When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's the guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push-ups. They're doing 30K a month.
So Pat is here from Starter Story. Pat, HubSpot just bought Starter Story. That's amazing. Congratulations.
It is technically not closed yet. So, I'm going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys.
You're seven days out right now from selling, and when this goes live, it is presumably closed, and yet you are nervous. What's that about?
Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow. But you know, the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired. Otherwise, I cannot take myself to that place yet, to celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird, you know, doing the production process because content needs to be recorded early to go out. So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.
How did you do with the negotiation? Do you feel like walk us through how you approached that and how you think you did? Give yourself a score there.
I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened. When it just came to my head and I started talking to ChatGPT about it, having a little conversation of like what is before even the sale or anything conversations happened, said like what would be my walk-away number. And I just remember thinking back what that number is. And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well, I made up that that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that. I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever. That was actually the number.
Do you feel any bit of regret because you're like, 'Oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more.'
You haven't made it if that doesn't happen. That's the final stage, maximum regret, and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done.
All right. So let's explain what Starter Story is. People don't even know. Starter Story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working a nine-to-five because I couldn't start any successful business. So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online, and maybe I will find a co-founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off. We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies. We had products. We had community. We had a YouTube channel. It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10K to 100K per month.
Let me ask you what you got right, because this idea of hey, I'm going to interview founders about how they did it, that's not like a new idea. And you did this only a couple years ago. How many years have you been doing this? Three, four years? How long has it been?
No, I've been in the game longer than you might think. Eight years is when I officially started the business.
Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea. But you did well with it, right? You separated yourself from the pack. You made it a success. What do you think you got right that others didn't? And I really hope it's not just like a 'I worked hard,' you know?
Yeah. I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what did we get right is that you had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site. This is something that we got from Indie Hackers at the time, which was big on that too. Shout out Courtland who built that. But once you could see, like, you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making. You want to know how's this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.
If you guys Google like Starter Story case studies, you could find this thing. It's called the full case studies database. And so early on you were really interesting because you would interview people, and I always thought that I was like within a very small niche of people who like this, but I think it's actually a lot of people who like it, where I love numbers. I'm obsessed with numbers. And you would do these interviews with people, and they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc, the same Google Doc over and over and over again, and you asked questions and they typed out the replies. And then you created a graphic at the top, and it said, here's one. It says Brewmate, I think it's called Brewmate. Yeah, Brewmate. I grew a drinkware brand to $1.1 million per month at 23 years old. And it said Jacob, and it said his revenue per month is $12 million. There's one founder, there's 53 employees. Like the way you did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. And then what you did was once you had like hundreds of these, I could sort through like DTC, SaaS, I could sort through all these things. And frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company...
That's probably not the right word, but figure out what business model I wanted to do and like...
Well, if you wanted to clone someone's company...
Some [__] was going to do that.
Yeah. But like if you wanted to like research, that's a better word. You were like, you and Indie Hackers were like the best, but like you had like a bunch of legends, like you had David Hower from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on, and it was really cool.
Every single week I talk to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between 10K and 100K per month, and people whose businesses have taken off recently. So I get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now. We can go over some of that if you want to.
Yeah, sure. What do you guys want to talk about? I have a couple options for you. We can talk about iOS. We can talk about YouTube SEO. We could talk about APIs. We could talk about B2B video. What's exciting to you?
Um, let's do iPhone apps because to me that sounds like 10 years ago.
Yeah, that was probably the most surprising one on the list, right? It's like, wait, that's the now opportunity. I feel like that was the 2010 opportunity.
So yeah, it might feel like it's an old opportunity or it's too broad, but again, this is not something I read on Twitter. This is not something that I just came up with through ChatGPT. This is what when I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. This is where this is coming from. So, a couple examples. There's the guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do push-ups before you can go on social media. Like you scroll, it blocks you, and then you have to put your phone out there and prove that you've done push-ups. They're doing 30K.
They're doing 30K a month. And actually, they're doing a lot more. Can't disclose it exactly, but after we interviewed them, they told me some crazy numbers. And there's another one that does basically the same thing, but it makes you pray. Makes you do a prayer to God before you can go on TikTok.
To enter heaven.
Yep. There's like a feature in the iOS API or something like that that allows you to screen block apps. So there's tons of apps like this, or just basic blocking apps. There's a bunch of productivity-related apps that are popular like that that have some sort of almost gimmick element to them. But you see it on TikTok, you see it on social media, and you're like, 'Oh, let me try it. Okay, I want to do some, I want to get a little healthier or whatever.'
And are these... Okay, so I see it. Push-up time blocker, right? Push-up app blocker.
Push scroll. Push scroll. That's the one.
Push scroll. Okay, gotcha. So you go, um, push scroll. Okay, push scroll screen time control. So you...
You replace doom scrolling with a healthy habit. It literally has a picture of a guy doing push-ups like with AI watching him.
And then it says it can limit the apps you're addicted to, and basically you earn it as you make progress. Now here's my question. Are these doing the same kind of like you make a fun kind of novelty app...
...and then you do like massive TikTok content by paying influencers or affiliates, or basically getting like a hundred or a thousand pieces of content posted every week?
Oh, they'll come up with their own hooks like, 'Oh my god, y'all, you know, check this out. I haven't used Instagram at all this week because of whatever,' right? Or, 'Here's where these gains came from. Instagram what?' And then it's like, you know, is that the playbook that they're all doing?
Shaan, you should become a TikTok affiliate. That's pretty good.
That was kind of natural.
What was really cool about this app, I think this is a cool story worth telling, is that they didn't actually build the app first. They created the viral video first. And this is a really cool story that we told, is basically they created a video about them having to do push-ups before scrolling. They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do push-ups or whatever. And they created a bunch of other videos about other app ideas. This is the one that went viral, and then when it did, it got some hundreds of thousands of views. They went and scrambled to create the app, and then it took off. So they were able to validate the idea...
...through TikTok and through their marketing, show they're going to use, and then build it, which I thought was super cool.
Uh, one guy, there was two guys. One guy was the technical guy. The other guy was kind of the marketing...
One guy's just great at push-ups. So this is the opposite of Field of Dreams, right? Instead of, you know, 'if we build it, they will come,' it's like, 'if they come, then we'll build it.' I guess we got to build it then. And they just went viral first.
Exactly. They reversed the whole process, which I think is the right way to do things now because imagine creating 10 apps and having none of them work. That would take you a year. Or creating one video in one day and having it work. And that takes one day.
All right. So Pat has given you guys something straight out of his playbook, which is his method to finding a $1 million business idea. It's a template that guides you through seven proven methods to identify 21 problems that you can solve. It gives you real founder case studies so you can build and validate your ideas fast. If you want the template and case studies straight from Pat, you can download it right now. Just click the link in the description. Now, back to the episode.
Are there other apps that you're seeing? Another genre of apps that you're seeing that are working?
Apps are the new info products, I think. So anything in health, wealth, relationships, productivity, self-improvement, these are all great spaces. And the reason why I wanted to share the dumb apps is because they're the most funniest when you think about them. I'm not saying go build a dumb app, but build anything in these sorts of spaces right now. Health, so fitness, gym apps, these sorts of things, wealth, money, productivity, these sorts of things. That is a great space to be building right now.
What are you seeing in wealth?
Well, there's not any kind of the silly apps, but anything that's in like crypto, trading, these sorts of things. Those are really, really popular.
What's a stop vaping app?
Yep. So that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There's a guy that just built an app that helps you track. It was called Puff Count. And I think you just track how many puffs you took, and then once you get to a certain low amount, it sort of gamifies the process of quitting nicotine. That was a cool one. He sold it for a lot of money, and that was a really cool example. Did a lot of...
Who bought it? Like Philip Morris, and they shut that sucker down.
And are these kids built like... I watch your channel, and it's mostly young, like 20-somethings. Are a lot of them actually technical, or are they just using AI to make this stuff?
That's the thing is they're using AI coding. And this is why it's big now, and you thinking it was big like 10 years ago. It's big now because in order to build an iPhone app, you needed to have a team of four. To build a good iPhone app, you needed a designer, you needed a product person, you needed an engineer, probably a backend and a front-end engineer. But with AI coding tools, you can just have an idea. It's not perfect, but it's like 95% of the way there. You can just build it with basically a team of zero. Apps that couldn't have existed before because it wouldn't have been cost-effective. You couldn't have built a stop vaping app with a team of four people getting paid $100,000 a year or $200,000 a year. It just wouldn't have been feasible. But now there's this opportunity for all these little kind of weird fun apps that blow up on social media because you don't need anybody to build them anymore.
You know what's interesting is you said that apps are the new info products. That didn't hit with me until just a second ago. Do you guys remember the police scanner app? I think it was called 5-0 Radio or 50 Radio.
Do you remember that, Sean?
Not really. I've heard of these like Citizen is the one I know about.
This was before that. So I'm part of this forum where this guy is a poster, and I knew he was kind of a celebrity to me a little bit, and his name's Alan Wong, and he started this thing called 5-0 Scanner. So if you guys Google him, he kind of was famous because he created this iPhone app. And I think his story was that he was an immigrant from another country. He came here with nothing. His family, I think they worked in a restaurant, something like that. He created this thing called the 5-0 Scanner right when the iPhone got started, and he made eight figures. I think he was making like $5 million a year repeatedly for a very long time. And he wrote this story about how he was able to retire his mom and dad. Then he bought a Lamborghini, and he took a photo of himself in the Lamborghini when he was like 24. And he kind of went viral for that. But he never actually taught how to make apps. He was like kind of true to just making apps.
And I remember this guy, and he was like one in a million. There was like not other people doing like these iPhone apps that were making five or $8 million a year with one employee. He was one in a million. It was so cool. And he's like a celebrity a little bit to me because I kind of grew up, it was kind of like my Tai Lopez. And it is kind of interesting to say that these are the new info products because info products when I was growing up, when I was 19 and 21 trying to get into the internet, it was always info product people that I didn't exactly look up to because I thought they were sleazy a little bit, but I was like, I want that life. I aspire to have that, like I can make money anywhere, anytime, be on a beach type of lifestyle. And it is funny that you're saying that apps weren't even on my radar because I didn't know how to make them. I physically couldn't do that, but now I probably could. And that is kind of an interesting way to look at it. And then we had this one, what was the kid's name who we had on here, Sean?
Have you guys seen how big that business is now?
So he talked to us, this guy Zach talked to us literally. It was noon on a Tuesday. Go, what are you doing here? He goes, I came home...
He goes, I came home for lunch during high school to do this interview, and I have to go back to school. And at the time, I think it was a $30 million a year business. How big is it now?
I saw on X, so it's not verified or anything like that, but they said they did 6 million in January alone. So 70, what does that put it at? 70-something million.
That's incredible. Well, he launched a thing called App Mafia, which is like a course on how to make...
...apps. And I don't think it landed. I think people kind of mocked it, but anyway, it was cool to see that this is the new info product.
Well, it's cool because it sounds like there's two trends coming together, right? It's apps are getting easier and easier to make with AI and vibe coding. And then on the other hand, you have a new discovery platform, TikTok, that you can get your app downloaded from. And both happening at the same time, like Charlie Munger calls these like Lollapalooza effects where multiple factors kind of conspire in your favor, and then suddenly you get this like crazy sort of Lollapalooza effect out of it. So you get one, two, three, four variables all pushing in the same direction unintentionally, and it creates like a new opportunity. So we were joking like, dude, iPhone apps, this is like 2010, like what do you mean that's the opportunity? Well, there's something that changed. Apps got way easier to build, and apps got way easier to be discovered. There's a new way to get discovered as an app. So the playing field reopened in a way that the window was sort of closed over the last, let's say, five years ago. It was less juicy than it is currently.
Okay. You want to do another idea? What else you got?
Let's do this B2B video. I'm curious what you have there.
