Transcription
I've made $800,000 building silly little consumer apps on the app store. And in this video, I'm going to show you exactly how I pulled it off.
If you're tired of chasing the next big thing, and you just want a practical, profitable way to build freedom on your terms, this is for you. From juggling kids, a full-time job, and all the complexities that life just keeps throwing at you, to quitting your day job and building apps full-time, people kept telling me I was doing it wrong. That I had to have the next big idea, that I had to be the next Uber or I had to be the next Airbnb. And anything less was just like a hobby, or I wasn't going to make it.
But the truth is, I didn't have a big idea. And even if I did, I didn't have the resources or the knowledge to even pull it off. And the concept of finding venture capital and pitching ideas to investors just kind of doesn't appeal to me. And the path is fine for some. I'm not knocking it, but it's just not for me.
Before I was earning $70,000 a month and before my life changed, my goal was really, really, really simple: Get out of debt and make enough money from my apps to pay the rent. They call this a lifestyle business, and it's a business that serves you, the business owner. But the idea that a passive income could just magically land in my bank account each month and pay the rent sounded super appealing. And it goes against everything that I was ever taught in school: Get a degree, get a job, put all your money away in a 401k so that you can retire at around about 80 and enjoy your geriatric years in peace because you deserve it. But I had other plans.
The harder you work, the luckier you get. This cliche mostly gets it right, but it misses a key point. Hard work for the sake of hard work is just pointless. Refactoring code for 10 months is hard work. But where's it going to get you? Hard work needs to be intentional and strategic.
Before I start a brand new project, I always ask myself, can I reuse the code in the project for at least three different apps? And I learned this while building my push-up counter app. I realized I could spin this app into multiple counting apps, a squat counter and a plank counter. And to my surprise, the squat counter actually outperformed the push-up counter app. And this is when I realized if I had have stopped at the original app, my efforts would have been just like a total failure. Not because of the time that I'd put in and not because of the effort that I'd put in, but because of this simple thing we like to call luck. By releasing three apps, it increased my surface area of that luck.
So, I applied this same strategy time and time again. For my vegan identifier app, I also created a fish identifier and insect identifier. And for my Pokemon card scanner app, I spun it up into a Yu-Gi-Oh card scanner and a Star Wars unlimited card scanner app. And then for my remove My X app, this was an app that uses Google Gemini to remove people from photos. I spun this up into a cartoon yourself app and an app that turns your drawings into photos. All three of these use the exact same code to interact with Google Gemini and a lot of the framework that I built for the apps themselves. They just needed a few tweaks. And this strategy has expanded into creating my own reusable pieces of code that I use in many of my apps. The animation sequence module that I built for Screen Riz let me create videos and transitions and effects programmatically. And I've gone on to add that module to nearly every single app that I've built.
In summary, use your time more effectively. Create code that can be reused in future projects to increase your surface area of success. First, work out what works. A lot of what I've built early on has just simply flopped, but a few of them have worked, and those that worked really worked. So, I stopped theorizing, and I just asked myself, can I finish this app? Can I get it approved? And will people download it? And then eventually that turned into, will people pay for it? You won't answer those questions by watching a YouTube video or doing another course. You can only answer those questions simply by building and shipping. It's really that easy.
When I was learning, the best I could do was create a simple to-do list app. And everyone said, "Don't build another to-do list app. It's been done." But here's the thing. I think that's actually bad advice to give to beginners. You've actually got two options here: Build that to-do list to learn to code because that's where your skill set is at and keep it all to yourself. Or build that to-do list, release it, and discover how to release your first product. That silly little to-do list app that I built, it generated $700. But more importantly, it taught me how to build, launch, and iterate.
In summary, don't just learn to code, learn to ship. That's how you find what works and that's how you start to build bigger and better products over time. Then apply the machine gun approach. Now you know what works and you're growing a library of code that you can reuse for all of your future projects. It's time to go full throttle. I call this the machine gun approach: Build fast, release often, and treat every single app like a small experiment. Most people try to take like a sniper shot, one big idea, months or years of work, betting everything on a single shot, a single release, and then when it fails, game over. But the machine gun approach flips that logic around. You take lots of shots on the target, and most will miss, but sometimes you'll get a hit. Some of the shots will actually hit, and that's how you win. Not by aiming perfectly but by firing consistently.
And then for me, something really interesting happened. I got addicted to it. Every app I launched gave me feedback. It gave me a new dopamine hit and it gave me more momentum, and slowly I built up my portfolio. A few duds here, a few surprises here, and then some that really took off until one day I look at my App Store Connect and I saw that I've done $800,000 in total sales. All from this so-called silly little strategy.
My journey has now entered a brand new chapter. As this channel grows and as the work I put into the world gets more attention, I now have my own distribution channel. And I think that's the natural step in this game. You start, find out what works best, then challenge yourself by scaling those efforts with the machine gun approach and then build apps that can be remixed to exponentially increase your chances of financial freedom. And then finally, you get to a stage where you can start building your own brand. At this stage, you are truly free from any external factors like the app store or the algorithm or optimization. And you can finally take control of your entire journey, going from making products to making a brand.