I Locked Myself In A Room, Made 17 Apps, & Sold 2 for $265,000

0:00I built and sold two apps for $265,000 after teaching myself to code in just two month this guy locked himself in a hotel room taught himself the code and started building and just two months after I launched my first time he started small but over the course of that year he built over 17 apps most of them failed except for a couple which he then sold for a combined quarter of a million so what did you do right I grew my apps from 0 to 7,000 of monthly recing Revenue with Facebook ads when everyone say it wouldn't work but what's even cooler is the secret he

0:35learned along the way on how to quickly monetize these ideas I sat down with Nico for a couple hours and got all the sauce and in this video you'll learn exactly how he taught himself to code and build apps how to sell your app the right way and a full breakdown of his special secret paid ads sit down strap in and let's go I'm that walls and this is starter story all right welcome Nico to starter story thanks for coming on can you tell me a little bit about yourself and what you built my name is niik I've built 17 apps in a year and I sold two of them

1:14for 265,000 USD the first one is me logo. which generated $26,000 of Sales Plus I sold it for $65,000 so that's around $85,000 in total revenue from this project alone the next next one I did was to notes we generated $77,000 of sales before I sold it for2 200,000 last Julie I'd love to get a further breakdown of the two apps that you built that you sold for a combined quarter of a million dollars so make logo with an app to generate logo using AI the business model was just onetime payment so you can select a pack of logos so there was option for like five 10 or 15

1:54options and then you had a few options to customize it so for example add some uh text next to it or just change position Etc I started working on it I think in I think November the transaction was closed in March so that would be around like 6 months most of the customers were people who were just curious about AI in general but I also had lots of small entrepreneurs who didn't necessarily wanted to pay a designer for a full logo but still didn't want it to have like something super generic the next one I did was Tor notes Tor notes is an app that helps you

2:27turn any kind of voice note you can record into proper formatted text in terms of pricing I started with onetime payments it was like a one-ear pass and eventually I switched to subscription which was 60 year or $12 per months in terms of customers I think I had around 10,000 users for the app I had like different targets like people who often need to brainstorm IDs and write them down so they can remember it later let's go into what got you building online give us a timeline of going from working for someone else to learning the code and making a living with your own projects I got started because I had a

3:05summer job in a bank and I really hated it so I resigned after 3 days I was 19 years old back then I think and I had like no clue what entrepreneurship was or what I was doing so I was just like trying things out after around one year I decided to create a brand of ties made in friends obviously didn't work out because no one is wearing TI anymore and I didn't have experience but it got me started into e-commerce and marketing which ended up with me learning about Drop Shipping on Facebook groups so I give it a try I didn't really got much success from it at first but I learned

3:45how to run ads on Facebook thanks to this I was hired as a freelancer for a Belgian closing brand eventually the owner of the brand I was working with told me that we would have to stop because he was going to work with someone cheaper at the same time my e-commerce brand wasn't working as well as I wanted it generated sales but very little profit so I decided to stop everything lock myself in a hotel room for 2 months and learn to code it was hard but after that after those two months I was able to make my very first step so it was was it at the end how did

4:18you find the ideas that ended up being successful and just generally how do you find ideas for that I have four main criteria the first one is the person value is that that something valuable to other people are they valuing solving this problem or is it just like a slight inconvenience that they don't really care about the second one is the scale uh is there like a market for that or is this like three people worldwide then the idea is not going to go far so I want to have something that people want and that many people want last two ones are more related to me so that would be

4:53my own skills so is that something that I can do myself and the last one is distribution so if there a way for me to reach user in a profitable way but I would say most of the successful ideas I had came to me like organically in a sense that I needed that for myself and I just made it all so let's talk about how you actually build products what's your step-by-step process to go from zero to one with a new idea so I us start by fixing a hard deadline if I don't have any constraint in time then there will always be something to add

5:30something to make you know the perfect app Etc and it forces me to only focus on whatever is necessary then the next step is the app prototype so that would be the very first interface to interact with the tech so I us start with like some kind of planning phase so that's where I write down all the features not the nice stuff only what is just essential once I plan all that I like to look for for example design IDs for the interface on dribble and Google image and recently VZ has been really useful to generate interface and then once I have lots of ideas and I have a better

6:07idea of how my interface is going to looks like then I either make like some kind of prototype on Sigma if that's a really complex user interface where I have to put lots of things together or I just do it directly by coding and improving on the B then the next step is to add like SAS layers so that's things like authentification payment like anything you need in know s that's typically the baller play code that you from from one project to the other once I have all that ready I go to the landing page part so this is going to be the sales page so just making a landing

6:42page that is as compelling as possible you know to make people want to either sign up or purchase the app or whatever is the goal of this project once I'm done with that I focus on optimization like optimizing for SEO Etc fixing like small issues that is any or optimizing for mobile etc etc okay so this is a lot of the build stuff tell me a little bit about the launch which is you know are there any either shortcuts or or kind of hacks that you found to be able to launch faster uh yeah for example for Mech logo AI I use tyo to get the

7:15information the name of the project uh some information and what kind of logo they wanted and collect the payment so I didn't had any backend at all it was not automated it's definitely not scalable but I was able to get something going and I got my first saes from that it's probably mean people are interested into that and now I can spend more time making a proper interface before we get into the marketing side of things I want to talk about something else first if you're building anything in B2B then you need to stop and watch this I talked to a lot of Founders in B2B behind the

7:45scenes about selling into Enterprise and just how much it changes their business imagine adding 100,000 in ARR per year from a single Customer because you landed a whale well that's what happen if you do Enterprise right but everyone in B2B knows that this comes with a huge headache making sure your app is compliant with sock 2 ISO 271 ISO 421 Hippa Etc if it's not you'll probably lose the sale waste a bunch of time and feel sad because you know just how much money you're leaving on the table well that's where vanta comes in and we've partnered with them because I think what they're doing is awesome Fanta is

8:26designed to get your startup compliant fast so you close those deals with confidence and not worry about the massive paperwork headache not only does vanta save you time it also saves you money this new IDC white paper found that vanta customers achieve $535,000 a year in benefits and the platform pays for itself in just 3 months over 10,000 companies like ramp atlassian and pendo use vanta to manage risk improve Security in real time so if you're serious about getting compliant then I think you should definitely download this free suck to checklist it breaks down the process in the road ahead so you can land more Enterprise

9:04deals with far less headache just click the first link in the description to download it for free thank you to vanta for sponsoring this video I think what you guys are doing for Founders is awesome all right let's get back into it let's talk about marketing so we talked about how to build how to launch but the probably the hardest thing is marketing so have you gain thousands of users and made hundreds of thousands of dollars so it all depend on the project and the resources I have available for example for make logo I didn't had much saving so I didn't wanted to spend any kind of

9:36money on ads but the thing is I was the first to have like AI generated logo back then people were just naturally curious for to not it was a bit different I didn't start ads right at the start so I first tried to validate the ID organically and just from that I got 1, 500 Mr or something like that and once I got to this point I knew the ID had potential I I decided to start running ads and I didn't had still lot of resources in terms of creative so it was really basic uh static ads so it's just like an image with a headline Etc I

10:09ended up making then landing pages for specific audiences and ads for those audiences and that's where it really blew up for the marketing cost again it it really really depends on the project for to notes for example I was spending between 20 to $100 per day I mentioned this is really not much for ads but I also had limited resources to like both make creative and other customer support Etc so in my situation it wouldn't make sense to spend thousands per day back then well let's dive into that a little bit because uh you know a lot of the people we talk to on this channel make

10:43it through organic short form you know this sort of stuff this is really really cool that you did this with paid ads so can you just walk me through your paid ad strategy a little bit so it really depends on the platform for example you have search platforms like Google Etc so in this case that's more about giving people what they want at the right timing but you also have Interruption platforms where you show you ads while people are doing something else so for example on Facebook or Instagram they're just scrolling and in this case it's really all about catching the attention and making the user like want to learn

11:21more by you know washing the ad and then clicking on it I use both video and static ads depending on how much budget I have Etc I have one ad for talk noes that worked really well it's not really like a professional ad it's more something that you can find scrolling on your on your feet so if you look at the video it's not like professional studio or whatever it's just a guy that I paid and he was recording himself reading the scripts in his office so it looks really like organic it doesn't really looks like an ad people will naturally be more inclined to watch the ad and you know uh

11:54maybe click after that that's one of the thing that made this art works well and it also focus on the problem so the name of the app like do notes is not mentioned until way after in the app you just keep giving them reason to watch to watch to watch until the end of the ad where you have the call to action and it's like oh now if you have all those problems and you want to solution then have a look at this product for example Okay cool so I want to do a little section going over the sale process just talking about ac.com and the process of

12:25posting your idea on there I think that would be helpful you've got through the process two times to sell the app the first thing is obviously where are you going to list it for sale in my case I went for acquire. comom now they don't handle the transaction themselves so they just put you in touch with like the buyer Etc but then you have to make the wire like sort of on your own the important thing is to is to make sure that the listing is like a landing page so you really want to showcase your startup as like a product now for the negotiations it's better to entprise

13:00your startup to get buyers interested because the thing is there there is some like ego play so for example for M logo I think I got like 50,000 and maybe 55 or something then I got 65,000 paid over a year and then the last call of the day the guy was like okay I don't want to waste time like bidding against other buyers Etc so I'm going to offer you 65,000 cash but we need to finalize everything in the next two weeks I don't want to waste time can you tell me what kind of tools or languages you use to build these products and run your

13:33businesses I use n as my main Java Script framework I tried like different Frameworks but no is just much better on every aspect for me I also do use next UI that goes with it so it's like a library of components so that way I don't have to code like every little button and stuff like that I can just say Okay button here allowed me to code like three times faster so I don't have to remake everything obviously I use csor coding so what I did is I embed the documentation of N and noi compared to before when I was not using AI n Etc I

14:07just work like 10 times faster with just those three ones I use v0 a lot so you just say I want this interface and they just make it to you get the code so I just have to convert it into next then for SEO even if it's not my main like Channel I still try to do a little bit and hre is amazing for that to collect user feedback I I I use and I created it myself is feed feedback widget. it's just a way to like easily collect feedback and the last one I would say is h test it which is the one I created is

14:39to make AB testing and increase conversion rate or test different boardings etc etc let's talk about um day in the life you sold uh multiple asss for quarter million dollars what is your life like now what does a day in the life look like for ni so in terms of routine um right now I don't really have like a strict r routine like I wake up at 7:00 a.m. work in the morning and in the afternoon I either work if I have things to do or I just do like Hobbies play video games with my friend and stuff like that but when I have like a a

15:12really specific goal in mind and it's just about grinding then I just uh wake up at like between 5:30 or 6:00 a.m. just go to the gym and then I just work until 7 or 800 p.m. I move really really fast uh by using this mix of like try hard then rest a bit to assess and try to find what I work on next that's awesome okay the last question that we asked everyone on starter story is if you could stand on Nico's shoulder in that hotel room when you were just learning how to c what would you tell him what advice would you give yeah I I

15:45would say don't get emotionally attached to the products that's something I already had but yeah make technical prototypes quickly to solve the problem then go to talk to user as soon as possible another thing like don't try to make 100,000 or even like $10,000 for your first project if you haven't got any success yet just try to make your first dollar online first and forget about scalability or anything it's just uh compounding small winds but you need this first little wins to PCH the snowball until you get like a a bigger one at the end of the slope all right well that was awesome thank you Nico for

16:24coming on to starter story your journey is amazing 20 apps sold them for a quarter of a million living the dream in Bali so I'm excited for what you're going to do next and uh thanks for coming on and sharing everything thanks that was a pleasure so thank you for Nico for coming on I think your story is amazing I think if you watch this it might feel like Nico had some crazy formula for success but I really just don't think that's the case he got started shipped a crap ton of stuff and while doing that he eventually kind of stumbled on a couple of things that

16:54worked I see a lot of people waiting waiting for the right time to start sitting on the sidelines While others like Nico are just getting started playing around with all these AI tools and new markets and just shipping stuff every week if you're trying to do something similar well I have something special for you it's called the AI build accelerator and in 2 weeks you'll ideate build and ship a real life production app imagine what would happen if you started today imagine where you could be in 2 weeks if you're curious about doing this and actually building something then check out the link in the description if you want to learn more

17:30but this is only for people that are serious about actually building something I'd love to see you in there just click the first link in the description and let's build all right guys I'll see you in the next one peace