How He Scaled a Social App to $100K MRR & a 7-Figure Exit

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0:11[Music] well hello there what is up app Nation it is Steve Pou founder of rms.com the place you go when you want actionpack content related to helping you grow your app downloads and more importantly those revenues today I've got a phenomenal guest and he's built a great library of screens that you're really going to want to see but let's talk about his accolades right he built an app took it to 100 Mr had a seven figure exit you're going to learn all the lessons he did maybe all the rights and all the wrongs from spending $1.5 million on Instagram ads so without further Ado let's bring in Alex

0:59[Music] Alex welcome to the show my friend thank you so much and I I love the world setup I love the the world pumping of the the intro pumping I love it oh well people are excited just as I am to have you on so congratulations on your most recent exit how you feeling since then now that you know I know how hard it is to be a founder and you're like okay this was was a success yeah it's it's a it's a good time to to look back back at all at all the challenges uh take a breath but you don't want to Coast too much you know

1:41because uh when you when you have an accident like that like like we had the risk is that you become complacent and then um you don't want to you know you don't want to linger too much on it and so that's why uh we already have new challenges and one of these is this new library that we feel was missing in the in the industry uh but yeah it's I think it's uh it's great to turn that that chapter and close it and and and close it well because like along the way even when you're drafting the contract um you never know if the deal is actually gonna

2:14close or you know this industry so many people make it so easy but Apple can take away your apps there are people like those or meta can bu you or anything can happen or legals legal can go sideways so you don't take it for granted it's super stressful and when you actually close a deal and the money is in the bank you actually finally take a day off maybe yeah how long did you take off oh I would say I I don't know lately um lately it's been more of like a period of uh I would say half of the day I'm working and half of the day

2:49reflection and I'm like playing chess or these things and uh I'm actually right now in Belgium because uh of some dealings with biotech and uh yeah and uh I I think every once in a while it's good to take three steps back and this is one of those perfect times right because like when you're in the middle of it and the ads are not working and you feel that the sky is falling you know it's not the time to actually uh be able to have the the perspective but yeah I felt that uh it has been useful also because of that to turn the page and start a new chapter and yeah love it

3:24and that chapter we're going to talk about is screen design.com where you can really Alex will tell you more but you can really look at the pay wall the onboarding of some of the top apps in the industry and you see their revenues and Alex what I love is you guys actually put in the work like you literally went through uploaded voice chat enabled uploaded a photo saw the results of the photo you really break down the uiux of some of the top apps out there as well yeah we're gonna get to 2,000 apps inside uh pretty quickly and the the second competitor is like 600 and it took a year uh for us to to

4:02do this and actually it stemmed from the fact that a bit like you doing your own podcast where you show show the screenshots of of the apps yeah back in the day we had to optimize everything in order to make it because we we do not we did not have debt we did not have Equity we we had to make it from ground zero and uh and in order to do that we had to optimize all the on boarding and the paywalls and we were while we were doing like every a lot of people on sure are doing are downloading a lot of these subscription apps on the phone so that

4:30terabyte on the iPhone or or even less is going is going away really quickly and then when you see the onboard actually you're onboarded so you don't see it anymore it's gone on boarded you so say byebye and I'm not gonna show you the the secret sauce and so we decided to uh to build it for ourselves and we we thought it could have been useful for for the industry it was something that was missing because actually the iPhone screens the preview screens you can see them from uh apple.com but the actual onboarding flows you cannot um you could not until now especially for subscription especially for for for the

5:05industry so I feel it's it's it's going to be really valuable we're getting amazing uh amazing feedback and uh we're getting both big customers who want to uh for us to to actually uh dra like design their own new on boarding their new copy interes this Cutting Edge knowledge that we have acquired by uh by getting this library and also we have inds who just pay 25 bucks a month and uh and and they have access to it then and they can go ahead and and see I want apps in this category education or Fitness or whatever I want apps that only make at least 50,000 a month and

5:41they the onboarding payall and preview of The W app and there's also search engine so people can search like payable or whatever and get inspiration quick inspiration in order to iterate and in order to um actually get and then with the statistics and mix panel in order to actually then F tune what what's the perfect perfect experience for the user and what's going to actually drive uh profitability for for for these developers I like how you say no free trial soft pay wall yeah we also do these things because like the other all the other tools in in the in the in the in in this in all the other libraries

6:14what they do is uh they're not from the subscription app space so they don't know about hard pays uh soft pbls they don't know about onboarding steps they simply make tools for designers and that's it you know but this could be like giant banking apps and and they're not too much related to conversion and marketing optimization so I we felt that it was something that was missing and uh we are pretty stoked yeah to to launch it like actually we launched it like a couple days ago yeah congrats man I want to say hi to a few people Urus is here Kevin congrats on that feature simonas

6:48says petition for Steve to use his own dad jokes instead of AI generated one all right deal but right they're gonna be really bad what's up Miguel Hassan is here as well bomu is from Switzerland kind of close by and then we got somebody from London as well and then Caesar from looks like topcat is here as well all right and then let's get into the app so it was this app that you ended up selling but talk to me about the journey like what were you seeing in the market and then how did you go about like really just the early days of your recent exit Bo app social yeah yeah by

7:21the way brother is is asking what the app is called it's called screens design.com and uh yeah you can go to that website uh you you can just Google it I I think Google already indexed it it's very new it's very fresh so yeah um the app that we initially built ourselves uh it was called boost up Social uh at first we we we made a mistake uh and we made a a web app for hashtags I mean it was not necessarily a mistake it could have worked but you you can understand how clunky it can be for a mom and pop shop to import on the

7:54desktop hashtags and search the hashtags and they export it on mobile on Instagram in order to then publish them together with the with a caption and so we quickly realized we we we did have no intention of getting into the business of iOS subscription app what was it it's like we we thought we would do SAS or something like that but then we saw a really good fit there because Instagram is mobile we have this hashtag search engine that we have built we have the technology how about we put the search engine inside and app and we Tred to reach these Mom and Pops and creators

8:27and influencer and all these people who want more exposure on the Instagram platform and we saw another app it was called hashtag expert back in the day and the guy like the guy scaled it to 400k uh 400k in in spend a month some months not all the months but but with with metad and back in the day I I also had friends in e-commerce and in affiliate who were wizards of the uh Facebook ads game I'm talking about 20 2022 we we we launched the first yeah the beginning of 2021 end of 2021 beginning of 2022 and at first man the first months we thought this is not

9:06going to work the the the math here is not mathing uh it's gonna be hard we're gonna do something else I don't know and then we kept at it we kept iterating and iterating and iterating and uh chiseling at it you know and then and then at one point like in spring because also you look at this app and you think it's not a seasonal app right yeah this is a very seasonal half spring and summer are really good months why because um it's like the season of the human being when there is spring and summer people want to grow people want to start businesses they want to do like do their hustles

9:42you know and then like winter and Autumn there it's a little bit slower and we felt it ourselves too well it could be also because for example Christmas period is more competitive on the adside with they competing against all the e-commerce but I have a strong feeling that we discounted also the period when we launched it because it was Autumn and or or um Christmas time and then when February started to pop we saw the numbers go up and we started scaling ads SP up to 12K a day on on on meta ads and what one point we were higher than Skypey and through social as the top

10:19downloaded social media apps of the day unfortunately didn't last long everyone wants to sell to you that everything is infinitely scalable that you're going to make a billion bucks a day unfortunately you know uh unfortunately things are not like that but uh you can still reap a very profit you can still make a very profitable app and know when to scale when know when to pull back and it's half science half art I would say I see I love it okay did you start off with just running ads right off the bat yeah man because uh well at first we thought ASO uh but pretty quickly we

10:54realized also we were unlucky because when we launched that that's when iPhone uh I iOS 14.5 came out and so all the Privacy walls you know and uh and meta had still had to adopt and we tried a bit with ASO um but uh we only had the ashtag thing and then my business partner one day came to me and we said how about we instead of just doing an ashtag app we make a toolkit so we make seven apps in one we packet it with value and this way we can maybe charge double and make the math make sense on the acquisition front and it it immediately clicked with me that

11:33and we went at work with it maybe like as by that by themselves would have not them been that impressive but packed together you know it was a s a useful Suite of tools that small business owners could find very very useful uh in order to optimize their Tik toks and Instagrams so you mean like hey it's not just a hashtag expert you're going to help you write better content you're going to have story templates you can have these profile stuff you can have everything it's like a tool like a canva for social media exactly yeah all these things and now the guys change the screenshot so it's not it's not ours

12:10anymore I want to say so um but uh yeah this is not Alex's baby anymore all right these are not his words exactly and uh but but yeah that's completely right it's not gonna be just a hashtag tool also because hashtag expert started before us and they were already ahead they they they trained algo The Meta algo so well and they were spending a lot of money and so we're behind so we we had to make it a a a power punch of value in order to to to make our users feel that it was something worth ex exchanging their money uh for and man it

12:45worked I have to say I I I think it was a great bet that we did there uh because also that tool was unique that than at that point in the space there was asht expert for sure there were other apps that were doing other things but we were the only one with like seven things really well done the hashtag engine was like I would say the very best uh well right now the the equation has changed a lot with ch GPT and all these things and even hashtags now nowadays are not that relevant but if you look back a couple of years ago they were one of the legit

13:13strategy that one could use on on Instagram and Tik Tok in order to to gain more more exposure so so yeah and and it took a lot of learnings and a lot of battles even with meta you know they can one day they ban your account these alos they ban your account and then they come up with some absurd reason and there it's all algorithmical but uh they have so many advertisers that you have to fight your way back into the game and in order to regain your account and uh yeah I want to say to many people who maybe you know they they incurring this

13:43issues to not to to not uh to keep keep on going try to gain back the account from could have happened to Apple as well didn't happen to us but I hear that some people also lose access to their apple uh developer account or meta or Tik Tok whatever like keep on fighting keep trying to talk to support do everything you can it has been pivotal because if we stopped when meta told us oh this is a permanent band would have we we would have never made made it like we did I mean I'm not saying that we made a dualingo or anything like that but yeah 100K Mr I'm I'm pretty

14:17confident the result yeah and uh but many times man it was like super stressful because like we didn't have ASO at that point because the app was seven tools so maybe you can tell me how to do it but no keyword do you go for you know because we had the ashtag thing but uh but uh yeah man yeah hey Alex I do wanna I want to talk about the product you when you decided to be a complete toolkit was that just talking to users or was that something that you saw in ads too how did you validate that because Alex for me it's scary building more of these

14:50features and trying to you said the best you said I built seven Fe features and they were all really good and that's really hard to do so what made you conf confident that this would pay off it was marketing intuition to be honest with you it was not even like it's easy to say oh I listen to the users or or this and that and then for sure but being in the business we already were in this business of uh of the agency helped m mom and B to grow their presence on Instagram and we felt that the value prop would have resonated so it it was already years that we were

15:24in the space let's say it was not like a new app that you launch that you know like I launch a fishing app and I don't know nothing about fishing right we were already in the space so I had the intuition of of what our Target user could resonate with and when my business partner told me hey how about how we do this and in order to do to do that I immediately made a calculation okay right now meta ads for us are not that profitable but if we we if we value packet and we know how to delivery with the onboarding and the pay wall it's

15:56going to it's going to hit it's going to hit the name in the ass and uh and and yeah we were we were pretty right and uh we were pretty right in in that sense and it took a while to to start the machine uh of of advertising uh but then when it was uh when the train started moving um the results started coming in and uh and yeah I think it was smart delivering as far as on boarding and pay very much we we we made like a triangle in the in the onboarding and we say the foundation to a great presence on social media and it was like lighting up with

16:32hashtags and like AI chat and then we said you're also getting these bonus tools I like it I feel it was hyping up uh our users and uh and to be honest with you what we saw is that at the end of the day that the chat was uh being used a lot because like that in time it was the AI the AI Revolution came over with the chats and we also implemented that chat inside and and yeah that was used the hashtags used and some I got see if that thing is still in there man yeah yeah the triangle I got to see if that triangle is still in there proba

17:08probably yeah it is are you did you did you P I'm gonna go through it I'm gonna go through it I love it I love that idea too you know the reason why I asked to Alex sorry the Mary has the same question it's like you can sell you could have probably sold each app differently and had seven different apps you know yeah it's it sound sounds good in though how can you sell the collection of apps nobody pays for assets these days people pay for Revenue so you have to have profit in order to sell this collection you're not going to sell a collection of apps that that sits

17:41there on the App Store like one of the things that I want to say also about screens design is that we saw there I don't know three million apps on the App Store you know how much how many apps make money 10,000 20,000 apps make money if you remove China it's probably like 10,000 12,000 so actual money I'm not like four 5K Mr or more so having just an app and like taking our app and like segmenting it and and trying to sell it you would find no very hard uh you you would sell it for for for very little money you need something that actually

18:15has a scale that makes profits day in and day out if you wanna if you want to sell it so in theory it's true if you look at the asset uh like s selling you know a pot of gold or iron or whatever yeah it's an asset but in this business it's cash flow based so you have to have something that generates profit otherwise you're not going to be able to sell it I think unless you have some revolutionary technology well it's a great segue to what I wanted to move on next Alex is you spent over 1.5 million on Instagrams how were you able to what would be the

18:45top like three lessons that you learn from running profitable ads first of all I think that um one very important thing to understand in my opinion because there are so many theories these days so I wanna I I'll tell you my don't take my word for granted don't take anyone's work for granted at the end of the day you have to bet your own money into it what I want to say is I think the train is like a 10 ton train that you have to start moving and at first you will put the first 10 bucks 100 bucks and you will see Zero bucks back and you think oh

19:21this is a scam this don't work meta are not for me what I want to say is that these days especially in my opinion it's also becoming a game of capit Capital so you need to have be willing to invest a couple thousand bucks I would say upwards of 10 20 30,000 bucks in order for the actual machine to start delivering profits if you want to take that route of of meta ads it very possible that it can work with just a couple thousand bucks but if you're not willing to put those money and not saying like spend a thousand bucks a day start with maybe 50 bucks 100 bucks I

19:55know that the Privacy thresholds are not hitting but in my opinion still it's better than nothing if you don't have if if you don't have cash it's still better than nothing even if you're like and second we go to the second one right now is that yeah there are all these super experts that make it super technical like if you go to some Discord Pages or slack threats they make your mind blow you know with all these technicalities and I feel that someone who launched a cool concept and my work is gonna oh my God I have to do and and all these 10 acronyms per product and people go crazy

20:30you know and like do Advantage uh Advantage Plus campaigns put inside the creatives and have a sense of like iterating on Creative makes them more C make them more catchy on the hooks use angles it's very important to have marketing sense there um to have the story check Tik Tok check what's working on Tik Tok and then understand what's a CTA is a call to actions hooks angles understand these Concepts because at the end of the day I also agree with those who say that these days 80% 90% of the game is the creative and I would say that 7% of the game is the capital the

21:09willingness of some people when they have the right product to be willing to spend a couple thousand bucks in order to have the 10 ton train start moving because if you only go in and you oh I'm going to put in only 200 bucks it's gonna and then and then decide and maybe stop everything it's gonna be I think hard because meta has not yet learned who is the right uh the right target for your audience maybe you can take another path like do ASO or Tik Tok influencers at that point and third I would say is as I was saying before um these platforms right now they have so many

21:46layers of management they might have 10 layers of management so when you talk to support when you have a problem like they restrict your account for wrong reasons and man I've taken the policy course I think 10 times by now you know like oh my God because you know because if we didn't run we were not making money so we had to like you know run by the book and now we had so many competitors who didn't care they never got restricted or anything and we like we were hit but we always managed to get it back so we have to fight the be able to be willing to fight the fight like

22:16keep talking to support the support says no you keep on going you know because if you're right at the end of the day I I I I was willing to go to Dublin at some point in order to have my account unrestricted because what what are you going to do like if today your app works well with with meta you need to be able to to advertise it and it was legit it was all legit so so you yeah I think those are going to be the mistakes like not having marketing sense in the hooks in the understanding CD's angles and uh not willing to put enough capital and uh

22:49and um if if you hit roadblocks you have to be able to go either around there around them or through them and yeah you have to keep the hustle alive hey Alex how long I love that 10 ton analogy aspect of it how long do you think it took you and how much do you think you were if you can remember the time when you're like this is not going to work how much were you spending and how long did it take to finally get it to a point where you're like oh this might work yeah so at first uh I would say we were spending like 50 100 bucks a

23:22day and uh for the first month I we said all right maybe we're gonna Break Even but not make zero profits and then so that's why I saying this is not working you know yeah and and then and then when February hit and our app is a seasonal app which like I would say nobody would like like nobody not nobody but like it's hard to estimate oh you see a app social media to it why is it a seasonal app right and instead when it's spring people want to start that business they want to go for it also summer and uh when February hit man we we we we started like see the

23:59trial come in Trials come in and we started like then ramping up 100 bucks a day to 200 bucks a day 200 bucks a day to 300 bucks a day 300 bucks a day then we scaled up to I think it was like the end of February 2022 and uh it's probably gonna be in the archive some some in the history of apps and we spent like 12 or 14k in a day yeah we did 1,000 trials wow dude with hard pay yeah hard pay well 1,000 trials and that's something I learned from you as well and yeah maybe four point other than meta is listen to some people like

24:35St like Steve because they tell you that the they tell you I I feel that many times like you you were saying the har pable thing let's be honest like I was I remember I was like uh two years ago in Spring and we are still like we already making like running well you know but I was listening to you and we are always optimizing we were always hustling like doing crazy statistical experiments you know with uh trying the little that why also we build screen design and you were saying hard paywall like talking about this concept that many you know Puritans in the industry would would would deem

25:09like UNT talkable uh Unthinkable two three years ago and you were saying try out the hard payall because it it might work very well now I'm not saying this is true for every app but in some cases like our case I think hard we would not be here right now if we did not I did not listen to you at the time and be so convinced in in the hard payable concept or or or or these things so um so yeah you you you have to you have to you have to want it and wanting it means looking at Steve podcast every time he comes out take notes try things

25:45come up with a plan and then I remember also one other factor that changed it a lot was when there was mix spanel and me and my business partner we were saying okay we're going to test one thing every three four days and we said 400 people 400 people 400 people come we show them one change 400 people we show you know the the test and experiment thing and not changing anything else and waiting for 400 people and 400 people to come in and then iterating from there and we saw how many like because you know in this business if if 1% at the beginning of the funnel

26:22changes 40% at the at the profit yeah this like you know yeah yeah it's crazy so it's it's it's Cutting Edge and I think it's going to become yeah I think you're going to be you're goingon to have to be on point with the design you're going to have to be on point with the marketing and I'm not talking about marketing with this crazy concept that that all these privacy technology freaks care about in met and Tik Tok I'm talking more about like the madman if you want to watch a beautiful uh TV show about marketing is like madman for example or or understand hooks understand uh just Google it and

26:58Tik Tok maybe or yeah I don't know where to check it because it's been so many years it's part of like DNA now I love talking to people and how they structured teams now right like yeah now we have Team 25 and I'm like always curious about how you set it up and you know one of our clients and friends that I I've been working with for a long time he's like telling me it's team structure so when you are spending $14,000 a day at a high point what what did the team look like were you just cranking out three five creative every day like was it the primarily Focus was

27:31like Hey we're just going to be focused on creatives and D like on boarding data mix panel and cre ad creatives and that's it well to be honest with you you you can think about the funnel also in terms of acquiring creatives because you people usually think about fasor in terms of acquiring uh users right for the UA but actually what we what we also understood we were already good with email marketing because that's when we started back in the day to get clients for our agency telling you like six seven eight years ago when when it first started and so we started emailing creators and there's nothing that

28:07creators love more than receiving emails so the it was down a downhill battle there because like creators love to charge your money and then you have clearly to uh negotiate and so we created a funnel structure for acquiring creative like hitting a couple thousand people on Tik Tok with emails and we built like our little scrapers that got the emails of people and then we have our system but I mean if someone wants to hustle and you're a solo developer you can still do it like boom boom send emails and talk to people or do it yourself I would do it myself probably right now if I had to start from scratch

28:42and uh and then we had my assistant go through okay we were moving people to Telegram and then signing the contract and all these things and so I think we structure like a diagram that's the best way I would I would I would explain it like the diagram for creatives and once you have the diagram in place and you see oh this is not working well you fix the the parts in the diagram and then I completely delegate I create the process and then I delegate it to my one of my assistant and um and she took care of that and uh it work it work it worked easy and your

29:16your general question is about the team um how do I structure the team do you mean like the designers the developers everything yeah how many did you have yeah well right now we're around 12 people because we still have the Legacy agency and then we have screens design right now and we have since we know about the business of apps and we actually uh we had to learn about it the hard way in the trenches uh bootstrapping we are going to make a video editor uh for we're making a video editor concept uh for but uh that's also there is H yeah um so and then the third

29:51thing is we're making another SAS as well yeah so we're building three SAS and 12 people what's the agency what what the agency do well we we still we still have uh we still consult clients on on Instagram strategy um yeah but clearly we didn't want to do it anymore because uh because it's more of like a Consulting uh Consulting thing yeah and uh and uh and we and to be honest with you that's also one of the reasons why we sold the app is that we didn't want to work in the business of social media any we wanted to do something fresh so I understand if

30:30you do something new for a year okay but it's it's something that I didn't love anymore to do this uh you know social media marketing things and I prefer to build something totally fresh totally different not totally different but like different and so the team is structure it's hetic man to be honest with you but uh I would say we have two two freelance designers and one coo uh that is very good but is a bit lazy if you're listening because I'll send it to him uh he really good no he not lazy uh but um um and then we have um and then we have

31:08the developers uh the the developers more frontend developers you know the the guys who make more the the front end part and then for the other app the video editing app for those you need Graphics programmer which is the craziest thing ever it's like God code because it's like video game code it's like code that turns into images which is like insane um apps are very fast they're very low to the to the graphical unit to the GPU and it's it requires a special type of programmer that is are very hard to find yeah all right we got some audience questions for you okay and I will get to the buyer part but Dion

31:43had a great question what data did you find most useful when looking to where to spend on marketing we went one channel uh that's was one of the things since we as I explained before we couldn't do ASO for example we tried a little bit with search as but we felt that the volume was not there for us uh was not enough and um we felt that we had the edge in the marketing the creatives in the hooks in the call to actions in the acquiring the creatives and testing a lot of creatives and so we felt that our Edge was there and we felt that we didn't

32:17have much of an edge in the Apple search ads first of all because the guys like ash expert already were cramming the keyword positioning and they were already doing a good job there and second of all um we felt that the volume was not enough so we didn't do any of we tried a bit but we we quickly focused on one channel also because this allowed us to say okay I spend 10K today I get uh 100 trials and th trials my cost per trial is 10 bucks and I can attribute all of it to Facebook not in the sense of attributing but in the sense of I can

32:53put back all the money inside in the machine in order to scale you know it was not an attribution of say oh organic is X meta is y it's a I'm getting I'm spending this on one channel and I'm getting this how much can I put back into the machine calculating in the future my lifetime volume is gonna be this and you you know and uh so so we did one channel only and uh I'm not sure if the question is related to how much to spend or where to put the money as far as the platform Stephen what do you think no I I thought you answered it the

33:24best man because I think I people hear that all the time and I hope people take this away and I've definitely taken this away Alex is one you started one channel you were so focused you just kept tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking being patient with it even when you felt like this is never going to work yeah right and that's what I've learned from even Nico last week was talking about that he was just tweaking onboarding tweaking pay wall watching people use his apps like my man like a maniac just really tweaking all this stuff and that's how you grow like you because you become so focused you're

33:58gonna eventually figure it out because I get a lot of clients Alex and they're like this not working Steve what what should I do I'm like you're gonna have you know like be patient like it it sucks yeah and it's always a balancing act because you know both I would say in the on boarding you w have enough statistical significance that's why I was saying 400 people saw this button 400 people saw the other button you need to have enough statistical significance if you don't have it you you have to have a little bit of taste I would say like look at go to screens design look

34:27look at what the good apps do see a pattern Implement that then when when you start to have the the clients come in then and you see okay I'm getting 500 CL users a day then it's where you can start to do the STA statistic and mixed panel game of checking a versus be testing you know and second of all it's also on the meta side it's a bit of an nard you know because you want to tweak it with the creatives and everything but there are also people who tweak they spend five bucks and they and they revolutionize the campaign structure again you know so it's somewhere like

35:01you know The Sweet Spot is somewhere in the middle when you want to tweak it with the Facebook ad for sure every once in a while you want to reset the machine where it gets stuck or you want to try something new for sure but you don't want to because so people are so freakish and they spend five 10 bucks 100 bucks sometimes you have to let it rip you know um and so it's a balancing act there yeah I like that I like that and oh the other thing I I really love what you said was the Blended and that Dion like the number you know I think

35:30the answer would be how much money are you making go one channel how much you said I'm only doing one channel and that's what I did too Alex I didn't even care ASA basic when I said I'm doing ASA basic and it works I was like here's how much I spent here's how much I made and I didn't do anything else that you said it perfectly too and I was like that's what I did Fuel and you can see it as fuel in order to put it back into the machine and I feel that to be honest with you it's it's the job of many of these Consultants to make the

35:58life really really easy of some people because they want to say oh you want to do Tik Tok and Facebook and all of this and boom boom boom boom boom sure has a place especially when you're bigger if you're an app like that that is bigger and um so so I feel that for some people who wna for the people who want to want to start uh they can select one channel Tik Tok can work great you also have to understand the demographic side because clearly if you're targeting people who are 20 years old go on T Tik Tok maybe for sure even younger for sure t is the

36:28place to be and you have a huge viral app for our app it was a toolkit for Instagram marketing so for us The Sweet Spot was clearly Instagram ads right it's like uh yeah it's perfect yeah I like it man okay the let's go into the few questions and we'll get to the app audit side how much profit Mary says how much profit from the app did you put back into the ads over time so this is a good question because you know when you're acquiring we we at one point with we tested and we understood that the we the 999 week for us was was the zweet spot because it was

37:01a business focused uh app it was for business owners wanted to expand Their audience on on on Instagram so they didn't have any problems spending 10 nine bucks a week and uh and uh we then made our own dashboard to understand okay I'm getting I'm getting 100 trials how many how many weeks are these people going to stay on average and clearly you are projecting into the future so so it's half science all half art um you you can look at the past and you can look at the last week the conversion rates uh because clearly if you have like 10 bucks uh 10 bucks per trial and

37:42you have a 25 per conversion rate let's say from trial to pay uh you have a 40 bucks acquisition cost right and then you calculate that against how many weeks or months or year if you do the yearly the person is gonna stay and then clearly it's a cash flow issue because you're you you will get that back the money in the future but you are spending it today so that's why I also say that the train has to start moving it's a 10 ton train that you have to start moving you have to get the payouts from Apple that happen every 55 days and uh but the

38:16profit uh the The Profit that we put back what what does it mean like back into the ass or back like let's say you're making like two to one right like are you just spending that alongs are you putting all of it back in then you know or yeah yeah yeah we were we were we were basically we were basically putting all almost all of all of it back in well to be honest with you yeah the pay what yeah I would say I would say yes but then you also reach a point where uh where for example meta they give you the credits the credit so you

38:48can pay 60 days after and so that helps a lot you know when meta when you start spending more on meta you can reach out again the hustle culture like reach out in the in the chat of met hey give me the credit line it's called and then they give you an invoice and the invoice you spend January 1 to January 30 one how many days January anyways you spend that and then they want you to pay by February one so you have a gap there of 60 of 60 or 30 days whatever like the average Gap and you have a cash flow Gap that you can you you can use uh that is

39:20gonna give you an advantage uh so so yeah at one point the payouts from Apple where this the cash flow was disconnected cuz like you had these big payouts every 55 days and what you were putting was what you made back in the day but yeah I would say I would say we were profitable at uh at a yeah we were profitable at a significant very significant rate like but it's always hard to know the precise estimate because many of these lifetime values you know they pan out over two years two years and a half so telling you the profit is is a bit of a complex like the

39:53precise profit is a bit of a complex uh uh point because yeah especially yeah we're going through this right now with a client of ours we switched he was doing monthly for the long time and we we switched over to weekly because all the competitors are doing weekly and we know in this space weekly will do probably do better but bro it is stressful just waiting for the data because the data looks like it's going down but then the weekly revenues keep going up week over week yeah yeah it takes a lot of Google Sheets and sitting down with a cool head and sometimes not so much of a cool head and

40:29looking at things and looking at this data and seeing okay these are like the you know the how like the percentage of the the curve how is it how is it going and I told you it's Al science alart because at some point five 10 weeks are going to be passed and you have the curve that goes like that but then you have the dot dot dot dot where is the curve gonna go because if the curve flattens man you're in a good spot because then you have no churn anymore and you those payouts are still going to come so half science alard do not believe those people in this business

40:56who tell you oh everything like privacy metrix 10 metrics per paragraph boom boom boom boom don't believe them too much yeah yeah I love it I love it I'm I'm the same way I'm it's like just keep it simple just do one thing at a time they're like should I change this they go to screens design.com like should I change this paywall and this onboarding and this one thing at a time please yeah all right Abdullah says when you implemented a hard pay wall how much did users drop off or turn the turn increase I like again it goes with the periods but uh if I remember correctly we had a

41:2833% uh we had one of the highest in the industry we had a we had a almost 10% uh install to start trial 10% nice 10 12% at sometimes install yeah well what I say is like and I I gave this advice to a if you have a niche app that's why I love the niche apps Alex and I would say you know social media for business owners pretty Niche like you've already figured out who you're helping that's where hard pay all really really pays off and exactly we had business owners those people they wanted the thing you show it to them it's not like a social media app where

42:03you can do this crazy virality tricks no we had people who had their Baristas and hairdressers they wanted to have this tool kit to do their things find the hashtag post the cool things and try to grow you know boom they started try not a problem to have a good toolkit for nine bucks a week yeah nice all right let's get into the app audit section of our show and we like to S off every app audit with some dad jokes [Music] all right Alex I know you have a good one well a good one as as good ones as that jokes can be do I go for it go for it man okay so

42:45I'm developing an IOS app that helps you to find your lost Apple products I'm calling it find my finder like it because you know on Apple on iPhone you use it to find your other yeah that's funny all right Alex eight BS can kill you but if you add one more you are safe because it's B9 there you go all right put a if you thought Alex joke was better and put s if you thought my joke was better and Alex I will play for drinks in Belgium how about that we'll go back to Italy drinks in Rome oh wow that's something all right we'll look at Susan's app Alex

43:29first yeah and then she needs help on marketing she's got a social media app which Alex knows very well about looks like it's a talent show share your talent win cash get discovered stop posting social media let TK Talent pay you a fee you go to to to actually to screens design you don't even have to pay we have made the Apple Store screenshots completely free so you don't have to be a pro user like Stephen is like Steve is uh all the App Store screen are free so um so you can take very good inspiration there I think you're uh to be totally Frank your

44:06current setup is a six to six minus uh there's a lot a lot of work that can be done on the both logo the logo it looks a bit like 2010 and the screenshots they're okay they're okay St as like an alpha product but if you look at the top leagues um these screenshots feel a bit dated and a bit um a bit janky uh definitely I see that you you have some ideas like the the diagonal screens that go between one screen and the other uh in between it's a good idea in my opinion it looks really good um but uh can you can you go back to the to to the

44:42left to the at the beginning yeah um yeah I mean okay so also ask yourself a question uh pre it's hard to pretend but maybe ask a friend or something pretend that a friend doesn't know nothing about it and goes through it uh so talent show select your talent category okay win up to 20 weekly winner yeah I mean it's a bit like the value prop is not immediate that's what I want to say it has to be it should take less than 10 seconds to understand really well what is like give me a headline give me a sub headline make me intrigued uh by what it is also TK talent show

45:23with uh two question marks I don't know it feels a bit um uh oh maybe it's the it's a screenshot from inside the up yeah it's a screenshot from inside the up yeah it is I would say it's a start it's a good start it's a it's an alpha version uh I'm sure you can iterate on it uh a lot yeah I agree look I think you know there's Stephen who did Puff count he was part of my previous live you already see exactly you immediately see what I'm talking about yeah yeah so like he the the net of it Susan is look you're G to get

45:58you're paying people for their talent right and it's sort of similar to Stephen where it is sort of like a 99 designs for ugc content is what he's sort of building out but anyways you can sort of kind of see like this is a lot cleaner the text is very clean and it's a a big difference from what you got too yeah I like it all right marketing wise Alex I feel like this needs social media help like you can't you got to find influencers you gotta do what Alex said hit rewind scrape a bunch of influencers let them know about this particular product and get them into the app and

46:31start using the app as well their feedback hard on the DM verify your profile and uh even even just DMS if you don't want to go crazy with the Outreach or anything like that just DMS and and go for it then then you can you can add emails as well on top of it yeah yeah super simple I mean look this was the best episode for you season I know she's here too as well all right Alex now for the I need to drum roll has Haun you okay I don't have a drum roll but are you ready for the results of the dad joke round thank you guys for joke or

47:05joking thank you guys for voting by voting hu is gonna pick a random winner of the people who voted and you're G to get a free India apppp Santa promo on us and if you're not familiar with India app Santa I'm not gonna plug it just go to India apps.com and you'll figure out everything there as well all right aanu you ready my friend come on in you're the producer you want me to bring you in okay good you want to bring in he are you ready to know the winner so hold on lose here I'm a friend of The Office UK though it's like super cringy

47:40humor so I love it is it spinning all right spin that wheel baby yeah let's go hopefully we don't have a repeat winner I would love to give it to oh Jade Jade all right Jade congratulations Jade Lise for you didn't even vote for me jade oh my God hey who won the vote who won the joke round ISU it's Yi yes take that Jade all right and Alex all right Alex let's get in and we got some good stuff too from Abdullah said text is not that visible that's for that yeah yeah as well you know this is also pattern recognition so if you go to

48:29screens design and you you look at some apps that make Bank uh you will be able to see patterns and I would yeah you can give all these suggestions but um I think immersing uh yourself into all these screenshots at the top left you can select that screenshots and you will see for example yeah myness P they have hard good designers and uh you can see how big the it's more pattern recognition I would say it's like developing a sense you know and then you're you automatically pick it up I would say probably yeah yeah I love it man I love it all right let's get into Dave's app Dave has a

49:01reflection app and he needs help with ASO all right Dave well this is already clearly sexier um great visuals ASO yeah well ASO is your for so no go for it I leave you the stage um I mean ASO it depends on what keywords I guess he I I come from CEO actually I was doing I even ranked Omega 3 back in the day 10 years ago but uh yeah in Italy not not in the states unfortunately but um um it depends on what uh type of keywords like you would need a keyword finder like the one of my friend Mato from Tri asro yeah I guess journaling or uh

49:39journaling wait wait you know Mato did you know Astro you know the guy who created Astro with he's a great guy also Italian like us yeah nice yeah cool I've got to reach out I've been meaning to reach out yeah that's it all right yeah yeah one of the tools I love so I'm going to give you the ASO tool Dave but I've been I did I was on a live stream with app figures from Ariel I really love his tool he gave me you know one of the be best access to the tool but I I I'm really digging it because no offense to app follow but I used to love

50:10them but it's not as the technology breaks a lot whereas I found app figures does a really good job of that keyword so for you it could be reflection I don't know I know manifestation journaling is a good keyword too so I'm going to put in reflection but right here just to see what happens okay that's you so keep it there I love that Dave but obviously you're going to have to go into journaling so journaling is a hard keyword but it is very popular what I would say is dude Dave look at Apple search ads look at iPad only Apple search ads too we had

50:51one client that was making about 2 million a year and then 1.6 1. 1.4 to 1.6 was purely off of iPad sales because it's a journaling app you know it it work it could work really well on the iPad see journal for iPad 45 so I would really focus on iPad and I'll try to get journal for iPad ranking high for that keyword as well so that's how I would try to approach this because you're not going to beat day one yeah perspective yeah then this is I I found it better so like you know sorry I follow I I used to use that follow because it was free but I guess you get

51:30what you pay for so I I can't complain too much but if I were to do journaling or Journal woo had to sneeze let's see this is my favorite way of doing keyword research to just hitting this I icon and then trying to find new keywords and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't but yeah it is working right now for her so app figures I love them and then app follow as well and app figures I went into related keywords to figure it out so what I would do here is in the keyword field try to throw an iPad somewhere so you can rank for it

52:05Dave cool Alex should we go in the app real quick got to take a look at the app right and heck you want me to take screenshots for you for screens designs.com no need man no need okay you're gonna get this you otherwise what' you say it's gonna be send a fat Bill otherwise for I've got boost app too so oh gotcha you're boo social very good dude are you legit like having somebody go in to each app and like taking screenshots and the secret sauce Secret Sauce oh man all right well okay more than a year more than a year in the making more than a

52:40year in the making but that's the valuable thing right grows and grows and maybe you saw this too as you guys kind of put this together at screens design but what my team told me too was Jacob from retention. blog he was talking about how this story mode is happening versus forcing people to swipe there's just a time delay and just swiping on its own that seems to be a trend right now so think I like that you're doing that all right Dave so from a product perspective we found that showing this signup page after a pay wall beautiful is the better way to go because there is huge drop off

53:17right here you have to look at your numbers for the drop off but we've typically the highest I've seen is like 75 80% that's it so I'm going to hit allow for you because to totally agree with you there and you said something also very right you have to see from your numbers but what we did as well with Boost up Social right after the trial started that's when we made a users login yeah I love it man and Dave you didn't have this payall I had to go find it you got to add this pay wall to the onboarding process yeah yeah and that you got any

53:50ideas for the pay wall right now uh this payall first of all okay it's it's a soft payall uh limited free access for S days un limited use of depth for personalizing insights and problem well well the second the second point is really tricky because if I am doing the on boarding and I do not know what depth is yeah you know like already either you're confusing me you know so yep I like this little quiz that he has like if I hit X why are you not buying it just to get data yeah I right that's fair I'm gonna say like have more visuals too like maybe have a journal

54:28that's filled out with somebody that's smiling and then I would have I think me look I could be wrong cuz this seems more female oriented but I think I would try to build this put this up more like the the quotes and the testimonials and then show off some of the features I like the long pay wall because I know you know some people want more data and for not like this you might need to highlight more data before somebody makes a purchase year two yeah okay cool I like it though I'm grateful for Alex okay that's a so Dave this A great time after I've put in one journal entry

55:13um ask for a review it does work really well so for a review yeah true true aha moment so all right Alex you got some you want go through some last questions that people might have says for starter app in the mental health space would you recommend using ASA or meta ads to start mental health space so you we can consider also the app we just saw maybe as something like mental health ASA or metal well I would say I would say like Steve like Steve did right so if you look a really juicy keyword right by exploring if you find a juicy keyword is that like hits a d you know maybe go for

55:56it why not and it might be a a very good path um but just I wouldn't just like decide straight away oh I'm gonna do ASA and then my life is gonna you know tie to it forever so I would like explore it get in the jungle like Steve showed you and if you find something that is not that tapped into because you're probably starting out the budget is not immense like many of these apps and if you find something weird keywords that you feel that you have a chance at why not that's one meta ads as I was telling before I was saying that it

56:31requires in my opinion at least some some money commitment of at least a couple thousand bucks uh not not daily but over the course of a month in order to assess how how things are going and uh man I would start if you're young and you have no maybe no cash how about you start creating content on Tik Tok and uh that's also a free Avenue that you can explore create content don't make it to Sales see look at what's working what and and find crazy angles make content every day once a day and po post it on reals and Tik Tok um yeah but I would definitely probably

57:08start with either meta or ASA because then otherwise the tracking is not going to be is they going to be a little bit polluted you know so I would rather if you find a juicy keyword on ASA then try for it go for it if that doesn't pen out then maybe switch to uh the other I love it I there's somebody in our community paed in and he's built up a a he did exactly what you did Alex he's younger he's creating content he's built up 40,000 50,000 followers on Instagram he hasn't even launched his app yet and so I'm hoping to have him on I said launch

57:47your app let's make it a success and then let's have you back on to break down his strategy for sure I love it dude you know this guy Marco says well this guy is crazy good he's been Consulting my companies for years it's my [Music] brother on the LinkedIn or something I don't know I love it yeah he's on LinkedIn that's awesome congratulations Jade all right Alex I almost called you Marco I'm loving Jeff Daniel says I'm loving this channel well welcome um it is screens with an S design.com screens design.com I did put it into the comment as well as long as it is in your favorite podcast app if

58:26you're just listening to audio version and the YouTube description as well Alex anything I missed do you want to make sure we cover Before We Say Goodbye um I'm not sure it's it's been a blast to be honest I love the concept that you have it's super entertaining and props to you man for keeping it real and helping a lot of people in the industry and a lot of people starting out it has been helpful super helpful for me as well uh totally Frank like back in in the past years there there were many periods where we thought where not going to make it and then checking your

58:58podcast and uh trying things and trying things and trying paths at the end of the day you throw things at the wall and something maybe is gonna stick yeah well congratulations man something did stick to a seven figure exit so congratulations to you my friend let's double it next time we're gonna be one of the top 50 let's hope I love it who's who's up next week coming up next week on app Masters you're mute bro oh you hold on hold on you you you I have something yeah sorry go ahead who's coming up next week yeah next week we have RI MAA who is extender and he will be Shing a lot of

59:46good content about how they build to one 1 billion plus dollar uh in Revenue it's more of a product discussion right s yes monetization and product book yeah yeah I love it so exender Robbie's going to be on we've been working on that interview for a long time so shout out to youan for finally making it happen all right for Alex once again it is screens designs.com thank you guys for watching and I will see you guys next week