Transcription
In the next 10 minutes, I'm going to teach you how to grow a $1 million app.
Step one, find an idea. Find a core human desire and match it with a niche that you are really passionate about. For Dualingo, it's the desire to improve, combined with language learning. And for Kaii, it's a desire to become healthier, combined with AI. And for my app, Life Reset, it is the desire to change and become better, combined with anime, which is something I really like.
Step two, design and build your idea in 6 weeks. Use AI, learn coding, or whatever. You'll figure it out.
Step three, marketing. Your target customers are people with a mobile phone. Where do these people hang out? Social media. So, your marketing tactic is simple: make people see your app on social media.
To use social media to grow your app to 1 million in revenue, there are four stages. From 0 to 1k, you just need one single viral video. From 1k to 10k, you need repeatable viral formats. And these two are the organic stages. For from 10k to 100k, you need to do paid marketing. From 100k to 1 million, you need to scale your paid marketing. These two are the paid stages.
Organic and paid are two ways to use social media to grow an app. Organic growth means posting videos and getting views naturally. And paid growth means sponsoring influencers or running ads. So, let's break this down.
Organic is cheap but unscalable. It is very hard to go viral. Your views fluctuate like crazy. And even if you find a hit video, it takes enormous effort to go from posting one video a day to posting 10 or even 100 a day. There's no leverage.
And paid, on the other hand, is costly but scalable. Your cost per view is generally stable. It takes you a few clicks to go from buying 10k per view a day to a million views a day. You're using money as your leverage to your output.
So here's our strategy. In the four stages of growing from zero to a million, you should use organic growth for the first two stages, then paid growth for the last two stages.
To go from zero to 1k, you need just one video. So, let's do the math. When we're using social media to drive revenue to our app, it's basically turning video views to app installs and then app installs to subscription revenue. Let's say 10,000 people watched your video and 0.1% of people who watched it will click your link in bio and install the app, and out of 10 installs, one person will subscribe to your $5 per month subscription plan. So from 10,000 views and 10 installs, you made $5.
And typically, an app makes around 5 cents to $1 per install in the early stage since the app isn't mature yet. After your app matures and you find the right business model, you might see $2 per install or even up to $5 per install. So, in the beginning, to make 1k, you need around 1,000 installs.
Now, it's hard to project a good view-to-install ratio because it varies wildly depending on the video quality. On the high end, we will see around 0.5%, which means one install per 200 views, which is very good. And on the low end, we could see 0.005%, which is one install per 20,000 views. So let's take a conservative ratio of 0.05% as our initial benchmark. That means you need 2,000 views for one install. And that means you need 2,000 * 1,000, which is 2 million views to make your first 1k. In reality, you might need less than 2 million views. It all depends on the quality of the video you made.
So let me show you my own experience. When I was making organic videos in the beginning, I had two videos that went pretty viral. The first video is a hilarious meme video that didn't really show any parts of my app. It got tons of views. It got actually 40 million views in 2 to 3 weeks. And the view-to-install ratio is actually 0.000018%. So basically, it has a horrendous view-to-install ratio. And on the other hand, another video that is entirely about my app, it got 1.2 million views. And the view-to-install ratio is actually 0.2%, which is very good.
And the way to find your first viral video is just honestly just keep posting and scrolling on social media to see what kind of videos other people are making and what kind of videos are going viral in your own niche. Replicate for your app and post on Reels and TikTok, and to post 50 videos a week across different pages to increase your service area of luck. Eventually, one of them will pop off.
Phase two, 1k to 10k. So, the goal here is to find repeatable formats. Once you find what works, create variations. Test different hooks, different endings, different visuals. Study what worked for other pages. Look at successful accounts in your niche. What are they doing? What kind of formats are working for them? For me, I tested these kinds of different formats. I tested motivational edits, I tested memes, I tested hook and POV, I tested fade-in memes, and I also tested screenshot memes, which ended up working the best for me. And this phase is all about speed. The faster you can test and iterate, the faster you can find a repeatable viral format that you can just, once you find it, keep milking the format until it doesn't work anymore.
Phase three, from 10k to 100k. At this point, you've made 10k in revenue so far, which is amazing. Organic might start to saturate a bit. You can certainly keep scaling on organic. For me, I grew Life Reset to 100k all the way with organic. But I think this is where you should start to experiment with paid growth to climb the learning curve. And here's the beautiful part: you made 10k already. That's exactly what you need to spend to go paid.
So here's how you formulate a paid growth batting strategy. It's either Meta Ads or sponsoring influencers that are going to be working for you. So don't overthink it. The process is like this. So you got 10k. You want to experiment with Meta Ads and influencer sponsorship as two marketing channels. Give yourself one month of time, 5k per channel, so 10k total budget, and make sure your app is either hard paywalled or with a free trial, because that's the only way to make sure you can run ads sustainably.
First of all, on ads, use your own face to make ads. You don't need an agency. Make 50 different video ad concepts per month. Format your videos to ad concepts in the formula of pain points your app solves, the context, and also the format. So it could be something like this: weight loss x score x UGC is one kind of ad concept you can make, or weight loss x new year x C is another kind of video you can make, or getting jacked x new year's x cinematics, another kind of video you could make. You can easily come up with a thousand concepts on how to make videos based on this kind of strategy.
Testing scaling dual campaign structure. In testing, each ad set contains one ad concept with four different variants in each ad set. Broad targeting at $50 per day. After 3 days, move any creatives with more than one XRO to scaling. Set scaling as CBO, one ad set, broad targeting. Use Facebook SDK to set up AEM as your attribution. As mentioned before, hard paywall so you can directly optimize for purchase and scale. Also look at big apps for ad inspirations like OPPO and Realme. Two of my biggest favorites.
On influencers, the strategy is that create a new page. Scroll like your target users and see what kind of influencers consistently get more than 100k views per video. Negotiate and retain a deal so you get around $1 to $2 per CPM. It could be $500 per 250k view retainer or $1,000 for 1 million view retainer, which is recommended because the higher views you get from a retainer, the more stable kind of performance you can expect. Spend your time filtering the right influencers with a good ICP match and negotiate a retainer deal. Look at apps for influencer collab content inspirations like Cari and Critter.
Then phase four, from 100k to 1 million. By this point, you've already found a channel with the best ROI to scale to a million. Believe it or not, it's actually the easiest among the four stages. You just need to do more and do better.
Do more. For ads, you want to increase your ad spend, work with more influencers, and create more ad creatives. And a pro tip is that get credit lines from ad networks or a bank to run ads on credit so you can spend more.
Do better. You want to improve your creative quality and refine your messaging. And this is where it gets exciting. The money you make feeds back to the growth. So that it is actually a flywheel effect. You're spending 50k to make 100k, and then you might spend 150k to make 200k or even 300k. And the key is that don't get fancy. Don't try new things. Stay focused. Just scale what's already proven to work.
And phase five, lastly, you want to scale to what? 10 million and beyond. Few apps have managed to scale to beyond 10 million. I haven't gotten there so I can't tell, but here's what I plan. I'm planning to do. Right now, Life Reset is paid only, which allows us to scale faster because we can use the revenue we got from the subscription to acquire new users. But we're seeing a lot of word-of-mouth momentum from users. So, we believe that if we turn the app into freemium in the short term, it's going to be bad for revenue. We're going to make less money. But in the long term, your revenue is more stable and you can reach a larger group of audience. And if you believe your app is really good, people will talk about it. There are, of course, apps that just keep spending money to go beyond 10 million. There's Kaii, there is Simple, there's Blinkist, Headway.
All right, so there you have it. The roadmap to grow an app to 1 million. If you like this video, subscribe to the channel and then comment on what kind of questions you have. And then I'll see you in the next.