# The 22-year-old that built a $1.5M Ai app while homeless | Kelechi Onyeama

Channel: Brett Malinowski
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdlf2TKuLK4
Duration: 1 hr 30 min
Language: English
Words: 20139
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/kdlf2TKuLK4

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[0:00] How much money do you make? Within the last year, um, I've done about 1.5 million. Over the course of the next 10 years, I'll do a billion. All right. How old are you right now? I just turned 22. 22? Yeah. Okay. What do you do? I'm a solo founder and I build mobile consumer apps.

[0:17] Mobile consumer apps. So, you've done multiple or I've done multiple. Correct. Um, have you seen those RZ apps on Tik Tok? RZ? Whereas like a guy strugg struggling to like talk to a girl and he gets like something to say like a picture and stuff like that. I own one of the largest ones. Uh it's

[0:33] called social wizard. So okay. So that was the first one I built. What was it called? Social wizard. Wizard. Okay. Yeah. Social wizard. And so it just literally helps people talk to girls on like Tinder or something. It's actually a huge problem. And every time I tell people about this um they're like, "Oh, that's impossible." But it's a huge thing. Like guys really want to

[0:52] get girls. Like this is a big market. Um, so there's about three features, but the main one is really the texting one. Um, whereas like you're conversing with someone and it's mostly girls, if I'm being real and you're kind of unsure what to say, the app sort of like steps in and makes that easier for you. Is it like connected to your text messages? Is it on Tinder? Is it Or you just send a screenshot of the

[1:16] conversation? So you can take a screenshot of the conversation or you can just type in the message like manually and uh put in context. I usually like in the app if you actually come on the app um the second part of the how you use the app which is the manual where you type in we try to push people to type in the messages because it's more accurate when you do that when you put like a screenshot then we have to like sort of like figure out what's in the screenshot and you know some people don't take the right screenshot so it makes it harder and harder to like make it more accurate

[1:45] but um that's how it works. It's not really attached like a key. Do you have to give it context? Like do you have to like show the profile of the girl? Like does it give like tailored feedback like that or is it literally just like here if this is a message that you're trying to

[1:55] reply to? That's a very good question. Honestly, when I started working on this, which is like last year, um it sounded like very very simple. But as I started progressing with there, I realized that it was a much harder problem to solve because the first thing is what is even a good reply, right? Um it depends on culture, it depends on the girl's age, it depends on multiple things. Um there is a section in the app where it's like you can personalize um the kind of message. So let's assume I take a screenshot of uh

[2:25] someone's story, right? And it's a girl from college, whatever it is, and it's our birthday. You can use that screenshot and also add more context in the app and say, um this is my friend from high school. We haven't spoken in a year. Today's our birthday. And so the AI would take that context and it also take the picture and sort of like fuse it together and give

[2:45] you a good reply. So yeah, that's actually what I think made us different compared to the other apps out there. Nice. It's always good when you have a human survival need as a part of your product. It's the biggest market in the world. Of course, bro. Like I always say because if you look at like consumer apps, everything is tied to solving about like at least the ones that really

[3:04] really made money. Mhm. There's just few core human needs that we're trying to solve. Um your app either has to help people make more money, find love, or have fun. Mhm. These are like the three core things. Um and if you look at every single app that's gone viral, they're solving one of this in some way, shape, or form. Like if you break it down, um every app helps people either make more money, find love, or have fun. Every app on the

[3:30] app store. Yeah. And then you have like health, which probably helps do all three of those, you know. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You want to be healthy both. Why? Yeah. Exactly. You know, like it's like going to the gym. Personally, for me, I actually I mean, the reason why I started working out, I don't care about being healthy, man. I'm just 22 so I know I'm not going to die soon. I just want a good body. Like for me, it's it's like prosthetics, you know, um and that's going to help me

[3:53] in relationships. So, if you break down every single if you really go down the rabbit hole, you find out that it's really just three things we're trying to solve. So, interesting. And so this one was literally just you're going to upload context of like an Instagram story and it kind of tells you what to reply to an

[4:09] Instagram story. Is that what you said? Right. So the actually three features of the app. The first one is start a conversation where is you know you upload a picture of someone. Um it could be a story, it could be a profile picture, it could be a dating app uh picture. The AI will look at what's in a picture and will give you a reply where you can you know tailor to that. The second one is the reply feature. Where is you're texting someone and you know it gets to a point where it's like you're unsure what to say then the app will take that conversation and give you a reply. And

[4:37] then the last one is awkward situation which is where you just type in something that happened and the AI will give you um um like a reply but that's the least used feature which surprised me. I would I assumed it was going to be the most used. Um but people use that list. The most popular one is the reply one followed by the picture one then the help with awkward

[4:58] situation. I I thought that was really really interesting that story replies was a feature because that is Instagram is the ultimate dating app dude and a story is a good way to like trigger a reason to have start a conversation. Dude Brett you know it's crazy like every like within the last year every month that has passed by if you ask me why social wizard ended up blowing up you know we've about to hit like close to like a million in revenue. Um, my answer has been changing on why I think it worked, but right now I think the only reason why we ended up going viral,

[5:30] it was just based off timing and grits. Um, so this was last year, um, 2024, January, um, I say like December to January when I started working on it, building it out. GPT4 vision was literally in works. Mhm. It hadn't existed, right? There was no way for you to take a screenshot or a

[5:49] picture and find out what was in there. you could do OCR the apps that released before um that's the technology they were using which is kind of popular you can integrate that um but there wasn't any way to do that with an LLM so while GPT4 vision was being built and getting released because open had just demoed GP4 vision that was when I started working on social wizard side by side in fact the the API wasn't even ready for production you know and so when we released I had to like have like 10 different API keys because everything was like rate limited

[6:19] by like 10 requests per which was crazy. So I was building it side by side as the API was getting released. And so when we dropped there was no way for you to actually take a picture of someone and get stuff to say like that didn't exist. I mean right now you can easily do that with RGBT and there a bunch of apps but at that time there was there was no way for you to do it. So I think that's kind of what made it very easy for us to like

[6:41] just go viral. So there's a little bit of a moat that it wasn't easily accessible to do yet. And so you were the first one to really be able to do this. We were very very early literally timing. How did you market it? The marketing was Tik Tok and uh uh reals. Okay. Primarily

[6:55] Tik Tok and reals. Did you How much what was your pricing structure? I've had to change pricing a bit. So when we first launched I looked at all the um apps that were sort of similar. Um they were charging it was a weekly subscription about which is I mean people are going to say it's very expensive.

[7:12] Uh about $6.99 a week. You know that was what we started with. That's expensive. I mean most people find out that's actually I mean compared to like all the applications and stuff like that. Oh, is that's that's cheap in the app world or it's expensive in the app world? Yeah, I think it's expensive in everywhere.

[7:28] Okay. You know, $6.99 I don't even think I can I would pay for that personally. Um well, it depends on what it is, you know. Um but $6.99 was, you know, what most apps were starting with and I just like built $6.99. After a while, I released I realized that um my app was more quality and so I updated to $9.99, $10 a week and that just shut up everything. LTV went up, more cash through the door and uh yeah, so we started charging like 10 bucks a week. We also have like a monthly and a yearly, but I push people more to the weekly because, you know, um

[7:58] it's faster payback period. Mh. Um and yeah. Yeah. It's when you when you really want that girl now, the $10 per week, the plan makes sense to me. Yeah. You know what's actually crazy? And I' I've barely done research on like like interviews with people using Social Wizard, but and I'll say this publicly, most people who use the app don't actually use the hints that we give them. And so if you're conversing with someone, you're not sure what to say. You go to the app and all these hints are popping

[8:27] up. When I looked at the data, the average person generates like 10 hints before they copy one. So we track when they do copy one. My thesis and this is what I think is that when you take a screenshot and you go to the app and you're generating and you're generating, you're generating, you're reading the hints, you don't like this one, you generate again, even though you don't find exactly what you want to say, you get ideas of how to reply because the AI is suggesting different

[8:57] things and so your brain starts working. Your brain starts moving. And I think that's literally what we sell. We don't really sell the hints. We sell ideas like a brain a brainstorming party brainstorming literally that's what's being sold which is crazy when you think about it but that's why I think people do use it I don't think the hint itself like some of my friends oh I would never say this to someone sure I would also but do it 10 times and I'm sure you'll figure out something to say 100% and you don't have friends you like that's not really something that you like hit up a friend for advice on

[9:30] necessarily unless like you're like hanging out on a weekend one day but like in the moment during the week when you're alone you're not going to text your friend like what should I say to this girl? You're usually you and if you've never done it before, you're kind of clueless. It's also the reason why we don't really

[9:42] have like a lot of referrals. Like the way the app has grown primarily has just been me pushing like marketing. Like no one actually like refers their friends and say, "Hey, check out this app." You know, I' I've done like a lot of like um giveaways and stuff like in it and no one cares. Like people don't

[9:56] want to refer their friends. Nice. I also, you know, I've offered them crazy things and they still don't care. So what's the onboarding look like? So the onboarding starts with us. It's actually, you know, interesting. I've changed that a bit. But right now, the onboarding we have is like very high converting. It starts with a game, right? So, you come on the app and it's like a it's like a text box and the app asks you, "Okay, this is a reply from a girl. What do you say? Go." And most people just [ __ ] freeze because they're like, "Okay, they don't know how to reply to

[10:23] this." And they give a very generic reply, basic reply. Um, and then we assess it. We rate it from a scale of 1 to 10 using like an LLM. Most people end up scoring a very low score and we tell them, hey, like clearly you have poor social skills. Here's how you would have replied if you were using the app. And I think once people see

[10:42] that, they're sold. So you actually make them go through like a demo of like the good tribe, but you should I should have replied like this. And so you show them that you like have good good game, literally. All right, let's give all the There's a lot of app founders out there watching this podcast that probably aren't that good with girls. So you've seen all the data. Do you have the top three ways to reply to women or what are the most common interactions you're seeing between men submitting questions there? If you're building a SAS and you're deciding what stack to use, I highly recommend you use [ __ ] to process your

[11:13] payments. With W payments, you can accept payments from customers in over 194 countries and it takes less than 2 minutes to get set up and start accepting payments. [ __ ] also has authorization built in, so it's perfect for indie devs that are trying to build apps rapidly. If you want to use [ __ ] to process payments for your software, go to wop.comsell or visit the docs at dev.wop.com. Back

[11:35] to the episode. I actually think we have like in one head I probably have more data than I could ever imagine. I think we're about to hit 1 million screenshots uploaded on the app and we've done like close to like 5 million hints. It's actually crazy what most guys are struggling to say. Like most people can't even say hi to a [ __ ] girl. You dude, it's it's insane. Um, I would say most of the issues we face like in terms of conversations is like guys trying to ask girls out like that's usually the part of the conversation that they they just lose their minds. Um,

[12:07] you know, like how to actually say, "Do you want to go on a date?" Yes. Like how like, "Hey, would you want to get called to action?" Yeah. Like, "Oh, yeah. It's literally that's where they struggle with the most." Um, I'll say also double texting. Um, when I was looking at data, a lot of screenshots are like one message to the left, five messages to the right. What is the sixth message

[12:25] I can send? Uhuh. Does that make sense? Yes. Yes. The girl the girl replied, you reply once. She doesn't reply. You send another text? And then you get nervous. You're like, "Wow, she's not replying. I need to come up with something better." Third text and then you're like desperate now. Yeah. It's crazy, bro. Like this is a huge thing. Um, so that's actually like the biggest problem is it's really just like guys trying to like close it like, "Hey, let's let's let's let's go do this." Um, so if you're asking me for tips on how to reply, and this is what I think personally, man. Um, and I'm still

[12:56] getting better at the game, but uh, cuz I'm, uh, I think when you meet a girl, right then and then, she's already decided if she wants to go out with you. I think the text messaging part doesn't really like make a difference. Interesting. As long This is my personal thing. As long as you got the number.

[13:20] Like what do you mean? Or I guess the start the conversation. If the conversation's starting and she's replying, if she's at least open to it, is that what you're saying? Not really. I'm saying, well, it depends on what she's replying, right? Um I think if a girl really wants to go out with you, it's pretty obvious, you know? I mean, the girls I've gone out with, I didn't really have to do much work, you know? Sometimes I just say, "Hey, pull up here and let's take a walk." And they don't care. And the times where um it didn't work and I didn't get a girl, she, you know, like was playing games

[13:51] and stuff like that. She was saying, "Hey, I'll let you know." And usually I just let it go. I just let it pass. And texting wasn't going to save it. Okay. But do you see like I'm What are the most common conversations? Is it really just that really that basic and people just struggle with the basics of saying hi or like I'm just curious if you like categorized types like girl says this on average like the most common thing that a girl would do and the most common reply that a guy was struggling with was it literally just

[14:17] hi? No. So the most common situation whereas like a guy is trying to get like a reply is trying to get the girl to go out with him. That's like the case. It's like hey how do I invite this girl out? So they'll take a picture of her story and then say, "How do I ask this girl out?" Yeah. That and also through text messages. Also, I'll say guys also trying to get laid. Like I'll be honest, but part of the like conversations actually leans more like to like like some more intimate stuff, you know? Um uh guys trying to find out like how do I

[14:47] escalate this with this chick? Like what do I do? Which sometimes actually scares me personally. It goes like like asking an AI is like hey like do I kiss her when she says this you know type of stuff. Um it's actually crazy. We actually have a good percentage of guys who are in relationships using the app which

[15:08] for the girlfriend. Yes. Which initially I was surprised to see bro. Um if you're already in the relationship with a girl is I don't know if there's much to lose in terms of how you converse. I don't know. I don't know. Um, I haven't been in a relationship in at least five years, bro. Um, so, um,

[15:25] so you were not your own customer. When I was I'll tell you something. I'll tell you something. When I was testing out social widget, like when I was building it initially, it was very, very hard for me to decide on what is a good reply and this is something I still you know, you know, ask is like what makes a good reply a good reply? And from my research, these are things that I figured out. A good reply must be able to like you have to set it up in a way where it's like the other person who's receiving the message instinctively knows what to say back to

[15:52] you, right? Yeah. It's like a yes, no, or like there's an answer you're asking for, not like an ambiguous open-ended statement. Correct. A good reply should not lead to essentially when you get a message from someone, if you can easily reply yes or no, that's not a good reply. A good reply should continue a conversation, right? That's one of the main things that you know we've uh uh sort of like realized when I was building the app in Google reply was like allow conversation you know to flow. So if you look at social visual that was the thesis on why I built it on when I was testing out myself I had like

[16:26] different conversations because I couldn't benchmark this on anything. So I would go on Instagram I'll go on Snapchat or go on iMessage all the girls I've spoken to and you know it led to a good outcome whether that was an intimate outcome whether that was me going out with the girl whether was you know us linking up at the party. I took screenshots of every conversation. I put them in like uh notion and I was benchmarking you know replies on social media uh social wizard against that. So I would converse uh with the app take the screen put it in there and see okay the reply I'm getting from social wizard

[16:56] would I have been able to use it in this conversation that was happen with a girl and that was how I was able to keep tweaking like the prompt to make it you know good enough to use it. It go to a point where it's like the screenshots I had the girls was not enough. And so I'll hit up my friends and I'll tell them, hey, like I hope I don't get in trouble for this, you know. Um I'll hit up some of my friends and tell them, hey, like could you send me screenshots of you talking to girls and I use that to train the train the AI because I really needed

[17:23] a lot of context from people like, okay, guys who have got in girls, what did you guys say? And based off that, I kept tweaking the app to make it good enough. I don't think you're ever ever going to get it there. is like 100%. But if you make it good enough, guys, I will use

[17:36] it. Do you think that did you have some sort of mechanism that like have a person say this was successful? Like if they like like after they fact if they use social wizard and then like talked to the girl that they went on a date, is there a way for them to say like this worked for you

[17:48] to collect it all? No, but the way I kind of look at that metric is if they came back. Yeah. If they copied Okay. Or if they came back, isn't that bad? If they came back to use the app, I think they're getting value. Yeah. Yeah, you know, and also also track when people copy the hints to like that's another metric. It's like if the person copied it, then maybe they used it, you know. Um, so to make this simple to understand, it's not you don't want to ask like a yes or no question where just like a like yes or no, like basic. You want to

[18:16] ask like is your favorite color blue and why or something like that. Kind of something like that. Um, let me see if I can give an example. Um, I'm just looking out for everyone watching this podcast right now. on the on the edge of their seat. Yeah. Yeah. A good reply has to allow the person to be able to think of what to say instinctively. And it can't be a yes or no. It can't be the person should be able to reply in like a statement, you know, or you know, to continue conversation. So, let's assume um you DM a girl and say, "Hey, like um

[18:47] are you going to this concert tomorrow?" Right? That is not a good reply because she could easily say yes or no. Um a good reply is more like

[19:02] And this is going to take me a second. And this is why social wizard exists initially because it's [ __ ] hard. Um, I'll say something more like um,

[19:15] do you prefer listening to this artist or this artist? I think he might be doing something tomorrow in this location. Mhm. And then now she can say, "Oh, I I really like um Drake, you know, um when did he say he was going to have that concert?" Something like that. Gotcha. As opposed to something that's yes or

[19:34] no. So men are like really objective like, "Are you going to the concert?" And the girl could be like, "I don't want you to know what I'm doing." Yeah. Or maybe you can ask more. You could probably start a conversation with like, "Do you like Drake?" or you know, "What do you, you know, what's your favorite Drake song?" or something like

[19:46] that. And then she gives a reply and she could explain why. Or you could even say something like, "Have you heard him like uh Far Away from Home?" Actually, let me uh what song do you more people like? Like like The Motion by Drake, right? You could ask, "Hey, like or In My Feelings, that's more popular, right? Um have you listened to In My Feelings live?" Right? You know, um Drake is going to be here, blah blah blah, and that can like continue the

[20:09] conversation like that. So instead of just like, "Have you listened to In My Feelings?" You're saying, "Have I have you listened to In My Feelings live? Drake's going to be here." Like that's a more of a more of like a conversational statement. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Should be able to continue the conversation. You don't want a person to be able to reply yes or no. Like what I think is like with chicks, bro, like if you make it so hard

[20:28] Mhm. Yeah. Out of there. And I just want to say I am in no way a [ __ ] relationship expert. Um I'm just a guy who just goes on his computer. Do you have the data though? I do have the data. I do have a lot of data. Um but you should be able to make it so easy for the person to just type in something. M I say back to you. If it's like a yes or no they can easily say or just a oneliner, you've probably lost

[20:51] them. It's just a dead conversation. It's like they're bored. And girls chicks don't have time for that. Yeah, they don't have time for boring guys. I understood that. I think that makes sense. Like have you listened to In My Feelings live? I heard Drake's going to be here in concert. Something like that. Like that is like a more of like Yes, I have. I

[21:06] love that song. Oh, I didn't know that. That could be really fun. Yeah, exactly. That would be more of like that would be a expected reply to for her to hit all the different conversation topics and you can gauge off more interest off of that. Or if you're just like be in concert tomorrow, it's going to be like yes or no. Do you

[21:22] want to go? Yeah, I understand that. That's good. We're data driven podcast over here. So, this is good to understand the data. Yeah, we do have lots of data. Like I was looking at yesterday. I think we're about to hit like 50 gigabytes um you know of pictures and of text. Um the text is probably I don't have the number in terms of like storage size but I know we're about to hit like five million like hints like in terms of like the amount of documents we have on Firebase is crazy and some of my friends have said hey you know you can use this data to like start like a a new dating

[21:53] app or something like that because it's like what do you do with this? You're just sitting on this you know you know um you know pool of people interacting. What is it worth? What can you make with it? You know it's very interesting you know. So, you said the onboarding was like they you put them through a test basically. I'm assuming that test every time just gives them like a I don't think they can pass the test,

[22:14] right? Yeah. I mean, look, I'll say here like everyone who takes that test is going to [ __ ] fail. We have to make you fail the test. And so, it's kind of like a way of priming the user. So, yeah, you take the test, you're 100% going to get a low score. So, we we scale it from 1 to 10, but the

[22:30] AI scales it from 1 to five. Nice. So you're already no good. You're already at max you can do is 50%. It's smart bro. Onboarding is all psychology and this is where the marketing starts or like ends I should say but onboarding is a part of marketing. One of my close friends he says it best like session one is everything. When someone downloads an app you don't have two opportunities to get them to either subscribe or tell their friends about it. You have one [ __ ]

[22:57] opportunity and that's session one. Session one is everything. when they download the app and they get on what do you tell them within the first three seconds what do they find out you want to make sure that you get something from and I don't want to really sound like a bad person but it is important that you extract something from that user in their first session whether that whether that's them you know leaving a review about the app whether that's them you know subscribing starting a trial they have to give you something right it is crucial a lot of people they build their apps in such a way where it's like

[23:27] people come on and in session one they don't get it they don't understand what it is. Session one is everything. You need to make it clear as possible what the value of this is. And the easiest way we found for social wizard was just to put them through a [ __ ] test and instantly they know what the app

[23:41] does. Mhm. Crucial. Mhm. Yeah. It's like the you're focused on the time to value and the simplicity of understanding the con like what the app is. Dude, there was actually a time where I was tracking um you know install to first hint metric. So when someone downloads the app, how long does it take for them to get their first hint? That was the metric I was tracking. like literally just one KPI, you know, um how many hints does someone have to, you know, generate before they, you know, copy? These were some things I was really focused on. That's literally

[24:09] it. Mhm. Because I believe that the more people like social was more like a volume game. The more people generate hints, the more likely they are to stay longer. Like it doesn't even matter if the hints are like as [ __ ] but if they keep doing it, they're likely to stay. Interesting. So, what was the entire onboarding process? Literally, you ask the question, they reply, they go through a little test, they get a score,

[24:30] you have a four out of 10. Then what? Then we ask them what their goals are. Okay. So, you start asking questions to start Yeah. So, start like priming psychologically. Oh, yeah. Just just heavy priming. Like, do you want to sound more flirty? Do you want to sound more seductive? Do you want to sound more whatever just throwing any [ __ ] [ __ ] there? And we have like three or four like sets of

[24:48] questions like that. And yeah, we we asked them to start a trial. Mhm. So, it's like four questions. Do you want what do you want to sound like? Do you ask like why? Like what you're trying to accomplish, get in a relationship, have one night stand, anything like that like No, we don't ask that. One of the reasons why I actually took that out was because of like Apple, you know, Apple is going to because social widget is rated like plus

[25:07] N. Um and if I lean the app too much that direction, I don't know if Apple is going to approve that. Yeah. It's more adult level. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So if literally when you come on the app, the whole thing is framed as social skills. Even this whole race thing, there's no mention of the word race in the app. Some apps did that, but I decided to take a different path because you kind of get a bigger slice of the market. Um, so it's more like, hey, how do you want to sound more in your conversation? What are you

[25:34] struggling with? And, you know, then we ask them, we hit them with pay wall. So, it is like a general social skill. Social wizard is the name. So, it's generally social skills, but the marketing probably leans towards RZ. And that is the strongest emotional human need, right? It wasn't actually even called social wizard when I when we started. The app was just called wizard. But when you when I when you launch an app, right, the name of your app is very [ __ ] important because of ASO, like Apple search optimization. So when people search for the name of your app, how much do they have to scroll before

[26:08] they find out? A lot of people who build apps don't think about this, right? You have to name your stuff um uniquely. So when I named the wizard, when people search for wizard, they see mostly games. they don't find the app. And I was like, all right, social wizard, right? And people come on and they search social wizard, it's like the first app. It's actually funny because if you go in the app store right now and

[26:29] search wizard by the first app. Mhm. Really? So it worked. It worked out. Yeah. Yeah. It worked out. It's actually crazy. We won those two keywords. Yeah. I think definitely with consumer apps, it's very important that like the name literally tells you what it is. Like you can deduct that social wizard is social skills, you know, like that is very very important. I think our mutual friend Hunter had the same problem. They had NGL used to be called something slightly different and it wasn't picking up traction, but once they renamed it to NGL, which is like the same, yeah, the slang term, not going to lie, for their

[26:57] demographic, it like took off because like it was intuitive. The name of your app is is crucial. Like in the early stage, it's probably like 30% of it. You know, people don't think about stuff like this. later down the line, you're going to build that like reputation of the app, you know, ASO and stuff, you know, to adjust, but early on, you want to make sure that when people search for

[27:17] your stuff, they can easily find this. Do you have any ASO tips? Uh, yeah, I do. I'll say like the name of the app and also like the subtitle, those are the two things that also going to hit. When I name my apps, I always try to So, for example, the name of the app is Social Wizard, but it's always good for you to put a dash and then put like what is about. So, Social Wizard up your game. My second app which got acquired last week, it's clean food scanner. So not just put the name of the app just there. It has to be the name

[27:47] slash uh dash whatever you know like what two phrase word can you give that would also give people more context about this because all you're trying to do is you know explain what it is this [ __ ] app does and the subtitle you put is also very very important. Gotcha. And those are the words that are probably if people search it are the most like weighted when people are looking up what or what when Apple's deciding what app to surface for those

[28:11] searches. So the way app store optimization works is that I mean there's a bunch of keywords that people are going to be searching for and Apple ranks those keywords against your app. So for example something like food scanner right health and fitness is by far the most competitive niche on the app store. There's so many companies who are building stuff in that niche. It's so competitive for you to really rank for

[28:37] something as simple as food. You have to probably be getting like 50k downloads like a day. It's that hard. Um, and there's also people who are running ads against your keywords and against your app on the app store, literally. Yes. So, you have all these things that you're fighting. It's very important that you pick the right words for your app and then you just like shove that in everywhere. You shove it in the the description. You shove it in the name of the app, you shove it in the subtitle, even in the pictures, like put it everywhere to make sure that when people are actually searching for this

[29:06] keyword, my app is, you know, like to pop up. Ratings is also a huge one. Apple also looks at your ratings and that will also determine what, you know, is going to like place your app above this app and and that. Interesting. Okay. So, now that you have the onboarding down, you have your ASO down, good name down, what was the marketing strategy? You said Instagram and Tik Tok. You can increase your conversions by up to 6 to 11% without changing anything in your business. With Watt Payments, your customers can spread their payments out over time with zero credit check while you get paid the bulk

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[30:12] today. But what did you use UGC? Was it ads? What did you do? Right. So the way I went about like marketing social wizard um when when I started I didn't really have I was [ __ ] poor bro um you know there's so many pictures of me last year just terrible um cuz I'm not even an American I came from Nigeria and everything like

[30:32] that. You were in Nigeria when you were building this. No I had moved from um so I flew from Nigeria to America and I was working on like a social media app. It was called Caspade. It was like a social media stuff you know uh for Instagram. Ended up failing. Um and then social widget is what I built next. So I already had a lot of context of like social conversations and stuff like that. So it was very easy to just like you know go

[30:54] on to this next one. But when we started marketing there was no capital, right? It was just literally me on TikTok just making content every [ __ ] day until yourself literally just me and until I found something that kind of worked. And what kind of worked was the feature of the you know where you take a picture of a girl you put in the app and you get something to say. I noticed that when I looked at all the video have you know I had made none of them went viral none of them got traction but there was one that kind of stood out and that was when I was using

[31:24] the photo one. So step one was okay I know this content style you know is valid and you know people would want a feature like this. How many views did that get for you to know it's valid? Like 17k 17k was enough for you to be like this one's kind of working. Yeah. But honestly if the video even gets 5k I think that's enough man. 5k signal on Tik Tok. It's very hard to pull [ __ ] views, bro. If you have a video that hits like 5K, there's something there. You need to sit down and look, okay, what part of this video, you know, made it hit like 5K. It's

[31:56] very, very, very hard in the beginning stage when you're making, you know, content you're pushing out every every day. All you want to see is just some spike. If you even get 3K, that is signal. So, you need to look at that video. Okay, what changed here? What did I say different? You try again. You try again. You try again. You try again. If you try enough times, you're going to find one that's going to win and you're going to

[32:14] become successful. It's not that hard. People are just most people just give up. Yeah. And it's just it's not the not necessarily a comp complimentary skill set for developers like creating content and software development very different skill sets. There's like storytelling, understanding people. So what happens when you hit 17K though? What were you

[32:30] saying? I didn't mean to interrupt you. So when we hit 17K, it was like, okay, how do I reproduce this at scale? I can keep making videos by myself, but this is going to take [ __ ] forever. And also at that time, bro, I was kind of like chopped as [ __ ] bro. Like, there are so many biases on Tik Tok on and Instagram. If you're going to be if you're going to be making a video about getting girls, you need to look like

[32:54] you're attractive. Yeah. Yeah. And I was super chopped uh like last year. So, I knew I couldn't [ __ ] scale this. And it was like, okay, where can I get distribution for this? And that was when like streamers even to this day, you know, um a lot of people like 2024, there were streamers popping up like every [ __ ] day making all these clips about like Riz. I think in 2023 the word RZ was like the most popular word ever used. I saw that thing on like a dictionary and stuff like that. So early 2024, there were so many streamers doing this, you know, kind of

[33:25] content where they would go on a girl's Instagram and try and get the girl live on stream or go on a dating app try and get the girl live on stream. So my plan was like, okay, how do I reach out some of these streamers who are not so popular but have who have the potential to get popular? So these are like micro creators. So you have creators and you have micro creators, creators that are still very very small, but maybe they have one video that has spiked and they have like potential. They're pulling like two to two 3K views. But if you work with them and you can make one

[33:54] video like go viral, the upside from there is uh tremendous. So, one of the first creators I worked with was like uh he was a streamer, right? And he was making content about like Minecraft, you know, getting girls, rage baits, all sorts of crap, just crazy degenerate stuff. And he was perfect for my use case because most of his clips were like

[34:16] perfect. Most of his clips were like 2 3k views, but he had some that had spiked. So, I reached out to him. I was like, "Hey, like, you know, here's the app I'm working on. I think we can make a video together. Here's the feature I think has potential. I'm not sure what can we do together. And that video ended up getting like two million views. Crazy, bro. On Instagram. And I think on Tik Tok it underperformed. It was like 400,000, which I don't know why, but that was what just started everything. We went from zero in revenue in January to February, a whole month, $0. I think one week

[34:52] after that, we hit like $2,000 and I think the next two weeks it was like $25,000 made. Yeah, the app spiked. Okay. So, you made this video, this format yourself first. It got 17,000 views. What was the format? You said uh the feature where you get stuff to say uh from like a picture of a girl.

[35:09] So, you take a story post basically. You take a story post of a girl's Instagram, you put in the app and the app will tell you stuff to say. It was novel. People hadn't seen I don't think till this day people haven't seen stuff like that because if you look at it, like you said, Instagram is like a dating app, bro. You know, that's how I

[35:22] see and you know, you know that as well. Story replies are huge, bro. Mhm. You know, even when you like someone's story, it's like, does he like me? Does she like me? It signals like a girl likes a guy story. It's like, you know, that's like the ultimate initiator. Yeah. It's like, okay, something is happening here. It's like flirting. So, getting hints on how to reply someone's story was a no-brainer. Guys hadn't seen

[35:46] that before. Um, so step one was, okay, we need to figure out what content style is going to hit. Mhm. And the beauty about Tik Tok and Instagram and all these platforms is once you find something that works, once you find quality content, you can reproduce that at massive scale and just [ __ ] print,

[36:02] bro. So, what was the script though? Was it like, damn, I don't know what to say with like are you voicing over and like it's like a faceless like story of like, damn, I don't know. This girl's high. I don't know what to say. Literally what you just said right now, I wish I could pull up a video and show you. It was literally here like damn, she's pretty. But what do I say to this

[36:17] picture though? Take a screenshot. Go to the app. gives you what to say. Take the line, reply the girl, she replies back and boom. Yeah. You just simulate her saying, "Oh my gosh, that was so funny." Haha. Yeah. So, you're just going through the story of the app, telling it visually. And so, it's like, "She's so pretty. Well, I don't know what to say." Screenshot home screen on your phone, scroll, open your app, make sure everyone can see very visibly, social wizard, and then see the

[36:43] value of the app. One thing I'll say about like distribution is it's really just showing, not telling. You don't want to You're not trying to sell the [ __ ] app. Just demo what it does, right? And that's all you have to do. Make a video about the product. Show what it does. If people find value,

[37:01] you're going to make money. That's all. You don't have to do anything else. Um I made a tweet a few days ago, you know, because people use this term inherently viral all the time. And I was really thinking about that. I was like, what does it mean for something to be inherently viral? What does that [ __ ] mean? Inherently viral means show me something I haven't seen

[37:19] before. That's it. And if you can show something that people haven't seen before, you're going to go viral. If you look at apps like K AI, the idea of taking a picture of your food and getting an estimate of the calories wasn't something people had seen before. That visual hasn't been seen before. If you look at Social Wizard, the idea of taking a screenshot of someone's story, getting something to say, people hadn't seen that before. So those apps were inherently viral. Even UMAX from, you know, Blake, I'm sure you've had Blake on here before. I have huge respect for

[37:50] that guy. Um the idea of taking a selfie of yourself and getting a rating, people hadn't seen that before. So this, you know, bogus word inherently viral, all it means is show me something I haven't seen before. Yeah. I use the word novel here all the time. Anytime we're talking about marketing, like if we're doing short form, any organic marketing, like for socials where you're playing the algorithm, it has to be a net new piece of content. Of course, any YouTube video I've ever posted, any podcast guest I've had, literally, I'm looking for podcast guests that are novel. Young kids, they've never made content before. It's

[38:20] their first podcast and they've made a lot of money and finds a new novel way to make money. That's my entire thesis. So, I encourage everyone to really understand what the word novel means and understand that there's like two sides of it. Like you want to copy content formats that work, but you want to inject a novel piece of it. Like f like find the storytelling in the format and the way to cut and like explain and visually show it, but then insert novelty and you're guaranteed to get

[38:44] views. That's like the two pieces that you need to really understand. Yeah, I think you said it best. I mean, like you got to look at this way is like, bro, people are just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. There's so much content that's popping up. You're competing against people who are com, you know, doing like felonies. Like that's that's the kind of content you're competing with. They go to like McDonald's and they're like making noise

[39:04] and they're trashing the whole place. That's your competition. You're competing against all sorts of stuff. If you're going to make content, it has to be so different that when people stop, they're like, "Wait, what the [ __ ] is this?" If not, they're just going to scroll past. You've lost that user. And yours is actually probably like so quick and kind of like slick. Like they're not even realizing they're watching an ad. They're like understand like everyone's had the shared experience of trying to reply to a story and they're seeing it like, "Huh? Oh [ __ ] that's a good idea." Wait, what's that called? Done. And they go check it

[39:33] out. Like they're like they actually feel like they just got some game through the piece of content. So like they learned something. But you made that video yourself. Then did you take that video and give that to this degenerate streamer guy and say, "Hey, this worked. Try this style. Like if you make this version, here's my app. This is what it does. I made something like

[39:50] this. Did you show him that first?" Dude, full transparency. When I first made that clip and we had that go viral, well, not really viral, just a couple thousand views, I still wasn't certain that, you know, this is how we're going to go viral, but I just felt there was something here. I was like, hey, like I think there's something here with this particular feature because when people even today to to you know to you know today I told you like the most viral feature on social wizard is the

[40:14] reply one, not the story one. The story one is just how we get people into the app. When they get in the app, the text one is where I push them to. Yeah, because that's the most retentive one. Mhm. I mean like how many times would you need to reply to someone's story per

[40:27] week? No, that makes sense. But that is the opener. Like if you don't reply to the store, you're never going to get to the texting. So literally that that makes sense. You got the whole funnel, right? So you know when I first made that clip, you know, then you go to the people and say, "Hey, like I think there's something here. You know, what

[40:39] could we possibly make with this?" At this point, I think Social Ws on Tik Tok and Instagram. Every creator we've worked with, I didn't let them just go make content. I literally was micromanaged. I micromanaged all the content that went out because you really want to work and also if you don't really have capital, you want to make sure that every dollar you're spending is bringing about at least a dollar and a cent, right? So everyone we work day was really

[41:08] micromanag like I think this work here. What can we make here? You have to say this, you have to do this. You have to do this like like give them stuff like they have to do like a guideline and then they can add their own they can sprinkle their own creativity but it should be very rigid. Dude, it should be

[41:21] a system. Yeah. So, you basically had no money. You made it yourself first, found something there, and you're like, "All right, I'm going to try this with someone who's like a like a true content creator. Reach out to him." Did you show him that video? I did show him. Yeah. You're like, "And you said, make this exact same video, but your way like kind of like that's kind of how how the conversation was like he like, "Hey, I did this. There's some traction here. I think you should use this feature and let's see what happens." And then then he goes with his own creativity, his own

[41:46] style, his own tonality, and he makes something that he thinks is valid. I see it. I approve it. Um, and he posted it. How much did you pay him for a clip? First clip was like $120. $120 for that first one. Yeah. Feels a little expensive. How many followers have expensive? Yeah. I don't I actually think I got a deal for that one cuz usually all these streamers like the average price that was paid was like 400 bucks

[42:09] for one video. Yeah. For one video. Mhm. Did he have a lot of followers or he had videos that gotten views? Like was he pulling views already or was it like a He was pulling like 2 3,000 views but he had videos that had spiked. Yeah. So, he's had some success. Yeah. 120 is not like a unreasonable amount by any means, but 120 is actually very small. Be honest, bro. Like, well, that's a very that's a I agree. Simultaneously, I'm we reach out to hundreds of creators a day here and it's like we are baffled by people who quote us 2K and they get like 2K

[42:36] views per video. I'm like, you're charging a dollar per view, bro. Dude, the creator landscape is so they're scammers, bro. It's it's like cuz when you're working with creators, there's so many things you're dealing with. you're also dealing with like ego and pride and all these things. It's like it's like a fine line of someone thinking they're worth X, but in reality, you know, they're worth Y, and you have to communicate with them and get them closer to why they're

[43:01] actually worthwhile. Um, it's very tricky. You have to be very respectful. You have to, you know, play into their ego. Literally, it's it's it's a different game. Like, we love your content. we think your style is super quality, but and we'd really think this would work well, but then maybe even be like, we're on a tight budget. We'd love to work together. Can you make this work? Like

[43:20] hit them with this number. Another thing I'll say is like once you've already gotten traction with your app, once you've gotten ratings and people are using it, you actually have more leverage against creators. For sure. Especially when you've worked with other creators because you can say, "Hey, we work with this creator." Usually, we start off with like this is I'll tell you how I negotiate with creators. I get on a call. I always get on a call, right? Emails, text, just get that [ __ ] number. Once you get that number, you always want to get on the call to close them. Uh when I get on the

[43:42] call, I start by saying, "Hey, you know, I introduce myself, you know, I talk about stuff I've done. I talk about my relationship with other app founders who have apps that have blown up." So, and this is just for like you you do have to play like a status game also. So, I could say, "Hey, you know, you know, I've been building apps for a while. You know, you know, this is one of the you know, apps I built. This is one of the apps I've worked on. We we we did this deal here. We did this deal here. You know, sometimes I would even say, "I've worked

[44:07] with this creator." [ __ ] lie. Just you're trying to communicate with this person, which is crazy. But your goal is to communicate with this creator or streamer that, hey, like you've been in this game, you build apps, you scale apps, you pay people, and you have money. That's step one. Then I tell them, hey, like, you know, usually when we work with creators, we like to like work with like start with like a test video, one video to sort of see like um how the content performs. Do people like it? We want to test out your audience. You know, I I don't really know if people are going to like, you

[44:40] know, this content promoting our product. So, it's important we start off with that. And when you say that, you actually open up the floor for the person to think, okay, this guy wants to work with me long term, but he's not sure if I'm a good fit. So, you flip it and then you can actually bargain a lower price with

[44:57] that. So, that's usually my strategy. Yeah. Cuz like you're you're promising or hinting at a long-term relationship where there'll be consistent money in the future. And so you're just saying like if this works well, you'll get paid a lot more in the back end basically. And they will want to try harder and they'll be more willing to try for the first one. And if it doesn't do well, no one's they're not gonna be surprised if

[45:14] you don't want to work with them. Yeah. So they want to try to make it better. Yeah. Interesting. But you're always going to do that on a phone call. Yeah. And that video honestly actually like I'll say like 90% of the time that one video ends up paying for all the videos they'll end up making in the

[45:26] future. Did you ever sprinkle in an affiliate or CPM model? Like were you paid per view? No. It was really hard for my app. Mhm. always retainer or flat fee. It depends on Yeah, but it depends on the niche you're in, bro. Like my niche, all these creators is like, if you're not going to work with me, who you going to work with? You're making real content, bro. Like, no [ __ ] brand is going to work with you. I'm like the only guy you can work with,

[45:51] right? And I didn't realize that early on, but after a while, I realized it's like, hey, like you're either going to work with me or like stake.com, which is the gamble and stuff like that. They don't really have a lot of options. for my second app, uh, Clean Eats, we were able to like do like some of those rates because like I said, health and fitness is the

[46:08] most competitive niche, the app store. Um, people who make fitness content, they can promote supplements, they can promote apps, they can promote apparel, they can wear Gym Shark, they can promote drugs, like there's just so many things they can promote. They can promote events, they can promote gyms. So they are much they're much more open because they've had they've worked with multiple people and they those deals have all they've all had like different structures. So when you bring up stuff like that some creators are open sometimes it doesn't work. It really depends on the it's all about leverage here like so what was what was easier was it

[46:42] social wizard or clean needs to work with creators in terms of speed clean was much faster. I was dealing with like much more experienced people, people who are like more matured, you know, you do a deal, you sign a contract, they they make content. It's like, you know, it's much more professional. With Social Wizard, these are guys who are like 16, 17 kids that I'm dealing with. So, it's much more casual. You know, we're texting, we're facetiming, we're having fun, we're chilling, you know, sometimes they make content, I don't pay them for like three days, you know, I was like, "Oh, I forgot I just sent any money." It's much more

[47:17] laidback. Um, but then you get the flaking because you're dealing with 17 year olds. Yes. They tell you to make video today, it takes like 3 days. Hit them up. It's like, "Hey, bro." Like, "Oh, I'm busy." Takes another three days. So, I'll say this is good and bad. It's like really different different sets of

[47:32] people you're working with. What how would you decide how much to pay people with clean eats? That was actually very expensive too. Clean was much more expensive. Um because again, these people are much older so they expect more. When I I can tell you like my selection process of how I'm working with creators. When I'm scrolling through like Instagram or Tik Tok, depending on what I'm promoting, when I watch someone's content, I always try to envision what kind of video I see them making. Like that's my step one. M um even if someone has views and they have like a lot of like um people watching their stuff, if I don't think,

[48:08] and this is where like the spidey senses comes in, if I don't think they can integrate my product in a good way, I wouldn't hit them up. Um so I always like look at creators and ask myself, okay, like what kind of video do I see this girl making? How do I think she can make it here? I watch like a couple of their videos and when I find one that I think they can easily make, then that's when I proceed to to hit them up. In terms of like pay range, it does depend on how many views they're pulling and you know the ratio for that. But I always so the

[48:36] model is if I spend $1,000 here, can I make $3,000 back to like 3x is kind of like how I usually base it. And you know with clean we're charging mostly yearly subscriptions. So the payback from that is much higher compared to social visual you're charging $10 a week. You know if someone stays three weeks then they make

[48:54] the same amount of money with cleanings. But with cleans the cash up front was just much much higher. But then you c the LTV cuz I mean it's till next year if they renew. Um you most people end up canceling. Um so with that it's much more you're more careful because the LTV is capped but more money is paid because you get more upfront more cash comes through the door. Um I'll say average for that was like like 1,500 to like 2,000

[49:23] per video. Yeah, because we did work with really good creators. There's this one creator that we worked with and I paid her like 5,000 approximately 5,000 like 4.5K. The first video made back 6K and that was for like a six deal structure including stories. So from that one creator from paying her like $5,000

[49:44] I probably pulled in like 20 grand. Wow. Which is crazy. So for you Hold on. You pulled in 20K? Yeah. For that one creator. How much did you pay her? uh like 5K. So 5K for how many videos? So the deal was six videos for 5K and she hits like a specific view clause which was 2 million and she actually

[50:01] didn't hit that view clause. Um and this is where like um what's the word? Conscience comes in you know even though she didn't hit the MVC, she did make me a lot of money and so it was a question of do I demand more from this girl? Do I extract more even though she hit a

[50:16] deal? Which I mean listen I'm a businessman bro. I did I and I asked I asked for more clips. I said, "Hey, like you didn't hit the MVC. Give me more clips." And she ended up making more clips. She still didn't hit it. And then I said, "Okay, give me more stories." And she made more stories. And she still didn't hit it. And we ended up just parting ways. I already made my

[50:35] money back, bro. Okay. So, but you're saying I I like in the deal structure. I will pay you 5K for six videos, but you must hit at least 2 million views of a minimum view guarantee. So, I I'll tell you the whole deal structure. So, it was like it wasn't 5K, it was approximately 5K. So, it was $5,000. Let's just say $5,000. She was going to make content on Tik Tok and Instagram. But the MVC, and this is where I I I don't do what most people do. I do the MVC off one platform. So, if they are, you know, it depends on what platform is like the biggest for

[51:06] them. Like where where do I see myself making the most money, right? Which is like Instagram for example. On Instagram, you must get like two million views. I don't care what you do on Tik Tok. Tik Tok is still part of the deal. You're still going to make content there, but the amount of views you pull in, we are only going to tie to what

[51:21] happens on Instagram. Mh. And then I cap it to seven days. So if a video gets posted today, after seven days, how many views does that does that video have? And then we track that. And then you post six videos, we add it up. After seven days after each one, if it's not 2 million, you're going to make more

[51:38] clips. And she didn't hit 2 million. It was like 1 point something. Yeah. It's a good tool to kit to have in your arsenal to really protect yourself from getting screwed by creators. Yeah, cuz it's very easy. Creators are going to be very confident and tell you a big number. You know, one thing I realized working with creators sometimes they don't they don't really care about like how many clips they have to make. They just care about how much you're paying them. And the person who told me this was Zach too

[52:01] for account. Like they care more about how much you're going to pay them as opposed to how many clips you're going to do. So, if a creator says, "Hey, like I want you to pay me 5,000." And if you if the deal structure was four clicks for 5,000, right? And then they decline, they want 6,000 or they want

[52:22] 7,000. You could actually double and say, "Okay, I'll pay you 7,000 if you make eight clips." And most times they will say yes. It really depends. But from my experience working with creators, they care they care less about how many integrations because the video isn't really about your app. It's just an integration. They care less about the integrations and they care more about how much you're going to pay them. So, if you focus more on how much you're going to give them, you could actually up the amount of videos and up the amount of views they have to get

[52:52] all the time. You know, they care more about just the cash. That makes sense. Okay. So, let's talk about Clean Eats then. So, this is a food scanner you said, right? So, Clean Eats, you know, very very different. um you go from making you know raising abs to like health and fitness. Uh the way I you know ended up building that one was this is like last year I've lost like 30

[53:14] pounds. Um when I started making a little bit of money something fell off like with with fitness. I felt like something was missing. And so I started trying to like you know find ways to like lose weight, track calories, but still eat foods that I like which is actually very very hard. you know, it's really hard if you want to stay within like the 2,000 calorie

[53:34] range and still eat foods you like. That's something I struggle with. It took me time to kind of figure it out. And so the way clean works is you scan the barcode of a food product and we will tell you how well or how bad that's going to affect your skin on your weights. So very different. When I talk about app like this, people think it's Kai, but it's very different from what Kai is doing. It's more about skin on your waist. You know, we just based it's kind of like Yuka, which is a

[54:00] much more popular app on the app store. It's a competitor to Yuka. The difference is that we personalize it. So, for example, you go to like uh uh like a Delhi and you scan like a cereal box. We look at the nutrition facts and the ingredients and we tell you, hey, like we will rate this a skin score of

[54:15] like 60 and a weight score of like 40. So, in terms of trying to lose weight, this probably wouldn't work. for for your skin, this will do do better because there are some foods that are great for weight loss but bad for your skin. And there are foods that are great for your skin but bad for weight loss.

[54:32] For example, Halo Top ice cream. Mhm. If you consume that whole pint of ice cream, it's only like 300 calories, but it's packed with [ __ ] sugars. So, yeah, it's going to help you lose weight, but it's going to [ __ ] up your skin. And so, that's really where cleans comes in. Interesting. So, instead of like macros for like growing muscle or whatever, it's like specifically talking about like the like general health and nutrition of the food, right? But you have to tie it to something because people don't care about being healthy,

[55:03] right? But they care about having bad skin. They care about not looking the best. M so all the marketing for clean eats was less about you need to lose weight to be healthy and more about you need to become attractive and you can become attractive if you eat foods that wouldn't make you gain weight clean to help you do that but an emphasis on skin emphasis on skin and weight which is a huge [ __ ] market yeah I'm sure women would really like yeah really like the face interesting did you take inspiration from Cali like was that like did you see them first or was this something that

[55:36] you just built separately cuz it's still like an image thing, right? Like you take a you have to scan something. Not really, honestly. And I I'll say this, bro. Zach, Henry, Blake, Jake, those guys have built a really [ __ ] crazy app, bro. When I was marketing for clean eats, a lot of the creators I hit up assumed I was Kaii or I was working on a Cali

[56:04] competitor. It was actually really hard to convince because and I'll be honest, bro. Some of the guys that we hit up declined to even work with us because they said Cal AI was inaccurate and they don't want to promote that app. And I was like, "Hey, like we aren't Cali. This isn't Kai. We aren't tracking calories." It was so hard to find a creator to work with because they like almost everyone we hit up. I'm sure Kala Kali had hit up like 90% of them which was it blew my mind. It didn't like I didn't Yes, Kali is making a lot of money and they are so

[56:35] big. Um Zach is one of my close friends but I didn't realize the gravity until I started building health and fitness. A lot of people we hit up we're already hit up by them. So step one was trying to convince them that we are not building anything like that right and we haven't done a deal with them. This is a different application. And this is about

[56:52] scanning your weights. Yeah. It's actually taking is it taking the nutrition label or Yeah, it's more about the nutrition label and like not taking a picture of chicken and giving you score of chicken. Yes. We don't even do like It has to be packaged foods. Yeah. So, it's the packaged food. You're actually taking a look at the ingredients and it's analyzing the

[57:07] ingredients and then telling you. We also changed the wording from You see how you said taking a picture? I say scanning. Yeah. Scanning. Yeah. So, they know it's different, bro. Because you have to scan something that's like a label. Yeah. Yeah. Very smart. And but did you just sell this? Yeah, we actually got acquired last year. Uh I said last year. Last week. So

[57:25] last week. Yeah, literally last week. Yeah, last week. Um so we clean Eastboro. Um look, it got to a point where it's like so we launched early this year, like January, Februaryish. Um I had my birthday in March. Um I did an open bar, do like 30 grand in New York. It was crazy. I had that week was

[57:44] super fun. As time went on, April came, you know, May came, June came, kept working on clean, I sort of lost interest interest in the product like, you know, skin weights. Yes, it's good. It's a huge niche. I don't know if it was something I was very very interested in. It's not something I really wanted to pursue. It was also really hard to really get to the scale I wanted in terms of like time because everyone we tried to work with assumed we were something else. Um, multiple different things I was struggling with. And so I put out a tweet that hey like I'm going to shut

[58:17] this [ __ ] app down. We've made at that point it was like 60k in revenue. Close to half of that was profit and these are our ratings. This tweet went viral. Everyone was like oh why you if you're going to shut it down you know why you shutting down something that's making money are you lying. And I showed proof. I was like hey like see the revenue and that was just like an inbound for just buyers. So a lot of people started hitting him up. Hey like we want to

[58:38] acquire the app. We want to buy the app. So I didn't plan on selling. I posted I was gonna shut it down and people ended up That's far honestly looking back. Yeah. Yeah. And people ended up texting um that you know wanted to acquire. So I spent the next two weeks just getting on calls with different buyers and we eventually find someone that would just close it

[58:56] out. It was like a two-day close. How much you sell for? The amount of money that made and how much we sold it for is actually less than how much social made. It was a very low six figure sale. But honestly, I think selling the app was more of a checking boxes play than it was to financial. Like I already had money. Um, and I think being able to say yes, like

[59:18] I I sold something. Mhm. I I think that's I think it's cool end to end. Like you built a product that had intrinsic value that someone would pay for it. Yeah. Another thing is like when we got acquired, it sort of changed my mindset a bit to the point where I was like, "Holy [ __ ] I can actually

[59:36] make something and someone can buy it." And again, we didn't sell for a crazy amount of money, but that that's a few hundredk is great money. Yeah, it is. I'm I don't want to be ungraceful here, but that gesture Mhm. it kind of made me really believe in myself more and say, "Hey, like sure,

[59:54] what if I sell something for a billion?" Mhm. You know, 100 million, you know, because seeing his believing, man, you know, seeing Zach pulling millions of dollars from one app has made me believe that it's possible. You You really have to see these things. So, I think selling clean has really like it's done a lot for my mindset, like for my mental like I I know that now I can actually [ __ ]

[1:00:14] do this again. 100%. One thing I've noticed here at [ __ ] is that we have conversations and like we're like debating like how should we do pricing and like I was arguing we should do a subscription here or something like that and then like literally one of the co-founders said well if we did that we're only going to be $150 billion company and that's not very cool. We want to be a trillion dollar company. We we think we can do a be a top 10 company in the world but that like but he's and he said it dead serious and it's like that's like really

[1:00:38] inspiring because it really the level of decisions that you're making you are capping yourself if you're not intentional with that. And so like it was a very good argument where it's like wow. Okay. And then he like pushed a different vision for like how we could monetize down the line if this thesis became true. And I'm like that's just like a really important thing to understand cuz like you're only going to you can only achieve what you set out to achieve and if you make decisions you are capping how far you can go based off that. And so if you're not hyper aware of how that

[1:01:06] decision could affect the the ceiling of your company. It's very very important to understand. Agreed. Also like being able to sell an app also depends on like the niche you're playing in. Like it's it was like it was like a 100 times easier to sell clean than even trying to guess which are fired.

[1:01:19] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you're playing in health and fitness that's a niche that a lot of people want to get into, you know, because women who are in 30s and they can use it in their 40s, men like your market is infinite. And there's other businesses that could pair that like I'm sure they've had another business interest where you're pairing that feature and it could be like a package deal or it's a complimentary legion asset. Like it

[1:01:39] makes a lot of sense. Yeah. In my opinion, look, I actually think most apps are not sellable. Mhm. Like like 90% of apps you can't [ __ ] sell them. Most of all the consumer apps that we're building, no one is going to [ __ ] buy it, you know. But yeah, if you're building like a in a niche that makes sense like health and fitness or maybe uh you know work you know working out that's a niche that is good and it's always going to be here. Um I'll say that also really matters for sure. Especially in the consumer side, like they're more like I bet if

[1:02:09] anyone acquires them, they're really trying to acquire the team to help with the marketing, right? Like they want they'll give you like a million dollars, but you have to work there for two years just to do the marketing for their better engine. Yeah. I actually had an offer for clean. There was this company in Spain I wanted to buy the app, but it was more of like an aqua hire. I had to move to Spain to work and I was like, I don't want to

[1:02:26] move to Spain. Yeah. I know Fiverr is doing that. One of my friends has a has a software company in Fiverr was reaching out to acquire them and they were very candid about it. like we're like we like the tool, we'll use it, but it's really just we want you guys to come here and do what you're doing for that tool up front and then funnel it to us as like a backend driver. So they're like we're like we're buy we want to buy the lead genen. So they don't do that cuz it's just like again I see that's like kind of like a job

[1:02:48] disguised in the deal. It is it's like you get a big signing bonus, you know, like you get like $20 million, but then you work at this place for three years and they're I my my brain I can just I can't do that. Tell the big businesses think though. It is really smart. Like Facebook's doing this with half the OpenAI employees right now. They're getting they're

[1:03:05] getting $100 million offers, you know. Yeah. I saw OpenAI is the uh they're raising again half a trillion. Half a trillion. Yeah. 500 billion. But I think that's more for like uh to have like the like sell like secondaries. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Because like Meta is like, you know, just buying up everyone. So they want like the

[1:03:24] employees. That actually is really smart. That's insane though. I don't even I don't even know how much money exists in the world. 60 trillion. Like it's it's crazy, bro. It's crazy. Um, but it's it's it's good. It's a good thing. Like, you know, I'm pro like all these apps. Uh, I think OpenAI, you know, Atropic, all this stuff. I've seen all the CEOs, they talk about how, oh, there's there's going to be one interface to use all apps. You wouldn't need all these apps on your phone. It's all [ __ ] There's actually going to be more and more apps, more and more agents, more

[1:03:51] and more all these things. People like specific products for one use case. Like like literally if I want to solve this people want one solution for that right super apps aren't really big in the US like in countries like China yeah you have one app like we exactly that can do a million things here in the states it's very different you know Americans at least from what I've seen they like one tool for one problem one tool for one problem one tool for one problem it helps the mind and that helps the economy more people can build different types of apps and so you have one problem you can have

[1:04:23] thousands of competitors another problem same niche slightly tweaked. So you can have an app for scanning vegan products, you can have an app for scanning low calorie products. It's actually crazy. Um and you can build more SKs of that. These are different products and there are different competitors for all these different products grows the market. Um I actually think that's that's going to you know you know you know keep playing out. I don't think this this uh this idea that it's going to be one tool that does everything, one agent for everything is just [ __ ] [ __ ] I'm interested on this this concept is

[1:04:56] interesting, but I'm curious now that you're a free agent. How are you deciding what to start next? Like what what checks do you need to hit? Dude, you're so [ __ ] smart cuz I was talking to someone about this yesterday. I literally said I'm a free agent. Um there's a there's so many things I'm thinking about um what I want to do next. I'm sort of in this point in my life where it's like um I've always wanted to get to a point where I'm like stable financially, don't have to really think about money, but I also want to do something that's going to be here for so many years to

[1:05:27] come. You know, I think that's like the end goal to build something like I have on my website. I want to build something that 100 million people are going to use. And I know it's not going to be from all these stupid consumer apps that we're just [ __ ] around with. Like this is just like a way to get cash flow in the

[1:05:39] door and have like money to do stuff. Um, if I am going to build something that millions and millions of people are going to use over 100 million and you know if you build something 100 million people are going to use the chances that that becomes valued at at least a billion is I mean it's like guaranteed. It's going to take time. It's going to take you working with a lot of smart people. If I'm going to do that my start I might as well start now at 22. I don't want to do that when I'm 30 or 35. Um because it might not work even though I

[1:06:08] don't really think about failure. I just hit the road and see what happens. So, recently I've been exploring some opportunities on what I want to do next. It's still going to be in consumer, but it's most likely going to be consumer infrastructure. That's ideally what I'm going to build around that area. Consumer infrastructure. Do you have like a checklist though like of like like clean needs? Obviously, like there's a very visual experience that you could show through marketing or are you just really hounding it on like the

[1:06:31] level of the problem? I think I want to build something that developers are going to use in terms of, you know, making it easier to either build an app, making it easier to monetize an app. Um, that's kind of the space ideally I'm looking at like as a developer myself because building cleans, building social, there's so many problems I had, you know, during the process of trying to scale all these apps and I wonder if there's some opportunity, you know, with AI now to build something to ease that process. You know, if you look at

[1:07:00] lovable, that's all they doing, bro. Mhm. Building an app is really [ __ ] hard. What if we can make it easier? And playing a consumer myself, I've seen that building an app and being solo, building an app, marketing yourself, scaling it, distributing it is really hard. What's the hardest part of the process? What can I make to make it easier for devs like myself to do the

[1:07:20] same is what I've been looking at. Interesting. Yeah. Well, I think we're doing something cool with like W apps. We're going to let developers build apps for creators to sell in their community. And so you can build it with AI, use payments automatically built in, authorization automatically built in and just use like an AI builder and then deploy it into your community. So then it's like housed there instead of like a website. And so I think that'd be like a much more beginner friendly way to at least make some sort of software tool if you're not

[1:07:43] technical, right? But the technical side, it'll be interesting to see what you come up with. And the developers would get like a quotes from what Yeah. Yeah. The developers can do affiliate, they can charge for $1,000 for the install, they could charge per seat, so a dollar for every person in the community, they can do transaction fees. So like we built the content rewards clipping thing. We just take 10% of every single dollar spent paid out, you know. So you can do all that since W

[1:08:02] is payment platform. It's built on [ __ ] Yeah. So it's we have the [ __ ] app store. And so it's like creators install apps in their community. So a chat app, courses app, whatever. But now developers are building them. So we built content rewards which is like the clipping app, but you can build anything. So like we have fitness tools, we have calorie trackers that fitness coaches can install in their community with their course, with their chat. So it's like you can sell software inside

[1:08:23] your community now. So it's like an allin-one. That's what [ __ ] is. WAP has payments. WA has WAP has payments. Authorization, distribution. That's like my tagline, dude. It's actually crazy. Like there is so much money out there. Like you can you can you can build literally anything and as long as you're solving one core need like I don't even think about

[1:08:49] competition anymore. I don't even think competition exists. I just ask myself like what can I build that's going to provide value to people and how can I just tell more people about it? Marketing is like you know I don't like using that word. I say tell people about it because that's what you're doing and if you drive enough traffic to something people are going to

[1:09:06] give you money. And if you have a good product they'll stay. Yeah. Literally. Literally because then it's going to be like a leaking bucket you know. Don't I know that one? Okay. So I actually am very curious. I usually don't go into people's stories of like how they came here but I'm very interested. I see a lot of comments all the time on my podcast. They're like, "Oh, easy for you. You're in a first world country." Blah blah blah blah blah. Like, I I would never be able to do this. You have a very interesting

[1:09:29] story. You started this in Nigeria. And so, I'm very curious like I'm actually like personally genuinely curious. How did you even get to America if you were in Nigeria trying to build apps? I'm sure you're sure you're seeing all these kids on the internet making money because we all live in one big world now. But like what was that

[1:09:44] process? Okay. So, I've had a very rocky life and I'm just going to take it back to 2019. So, in 2019 I was 16. I was living in Nigeria and I had just finished high school. Um, I didn't go to a crazy crazy high school, but I went to a high school where I was able to rub shoulders with people who their parents were successful. Um, and so it kind of gave me standards in life. Even though my parents didn't really have money, but them struggling to put me through there was able to like I was able to like look at, hey, like there's there there's more

[1:10:15] to life. I always used to come back home from school like after like cuz it was a boarding school and asked my parents, hey, like why don't we have this? Why don't we have this? Why aren't we rich? Like these are things that I was very curious about because I saw a lot of kids who had all these things. So I finished high school at 16 and which is very early compared to here in the US. I know most people here graduate at like 18 or you know in Nigeria it's very different. You can

[1:10:40] actually finish at 14 if if you want to. And it was time to head to college. A few of my friends were going to US, Canada, the UK, developed countries to further their studies. I wanted to also go through that path. I didn't want to stay in Nigeria to do college but my parents didn't have the

[1:10:57] money. And this is where ego comes in. And I told him I was like, "Hey, like if I can't go to the US, I'm not going to go to college." Uh, so the first gap year I took was I'm going to get a full scholarship to come to America because I'm smart, right? That's how I felt, you know? Um,

[1:11:13] turns out I'm actually not that smart. Till this day, I haven't met anyone who scored lower than me on the SAT. I had a 1260 on the SAT. Okay, 1260. Um, I had like in math I had 710 and I think English was 550, which is terrible. Um, so I didn't get a full scholarship. And so one year goes by, we're in 2020 now. My parents are like, "All right, we gave you a year to get a full scholarship. You clearly didn't do that. Let's go to school now." And I'm like, I don't know. I don't I don't think so. You know, I'm looking at all

[1:11:45] these Instagram stories of my friends in the US. You're having fun. I'm in Nigeria. I'm like, I don't no, I can't. It was so much I was very status driven like, you know, a couple years ago. And as I said, ego. Um, took me a while to kind of like realize this. And so from 2020 all the way down, you can name any business. Drop shipping, ecom, you know, affiliate marketing. I tried everything because my frame changed from, okay, I'm going to get full class to come to America. That didn't work. Okay, now I'm going to make enough money to pay for my school fees, which was a very

[1:12:19] unrealistic goal. One USD is like 1,500 naira. The idea of a 17-year-old making $20,000 is so unrealistic. like it's it's it's impossible. And in Nigeria, most of the ways that like the wealthy people, they got rich building in a very fundamental core industry like agricultural, cement, construction, you know, healthcare, physical like consumerism does not exist. These apps

[1:12:43] we're building, it's all consumerism. People don't need them, but they just buy because they they just bored in their million dollar house. Yeah. Like literally almost almost literally almost all apps are just consumerism. Those things don't exist in Nigeria. If you want to make money, you have to be solving like near infrastructure. Yes, infrastructure. Exactly. Like payments, like something like these are

[1:13:02] like core things you have to solve. So, how else are you going to make money at 17? It's just impossible, you know? So, I tried multiple things on like literally just online businesses. And in 2022, I saw a tweet about a guy who was in his early 20s talking about how he made a million dollars a month from an app. That guy ended up being Hunter Razixson. and me and him are very

[1:13:24] very close today. He was talking about NGL. That was the app that went super viral. And that blew my mind. The idea of making millions in your early 20s from an app. I didn't know how it was possible. And so I just started stalking this guy. Like today, even when I talked to Hunter, I I keep telling him about how I

[1:13:41] was stalking him years ago. Hunter and Nikita, those are the two guys I was stalking on on on you know on Twitter. And uh you know 2022 was when NGL went viral. There's this app called Paparazzi that went viral. Also, Gas by Nikita. Um, all these apps in this social space were just going viral, going viral,

[1:13:59] going viral. You had to have been here. Um, this was like peak peak consumer social and I'm literally in Nigeria on my phone seeing all these things happen and I tell myself, okay, I think I'm going to get into apps. I didn't even know how to code and so I started learning how to code. Um, the first app I built was Caspid. It was a social app and the idea was simple. You know, if me and you go to a bar, for example, right? If you posted a picture on Instagram that you were with me in the bar, that's cool. My friends won't see it, but your friends

[1:14:30] will see it. And if I did that, my friends will see it. Your friends won't see it, but we are both friends. So, the thesis was flipped. Yeah. What if there was a way for us to create like a temporary circle where you post content into and I post content into and instead of our followers seeing it and following each of us, they just follow the circle. So, we create this temporary story where people just follow because friends hang out with friends all the time. You know, when you go out to like a bar, a party, most times you're going out with the same set of people. So,

[1:15:03] what if we create like this circle where people just follow the circle? Sounds good on paper. In reality, it was really [ __ ] hard to execute, bro. Like, so [ __ ] hard. And I built that while I was in Nigeria. I built that on a broken Dell laptop. And uh the app grew to about 3,000 users, 2,000 users, but over

[1:15:23] 20,000 pictures are posted on the app. Um before it failed, I came to the US to give it one last try because when I was in Nigeria, all I was telling myself was the reason why I'm more successful is because I'm not in America, which is kind of delusional um in a way you know because everyone has like this reason why you know yeah it's like oh if if I had this then I would have this I was still in that mindset oh the reason why the app is not successful is because I'm not in Nigeria and I was able to scrap up some money uh my mom gave me

[1:15:53] like a $100,000 naira which is like $100 you know you know I was able to pull together to get a flight uh came to the US my friend from college he let me sleep on his uh you know college floor and he was literally stealing food from in the cafeteria to, you know, to bring to me to eat. It's crazy, bro. You're stealing pizza, um, which was so unhealthy, bro. That's when I added like 30 pounds because that's America. That's why everyone's fat because the most affordable food

[1:16:17] just poisoned. Yeah. So, um, uh, I was doing that for a while and I was in his college trying to push the app. I'll say like after like 3 days, I knew it was not going to work, you know, and so Caspid ended up failing. I didn't shut it down. I just took it off the app store and the database is still here. People who are

[1:16:33] the app, they still have their pictures. There's so many pictures of me in the app like back in Nigeria and K failed. I was a tourist in America and I was [ __ ] broke. My return flight to America to Nigeria was like three months ahead. So here am I like one week into the US. The next flight back to Nigeria is three months from now. I'm broke and I'm in my friend's college. So I slept there for a while for like weeks. After a while I had to leave. um the school kind of like caught on that I wasn't a student there and I

[1:17:04] was eating food and I was living there. It was kind of weird. And I don't know, my friend, he started getting like in trouble. So I was like, "Hey, you know, it's fine. You helped me. I'm going to have to leave right now." And I spent the next like couple of like four to five weeks just going from relative to relative, relative, like bouncing around, you know, different houses. Um, you know, with people to live by because and I'll say my mindset has changed a bit. Like back then I was more like entitled. Oh, you're my uncle. I have to live with you because I don't have a

[1:17:31] place to live. It's not like that in America. here there's a more individualistic type of way of thinking. It's very different in Nigeria. It's more communitydriven. You know, you can go to your neighbor's house and ask for money, ask for food, sleep there. It's, you know, and living in America now like and being here, I see why we this country like people here are much more ahead because

[1:17:56] back home people are more dependent. Mhm. You owe me this, you know, because you're my uncle, you're my auntie, you know, um you're part of my family. Here is I don't give a [ __ ] It's very different. And I when I came here, I had that same mindset. But I I realized quickly that I was over 18. I think I was like 20 at that time when I was in the US and I am on my own. So when I was living with my relatives, I couldn't stay in someone's house for a very long time because you're intruding their space. These some of these people had kids. And the last

[1:18:27] relative I lived with, she actually ended up kicking me out with police. Um, crazy, bro. She called the police on me. So, my auntie was having problems with my dad right away. I don't know. I don't look for me, man. And this is I know we're getting into like more personal things. I like if two of my friends are having problems, I don't give a [ __ ] bro. I don't want to get involved. I don't want to talk about it. You know, I you're my friend. I just want to be with you. He's my friend. You guys don't Something's happening. just leave me out of it. It's

[1:18:56] the same way, you know, I was to like, you know, my extended family. So, my dad is having problems with my aunts. I don't give a [ __ ] She's my aunt. You're my dad. Don't get me involved. But that wasn't the case. They wanted me to get involved. And my aunt, he started

[1:19:10] heating up. She ended up kicking me out. She called police on me twice. Bro, honestly, she was I'll give, you know, her credit. Like, she was threatening to call the police, but being Nigerian and knowing how our culture is, I never believed she could actually call the police on me. I was a tourist in

[1:19:28] America. I could have been [ __ ] deported. The idea of her calling the police was like a baseless threat. It's like, I'm going to [ __ ] kill you. You know, someone pours water on you, I'm going to kill you. You don't believe that [ __ ] That was how I saw it. I'll say when I was sitting down in the living room and I heard the door because these people they want to break down the [ __ ] door and just like boom boom boom boom boom and I'm like that's weird. I've never heard that sound before and then you start hearing like the radio thing is

[1:19:55] like oh 314 channel this and I'm like when the door open and I'm seeing these two guys walk in there literally on my phone I have like this this is twoour video of my interaction with the police and maybe we can put it up here. I'll give you like a clip of it please. Dude, when the police walked in, it took me like 30 seconds to even get into reality because I didn't believe the idea of seeing the police was never uh possible. So, when I did see the police, I was like, "Holy [ __ ] like this is real." She called the police on me and

[1:20:27] that was my first ever interaction with police and even in my life, bro. Like, literally, I'd never been had that interaction. And, you know, she wanted me out of the house, but she actually couldn't kick me out because I was in Maryland at that time. They have this law. It's crazy. All these laws, we don't even have them in Nigeria. But they have this law that if someone lives in your uh place for longer than I think

[1:20:50] four weeks or five weeks, I'm not sure. They become something called like it's like a resident something. Essentially, you can't just throw them out. You have to go to like the courts to get all these documents. Yeah. It's crazy. I didn't know that. So, legally, she actually couldn't kick me out. Um I think I was like a squatter. I I can't remember how they defined it, but I knew like legally speaking,

[1:21:07] she couldn't throw me out of the crib. That's crazy, dude. She had to go to like the court to do that. But she had taken my my key. I wasn't going to eat. Like yeah, legally she couldn't kick me out, but physically and with other measures, she could kick me out. So the the best move on the chessboard was to leave the house, bro. And so I left the house. All my stuff was literally uh the last floor. Literally, I have a video of this, bro. I I'll give it to you. All my all my my stuff was literally on the last floor. as I was

[1:21:38] homeless for a while. One of my aunts who also lived in Maryland, she was in China at that time. Um, her and her husband, I don't know, I don't think their relationship was the best. I think honestly, I don't want to say something wrong in this camera, but from my perspective, bro, it seems to me like they were separated, right? And uh, you know, I think she has equity in the house. So I called her and she said I should go to the house, which is crazy because you're and this guy aren't really on par anymore. This

[1:22:07] is [ __ ] America. He could have a gun. He was actually a police officer. And so I drove to the house, you know, I set up something with one of the ladies because she had a son and she had the lady who was babysitting the son. I set up something with her and she let me into the house when the dad wasn't

[1:22:24] around. He comes back from work, he sees me and he's like, "What the [ __ ] are you doing here?" It took like three hours to calm down everyone. But after everything, um, they let me stay in the house and they gave me five months deadline. So, this was around the time I started working on

[1:22:40] Social Wizard. So, I had to succeed. Like a lot of people don't know what it is to roll the dice and get six. I think that was a point in my life whereas like I was literally at the lowest point in my life. My auntie had kicked me out. police had come. I didn't have time to be sad. I think some people, you know, something bad happens to them and they're sad, they're crying, they're complaining. I didn't even have time to think about this. I had five months to get something going. And I knew I couldn't get a job because one, that's illegal. And two, you're never

[1:23:12] going to make enough money to to live at that time. So during this period I started considering pos possibly even like studying in America and ended up being here and you know trying to push social wra at the same time and I think that desperation was what you know made me succeed. One week after I got kicked

[1:23:31] out social widget made $2,000. So look if my aunt is watching this video I actually look thank you so much for what you did because when she kicked me out she accelerated the process or the time period that I had to succeed. She just pulled like she she she sped up everything. She increased the what's the word

[1:23:53] essentially there was a countdown now? Urgency. The urgency. Exactly. Like like now I had like I had to make this work. Um and yeah, you know, looking back it ended up working out. So um I ended up staying there for like uh I actually didn't stay the five months, bro. I ended up staying like four months and then in the summer I flew out to San Francisco to meet up with Zach and Henry. I spent a month with them ealagas like the early stage and yeah bro my whole life changed like 360 um social wizard you know ended up doing massive massively well more much more higher than I actually anticipated

[1:24:26] I didn't think the apple was going to be this successful and you know built clean next ended up sold and selling that made really good friends changed my whole life and um I went from being a tourist in America to being a student I dropped out after a semester then I got my 01 visa which is like the visa for extraordinary people and right now I'm

[1:24:45] about to transition into a green card. So, holy [ __ ] Ended up migrating through suffering which is crazy. Like it's so it's insane. When I was 16, I really wanted to come to America to study. I could never make it here. And by when I I made a tweet about this, bro. That tweet ended up going viral. It did like half a million views. And I wrote that I got here through sheer wheel because it was literally I had to

[1:25:08] brute force my way into this country. And when I got here, I had to make money, stabilize myself, then change my status. I think at this point, I've probably spent close to 70,000 on immigration issues, which is crazy. Um, but look, I tell my friends this, you can't you can't control where on the tracks you start because I think we're all running a marathon. You can't control where you start. You know, some people were born in the US and they start 300 yards ahead. Some people were born in Syria and there's war, they start a thousand yards behind. You can't

[1:25:46] [ __ ] complain because no one cares. The only thing you can control is how fast you run. And so if you come from a very developed country, instead of complaining about how hard life is, you need to work harder. Like there's people in Nigeria complaining about, oh, this and this and this. I'm like, bro, like no one gives a

[1:26:03] [ __ ] Like your life is hard. So is this guy, so is this guy. what are you going to do? And if you succeed, you actually have a better story to tell. And people don't realize this because stories are actually a huge thing. And I know that today people love stories. If you were born into a [ __ ] rich family and you went to Stanford and you made an app that made 200K, I don't think people are going to give a [ __ ]

[1:26:25] It's like you you already started ahead. You're supposed to succeed. There's more expectations. But if you're that guy who is just like [ __ ] struggling in a very developed country, you don't know how you're gonna make it out. you need to go harder and harder and harder. And if you win, my god, people are going to want to be around you because you don't really have much, you know, and right now at this point now, I'm even so delusional about stories. When I was flying from San Francisco to here, I was on a plane and

[1:26:50] there was so much turbulence. The lady to my right, she was trying to strap on a seat belt. She was like, and I was just looking at her and I was like, if this plane crashes, this will be a good story to tell if we survive. That's how delusional I was. I was like I was telling my friend this. I was like right now I when I look at the things I do I always ask myself is like would

[1:27:13] this make a good story or not? And if so I I just want to do it. You know storytelling is huge. And uh yeah man like everything worked out well. I ended up making it here to the US and I'm grateful. I'm grateful to all the bad times and all the good times and people who have helped me people who didn't help me. It's fine, you know, and right now I'm just thinking of what can I do next,

[1:27:33] you know, to to get much bigger. That was so inspiring, bro. I do not know that story. I don't know how you can hear that and not just like be extremely a grateful for the position you're in or get out of your seat and start sprinting. Like I think most people in America are

[1:27:50] probably just walking their marathon. Yeah, you're walking and I'm [ __ ] running. You're running. You know, a lot of people like us are all [ __ ] running. It's like when people and I I I heard Alex Humozi say this. People already know what to [ __ ] do. Like if you want to lose weight, you

[1:28:08] know you should eat less and move more. Like you already know this. The question is why aren't you doing that? Not what shall I do, right? You know, people want you to they want the words to be said to them in a certain way to get them excited and motivated and all these different things. And for me, it's like

[1:28:25] just tell me what I have to [ __ ] do. You know, I look at everything as increase the likelihood and decrease the likelihood. And we can go back to weight again. If I walk 10,000 steps a day, would that increase the likelihood that I get to my goal weights? Yeah. If I don't track my calories and eat whatever, that would decrease the likelihood that I don't get to my my target. I look at that today. It's like, okay, like I spoke about in 10 years, I want to get to a billion. What are the things I need to do today that are going to increase the likelihood that I get

[1:28:55] there? Living in a good city, whether that's New York or SF, where people are doing cool things, being around people who are smart, what are the things that are going to decrease the likelihood that I hit that goal? Getting distracted, chasing girls, doing dumb stuff, like so all the actions I take, it's more from a perspective of would this increase the likelihood that I get to this goal or would it decrease the likelihood? And that's just how I make my decisions. It's it's that simple. You don't need to be super motivated and all this. Um, I'm excited today. Like, every day for me is [ __ ] hard, bro. But you

[1:29:26] have to do it regardless. And I think that's what makes it fun. Bars, bro. Okay. Well, I'm extremely grateful for you coming out here and coming on the podcast. Where can people find you on Twitter? What's your name? Give everybody the spiel. All right, man. Uh, so Instagram and Twitter X. It's my first name, SP. So,

[1:29:44] Keshi SP. Keshi SP. Yes. So, it's K E L E I K E L E C H I SB. All right. Perfect. Well, my guy, thank you for coming on. Thank you for telling the story. Congrats on the success. 100% earned. And I just want to say that that was probably one of the most inspiring podcasts of all time. I think you're on the cusp of something really good in the next 10 years. I think that billion dollar mark can be accomplished no problem. You're a very smart guy. You're motivated. I think you have a good head on your shoulders and you've already gone through a lot of difficulty. So,

[1:30:11] appreciate the roads ahead of you, bro. Thank you. Thank you so much.

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