Transcription
99% of mobile apps fail in the first year. And the reason is not what you think.
I've built multiple apps. One of them hit 45K in monthly recurring revenue before I sold the business. And my latest app, the one I'm currently working on, just crossed 150K in monthly revenue.
In 2026, thanks to AI and the vibe coding platforms out there, it is easier than ever to build and launch your app. But still, the sad reality is only 1% of them actually make money.
I've watched hundreds of founders burn months building apps that never make it to the app store, or when they do make it to the app store, they just sit there and never make any money.
The difference between the apps that print money and the ones that die, isn't how sexy the UI looks. It isn't how complex your tech stack is or how good your code is. It's three specific mistakes that kill apps before they even have a chance.
And spoiler alert, if you're building an app right now or you're thinking about building one, you're probably making at least one of these mistakes, too. But don't worry, in this video, I'm going to break down exactly why most apps fail and what you can do instead to build a successful app that actually generates recurring revenue and hopefully gives you the opportunity at time and financial freedom like it has for me.
So, if you follow what I've got to say in this video and you implement these tips correctly, you'll come to find that building a mobile app is the best business model in 2026. Because once your app is built and submitted to the app store, it is there forever. It will generate passive income every single day with very little extra work. All you need to focus on is the marketing.
So, get out your notebooks, get out your crayons, and make sure to take notes and watch this video until the end. Let's get into it.
Okay, here we have it. The blueprint for being successful and not failing like 99% of the other apps out there. This entire document is going to be in the description of this video down below. You will be able to download it for free. But let's jump into it.
We're going to be covering your app idea and how to validate that idea, building and what features you should be focusing on. How to maximize the conversion of every single user who comes into your app so that you can scale because if you make more money per user, it's going to be easier to scale, right? And then of course, how to successfully market your app, which is in my opinion the most important part of scaling apps right now. Everybody can build an app, everybody can launch, but the marketing is where most fall short.
So let's start with idea and validation. When you're building your app, all you need to do is solve one painful problem for a large number of people. And that way, you keep your app simple, too. If your app only has to solve one painful problem, the features can be very simple. They could be all centered around that one problem.
The fastest way to fail in the app game is try to build an app that does everything. Try to build an app for everyone. Because if you do that, you're not going to have a specific pain point that you can latch on to. You will not succeed. You will not be the app for everything. Specific positioning wins because it makes the value prop stronger and it also makes word of mouth marketing very strong as well. So you should have one goal, one audience with one urgent problem.
Okay? And we need to make sure this idea is actually marketable. We need to make sure that there is cultural relevance around this idea. I'll give you an example and we'll use my previous app as an example. It was a quit vaping app. This was pretty much the entire app. This screen you're looking at right here. It was one screen that had a puff button and would tell you how much you puffed, right? One simple app solving one simple problem, one simple feature.
Let's look at another app. This one does $8 million. It's Flow. It's a period cycle tracker for women. Of course, it did $8 million last month. They're targeting a specific demographic, a specific customer, and it has one simple feature, track your cycle. Right? Of course, they've added extra features on top as they've grown, but they started with this one core feature, right?
Let's look at Calai. A calorie tracker. They did $3 million last month. Let's take a look at their app. One simple feature, one core feature. Snap a pic, see the calories, track your progress. Look similar. Track your progress. All of these apps all have one simple feature. They're solving one painful problem for a large number of people. And you should do the same in your app.
And I'm going to show you how and how to validate your idea to make sure that the problem you're solving is actually relevant because that's the most important part. You should be coming up with your ideas and thinking about your product with a marketing first mindset. And you can run this test as well, the painkiller versus the vitamin test.
Painkillers solve urgent problems people will pay to fix right now. What is the painful problem? For me, it was your health. Vaping is bad. Everybody knows that. They don't want to be vaping anymore. For Cali, it's fitness, looking better, slimmer, getting bigger in the gym. For girls, they feel terrible on their time of the month, right? How do we solve this? How do we know? How can we track our symptoms? How can we understand what days are going to be better than others, right? Painkillers solve urgent problems that people will pay to fix.
Now, these are all painkillers. Puff count was, Cali, Flow. What you don't want to do is build a vitamin. Vitamin is a nice to have app, one that people don't really painfully need. For example, you don't want to have an app that solves when your nose itches. Not a not a super painful problem to have, right? It's going to go away eventually. You don't want to build a nose itching app. You want to build a painkiller.
And there are some tools that you can use to identify these ideas. Number one, you should always look at your day-to-day life. Go through your day-to-day life and understand what problems am I facing day-to-day? What problems am I facing in my business? What can I solve that is painful for me and others around me consistently. That's how I came up with the idea for Puff Count. I was addicted to vaping, right? All my friends were addicted to vaping. I knew it had relevance and I knew it was a painful problem.
And we can take a look at acquire.com for example. This is a marketplace. Acquire is a marketplace where people are selling their apps. And you can take a look here. Look at this QR code reader. They've made 8 million in profit in the last 12 months. It is a QR code reader. That's it. One feature, one problem. A storage cleaner. Gets rid of the photos on your phone. $5 million in the last 12 months. Let's look at this one. Building your credit score. $2 million in the last 12 months. Helping people learn Arabic. 350K in revenue in the last 12 months. All of these apps are selling for millions and millions of dollars and they are making millions of dollars every single month in revenue. They're all very simple one core feature apps. That's it.
So, you can browse marketplaces like Flippa or like Acquire to get these solid ideas. You can also validate your idea by going on to Google Trends. Let's type in Let's do this together. Let's type in quit vaping. Let's see if this problem is actually relevant. Let's go worldwide. Let's go 2004 to present. Bang. The search term for quit vaping is at an all-time high. Probably a pretty good pretty good idea to build an app around that, wouldn't you say? Let's type in period tracking for flow all-time high. Let's type in macro tracking. Yeah, all-time high. Flow, calai, puff count, all successful because we're tackling painful problems that currently have cultural relevance. This is how you come up with an idea and this is how you validate ideas.
You can further validate by going to these two websites like the TikTok ads top library. TikTok will show you what the top ads are for apps. We can get rid of this. We can go to industry apps and then we can look at the last 180 days. Objective of course app installs. Boom. Here are the most popular ads for apps. A fitness app. Another fitness app. Fitness app. Type better. Be smarter. A fitness app. Get cheaper flights. Get cheaper hotels. As you can see, the fitness apps are crushing it. But each one of these solves a painful problem for a large number of people.
We can even go in here a little bit further and we can go break it down by category. So, we can type in health and fitness apps. Let's look at parenting. That's a good one. And maybe utilities. Let's take a look at these. A lot of this just lazy fitness workout. Again, getting slimmer, getting stronger. This seems very powerful. A security app, workouts app. You get the idea. You can use all of these different marketplaces. You can use the TikTok ads library. You can look up competitors on the Facebook ads library, too.
For example, we can go to the Facebook ads library and we can look up one of these massive apps. If they are running a ton of ads, that is a good sign. It means they are actively spending money profitably to acquire customers. This is always a good sign.
Run through this idea and validation framework to stress test your idea. Is it a painkiller? Does it have cultural relevance? Is it a viral search term? Is it going viral on social media? Are your competitors running paid ads? These are all positive signals and positive signs that the idea you are building makes sense to build.
Once we have our idea, we need to actually build it and we need to think about what features we want. And the main thing here is you don't need to overbuild your app. In the very beginning, you need to keep it very, very simple. A lot of founders fall into feature creep. And when they're building their first version, they want to make it perfect and they want to add all these features before they first launch. Do not do that. Launch as simple as possible.
Again, I'll show you puff count. This was it. This was the only screen we had in our app when we first launched the MVP. All it did was track your puffs, but it still that one feature solve the core problem. And then, of course, we marketed it. We got users, we got real feedback, and then we built on top of it, right? To improve the product further. But you do not need to fall in love with the features. Do not let feature creep attack you. Do not spend months to years building your product. Launch as fast as possible. Launch the MVP. Launch with the minimum viable product. Build the quickest and the simplest version that still solves the pain of your users. And that way you get it into the market. You can start marketing. You start generating revenue. Start getting users in. Start getting real feedback. And you can use that revenue and feedback to build the rest of your features. It doesn't need to be perfect day one. It will not be perfect day one. It will never be perfect. You'll always be iterating, always be fixing bugs, always be adding features to your app. The key is to get it into the market as fast as possible so that you can build with confidence. You build based on data instead of you just sitting in your room guessing what you should build next.
And to launch your MVP as quick as possible, you can use no code tools. You can use a tool like ROR to build your app really quickly. Just prompt it, get it out there, get it into the market, and then after you launch that initial version, get the feedback, and keep building.
And on top of building as fast as possible, getting your MVP out there, getting it into the market, even with your MVP, even with your first version, you should always be charging for your product. You should always be conversion maxing. Every founder has this kind of glass ceiling mindset of they think, you know, my product isn't good enough to charge for yet or it's not perfect enough or there aren't enough features. And that is a false mindset. That mindset will hold you back. You should start charging for your product from day one. You should have a hard paywall on your product from day one. And I'll show you exactly why here in a second, but you should have a strong onboarding flow that is based on psychology. We'll get into that in a second. You should have a hard paywall. And you should price with confidence. Don't be afraid to charge for your product. If your product has a price point, it has a higher perceived value. If your product is free, there's no perceived value with that. People will download it and stop using it because there there's no risk, right? Make your users pay immediately.
And I'll show you an example here on this site. Let's let's follow the examples that we've been looking at. Let's look at Flow. Let's see what they're doing in their onboarding and their paywall. How much are they charging? Here is their entire onboarding. Let's go through. Boom. They have a long onboarding walking the user through their problem. A lot of questions. Actually, an extremely long onboarding. Asking how tall you are, what are your side effects, all of your health data in one place, creating your personalized experience, building some social proof there. com making the user commit and then boom, hard paywall. They make you commit to a free trial before you even get inside the app. They have a long onboarding and then they hit you with the hard paywall. Every big app is doing this.
Let's look at Calai, our other example that we've been following in this video. Download Cali. Long onboarding. What's your height? When were you born? What is your goal? What is your desired weight? We can help you do that. Some social proof here. Long long long long onboarding. And then of course the hard paywall. You have to commit to the free trial before you can even use the app. Making the user commit. $29.99 per year for our app.
Puff count. This is our entire onboarding flow. Welcome. Value screens. Boom. Walking you through the survey. Walking the user through their pain. Long onboarding. A lot of questions making them think about the problem that our app solves. And then once they finish this hard paywall, there was no X button. We made the user commit to the free trial.
Your app is still free. The free trial lets the users test out your app, get value from it, and then when that trial converts, it doesn't feel like they're paying for something new. It feels like they're keeping something they already got value from. So from day one, launch your MVP and launch it with a strong onboarding flow that is based on psychology. Launch with a hard paywall and price with confidence. Charge as much as you can because the more you charge, the more you can spend to acquire customers in the future.
And again, you can use this tool to copy winning onboardings and paywalls. But what you'll come to understand looking through each onboarding, this is just a psychological journey that you're taking the user through. If you don't do this, your conversion rate will be trash. I didn't do this when I first launched PuffCount and my conversion rate was terrible. After we launched this onboarding, our conversion rate went through the roof because we are taking people through this journey, this psychological journey, making them think about their problem. How long have you been vaping? What side effects do you feel? What area of your life is most affected due to vaping? Right? Asking them how much they spend per month, per year. And then you hit them with the hard paywall. Every single app is using this strategy right now.
And now that we have our MVP built, we have a conversion mechanism, we have an onboarding, we have a hard paywall, we know that we can convert users, we need to start to market. We need to start to get people into the top of our funnel. We need to get them to download the app and let the onboarding and the paywall do their thing and the users will convert.
So let's talk about marketing. When you are marketing, you do not want to talk about your product. You do not want to talk about your app. And I know that might sound counterintuitive, but that is how you are successful in organic marketing. You can't make the content feel like an ad. If it feels like an ad, it won't get views. You won't build any trust. And if you don't get views, how are you going to convert anyone?
So, what you want to do instead is you want to sell the transformation. You don't want to talk about the features. You want to talk about the journey that you're going to take the user through, the transformation that you're going to give them. People don't care about your app. People care about what your app can do for them.
For example, this video, 476,000 likes for my product. This video got 8.4 million views. In this video, we didn't really talk about puff count. We showed what was inside a vape. How scary does that look? This attracts vape users and shows them how scary it is, how bad you're smoking a battery. And then at the end, we present the app as the solution. This app helps you quit. Only a two-second call to action there, right? We made an entertaining video. We showed what was inside. We showed how scary it was attacking the pain. And then we presented the solution at the end of the video only for two seconds there. And you'll notice I didn't explain the features. I didn't explain how the app works. I didn't explain why you should download it. No, I just presented it as a solution. Here it is.
Let's take a look at another example. Let's take a look at this video. This is a video for Cal AI showing a jacked dude with a cute girl showing the transformation. Everybody wants to be fit. Everybody wants to have an attractive girlfriend and then boom, tracking his calories in the video. That's it.
If you are currently an app founder or you're thinking about building your first app, I am hosting a live class where I'm sharing everything that I know about building, scaling, and eventually exiting mobile apps in this live class. It's going to be completely free. It will be live. You will be able to be there, ask me questions directly, and I will be able to give you answers and hopefully a bunch of sauce too, a bunch of tips. So again, that live class is completely free. The link is going to be in the description.
Search Cali and you'll see videos like this all day long. Here's another one. Showing the transformation, tracking protein and calories. Again, not really talking about the product, just showing it. Showing the product simply showing the transformation. This is literally a transformation video. Think about this for your product and you can type in the keywords. You can type in losing weight, right? For example, if you have a weight loss app, type in these. Do market research. Understand what is going viral in your niche. Sell the transformation, not the features.
You can do market research before you create content. Before you even press record on your video, before you hire that first creator, do market research. You can use tools like viral ad library to find the most viral videos for other apps on Instagram, on TikTok. And again, once you do this market research, you should identify viral formats. Only focus on the most viral videos for your competitors or in your niche in general. And once you have these, copy the URL and save them and put together a spreadsheet. Study your market. Do market research. Save all the most viral videos into a spreadsheet. Understand what the topic is, the hook, the story line. Once you start to do market research and you understand what's going viral in your niche, you will be much more successful at creating content yourself or hiring creators to do it.
And once you have the market research, you can use creators to create that content for you and post in volume and drive distribution for your product without you doing any work. And the easiest and the best way to hire creators and get content for free is on posted app, postedapp.com. You can go here and you can launch a deal like we have, right? Where you will get creators to submit videos for your brand for free. I'll show you an example here. This app, Ninja, they launched this deal where they explain what their product is, what they're looking for. They uploaded their market research just like we took here and showed it to the creators. This is what type of content we want. And then creators make videos for your brand and you only pay for what you actually like. Like this guy with 400,000 followers, submitted an offer for $110 video, $110 for this video. You can also launch a CPM campaign where you're only paying creators based on a CPM. You're only paying them out based on how many views they get. Like this brand who went viral. They got 754,000 views in their first 30 videos. Again, you build your brief. You tell the creators what what you want. And then you can set your flat rate per video and your CPM rate per video. You can even set a daily budget and the content will flow in on autopilot. Look at all these different submissions from different creators. These creators were only paid based on the amount of views they got. As you can see, flat rate here, $1, CPM rate five. This creator got 200,000 views, 114,000 views, 80,000 views, all on autopilot. All you have to do is build your campaign, set your CPM structure, set your daily budget, and you can see the views flow in on autopilot. You can also set up custom metrics. You can set up Google Analytics, Superwall, app analytics, and you can track how these views are affecting your product in real time.
Once you found what content works for you organically, then you can scale it with paid ads. And this is what all the top brands are doing. My fitness pal running paid ads. Let's look at Calai running paid ads. Let's look at Duolingo running paid ads. Once you have a painkiller product, you've built the MVP. You have a solid feature that solves that problem. You have conversion max. You've built a strong onboarding. You have a hard paywall. You've priced with confidence. You're earning per user that is installing your app. Then you can start to scale with paid ads. Start organically, pay some creators with posted, and then you can scale with paid. That is how the biggest brands in the world are scaling their businesses to millions and millions of dollars in monthly recurring revenue.
And a quick little cheat code for you here as well. If you want to do some free organic marketing, you can post on these different subreddits. Let's pull up a couple here. You can talk about your product and what you're building. You can talk about a SaaS product that you're building, right? Let's go to top of all time. You can talk about the product that you're building. You talk about the SaaS that you're building. You can talk about the startup that you're building. Post value in here. Don't just spam your product link. You can talk and you can share value about what you're building and people will give you real feedback on your submissions here. Reddit is a super underutilized growth mechanism. And there's a there is a subreddit for everything. I provided some links here for you in this document. By the way, if you want this entire document, the link is going to be in the description. You can download it for free. Go check that out.
Solve a painful problem. Validate that problem. Build your MVP as fast as possible. Launch with an onboarding, a psychologically based onboarding, and a hard paywall. And then start marketing. Stop overcomplicating everything. Apps fail when they overcomplicate each step of the process. It's a simple four-step process that every successful app follows.
Hopefully, this video gave you some value. If you have further questions or you want my opinion on your app, your marketing, whatever it is, shoot me a DM on stephven.build.build, I will get back to you. And if you're still watching the video, you probably enjoyed it. So, drop a like on the video. I would definitely appreciate it. And subscribe to the channel because I'll be dropping valuable videos just like this all the time. Catch you on the next one. Peace.