Transcription
I decided to really lock in and focus on building one specific product, and we've gone from 0 to 30k MRR ever since.
This is Benji, and in the last year, he's built over 45 apps, and his latest one just hit $30,000 a month in less than 4 months.
In the past year or so, I've built over 45 apps. But this isn't a story about one app. It's about the system behind all of them, the exact process he follows every single time to go from idea to revenue fast.
The entire process usually takes around four to five hours to actually get a good app built out.
So, I asked Benji to come on to the channel to break it all down step by step. And in this episode, we'll dive into how he goes from an idea to a working app in just a few hours, the simple distribution strategy that makes his app thousands of dollars every month, and the complete playbook he'd follow if you were starting a mobile app again from scratch today. If you're building apps right now, this is the episode. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story.
Okay, Benji, welcome to the channel. I'm pumped to have you on here. Tell me about who you are, what app you built, and what's your story.
Hey guys, my name is Benji. Today I'm talking about Snag, which is an app that my team and I at 10X Studio had launched around 4 months ago, and we've gone from 0 to 30K MRR ever since. And I'm really excited to share the entire playbook that we used to scale Snag.
Okay, awesome. Before we get into the whole process of you building it and growing it, let's talk about what you built and how it's doing. Could you pull up some of your dashboards, show me the revenue it's making, and just show me what you built?
As you can see here in Superwall, we have around $30,000, uh, US in monthly recurring revenue. We have over 100,000 authenticated users on Snag, 9,000 conversions, and over $80,000 in total proceeds. Snag is an app that helps people find free items near them. This is the main page of Snag where users literally will gain access to free items near them. They can select what they want here, either by searching it or filtering it. You can store the good items that you like in the favorite section. We do weekly, monthly, yearly, one-time, uh, subscriptions. We have around 3.3K ratings on App Store, which is very important social proof when you're promoting, uh, consumer apps.
Amazing. $30,000 a month in just four months shows you how fast apps can grow. We talked to a lot of founders that are growing apps very fast. I think it's awesome. Tell me how you get here. How do you get to the point where just in a couple months you have an app that's absolutely crushing it? What's your background?
I grew up in Asia, and growing up, I always played by the books, worked really hard in school, had a 4.0 GPA, but really didn't explore myself enough to the point where I knew what I wanted to do with my life. Then sold my first media company for six figures. Then proceeded to work in corporate investment firms. I was doing quant research, also worked in media companies before I was just trying to explore myself before ultimately pursuing software products. And then in the past year or so, I've built over 45 apps. My first ever app is an app called Pillar. It's a self-improvement app. We scaled to 11,000 users with basically zero CAC and basically stopped because I had shiny object syndrome. I proceeded to build my second app, which is called HighGBT. Again, shiny object syndrome. Just proceeded to build the next 43 products and then decided to really lock in and focus on building one specific product that could scale over time with amazing people.
So, you mentioned shiny object syndrome. I think it's super common. I've experienced it. Pretty much everyone who's building anything experiences it. I see it all the time with people we bring on the channel and people who want to build stuff. Let's talk about that for a second. You said you built 40 apps. You probably got pretty good at building apps. What was your process to build over 40 apps? That seems crazy. What was your process?
The highest leverage thing you could do is to find a great idea. So you start from the marketing. So reverse engineer the value proposition that you want to show in your app first. Then you could think what would the app look like if you want to attract a user in 3 seconds. Then you go to Figma, wireframe it, design it, feed the designs to Claude Code in your IDE and code it. The entire process usually takes around 4 to 5 hours to actually get a good app built out without the back end.
Personally, I love Benji's process for building apps. Why? Because it's a simple, proven system where he can ship things fast. If you've gotten to this point in the video, you might be thinking about your app that you're going to build. Well, that's why we launched the free iOS boot camp. In just a few days, this boot camp will walk you from idea to a real working app in the App Store. You'll learn how to think about the right ideas, how to build with AI, and how to actually ship. So, if you're ready to actually build your next app, just head to the first link in the description and you can get started for free.
All right, let's get back to the episode. You mentioned something crazy, which is you're building apps in four to five hours. I expected you to say like four to five weeks or something like that. You built so many apps, you probably have like a nice little tool set. What are those tools?
Yeah, it's pretty much a streamlined approach for me right now to build apps. So I use Cursor as my IDE. I use Claude Code Max to code pretty much the entire thing. I use GoDaddy to host my app's domain. I use Loops to send out emails to churn the users so that I can convert them back to the app. I use Superwall to A/B test my paywalls. I use Mixpanel to track whether my onboarding process is good enough or not. I have an Apple Developer account, Figma subscription, and finally, I host everything on Supabase as my back end.
On a separate topic, before we get into the whole build and how you build stuff and how you grow it, how do you think about ideas now? How to come up with a good idea that could make $30,000 a month like yours?
YouTube and Twitter is a great source of inspiration because you just see people making money from all sorts of different ideas, and I think you can discover pain points that are underserved and actually impact you as a person. Or you can go on Sensor Tower to search for ideas that are making a lot of money, and you can literally copy the same app but make it 10% better. A great example of this would be HighGBT that I built. After we launched HighGBT, there were around 20 different copycat apps, but they're also making hundreds of thousands of dollars because they have a better user interface, they have better marketing, they have better funnels. So, ideas don't really worth much if you cannot provide the product to the end user in a better way.
Thanks for sharing that. Ideas are worthless, but they're also kind of everything. You still got to have a good idea. But if you can launch the HighGBT app and there's 20 other competitors, you need something else. And just what everyone in the comments are going to say right now, Starter Story, you don't talk enough about marketing. Building is easy now. So, let's talk about it.
Specifically, what we did is we ran UGC campaigns at scale and then turned those creatives into paid ads. So, essentially, how this works is you reach out to a bunch of creators first, and then filter them one by one by interviewing them to see whether they have that virality built in them. And typically, we get a 10% conversion rate. So for every 100 creators we interview, we get actually like nine to 10 good ones. Then you put them on a monthly retainer plus a CPM structure, and then you test them. If they're doing over 50,000 views per video, then those are great videos that you can run on Meta Ads. So you can set up test campaigns on Meta Ads and then figure out the ROAS on it. So if your ROAS is greater than one, that means you're making money from your app. And Meta Ads is not a linear growth structure. Meaning that if you're making 10% profit margin when you're spending $100 a day on Meta Ads, it does not imply that if you spend $200, then you get 20%. Because there's diminishing marginal return. So you have to see whether your ads are fatiguing or not on Meta Ads and then basically pump out more creatives so that you could test more options and to figure out the most optimal creatives to run on Meta Ads.
I like that because, yeah, working with UGC creators is a pain over the very long term, and switching over to paid ads when it starts working is smart because you don't have to deal with as much of that headache of rehiring and the churn and all that. We're going to get into the paid ad side of things, but I'd love if you could just show me an example of the UGC that you did, maybe a successful post that led to actual revenue for your business.
As you can see, this video is soft-selling the app. "I seriously can't believe she just put them on Snag for free." So, this video got 240,000 views. What we typically see is with every 100,000 views, we can make around $1 to $2,000 that we can directly make from subscription profits.
Thanks for showing that. It kind of shows how simple these videos can be. This video got 240,000 views, and I'm sure you created a bunch of other videos like that that also crushed it. You mentioned that then, once a video like that works, then you run paid ads on that specific TikTok video. How does that work?
There's a two-step approach that we usually take. First, we set a test campaign. So, we spend around $50 a day. We just test whether a specific creative is worth it or not to keep running and to scale up. And if you have a greater than one ROAS or a really high CTR, then you could assume that it's going to probably do pretty well when it's ran as paid ads. So you just gradually scale up the number from there. So you start off with 50, next day 100, 200, 300. For this ad, we placed around $3,000 in total for this ad before the ROAS became negative. That's why the number of creatives matters a lot when you're running paid ads, so you get more tickets to the lottery.
Thank you for showing that and thanks for sharing some of your numbers. I want to switch topics a little bit since you've launched so many apps. For anyone watching this right now, like let's say you had to start over from scratch, what would be your playbook for building a consumer mobile app in 2026?
Keep in mind that this literally worked for me for even my first app, and I didn't really have any money as a college student. So this would actually apply to everybody. So step one is figure out an idea that is actually scalable and that you can implement properly. This is probably the highest leverage thing you could do. Think of it like this: a good product doesn't really need much "quote unquote" marketing. People convert at a higher rate, and people don't want to cancel subscriptions on your product because your product is providing so much value to them. For Snag, it was very simple: you pay us a few dollars a month, and then you get access to products that are worth hundreds of dollars, and hence why I think we have a very high conversion rate.
Yeah, I agree with that. My favorite apps are apps that help you make more money or help you save more money. This is a very simple value proposition. I'm happy to pay for that. What's the next step?
Step two is to start building. So, open your IDE and start using Claude Code to actually code out your app. Most likely, when you're starting off, you're probably going to be building single-use case apps where it's pretty much like an API wrapper, which is perfectly fine. All you have to do is use the API properly, make sure the app is actually functioning, and make sure that there's a way for you to authenticate the user for them to create an account so that you could actually get approved on App Store. That's pretty much it.
In building nowadays, according to you and basically everyone else that we talked to on Starter Story, takes four to five hours. So this part shouldn't be hard. What's the next step?
Step three would be distribution. So if you don't have money to hire UGC creators or influencers, start filming them yourself. I filmed probably thousands of videos for my previous apps by myself. And then you can find an editor to edit your videos at scale, have a package deal to run them as paid ads. So yeah, the greatest skill I think right now is the ability to create content and know how to get views and engagement in this sort of algorithmic TikTok world that we live in. That is probably my favorite one.
What is the final step?
The final step is just iterating on the product so that you have a better product so that you get higher LTV, lower CAC. So focus on generating real value to your end users because ultimately, business is the transaction of value. They give you the money, you give them the value.
Okay, thank you for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story: if you could go back in time while you were, you know, in college or thinking about going that traditional career path, what would be your advice to your younger self or your advice to anyone who's watching this who's in a similar spot?
Definitely create your own luck and meet the right people. I'm able to learn so much in the past few months because I met a guy called Blake Anderson. If you work with great people like that, you tend to want to improve yourself so you can match their pace and then to provide value. I'm not saying to do meaningless networking, but create your own luck. Meaning that just keep doing what you're doing right now. Iterate, learn from mistakes, and then you're going to be at a point where you're able to work with great people. And great people leads to great opportunities in which would just enable you to learn even more.
One of my favorite phrases is that you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with. Just by surrounding yourself with people that are crushing it, like Blake, who has built a ton of cool stuff, it just makes everything easier when you're surrounding yourself with ambitious people.
Thanks for coming on to the show. Love what you built. Hope to see it keep growing, and you can come back on Starter Story and share more. Thanks for coming on.
Thank you for having me.
All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story. What did you think of this one?
Yeah, Benji was awesome. When I first talked to him, I really liked his. He's super chill, first of all, like personality, but loved hearing just like this proven system he has. He knew what he was talking about. He had the numbers, he had the creatives, everything in his head there. So, that was really cool.
He's not worried about the things that can go wrong or doing things wrong. He built 40 apps very kind of straight into the point. Do this, do this, do this. Let's not really like overcomplicate it. And this is how smart builders act is like, instead of worrying about, is my idea not going to work? What are people going to think about me? Build apps, get your ROAS up to this point, and you're good to go. So hopefully people watching this realize that, hey, it can really be this simple. It's math.
On that note, you still got to find your idea. You still got to build something. So I'll put a link in the description down there if you want to build an app. We'll help you come up with an idea. We'll help you build it. We'll help you ship it to the App Store. Put that all down there in the description. You can download it and get started building right now. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.