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Podcast

Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again

My First Million

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  • iPhone Apps Reopened As A Big Opportunity
    • iOS apps are resurging because easy discovery (TikTok) and easier building (AI) align right now.
    • Pat says many founders are making substantial recurring revenue with small, focused apps. Transcript: Pat Walls 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? Shaan Puri Let’s do iPhone apps because to me that sounds like 10 years ago. Pat Walls Yeah. Sam Parr 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. Pat Walls Right, right. 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 of examples. There’s a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups 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 done pushups. They’re doing 30k a month. And actually they’re doing a lot more. (Time 0:05:50)
  • Viral Video Before Product
    • A team made a viral video pretending an app forced them to do pushups before scrolling, then built the app after traction.
    • That app validated via TikTok and later generated tens of thousands per month. Transcript: Pat Walls There’s a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups 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 done pushups. 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. Yeah. Yeah. Just like God intended. Yeah. Yeah. Sam Parr To enter heaven. Yeah. Pat Walls 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, you know, 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. Is it push scroll? Sam Parr Push scroll? That’s the one. Push scroll. Okay, gotcha. So you go 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 your the apps you’re addicted to and basically you earn you know you earn it as you 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 giving a paying influencers or affiliates or basically getting like a hundred or a thousand pieces of content Posted every week. They’ll come up with their own hooks. Like, oh my God, y’all, they, 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 it that, is that the playbook that they’re all doing? Sean, you should become a TikTok affiliate. That’s pretty good. That was kind of natural. What was really cool about this app, and this is a cool story worth telling, is that they didn’t actually build the app first. Pat Walls 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 pushups before scrolling. They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do pushups 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. (Time 0:06:37)
  • Validate With The Marketing First
    • Validate demand with the exact marketing channel you plan to use before building product.
    • Create the viral content first, then iterate on an MVP app after traction appears. Transcript: Pat Walls 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 pushups before scrolling. They pretended that the app exists and they showed them having to do pushups 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. Were they technical? There was two guys. One guy was the technical guy. The other guy was the kind of the marketing. The pushup guy. Yeah. Sam Parr 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. Exactly. I guess we’ve got to build it then. Pat Walls And they just went viral first. (Time 0:08:40)
  • Apps Are The New Info Products
    • Pat frames apps as the new info products for health, wealth, relationships, and productivity.
    • These verticals convert well because people pay for short, habit-change utilities. Transcript: Pat Walls 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 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. (Time 0:10:20)
  • Stop-Vaping App Sold Big
    • Pat recounts a PuffCount app that gamified quitting vaping and sold for a large sum.
    • He links its growth to TikTok marketing and strong product-market fit in health niches. Transcript: Pat Walls Vaping app? Yeah, so that would be another one of the health. I think the health one is a good space. There’s a guy 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. (Time 0:11:00)
  • Use AI To Build Lean Apps Fast
    • Use AI coding tools to build lightweight iOS apps without large teams.
    • Prioritize simple, testable app ideas that wouldn’t have been cost-effective to build before AI. Transcript: Pat Walls That’s the thing. Is they’re using AI coding and this is why it’s big now. And you’re 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 frontend 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 zero. 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. (Time 0:11:41)
  • Video Is A Missing Company Function
    • Companies lack repeatable playbooks for video production despite high demand.
    • That gap creates B2B opportunities for specialized video strategy and execution services. Transcript: Sam Parr I’m curious what you have there. Shaan Puri Yeah. Pat Walls I don’t have like crazy business ideas here, but I have just some intel on how big this opportunity is. And there’s so many business ideas you can do off of this. So I know this, and you guys know this, is that video content is hard. Doing anything on video is hard. It doesn’t matter if it’s long form, short form, paid ads, organic, getting authentic, non-AI, we’re not talking about AI generated stuff, like video to work for your business that Gets views and converts customers. It’s really, really hard. At companies, there’s lots of functions, right? Design, that’s pretty much solved. You get good designers, they do good stuff. Product, that’s a little tough, but kind of generally solved. Engineering, kind of solved, especially with AI. Sales, there’s lots of playbooks for all of these, right? But there’s no playbook right now for video. I’ll stop there. Let me know what you guys think immediately about that. (Time 0:16:15)
  • Package Video Strategy For Enterprises
    • Sell packaged video playbooks and teams to big companies for high retainer fees.
    • Target Fortune-level clients that will pay $50k–$100k per month for YouTube strategy. Transcript: Pat Walls One guy that I think is cool, he does, so big companies, they want to get into video. HubSpot obviously wants to get into video. Big Fortune 50, Fortune 100, Fortune 500 companies, they need to figure out YouTube and they need to figure it out fast. And I know a guy who has an agency that he goes for the big boys. He goes for like the Microsofts, the Figma’s, and he basically just sends them, he helps them build YouTube teams and he sends them packaging ideas. Do this title, do this thumbnail, do this title, do this thumbnail, because you are Microsoft or some massive company. He charges like, it’s different probably per client, but he’s told me some crazy numbers, like $50,000 to $100,000 per month just for YouTube strategy. (Time 0:20:50)
  • Niche Video Format Scaled To Millions
    • Pat met a niche video-format entrepreneur who scaled a single format (street interviews) into a multimillion-dollar business.
    • That founder expects around $10M revenue this year by repeating one deliverable format for clients. Transcript: Sam Parr There’s other people who are doing like done for you, right? So we’ve, we’ve talked about the guy, I think his name’s Josh, who does the street interviews for companies. So it’s like, oh, like, you know what, you know, what’s the most shameful and awkward and difficult version of video is like man on the street interviews. So he’s like, just niche down into like, I’ll give you that format. You give me money. I will walk around New York. I will stop people on the road and I will ask them, you know, three goofy questions to try to get, you know, try to get you some clips. Okay, so that’s like one guy who’s doing the done for you service. I know these other guys that do, they fly to companies and they podcast interview them. They’re like, look, forget even getting booked on an actual podcast. I’ll just interview you. Chop it up like you were on a podcast. Nobody even needs to know that there’s no long form podcast actually underneath this. And I’ll just give you the clips. And for you, that’s a lot easier. Usually the CEO or the founder is pretty comfortable just sitting down and being interviewed about their company in a podcast format. And they just do it, the whole thing turnkey. And it’s like, wait, let’s just cut out the part of helping you get booked on actual podcasts and cutting it. We’ll just fake the podcast. It’s great. And so that’s like another, like, we will deliver this format to you for a, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a month type of thing. Now you only need 10 customers and now you’re cooking at over 100 grand a month. Pat Walls Yeah, I like the idea of taking one popular format and then turning that into a business. Like you said, the street interviews, do that one format for one business. And I actually met that guy who started that business and he told me some pretty wild numbers about his revenue. Shaan Puri We talked about it. Yeah, it was doing, I think this year he’s gonna do 10 million in revenue. Yeah, (Time 0:21:47)
  • Prewrite A Treatment For Every Video
    • Prep content with a title, thumbnail, and a concise treatment before filming to guide production.
    • Build each video around one big idea or checklist to make it sharable and actionable. Transcript: Pat Walls I mean, my first million has something like this too, but this one is a little different. This is our prep doc for all of our videos that we do at Starter Story. And we will do a couple things in here. First, we start with the package. So this is before anything gets filmed. It’s not post film, it’s pre-production. And we do the title and thumbnail. So this is this guy here, it’s a different guest, but we’re saying, hey, this is the thumbnail we’re going to do. And this is the video. This video did pretty well. I think it got like five, 600, 700 K views. So that’s why I want to show it. It’s like a good example. And I learned this when I read this production book. It was like Hollywood production book. But when you sell a script in Hollywood, they have what’s called a treatment. And it’s basically a pitch of a video of why someone will want to watch this video. If you want to sell your script in Hollywood and convince some director to pick it up or whatever happens in Hollywood, you have to sell this. You don’t give them the 120 page script. You sell them the sales page of the script. So we always have title thumbnail, obviously. And then we have what’s called a treatment. I’ll stop there and let me, you guys, let me know what you think about this. Sam Parr So let’s just read the treatment. So you go, this is Mike founder from Australia. Now, are you thinking about this? Like what, what needs to be nailed in the treatment? What do you have to, what’s the important part to find when you write this pitch? Pat Walls Yeah. I always try to think about how, and this might have been written by my producer, but what I like to think about in the treatment is like the vibes and the feeling that the viewer will get When they watch it. Why should this video exist? Why will they leave this video and think about it for the next two weeks or send it to their friend? I like to think about the feeling that you have when you watch it. Maybe this isn’t the best example of that, but what is the viewer going to walk away? This isn’t really like an intro. This is more like, I’m telling my producer right now, sell me on this idea so that when we go to record it, we know exactly what we’re trying to get out of this and that it ends up being how We planned. Sam Parr So in this case, is the kind of the main thing I would be feeling or wanting is, oh man, I really want the sort of exact playbook. You know, in this case, the 10-step playbook validated by a Reddit post with 151 comments of how he’s built these, you know, he builds SaaS apps to 200K MRR, something like that. Pat Walls That’s the premise of this video is that, hey, I have this very specific 10-step playbook. And this is something that we found because he had written this awesome Reddit post about it. And it was really like a simple 10-step playbook. If I do this, I do this, I do this, I do this, something that our audience really likes. So we build the whole video around that checklist. And that checklist almost becomes like a character in the video that we can further dive deeper on. (Time 0:24:41)
  • Separate Value And Growth Hypotheses
    • Growth and value hypotheses are distinct and both must be validated for scale.
    • Getting value right without a growth channel yields a small business; get both and scaling becomes straightforward. Transcript: Shaan Puri So how many of these videos are you doing a week? We’re aiming for two to three right now. So you’re making two or three of these a week. That’s a lot. Yeah. Sam Parr Yeah, it seems like you kind of undersold yourself at the beginning when you were like, you know, I stuck with it. I think obviously consistency and sticking with it mattered. But it sounds like also what really mattered was building a system to be able to do this at scale, right? A team and a system. You had to do that. I would say most creators don’t know how to build a system Right, right. And it sounds like you found the growth hypothesis, which was, if I put these types of stories on YouTube, there’s always, YouTube will keep feeding me more and more audience for this Type of content. And I can grow that way versus SEO versus anything else, right? (Time 0:28:42)
  • Design For Asynchronous Workflows
    • Build asynchronous systems and track tasks in Notion to avoid urgent culture and burnout.
    • Let people work flexibly as long as KPIs and deliverables are met. Transcript: Pat Walls And I had a note in here that I wanted to talk about, which was busy people are the biggest losers. I used to be in corporate nine to five and I hated urgency culture. I hated getting emails and one-off Slack messages. I worked at Deloitte and you’d get an email and then all of a sudden you’re working a deal the whole weekend. I hated that. So I knew that when I started a company, I didn’t want to build my business like that at all. I wanted to build it around systems, asynchronous systems so that I could play tennis every day at noon. And also my people that work for me enjoy that too. It’s not for everyone, but this is how we operate. So everything exists on a notion. So right here, we have our all tasks that need to get done in the company are simply assigned out to people and there’s no like real like deadline or meetings about them. There are just things to get done when you can manage that deep work session that you meant to do that day, go and do those and we’re good. As long as you get the stuff done that we plan to and we hit our KPIs and all these things, you can work whenever you’d like and everything is here in this notion. Additionally, we have all of our production for our company, including YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, everything we post on any sort of social media. (Time 0:31:57)
  • Systems Manage Growth, Not Create It
    • Systems help manage growing headaches, but don’t substitute for finding product-market fit.
    • Implement systems once growth proves sustainable, not as a premature shortcut to success. Transcript: Sam Parr Can I say a quick disclaimer? Because I used to be the kind of guy who somebody, I’d be watching something or I’d hear a talk and somebody would be like, oh, I use this system. They give me some acronym. And then they’re like, yeah, this is what I do. This is, it’s so good for me. And I’d be like, ah, that’s what I’ve been missing. Just that’s the tool. I was one tool away. I was one framework away, one acronym away from success. And it turns out, spoiler, I was never one acronym away from success. And there’s a specific type of person and a specific moment in time when you need a system tool. And that is when you have growth, but you have a growing headache. So the business is growing healthily, but your headache is growing, you know, maybe even more than that or proportionately to that. And I think what most people have is a business that is not really growing enough. And then they try to add systems and processes and it actually slows them down and they don’t even grow faster because growth often is like a matter of like striking a vein, it’s like drilling For oil. You don’t need to be super efficient. You just need to find the oil. And sometimes that’s brute force. Sometimes it’s a little bit of gut instinct. Sometimes it’s a little bit of cowboyness to trying different little experiments. But I think, you know, I just want to say that out loud because I wasted a lot of time when I actually needed growth. And then I adopted systems of people who had growth and I’ve conflated the two. I thought the system creates the growth. (Time 0:38:32)
  • Think Week Reoriented His Focus
    • Pat took a solo ‘Think Week’ road trip, realized Starter Story was his true business, and refocused on it.
    • After going all-in, he doubled revenue in one month and accelerated growth thereafter. Transcript: Pat Walls Yep. This blog post all revolves around a single week in my life where I, is post-COVID, I was about three years into building the business. And what most people don’t know, they think, oh, you just built Starter Story and you grew that. Well, no, I was the guy with like 10 side projects and I had two businesses that were like, I was splitting my time on and then other side projects and other personal brand and doing all These things. Starter Story was making $8,000. These are sort of high level numbers, but it was making $8,000 a month. And then this other business I was building was like a software plugin type app was doing $2,000 a month. And I thought this was going to be a bigger than Starter Story because I didn’t think Starter Story was going to be big. And I was so burnt out that I said, I heard about this Think Week by Bill Gates, where you go off to a cabin and you just think about stuff. So I couldn’t afford a cabin in the woods or anything at that point. And I decided, okay, I’m just going to go get in my car. I’m going to get drive across the country and I’m going to think. Through that process, through that week of not being on the phone, you know, this is no social media, nothing. I couldn’t even check my email. I realized that starter story was the business I should be going all in on. This is the business that I was meant to be built. I’m throwing basically no time into this business that’s doing $8,000 a month. And I’m throwing all my time into this business that I’m supposed to be building. This is how I get into YC and I do all these things. I’m putting 20% of my effort into 80% of the revenue. Let’s just drop everything else. And in that moment, after that week, after I realized all this, I basically sold that business, stopped working on anything else, and I went all in on Starter Story. And this is three years after starting it. Best decision I ever made, obviously. And I don’t know if I would have made that decision if I didn’t take that week off. And essentially, I doubled the business’s revenue in a single month after that. And then everything went up after that. (Time 0:41:46)