3 ways to make tons of money on apps in 2026

0:00So, everyone and their mothers is saying software is dead. They're saying there's no point in building software, there's no point in building apps or SaaS or anything cuz anyone just can vibe code whatever they want in a couple clicks. So, why would you build an app? Why would you build a SaaS? I completely disagree. Uh over a year and a half ago, I launched Creator Buddy, which is my first SaaS. Since then, I've made over $400,000 on it. Anyone on planet Earth can go on Twitter right now, vibe code it in literally 10 minutes, probably make a better version of it, and I

0:29promise you I will still out-sell you. What I'm going to show you right now is exactly the three ways you can still build software, apps, whatever you want, and still make millions of dollars on it. I'll go through the three things you need to know to still be successful with apps. Now, this is really important for everyone to watch because right now anyone can build software. Anyone can build apps. I still believe it's the

0:56biggest opportunity out there right now. You just need to know about these three things in order to make it successful. The first moat you can still have in software is distribution. This is why Creator Buddy, my first SaaS, was very successful because I had distribution. If you have an audience, if you have a community that trusts you deeply, you can build and launch pretty much anything and have customers day one. I'm going to launch a new app in a few weeks called Henry Intelligent Machines. I promise you day one it's going to be extremely successful because of the audience I built. This is why I talk so

1:33much about growing on social media, building a Twitter, building a YouTube, because if you build yourself a trusted audience on these platforms, you become bulletproof. The fact that I've built up 450k on Twitter and over 200k on YouTube, I can do, build, and launch pretty much anything I want and immediately have success with it. Now, I launched a video a few days ago that went super deep on the distribution. So, if you want to see that, go look at my past videos, you'll find it. But, the two things you need to know is I think Twitter and YouTube are the best place to be building right now. X is the

2:10lowest barrier social media to get into. So, it is really easy to kind of crap out any tweet you can think of and put it online. So, it's very easy to get It was the first platform I did back in 2021, I used X. You can build an audience pretty easily there. The one challenge is the fact that it's so low barrier means you have a lot more competition. But, if you stay consistent and put out quality content that is like valuable for people, it doesn't matter that the barrier is so low, you'll beat all of these engagement farming losers that are all over the timeline. The

2:41other option that I highly recommend is YouTube. YouTube is much higher barrier, and the fact that it's so high barrier means you have way less competition, which means if you stay consistent with it, you have a lot more of a reward. If you build on these two platforms, you will build an audience. If you build an audience, it doesn't matter that anyone can buy I challenge everyone watching this video, go sign up for a free trial

3:05CreatorBuddy and copy it and launch it. Every I If everyone watching this video copied it and launched it, I promise I would still probably have more customers. Uh maybe unless Elon Musk makes CreatorBuddy, yeah, he'll probably beat me. But, distribution, huge moat, doesn't matter that you can one-shot prompt basically any software out there. If you have distribution, you'll make money. The second moat you can build in software, even though you can one-shot any app right now, is the network effect. If your app or what you build has a network effect, it is going to make tremendous amounts of money. If software is dead and SaaS is dead, and

3:45because you can vibe code anything with Claude code right now, then why is Instagram still worth tens of billions of dollars. I can probably one shot a better version of Instagram right now, but it will not have that many customers. Why is that? Because right now Instagram has your childhood crush on it posting bikini pictures of herself on it. That's why Instagram is going to beat whatever your vibe coded version of Instagram will be. It's the network effect. There's way more people on Instagram right now than will be on any vibe coded version of Instagram you can build. I mean, remember Vimeo? Vimeo was that YouTube competitor where all the

4:27videos were like 1080p 4K before like high definition was a thing, and it died. Why? Because all the creators and all the viewers were on YouTube. YouTube had the network effects. So, you need to build network effects. If you have a network effect with your app, it doesn't matter if 10 billion people copy the app

4:47you built, it will still be successful. Now, the question becomes, how do you build a network effect on the app you're building? Well, there's a few strategies. The first strategy is FOMO. Building in FOMO into your app. How do you build FOMO into your app? If you notice, basically every social media site out there launches the same way. They're all trying to build FOMO. They don't just announce, "Hey, our social media app's available. Sign up right now." No, they all do FOMO. They all make it's only a few select people start at first. Those few select people, invariably because they feel special, tweet out, "Hey, look, I'm part of this

5:26app. How amazing is this?" And everyone who sees those posts go nuts. "Oh man, I wish I was a part of that app." An example of this recently is Robinhood. Robinhood just launched like a social network on their Robinhood app. They started letting people into it a year ago, and people were posting screenshots and getting excitement, and then they do the full launch. Now a ton of people are on it. If you can build FOMO into your application, roll it out in a way that builds anticipation, you'll get tons of people wanting to use your app, even if other people can vibe code it. The other

5:58is social techniques. So, getting people to share what they're doing in your app on social media. An example of this is Grok. Elon does this great with Grok. They made it unbelievably easy to share Grok imagine videos of dragons fighting fairies on your timeline. And yeah, now is there a bunch of slop on the timeline? Yes, but everyone is using Grok because of it. They also built this into the replies where you can tag Grok and say, "Grok, is this true?" And it's just making more and more people want to use Grok. So, building social techniques where people want to share everything they're doing on social media is going

6:40to build your network effect where people And kind of another example, Robinhood, honestly, where you see screenshots of people making investments on Robinhood left and right. It makes people want to go and download Robinhood and use it as their investment platform. The other is important people. This is something Twitter did in the old days where they paid like Jay-Z $2 million to start a Twitter space back when they first launched spaces. And just by doing that, it got so many people to use spaces, host their own spaces, listen to spaces. If you can get important influencers and people to use your app and talk about it and share it, it will

7:18build a network effect where people will want to use your app. So, distribution and network effect. You do even one of these two things, you're going to have a successful application. But what's the third? What's the third thing you can add in here? Partnerships {slash} data. Riddle me this. If SaaS is dead, if software is dead, then why is Palantir

7:39worth $300 billion? Right? All Palantir is is an analytics platform. Why are they worth 300 billion dollars? Because they have partnerships. They have partnerships with everyone in the US government and they have the data, all the data on planet Earth basically, right? Partnerships and data, that's why they're worth 300 billion dollars. Now, there's a lot to this. There's a lot of different things. Let me give you an example. Before I quit my job to build and create content full-time, I worked at a company called MongoDB. MongoDB at the time was a smaller database company and we're trying to rip out Oracle from every

8:16single company we were going after. Oracle was a much more expensive, much more crappier product than MongoDB. But why couldn't we rip out Oracle? Why was Oracle still beating us with so many companies? Because Oracle's 60-year-old sales guys were taking out their contacts at each one of these companies out to golf every year right before they signed a new contract, yucking it up

8:43with them and that was keeping them on. They built these really deep friendships, relationships, partnerships with each one of these companies and when it came down to it, the companies were like, "Well, we can go with that upstart MongoDB or we can go with the guy I'm friends with who's been very nice to me for 15 years now." They ended up staying with Oracle. So, partnerships were so important. How do you build

9:08partnerships? How do you get good data? Well, this comes down to straight-up building relationships. When I launched Creator Buddy a year and a half ago, some of my biggest competitors had an advantage over me. They didn't have as much distribution, but they had partnerships with X where they were getting a lot more data than me into their platforms, which made their platforms a lot better than Creator Buddy in some ways. They were reaching out to all the X product people and sales people and building relationships there. While I was paying $6,000 a month for their API, which for the record that was crazy, that's how much it cost back

9:42then, the other guys are building relationships, getting it for cheaper, and getting way more data. So, they were building relationships there. So, what you need to do is you need to reach out to people, companies, customers that you want to work with your app, and build relationships there, and build partnerships, and make special deals with them. If you can get the right companies or the right data to work with you and put it in your app, you have a moat that no one else can have. If you become the exclusive analytics partner of Claude Code or CodeX, and every Vibe Coded app gets your analytics platform

10:16built in, that's a moat. It doesn't matter that people can Vibe Code your analytics, you can get built into every single app. So, this is around building relationships with the right companies and the right partners. If you get even one of these three things built into your application, you're going to make very good money. For me, I pretty much

10:36only had distribution in Creator Buddy. Right, I didn't really have a network effect or anything that was like shareable. I didn't have any partnerships or data. While every other competitor was building relationships apps, I just didn't really care, to be quite honest with you. I just wanted to get my app out there. My next app, Henry, I'm working to get all three of these built in. I think it's going to be very successful. But, what you need to think about when you're building your app out, and you're even thinking about the design of your app, is one, how do I get network effects? Two, how do I build

11:05partnerships with people so I can get data that becomes a moat or partnerships that become a moat? And three, how much content am I making? How much of my audience am I building? How much trust am I building with potential customers of my app? That's another really important thing when it comes to distribution. You can't just build an audience and go, "Okay, I'm going to sell now." The audience you're building has to deeply trust you with what you're building. So, I talked about the algorithm a ton, right? And Creator Buddy is an X algorithm tool. So, I built trust in the algo- X algorithm space. So, that led to tons and tons of

11:42customers. You need to make sure the distribution audience you're building matches what the customer base of your app will be. If you do one of these three things, tons of money. All three, you're going to be a billionaire. SaaS isn't dead. Software isn't dead. You just have to change your strategy now, where you focus on the motes that absolutely no one can beat you in. If you found this helpful, make sure to

12:06like, subscribe, turn on notifications. I try to make as many of these helpful videos as I can. Hope this was helpful. Have a great rest of your weekend.