# App Ideas That People Are Already Searching For (Steal This Strategy)

Channel: App Masters
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cq6KhOH6GAw
Duration: 18 min
Language: English
Words: 2871
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/cq6KhOH6GAw

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[0:00] Coming up, what if I told [music] you your next million-dollar app idea is actually hiding in someone else's app? That's exactly what I call the Tentacle Strategy will help you find. Stay tuned. [music] What is up, App Nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. And in this video, I'm going to help you find the profitable app ideas from day one. Instead of asking yourself what app I should build, ask what tentacle I can pull from a successful app. Let me show you what I mean. First, I want to show you the problem. All right? Here is the RevenueCat State of Subscriptions Report. As you can see, there's been an

[0:53] onslaught of new apps ever since the beginning of 2026, right? When vibe coding completely exploded, we've seen so many new apps being launched, and primarily on iOS. So, the competition is very, very steep. Even worse, okay? You can see, and if you can't read that chart, here's this chart. If you can't really read it, here's what I'm going to

[1:24] tell you. The apps launched before 2020, all right? Before 2020, they generate 70%, 69% of all subscription revenues. And apps launched in 2025 or later, aka the vibe coding era, account for just 3% of the overall app subscription revenue. That's at a macro level, all right? So, if you're thinking about app ideas from your dome, from your head, you're probably going to fail. Here's what you should do instead. First, study the category of apps that actually generate money. Now, this is RevenueCat's report again. You see the average revenue per install. You can see certain categories have higher revenue per install than others. Health and fitness, one of the

[2:20] biggest. Then education. Then business. So, I personally would try to stay in those three categories if I can. The categories don't change much when you change it from day 14 to day 60. They pretty much remain the same. All right? So, meaning why I like this chart is day 14, your break even is probably about $3 for health and fitness. By day 60, close to $4. So, if you spend $1,000 and you can wait a couple of months to get your hopefully, you know, two to $3,000 back or $4,000 back, you'll be okay. So, this is what I like

[3:03] to focus on. Find app categories that have high revenue per install. So, here's how we're going to do all of this. Pay attention. I call it the Tentacle Strategy. Now, if you hear anybody else calling it, you let me know because I made this up. All right? And I'll explain exactly what this strategy does. So, I'm going to

[3:25] pick on Calm. This is Calm. This is the octopus. They're the big core app. This is a successful app. Now, Calm started out with meditation. But as they got bigger and bigger, so they started out with a tentacle. Just meditation. But as they get bigger and bigger and bigger, they need to add more content because they need to capture more of the market, right? They raised a lot of money. They need to get bigger and bigger. So, what they do? They started coming out with sleep stories, soundscapes, focus music, green noise, as an example, right? They started adding more and more of these tentacles so that they can be

[4:07] bigger and bigger and target a different type of audience. You can only say meditate, meditate, meditate so frequently before it gets old and users just kind of get what you do, right? So, you have to add on new and new products to get to that next level of success. Now, Calm is a big brand. They can't optimize their keywords for all these types of keywords and rank well for them, right? They don't even

[4:34] rank number one for meditation. So, they're not worried about ASO in that regard. They're worried about keeping their existing users and trying to capture new users beyond their first tentacle of meditation. So, this gives us Indies a way to leverage one of these tentacles, right? I'll show you how to do that. All right. So, I like to use ASO. Why? It's organic traffic. The other reason is it's free traffic. And the last reason is it's one of the best sources of traffic to get sales, all right? It's a very high converting channel because people are searching for soundscapes, people are searching for green noise. And if you

[5:21] can get your app to rank pretty well, let's say one or top three, you will drive sales, all right? Because these are high converting channels. And I want to give you examples of apps that have followed this tentacle strategy, okay? So, stay tuned. But, I'm going to show you how to do it. Here we go. You're going to use a tool called appmagic.rocks, appmagic.rocks. It's completely free. Now, you can pick a month, you can pick a quarter, you can pick a year. Does not matter. Here's what I did. I sorted it with health and

[5:50] fitness. Right here. All right? And I only selected iPhone iPad. Because iPhone iPad users tend to pay a little bit more than Android users. Okay? Then we'll look at top grossing. So, I already know from RevenueCat's data that this is one of the highest revenue per install. I'm going to scroll. Okay? I'm going to try to scroll. Obviously,

[6:12] there's some popular ones here. But I'm going to scroll a little bit more, give you the example that I'm currently looking for. And you can obviously pick Better Sleep, one that I saw right here. But I'm going to pick on this app called Endel. So, I'm going to click on this link. I've already done that here. Now I'm here. Now AppMagic is saying that Endel makes about $500,000 a month with just about 100,000 downloads. That's an amazing ratio. That's the type of ratio that I

[6:40] want to see. Either three to one or up. Okay? Again, get to that number, $3 per install. This rough math says $5 per install because of all the renewals and all that stuff, right? And if you want to double-check your math you can put Endel into Sensor Tower. Everybody should know Sensor Tower by now. And Sensor Tower's saying 600,000 with 100,000 downloads. So, the ratio is very, very solid. You like that type of ratio. So, now Endel is focused on focus keywords and sleep sounds. All right? The next thing you want to do to find the keywords that Endel, those tentacles that Endel may not be able to pay attention to, is next

[7:25] you want to put Endel into one of my favorite ASO tools right now, asomobile.net, asomobile.net. I've got Endel in here, and then you're going to put in app keywords. Now, the reason why I love ASO mobile right now is is it gives me all the keywords that Endel indexes for. Okay? Once again, it gives me all the keywords that Endel indexes for. So, you can see new index, competitors, comparisons, suggestions, all that stuff. But, I want the index, right? Because Endel has done a good

[7:56] job. Right? Calm has done a great job. So, they're probably indexed for a lot of keywords. Unlike other ASO tools where you actually pick the app and you have to input the keywords, ASO Mobile will give you all the keywords. Now, I've sorted this by search ads. This is the volume of traffic according to Apple. And what we're trying to find is about six keywords. Really, ultimately, we need two or three and that's it. But, we want to find six to 10 in case our first two to three were wrong and we have backup, right? So, we have plan A, plan B, and plan C. All right? So, here's

[8:37] what I'm going to do. I'm going to keep scrolling, keep scrolling. Now, you want to find keywords with roughly a search score search ads traffic score of 30 and up. Okay? Roughly around 30. 28's fine, 25 is fine, but 20 and lower, not that great. Okay? So, I'm going to scroll a little bit. You can see sleep sounds,

[8:56] but probably pretty competitive, right? I'm going to come down here a little bit. Mood. All right, maybe. Mood tracker, maybe. Anxiety relief, decent. But, here's one, brown noise. So, this has 35 and 35. These are the type of keywords that I'm looking for. Brown noise, 35 score, brown noise free, 35 score. Because I like these keywords. Meaning, if I can rank well for brown noise, I can probably rank well for brown noise free. So, they're back-to-back, right? I like these keywords. If there was brown noise app that had decent traffic, too, that's even better, right? So, how do you check? You can see that the complexity score

[9:41] I'm looking for something lower than three. And brown noise meets that. So, I'm going to double-check. So, I'm going to go into the App Store right here. And I'm going to search for brown noise. So, I've done that for you already. And I can see this app has only 645 ratings. Now, pretty decent

[9:58] but it doesn't have 10,000. Okay? This one has 271 thousand. This next one, 1.8. So, I'm really looking for apps that have brown noise in the title. 1.8, not bad. Number one, 640 five. Number 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 is only has 11. So, I feel like, okay, ASO Mobile told me low competition. It's 2.5. It's under

[10:26] that three number. It has that 35 search traffic score. So, it's above that 30 that Steve told me to did look for. And the apps out there right now, not too many are focused on brown noise. But, so give you another example, let's say focus, which Endel is really trying to target in their title, right? So, you can see, uh not the best ASO keyword for you, Endel. But, let's put in sleep sounds cuz that's what they're also

[10:53] going after. Let's see if they're number one for this as well. No. Endel, probably not good keywords for you. Okay? So, these are very competitive keywords. So, let me go back. Here's Endel. Give him a little plug here. But, let me go back to sleep sounds. As you can see, this one sleep sound has sleep sounds. This white noise deep sleep sounds has 205,000 ratings and has sleep sounds in the title. So, if the app has a lot of ratings and has the same keyword that you're targeting in its title, you're

[11:27] probably not going to beat them. Okay? Cuz Apple will reward them. And I'm going to base ratings based off of revenue and downloads. So, the higher those numbers, the higher the likelihood that the revenue numbers are pretty high, and the higher the likelihood that I'm not n o t not going to beat them, okay? So, I'm going to move on, but brown noise I feel like I can beat. And then, I go ahead and build a brown noise app and collect those revenues. So, if you're not a believer, let me give you

[11:57] some examples. Here is one of our apps. Made $550,000 last year. And here the keywords we're number one for. There's actually a whole lot more and I'm working on getting us to number one and I've already gotten a few of those keywords to number one, but I'm coming for more. And this is the exact strategy that we use. We looked at the keywords, then decided to build the app using the tentacle strategy. And lucky for us, there's a lot of search volume for the tentacle of this particular octopus, so to speak, right? Here's another one of our apps. It's a little bit smaller and it's doing about two to three

[12:41] thousand dollars a month, but again, utilizing the same tentacle strategy. Again, for this particular app, it's not in one of those high RPI categories, so I built this app way before I really started thinking about app cat- category, but we still used the tentacle strategy here. And this is The good news is I'm not spending any money on marketing on either of those apps. I'm spending a little bit on this app cuz it's doing much bigger numbers, so I'm spending some money so I can scale this up into seven figures, but for this particular app, this is all organic, right? It's $2,000, $3,000 every month

[13:19] purely organic. No ad spend whatsoever. Here's one of our client's app. This was launched a bit ago. This was launched in 2023 actually in March, but you can see we were profitable from day one. Right? The app has done a lot better recently, and now we're starting to put ads behind this app, but we were able to get it to about 15 12 to 15,000 dollars a month with just purely organic using this tentacle strategy. So, again, we didn't build the app based off of an idea that we had. We looked at the market, we found the keywords, we noticed the keywords were not as competitive, and no one was

[14:01] paying attention to it. Then we decided to build the app. Okay? So, let's summarize, shall we? One, pick a high RPI app category. We saw health and fitness, education, and business. Pick one of those categories. They have a high RPI, revenue per install. Find a big app with hopefully about three to one revenue to downloads ratio. We saw Endel have about a five to one,

[14:28] and then Sensor Tower said six to one. So, you're looking for something with that big of a ratio, meaning more revenues, less downloads. So, at least 300,000 a month in revenue, and then about 100,000 in downloads. Now, you don't need 300,000, but I like to focus on those six figure a month type of apps because they tend to have a little bit more tentacles that I can

[14:53] work off of. Okay? Next, we're going to find six to 10 keywords with search score of 30-ish. Now, we found brown noise, brown noise free. We could also have found green noise, green noise free. So, those six to 10, I want to accumulate six to 10 roughly with a search score of 30, and that are low difficulty. I broke down how you kind of figure out if a keyword is low difficulty. You look at the ASO tool, and then you also look at the search results. Because sometimes the ASO tool is not always accurate, meaning they'll tell you might be a little bit competitive. We saw

[15:31] for a client we did this exact thing, but when I looked at the search results, no one had that particular keyword in its title, and we were able to get it to number one right upon launch. So, it was that easy. All right, if you believe you got to get to number one though, you can get to number one, then go ahead and build the app with the simplest features

[15:51] possible. Simplest features possible. And once the app gets downloads, then figure out how to better monetize. Meaning work on your paywall, work on your onboarding, work on your pricing. In step five, when you're building it, good enough is good enough. Cuz you need to get to number one for that particular keyword, and once you do, you got time now to fix everything else. And then, once the app hits about 5K, work on new features or 10K, whenever you want to figure that out. And ultimately, once it gets above 10K, that's when you can start to decide, "Hey, do I want to put any paid advertising behind it?" Again, to get

[16:30] paid advertising to work, you need a high RPI, because paid advertising is going to get expensive. The average cost per install is roughly around $2 to $5, around $2 to $5, okay? So, your RPI, or your revenue per install, needs to be bigger than two, right? So, that's why that RPI is so important, because you can get to a certain level organically,

[16:54] for free. Let's say that's six figures a year, but to get to seven figures a year, you're going to probably need paid to go above that seven-figure-a-year mark. Not to say you can't do it all organically, but like the initial report I showed you, it's not 2020 anymore. It's 2026, and people are vibe coding everything

[17:17] right now. So, the competition is huge. That's why I use the tentacle strategy to build our apps moving forward. All right, that is it. If you need help figuring out what app idea you need or what is your distribution channel going to be for your particular app, well, check out appmasters.com if you want us to execute for you. All right, that's it. Till next time, I'll see you on the

[17:44] next video. [music]

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