How to build a $1M+ Consumer SaaS App (step-by-step guide) - podcast episode cover

How to build a $1M+ Consumer SaaS App (step-by-step guide)

Nov 13, 202450 minEp. 174
--:--
--:--
Listen in podcast apps:

Episode description

Join me as I chat with Joseph Choi, Founder of Viral App Founders Community, as we discuss his frameworks and strategies for finding and building profitable Consumer Apps. Learn his step-by-step formula to building and growth hacking apps. 

Episode Timestamps: 
00:00 Intro
04:01 Ecom Marketing Strategies applied to Consumer Apps
11:07 TikTok Shop Affiliate Center  = goldmine for app ideas
22:16 Profitable Niches that are Underserved
33:26 Influencer Marketing 2.0
40:58 Capitalize on internet "cults" & movements

1) TikTok organic = BIGGEST underpriced distribution channel right now
- Cost of creating & distributing content = low
- Potential reach for consumer apps = high
- Time to leverage this opportunity! 

2) E-commerce tactics are invading the app world
- Remember Tabs Chocolate? 0 to $10M/year with mass UGC creators
- Now these tactics are being used for consumer SaaS 
- Higher margins + better exit multiples = Bigger Opportunity

3) Carousels perform better than Short-form video on TikTok?!
- Surprising trend: Photo carousels are CRUSHING IT
- Easier to create + more scalable than talking head vids
- Pro tip: Use Midjourney for quick, eye-catching visuals 

4) TikTok Shop Affiliate Center = goldmine for app ideas
- Find top performers in any niche
- Build apps to help them sell better
- Get free marketing from influencers

Win-win-win situation! 

5) High LTV niches are UNDERSERVED on TikTok
Think: Golfers, poker players, niche sports
Example: Golf swing analysis app

- 10k downloads / month
- $70k revenue / month
- Huge potential for more!

6) Myth: TikTok users are all young
- Reality: Diverse demographics, especially in niche content
- Serve content to underserved niches = Underpriced reach

7) Rethink influencer marketing for TikTok
- Old way: Pay for followers
- New way: Hire creators as ACTORS, not for their audience
- TikTok algorithm favors good content, not follower count 

8) Capitalize on internet "cults" & movements
Examples:
- Looksmaxing (YouMax app)
- Make money online (Crayo app)
1. Find passionate communities without products
2. Build the app they need 
3. Profit 
Bonus tip: Product quality is CRUCIAL
Nail your metrics before scaling marketing efforts!

Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)

Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas

Work with me and my team: LCA — world’s best product design firm to build apps, websites and brands people love. https://latecheckout.agency/

BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/

BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/

Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co/

Stop Building Websites That Look Good But Don’t Sell: https://www.designscientist.com/design-store?b=https://www.designscientist.com/

FIND ME ON SOCIAL

X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg
Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

FIND JOSEPH ON SOCIAL
Viral App Founders Community: https://whop.com/viral-app-founders/
X/Twitter: https://x.com/JosephKChoi
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/choi-joseph/

Transcript

There are apps that are getting millions of downloads because they've mastered TikTok. And it's kind of a black box for most of us. So I brought on Joseph Choi. This guy knows exactly the formula for how these apps are getting users. He breaks it down and you're going to love it. People charge $5,000 for this sort of thing, but I'm given to you for free. All you got to do is listen and take notes. Enjoy the episode.

Alright, Joseph Choi on the pod. This guy doesn't want to talk about B2B marketing at all. And that's okay. Because he's the guy to talk to when you want to blow up your consumer app. And today he, I mean, you tell us, Joseph, what do you want to talk about today? Yeah, let's talk about viral consumer apps. I've been seeing a lot of people making a lot of money on pretty much getting all their users from these really simple TikTok videos.

So I want to go through a few things. Some quick wins like that you can just copy these apps and get 10K MRR within a couple of months probably if you just copy the content, copy the app. Do some slight differentiation. But I think there's also like legit opportunity for people who are more ambitious want to build bigger businesses and like tick. Yeah, but the overall theme is I think that TikTok organic is probably the biggest underpriced distribution channel right now.

And yeah, just the cost of creating distributed content is just so low that I think all types of consumer apps can be using the strategies. Great, you know, yes, the answer is yes, we want to know more about that. We see we've been seeing more of that on Twitter people have been like sharing like how this company got you know four million, four million downloads in like 90 days and are making $3 million a month with some AI app.

So people, people want to know and they want to figure it out and and let's let's learn. Yeah, yeah, I mean one of the biggest trends that I've seen is that these all these tactics are basically being stolen from the e-commerce space. So TikTok shop got released I think in November of 2022. So it's only been two years since TikTok shop came out.

So we've only had like two years of TikTok marketing innovation. So the space is still super new, but what I've seen is like for example, tabs chocolate they went from zero to 10 million a year for an e-commerce product, this chocolate company.

And they basically use these mass UGC creators hiring tons of teenagers putting them all in a discord server and then just mass producing content every single day. And the founder of that Oliver, he he pivoted from tabs chocolate to a micro sass that helps people do their homework in college.

And it's really interesting because they're basically using the same tactics in their marketing, but now it's a sass is a consumer sass business. So instead of e-commerce where you have like 20 30% margins, it's now a micro sass and you get 90 plus percent margins and a higher exit multiple if you decide to sell the business.

So I wanted to show you a couple of marketing trends that the e-commerce space is doing right now. And I think there's a lot of ideas that you can take from the e-commerce space and then kind of build apps around the same marketing strategies. So one of them is a colostrum. So this is like an example of a video POV you divorced bread. So this video got I think something like 700,000 views.

It starts by the way, this is all AI. So this picture is mid journey. It's not even real food. But it's POV you divorce bread is kind of a funny hook. And then it just goes through by the way the audio is I think a Joe Rogan like Clapper. I don't know who this is. Maybe it's he reminor someone but you know common pain points energy brain fog metabolism. By the way, also I use colostrum and you should go to miracle moon Amazon. So if this video gets I don't know.

700,000 views and you know 0.5% to 1% of the people actually close their app they go to Amazon they check it out. Even if that conversion rates pretty small they're going viral with the same types of videos every single day. And this is not even the same. This is not even the only account. So they figured out this one content format that works and now they pump out these mid journey stories like every day.

But they're pushing all the traffic to e-commerce which is interesting because you know you could do the same exact story like theoretically with similar pain points but then solve the pain points with an app instead. So here's an example of the same thing but for an app. So TikTok. Strong negative hook. I guess hated the controversial rules we enforce at our wedding. And then it goes to the rules don't ask photographer pictures.

No kids at the wedding no plus ones don't post photos before us. And then the last slide is we had our guests use the POV app which is a disposable camera app that they can use to take pictures of the pictures at the wedding. And this account does the same thing. So they have all these slideshows and looks like they're experimenting with some AI actors more recently. But they they pretty much post these wedding wedding angle stories for like you know every day.

And this is also mid journey the the faces and stuff are getting really realistic. This is also kind of weird but they have the like I think they at some point they realize that. The like cake on the face image as the first image like gets views for some reason so they just prompt the mid journey to do that same hook. Every time. So I don't know just weird stuff like that where like you you can never predict what consumers will respond to. So I think a lot of this game is just like.

Trying a bunch of random stuff and then seeing what works but then once you figure out what works you can just spam it every day. So the POV app is doing super well with this content format. So quick reactions so far. So one is that when people think tick-tock they think short form video and the examples that you're showing is carousels.

So that's just a surprise for me I guess is that. It's it's by the way a happy surprise like it's way easier for me to create a photo on mid journey than it is to go and create a video just from a effort perspective. So just surprising that that carousels are working so well.

That's completely true and I what I've heard from people in both the e-commerce and the app space is that slides are generally lower converting because there's less of that human feeling of an influencer talking to you you know with a talking head video. But you know there's a lot more scale and it's like the barrier to entry like you said is so much easier. So I have seen talking head and I wanted to get to that too.

Of influencers you know talking to the camera selling various things but if you're just getting started and you don't know how to hire influencers you don't have the budget. Then this is like super easy way to start out one issue that the industry has right now is this company called goalie basically there a supplement company and they sell all sorts of supplements including as one of their most popular ones and they do these talking head videos.

So basically what tick tock shop is it's a platform on top of tick tock where you can as an e-commerce brand you can upload your brand and your products to the site and then creators can sign up to affiliate for your product and they just make videos automatically.

So you don't have to hire them sign contracts or anything you just upload the product and they just start making videos and then they take an automatic affiliate cut so you can set your affiliate cut at whatever you want 15 20% is typical and then people just start making videos. So tick tock shop was a huge gold rush in the past like two years but then over time brands started to catch on and goalie was one of these brands.

And now if you search like goalie creator prizes they give away they're giving away like insane prizes to top affiliates to just basically have a monopoly on all the creators. So for example they have these like if you sell $7,000 in GMV you get a Macbook Pro if you sell you know 45k you get a Rolex if you sell 250k you get a BMW 500k you get a Tesla.

And this is on top of the affiliate commissions so you get the 20% commission and you get these prizes and goalie has said themselves that this is not profitable but it just makes it really hard to compete. For these talking head creators because they're just all making videos for for goalie goalie is not the only one there's a couple other supplement companies that are sort of monopolizing all these creators so that's another reason to go to slideshows.

It's just yeah the competition is a lot less but I also wanted to talk about an opportunity potentially to ride the goalie wave if you wanted to hear about that unless you had some more stuff to say about these. Yeah yeah let's let's do it. So here's an interesting tool that I think not many people are looking at right now so if you go to the TikTok shop affiliate center you can find a lot of really good data on exactly what TikTok shop products are being sold in high volumes on TikTok.

So you can sort it by industry too so you can find creators that are selling all these different products so and the filters are really good so for example let's let's try to find supplement creators or let's do let's do a different one let's say like skincare so here's all this stuff that has to do with skincare and you can sort by. Performance to so you can find people that have between a hundred and ten thousand total GMV.

So now basically I've selected all the skincare TikTok shop affiliates who do medium range GMV so. The opportunity that I see with this is all these TikTok shop creators are being incentivized by these huge ecommerce companies to make all these videos but they're just selling ecommerce products and I feel like they could all be selling apps instead.

So you read my mind like what are you doing you know what I mean it's like I almost it's crazy that we're going to publish this episode because I think that so many people are going to listen to this and I think it actually will change the dynamics of TikTok shop.

I think so too I kind of held this in for a little bit because I run the community of consumer app founders and I've been sharing this with the members so I'm sorry to my members but I'm going to leak the alpha but I mean this is just kind of the game with TikTok like the tactics are always evolving there's always going to be something new some new edge but this is something that I think I think the entire industry will benefit from if everyone starts making video.

And videos for apps instead of ecommerce then there'll be more content formats more video trends to follow and yeah just like a lot more innovation in the space so I mean you can do this for so many different niches it doesn't have like skin care like for example there's this app called. What colors and it's a color analysis app so basically it's like people that want to know what type of clothes or what type of makeup works best with their hair color and their skin tone and their eye color.

They can use color analysis and typically it's like a it's a you know high high paid consultant who is you know doing the color analysis for you but now they put it into an app and they use AI to analyze your you know the colors on your face and your hair and stuff like that.

And this app promotes this video promotes this app so this video got almost a million likes so this app is doing very well and it's yeah it's just another simple slideshow and then cta is you know download the what colors from the app store and do we know do we know the business model of what colors like how they charge.

It's a so a lot of these apps that are like single single utility apps are just paywall so you on board onto the app you answer a few questions and then they hit you with the paywall you pay weekly or annually and then you can scan your face typically they have you scan your face first.

So you're kind of brought in and then says the paywall and then you pay subscriptions which is also by the way subscriptions I think one of the other reasons why the consumer apps are having such a boom is because of the double tap to pay like I think that apple pay that simple like UX change has changed people's perception of.

Of iOS subscriptions like if you look at the past five 10 years of iOS subscriptions the revenue is just blowing up like apps have always existed you know there is a the 2000s you know app boom and then. But none of those apps are monetized are all free now like people are actually paying for apps so this is yeah this is one of these apps that you you pay for for as a subscription.

Well I can give a little more color to that so as someone who was building apps during like when the app store came out and you know back then to as in to as in 10 you know to 2011 back then the distribution like how you got people how you got millions of users into your app was the app store. The app store would feature you and you would get hundreds of thousands of downloads per week and that worked until it didn't work.

Now what is the equivalent of the app store to today it's tick tock it's Instagram these are places where people discover content how many people are opening up the app store and thinking oh give me a app to download today. Like that's just not how how it works anymore it worked when you're getting your first iPhone and you you wanted apps to make your phone more functional. Just doesn't work anymore.

That's great that's really great context and but the thing is also is like once you get the top of top of funnel distribution through tick tock. Then people start downloading your app then you do rise in the ranks and then now you have a search you know ASO app store optimization. So you will so you'll actually start getting organic downloads just from from the app store if you get a kind of boost so you do this tick tock stuff once and you benefit forever.

So yeah great context with that but yeah the reason why I was bringing up what colors is like if you go to these like if you think about what kind of app could you do for skincare like you could do a skincare version of what colors where you analyze your face and then you suggest skincare products for example and one of the hardest parts of going viral on tick tock is

making videos that get views but then also convert so you want to sell you want to actually sell a product you don't just want you know the vanity metric of number of views. And typically the more the harder you sell the product the fewer views that you get.

But these tick tock shop creators are the top 1% of the people who know how to do that right because they're getting organic views and they're selling high volumes of GMB so I think this is actually the gold mine like finds tick tock shop creators because they know how to make the style of video.

And then have them promote apps to take a level deeper you could actually make an app that helps them saw that helps them sell the products that they're already selling so if they're selling skincare products ecommerce you know creams or whatever you can.

Like for example you could make a skincare app that analyzes your face and you could do a before and after video where you say hey today I'm going to you know try this skincare versus this skincare product and then you know look at the results after a week and then you you briefly show the app and you show the interface and you scan the influence like the influence of scans her face. Before and after and then shows the transformation and it's about it's about the ecommerce product.

But then the app is being used as a utility to show that transformation and you don't even need to mention the app or you could mention it very casually in a non threatening way.

And this is another it's just another scale thing like if you reach out to all these influencers I bet they would use it use the app in their tick tock shop affiliate videos for free because it actually helps them make content so you could get you could get the marketing completely for free and you could do this for any niche like doesn't have to be skincare so many niches like make a personal care fashion.

You know electronics sports home improvement collectibles jewelry home supplies so whatever people are selling just help them to sell the thing better. Yeah I also think that what's cool about the app approaches it's way harder to get a stranger to drop a hundred dollars on some product from an influence of the they've never heard about and way easier for them to just double click on.

You know download an app double click again and spend five bucks you know so that's another interesting thing about digital products is yes the the price point might be a lot lower but the actual volume might be a lot higher. So true yeah like some of the weekly prices on these apps is like two dollars a week or ten dollars a week or the annual is like you know thirty to sixty dollars a year. But the cost of goods on that is basically zero so if you just it's you know infinitely scalable.

I have some like high revenue per user ideas that we could look at if that would be interesting you're an angel you're an absolute angel so okay think about okay so the I think there's a myth that tick tock users are all young. I think generally it's it's basically true but there's still wide range of demographics on tick tock and if if you if you serve content to a niche of people on tick tock where there's not as many creators.

Your content is going to be under price and you're still going to be reaching these demographics so. Like who who has a lot of money to pay to pay for products it's like one idea is golfers and this idea has been circulating on Twitter for a little bit but if you search like.

If you go on to tick tock creative center and you go on keyword insights you can see what people are searching for on tick tock and then you can find related videos to these things so one idea that a couple of people are already jumping on right now is the golf swing analysis.

And you know you could build an app that takes that takes a live view of your uses the camera to take a live view of your golf swing analyzes it the angle and the speed and everything and gives you tips on how to improve that and it's like a golf it's like a AI golf coach basically. And if you look at the videos that exists in this niche for example improve your golf swing like these videos already exist.

So they're promoting these app this app I think is talking about it's like a GPS tracker so it shows you how far you hit the ball. But there's also this other swing analysis if you go on sensor tower and you search. And then you can see the golf swing there's the top app I think is has 10,000 downloads a month and it's making 70,000 dollars a month which is a pretty crazy revenue per download ratio compared to some of these other apps.

And it's probably because you know this demographic is willing to pay a lot more for for things. And then you can see the level of the golf golf golf like horrible like horrible I've only got a few times my life and I signed up for a golf swing analysis.

So I don't know what these with their charging but I already feel like uncomfortable like going and some like random person is going to analyze my crappy golf swing and I have to go and like drive there and park and walk and like doing it out of the comfort of your home like that's for like $20 like I would do that all day. And then the app is just like so much more scalable than a bunch of coaches that you can get some good content ideas from TikTok itself to if you just search golf swing.

And people that already sort of make this content where they analyze the the angles of you know famous golfers swings and another app that I like in this space is KO their MMA app so they help you train like boxing and mix martial arts. And then you go to you know if you search KO watch some of these videos it's basically a product demo.

You know there's lessons in the app but then also this like wireframe skeleton thing I really like this concept I think this could be applied to so many other apps like tennis golf pickle ball if you draw this wireframe over people and you kind of use that to analyze our movements. It works really well on TikTok because it looks it looks really cool it looks like visually has this kind of wild factor and you know the content already sort of has this.

And then you know this analysis in the organic videos it would be so easy to plug in an app on this and just have a little screen recording in the corner that shows the interface of the app analyzing the golf swing. It's a super easy product integration. I mean I like it because I mean it works it's you know tennis pickle ball like what are other like skiing you know I'm just trying to think of like what are high value like what are what are sports at people.

The left-end value of customers high as well as that they're interested in analysis of how you know of how they. How they swing or player whatever there's actually I forget the name of it but there's a camera that does this and it's specifically designed for tennis players and pickle ball players have you heard about this.

I have a friend who does it he like he sets it up every every time we play tennis he like puts it on the fence and then the camera and I think there's an app component to us as the camera and the app together. Totally and that really is I don't know if the cameras completely necessary though I feel like GPT is like good enough to kind of yeah.

Like the camera on the iPhone is pretty damn good yeah and you can just use the API is like the GPT this is super fresh by the way like GPT vision just came out this year and you know all the other LLM companies are building better and better versions of the AI vision stuff so the opportunities very fresh like there's not that many. Competitors in the space yet.

One more high LTV niche is poker I still have not seen a really really good like well monetized poker app but when you think about it poker players are probably the best customer that you can have when it comes to like sports and you know games.

And people who would use apps I mean typically these a lot of these poker videos and like content gets monetized via gambling sites because obviously they make a lot of money to but you could build a you know an app that helps poker players analyze their their hand history like analyze the. The strategies that I make a mistake here are there. Even position it more towards beginners and show them you know tips on hey here's what you did this hands here's something that you might want to do.

Next hand and sort of have an educational component similar to similar to KO. But a lot of these poker videos are unmonetized so just or at least under monetize like they either sell a poker course where they say here's highly learn poker or they're sponsored by gambling websites but you could reach out to all these poker poker creators and integrate the app into the into the gameplay videos like for example. This video has like 90,000 views. It's like biggest tip for poker players.

It clicks the wrong one this one. How to play the straddle and it's just I think the person is probably talking voice over. So for here he calls. But imagine if you just put a little interface right here that said okay let's look at you know what are my what are my pod odds like what are my. You know what what's the rain what's my range right now like how should I bet here should I fold should I check. You could put the app interface right there just flash it for two seconds.

And then continue on with the video and then people in the comments are going to be like. What was that app like how did you do that and then you can just reply and people read the tick to comments you're going to get a lot of people getting downloads from that and there's. Tons of accounts that just post these poker videos every day and they're completely unmonetized. When I hear you talk I just. I was okay I'll tell you a little bit I had coffee with someone this morning who.

He's a founder he sold his last company for like $180 million dollars and he was kind of complaining to me that. It's so hard to stand out now it's so hard to come up with ideas for stuff and I was like dude what are you smoking. Like what are you smoking like there's the amount of opportunity right now like and these aren't even like. You know I call them super niches which is like a niche of a niche these are like. Large categories that you're you're talking about.

That's true yeah you can even my more micro with these but I just like. Tiktok is just. Yeah like I said it's mostly monetized through e-commerce and. I'm just not that many people that have figured out this content yet. Like one thing one thing that I've noticed is that. People also get stuck on like influencer marketing because everyone views influencer marketing through. The lens of like the Instagram era which was.

You know you pay an influencer they have millions of followers and you know people the theory is that people follow people not brands. And I think that's true I think influencers you the access is a niche audience. But Tiktok is is different it's different because. People watch content on the for you page they don't watch content from people that they actually follow. Like if you scroll through your for you page 95% of the content is brand new accounts you've never seen before.

So because of that you can't do a influencer marketing in the same way. With influencer marketing you're the creators that you hire are actually three different roles. It's like they're an actor. Which most people think about. But then they're also a director they're creating the video a lot of times you give them a brief but. Best practices usually hey you give you know get creative freedom and then they're also. They have a built in audience. But this the director portion is often a huge.

A huge. And the mistake that a lot of brands make is that they either give too much creative freedom or not enough creative freedom. If you give too much then. The influencers just going to make whatever video they want and not sell the product. Because influencers don't like selling stuff they don't like the feeling of selling hours you know. Shilling things so they they're artists like a lot of influencers they feel like artists they don't want to. They feel like they're not going to sell out.

But then on the other hand if you're over prescriptive and you say okay you actually have to mention these. Here's the brand guidelines. Then the video is not going to get any views because. It's just it'll feel like an ad and this happens a lot. So because the the TikTok algorithm is for you page based. It's all about making good content so you can skip. The audience part so if you find if you cut out the director role and the audience role.

You can now hire creators just as actors like just to be the talent in the video so they can have zero followers so when people say like oh influencers are overpriced. This is my response but because you don't have to find people who have big audiences you just have to find people. That know how to make good videos and if they have a thousand followers or 10,000 followers you can just make a new brand account. And make content on there so for example if you look up. Tabs. Tabs chocolate.

This is their strategy they just make all these brand accounts and they hire a creator for each one. And then they're like the same thing with all these other apps that I'm mentioning like the. What's what was the. What was that app where people did it's like a widget on your phone and then you can listen to the music. Oh air buds is that what you're talking about?

Yes. Air buds does the same thing it's like Layla air buds, Stacy air buds, Will air buds so all of all of these accounts they're new their brand new accounts that they found the creator and then they had them created a new account. So this was this is very cheap to do they just found small creators and then have make new accounts. So I think it's still underpriced I think if you do traditional influencer marketing is definitely going to be a little bit expensive.

Especially if you go after influencers with big follower accounts. But I think there's still lots of ways to do TikTok in a very underpriced way. I agree especially like we both been saying especially if you are creating digital products I see you have locks club as an example here. Yeah yeah yeah they're a member of my community they are.

I really like their content strategy they do so locks club is a exclusive dating up for Jewish people with very high standards so it's sort of like raya but more niche down and there's starting to do this content series where it's like how to find a nice Jewish boy at NYC. These are like Jewish inside jokes. Yeah yeah so like if you find someone like this who knows the culture knows you know how to talk to the target audience.

This can go viral on a brand new account account as well so I was just talking to them to the founder this week and like I noticed that this video was the most popular out of the most recent one. So they could create a whole new account just dedicated to this typo like street content. So when you find a format that's working and scalable doesn't make sense to create new accounts for it is that what you're saying?

Yeah yeah it does yeah because the algorithm works in a way where if you think about like TikTok wants. If content is good TikTok wants to show it to the right people like it's in their best interest to get more wash time so if they're if they know that a certain account has a lot of. So for example if this if this reached XYZ audience. Then now TikTok or Instagram reals they know that this account sir this content did well with this audience.

So if you make another video that looks similar has the same face the same format. Then it'll be a lot easier for it to for the algorithm to serve that content to the same audience again. So if you see if we go back to the. Collostrom videos. This account figured out that the food content works so they just spam the same thing every day so the algorithm knows and expects what audience to serve it to it just helps with the algorithm if you put too many faces in a single account.

Then it'll hurt your your reach the algorithm kind of gets confused like who do I who do I show this to. So it's not so much about making the whole page look aesthetic it's more because people don't really look at the page anyway it's more like optimizing it for the algorithm and making sure it knows who to serve the content to. That's good to know you had one last thing I want to talk about on your list I think it was something to do with cult movements what would you mean by that.

So one of the biggest names in the space is Blake Anderson so Blake did the looks maxing app called you max basically there's this movement of basically men who want to improve their physical appearance is pretty simple but it does go very deep because when you think about like what are.

Like what are people motivated by it's like people want to look good there's a lot of insecurities attached to physical appearance and especially with young men these days I think there's a lot of challenges with dating and you know I mean teenagers will always be insecure about something so there's this app called you max and it scans your face so that has this interface.

So this this app it scans your face and it shows you your potential and all the scores about you and then and then it you know gives you tips on how to improve your jawline how to fix your skin care your hair you know these various things about your about your face and this app makes a lot of money.

I don't remember what the revenue is but it's several million a year and they mostly used tic tac as their distribution but it's really interesting because looks maxing I don't know if everyone knows this but looks maxing is sort of a really deep internet movement like it came from sort of these red pill slash in cell kind of reddit communities from.

Several years ago and it was sort of this very niche thing and now it's gone mainstream but it has deep roots in like people really believe like you know you need it's almost an ideology it's like you need to be. Maximizing your physical appearance is like you know looks maxing.

So they like you max was one of the first apps that capitalize on this movement so if you think about you know other movements that haven't really that don't really have a product attached to them yet I think that's sort of the 10 million dollar. So it's like a business that can be started in all kinds of niches. Another one is well and a framework I'm not going to like.

If I had the idea I would build it but I can give a framework for like finding these ideas which is you know like what do what do people want in general in life it's it's health wealth and relationships. And this this one is relationships it's like you improve your physical appearance sort of health in a way but it does have a lot to do with you know finding finding love and dating and things like that.

And I guess self improvement is pretty health as well but if you think about health wealth relationships those are the three main things that people want. And the movements that can be built around that wealth obviously there's lots of cults related to wealth like I don't know if you know Crayo. This is a app I think they have more than 5 million annual revenue right now they basically partnered with this guy and a couple of other.

And then they put together a lot of YouTubers and Tik Tokers who teach teenagers how to make money on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts and they show them basically like. You know find these streamers clips clip up the videos and then mass post them on Tik Tok and YouTube shorts and then they sell a course so they monetize by selling a course on how to do it it's like a.

And then they have this existing audience of all these people trying to make more money and then Arab Khan is the guy who started this sass he just created Crayo which basically productizes the course so instead of teaching a course on how to make these videos you just make the videos with the software in a more automated way.

If you've seen these like Reddit minecraft park horror videos like a mass posted on YouTube now instead of promoting his course Daniel gets to promote the software instead. This is another sort of the cult of money I guess you could you could think of it. Yeah, cult of young money to right like it could have gone after everyone but they focused on really teenagers I guess like them to you know like people who look like Daniel like young.

You know so interesting I think what you know what's interesting to me there is it's it's cult like I'm always a believer in you know the best businesses are cult like and then someone's listening to this and being like well that's spammy or sleazy it's like well no like Apple scale does a cult like business there's plenty of. Rapidable businesses the best businesses in fact are always cold based cult like so i think that that that that that comes to mind.

That's how I think I just have yeah yeah just going to say the other thing I just have to say is. Your product has to be good baseline though you know what I mean like just because you have great distribution if you're sending people to a product. That isn't high quality and I'm not talking about crao i'm just talking about in general looks maxing any of the stuff we're talking about you know the baseline is the product needs to resonate so.

Before you get millions of people I guess this is a champion problem before you get millions of people to try your app make sure that it isn't a leaky product that's retaining. That there's some product led growth get those metrics right and then layer on all the stuff that we talked about today. Totally yeah i would say like the.

And it will help you it'll help your marketing to because once you figure out okay i get a thousand downloads and this many people paid and then here's how many actually retained and stayed for another month because they value the product now you can see. Your LTV and your cat and then you can spend more on marketing you can make your marketing better if you know your product is good so.

I think if you don't know that your product is good and you're spending all this money and marketing then yeah you have a leaky bucket you don't want. A product that's not retentive then you're getting then it's basically an ecommerce product all over again because you're just selling all product once. Right in the fun exactly the point of the time is that it's scalable and it's you it's retentive right.

Okay if you made it this far in the in the episode i don't know about you all but i'm obsessed with Joseph i think he needs to come back on so. Like comment subscribe let's get this video to go viral because i think that you know you're criminally under followed and and i'd love to get you more well known and i think that there's just so many nuggets of insight in this video that i think is. Is really going to.

You know help people avoid a lot of pain in actually building out their idea so i thank you for that Joseph where could people get to know you and and some of the stuff that you're working on. You can find me on twitter i post content about the latest trends i'm seeing in tiktok and consumer apps and i also have a community of consumer app founders where we discuss the latest tactics so check out my check my twitter. Check his twitter alright my man i'll i'll see you around and.

You know this has been real catch you later it's been great thanks Greg.

This transcript was generated by Metacast using AI and may contain inaccuracies. Learn more about transcripts.