He Built a Simple $120k/Yr App, Then Sold It For Multiple 6 Figures!

0:00When it comes to exiting, people who are so obsessed with trying to get the highest price ever. I would rather take like the third highest price if they can be like, "Yo, we can close to in the next four, five days." This is like a masterass in like Rage Bay. Someone needs to create a Bible survival game. Praise Screen was the first focus app for Christians and then gave it like 2 3 months and then there's like 70 listings now. Or call that Bible focus. Is there any like common advice that you feel like if everyone knew starting out it

0:31would kind of accelerate their progress? Two things I see. Number one, everyone wants to become like Blake Anderson or Zach and all that kind of stuff. I always told people, yo, like while most people are struggling to build their first successful app, this guy just sold his fourth one. Preycreen is an app that makes you pray before unlocking your phone and it hit 120K AR in 6 months and got acquired within a week of him tweeting about it. The craziest thing is this wasn't beginner's

0:57luck. This is a system. This is Lots. And he's cracked the code on building viral consumer apps that actually make money. I'm talking about apps that hit number one in the app store, generate millions of views on Tik Tok, and get acquired by buyers sliding into his DMs. The best part of all this is that he doesn't try to invent the next big thing. He just finds what's already working and then makes it better for underserved markets. One example is Preycreen. He saw apps like 1se sec making 100k a month by forcing users to breathe for 3 seconds before opening Instagram. So he built the same exact

1:27thing but for Christians and suddenly he had people praying four times a day with 60% retention on day 30. So today I'm excited because you're about to get the complete playbook from someone who's built and exited multiple apps. You'll learn how to spot viral content formats before they get too saturated. Why he targets Twitter followers of celebrity

1:45pastors to get two cent app installs. exactly why he optimizes for speed over maximum price to consistently turn apps into six figure checks. I think this conversation will completely change how you think about app building, marketing, and the art of the quick win. Let's dive in. For those who don't know, this interview is brought to you by Superwall, the all-in-one platform for paywall management, and revenue analytics for your mobile apps. Let's

2:07get into it. So, you sold Prey Street. Just tell us the story of of how you did this. I think Facebook first launched December 2024 and then we were able to scale it quickly using obviously UGC on Tik Tok and we found like a hook that that really worked out for us. I think we run it for like maybe five 6 months got it to like 120k and then we just basically tweet about it and because I've sold multiple things before like the tweet did numbers and I think because it was just such an easy app to understand right it's just kind of like hey we block your apps you then pray to

2:37unlock your apps had a few buyers DM us and the buyer that we actually end up selling to was someone that wanted to acquire Body like 2 years ago we closed within like one week so that was pretty sick that's awesome you tell the story of how you grew it yeah yeah so we have like I think 10 or 12 Tik Tok accounts. We had an agency that actually helped us with that and about scaling that. And then we wanted to find different types of content that worked well, different hooks specifically. And what we found or what I found generally with like UGC is that you want people to be commenting a lot

3:07um and engaging a lot. So we kind of did a lot of comment funing and then we found that oh what's like the opposite of religion itself and what would give kind of like the shock factor and we were like oh actually yeah we'll probably give that kind of like shock factor itself. And you know, when we first kind of posted the type of content, we found that people commenting like, "Oh, why would you do this?" Blah blah blah. But after a while, people kind of like, "Oh yeah, I really needed this app." And end up working out really

3:29well for us. I feel like finding viral formats like this is it takes a lot of tries for most people. How did you like find this? Cuz this is a perfect intersection of it actually shows the demo of the app and then it's also kind of a controversial like viral hook. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think something that helped I would say is two things. I think what you need to do is find that one emotion specifically that you want people to feel after that content and that one thing it is. And then number two, I actually am a very big fan of what make your splash page. The splash

3:59page is when you open the app first, that kind of like first animation you see. So for us, it was a pre-creen kind of like halo thing coming up. Making that really nice and then using that for the content because that helps kind of like brand things and then you don't actually have to go through the onboarding process within the Tik Tok itself. It's kind of like, okay, you show it for like half a second or second and then the next time you show the phone, you just show like a screen that's like the one that's sharable

4:21essentially. I feel like this is a really good app idea. Did you actually think about Opal cuz I know Opal makes like 5 million AR. Did you specifically think like how do we get some of this market? I've always kind of heard of Opal and then there was this kind of big movement towards focus and people caring about their screen time. So that was something that was kind of like interesting. And then I saw that there's like one sec

4:43screen zen and like other ones as well. And I remember I think it was specifically one sec. I downloaded the app just to try it. And literally all it does is that you open Instagram it just says hey brief for 3 seconds and then it opens Instagram for you. And I was just like wait hold on they're making 100k a month. What the hell? And because like I've normally built in the faith space myself I was like okay cool. The same trend I see. Let me just copy that but for a different industry and then see

5:06how that works out. That's crazy. I remember seeing this too. I feel like One Sack was one of the only ones that had like the hey just take a deep breath, but it makes sense. It's like everyone is just farming attention and trying to harvest as much screen time as possible and this app is kind of going against that. It's like objectively like a terrible user experience. Like I we're just going to force you to like sit there for like 5

5:26seconds like not doing anything. That's what kind of crazy. So like we had people praying four time cuz I'm Christian myself. We had people praying four times a day. We had 60% day 30 retention of like daily praying four times a day. So that was like super insane. It's not just like the screen blocker, you know, instead of just sit there for 5 seconds, it's like, oh, you actually pray during those few seconds that you would normally be doing other things, but then you also there's like a retention aspect where your people are actually like in the app using it. Was Tik Tok organic the main growth driver

5:58of your first like 10k MR? I would say Tik Tok was and then we then did a lot of like meta ads for Instagram that did really well. The best day we had was like 39 cents per install in the US market and then like I think we end up averaging out like 70 cents or 80 cents per install um in the US market which is insane because like most people are getting like a $1.50 and they're happy

6:20about that. Do you feel like it works one to one? Like you can just make organic videos and then if it does well you can just put it into ads. So this is how I think about it. It's like when you post on Tik Tok, you don't control the audience that sees it. So if the general audience sees it and interacts with it and it gets lots of views, there's something about that specific video that people like for some reason. So if you now put ad spend behind it and then show it to the exact audience that you want itself, you

6:46should expect super low CPIs on the end. For us, there was like one video that was like out of all the ones that just did so well, but it had like 70% of our spend. 70% of the installs was like one video you said. Yeah, literally we had like 20 or 30 videos of that kind of like angle, but that one specifically just did so well and up to now I can't tell you exactly

7:06why. And that was organic or ads? It started off with organic and then we repurposed that same creative. Interesting. So 70% of your downloads organically were coming from that one Tik Tok video and it's like obviously okay I'm going to put that one into an ad and then it also performed really well as an ad as well. Exactly. Exactly. That's interesting because this one doesn't have as much of

7:27the angle. Yeah. Compared to the others. Yeah. Yeah, that's true. So maybe that that's like one thing of it. Something I realized as well is that also like people really like we were very strategic about the songs that we put. So we made sure that we put like super Christian songs as well. So you see people commenting like, "Oh, I love this song." All that kind of stuff. So like

7:41that also helps. When you actually show the app in these videos, is there any thought to like what part of the app you show inside the ad? cuz you don't want it to look too salesy or like obviously like an ad, right? The first thing is the splash screen and the splash screen I care a lot about because it kind of shows up the branding first of all. Number two is like the main part of the app. So for us was a prayer and then the third thing was like the congratulations page. You've done

8:04your first prayer. Yeah. So that was like the let's pray screen congratulations. Interesting. So you're kind of like showing the end result. And you said you were getting like 50 like less than 50 cent cost per install on these ads in the US. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. I assume that was profitable then, right? You're probably

8:19getting revenue from each of those. Yeah. Well, one thing we did find, right, cuz again, every app is kind of different. You kind of have to find what's the strong point of your own app. Our conversion from install to paid wasn't like anything outstanding whatsoever compared to like all the other apps out there. We're kind of thinking like this. If our conversion is like 2 and a half% for example, what that's basically telling us is that we are spending X amount for like let's say 100 users to come in and only 2 and a half% of them are converting to paid users. Another way of looking at that is that you're

8:47basically telling 97 and a half people to off. So we were like, "Okay, but our retention is super good. So what we should do is actually have a free version but then have ads instead because we know that 60% of people of the 100 people are still going to be here doing four prayers every single day for 30 days." So that really worked out for us because I think we were making

9:03like 5 cents per user per day um on ads. It took us like about 14 or 15 days to get a return on investment. 5 cents a day for 30 days. It's like $1.50 50 per user and it's only 50 cent cost per install and this is for 60% of the not converted users. That's like completely lost revenue if you hadn't done exactly. I advise some people who do apps and like they're very much like conversion is one of the hardest things to improve. So I just asked them like what are the stats currently and where the problem currently is and they tell me oh I show one pay wall. I'm just like

9:35wait what just show another one. You said you advise people. We create valers. This is normally for people who creating their first app and what they want to do themselves is that they want to be able to go from idea to launching their mobile app for the first time and also help around viral Tik Tok etc. So we're just a community pretty active every day. People just ask questions about what they wanted to build. There's a guy called Sha. He maybe started four or five months ago and then he would kind of think about different apps. At first he was like I want to do like an AI social app rob

10:04like bro just get your first nut first before you start doing all these like crazy stuff. And he created something called car spotter and it's basically like a Pokemon but for cars. You take a car, you take a picture of it and then it kind of explores it for you. And he recently just hit 8K MR.

10:17And how much time? I think it's about 4 months or something and all he has is one Tik Tok account and one Instagram account. Is there anything else interesting to share about pray? I just think generally the faith space also is also interesting because we did four ads a day for each person because they have to watch your ad got 40 to do a prayer and then I kept on seeing the same ad and it's called white out survival live now guess how much money do they make a month across both iOS and Android a month I would guess maybe 5 million a month I don't know to right now white

10:47out survival or something 53 million a month and then iOS is 51 obviously I'm doing something else now I'm doing like another creator stuff, but like I think they someone needs to create a Bible survival game that these things print so much money, bro. And like the Bible is something that doesn't have any kind of like IP and there's so many stories in the Bible. If someone wanted to do this, they should reach out to me. I'll probably help fund it. I think that something here, man, cuz games print

11:14like crazy. That's a really good idea. A Bible themed citybuilder game with hyper gamification and microtransactions. I don't know where this came from. Like I feel like this just came out of nowhere, but I think it's been around for a while. When I say every ad I saw for like 3 weeks was always them and I was just

11:33like, how are they doing this? That's crazy. I know mobile games have always made a lot of money, but this one's like so new. Maybe it kind of feels like one of the first in its meta of maybe just the ad type cuz the game itself is not actually that different. This could be a good way to find ideas. just look at their other ones that are newer and then kind of see what they're taking bets on right now. It's probably hard to do games really really well though, right? The skill to create the game, yes, but these things have been played out over and over and over and

12:03over again. There's probably some kind of templates out there you can start with and like how they do their go to market like it's just inapp ads and other apps. So it's like if I can then say, okay, every prayer app that does inapp ads, I just want all my ads served in there itself for this kind of like gaming thing. I think there's probably something there. But yeah, games print

12:23and they're profitable as hell. Yeah. I don't know. Like I feel like a lot of these viral like media in general, like games, videos, everything. It just seems like it's not as saturated by Christian content. And Preycreen kind of proves that. Like Bible chat kind of proves that. Praise Screen was the first focus app for Christians. Like so much so that you typed in like Bible focus and like the only listing was us and then gave it like 2 3 months and then there's like 70 listings now all that Bible focus like so many and it's just funny how like everyone just kind of

12:55jumps on the bandwagon. So you've had other apps in the past, right? So you had Bible buddy, you had 100,000 monthly active users. I created Bible body to be more so like a therapist for Christians specifically. And so instead of it just kind of regurgitating like chapters to you, it was more so like okay like you can use this as a therapist or a journal that you can chat to and then afterwards it kind of responds to you and then kind of

13:19relates it to a chapter in the Bible. And actually how we freshly originally grew it wasn't actually an app. First it was a uh a WhatsApp bot and then like it started costing me like crazy because a WhatsApp business API or whatever charge like 2 cents per conversation window or something like that and then you grew through some weird

13:38marketing channels like Twitter ads. So I found that hardcore Christians normally have an affinity to like one pastor or like one like celebrity pastors. So I was kind of like, okay, if you follow that pastor, that's probably like a good indicator that you're Christian. So Twitter at the time, I don't know if they do that now, they allow you to target the followers of specific accounts. So I think I just went on I was like, "Okay, cool. Who do

14:03the top 20 or 25 most famous passers? Okay, cool. What are their Twitter accounts?" And then just like target their followers. This is one of the first apps I created. So like I found it very hard to find how to monetize it. So we I started doing ads at first, which was more like a banner ads. exam. But at the time we did do the interstitial ones. I couldn't crack how to monetize it properly. I think maybe I was just more afraid. I was kind of like if I

14:28monetize like Christianity, is that bad? I don't know. So that's kind of like my first one. I think I I definitely took a lot of learnings from that. I'm just trying to look at if the follower ads are still a thing. I think they are. I think I was looking in the Twitter ads dashboard the other day. Oh,

14:43there it is. Follower lookalike. Yes. Yes, that was it. I don't think any other platform does this. Maybe Facebook for Facebook pages I think. Okay. And then tell us about Magic Music too. Magic music came after a friend of mine created like a was called chat something. Um and it was when ch first came out and it was exactly a replica of chat beauty but they just did it for like different languages and all that kind of crap and they were making half million a month and I was so I was just

15:07like bro like I should have done this. So, I I told myself I was like, "Yo, the next AI thing that comes out, I'm going to rap that very quickly." And then like I think like a week later, Sunno announced that, "Oh, yeah, Sununo AI music." And within 4 days, I created Magic Music. I was just like, "Yeah, I'm rapping the hell I had this." And there was no API even up to now there's no API. I think it's actually the most fun I've had going on the app. And so, I was actually emailing the founder of Cena cuz I was I was basically telling him

15:30like, "Yo, I'm rapping your right now." Cuz they don't have API. So, I was kind of like asking like, "Yo, like I need more songs. Like I'm trying to do the legitimate way, but like you're not allowing me to legitimate way. Do you want to talk about toxic traits? So basically create an app where you upload screenshots of conversations and then it basically tells you toxic traits. This is like a master class in like rage bait. So girl emotion like oh she's like kind like I don't care. It

15:53says looks like a big red flag to me. What do you say girls? And then specifically you show something that doesn't actually look like a red flag because then people are going to argue in the comments like something that just seems like ambiguous. So obviously he just says you demand respect but you haven't done anything to earn it. And then you get in the comments people argue with each other which obviously

16:11then baits everyone. Yeah. Everyone's saying like he's right from the perspective of the girl. She's saying wow this guy's so toxic. Look at this big red flag. It's like you demand respect but you haven't done anything to earn it. Then we do the same thing. You see the splash base thing. This was our splash page um at the time. So at least then people know okay cool is this this is the brand. And then I think we just showed in after this the upload of the screenshot and then I think then the results page. This wasn't real like an example thing but then people were like

16:38okay cool. This kind of makes sense as to what the app does. That is a high quality rage bait. They're all kind of the same thing but with different hooks. It looks like oh and then different demo a little bit. I didn't think twice. I immediately sent this text to an AI. Look at the result it gave me and then scanned. I mean, it's like similar to the the whole like Blake Anderson like, you know, looks Max stuff where you like scans a thing and then it gives you a score and then you're like curious about what the score is. Um, and you can use

17:01GPT to just analyze each generation. Interesting. This one is more of a talking head. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a bit of a different format that we we saw that that kind of like worked. It's actually for sale. It has Android iOS fully functional already. Already has 330 pieces of content already ready to go. And we haven't really tested ads or

17:20anything like that on this at all. Great. It's for sale. Yeah. If you're watching this video, reach out to lots. Maybe you could buy this app. What would you do as the buyer to like continue like growing this? I would say like the content pieces that we found that work, just repeat them over and over and over and over again. Then number two, I'd actually look at different languages as well. So, I think that's something that's that helps a

17:39lot. Is that a strategy that you've done with your other apps? Like you find an ad format or an organic format and you like have it in other languages. Well, normally whenever I get a buyer, that's not the first thing they do just because like everyone's competing for the US market. Uh, but there's also like so

17:53many other markets that are super big. It depends on the niche itself. US, Philippines, Canada. Yeah. Interesting. Cuz I feel like most app founders, if you're based in the US or you know that the US is a good market, you just start there, but you don't really think about, okay, you could expand to other markets. Just from like all the people that you talk to, like I'm sure you get a lot of frequently asked questions of people who are just starting out. they're they they see the opportunity of building consumer apps and going viral on these platforms. Is there any like common advice that you feel like if everyone knew starting out

18:26it would kind of accelerate their progress? Two things I see. Number one, everyone wants to become like Blake Anderson or Zach and all that kind of stuff. I always told people, yo, like get your first nut first. And I'm not saying you can't get there, but it's very hard for you to get there on your first try. And I'm just like, yo, if you can get something to like even five to 10k MR, you can sell that thing, right? And it's kind of like, okay, this is my first win. I was able to learn things, whatever it is, okay, then you have their biggest M. I'm very different to

18:51like the Blakes of the world. Like there's what they're doing, but like I'm very good at repeatably doing the same thing over and over again. Yes, my MR doesn't get to the millions or AR doesn't get to the millions cuz I'm not scaling it itself, but it's like I get lots of shots from so that a lot of people kind of come to me, they're like,

19:06I'm not hitting this huge huge numbers. cuz I'm like bro like right now if you can sell I think for half million right now what could that do for your life and then you're more comfortable to then take more big swings in educational way. Yeah, I mean with all these things, these were all like kind of a twist on

19:21something that already existed, right? Like Praise Green, you had a great run with the revenue and then you exited. It wasn't like a brand new invention. You're kind of combining a concept of religious apps and Christianity with Opal and like screen time apps that kind of already existed with Bible buddy. All these did super well and you were like getting all these learnings like you

19:41learned how to hit number one in ASO. you learned how to find underpriced channels with like Twitter ads and then with this one you've learned how to do viral Tik Tok. That's actually really good advice though. I feel like a lot of people like they see the big success and they just want to have the same thing but they don't see that it's kind of you need to have the skills to actually have that big win. And the best way to get the skills is to have like smaller wins to start out and like it's not small like the 500k in your pocket is like

20:08pretty good is pretty good win, right? Plus you get the skills. Like that's kind of the main thing I think it's the skill and the people that you also meet because like now if I wanted to do this Bible game thing like I know like 20 people who will fund an entire thing because they've seen me do it over and over and over again. So for them on their end it's kind of like it's a derisk thing because hey you already know what he's doing. It's kind of like the people you sell to even the people that you chatted to that maybe you didn't end up selling to. For example,

20:34Bible someone that chatted to didn't end up selling to them. They came at Pracere like a year and a half later and they closed that within three days because they already knew me from before. I guess one more question I just thought of if you're going for an exit like that. I feel like people don't think about exits nearly enough cuz they see the MR and then these days it's like MR is the thing that you flex. It's like oh I'm making 10K a month or I'm making 100K a month. And then people think of that as like okay well if I take home 50% of that after tax like okay now I'm

21:01earning 50K a month in my bank account. But then they don't think, okay, what but what if you multiply that by 12 months and then multiply that by an exit multiple, you get a ton of cash up front. So I guess I'm curious, what are any like benchmarks that you've seen for exits? I've seen numbers all over the place, right? I've seen like 2x to 6x that's at the spread I've seen of ARR generally. And what I always tell people is like before you build anything, ask yourself, am I building this for cash flow or am I building this as my life legacy? Number two, when it comes to

21:32exiting, people who are so obsessed with trying to get the highest price ever. And I'm just like, bro, most deals fall through, like 90% plus, I would rather take like the third highest price if they can be like, yo, we can close through the next four, five days. So, that's kind of like my advice. The other thing is it has to be a good app, you know, like there there needs to be a reason for the buyer to to want to buy the app. They see some growth potential and yeah, you got to give them like reasons to purchase, right? And this is the reason that I never do

22:03internationalization of my apps in terms of the different languages myself. If I go to you, I'm like, "Oh, yeah, cool. Buy Tops of Traits. Um, we've tried everything and it just didn't work." But if you frame it as, "Okay, we've got this content. This thing's already working. You haven't even tried this, this, this, and this." To you, you're thinking, "Oh, actually, yeah, this collects some key things I can kind of pull on to kind of grow this super

22:23quick." That makes sense. That's just how it works with like private equity and acquisitions. Like each type of operator specializes in a different stage of the business. So for you it's like you specialize in a 0 to1 getting a 100k AR and people who are good at the internationalization and the other 1 to 10 kind of growth stage they will highly value that. So if you don't have a whole year's worth of ARR does that decrease

22:47the multiple? I think 3 months and above is good. And if they can see like consistent like revenue like they don't want to be able to see like one day was 100k MR the next day was 20K and they don't want to see that. But if they it just looks consistent then I I think that helps. I

23:02think definitely the longer the better. From the buyer's perspective I think they understand that the seller you see the growth potential but you're just interested in other things like you want to do creator tech or you want to build a mobile game. like there's just other things that you know you've lost passion for this specific app or you just don't care enough to like really invest all your energy into it. So from their perspective it's just like a win-win like hey I'm going to actually make some

23:24more money with this. Exactly. Exactly. And I think if you offer them stuff like you know a month or two months of like the transitionary period helps sweeten the deal. Right. Some advising. Yeah. This was super valuep packed. Thanks for thanks for hopping on. It's cool man. By the way this is the Super Wall podcast. We have a lot more interviews

23:41on the channel. So check them out. They're all super tactical, just like this