How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads

Summary

Highlights

• Roman shares how transforming Spotify playlists into visuals went viral on TikTok 🎨.
• AI integration isn't just about new ideas, but can enhance existing apps significantly 🧠.
• A deep dive into virality showcases how well-laid marketing plans can amplify user growth 📊.
• Strategic keyword use in app stores can be a game changer in discovery 🔍.
• Young innovators proving age is no barrier in tech with impressive app revenues 🍏.

Key Takeaways

• Building a $400k/mo AI app is not just about technology, but also about strategic marketing and optimization 🌟.
• Embedding marketing into your app's concept can drive virality and user acquisition effortlessly 🚀.
• Viral marketing, when done right, leverages platforms like TikTok for organic growth 📈.
• Adapting existing ideas with an AI twist can capture untapped demand with minimal effort 💡.
• Niche targeting, like a calorie counter specifically for high schoolers, can carve out unexpected success 🤓.

Overview

How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so today I brought my friend Roman on and the reason I brought him on is he knows which a AI apps are popping why they're popping how to get users to these AI apps and just go through the ecosystem and some of the tools that were that you know Roman's using and uh I'm excited to have you man me too thank you for having me let's do it [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 all right where do you want to start maybe let's maybe let's just start by opening uh what's it called tensorflow is that what it's called a center Tower censor Tower yeah okay and and yeah we can just start sharing your screen and and sort of walk people through the process of uh some other AI apps that are doing really well
• 01:00 - 01:30 how much revenue they're bringing in and how they're acquiring users and I just you know my goal is really just to show people how how you think yeah all right let's do it have you seen this new verse app that was poing this week h a little bit tell tell me tell me more yeah so to me this up is like kind of interesting because I'm not sure I can even easily describe what it does
• 01:30 - 02:00 uh and I feel so all seeing that but basically it's an app that transform a playlist like a Spotify playlist into something Visual and uh they do like kind of this like beautiful covers where you see uh kind of like a kid would have like designed uh his like wall in his house with a couple of posters and stuff like that and he does it from a link basically from a Spotify link and it recently
• 02:00 - 02:30 popped up on on Tik Tok it was super viral and to me there are a lot of interesting insights from this one one like it's very hard to come up with like a way to like consistently come up with good ideas because this one is like so unique such a unique idea the second one is this app does something that is very
• 02:30 - 03:00 that is very important when you are thinking about a new app ID is that they embedded the marketing flow inside the concept of the app itself so basically it's like when you create this like this wall with the app and I I don't even know how to call it I think they call it vision boards with the with the Spotify link then what to do next with it and the like the next step is basically to to share it with your friend either share it directly uh like through
• 03:00 - 03:30 iMessage uh with the link and they did this very well done like invite flow where you can show um the exact app like the design that you have made and send it to your friends or even through Tik Tok because kids those days they create they are more and creating more and more content and they are on Tik Tok themselves and it's very easy to share those on Tik Tok so I think it's a very good example of like an app that from day one and they were released like early September like I was checking on on Sor Tower um the app just got
• 03:30 - 04:00 released and they already got like millions of visitors on the website and it's just the beginning and yeah it shows how important it is to think about the marketing funnel when you do an app even before like building new features and building the products yeah I think it's a few a few interesting things about about that particular um app so one is I think it ended I think it got to like eight spot eight in the App
• 04:00 - 04:30 Store so it's kind of crazy like how embedding a little AI virality into it could could get you in to chart so much so I think that was really interesting um I will say the other thing I think about about verse is it's a really hard product to build so there's two ways to to build AI apps one is you come up with like a completely new idea like they have and
• 04:30 - 05:00 spend a lot of time thinking about a unique product um they have this canvas that I think is really cool um and it really is a beautiful product the other way to do it is and and which is what we're going to get deeper into during this episode is what are what are existing popular apps and then how do you kind of add an AI Sizzle to it um to capture that demand um yeah and it's way
• 05:00 - 05:30 way easier to do that um however by the way I love doing number one too I'm not you know it's just today I think we're going to talk more about there's demand out there how do you capture that demand and kind of just add a little AI Sizzle to it 100% and actually I think it would be more relevant to talk about that but because that's exactly what I did in my previous company we did an inter intermittent fasting app like other app that were nothing re
• 05:30 - 06:00 revolutionizing uh that already had a little bit of competition but we executed the product and the the grow very well and yeah so let's let's jump into it and uh share how you can embed AI to to do to do that and to grow faster um there are two things you need to nail when you do an app and it's the product like uh the onboarding flow the actual product after the pay wall and the gross and and in our previous
• 06:00 - 06:30 company with mounder Dyan what we did is we clearly separated the role he was in charge of building a good product and I was in charge of growing the product and Sh don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you a millions and I'm giving them away for free these aren't just random guesses they're validated Concepts from entrepreneurs who built hundred million plus businesses I've compiled them into
• 06:30 - 07:00 one simple database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet the idea bank is your startup shortcut just click below to get access your next cash flowing business is waiting for you yeah if you need
• 07:00 - 07:30 those two things then you have a chance of like making a very profitable uh app and which is why it's such a beautiful business you don't need a big team to to grow that and I think AI can help you in both of those things like it can help you with the product development I've seen a ton of kids um learn how to code up with chat GPT and let's share my screen and show you one example of that they basically learn how to code in maybe three weeks or six weeks and build an app that was literally making
• 07:30 - 08:00 millions of yearly revenue and then they use AI to to grow the app uh so let's let's share my screen and show you one example of that so the first app I had in mind is umax you probably have heard of this one already um and it's I think he is 21 22 years old it's a very smart kid who basically taught himself how to code with chat GPT and released the app and the app is super simple and actually
• 08:00 - 08:30 it's by Design obviously because he didn't have the skill to make a complex app but it's actually something you are looking to do uh when you do this kind of app because you want the flow to be as straightforward as possible so people only have one thing to do in the app which is use the core feature and then proceed to the payment um so yeah this one is very interesting because they grew with Organic Tik Tok um so basically what it means is they
• 08:30 - 09:00 developed the app and then they found very uh small creators to promote the app on Tik Tok Instagram and make viral videos so we can go into the details of that if you like that's one of the way you can grow a mobile app I I think there are three main ways to grow a mobile app the first one is like Tik Tok organic like these guys and I can show you a ton of other examples of people who did very well uh with this uh strategy the other method which is the one that we use in our previous company
• 09:00 - 09:30 and that I'm going to show you a couple of example to who we which usually are the biggest companies in terms of like Revenue um are the paid ads strategy so basically you make an app and then you do very good ads for Facebook ads Tik Tok ads Google ads and the Third Way is Apple search so it's either ASO Apple search optimization or ASA which is Apple search ads and it's basically the search result when you type for a keyword in the App Store and it's also a very good way to to grow up and I can
• 09:30 - 10:00 show you a couple of example example of that too yep and lastly yeah maybe one like one last strategy which is more of the ver strategy which is not the one I know the most but the strategy is basically virality like having embedded in the the flow like an invite flow that is very well done some people on Twitter like Nikita do this they are the masters of this I don't really Master this way of doing it but it's uh also and usually like they feed the product with initial
• 10:00 - 10:30 traction through one of the three methods I told you and then it's like uh Catch the Fire uh Sol the fire for for the app to grow virally which is like something that is really beautiful to which happened to the verse app uh but yeah I think those are the three main ways what do you want to do do you want me to go through every single like examples for every single strategy 100% an example of every single strategy who's doing a well um and on the the last the last sort of piece to you said
• 10:30 - 11:00 the product Le growth of viral you know the viral features I actually have a lot of experience there so I just want to tell you one quick story I think you'd find this interesting so my last company it was called islands and it was kind of like a Discord for college students and we wouldn't launch a new school we wouldn't launch a school until we had 5% of the school pre-signed up so we would do a lot of marketing to to get those 5%
• 11:00 - 11:30 signed up and then what we do is we get you right before you like join the experience it would say keep University of Alabama safe invite at least three people to make it a secure and fun environment something like that and then the average person would invite 2.7 people or something um and then we'd go from 5% to 20% like kind of over you know very quickly um and that little piece allowed
• 11:30 - 12:00 us to be way more efficient in our marketing so uh maybe it cost us $8,000 to get 5% but now all of a sudden it cost us $88,000 to get 20% so I think thinking about from from a product perspective how to uh it basically the way to think about product virality is it's basically a multiplier effect on your marketing so but yes let's let's go through your three things and then while PE while people are taking notes on these three
• 12:00 - 12:30 three ways to grow it think about in your own app what is the multiplier effect that you can add to it because I 100% yeah and uh I mean I I even think with AI there there are opportunities for those viral app that needs like a very small niche of people like in a like in high school to install the app because now if let's say you want to like get the initial like the first 20 users like those one or two% it's very hard to get them even like uh even if
• 12:30 - 13:00 you want to get those 20 users you maybe you need to go to the school like physically which is like can can be weird for a 30 years old to do that maybe you want to run a couple of ads but it's very hard to Target a specific audience like this but now with a you could like very easily do one ad specifically for carel Catholic High School and another ad for another very specific high school and in the hook of the ad that you do you will do hey you are Carl Catholic High School like did
• 13:00 - 13:30 you hear about these new things that's happening and it's very hard to scale that if you don't use AI because you will need to have like influencers in every single school but with AI and we can like uh discuss that after but it's it's not possible to even Kickstart this strategy of like Varity um but let's start with the the ASO one I I mean ASO so Apple search optimization is basically the art of Being number one when people types a keyword word in the App Store it's very similar to search
• 13:30 - 14:00 engine optimization uh but it's in the App Store basically and here the challenge is to find when you are thinking about new IDs is to find a keyword that doesn't have too much competition yet but has enough volume for people to rank on it and we actually did that in the past at the beginning of um with one of our apps that was like this keyword text to speech a lot of people were typing in
• 14:00 - 14:30 the app store to find apps to like transform text into speech and there there was some web products like 11 Labs Etc but there were no product in the app store yet and for some reason people need an app to do that like for example if you want to clone your own voice it's easier to do it with a mobile phone than with a web product so we created an app that does that and it grew super quickly organically just with uh ASO and people searching for it I I I came across another interesting company that that does this exact strategy usually
• 14:30 - 15:00 those companies are not huge because you are limited by the volume of um search in the App Store and uh you cannot do intent based marketing which is like showing an ad to someone who is scrolling Facebook and they didn't even know they need this app yet but you show them that they need the app in this case with ASO you are only looking for people who already are searching the keyword which is kind of limiting but it's very profitable so let me share my screen again and uh show you an example of that
• 15:00 - 15:30 okay so the the name of the company is remone holding and even though they don't do a lot of Revenue it appears on tensor Tower I'm pretty sure they do much more than that because they the revenue number is capped to 5K on like like if you do less than 5K per month on an app it will just show less than 5K but addition if you addition all those apps they probably make more much more than 5K and um so they find those weird
• 15:30 - 16:00 keywords like fan noise like some people search for that some people search for green noise some people search for anime girlfriend AI or noise noise cancelling apps and they are very good at at identifying keywords people are looking for but that don't have so much competition yet it looks like the the noise one was a heat for them because they have the broad Noise app the green Noise app the F fun Noise app and very often those Studio those mobile app
• 16:00 - 16:30 Studios they repeat the same ID multiple time times like with the same technology but with a different keywall or different uh marketing um yeah so I will stop here maybe you want to comment something but that's one very interesting uh that uh I found in the upst so this is a this is a group of people I actually know who this is I think um they they aren't Reinventing anything right AI you know calorie count ERS exist already sleep sounds exist already
• 16:30 - 17:00 green noise exist already what you're saying is they are looking at what people are searching on the App Store and capturing that Demand with a title probably that's a little more interesting than you know maybe what else is out there so for example there might be a lot of calorie count counters but there might not be a ton of AI calorie counters um there might be
• 17:00 - 17:30 some sleeping sounds app names but there might not be a lot of green noise which is actually like a kind of a newer Trend so what they're doing is they're kind of looking at Trends and maybe adding some aess to it just because people are interested in the space and because of that and because they know how to rank which by the way is a whole other black box like got you know ASO is not my forte at all
• 17:30 - 18:00 I'm not really sure like how to how to do it well um but they obviously know how to do it well because it's working yeah yeah 100% as you say they try to put the keyword in the title and then there are a ton of other techniques to do that uh I think a very good blog uh on this topic is the blog from App Figures it's a tool that lets you search keyword and identify new opportunities for new keywords and there are so many techniques like using the title
• 18:00 - 18:30 obviously is a good one optimizing your conversion rate on the on the App Store when people visit the page so that they download and apple understand that it's like good traffic and that the app is relevant for them um optimizing the number of reviews the growth rate is important to uh there is also those minor techniques like when you launch a new app the the first day is actually very important because Apple gives you an initial boost on the keywords and look at looks at the conversion rate that you get on those on on on the app
• 18:30 - 19:00 and if on during this initial boost you get a very high conversion rate on let's say you you launch a new AI calor counter app and people when they search for it and they see you up they download it then you will get like a flywheel a positive flywheel of downloads and it will keep staying High actually so the the launch is very important other techniques is like these people they sometimes do ads to not because they want to be very
• 19:00 - 19:30 profitable on ads and optimize the ads but just because they want to have more reviews more traffic so that it creates this fly will of optimization for the for the rankings and um even though they still focus on the ranking they benefit from the traffic of the of the ads that makes sense yeah absolutely okay so that's ASO yeah and another one just to finish on this one that I think was interesting I think that was a key word that was put popping wall Pats Pilates and I see a
• 19:30 - 20:00 lot of apps that start to rank on on these keyword so I just wanted to show you an example of a new opportunity I don't know how new and how good this opportunity is but that's an example of like something people identified and it's growing and they made an app for for and they use it in the the key so now uh the second one wait sorry just on that just on that it could be helpful for people to look at traditional Trend software Ware that isn't even specific
• 20:00 - 20:30 to ASO um like for example Google Trends a HRS and see like what are the trends and then just going and searching on um I don't know what is that big there is one big ASO software tool I think uh we've talked about in the past maybe up figures or yeah um yeah yeah that might be up fig at you want looking yeah
• 20:30 - 21:00 exactly and then also checking like an app figures to see um if it makes sense from an ASO standpoint so yeah just for people listening I think using traditional software totally Trend software Google Trends glimps um some of these trends that I've talked a lot about on the channel go ahead and use them write down your Trends write down your ideas and then go and and you can use like an app figures or something like that just to see how competitive uh uh it is from an ASO
• 21:00 - 21:30 perspective 100% And that's a perfect transition to the next kind of like virality style um because research is one very good way to get ideas and lots of people get very good ideas from research on not on the App Store directly but on other uh websites and and by the way I I I did this simple thing that everyone can do which is I like created an automation that sends me every new app that ranks in the top of the App Store in each category and it's
• 21:30 - 22:00 a pretty good indication of like something is popping off and maybe there is an opportunity because this app just joined the top of the App Store and it's quite new and it probably means that there is something there and you can do something similar but the one I wanted to talk about um newx that we already covered and I'm going to talk about other apps because I think you you have already covered this one and lots of people have covered it but it's interesting because they discovered about the ID because it was popping on Reddit and Tik Tok like the the looks
• 22:00 - 22:30 maxing Trend which is like how to maximize how you look as a man was something that was a popping on Reddit and Tik Tok and that's how they got the idea of the app so it didn't come from the app storees they didn't see the keyword popping in the App Store it came from other software so 100% I think like using and that's what we did with the text to speech app like finding trends that are outside of the of the App Store uh but that are already proven to work on the web is a very good way to go like
• 22:30 - 23:00 that was recently this sunno AI product which is creates AI song uh from text and a ton of apps have been created basically repli replicating this ID in an app using the apis ofso AI or other apis so yeah 100% that's a very good way to to spot a trending app I ID and um yeah another one so quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring
• 23:00 - 23:30 marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my
• 23:30 - 24:00 businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com another very interesting one I think it's quite small still uh but um it's an app that I've seen trending recently that is very smart
• 24:00 - 24:30 about the organic marketing strategy so again that's the second strategy that I I've seen people do and it's basically about how do you manage to get free traffic basically from Tik Tok or Instagram reals or YouTube shorts B basically short videos platforms showing your product in a smart way that feels organic and that uh would get a lot of views and so this is basically an app to find people to
• 24:30 - 25:00 travel wheels and I think it's over optimized in terms of monetization they are very good at acquiring users but the second part of like how do you monetize their app they could do much better and it could be much more profitable um but uh what they do is basically they do those reals on Instagram that are very native to the platform they they really don't look like ad they they just look like content you would watch on Instagram right traveling Dolphins beautiful people stuff like that that will just do very well on Instagram
• 25:00 - 25:30 anyways and they include the app in the video so uh this one how can I find friends that I can do cool with is they put some music and then they show the app and they integrate it in a very smart and organic way and they just post again and again and again on their own account and they found a way like a repeatable way because they basically do the same video again and again again and
• 25:30 - 26:00 they have a repeatable well way to have pics of downloads for the app and keep growing the app this way so I I think it's a a very interesting way to to to grow an app now do you think they you think they're paying people to promote some of these like in the early days at least like because now it's easy right because they've got 636,000 followers so now that obviously they're GNA po they know their content's going to work so when they post the real it's you know with a good probability chance
• 26:00 - 26:30 they'll get hundreds of thousands of views but you think in the early days going zero to 100,000 do you think that they created content and we like you know some of these people here like hey you know in in these reals be like hey I'll give you $100 if you post it on your Instagram you think they did stuff like that yeah 100% uh that's uh what lots of these people do uh I mean sometimes they are very good at content themselves for for this specific case I don't know sometimes they AR very good at at at creating content and there is this guy who has an app parallel live uh
• 26:30 - 27:00 he basically creates fake lives and when you when you open the app it looks like you are having hundreds of followers or thousands of followers in a live session and it's he does very good organic videos and he goes viral repeatedly and he's the one the founder is the one making the video the videos and there is like this dating app recently also a French app GG the CEO she she raised money with SEO and she has a team but
• 27:00 - 27:30 she still creates content for her own Tik Tok and with her own face and is doing super well so sometimes they do post themselves because they AR very good at content but sometimes indeed they Outsource this to other existing creators um a cool example I've talked about recently on Twitter is like a young kid who created a calorie tracking app so AI calorie tracking app looks like a terrible ID that tons of people have done ready um this is really
• 27:30 - 28:00 interesting yeah go talk us through this one cuz I think the scale of this one especially is is is pretty impressive yeah it's like it's crazy to me so the guy is 17 years old he created that's the I think the second app he creates the first one was an alarm clock uh from like people who wake you up like David Goins like wake you up to so motivated and he reached out to me
• 28:00 - 28:30 and I was like very impressed by this ID and then he came back with another idea which is what the color tracking app and in my mind I found like don't do it that's the worst IDE ever like there are already a ton of calorie tracking apps like my fitness B that's own all the real estate for the ASO but he still did the app and he did amazingly well so let me show you the app so that name is k Ai and
• 28:30 - 29:00 it looks like he's walking on the new app which we can see here uh he released a new app on September the 16th but yeah the app we are interested about here is the first one but watch closely the second one probably gonna do probably gonna even be more interesting right because like you know that he's gonna iterate on that and there's something here so wait sorry just looking at these numbers if I'm reading this correctly he's doing $400,000 of Revenue a month and he did 200,000 downloads last
• 29:00 - 29:30 month exactly yeah that's crazy so the way you can research this one uh for the listeners who want to understand how they did it and I can quickly grow through it is basically to search on Instagram and Tik Tok in the search bar like stuff like um let's show them exactly how TR how they did it because I think a lot of people here are going to be inspired and they're going to think yeah I want to do something like that how you know especially if there's a 17-year-old kid
• 29:30 - 30:00 doing something like this it definitely inspires 100% a lot of people all right so we are going to look at the Instagram and then with the looking to the Tik Tok so that's the Instagram account and in this case I'm pretty much confident that they didn't post most of the content most of the content was other small micro influencers who didn't necessarily have big audiences but the beauty of uh this channel Tik Tok organic Instagram
• 30:00 - 30:30 organic is that now you can do a lot of it and get a lot of views without having so many followers because the platforms want to push the content and then they want to push creators to create more and more and you can get rewarded by the platform by just making very good content and so on this case I'm looking at the Instagram account because most of the time they like they are tagged in the in the videos or they post together so that's a good way to identify who
• 30:30 - 31:00 posted those videos initially or to try to trace back the actual micro influencers they used um so they probably they found this guy and paid him to creates content like this super simple content gym content I understand and the goal of the video is one to understand how to go viral on Instagram or Tik Tok reals so how to make very good videos that even if you don't
• 31:00 - 31:30 promotee it will get a lot of views but then you also want to integrate your app inside the video which is the hard part like basically you have to figure out a way to be very good at getting views but also be very good at converting those views into download and you don't even need to put a link or whatever most of the time people just close the app go to the App Store and search for the name of of the actual app uh the more organic you are the better it can do sometimes they don't even put the name of the app in the video and people find them in the
• 31:30 - 32:00 comments um so that's the strategy now let's try to find um their videos on Tik Tok I'm looking on another screen call AI yeah again we see a lot of content from their account but also content from other accounts and this one might be interesting so basically they show so it's an app that you take a picture of your meal and it will tell tell you how
• 32:00 - 32:30 many calories you have in it and I'm not sure if this is K actually or competitor but basically they probably do the same strategy uh they found this account and they probably paid them couple of hundreds bucks or couple of thousands of bucks and then the video did Super well organically so usually it's like being a VC right you invest in 10 startups nine will fail and one will pay for the dividends of all the other startups Tik
• 32:30 - 33:00 Tok organic is kind of the same it's the lottery but the more you do it the more you understand what's going to go viral so you try to find a lot of creators try to have them post content hopefully one of these content will go viral and then you try to replicate the formula of what was going viral with these specific creators and makes sense right cuz if it if it's working organically probably going to work with PID behind it correct yes they they will also uh do
• 33:00 - 33:30 some paid uh and uh we can talk about that too by the way of how to to gr and that's that's the founder so it looks like he create content himself in in this video so this guy is making like 300 or 400k per month with the calor tracking looks like he's at like his high outside as like high school you know he's like outside his high school just like filming $400,000 a month exactly he's tweeting all the time pictures of himself in the the the school class and telling about the
• 33:30 - 34:00 teachers like telling him he shouldn't he should Len more funny to to watch um do you want me to grow through the the first strategy like the the the paay ads one yeah yeah I want to I want you to go through the first one um and and yeah how to how to use AI to to to sort of create some of these ads as well and that's a great place that we can end on amazing yeah perfect so let
• 34:00 - 34:30 me think about a good example for for this one let's go to sensor Tower again and I think we could look at this uh Turkish company uh cway so they have a let's start with this one actually uh so this one is a plant identifier app and the name of the app is picture this uh they own multiple app apps including three or four plet
• 34:30 - 35:00 identifier and this one is huge like with just one single app they make 7 million of Revenue per month so that's that's huge it looks like a very small Niche but uh they are making a ton of Revenue on this one is like almost 100 million Revenue per per year that they are making with with these apps and 90% of it comes from the first picture of these which by the way is the same strategy that we talked about with the c tracker which was
• 35:00 - 35:30 uh before AI there were some plant identifier content apps which basically you know show your it was basically like a reference book digital around different plans and it helped you figure that out AI yeah exactly it really and some of them were popular now today that doesn't really make sense when you can integrate with you know G GPT anthropic some of these other llms they just took
• 35:30 - 36:00 the same idea but just made it a lot more valuable so they've added AI to the app now of a sudden it's way more valuable uh your clickthrough rates are going up your you know on your ads on your organic on actually downloading your app so that's why you're starting to see like that's why you can build an app and by the way their release date is quite interesting right we didn't mention this but it says their release date was 2017 so they it's not like they launched this
• 36:00 - 36:30 like yesterday um correct so they probably at you know my guess is they were doing not that much amount of Revenue up until like two years ago year and a half ago and then all of a sudden started to scale significantly because of um this you know evolution of of of AI adding AI to the app yeah it just made the product work right it just made it better and yeah as you say same for the calorie tracking apps there were I
• 36:30 - 37:00 remember a lot of like apps where you can take a picture but they didn't just they just didn't work before AI so let's look at uh the ads so and now the thing I I I want to highlight here for these like plant identifier apps and I'm not sure even sure this is the same app or another one but uh they they iterate like create easy on ads like they don't just like do a couple of ads
• 37:00 - 37:30 and see if it's profitable because most of the time it won't if you just like start training ads you do 10 ads and uh you get a lot of views a lot of downloads but to be profitable you did to be crazy about optimizing every single detail and this is what we did in our previous company that payad was our main channel to grow our apps and you are not doing like tens of ads every month you you are trying to do like thousands of ads every month to find profitability because you need to find
• 37:30 - 38:00 the perfect angle to promote the product and as you can see here they tested like 30,000 videos which is like an enormous number of creatives to test and again in the same way as now they can do this product and now it works with AI That's pretty much the same thing for marketing they can now test 30,000 ads the only kind of teams were able to do that in the past like maybe five years ago or
• 38:00 - 38:30 three years ago even two years ago before AI basically were the gaming Studios like if you look at uh companies like Candy Crush um or uh companies like King and uh companies like that they they were already testing a ton of ads before AI because you only needed a computer to to promote your product you basically need to get some screen record of the game and maybe add some text over on top of it and this was uh possible
• 38:30 - 39:00 without AI even though now ai makes it even easier but the opportunity I see here for mobile apps is that now with AI you can do the same strategy that they did in gaming which is you create all of your ads from a computer you you you basically think about like the ad and you don't need to hire an actor you don't need to talk to anyone to make it happen you can do everything thing with like a tool like Arad which is my
• 39:00 - 39:30 company that I'm doing now or uh just text to speech with tools like 11 labs and then using a video editing tool that everyone can use like even a seven years old can use now and piece like match the pieces together uh to to make a very good ad so do you want me to quickly grow through how to make those actual ads or maybe another example of yeah companies like that that would be great how to make one of these ads I think your point is really interesting which is uh you
• 39:30 - 40:00 need to make hundreds if not thousands of ads in order to find the formats that's going to be working but in the past that would be extremely costly and today it's not that costly um because of AI exactly exactly and that's that's what led us to to to create arets because we really loved making gaps and it was very profitable business but now this we saw this opportunity as even bigger because now all of those app
• 40:00 - 40:30 Studios and we are actually not working only with apps obviously but all of those companies they they are looking for ways to scale the creation of ads and AI makes it like 10 times faster and 10 times easier to create uh ads at scale so maybe let me share my screen and we are going to go to Arch ads which is uh the tool we created to to help people do that so it's quite simple so basically the way it works is you have this white
• 40:30 - 41:00 empty box right here where you write your script so let's say you want to promote a plant identifier app you would say something like hey I always have issue like finding the best plant and maybe you want to try this ID and you would write a script so basically you will type uh a script right here and then you would go through a library of hundreds of factors so you would have people in every situation every age every demographics so I don't know if you are doing a calor tracking app maybe you want to select people in the gym and
• 41:00 - 41:30 generate a video of of someone in the gym so maybe we can look at preview here and so you can select one or multiple actors click next maybe listen to the preview of how they speak click generate and just like that in a couple of minutes you will get your video that will uh basically match the script that you wrote right here and it will look
• 41:30 - 42:00 something like that and now if you want to promote your app and try 20 different angle in one day it just takes you like maybe an hour to find figure out 20 ways to promote the app and generate the 20 videos and maybe then put them into an editing tool and add some screenshot of the app remove the background behind the actor which can now be done with one click with AI again uh and just m make
• 42:00 - 42:30 20 final ads that you can test today and you will see that one of them will do like two times better than the other ones and then that's the starting point for you to iterate and to make a lot of different angles different variations until you find the one that is winning for you what about different languages like can you use something like Arc ads and and you know do an ad in French for example 100% yes uh that's what uh I'm going to
• 42:30 - 43:00 show you maybe a last example of that but that's the next step to scale so if you are just starting out obviously I would recommend starting on the in the US because not only the market is bigger but the conversion rate for subscription apps is much higher in the US people tend to pay much more uh for for for these apps so the step one is to make it work in your initial Market but step two then once you have done that and you kind of hit sailing in terms of
• 43:00 - 43:30 like how many people you can reach is to basically do the same thing take the ads that are working in the US and localize them in every single country uh this company is very interesting so one of our clients for Arad and they do a ton of AI ads and they are this is Turkish Studio they make 8 million of monthly uh Revenue with a ton of apps like cleanup phone
• 43:30 - 44:00 storage cleaner like again as you said IDs that are not very new and I think sometimes they acquire existing apps um sometimes ideas that AR quite new like the AI tutor Mass helper or AI art generator and then they use AI to do a ton of ads uh to iterate on not only the angles as we just saw before but also the languages trying to do the same ad in Spanish rench and every single location where there is
• 44:00 - 44:30 opportunity yeah I think so this is super cool first of all like it opens my eyes to just like this random Turkish company with no probably Silicon Valley backing is like making hundred million dollar plus a year using this strategy so this is really really interesting I think the I agree with you starting in the US generally is a good idea but it is it is more competitive and there isn't opportunity to just take some of you
• 44:30 - 45:00 know some of these plant identifier for example apps and just win on ads for different countries um and localize the app basically um and so I think there's a h there's that's a huge like there's a hundred ideas 100 startup ideas just from that um so I'm happy that yeah I'm happy follow ASO you like localize the app and rank better on search which is something that
• 45:00 - 45:30 some people might not bother doing because like they don't care about adding an additional 20K or 50k of monthly Revenue but maybe you do and then that's a cool opportunity yeah you can even do like plant AI for Canadians plant AI for Turkish people you know like just putting that as like this is an app for Canadians you know um for example and maybe the logo is like a Canadian flag and the ads are all Canadian and not you know Canada is
• 45:30 - 46:00 maybe not the best example because Canadians are so close to the US but like maybe and and they mostly speak English but maybe a a Brazil app or or something like that yeah 100% I've seen so many people do well and actually we did like we did a weight loss up for women it was like our approach to like niching down to one specific audience and an existing app is also a very cool strategy I've seen so many examples of that um you know the company behind
• 46:00 - 46:30 Tinder they own multiple apps like dating apps for Latinos dating apps for gay people and it's basically the same app wrapped for different niches and that's such a very good way to PR and I even saw one that was pretty interesting recently so there is this Bible chat app that was like basically an app that wrapped um the Bible and you can talk with it through like a CH GPT like interface and it was doing super well they do a ton of ads and they do very well but then new
• 46:30 - 47:00 apps in the the space started to pop out and um one of those was Bible for women that is constantly in the top of the app store which looks like a weird Niche but um again yeah this idea as you say like taking a appp that is working and proven to work and niching it down to either a country or um a specific audience is often a good idea love it Roman thanks for hopping on and giving us a master class around how
• 47:00 - 47:30 to come up with app ideas how to think about uh adding AI to our apps the three different marketing playbooks for some of these apps and and how to create AI assisted ads so appreciate you coming on where could people learn more about you've got these amazing breakdowns on Twitter um for some of these app Studios where where could people go and find you yeah so uh arc. a if you want to run some ads uh Twitter uh you can look for
• 47:30 - 48:00 Romain from arcad and you will find me on Twitter and I try to break up cool like apps that are pupping and uh yeah that was uh that was great thank you for having me of course all right my man I'll catch you later awesome yeah