, absolutely. So, I’ll
keep that nice and simple. Rob, I see a lot of apps using mega brands as metadata. Rob says Brazil is nice, requires Portuguese though. For App Store US ASO, in your experience, does Spanish Mexico have a higher priority than other languages? Yes, Leo, that’s why I’m just saying just do that one. Now, if you have some traction in Mexico, then just use Vietnamese, but we found that Spanish Mexico tends to be the best, okay? And okay, anyways. Uh app is live and is health category,
okay? How do I get properly notified of your lives? I would have found I would not have found this livestream without me coming to LinkedIn. Eshan, we go live every Friday, 9:00 a.m. Pacific, baby. So, it’s on LinkedIn, it’s on Twitter, it’s on YouTube. Welcome to the community, my friend. All right. Uh Eshan, let me see. I think we might tags. Thank you for detailed explanation.
Okay, okay, I think we’re good. All right. Sup bro? What’s up? What’s up, my man? Sup bro? Hey Steve, keep up the awesome work. Thanks, bro. I’m still here. I’m still standing, you know? Still rocking and rolling. All right. H, I think that is it. Anything that I miss on this? Nope. I think we are good, Steve. Yeah. So, next week I’m going to be at MAU Vegas. I’m going to be back on the
Friday live stream. The following week I’m going to be in Croatia. So, I might have to cancel that one, H. We need to Maybe we need to reschedule it to next Friday. >> Oh, okay. Next Friday. And if you guys have anything while I’m still here that you want to see from me. So, whether you you know, it’s about acquisition. I want to do one on Apple ads cuz I need I think I we need a refresh. Last time we did was in 2023. So, I’m going to do an Apple refresh video. I’m going to do one I can do one on acquisitions and the way I think about acquisitions, right or wrong. And you guys can think about
that. So, from an acquisition side, if you want me to talk about how to get acquired, I can talk about that. Now, we’ve sold a few things. And then the other thing would be how to acquire apps and the way I think about that because I’m very much bullish on that as well. All right. Thank you, Kate. Thank you, guys for being here. I appreciate you. Put it in the comments what you want to see, but I will definitely see you other other way. Our team will meet you in Croatia. That’s awesome, Kate. I’ll see you guys there. All right, guys. Have a
great weekend. H, you owe me those push-ups, bro. All right. Sure. [laughter] Yeah. I’ll see you next Friday, 9:00 a.m. Pacific, baby. Have a great weekend. Bye.