# 20 Minutes of App Growth Advice From $1M App Founders

Channel: Starter Story Build
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2oWiwbBnmQ
Duration: 20 min
Language: English
Words: 4647
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/N2oWiwbBnmQ

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[0:00] As you know, building apps in 2026 has never been easier. But, one of the questions we still get is how do you actually get people to download your app? There's [music] a ton of info online, but I wanted to hear from some guys who actually know what they're talking about. We built an app called Gleam that hit top 10 in the App Store, and we did over

[0:19] a million dollars in ARR. So, meet Charles [music] and Kelvin. They're two guys who built an app to over a million dollars ARR, and they've gotten a combined 500 million views [music] on their apps online. They are pretty much experts at distribution, so I invited them onto the channel to break down their framework for getting views and downloads [music] on their apps. In this episode, we're going to walk through what everyone gets wrong when it comes to growing apps, 10 specific examples of the type of content you should [music] be posting every single day, and ultimately their advice on what

[0:49] it takes to grow an app here in 2026. [music] If you've built something and you're feeling stuck about getting users, trust me, you do not want to skip this episode. Let's dive in. Welcome to Starter Story Build. All right, Charles and Kelvin, welcome to Starter Story Build. Super excited to have you both on the channel. Could you just share with us who you are, what you built, and a little bit about your

[1:09] story? We're Charles and Kelvin. We built an app called Gleam that hit top 10 on education in the App Store. We did over a million dollars in ARR, over 500 million views across socials. Kelvin and I both come from an engineering background, so when we first started building apps, we were good at the technical part, but we sucked a lot when it came to distribution. We were failing a [music] ton. We were extremely demotivated, but eventually we found a framework that worked for us, and [music] the purpose of this video is we want to share that exact framework, the exact playbook that took us from zero to

[1:43] over a million dollars in ARR, so you guys can do the same. Hey guys, I'm Kelvin. I do most of the product and design at Gleam. I also do some of the distribution. [music] So, Gleam is a way to learn and improve at communication skills, whether it's getting better at conversation, making friends, or preparing for an interview. And we have bite-size lessons as well as interactive practice to help you get

[2:06] better at your communication skills. Cool. So, yeah, you have some crazy numbers, right? Before I spoke to Charles initially, he talked to me a little bit about this sort of like framework and how you grew this, you know, through socials and whatnot. So, for people watching, you know, what are we going to get by the end of this

[2:22] video? So, we want to share our exact playbook that we wish we knew when we first started out that took us from zero to over a million dollars in ARR. It was really helpful for us, but hopefully we can take that and make something helpful for you guys as well. All right. What we're going to dive into in just a second is going to be really awesome. I think you're going to really enjoy hearing about all the different ways that you can try and grow your app here in 2026. If you're enjoying this conversation, we have an extra resource

[2:48] for you at the link in the description. It's called the mobile app growth cheat sheet. Inside you're going to find seven different tactics that other successful app founders have used to grow their apps. It's 100% free to download. Just head to the link in the description and grab it. All right. Let's get back to the story. Let's get into that framework. What is kind of the first step or first place we're going to

[3:05] start? This is explaining distribution like you are a 14-year-old. The biggest difference between consumer apps and B2B SaaS is that it is primarily a game of unit economics. And [music] the goal of all distribution is to optimize this one ratio called LTV to CAC. It's basically how much lifetime value do I get and how much does it cost to acquire that user, right? So, there's

[3:28] two main ways in which most apps scale. The first is through organic, which is by making videos yourself, posting them on TikTok or Instagram, and then scaling that through UGC programs or working with other creator agencies. And it also tends to come with the best margins if you have a video really hit. And usually the cost of acquisition here is going to be relatively low, but the lifetime

[3:51] value will also be a little bit lower. On the other hand, you have paid ads. And in this case, you're basically paying for eyeballs. There are a lot of different channels of which you can do paid ads through. You can do meta, which is probably the most famous one. And paid ads tends to work really well if you've had some experience in it before or if your app monetizes really well and you have the entire kind of like funnel figured out. [music] And the question is like how do you decide like which one to start with, right? For most people, I would probably recommend starting with

[4:19] organic because it is the cheapest. And I assume that most people that are watching this podcast are going to be bootstrap founders and you're not going to be raising sane amounts of venture capital or anything like that. So for the rest of this video, we'll be primarily focusing on organic because [music] I think it is what will be most

[4:37] applicable for the audience. If we were to start over again, 99% of the time we would recommend organic to start off with. Primarily being that when you do start off with organic, you can double dip. You can make a video that can go viral and convert. But if a video does convert and go viral on organic, when you do come around to paid ads, usually you can repurpose the same video for that. That being said though, I do think a lot of people treat paid ads as something that is intimidating and usually it is at the very beginning, but it is also necessary and extremely important. Like if you actually think

[5:09] about all the app studios that have scaled to millions of dollars a year, they usually scale with paid ads, right? Like you look at Calia, they started with organic, they went to paid ads. And that's for a reason, right? cuz paid ads you can scale and the feedback loops over there are also really fast. I feel like every app founder that we bring onto the channel, it's like these are the paths, you know? Organic, you're spamming TikTok and Instagram or a version of that, or paid ads and we have featured a ton of founders on the channel that have done like one or the other. So yeah, let's take us to the

[5:37] next step. So step two is really kind of understanding what you're looking for, right? So in middle school, I saw this diagram all the time, a paradox between good grades, getting enough sleep, and having a social life and you can only choose two. I think this is very similar to the consumer distribution game. And there's three different things over here, which I've put on like a Triforce, right? There's virality, there's

[5:59] conversion, and there's repeatability. The thing to understand is that these basically create a formula. Your revenue is going to be equal to virality multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by repeatability. So if any one of these is zero, then the whole thing will be zero. So at a high level it is can you get people to watch your content? Can you get people to want the product and

[6:20] can you continue doing it to scale? [music] And if you find all three, then that's when you know you really have a winner. So there's three common traps that every consumer app founder falls in and these are mistakes that we made starting out as well. The first trap over here is optimizing for view count, right? You don't want to just put out a video that goes viral. You don't want to confuse attention with demand. You know, you can have a video that does a million views, 2 million views, but only generates 20 app downloads. The second trap I'm going to go into is optimizing for repeatability and we are especially

[6:50] prone to this trap because we're both engineers. And one thing that engineers love doing is creating systems, right? And automating things. We like writing scripts. We like mass generating like TikTok carousels. But the question here is if you found something that is worth mass producing yet. And you don't want to scale something that you haven't proven to work yet and doing anything beyond that point is just over engineering. So what I would actually recommend is just like, you know, take out your phone, take out TikTok and just record videos of yourself, record skits, record content yourself, try and like get that feedback loop to be as short as

[7:21] possible. And when you have signals that something works, then you can start to scale it up. And the third mistake is around conversion and it's basically like not optimizing for conversion enough. Conversion is something where it's like you're selling the app, right? And the thing is like people really hate to be sold to. So we've like played around with a couple different formats over here. One of the formats is this animated skit of, you know, the average male experience. It went viral with I think like 15 million views or something, but the conversion was not the best on the video because it was primarily for entertainment and the plug

[7:55] came like at the very end, very late. Generally apps that do better follow this principle called show, don't tell. So it's not you vocally telling someone to download the app, but you're basically showing what the app does, right? And here two apps that do this really well. One of them is Push Scroll, which shows you doing push-ups, and then

[8:15] this adds minutes to your screen time. And the other one is Cal-A I, which is classic. You just snap a photo, and you see a loading screen, and you see the calories kind of pop up. You don't need to explicitly mention that it's Cal-A I or Push Scroll. You can just show the demo, and then people will look at the logo at the top, and then become curious and download the app. Again, the goal over here is to get a format that has all of these three. You only need one format to scale to 100k MRR. People think you need to do all these like different experiments. You need to do

[8:44] paid ads. You need to work with like five different agencies, but you just really need one format to take off. So, in the wise words of Alex Hormozi, you just got to do the boring thing for an extended period of time, often more than uh you would find comfortable, and that's how you win. Okay, so yeah, I think one of the things that's coming to mind is like for someone who's just getting started or trying to figure out this triangle of virality,

[9:08] repeatability, conversion. What's like an approach or a way they should be thinking about it? The way I've currently do it, and the way I've done it in the past, is to create a system around how you test. The hard part is usually not intellectually like finding the formats. The hard part is actually like executing well enough and actually following through on what you know you should be doing. So, it's more of like an emotional bottleneck, right? The way you get around that emotional bottleneck is at the start of like a week, you'll do an extensive research period where you'll find like a ton of different formats or a ton of

[9:39] different bets, right? You're basically taking bets on what you think could work. And then for the week following that, you'll space out when you want to test certain format, right? And then at that point, it's just execution. You become a robot. It's just about you you make a piece of content, you focus on the inputs, and then you get it out there. So, it's no set number. It's like figure out all the bets that you feel like could work at the beginning, and then just keep shooting bets. Treat everything like an experiment until you find something that works. Once you do find something that works, go deep. Go

[10:06] super deep. Go hard. Keep running it up because usually there's way more milk that can be squeezed than you would expect. Cool. Let's go to step three then. What do we do next here? All right. So, now that we found the secret of what makes a really good format, it's time to find the different formats that can actually make your app make money. So, starting off the classic talking head, many different ways to do this. I would say like with talking head to hit the holy trifecta, you usually need good creators. It's easy to start out with. It's not too creatively hard, but it does require finding really good

[10:37] creators, which is hard. Next one is skits. You can think of street interviews, what's your GPA, bands which videos, stuff like that. Another format is animations. Like how we showed before, this is really good for entertaining the user. If you do it well, you can actually get an animation team. That's also a huge moat and you can get lots of views with this. Pro tip, if you are making an animation with AI, I recommend adding in the prompt use Disney's 12 rules of animation. Helped a lot when I was doing motion design and stuff, so that's a pro tip. And then, motion design, this is kind of similar

[11:06] to animation. This is also a little bit harder to do, but if you can do it well, it's also a moat. Then you have challenges. These go viral on Instagram and TikTok from time to time. You can think stuff like public speaking challenges. Challenges are really good if you like timing with trends. Another

[11:20] one, this is a classic wall of text. Agencies love to do this because it's so easy to do and they can say like creators pump out like a ton of videos every day. That being said, wall of text usually doesn't convert that well. It used to be kind of good on views and kind of good on conversions, but these saturate really quickly. So, I I would say they're kind of mid, but you know, if you do want to test some sort of

[11:40] angle there, they're easy to test with. Founder led. I would actually highly highly recommend this. There's a lot of founders that have done founder led content like Yoni with Brainrot or Hot High Priests Sarah with her Upstella. The other reason I really recommend this is this puts you in the game yourself. Like you become your own creator and that forces you to think from like a creator's perspective. Also allows you

[12:01] to build an edge around your product. Like people are going to start associating your face with the product, which creates another layer of like trust and authenticity. Another one is series. High quality series is actually really good for building brand. Usually, people on Instagram and TikTok, it's so easy to scroll and forget what you're watching, but if there's a high-quality series, people will remember that. And then, memes. If you're like young and you're like super culturally tapped in, you could just pop these out and it's like great for volume. Obviously, it might not convert super well, but anyone who can make someone laugh across the screen, like I admire them. The last one

[12:32] we have here, this is a product demo. If your app is like viral in of itself and you can have that app work as a payoff for the video, this is really good for conversions, potentially going viral. It hits like the holy trifecta super well. Cali's eye basically ran this as his playbook with like influencers and you know, there's going to infinitely always be a running treadmill of like new ideas

[12:52] where that idea in of itself is viral. I love all the different examples, cuz I think something I read in the comments or people message me about is like, I don't know what to create or I don't know like where to get started. And I think you just listed out like eight or 10 or whatever, like very specific types of formats that people can try and go like replicate for their app. Do you have any sense of right now, you know, end of 2026, what's still working,

[13:15] what's maybe fading? [music] That's a good question. Like one of the key things to going viral is novelty. So, I would say all of these do kind of work, you just have to come up like novel angles, right? [music] Obviously, the ones that are going to work the best are when your product in of itself is viral. Like if someone just sees a product and within 3 seconds they go like, this is phenomenal. I need to get this product. I understand what it does

[13:36] and I think it's a great idea, right? And I can tell you a lot of my friends who do have successful apps, they usually have an app that is viral in of itself and then that makes it so that marketing is already taken care of. The thing is, with Gleam, we didn't even get that. We tried that, but we're an education app, we're not naturally viral, right? So, we had to innovate on other departments, like talking head or animations and stuff, and that's how we eventually got our conversions. I'm sure it's possible with other formats, but at the end of the day, like yeah, you do

[14:03] want to copy what's working from other people, but you need to innovate to some degree if you really want to create a level of success for yourself. Yeah, this is a really great list to run down. If you want just a little bit more information on this with like examples of TikToks and Instagrams, we do have a link in the description for you to download that for free. Those are our formats. So, what should people do with these formats once they figure something out or once they decide to choose, you

[14:25] know, one direction or another? All right. So, execution. Now, the analogy that I want you to think of when it comes to execution is a general leading an army. How can a general lead an army if the general doesn't know how to ride a horse in of himself or herself? Like, the reason why that's so important is your job as a founder is inherently to try and find bottlenecks in a company and try to unblock it yourself. What a lot of people will often do is they'll ask you, "Oh, should I hire a growth operator? Should I outsource this?" Right? But, what they find out later is usually agencies and

[14:58] other people don't care as much as they do, and that's a fallacy to think that they will. The other reason why it's important is before you outsource, you need to know what good looks like. If you don't know what good looks like, you won't have a good gauge of who to hire and if someone's actually good or not. So, let's say you're starting to do yourself, and I don't know, maybe you like pushing out videos yourself, and you land on a format that's working out, right? Then what do you do? Then it's about scaling, right? How do you find creators? One place is Reddit. Our site

[15:22] is UGC creators. We use this before. It's a little bit underrated. Not everyone knows about this. Reddit works. Creator communities. This is kind of like a thing where if you've been in the game for a little bit, you'll know uh different creator communities. If not, just know that they do exist. You can ask your creators if they are in any communities, and if they are, they can like make intros, and it'll just be your

[15:41] network that compounds over time. Universities. There's a lot of clubs, fraternities, those kind of things that, you know, as a university kid, you're always looking to make money. UGC platforms. Side Script is one of them. You can also recruit there. And then, my personal go-to, cuz it always works, right? You find a good UGC creator on Instagram or TikTok, send them a DM. Try and get hop on call. So, now once you

[16:02] recruit them, right? How do you filter? Cuz what's going to happen is you're going to get so many more applications than you know what to do with it. The way you qualify someone is you send them a doc, and then you try to verify that they've previously gone viral before, right? That's a really good filter that they can go viral again. Once you do, right? Compile a short list and then hop on a call, you want to create that personal intimate connection so they know that you're real, there's a person behind the brand, and then that's going to make the relationship so much stronger going forward. And then, this

[16:28] is another question that I get a lot is like how much do I like pay creators, stuff like that. Depending on the format, you can do 10 to 25 dollars a video. You can also put like a minimum number of views just to make sure that the video is quality so they only get the the base payment if they hit like 500 to 1,000 views, and then it's around two dollars to like a 0.50 to 0.8 per CPM on like milestone bonuses. And then, instead of saying like oh, we pay out like every two weeks, say we pay out after like 10 videos, right? That way

[16:56] people are incentivized to actually complete their retainer contract, but at the same time if they don't finish it, you still pro rate them and do the ethical thing, but it's just how you word it. One quick question here that I can imagine someone watching is like, I don't have a lot of money, like how much should I like put aside for this, kind

[17:12] of thing? Uh if you truly truly do not have any money, that shouldn't be a blocker, like it's free to create an account, it's free to post videos. Once you do have like some conversion on your app, then you can use services like AppCapper or I think RevenueCat does this as well, where you take out some of the money beforehand, and then ideally you have a proven format and then you [music] reinvest it. On your first campaign, I would say you should have at least like probably a few thousand dollars if you're hiring like more than like, you know, one to two creators as a recommendation, but I I don't have like

[17:40] an exact dollar figure for you. And this is the very last thing, which is like how do you communicate with creators? You do want to really care about the culture because what's going to happen is once you have creators who are like absolute killers, once they do really well, they're going to get offers from so many other companies, and a lot of these companies are going to be venture backed and they're going to offer like triple the amount of money you're going to offer, but the way you retain them is not through matching on price. The way you retain them is by building a really strong relationship with your creators,

[18:06] right? So, care about the culture at the beginning if you don't have that many creators, just create a huge [music] iMessage group chat like family, just chat with them there. It's the most intimate. And then as you expand, you can systematize more and then put people on a Discord group if it's effective. And a lot of the app founders we've brought on the channel they kind of s- do a version of this but I really appreciate kind of like how more in depth you're going for each of the steps. Someone will say, "Oh yeah, I scaled with UGC." And sometimes the question is like, "Well, how?" And I

[18:33] think what you're showing here is more of like the how to do that. So, I think it's really cool. Thanks for walking through that. Let's start to wrap up. What what's kind of like final advice? How do you want to like close out this like little session here? Yeah, so I would say that like the cost of building and the cost of distributing is so low now. It's really just about like building the right feedback loops, right? Like what is the fastest that you're able to turn out a video? What's the fastest that you're able to build a prototype to kind of validate a hypothesis that you have? And I think

[19:00] like one mental framework is like treating the entire consumer app game is kind of like a maze. You're over here at point A, you have an exit at point B, you don't really know where it's going to be. And then a strategy that you can do is you can just like explore a bunch of different directions, right? You might find some like treasure chests or like hints along the way that are like promising and you kind of go down that path a little bit more. If it doesn't work, you can backtrack. But it's really just about like getting the reps in and getting the steps in. That's probably

[19:26] like the biggest piece of advice that I could give. No, I agree. Yo, take action, bro. Like what are you doing? Why are you sitting here watching I I mean, yes, watching Starry Stories like hella valid. But why are you watching more videos on YouTube? Why don't you just take action? The smartest thing you could do this video is follow us on socials. For Instagram, Charles.unemployed. I also talk about like a lot of sauce when it comes to building apps. Kelvin.zhg on Instagram,

[19:47] too. And then you can also follow us on X on Charles Lu 9 [music] and Kelvin zhg. Yeah, 100% give them a follow. We'll also put those links in the description below. Hopefully in this video you've seen kind of the different ways that you can think about distribution for your app. Charles and Kelvin, thanks so much for coming on Starry Story Build. This was really awesome. And uh we'll be excited to have you back whether on this channel or the main channel at some

[20:09] point. Thanks. It's our pleasure.

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