Scaling Beyond Influencers: From Rags to Riches w/ Alex Slater and Co-Founder Connor McLaren

0:00you're going to have to St um all right let's read somebody's comments did I go to UNI no I dropped out of college in the UK If you know what that is it's not University it's called College uh why don't you guys like the trial method for users and why does quitter do paid only so we do have a trial for people that are uninstalling the app because we have a system that's very predictable we know that if we get x amount of downloads it will convert to x amount of sales that will produce x amount of Revenue and we can reinvest that Revenue back into mod

0:29history tion now free trials is very uncertain for us and will kind of mess us up on our path so we don't want to implement that yet especially in November which our biggest month I mean I also think a big thing that Alex did mention is that when something's free people act like it's free are user retention and activity drastically skyrockets when people pay for something because you actually use it um the amount of apps that I've gotten free that I don't use versus the ones I pay for that I know I need to use um are drastically different so we realize we'd rather lose customers and have them pay

1:05than give a free app and try to convert them later on when when they pay they're going to be invested because a lot of part of this journey is actually trying if you get a free app and you don't try and you don't put in the effort you're not going to get any results if you pay for something you've High intent to actually use it you're going to do what you know you have to do use it be a part of the community and actually gain value from it um so that I think that's the biggest reason I'd say why we don't do free trials unless someone's canceling

1:28um to actually provide more value to them uh what are your top five tips for influence marketing how much did you aim to pay for a th000 views so I don't think we pay per thousand views we have we actually are about to test $1 or $2 per thousand views but we usually just pay a Creator a retainer fee so about $1,000 a month uh to make four videos or one video a week and we kind of just trust that process to work itself out is that fair it generally comes out to a dollar to $5 depending on person I think we got lucky off the beginning we were

2:02paying a dollar per thousand views which is like a really good deal um and now we're we're looking at two to3 doll per thousand views and like Alex said we generally structure things retainer and then just a minimum view um and video count per month the key is volume by the way Hamza Hamza I I will say as well not not every thousand views is the same and they won't convert the same it really depends on the audience we've had videos that have done really well we've had videos with 20 30,000 views that have made us two free grand we've made we've made like two grand off a 40,000 viewed

2:33video and we've made $200 off of a 1.2 million one million yeah it's it's completely you really it's really in the engagement and and the consumer of who's watching it for that Creator um I think that's if there's anything you guys take from this from influencer marketing figure out who's watching the Creator video and if they're their target market and if you're that if those both things work then you should pay them even if they get 20,000 views a video you're still going to get a higher conversion um this is this is a good question so from Floyd he says how's the app price and what's the payment processor payment

3:07processor is super W which integrates to Apple pay and the app pricing we've playing around with it a lot lately it used to be $12.99 a month at 45 a year and most of our Revenue would come from the yearly plan um but we kind of switched it a little bit so now we're doing $6.99 a week and I believe $ 29.99 a year which lowers the boundary for people to join so I think Blake Anderson actually taught me this so it's not about how much you can make per paying User it's about the volume of users you can get to pay for a smaller amount that

3:41actually results in more Revenue I'll send the equation in the chat later but it's it's very smart uh how do you find a good co-founder try YC co-founder matching or even go on Twitter and look in Blake's comments and just message people because there's so many people in there that want to do what you're doing and even in this Discord server go in general chat and say I'm looking for a co-founder what I will say is if you're looking for a co-founder you better know you better know how to code because you don't want to be that guy that can't code and that's just the truth of it

4:09that's me yeah guys Alex told me he'd replace me if he could we got an argue at once he's like I'd replace you if I could it's probably the the the uh kindest thing he's ever told me no yeah but you don't want to be that guy that can't code you need to pull your weight you need to bring value Conor brought value by funding the first uh influencers I had zero doar for the last six months of my life and now we're found that I had a knack for sales like the negotiation tactics were crazy um I'd say a big thing also for co-founder is provide value like at a core um

4:47because I think Alex and I genuinely were timing I mean we got I don't believe really in luck because I think you create your own luck but it was generally timing what we were doing and it just worked and we trusted each other um if Alex and I during that time period we're like oh you're screwing me over you're this and like that block of trust we wouldn't be here right now um so I think it's trusting the process trust in the value you bring and just make sure you make sure you affect the bottom line if you can't bring in dollars you're not valuable doing [ __ ] startup like

5:17work of like I don't know making a post for social media or doing one you need to do volume and bring in dollar show how you make the company money and how you both do that whether it's affecting the pay wall increasing retention rates bringing you more volume volume getting more customers you'll be fine um I think that was the biggest thing for us um okay what language do you use to code your apps and how do you suggest us to get good at building and coding apps so I use Swift UI which is kind of a bad thing because I'm not building the platform for

5:49Android and I get thousands of messages saying build a build an up for Android but Android makes maybe 20% of what the Apple platform makes in terms of Revenue so it's not really worth building uh at least for for our current stage and then I use AI to help me build [ __ ] faster and I think guys honestly one of the biggest truths you need to hear you can build any app any AI of your dreams in two three days and you can get it launched at the end of this week Honestly by Sunday you can have money rolling in but you just got to try you

6:21just got to put your head down and you got to [ __ ] Focus AI is a literal superum um elaborate elaborate how how to use CLA in AI just tell it what you want to do copy paste the code run it if it's not accurate to what you see in your head tell it to change it and it'll take a few prompts but you'll eventually get to a finished product trust me most of quitter my app right now is built with AI like all the hard stuff like communities that's all built with AI um and that gives us the boat by the way that's why you can't just rip off

6:57quitter and make money because we have a moat we have a Community good luck trying to build that um um why do you only get on a podcast I think this just opportunity came up and we also know we've been in the spot of like trying to build stuff that makes money and we finally did it and realize how simple it was and so if anyone can even take 10% of what we're talking about right now you could change your life um I think personal brand is more important as well like leveraging a personal brand is far more worth it long term than making money off a

7:31so like right now what we're in is a [ __ ] gold rush and it's the it's the Kings at the end of the Gold Rush that will be remembered and everyone who's probably shoveling right now if you don't shovel fast enough you're going to get washed away so that's why I realized that and I got to build my personal brand now and share as much information with the world as I can before it eventually ends and gets so saturated I actually made a tweet saying XO is going to release full-fledged AI app creation soon which means anyone can just download X code get to make it up and it

8:00will do it so so yeah um what's more difficult development or marketing um I would say development because it's so much harder to learn but at the same time like distribution is simple but you got to realize it's the work you put in um like you have to figure it out like we're learning every single day what makes a video better and 10% better adds up over time but I think it's also who you ask like Alex might say development's easy and marketing's hard it's I really yeah yeah I would say that and I would they balance each other out they B but I also think Alex is much

8:36better development than I am and I'm much better at the sales and marketing than he is when it comes to like the other stuff and that's why it works between us I think final answer is you need both because your marketing will be you know it won't be effective until you have a good product and good pricing right so you might think oh my marketing's terrible cuz I'm not making any money but if your app [ __ ] if you're pricing [ __ ] if it looks sketchy you're not going to convert so in that respect building the up to be good is harder but yeah they balance

9:06each other out you kind of need both um if you have zero social followers how would you convince influencers to promote your app you don't need social followers you need money and it's just the numbers game you got to you got to DM 100 influencers to get one response but as I said previously if you don't have the money for that stick to Reddit organic stick to daily organic posting and just you can do all that free for free influences the next stage I think it's in the product a big thing for us is our product resonated with everyone we reaching out to we weren't just reaching out to random people with

9:40following we reached out to people that actually would resonate with what we were building and who you're helping so I think if you have a good product as well with a good Mission they're going to want to support you um yeah at agre uh would K be willing to be a growth partner for something else or are you taken taken that's so funny yo you can't steal my I can I can if you need help I'll help I'm always here to help but um my priorities are set at the moment so just send me we have a few people actually First St in marketing what were you saying Alex oh you can do

10:19your question first no I was gonna say first step marketing viral video is the best option I think for us we I think we found out the product worked through Reddit and Twitter and that was kind of like the slow stage of getting product feedback and then after that we were like all right let's push heavy and then that was volume within um influencers and when you say viral videos I think viral videos are a key to it but at the same time it just getting um targeted audiences through influencers targeting their audiences which are your consumers who want your product um how did you get your first users

10:56Reddit does not allow self-promotion well that's why I got Bann on Reddit but I made $2,000 before I got banned so it does work it does work and then if you want to listen to the rules then yeah you just make other accounts you're going to have to play this like this game to kind of win the beginning but that's just to get the early Capital because now we're in a position we could just scale Beyond doing that Reddit hacking here's a good one at what stage is the community aspect helpful we actually had it off the bat through Telegram and it almost oh yeah it almost it almost

11:28showed to us how valuable we weren't even focused on the community like oh let's have a community people to talk and like chat and then we realized how active it was every single day and then we it was like an aha moment of like wow this is what the app needs to be around and no one else can do this so it almost was it just happened through building different features and seeing naturally people tied to yeah and I honestly in my opinion communities are the best thing for retention if we have any monthly subscribers the community is always like a pillar you can lean on when you're

11:57struggling so having that is worth paying for honestly so retention wise I think it's a great feature um let me see

12:17what what are your thoughts on Google ads okay so this is kind of one of the topics of of this call actually it's scaling Beyond consumer uh Beyond influencer marketing and uh me and Connor are actually Building Systems out right now to kind of automate this process because right now it's very manual it's very DM him and then get a contract signed and then watch his videos see how they perform but we kind of want to have this cut and past formula that we know works and at scale we can reach a much broader amount of influencers and a much broader audience to consume our content and eventually

12:46enter the funnel so one of the two things we're doing is collecting emails in the beginning we 85% of our users do not convert on the initial payall which is an important number because if we can push emails and discounts to that 85% of people that aren't converting maybe 10 or 20% of them will convert you know so it's kind of like a numbers game and that's one of the things we're using to squeeze as much juice of all of our downloads that we can another part is um paid ads so actually we just launching them we're launching them today for the first time I know CI is scaling I think

13:22$2 and a half thousand a day for paid ads so if they're doing that it must be working and there's actually a document I'm going to put it in the chat right now now it's very very very useful but it shows you kind of the the the plan you'd take to get from 0 to 5 million Mr I'm going to put in the chat right now if you read that it shows you everything you should do at different stages so 0 to 10K a month is basic ASO and some organic post and then when you get to a million 5 million 10 million a month that's ads pretty much mostly because

13:52ads you can allocate budget and you can force content in front of an audience at scale without the bottleneck of dming uences back and forth but of course these are all in all in different stages and you need to Master One Stage before you move to the next a big things for Community sorry I'm just trying to answer a lot of these questions in here um one of the questions was how can we describe the community how we made it to be engaging it just was engaging due to the people so we didn't do anything to make the telegram chat engaging people just were in there asking questions Talking and it

14:25grew slowly and then eventually we built a forum on the app um where people can give their own help and what they've done to basically overcome porn addiction um and from there it's grown into what it is and now we have moderators and things of that nature but I would say like we really didn't do anything special we just allowed people to chat um and it took a while for someone to say uh to send any content we'll put it that way they to get removed quickly um so people were generally respectful yeah um yeah Bali Alex was with his brother Chris who's also um yeah yeah part of the team

15:06yeah Chris is our designer so how long did it take to go from zero to, customers as in paying users or downloads that's different for customers I think about take customers yeah okay downloads downloads downloads is about maybe two two weeks well I would say we did 20,000 downloads in a month so you can run the math on that it's actually probably a couple days um when it comes to do to th paying customers I'd say two weeks um generally yeah and again this is all very achievable AI really makes it easy for you guys and then just Reddit organic Twitter post it's it's really really

15:52easy uh is it true that one download from an external Source basically drives one organic app store download does that make sense like if you get in organic traffic AB OB I think it does in terms of SEO placement like the more traffic that goes to your app store Page of course the higher you rank on the app store if you search quit porn on the App Store we are literally like the third result and we're you know aiming for that number one spot rank um guys put your hands up too let's get some let's get some talks in here open the conversation open the floor up I

16:26mean yeah if anyone has any basic questions as well like don't feel afraid I know we're talking about scaling Beyond influencer marketing but if you guys want to talk about influencer marketing how to go 0 to one like that can happen as well we all were been in your shoes um so yeah um how do you host your stuff I use fire base and then I use Heroku yo Mark want to speak yeah go on we bring Mark in uh my okay there you go what's up man you hear me yeah yeah how you doing Mark cool how are you guys good solid day cool cool yeah I just uh just popped in

17:07here I just wanted to ask about influencer promos just on a micro influencer level like you know what cpms do you target any any like metas that you guys have for that engagement um I would say our first influencer was probably in the micro influencer category he had like 100,000 followers maybe not micro but his views were 20 to 40,000 views um when it comes smaller than that I would still say engagement if you're looking at people with 10 20 30,000 followers and they're getting views consistently like 5,000 views 10,000 views consistently I'd say the big thing is consistency across views and then engagement and then you can

17:43actually find out who's commenting what were they like are they actually asking about solutions to whatever you're doing um because I'm assuming that your product is a solution to a problem and that influencer is also providing value on solving that problem hence why it would be worth the partnership I hope that answer in terms of cpms uh again I said this earlier that not every thousand views is priced the same like you can get a thousand we we had a million views in one video we made $200 we had 20,000 views we made free grant and um I think the most important thing you should focus on is that c like

18:17following is that engagement I'd actually pay more for that influencer rather than someone that's going viral and not having much engagement does that make sense yeah definitely do you have like an engagement that you look for specifically you say metc yeah eyeball it to be completely honest with you okay um we look for consistency and then we test it and then um that you can you can structure contracts in certain ways to test things first um is another thing so yeah that's true have a speaker thanks for the help guys all right no worries Mar what's up man hey what's up man how are you um really good job

19:05yeah U I wanted to ask do you guys have you guys found any success in ugc in sort of making an influence to their own account and having them post pretty similar content I actually heard about this strategy we've so you're saying hire an influencer do it or just hire someone on ugc to create content around strictly quitter I I guess both both situations um I've actually been wanting to test it we're going to be testing clipping content this month for no November of clipping YouTube content from like Jordan Peterson Iman godi Hamza um Chris Williamson any of the kind of the self-help guys that you'll listen to

19:46about how bad porn is and just like pushing volume when it comes to the are you talking about like tabs chocolate stuff like what Oliver Bato did yeah yeah yeah yeah so I I've been thinking about that and I think we'll test that eventually but right now we just know what works so we know what works for us within the influencers and we're tapping into organic um so that was the I'd say what we're focusing on but I definitely want to try it I think it I think there's a lot of potential there because you're playing the viral game yeah I I think especially like Tik Tok I hear

20:22and I haven't validated this myself where if you post a video that has gone viral on a different account you can pretty much get very similar results on a new account so that's sort of the Strat um oh really yeah interesting I think a good example is like uh Charlie D amilo yeah she actually has like another account that's like super random and it's like Lally ran by her and she'll make content on that account it literally will get very similar views um oh really but but aside from that I wanted to ask you guys how did you guys initially like come across like okay I

21:04think this is a good Niche for us to kind of uh build around I think it was to be honest with you it was it was somewhat chance um because I was looking in the consumer utility space to build a product um and I was like what is something that a lot of men deal with for me I previously previously built a fitness app and so I was getting to understand the customer around people that want to work on themselves and that trickle down from Andrew Tate's big push on men working on themselves and I was like what other things are in this Niche and I was like

21:37in aha moment oh porn addiction and I kind of knew that men don't really talk about it and that's when I brought to Alex so I think a part of it was just like testing um which Alex can share more on what his angle was but we both separately had the idea and came together coincidentally exactly like the way it happened is I was at Chipotle with Conor I he told me about his idea for this consumer app and I was like bro I'm literally building this as we speak so it was just it was literally just coincidence and I think it worked very well for us I think the

22:09opportunity was clear millions of men struggle with this the top app on the App Store only makes like 100 Grand a month and I was like okay they only get 10,000 downloads making 100K a month but there's millions of men struggling with this this is going to be a big opportunity and we literally just got right to work and knowing that the top app makes 100K a month gave us the confidence to believe that yes this is a business and it can work out and that's how we got to this point does that make sense I really like that Charlie demilio idea I think Conor we should speak about

22:39that after and have Rashard make his own page for just twiitter I think that'll be quite sick we speaking about this live actually I'd say that the hard part is you have to find people that are making viral content and with what we're doing with currently it's his stuff isn't viral but it highly engaged um and so that's where I think things are difficult but I will say Alex what's the um so something Alex has talked about which I think we're we shouldn't Breeze over is so we looked at competitor apps and there's a plugin Alex uses Landon we'll get you up here when we're done by the way I'm seeing

23:10this um there's a plugin that we use to see competitor apps we weren't Reinventing the wheel but we could see who was actually making money and if there's a market there so instead of being like Oh how big's the market this and that we validated it by seeing other competitors making money we realized we distribute much better and that was why I'd say we're winning in space right now let me guys look in the comments I just put the the website to do that by the way you can check all your competitive Revenue nice dude thank you for uh thank you for answering my questions and um

23:42reach out whenever man it was uh glad we could help yeah absolutely keep keep crushing you guys bye thank you appreciate all right welcome Lon yo that's actually my co-founder um just oh really what's up yeah Al you actually DM me on Twitter so um oh what's up man Alex dming everyone on Twitter bro I was going to ask if yall experimented anything with like paid ads and if uh you have any advice on that uh well actually we're just into that today actually we just got everything set up so we're still to see the result of that actually no I just got an email your ad was approved just now as we

24:23speak wellow um but in terms of met I'll tell you our strategy on that so okay we're going to we're going to have a bunch of different creatives targeting the niches that we believe our customers to be in so men aged 20 to 28 US based health and fitness based and we'll just have a bunch of different campaigns running we allocate budget we'll have a broad pixel that's finding the target audience for us we have a bunch of uh we have a street interview creative we have a bunch of ads showing the app we have a 28 day challenge and I can't give you any real answers on how that's going to

24:59turn out but I think based on our competitors they're doing very well so we'll see on that okay and how are yall actually tracking um the do you all have it set up inside the app to where yall can actually like track and see if they've actually came from the ad like the Facebook like SDK inside the app oh yes yes yes we we do have that set up so we'll we'll find out very soon cuz we haven't even allocated any budget even with influencers too for tracking by the way tracking can get very difficult um so even tracking by just lining up when influencers post by when

25:36sales come in and we've been giving codes um so yeah right we'll see how Facebook goes but I think it'll be fine we've heard it's fine you I think you know what comes from Facebook and you can see link clicks and everything from Facebook as he download they say Facebook Facebook Raz is is much worse than an influencer but it's much moreable [music] you know that's the thing we can guarant or two or 3x on a Facebook ad for instance maybe we get a 10x from an influencer but we have consistent two FreeX that we can just allocate more budget reach more audience and make more

26:08money that's kind of the plan for Facebook ads right um appreciate no looking at the chat he's looking at sensor tower for us that is not accurate that's not accurate 20,000 downloads sensor Tower isn't actually accurate uh in terms of this [ __ ] but it's it's a it's a reference it's a reference damn listen listen ham is coming with the smoke this is not accurate go look at C it's like half of what they make yo ham I take back about what I said about helping you I'm kidding I'll help you man okay all right welcome Daniel welcome to the floor hi guys can you

26:51talk a bit about um the process of signing contracts with influencers what what specifically I say like let's get into the weeds of it like what are you curious about so when you do influencer Outreach and you Outreach to an influencer how do you sign a contract with them or like Revenue share whatever all right um the big thing I'd say is Outreach first um we do everything from Tik Tok Instagram finding emails you really just want to get creative um don't bombard them obviously I mean I've gone all the way to using LinkedIn to find a person um but i' say just like tend to be respectful you kind of know

27:28when you're being annoying um don't feel bad about following up too A lot of people are busy um we found out that following up actually works especially if you're like hey just bumping this up eventually they'll either tell you to [ __ ] off politely or they'll be interested especially if it works with their um content um but when it comes to actually signing contracts so we really structure everything um here AR I'll get you up here while we're chatting um we really have structured everything simply with minimum video per month and view counts and so if you do it that way you kind of just know hey you're paying X for a

28:06minimum amount of videos per month amount of views per month and if you control what the videoos somewhat look like you kind of can start knowing okay 100,000 views will bring in xll in Revenue times that by four you're paying them X so you generally can know your Roi um I would sorry I was reading the chat um [clears throat] so that's generally how we structure based on views and volume sorry that was a little all over the place I got distracted no it's fine thank you thanks a lot any more questions there um no it's fine thank you that's good awesome yo I I want to start hearing some of your guys

28:45ideas well it's said Arno ask yo I'm actually down to hear your guys ideas hear where you're at uh tell me your biggest problem and we'll [ __ ] help you well AR let's get let's let Aro speak first hi guys thank you for bringing me up again no worries a have a question you know a typical why Comin advice is to kind of like interview 50 people at first like and make a crappy MVP to see if people are interested or not but like nowadays everyone seems to be building their products fast and nowadays it seems like any crappy MVP is getting rejected by customers anyways because the quality is

29:23kind of high I was thinking should I build the complete app first or should I take the slow route um it's a really good question it is actually a really good question so I think don't ship something that you wouldn't use yourself there needs to be a fine line between an app and a shitty product if you won't use yourself then it's a shitty product if you won't pay for it yourself it's a shitty product I'm a perfectionist and that's kind of been a bad character trait because it stopped me from putting things out there in the world which is actually the most important part if you put anything out

29:56there in the world someone will like it some we pay for it but spend an extra week making it a little bit better and then push don't just get HTML document out there to your customers you know that make sense yeah thank you I think another thing is um I personally believe great distribution with an average app beats an great app with average distribution and so as long as like Alex said it's not shitty there's a clear distinction between a shitty app and an average app so as long as it's providing if it's solving the problem that you're trying to solve you're goodes the UI doesn't

30:32have to be insane as long it's solving a problem um we're chilling on that note like one of the core features in my app was content blocking and we're what three months in it still doesn't [ __ ] work imagine that like my porn quitting app doesn't even have content blocking but we've had almost $100,000 in Revenue so it's just something to consider it works and I think it's still really good but at the same time like [laughter] uh um it's not like and I think none of the content blocking is perfect to be honest with you across all the apps yeah okay a question thank you guys thank you

31:10guys all good good all good Daniel is that you back Daniel's back yeah yeah sorry I got another question no go for it so how do you decide whether you're going to make it a website or a mobile app what what like determines that oh I mean there's two different markets for either I mean both could work uh in my opinion mobile app because it's the most distributed you know everyone's got a phone everyone can download it and usually there's more more money spent on consumer apps rather than websites because you could just Apple pay and it's done does that make sense yeah that makes sense and how do you handle cyber

31:43security and all that stuff in terms of what data yeah just making it secure just what ele like I don't know from hackers or whatever uh a lot of my stuff is really front end base so it's not really going to be attacked by hackers are you talking like the payment processing or yeah yeah yeah that that's okay yeah that's all G through apple and then like our backend databases have their own cyber security so it's not like we have our we're using platforms that deal with that for us that makes sense yeah exactly um and then there's a question about um reviews we include that in the onboarding as well um which

32:26seems to work really well exactly question in the in the onboarding we go leave us a review a lot of people don't do it but we have 1% of people that do it and when you get 20,000 downloads 1% 20,000 is 200 then you got 200 reviews and then on top of that we ask them to review it while they're using the app and things of that nature yeah it's pretty easy uh thanks guys no worries no worries Daniel um guys thanks for bringing me up yeah just just a quick question what do you guys think about while you're building the product what do you think about running

32:58ads or posting content that directs people to kind of like an email list for when the app launches so at the like at launch you just have a massive like a big chunk of people come on and give you feedback and everything just to you know better the product it's a good idea I mean in terms of validation if you have five or six ideas you want to pursue you can run ads on all of those ideas and see which ones get the most signups to be honest though I'd stick with your gut and just build because you learn more when you're actually doing it rather

33:27than just collecting data and you can build an app in a week instead of setting up this whole process of wait list allocating build a creative you could just build a product that and if you can't build a product say you're like me and you can't code say I didn't have Alex a different perspective so I had a buddy use many chat and he drove traffic through to his like account which his product was and people dm'd him a word and he collect their email and then basically every video they posted said they're launched and it's like DM for the access code and then say DM they're like get added the wait list

33:58which is their email and they had to invite people and like repost to get bumped up on that weit list so they basically built theand in a couple weeks which um some of you guys have asked like what our plan is we're building things to an app studio so that's actually one thing we're going to do is build demand um as we're building so even if we build in a week we can build demand in a week so andan I will say if that's what you want to do do it um if you're actually int like spend resources on that um you can also I believe run

34:25ads to do a chat so you can run ads to have people DM whoever's running the ad and that can go through a many chat system as well and so there's a lot of creative things you can do there but at the end of the day like there's no bad answer but if you can code like Alex said just build an average product and ship it um but if you're waiting and you want to build demand and make yourself I guess feel better about things and more secure about what you're building then I mean I don't think there's anything wrong with that um because the day those

34:50emails list most likely will convert they're giving you their email cool cool okay thanks guys thanks guys I'll probably have another question as well but I'll mute myself yeah yeah well good you're welcome you're good um I think do is next or yeah yeah I was just wondering so I know you guys said not all content was blocked um which I guess defeats some of the purpose of the app but most of it it works pretty well um how do you eventually work to build the platform to block all that content what kind of steps do you take to ensure that all content is at the end of the day blocked

35:29so it's it's funny how we're doing this new system right now we're going to tap into screen time on iOS so I don't know if you ever seen opal where it blocks like the social medias you're addicted to but there's a feature where you can block all adult content it's made by Apple and our app will just override that setting so we don't actually need to do any of the work but it's very new and AI can't figure out how to do it so it's going to take me a few more days weeks but I'll get it done it'll be cool that's pretty cool and that all apply to

35:58desktop as well yeah we're going to build a desktop platform see very cool that's on the product road map um I'll will also say that I think our blocking system works for the basic stuff right now um obviously if you go on Twitter or Reddit and you really want to go that deep into things um you'll find what you're looking for um anyone that's way around but um we're we're still trying to make the product better every day and I think the biggest thing is the community and gamifying things and once people gain momentum we've realized they usually keep it so yeah that's great awesome guys well best

36:37of luck thanks for your questions man um I think it was ham Hamza [clears throat] was talking smoke yeah hey yo what's up guys what's up yeah uh I wanted to First congratulate y'all on quitter and um I actually kind of found it funny when you said screen recording other onboarding of the apps because I did that two to three weeks ago or three to four weeks ago with quitter actually I really like y'all's onboarding you know what I'm gonna try to copy this into my app but tailor it so kind of what I'm doing right now is um building out a skincare app to help with acne because

37:16I've seen it's kind of an undelivered in terms of the app space and in terms of marketing I was kind of wondering why you said Alex like hey like if you're starting out go towards the Reddit or like much more written organic route like if I have a couple thousand why can't I just go directly to influencers you can I was saying more for the people just starting out which is most people even I did I had zero dollars like three months ago so that's how I started you can go straight to the influencers that is a lot more there's a lot more return there to be made got it and then I had

37:49another question I was kind of into dilemma I was like so if I'm promoting the skincare up with influencers do I want to go with someone who has like terrible acne or do you want to go to someone who has like a perfect clear skin cuz I don't know it kind of throws me off like how do you know which one to go to I think the way I would do it it might be a bit sketchy but I would get someone to take a video screen recording using the app showing their acne the the apps like highlighting all of their acne showing them the recommendations to keep

38:18their skin clean and then the video cuts to them using face tune and all the acne is gone and then you run with that does that make sense so you're getting instant results and then you're going to go download this skin up and then boom that's traffic you know I think I would do it differently if you're going to be using influencers to launch um I would go on Tik Tok and look up best skincare products for men or best skincare products for women find out the people making content around that and then once you realize you're Mak content around it reach out to all those

38:48creators on Instagram and Tik Tok and then do this or ask chat tobt for example hey I have an app that's doing X Y and Z I'm looking to find creators doing this what what are some video ideas that these creators would make Now look up those how-to videos on Tik Tok and you'll then you can actually filter on Tik Tok to pass three months or one month and then filter it by like count and you'll find the most engaged people in that Niche and then from there you'll find either people with really clear skin with a tailored audience around how to get a clear skin which they would

39:17then push your product um or find people that are on the journey to get a clear skin or trying new [ __ ] and then you can also push your product and from there if you have a couple Grand [snorts] you can easily deploy like save two grand you can deploy like 500 bucks a month across four different guys for at least three to four videos you can you can negotiate it down start up working on this but I would do that to find the creators and then out Instagram Tik Tok they have what uh I was going to say imagine a beautiful girl she's going all of my followers

39:47keep asking me why I have such clear skin well I'm finally going to tell you how use this app it's called blah blah blah blah obviously make it more seamless but think about like is that clear skin versus acne for the Creator think about it in the sense of what value they providing and who's Their audience read the comments right are they asking your questions like think about like what value they providing because I don't I think what the question you asked is essentially irrelevant it's more who's Their audience and how do you find them and I basically just told you how to find them um so go yeah and that how do

40:20you price these influencers like because I see some with a lot of followers but like little to little views and then they have like big asking prices so what do you guys do to like you know evaluate someone and how much you should be paying them to to answer this I guess like efficiently um we care about views so you want consistent views whether it's 5,000 views consistently 10,000 20,000 30,000 30 to 50,000 consistently and some hits 100,000 you care about views so you have a guy with a million followers get 20,000 views like it's relevant because he's going to want a lot of money like you said um other than

40:51that when it comes to pricing figure out what you think is fair you won't know your industry until you start asking get them on a call and be like look hey we can really only afford 500 bucks a month for three videos um and we're looking for X views for this um and see what they say negotiate maybe they want 600 bucks or maybe they're like hey we can work with you this month and we'll look at the next um honesty is a big thing in this I would say um so just just be like yeah my budget is only two grand you think we can meet with a few trial

41:20videos and they'll go okay maybe I can do that one thing I learned from um Ridge wallet I'll keep this very short is when someone asks for an amount like $6,000 It's usually the amount they want and it's like [music] $6,000 for 10 videos and they might go yes you know does that make sense yeah that's and they're making a 100 million a year so yeah I would also recommend to you if you're looking to launch with this obviously don't go with don't P your eggs in one basket um find like four creators to deploy two grand across um and see what they say and then worst

41:54case might be stre number game maybe you have to keep asking 100 more people to find the four that actually are willing to work within your budget and your means yeah I was thinking going different creators different creatives and seeing what works best I mean when it comes to creatives I would say like you want you can give them a structure but have they're the ones that know Their audience best and their style works the best so um don't try to control too much if that makes sense make sure obviously your app is pushed in the CDA and it's like subtly pushed Etc but you don't want them to do

42:26something inorganic to their audience because I don't will do well um we've made that mistake before so I kind of a weird question so you know that horsee influencer dude or whatever yeah how well did his video convert because I was wondering like the CTA was so kind of like low to me so he has if if cult Lake audience is like really engaged users he has a cult Lake audience on steroids um so yeah I actually grew up with him um so he's a buddy of mine and I've like it did very well for us um I would just say that like it just and I

43:08also think if you think about it so I don't know how much you know about horse me but he has also a Discord which is like and a lot of his stuff is um very like dark humor right and that dark humor attracts basically I think porn addicted men like how did you find that video I went on your quitter dude I'm like a stalker for you Alex so I basically went your quitter thing and I looked at your I think your highlights or something your Partnerships I just went through every single video and how you're marketing it to kind of gear up to what I should do and I was surprised

43:43by how low like the CTA was it's not like yo check out it was like super low like super subtle I was kind of surprised you guys were converting yeah no it did it did very well for us you w't even um yeah nice but I also think but like I don't think that was let's put it this way I don't think it was the video in the CTA that made that convert I just think it's his audience so like that's another thing that you to understand you can't be like oh this will work for everyone um that was just a very I think Unique Style um so he's also say that again you

44:18you broke up so is the reason you guys use codes to track who's getting downloads or do you guys actually like reward someone based off of the code usage it's both we Ed it to kind of have their general idea of where the traffic is coming from not everyone will use the code and we use that not everyone will use the code to pay people less per referral does that make sense it only earn money on code usages and then we'll pay $3 per code use sounds good thank you guys sorry for the long question yeah by the way feel free to reach out I mean yeah don't hesitate

44:55I'm pretty open about things do you check your Discord messages Connor or no I will now all right sounds good I'll or Twitter just follow me on Twitter and DM me there as well it's in my Discord all right sounds good thanks welcome hey guys thanks for taking the time good so my question is I'm kind of starting out in this journey I'm very technical but I don't really know even what to build so I'm I'm curious if you could go from how you decided on the idea and the consum utility space because you said you were looking around that space and then specifically on the

45:31marketing piece on how exactly you found the influencers that you thought would have been good people to work with you mentioned the consistency of views and things like that but how do you actually find the influencers that are uh good for that space I'm sorry if you you've answered this before because I joined a bit late so I'm not laughing at you by the way if you saw me Snicker I was uh I'll I'll start so in terms of ideas I've put this link in the chat before I don't know if you saw it I'm going to put it in again because I think it's a

46:01very valuable resource called sensor to.com everyone go on that make an account you can go on the charts and see everyone's Revenue now it is just an estimate but it's pretty pretty accurate now you can use this to get an idea of the market size and opportunity of any idea even if it's not your idea just [ __ ] rip it off because distribution is what matters and then put it out there and that's how you get an idea that that has no traction no revenue and it significantly reduces your risk in terms of ideas in creation right okay makes sense so basically use sensor Tower to

46:37find the path to build something in and then build a better app and try to out distribute the find the ones making millions of dollars I'll throw some some [ __ ] Source in here build a sleep app they make millions of dollars a month now it's going to be hard to crack but just copy the [ __ ] goats and push it because it works really it really does thank you thank you appreciate it no worries man all right welcome rishy yeah what's up um I just had a couple questions about like distribution and stuff so in my Niche I'm I'll just give a little context I was in the chat for a

47:14little bit um I'm building something like for high school competitions and so we're basically selling to um high schools itself and it's kind of hard to first off get sales in that Niche itself um and also like there's there's basically no creators in that space as well so would you say that there could be like some sort some like companies that might just be way too Niche or um like I like are you struggling to monetize them is that what you're asking in away or are you just them like um what yeah mostly just acquiring them I would say um it's it's really hard to like get everyone

47:58get all the schools that we reach out to on board that's one thing and then another thing is like the space itself has maybe one Creator um and I feel like for me you take too much time to actually like get into content and all that and we don't have enough money to because I'm like in high school as well so I don't have like enough money to um like hire someone to do content or anything will you share the idea yeah sure so I could drop a link or something or I could just let you know so it's like we're uh so basically we're building like a suite of like a bunch of

48:34AI tools to like help kids who are preparing for high school competitions like Deca fbaa I don't know if you ever heard of those but um they they're like roleplay based competitions where it's like you're practicing with a judge and so a lot of kids don't really know how to prepare for these type of competitions um whether it be for the test or for the presentation itself so it's kind of like we're we're letting them make their own we're letting them record their own role plays and we can score it for them and then um they can upload a test and they can just take it

49:05on our interface stuff like that I say I say look there is a market for everything I don't think if your goal is to make money I don't think you should be doing this because it is as you said so Niche right you want something that's easier for you and you're going to spend a lot of time trying to figure out how this would work and it will [ __ ] fail in the end pretty much if you don't have the but if if you don't have that fire in your heart it won't work so it really depends on your goals if your goal is about money go on that website just send

49:33find S competitors and copy and try and make something better you know you don't have to I feel like what you're doing is you're trying to come up with this new idea that hasn't been done before because you know every revolutionary everyone that's looked up to has come up with this new idea but that's it's it's really just a game of I would answer it a bit differently I do agree with Alex if you're looking to make money find a way to make money and then you can do stuff you're passionate about but when it comes to this I think about it in the sense of tutors right

50:03like I I had a I had a buddy who actually he coached people in rowing to get them in IV League schools and he Slaughters it because you have all these kids and their parents that tend to be wealthy wanting their kids to go to Ivy League for rowing and he coaches them and his process works and so if this these comp I'm not familiar too familiar with these competitions but I gener understand if these competitions like help you get into better school if they give you credibility and you have wealth like the question is who's going to pay for it right CU high schoolers don't have the money to pay

50:32for it but if [snorts] like you're in a circle of like wealthy private schools and things of that nature you have these parents willing to throw money then I think you could have something there um and so if that's the case I'd look into T like how to tutors market right because if people people have to study somehow to do well on this are they going to YouTube are there YouTube creators you could use are they going on like there might not be an influencer for this but you really have to get creative think it's out the box of like like how is the current industry that is

50:58getting paid for tutoring this getting clients and then figure okay my app's better or what if your app helps those current tutors and then the tutors pay you like just get really creative about that because I also think a big thing is you're still in high school man like build this [ __ ] and launch it and you'll learn so much me it took me two years for my first app and the amount of [ __ ] I could do the redo it in two we in a week now and probably make more money than I made in two years off of it I I can guarantee you that but the

51:25reason that the reason I met is from that right I wouldn't have met Alex if I didn't go down that path I would have met in investors mentors friends so I'd highly recommend one doing it um okay but if your focus is truly making money there's probably better avenues that Alex is no yeah my I don't think my focus is making money I think is like actually just going down this path itself um and yeah I kind of relate with what you were saying with the whole rowing thing um this is kind of in that space of helping kids get into like stronger schools so I like into good

51:56schools so like I didn't really think about that it's a pretty good idea just think about what what strings you're pulling right like think about what you you're not selling you're not selling it's it's all about sales you're not selling um get a better score or like be the top of your class you're selling how to get into an Ivy League okay yeah yeah that's much more valuable than a high score in front of whatever a judge or whatever the competitions are okay yeah um 10 your [music] chances of getting into Harvard or Yale 10x your chances as students who've worked with us have a three times more likely chance of

52:29getting into Harvard stand out right um those are the things you want to pull because every parent especially if you're talking about private schools man they are that person that's going to these schools and it's a bragging rights thing so i' really lean on that um and reach out by the way like I said feel free to reach out to Alex or I um always here to help so thank you so much yeah of course thanks for coming up here and then pay actually was really interesting at first it was an idea like okay I'm going to dismiss it but when you spoke about getting into Ivy Leagues it changed my

53:05whole perception I told you bro I told we work together well man all right what's up what's up what's up guys um I kind of had a question more going into like your launch process um I think I'm apologies if I missed it but it was like four to five influencers at start and it was just like retainer deals of one two post [music] a week no a month a month one post a week four four posts a month got it got it and then when you guys I think uh Conor you kind of answered this but like you guys are going to push more with volume

53:41meaning just adding influencers or just posting more per influencer um adding more influencers like actually right now right now what we're trying to shift towards is going from draining and uh creators audience to join our app to having more viral content reaching a wider audience so we're Shifting The Way We structure deals in a way where we're incentivizing the Creator to post viral [ __ ] instead of stuff that they're used to posting does that make sense got you got you and you guys are kind of giving them a little bit of a framework like hey maybe you should try this and you get let them

54:19rip definitely more built a yeah we built a framework that basically is like a structure but it it allows them to be creative in the way their content Works cuz if you're too controlling with it and you do something that is not organic to what their followers and viewers like it's not GNA do well yeah fire fire yeah thanks for the input guys appreciate it wor wow we've been on here for an hour it's just flew by [ __ ] crazy yeah I'm enjoying this a lot actually I got a Yap more I'm a D1 yapper man could have went to [ __ ] y for that make an app for that how to

54:58talk more get into colleges Co want to should we close it off yeah I say let's give another five minutes 6:15 we'll hop off all right guys remaining questions hit us probably won't be doing this for another another a little while so yeah what's up Jan hit me on Twitter too guys been posting more on there hey can you hear me to be like Alex can hear you man hey hey what's going on I actually just joined the call I missed earlier I was working but um just joined the community and I've been following Arabs so I'm not sure exactly what you guys were going about earlier by assum it's influencer

55:40marketing and so things I've been following Aid's Playbook and I basically got on a call with a Creator yesterday over 100,000 followers and I basically got her to partner up with me on an app I didn't even create or anything it was just an idea and I guess she really likes it it's in a very Niche Community within spirituality and so I think I was going to offer like Equity at the beginning but I was going to do like a REV share deal and the same thing is like for another influence me up [music] back in my emails today this guy got over 500k followers on Tik Tok probably

56:14like over a million followers as a total social media Network like within his uh domain also in spirituality and philosophy so I'm not even sure like [laughter] what they even offer like how much like in rev share or like Equity or anything like I'm very new to this I come from like a paid ads background and when it comes to like influencer marketing I have no idea what I'm doing but like one thing I'm just kind of thinking is just being generous about it so I'm just curious if you guys got anything to say about that I think ARA's Playbook is very interesting I don't know if you know about it Conor but it's

56:49like bringing in IND give equity and then they kind of manage it yeah I think it really depends on situation if you have the capital you should maybe try and get her on a retainer so I'll actually tell you a quick story I'll keep this very short so my friend Zack gagari he actually brought in an influencer fory and um he realized very quickly that they didn't really need the the guy anymore so they tried to terminate the contract and now he's taking them to court because he realizes how successful CI is and wants to wants to share of it so bringing someone for equ is very touchy subject maybe they

57:23won't pull their weight in the in the years to come when you're doing all the work you know so I also will say I know I know we're on AR Discord right now and I have a lot of respect for the guy but I look at it as like how many times it's been copied and pasted right with crayo at worked because the kid's name was but he was he was the only one um say what you want free speech um he was the only one making a lot of clipping content and pushing it and that's a big thing of making money online right so a

57:52lot of people fled do it it's almost like the Ean Gody audience of like make money quick and build a product around there which is super intelligent like it's super smart play but I think I honestly if you don't have money to give her give some Equity but you can also structure the equity deal that hey I'm willing to give you 5 10% but you have to you can have a cliff in there that to stay on for a year they have to do X Y and Z in order to get that Equity so you're not just signing over Equity you're signing over Equity with conditions where you can set them up so

58:19that you don't get [ __ ] right like what if you guys blow up and she didn't do [ __ ] yeah yeah yeah that's exactly what I'm doing I was actually going to do like a yeah five and 10% and then like a vesting schedule where over time the person gets more Equity or or sorry it's gonna be red share but yeah how how big are they in your space so this one guy that responded to me today I think he's like one of the biggest guys U and just for a privacy reason I'm just trying to keep his name low just you know priv can you tell us like the

58:51industry or the app or oh so so for the app I'm actually build it's a it's a spiritual app so it's spiritual inspiration basically cting various quotes and wisdom for inspiration from philosophy spirituality whatever so that's one thing building the other one uh I am trying to keep it low because I think it's a unique Market with AI so I'm just trying to keep it low for now but yeah it's also I would recommend protect yourself and even the money dude pay like a small fee to have him post and see how converts like the headache if you have multiple people reaching back to you that are big

59:30like you can't be giving up all that Equity give Equity to people that actually like are going to be their longterm derive a lot of value and like exponentially give value um which I think that is if they push you and they help you grow life spot growth so I I would honestly say pay him don't even give Equity what's up Ken k all right thank you Jen come back appr reach out anything yeah how do I leave the panel I have no idea how to leave it I'll it there you go no worries okay welcome Ken y guys did he just cut out he did cut out yo

1:00:15you cut out yo [laughter] bro's in a cave [ __ ] yo guys I'm not running any related with um I'm not running a s business but I'm related to it I run a prioritized agency that helps s startups uh skill by building better systems for the S Fel so like I build better learning Pages for them to convert profic to uh turn those leads into users and I also help them with SEO to round for keywords to generate leads and also I also help them with rebranding my question is like as a Founder in your perspective do you think this is like useful I want to see what you guys think

1:01:07so I could maybe change how I approach s Founders what do you guys think uh yeah I think it's definitely useful it's definitely useful but you just got to do a lot of Outreach because most people won't reply and that's just what you got to deal with yeah yeah I've seen that a lot so my Approach changed today I thought of like since I do more of like websit and stuff I would roast a bunch of websites post them and tag like Founders around it this could build like kind of hype and I could fun out uh high quality since I'm like showing value than saying it what do you

1:01:51guys think I mean I think at the end of day if you're Prov value at over volume like Value Plus volume you're going to win it might not happen overnight um but I think if you're truly providing value to people and your product does what you say it's going to do like there's no issue there um great so so yeah so my Agy of like I categories tugs into two like areas the distribution site and which is like Distributing for my Ag and like working on my agency which is like doing the work for the founders and startups so with distribution I thought of like some

1:02:36distribution ideas that I came up with that I want to share yeah yeah so like me running an agency I to of like I can [music] distribute which one was really Cod and warm Outreach second was tapping into communities related to my Niche which I have only two at the moment and creating valuable content to build an audience so like I build an audience on like Twitter LinkedIn and stuff I create uh lead uh lead like lead t uh sorry [music] I cre Stu like magnet I know talk yeah then I also I also came across like uh using like referrals so I could give Founders like an affiliation program so

1:03:39that you can refer other people to the agenty and I also thought of like creating a program for like influencing marketing so I reach out to influencers I give them a a link where like when he promote my service to like throughout the content then they get paid for the share if anyone signs up for that and I told so talk thought of like creating a newsletter to F it so I have a couple of questions I want to ask which is like I don't know whether you guys have gone through this like how do I tab into communities the right way so like have you done any of this yet by

1:04:21the way sorry quickly have you done any of this no not all I've not done I've not done all I've done a few but not all I would say like focus on doing it over a long period of time before change it cuz I feel like you have a lot of irons in the fire on what's working like we strictly focus on influencer marketing that's it we don't over complicate it I think like if you talk to people and they're buying your product you're fine just keep doing that same thing You' doing over and over again um yeah so all right all right cool yo D DM us DM us and we're happy to talk

1:04:59about uh your agency all right I already sent you guys a DM both of you get to it all right I gu any final any any final questions comments concerns yeah we might we might call it a day it's a good hour and 20 minutes of yeah it's fun great you guys don't mind follow me on Twitter I'm trying to that been a little Incognito the past couple months but uh yes Hamza we hate Apple taking 30% that's it's always a [ __ ] coming 30 soon but um yeah hit us on Twitter yo let's get some let's get some W in the chat for Zack W's in the chat

1:05:42for Zach Zach got us here big up all right cool thank you guys thank you guys it will all be recorded it will be posted much love Z how does that 30% feel man [laughter] that's what I want to hear hates that all right word see you everyone everyone peace