How I Used Instagram to Make $26K in 30 Days (with a Mobile App)

0:00Ever wondered what would happen if you were posting daily video for a year? Well, this guy did it for 420 days straight. Thanks to that, Yi grew to 176,000 followers on Instagram and launched an app that made $26,000 in his first months. In this episode, you will learn how to get comfortable on camera, how to stay consistent, and how to get viral. But Uni will also give you a few acts that will help you escape the Android view jail. So, if you've ever thought about starting a building public but keep waiting for the right time, this episode is for you. So, Yonyi, before we start, I want to ask you

0:35something. There's something I struggle often is to warm up before recording a video. You've been recording for like 416 days. So, you probably have a special warm up that you use before or something you do. Before I film a video, I do uh 10 jumping jacks, 10 push-ups. I say ABC's forwards and backwards. No, I'm just kidding. I don't have a warm-up. I don't have warmup. I'll show you actually

1:04exactly what it looks like when I film. I film using this camera. It's DJI Osmo Pocket. It's like, as far as cameras go, pretty cheap. 4 500 bucks. You can use an iPhone. I use iPhone for the first, you know, 300 days. I just put this camera right here on my laptop and I just start talking. I start recording. A lot of times I don't even know what's about to happen when I open my mouth and it's just, you know, I what happened today? What am I thinking about? You know, what am I looking forward to? Are things going the way I want them to? I

1:36just tell the story because I think that content, you know, a lot of people talk about storytelling, but what story do you tell? Like you can tell stories about things that are going on in the world, AI events, you can talk about other people or you can just tell your story. And that's what I did. I think it's a lot easier that way because you don't need to script. You don't need to make it up. You don't need to really be creative. You just tell your story. You have a story. You know, you're building something. So, uh, that's what I do. I just, uh, I tell the very long 416 days

2:07in a row story of my life. Amazing. And was it always like that? my videos. Yeah. Like the first video you made, were you as comfortable as you have now? No. So, one of the real reasons why I started was because I was so scared of starting. And I think that if you're super scared of something, you should kind of double click on that. Look into it. Why are you What is so scary? Is it something that you can overcome? And for me, it was super super uncomfortable to be on camera, especially to look yourself in the eyes on camera because you're talking into your phone probably

2:48at first. Look yourself in the eyes and say something, right? And hit record. It's like it's super difficult and super cringe. You know, there's this whole concept of cringe. It feels really uncomfortable. Um, so I knew that I need to overcome this. And I just started filming for the sake of overcoming it at first. In my first video, I said, "Today is day one of doing nothing for every

3:09follower I gain. Follow me to find out." Because I saw some account who said this as a joke. Some creator, he had a bunch of followers. I don't know what his videos were about, but he made one random video sort of uh making fun of all these trends that are like day one of running a mile for every follower or for doing a jumping jack or push-up for every follower. Some people would do these threat these trends and they would build up a bunch of following. So I said day one of build of doing nothing and uh you know it took 5 seconds to record the

3:41video. It was super awkward but I just went away somewhere that nobody can see me. I opened the Instagram camera. No edits. I just talked into the Instagram camera and I posted it and uh then I did it again the next day and the next day and here we are in this conver. How did it go for you? Like did you get viral like pretty fast or was it a long

4:05and hard work to get there? Yeah, it was long. Um I know Jim, who you had on your podcast last, he went viral in the first video and uh that's like must be a super interesting feeling, you know, but no, I my first video just like everybody else got 200 views and three likes, you know. That's how it starts. And uh I wasn't offering anything interesting. I wasn't like Jim telling an interesting, cool, dramatic story. I was just like putting in the reps for myself publicly. I made a new account. It had zero followers. I was just talking into the void kind of to overcome this internal discomfort. Uh

4:48and it came slowly. You know, I did have a few kind of random viral videos in the first two months. Uh, one video got like 50,000 views, which it's like, you know, that feeling that you get when you're going viral. Even if it's 50,000 views, you know, a thousand people like your video, you've never seen that before.

5:07You're looking at all the notifications. It's like dopamine. It's like drugs. It's this super crazy feeling. This is the reason social media is addicting, you know. Uh, and I'm still trying to overcome that feeling now. A year and a half later, when a video goes viral, it's like hard not to keep checking. and you want to see, you know, maybe somebody interesting is commenting or

5:27liking or, you know, following me. Uh, yeah. Yeah, it took a while. It did take a while. It's funny you did a post about that like two days ago and I answered to that because for me it's like really a big feeling when I started Twitter. The first time you get viral, you get addicted to that and you're it's like a Russian rolet. Like you never know like

5:46you just post something, you never know. You kind of know if it will go well or not. Sometimes you're really wrong, but when it goes well, it's pretty amazing. And how did you stay consistent? Like because you started, you didn't have a lot of views, and now 416 days later, you're still posting. How did you get

6:06consistent? Yeah, it's a good question. Um, at first I was doing it, well I'm still doing it for myself, but at first I was uh doing it because I wanted to overcome this feeling of discomfort. And uh if you're uncomfortable in front of the camera, which probably many people who will be watching or listening to this feel that it takes time, but you do eventually uh you do eventually get over it. And so I I had to at least keep going until I felt comfortable in front of the camera. And that took a month or two. And then after that, I'm already sick on day 60. So it's like, what am I

6:45going to quit on day 60? What's the point? I just did. And once you kind of get day 60, day 100, day 100, 50. If you think about it, there's not many habits in your life that you do every single day with zero days off for hundreds of days in a row. Like maybe you go to the gym, you exercise, maybe you run, maybe you like, you know, whatever to host parties, whatever is your hobbies, you don't do it every day, right? You maybe go to the gym five, three, four, five, six days a week, but you don't go for

7:15the to the gym for 200 days in a row. Uh, and so now I'm doing something for 200 days in a row. It's like, how can I quit? You know, this is sort of it becomes a piece of you. you you know you become the person who shows up every day and uh you know it's public it's in public it's public accountability so it's not like these people will really care if I take a day off they don't care they're probably not even going to be on their phone on that day off or they're not even going to notice that I was wasn't on their feed but I care you know

7:46because I said I was going to do it and uh you know a lot of good has come of it did you miss a No, never. So, did you cheat? Like, did you like let's say recall two video in a day for the Yeah, one time. One time in January. So, this is like 6 months ago. So, it was about um 250 days in or something like this. Uh 200 days in. I went to Japan and to Hawaii with my girlfriend and we were gone for 2 or 3 weeks and I didn't want to be doing this you on that trip because I have been doing it for 200

8:30days in a row. Okay, it's a part of me. It's consistent but like somewhere you need to unplug. It's good to be consistent. It's good to create on social media instead of just consume. But it's also good to put your phone down once in a while. Like it's actually it's not very good to be 24/7 online. Uh, and so right before this trip, I spent like three or four days and I filmed 30 videos and I just scheduled them out using PostBridge onto my

8:59account. That's funny. I'm asking that because I'm flying tomorrow to Europe and I will see my family. I will spend a week with my friend in holiday. I'm like, I really don't want to give up. I don't want to miss a day, but I think I will need probably to record like 30 video in two days or something like that. So yeah, I need a topic. Just a quick break. I invited Yi today because I also started building in public 50 days ago. I've been posting every single day, but nothing really happened yet. And I'm sure I'm not the only one in this situation. So I decided to start this

9:33podcast. Every week I learn from the best content creators that went from zero to hundreds of thousand of followers through short form video. And I share all of that with you. I just created a free guide from everything I've learned from these content creators, from growing an audience to monetization strategies that actually work. And you can get access to it by

9:51clicking on the link in the description. And how did you get viral the first time? What was your first big video that got traction? Super funny. My first video was like day 19, I think. And I kind of remember these videos by their day sometimes. I don't remember what I did 400 days ago, but I remember day 19

10:16the post. Yeah, it's funny. This was the first one that went viral. This was a story about I bought an investment property. I like bought a very small house or I put an offer on a small house like in the countryside in America. And this was the first time I ever put an offer on a house. Uh, and I just said, you know, I put an offer on a

10:38house. Um, I don't know what I'm doing. I've never bought a house before, but there's only one way to find out, you know, something like this. And a bunch of old women. It like Instagram algorithm gave it to old women and they just ate it up. And so all the comments were like from age 60 plus women. And they were saying things like, "You remind me of my grandson." Because I was

11:03talking about like, "I'm buying a house. I never bought a house before and they were like this cute boy, you know, and my followers Instagram shows you the demographics. It's like normally you have the it's like a bell curve and usually most of your followers are like 18 to 24 or 25 to 35 is mine and then

11:23most of my followers are men like 90%. But at that time, because the first video to go viral was all women and old women, my demographics were like completely skewed and I had like suddenly thousands of followers who were age 60 plus women. Totally random. That's crazy. And did you use like um trial for that or you just posted a

11:45normal video? No, I just You mean Instagram trial? Yeah. No, I Instagram trial I think is a new feature. I don't think it existed a year ago. Uh it came out sometime in the last like maybe 6 months. Um and it's kind of a growth hack. If you already have some viral videos, you can use trials to sort of repost them more. But yeah, at the time I just would film one video every

12:10day and post. So you act Instagram to target grandmas. Did you find other Did you find other pattern on like all your video now something that really makes a video get viral? It's a good question. Um you know over the last 415 days I've uh been working on different projects. So right now I have an app and I'm talking a lot about how I'm building this app and I'm marketing the app and this is a lot of what I'm talking about. I'm sure we'll talk about it later, but a year ago I was didn't I wasn't building software. I'm a software engineer for my day job, but I was like doing e-commerce

12:53business and uh I had an e-commerce business that I started on camera and it grew to like $30,000 a month and then it got shut down with a cease and desist and it was like this kind of dramatic story and I was telling the story for the first 10020 days. I was telling the story about how I was growing that business and some of those videos would go viral where I would the first one that really went viral got a couple million views was very early into this e-commerce business. I had an idea for a

13:26product that I thought could sell well. I was selling on Amazon and at the beginning I was spending like a lot of time and money on the business and I had no revenue yet. So, I made some video talking about with a time lapse showing me working on this business in my office late at night. I said, "Sometimes this is what business looks like. You know, you're up late at night, uh, 3:00 in the morning, you want to go to sleep, but you keep working." And I show my revenue statistics, and I said, "So far, I've made $8.80 and I've spent $4,000 and, you know, whatever." And the comment section just

14:02went crazy. Look at this idiot. Spent $4,000. He only made $8. you're better off selling dirt like people just ganged up on me in the comment section and that video went viral I think as a result because you need to create some kind of controversy something I didn't do it on purpose I was just telling the story it's like at the beginning of a business you're negative until you eventually become positive but yeah Instagram sort of uh these these uh they dug their teeth into it yeah it's true I feel like you're rewarded for that and um so you've been posting a lot and And I'm sure that you

14:37have a process now to post video every day. Like do you follow a process every day? Like something that you do always like find an idea, uh write the script, record, edit, and publish. Yeah, it's a good question. So I have uh a bit of a uh you can call it unconventional, unorthodox approach. Most people write scripts to their videos and they plan them out. Uh, but also most people have what I would call like higher touch editing. Most people have videos that have a bunch of different cuts and it says look at this and look at this and you're trying to kind of keep people's

15:16attention. You have to do this on social media. I don't really do it. I just talk into the camera and so most of my videos are like maybe I'll have some images or screenshots overlaid but it's not like I'm in a park and now I'm on a bus and now I'm it's not, you know, I'm not like making a movie. I'm just sort of doing

15:34this lowquality TV episode of my life. For to do it every single day, it has to be some minimum viable form. And so I don't edit my videos. Sorry. I mean, I don't script my videos. I will come up with a topic. Uh, and then I'll just sit down and talk into the camera for like 3, four, five minutes. I'll edit it down into 60 seconds and post it. So, it usually takes me about 30 minutes from start to finish. Now, it at the beginning it took me like two hours every day up to two hours to make a video. You know what it's like, but now

16:11it adds me Yeah. like 30 minutes. And you use Cap Cut to edit. Yeah. Cap if if if some people don't know, I think it's a pro feature, but it's called transcript editing. So, there's a transcript button. What it does is it takes your video, transcribes it into like a basically text document and then you can edit that text document. So for example, one thing when I when I record videos, I might say the same sentence over and over again. Today I want to talk about but and then it sounds weird. Today I want to talk about

16:46and I'll say it until it sounds right. And then later in post you have to cut out all those first bits. But if you just see it all as text, you can just highlight the text and delete it. And Cap Cut will delete that piece of the video. It makes editing much faster because you don't have to scrub through the video and play and stop and find the

17:06bits. You can just edit it as text. Me a lot of time. Yeah. There's a there's an app called Descript and that's kind of their whole premise. Descript was they they were famous for this transcript editing and then CAD just added that feature. So you have your ID, no script, you take your Osmo, you film yourself, you edit on Cap Cut and you publish. Do you still

17:33use Buzzbridge to publish everywhere? No, I don't use it anymore because um I probably should in truth. I probably should. It's just I have a kind of a weird workflow where I'll edit it on my computer and then I put it onto my phone and I do some final touches and then I upload it from my phone. PostBridge Jack, if you're listening to this, if you make an app, uh, if you make a mobile app or like progressive web app or something, that that would be useful because I think that people have to post on Tik Tok, for example, from their phone. But, you know, PostBridge

18:12has issues posting to Tik Tok or any API scheduler has issues posting to Tik Tok because Tik Tok hates API publishing. Tik Tok wants you to only publish in the app. So, yeah. No, I don't use PostBridge anymore to publish, but I do use it for like if I'm scheduling in advance. Yeah, it's funny because I talked about that with Dim, but I have a a huge problem with Tik Tok is that my IP is in Indonesia and I tried a bunch of stuff, you know, like to send content in US, content in English country, but it's really hard. So, like every time I publish something on my phone here, I

18:47will target Indonesian. And it can be can go viral, but like it's not like they are really really good in English. So that's a problem for me. That's why I use Postbridge now. But yeah, sometimes I'm afraid that also Tik Tok kind of filter me because I post from an API. Yeah, it's a good

19:06So do you get views when you post? I get views, but I used to get I think like more than 2,000 views because I have like almost 6,000 followers on Tik Tok. But now I never get above 500 or even not thousand. So I'm not sure if it works well. I target UK mainly which is funny. But uh

19:30interesting. Yeah. Do you have any um well you you gave us like the cap cut a transcript. Do you have any little act that you use like for in any step of the process? H, it's a good question. I think that cap cut transcript editing is probably my biggest hack. Yeah, I I was going to say I think the biggest hack is just do it every day because people want to follow a story. You're going to grow faster at the beginning than you will at the end. Most accounts reach this kind of plateau at some point um because

20:09people want to be a part of something. And so if you're showing like I'm starting a business and you know last last week we had $100 in revenue and today we have $500 in revenue. Let's see where we are next week. You know then people are kind of interested. Oh I want to follow this and see where we're at next week. I'll tell you actually a good hack something a growth hack at the beginning for early accounts. I did this unintentionally but it might have had an effect on my early growth. I would share how many followers I have in the video at some point either at the beginning or

20:45at the end. I would say today we have 287 followers. That's up from 271 followers yesterday. I'm posting every day. See you guys tomorrow. And so what happens is people see they you're claiming some account growth and then they're going to go check your account and they say, "Oh, he had 284 when he posted. What does he have now? Now he has 291. Oh, he's growing." or something like this. You know, the account is growing. So, it kind of creates this curiosity gap where people are like, "Oh, he has more followers today than yesterday. I let's see what he has right now when I check." And that brings them

21:21to your profile and then maybe you have more followers now. They're like, "Okay, I'll follow along." You know, I'll watch this play out. It's funny because right now I'm in the position where I don't have any growth because I launched it's still a beta version so it's not public. I launched my my SAS so I don't have any growth. Yeah, something is building but they don't see anything and I feel like sometimes I miss this you know to show some growth because now I'm posting every day and nothing happened. So maybe that's a good trick actually cuz

21:50followers bro. Yeah. Yeah. And I say that also there is kind of a big spike when um when you start to get revenue like for example Jack Freaks on twe on on Twitter when he started to get actually good revenue on his app it started to explode like straight away and that's when starter story come to you that's where when Greg Eisenber comes to you you know when like the revenue start to come but yeah maybe you need some growth at the beginning so that can be your followers interesting Okay. And I have a question,

22:24but I feel like the answer is obvious. Um, what is the 8020 for content creation? What is the 8020? What is the uh what is the 20 that produces 80% of the results? What's the most important thing? What is the what's the obvious answer? It's a good question. What is the 8020? I think the 8020

22:54is just being consistent. I think uh I think the most important thing is that you show up and uh you know m maybe it's not for everyone. posting 400 days in a row. It's like a little bit of a crazy thing to do, but it, you know, it what you're doing is you're producing a TV show and you're asking people to, you know, watch your show, to tune in, and uh if you kind of make a promise that I'll make an episode for you every day, you want to be entertained, I'll entertain you, I'll tell you a story every day, then it doesn't have to be the most interesting

23:34story. you don't have to have the most growth in your revenue or you know whatever. I think it's like if it's down to earth and it's relatable then uh people want to see that more than they want to see somebody made eight figures yacht you know Gwagon. I think people want to see somebody who's like them who's also just like trying to figure it out. That's a it's a long answer, but uh I think to show up pretty that was the obvious answer I had. It's really like I think consistency and showing up every day probably just to

24:09learn iterate a lot. Yeah. following. Um, you cracked Instagram like 176,000 followers and on Twitter you were not that big and then you got this post like uh what was it 10 no 15 days ago something like that and you got 1.2 million impression explaining uh oh you build your first uh mobile app and got $26,000 from that. What is the thing that you find that you can apply on Instagram but also work on Twitter or like what is the what is the act actually what is the thing the secret that you use to get viral on both platform it's a good question so people so one thing is that people love

25:03to talk about money or to hear about other people's money people are interested in money. People are trying to start businesses. Why? Because they are interested in business because they want money, right? So, this is like a very core kind of psychological driver in humans. And so, to your point, once you start getting revenue, all the podcasts come out and they're like, "Hey, let's talk." Because it's interesting sort of to everyone. Um, I told the story of how I built an app and how it made $26,000 and people are interested. You built an app 30 days ago and now you made $26,000. That means that I can make $26,000 in 30 days. Let

25:45me just read these 11 tweets that will give me all the answers that I need to become successful. So, I think that's why it went viral. I had a very long tweet thread on Twitter also talking about how I grew a bunch of followers on Instagram. That was like a month or two ago. That went really viral. In some ways, it's like the rich get richer. Momentum compounds. Once you have some wins, you should talk about those wins and uh you know people are interested to hear from success of others. This there's a concept of like success porn. This is like people just want to watch starter stories is based

26:20on this principle. People want to watch zero to 17k MR in 30 days. Like you know it's a juicy story. So once you have some revenue to show, if you're not ashamed or you're not like shy to talk about it, I encourage you to talk about it. I think people Twitter uh Twitter is very happy to talk about

26:40money. A lot of people talk about MR. This is like the whole kind of point of tech Twitter now. Uh they're not shy at all. But yeah, I encourage you not to be shy and to talk about these things. And you know, it's other people. Let's talk about it. Then you made $26,000 with this app. Um the name is Brain Roth. Can you explain us what this app does

27:04exactly? Yeah, so Brain Rod is a screen time app that encourages better relationship with your phone and minimizing screen time by showing you a cute little cartoon of a brain. And the more that you spend time on your phone, your brain rots. And so at the beginning of the day, you have 100 health. Your brain is fully healthy and he's happy and he's smiling. And then the more time you spend on your phone, he sort of gets sad and, you know, squishy and by the end he's fully

27:36dead, mel melted, rotted. Um, and you can set up rules to block your apps to encourage you, you know, not to open the apps and keep checking these very addictive platforms. Very cool. How did you came up with the idea? I was addicted to uh I was addicted to these apps that are designed to be, you know, specifically addicting. Uh I think that these apps I mean it's obvious that these apps are addicting. They're but they're addicting both for consumers and for creators. Like they're addicting for normal people who are scrolling because

28:15you never know what you're going to get. Maybe something really interesting. You just keep scrolling. And they're addicting for creators because you post and you don't know what's going to happen. Is it going to go viral? Not go viral? New followers? No new follow, you know? So it creators are constantly checking their notifications. Maybe something cool is happening, right? But uh consumers are just swiping and both of these things just keep pulling you into the app. And I was pulled into the app hundreds of days in

28:45a row of making videos on social media. So, it's like, you know, and now I'm gaining a bunch of followers. It's like drugs to go viral, you know, especially for the first time. You don't know how to handle this feeling. And you keep checking it and you're up late at night checking it and you wake up first thing in the morning checking it. It's like, you know, it's really like drugs. And it started to make my life worse. You know, I'm I live in San Diego, Southern California. Beautiful city, beautiful by the beach, great surfing, mountains, deserts, ocean. It's amazing. I wasn't leaving the house. I was on my phone. I

29:22was on my computer, right? I have everything I need here on the internet. So, I I saw that I have a problem in my life. And uh usually it's good to try to solve your own problems. So, I I could have just downloaded an existing app. They exist for helping with screen time. But I was sort of looking for my next opportunity, my next project after the e-commerce business. And I decided to

29:45build Brain Raw. Amazing. How did How long did it take to build it? It took about two months, but that was way too long. It should have taken much less, but uh I never built an app before. I vibe coded something and it was really a mess. I knew that I can't finish this, so I started over and then I kind of

30:08tried to break it down more carefully. Uh, that took maybe about a month and then I submitted it to the app store and it got rejected for some reason. You need to have your privacy policy on the front of the app. Okay, I fixed this. I resubmitted it. It got rejected because the terms of service needs to be in the description on the app store. It's like, okay, I add that. I resubmit it. It got rejected because the payw wall it looks like this but it's supposed to look like that. Okay. It took like six, seven times before eventually it was accepted and each time takes a couple days. So

30:43end to end it was like two months, two and a half months from start to launch. It's funny because you say that but one of your video on Instagram got pretty viral talking about that, right? Talking about your totally. It's why you should build in public. I got a couple view a couple one or two videos got more than a million views where I'm just talking about how my app is getting rejected. Yesterday my app got rejected for the fifth time and today finally after 65 days of building the app got rejected for the sixth time you know and it went viral. So, it's like this is why you should build in

31:19public because even before you launch when you're struggling and it's like things aren't working and it's delayed. Either you're building in silence and nobody knows, nobody cares and it's not helping you at all or you're building in public and like you build your audience and people are interested and you're building tension and it's like what is

31:37he building? When is it going to launch? Why did he get rejected? He's probably an idiot. You know, whatever. just like is this how you do viral? Let's go back to the app. Uh what is your stack like? How did you build it? I built it in Swift. It is just an iOS native app. So there's a couple of cross-platform technologies. There's React Native you can build an app in and

32:02there is Flutter you can build an app. Uh this will let you cross-co compile it down into iOS or Android. I decided just to build in Swift just for an iPhone because I have an iPhone. I wanted the app. I didn't want to complicate it. Listen, most of my businesses have failed. Like I just like Peter Levelvels, you know, I've probably a few dozen projects, businesses, not nearly as many as him, but I', you know, I failed probably 12 to 18 businesses. And so, you don't want to over complicate it. Imagine if every time you want to start a business, you're like, "What's the most optimal way? Okay, I need to

32:42incorporate a company in the Cayman Islands, and that company is going to license its IP to the Bahamas, and that Bahamas is going to pay me to." So, imagine if you had to set up this every time you want to open a company, right? It's impossible. So, in the same way, I'm like, I just want to do something simple. I'll just do it for iPhone um

33:00and I'll launch that. Interesting. And do you think No. Do you know why this app worked and not the other one? Um, well, by the time that I launched, I had 150,000 followers, 160, whatever it was. So, this is for sure helpful. Um, there's no question about it. At first, I started making videos because it was hard and uncomfortable and cringe and I wanted to overcome this. But of course, I had intentions of, you know, building an audience so that hopefully they can help support me on my journey as an entrepreneur because I've been starting and failing all sorts of different projects for the last 10 years. Uh, so

33:45this was one of the reasons why I started making videos in the first place. Now I have an audience. Let's see if I can launch to my audience. Let's see if these people who support me every day through my videos also want to support or watch the app grow, right? Um, and so thankfully they were super supportive, my audience. A couple days after I launched to my audience, I launched on Product Hunt. This was huge for me. Product Hunt. So, I've seen a lot of people on Twitter launch on

34:14Product Hunt. I've never done it before. I've never used it, but uh, I scheduled something the night before to launch the following day. And I wake up in the morning and I check my phone and somebody sends me a DM says, "Oh my god, you're already number four on Product Hunt." And I look on Product Hunt, it was already number four by 7 in the morning. I was number four in the world. And then all I had to do was like tell my followers, "Hey guys, help me. Help me." And it went 4 3 2 1 and it was number one. And I was like, didn't understand how was this so

34:48easy, you know? And it's like I got 10,000 downloads more in one day. It was crazy. again, dopamine, you know, it's like drugs. Uh, I didn't understand how it happened. Comes to find out that Product Hunt every morning sends out an email to their subscribers a newsletter and it says these are some interesting projects that are dropping today. They will spotlight, you know, every day. It's like how many 200 new products on Product Hunt, but they will mention a few of them in an email. They sent out an email that morning with the subject line cure your brain rot. And the whole top of the email was about my thing and

35:30it had my banner image of brain rot. And it talked about, you know, uh this funny little AI character, no streaks, no complications, simple screen time app. You know, you're going to love this. It was the whole top of the email. And then there were a couple other mentions below, but the first link in a newsletter is always the one that

35:51everybody clicks. Yeah, I imagine I didn't pay on that. No, I didn't pay them. But but they funny you say that. They have, if you look up uh, you know, whatever it is, Product Hunt daily newsletter, you can see they're all on their website. And this was a couple months ago when it launched. And at the top of every newsletter, it says, "Do you know a project deserving the spotlight? email

36:15us at editorsprothunt.com. Something like this. There's an email. And so I guess I don't know if they do it paid, but uh you can at least hit them up in advance and be like, "Hey, I'm launching in a week. Do you have any advice or like what would it take to get a spotlight?" Something like this. I don't know if they will do it, but it's worth investigating because whoever is at the top of that email, they have a

36:43big advantage. They're crazy because yeah, product of the day now became really really on like we all know that. So yeah, congratulation. And on the distribution um you so you launched you got like $3,000 in one day with your audience and then $5,000 from Productant which is crazy. But then after that you had a constant $200 a

37:10day, right? Something like this. Yeah. Every day even still now there's like three four 500 downloads per day. And this is mostly from people who search brain rot in the app store. And they search it for a number of reasons. It's very difficult to tell why did somebody search brain rot. Uh but it could be because they're searching brain

37:35rot like memes. Probably not super likely, but or that they saw a video of mine or that they, you know, saw a tweet or they saw a post on Reddit. It's not very clear where the people are coming from, but yeah, that's what it looks like. And you tried other things, right? You tried like uh UGC uh what else? Yeah, UGC creator, main pages, Tik Tok. And you say you didn't have a lot of success with that. Are you

38:02keep do you keep trying? Yeah. So I'm trying all sort Listen, I'm not a marketing guy. I'm a software engineer. So like most like you know most software engineers, this is the big kind of skill gap. It's like you build a product, nobody knows it exists, nobody cares, and you get no revenue. So, how do you solve that? Well, you can post a video every day for 400 days in a row and hope that a bunch of people start following you. Or you have to Yeah, you have to do these methods. You have to do UGC, user generated content, where you get other creators to make videos for

38:37you about your product. And there's different platforms where you can find them. Ideally, it's like college age students because they do it as a side job, side hustle where you can pay them $10, $20, $30 per video and they will just make for you a hundred videos in a month and maybe something goes viral and you can use them to kind of test different formats and hooks and if you get I mean Calai does more influencer marketing. This is a app that makes $3 million a month. They mostly go to big accounts, but uh yeah, you need to be you can't just be posting on your own

39:12account, right? You need to have you need to be all over the place. And so I'm testing different methods now. Interesting. I will ask you a question that so many people ask on Twitter. I think in the group building public, I see this question every week. Audience first or product first? It's definitely audience first. I think definitely audience first. Maybe it's super provocative. You know, if you're a product person and you're like, you need to build a sticky product, you need to build viral loops, you need to build, you know, high retention delightful things maybe. But, uh, if you can't get a hold of people, it doesn't matter how good

39:56your product is. Roy Lee is this example of distribution first, right? It's kind of a new paradigm in business that uh if you have a billion eyeballs, you will have millions of dollars. There's kind of no way around it. Mr. Beast, what did he do? Mr. Beast, as soon as he got his first $10,000 brand deal, he made a video called giving $10,000 to a homeless person. And that video got, you know, 20 million views. And now he got another brand deal. And now he starts spending on the videos and and it's just audience audience audience. Once you do this then you can start a chocolate

40:34company and make $3 billion right you can do whatever you want Mr. beast and he has like a you know10 billion dollar company. Why? Because audience first. So you got inspired by Peter Lves at the beginning when you started. Now who inspires you or who do you get your ID from or what kind of accounts you're

40:56following? It's a good question. You can say me but you know you you for sure you for sure who inspires me.

41:18I mean so I'll say I'm not really closely following other creators and sort of trying to follow in their footsteps at this point. I'm sort of just I have the path in my head. I know what I need to do and I'm just trying to do the steps. At this point, it kind of feels like there's just not enough hours in the day to do the things that I know I need to be doing. And so I'm kind of just like with these blinders on on this

41:40path. But uh I think it's still Peter Levels, Mark Lou. I think it's these characters who sort of show that soloreneure life is possible. Peter Levels is a guy who it's just him. He had a server guy, Daniel, and he had a bunch of like robots on his computer, basically cron jobs. Every time somebody requests a refund, he automatically sends them an email. Every time, you know, somebody reports a bug, he automatically logs it in his. So, it's just sort of fully automated little ecosystem where it's like one guy can make few million dollars a year, lifestyle business. He lives in a small village on the coast of

42:21of Portugal. and uh I I really respect it. So probably probably still this kind of Greg Eisenberg largely like I'm I'm fascinated by bootstrap business and nothing against people who go raise money, you know, and build big companies, but I'm like just very I have this super romantic idea of like small bootstrap lifestyle business where you can live the life that you want, you know? I think it's Daniel Dalen who talked about that in um in an interview not long ago and he was saying that you should think about your success. So let's say you start something today and in five years you will achieve that goal and you have

43:05to think about the lifestyle that that goal will brings you. For example, if you want to be the next Zuckerberg, you will have to handle 10 meetings a day, take private jet every day, move everywhere, interview, like all this pressure around you. While if you take another pass and let's say you success and your successes, your success is like the life of Peter levels, then you're living in Portugal and you're chill and everything is automated. You have no meeting, no calls. So I think it's really important for someone who start to actually think about that like what my life will look like in like five years because eventually you will

43:44achieve that goal. So yeah, I'm 100% with you on this one. Totally. There's a book by the way called Die with Zero by Bill Perkins. I've been super obsessed with this book. I read it recently and it talks about how you should die with zero dollars. like people particularly in America in the west capitalism everybody is sort of capital oriented and people want to make money makes sense you want to start a business you want to get a job you want a higher salary you want to save more money you want to in America people save for retirement their whole life so your whole life you're kind of thinking about

44:23age 65 and uh you know you save save save save and then even by the time you're 65 you're just used to only saving money. You don't really want to spend it all. You're afraid of spending it. You end up dying with a bunch of money in in many in some cases. Okay? There's plenty of people who don't have this luxury. But for the people who have excess income and who have excess capital who just hoard it and they're just sort of they don't spend it. They don't use it to improve their lifestyle. They don't use

44:53it for fulfillment. They just hoard it. And uh I've been thinking about this a lot. It's like, do you need $10 million a year? It's like, probably not. I mean, depends on your lifestyle, but like probably you don't need so much. So, what So, what do you need? Do you need a million a year? It's like, well, I mean, depending on where you are in the world, what kind of tax situation, how many kids you have? It's like, yeah, a million dollars a year probably a good a

45:18good lifestyle. So, you just kind of have to think about what are, you know, what are your goals and don't hoard all your money. spend it on fulfillment because you don't know how long you have, right? Perfect transition. In November 27th last year, you wrote your 2025 goals. 1 million revenue across all income streams, 1K MR software with my software business, own three properties, 100K followers across all platforms, read 12 books, 265 bench press. What did you

45:54achieve yet already? Well, we're halfway through the year, so we still have time. I actually made a post recently of the status update. Maybe it was like uh a month ago, but uh what is the status? A million dollars revenue. I haven't made a million dollars revenue. The the primary driver of my revenue, I have a full-time job as a software engineer, which is doing the most of the work here. You know, I made an app that made 30K. It doesn't really move the needle for a million dollar goal. Uh but in total across everything I have some real estate investment. I had an e-commerce business at the start

46:30of the year and you know 30k in an app. I've probably made about I'm on track to probably make about 650 this year across everything. There's expenses, you know, whatever. But yeah, we're unless brain rot starts to really take off. It doesn't look like we'll make a million, but 650 is like by far the most money I've ever made. So, it's good to have ambitious goals knowing that some of them you won't reach, but hopefully some of them you will. So, that was the first goal. 12 books. I've read like four, so I have work to do. I wanted to read a book every month,

47:00obviously, and now I've fallen behind. Now, it's like I need to start really reading books. 265 lb bench press. I bench like 240, but that was a month ago. So, need to get a little bit more back into it. And uh just be careful not to injure myself. If I don't injure myself, I think this one will be okay. Uh, I have two properties, but uh, I'm looking for the third. So, this is like very small homes in the in the countryside in uh, in America. So, I'm

47:28looking for a third one. Um, what else was the goals? 100K followers. Thank God. This happened earlier this year. At the time that I made that goal, I had like 20. So, it was like this crazy goal. I didn't think I could get there. But, uh, it's good to have, you know, some crazy goals you should reach and some it's okay if they roll over to the next year as long as you're continually re-evaluating these

47:52things. Well, you're on the road to get all these goals. I think I'm not afraid about the million revenue. I think brain work is only the start. Like you started like 30 days ago, right? To distribute to talk about it. Yes. About two months ago now. Almost two weeks. Yeah. What do you do with your properties? Is mainly Airbnb or

48:13long-term rental? No, they're long-term rentals. Yeah, they're long-term rentals. Um, another question about all of that because you have a lot of goals. You have your full-time job. Uh, brain wrote, you're publishing video every single day. You didn't miss a day. How do you manage your time? Yeah, you know, it's a good question. Um, I have very little balance in my life right now. I told you, you know, there was a period that I just wasn't leaving the house and it wasn't exactly true, but I wasn't spending nearly as much

48:47time outside living my life as I should. I've been like working, working, working. So, that I mean, the truth is that you can't do all you can't juggle all these things without sacrificing other things. And um, yeah, I I'm extremely busy. Um, the video now takes about 30 minutes a day. Everybody has 30 minutes a day, so that's not really the problem. The properties, there's a manager manages those properties. That's not really a problem. Um, but listen, if you're a solo entrepreneur, solopreneur, there's an infinite mountain to climb, right? And there is as much work. The work fills the time allotted. If you allow yourself from first thing in the

49:33morning to last thing at night to be working, you'll find work to do. Um, so you need to you need to learn how to draw this line for yourself. And I'm still learning because I'm, you know, doing all this stuff and uh I feel super super busy and at times I'm very stressed. But uh, you know, you everybody has the same 18 hours awake every day, 16 hours. So not everyone feels as busy as other people and people get vastly different amounts of work done. So it's just up to you you know ultimately to figure out how in your life should you partition your time such

50:15that uh you can you can maintain this in the long haul and that's still something I'm figuring out in truth. Do you think that doing these goals, these bullet point goals helps you because you know exactly that you have these six goals to reach and that's it? I think so. I think it helps me. Um, it it helps me because it uh distills all of the noise into like a very finite list that fits just at the very top of a notes page. Um, I pin it onto my profile because this is sort of I'm very open with what I'm doing and what my prerogatives are. Uh, and I recommend

51:02this to any indie hacker, you know, building public person is like just be very transparent about what you want and where you are and how you're struggling and why it's not working or what is working. It's like, you know, the internet can be a very toxic place and it can be very uh negative if you just consume constantly and read about other people and scroll, but it can be super loving and warm and positive if you create and you share

51:41rather than just, you know, consuming. So encourage everybody like you know be open about what your goals are what what are you doing what are you trying to do you know let the kind of community help you amazing is there a question that I didn't ask you and I should ask you

52:08will I ever stop posting videos every day what is done. So, probably I'm sure I don't know when I I can't imagine I can keep this up for my whole life. That would be an insane experiment. Can you imagine? You look back 30 years later and it's like this is what happened every day. Yeah. There will be a time when I stop. Listen, like there's eras, there's periods of your life for different things. When you're young, you go to Europe with your friends and a backpack and you stay in the hostel. But when you're old, you don't want to do that anymore. Uh, and when you're young

52:48and you're excited and you're ambitious and you really want to chase your goals and you want to make videos every day, you know, and do all this indie hacker stuff, you want to post a lot and you want, you know, just go where the kind of where your energy takes you. And right now, I still have the energy for this. I'm really excited. I love making videos. Um, and I love sharing the story because I still feel very much that the story is unfinished. And so I don't know

53:14where it's going. So I'm kind of posting daily updates of uh just where we are today. So right now I love it, but one day once we've made it, whatever that looks like, if it even exists, maybe I'll stop. And if someone wants to stop today, like is he here watching this video thinking maybe I should start a daily building

53:34public? Why would you tell this person? What would I tell them? Yeah, I would tell them don't wait till you're ready. It doesn't exist. Start today. Make a new account with zero followers. Start posting. You know, get used get used to getting in the habit of creating. It's kind of an uncomfortable or a foreign experience, but uh

54:04yeah, just start today. Amazing way to end this conversation, man. It's been amazing. I really loved talking to you and I think there's a lot of insight that people will be happy to get. Um the last question, who do you think I should invite next? Oo, it's a great question. Who should you invite next? So, you had Jim on sort of tech guy Instagram videos. Jim and I are similar in the way that we're both sort of tech

54:40guys Instagram videos. The right here on Riverside it says build in public. If this is the theme, you should have on a guy called uh Rajan Cheetah. He I'll send you his Instagram after this. He just graduated from University of Virginia studying some kind of finance degree and him and his buddy bought some raw land in the mountains in Virginia and they're turning it into luxury Airbnb cabins and they're filming the process of building

55:15these cabins. First, they show the land. It's just trees and then they bulldozed it and then they put some foundation, they put a cabin, they put framing on it and they're asking the Instagram, this guy Rajin, he's asking, "What do you think should go here? Should we put the hot tub over here or should we put this the hammocks over here?" And people are

55:34really engaged and he grew in one year. We started at the same time. I remember I had like 8,000 followers. He had 2,000 followers and now he has 300,000 and all of his videos get like million views and it's like super fun to watch these videos cuz you see this cabin getting built. You should have on Rajin. He would I think that would be an awesome

55:55conversation. Well, I will ask him and I think it's funny because Jim talked about this guy when I asked who inspire him right now. So, he talked about this. And second thing is that I saw that you did a video as well like that, but when I posted the picture of my office on um on thread and Twitter and I asked what what would make this office looks cool, I got so many comments. I feel like people love giving their ID like you know mainly on this kind of thing like building a house or

56:24something like that. So makes sense. Well people you have to feel like they're like they're a part of it you know. Yeah. J are involved. Yeah. Well, Yi, thank you a lot for this 55 minutes of conversation. My pleasure for you. Wish you a lot of good thing for your project and I hope you will No, I I don't hope I know that you will get bigger and bigger and um yeah, all the

56:52luck for you. Thanks Florian. This was awesome. Thanks for having me. Thanks for watching this episode. I hope this one will help you in your journey. If you like this one, I suggest you my last interview with Jim Tang, who grew an audience from zero to 140,000 followers in 100 days. But before you leave, let me know in the comment who I

57:09should invite next. [Music]