The Shortcut to Scale: The Distribution First Mindset

Good. All right. We're going to show you how we took an app from just a few hundred bucks to $90,000 within this first year completely free. And I'm gonna show you a case study for a past podcast guest of mine that was able to go to 1 million ARR pretty much with no code tools, right? And lastly, I'm going to show you the strategy that really truly invented a category. But first, oh yeah, but first I'm going to tell you a little bit about myself. I was actually born in Burma, Mymar. You guys are know where that is. Kind of near Thailand, India. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Like Burmese food. Here it is.

Thank you. [clears throat] Yes, it's delicious. So, there it is. If you guys aren't familiar with it, came to the US when I was 6 years old. I was always wanting to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that journey would look like. I started making apps on the side in 2011. Made it for my son. Literally, the first app I was like, "Hey, Noah, take a look." Plays for it for a few minutes, hits the home button, and that's it.

Heartbreaking, but I was like, "How am I going to become an entrepreneur?" I was like, "I know. I'll start a podcast." Back in 2013, I decided to start a podcast and interview some of the heroes in my space to see how they did it so I can take this little side business that was making about 500 to $1,000 a month and see if I can turn it into a legitimate business, you know, fulfill that American dream that I came here for. So, we've talked to a lot of different folks from everywhere. We still do on YouTube. Go check us out.

And I've talked to a lot of people just to learn from them. So, here's their YouTube channel if you want to check it out. And then we've done quite a lot. We've worked on a lot of apps. All right, there you go. That's just a little trust symbol. Like, who should I try to live with this guy? Yeah, try it. So, I'm going to talk about distribution first. Look, I've been in the app space since 2011. That's a long freaking time. I've seen it all from the reskinning days to the black hat ASO to now all the viral Tik Tok content. I've seen it all come and go. And I think a lot of times when I talk to developers, they usually say, "Steve, I got a great app." I'm like, "Oh, that's kind of like Headway Calm."

You know, it's very similar like, "No, no, no, no. It's much better. It's much better." Well, what's your distribution? You don't have a brand. They have a brand. Makes a little distribution a little bit easier, right? So, I'm going to talk about distribution first. And I'm going to talk about all the different ways that you can go distribution first. Now, I know you're like, I have an app. That's not distribution first. That's product first. I'm going to tell you how to do that, too. So, the first part I'm going to talk about is ASO. All right.

organic SEO for those not familiar, SEO for the app store pretty easily. Do research. So, we had this case study where we were doing research and the client comes to me, Steve, I got a great idea. It's an app that does X, Y, and Z for kids. And I was like, homie, nobody's searching for that thing. And so, we do some keyword research. We find these two keywords. We're pivoting the product now, right? I'm like, I don't know what I don't know, but I've got an app that ranks number one for keywords around this search volume and it's making about 8 to 10,000 a month just organically, passively, right? So, I was like, you want to call your app that it's like, let's go. And we did it.

We're able to generate what is this 75? Oh, I'm sorry. This was the app. [laughter] This was the app that I took, right? It was number one. We bought this. Oops, my bad. I thought those are the little I like these little red things. But anyways, this was the app. It was making about $1,000 a month and we took it and we increased the price. No new features, by the way. We increased the price and we we're take it from $1,000 to $8 to $10,000. We bought the app. All right.

So, the client decides to call it that. I get him to number one really fast for those two keywords. He's making he's getting about 100 downloads a month. I mean, a day. If you don't believe me, there it is. It's through app store search, right? organically. So, we were able to generate $1,600 in 22 days for free practically because distribution first, right? Forget the pay walls, forget the onboarding, all that stuff is really, really important. I talk a lot about that stuff actually, but distribution matters the most. Went on to make $42,000 within his first year and then eventually went to 97,000 last year. We, you know, slowly grew it. All right, here's another app that we had for the longest time. It was making no money, no downloads. We exited this app, but because of a keyword change again, I found those two keywords around search traffic 30. We're able to get it to about $1,000 a month. Somebody wanted to

buy it. I said, "Okay, I decided to sell it." I know what you're thinking. It's my homie James is thinking the same thing. Steve, this does not scale. Come on, ASOS. Let's talk about meta. Let's talk about Tik Tok now. So, here's a client of ours. They came to us in about February when they're making about $70,000 a month. And why how did they make that? They called the app. I was like, "Why did you call your app this?"

Just think blank AI, meditation AI. So, why'd you call your app that? He's like, "Because it's SEO friendly." He's number one on Google search, web search for his brand. He did some SEO work and he was able to take it to $70,000. He hired us and we helped him a little bit ASO. I won't take all the credit for it, but we took it about $200,000 in one month. So, it does scale pretty well. And I convinced James, right, James? Fine.

This does not I like this launch of James expression. Fine. I thought that was pretty funny. All right. All right. I'm going to give you a black hat ASO strategy for those indie developers. I know you big brands probably don't want this, but for you indie app developers out there, here's a black hat ASO strategy that chat GBT helped me coin. It is called brandjacking. Brandjacking. So, we all know this. Google came out with banano banana, right? It's pretty cool. Pretty cool.

So, here's the search traffic. Thank you to app figures 61. Pretty decent. What did we just learn? Got to go after at least 30. Want to see what shows up in the app store? Google's number two. All these, let's just call them indie app developers are ranking for nano banano. They're brand jacking. Now, see, is it actually making money? All right, check it out. Even on Google, Google, literally Google, you own search. You're not even number one for nano banana.

There's a nanobanana.ai. There's the website. If you zoom in, it says, "Hey, we're not part of Google." They're brandjacking, too. It works. So, here's what you do. If you want to brandjack, I'm going to show you exactly how to do it. All right? Don't come to me if you get some legal papers. I ain't tell you to do it. I'm telling you how to do it. All right. So, you want to use app follow. You put a big keyword in there. All right. So, I put nano banana in here. And then, wait, what am I doing? Oh, you could go to figures, too. So, you put nano banana and do related keywords. Really cool tool you can find. For me, I'm like, I don't want to think what the keywords are. I somebody would tell me, right?

And then you can also use app follow here. So, it's a free tool and you hit the little eye icon and I like to pick the apps that don't have that many ratings because my assumption is they know a little about ASO. So, I want app follow to tell me what those keywords are and that's what app follow. They give you a list of keywords and you can see the search volume. So, now you can try to find the 30 that are available and same with app figures as well. Okay, again that's all you're looking for around 30. You just need two. I don't have enough case studies to say what about three, Steve. What about three with 20? I don't know. I don't know. I'm trying to isolate, right? And that's the only way I can isolate because we have apps that have ranked for number one for these keywords. I know exactly how much they make. I know exactly how many downloads they get. So, I can tell you the real data behind it. All right. So,

let's see this brand jacking app that's number one for Nano Banana. How much are they making? $43,000. But look at the last 30 days app figures. 40,000 in the last 30 days. So my assumption is because it launched in what earlier this year. My assumption is they called it whatever they called it AI image generator blah blah blah blah blah. And then they said hey Nano Banana came out. Let me look in the app store. Let me call my app that they got it to number one and they made $40,000 within the last 30 days.

Cool. No. All right. Let's go to the next one. All right. We got a great great growth hack right here that took this app from a few hundred bucks to $9,000 within its first year and $7,000 within the first month. I've talked about this a little bit in the on the YouTubes, but it's really good for more if you got an app that is doing nothing right now. If you're a big brand, go somewhere else right now. Okay? But if you've got an app and you're indie developer and you're like, I need to figure this out. I need product market fit. This is going to be awesome because if it works, it works beautifully as you can see. If it doesn't work, you move on. But I'll tell you the other benefits, too. All right. So, here's the app. Here's the sales. You can see it's all through organic. It's the blue line.

I like to give you a lot of data, too. Right. Here's how much it's making. It's purely for organic. I'm not running meta ads. I'm not doing anything. That's the blue line app store search. So, here it is. Here's the greatest growth hack in the world. All right. Now, number one, stinking Apple has now caused us to like some apps are getting in trouble for doing this. And it's not that much trouble. They'll send you a warning. So, you want to show your ratings prompt during the first time user experience.

why about 1% of all your downloads will leave you a rating. Okay, so I like to ask for it after the payw wall, Apple, but they're they don't like that anymore. So figure out another way to ask for it. You want to do a little bit of ASO title, subtitle, most important. The Spanish Mexico localization is indexed by the US app store. There you go, big brands. So, if you're not utilizing your Spanish Mexico localization and putting English keywords in there to help your US rankings, you'll leave your money table for us indie developers. Then you want to create a lifetime offer. I know yearly, weekly, monthly. Put a lifetime.

Make it for free. Promote it on Appvice, which is like a group or app sumo for apps. And then Indie App Santa, which we acquired last late last year, and we're only going to make it free for two days. Here's the app advice. This app's gone free, by the way. Here's what we did for this client. Did 106,000 downloads, 800 new ratings, 200 the US, 600 worldwide, and made $7,000 within the first month. That easy. Because it kicked in, drove so many downloads, we drove so many ratings. The ASO finally kicked in. We optimized the payw wall. We rebranded the stinking app and it went on to generate $90,000 within this first year.

Here's some other benefits, though. You get more apps ratings. If Apple doesn't hate this, ASO kicks in and use you get users for feedback. I was talking to the developer outside. He's like, you know, I just need a 100 people to give me feedback on the app. I was like, bro, just do this. Literally, you'll get feedback, right? And you'll get data. What are they doing with the app? People will use it. And the best part that I love, users will ask you for the promo again and they'll email you feedback as well. So, we did this for one of our apps. They're like, "Hey, can you add this like poetry feature?" All right, we can do that for you. All right, let's talk about paid marketing. I'm going to talk about this case study. So, for those who are just like have an app, I want to grow scale it. Obviously, you're going to use paid. I'm going to talk about certain things. But if you don't have an app and you only have an idea

and you're like maybe, you know, maybe you're a big company and you're like, hey, we're trying to debate whether we should spin this off and take this feature and put it into another feature, blah blah blah. Well, here's a interview I did with the co-ound the founder of Arya. Pretty spicy. All right. [laughter] Anyways, he's got 20,000 paying customers across the US and he's able to build all of this with no code tools.

Why? Because he was just testing paid marketing. He really didn't even have a product, right? He used Tyform onboarding, web to app flow. He used Squarespace to host all this stuff. And then he used Air Table to deliver the content. And what he was trying to figure out is one is there really a problem that I'm trying to solve. Two, are they willing to pay for this? Three, how do I test this very easily without building the app? It's a multi-million dollar business now. And there's literally no app. It is a mobile web product. All right, that's all it is.

What he said was, and I re if you're especially if you're doing web flows, no free trial, hard payw wall. Literally, you can't use the app unless you pay either yes or no. Charge high, right? I think a lot of people say, "Not sure. The features aren't complete." Don't matter. Go get that refund because you know what? People will give you ask for a refund. They going to give you a reason why they want that money back.

Your app sucks. Doesn't have this, doesn't have that. Guess what? PE free people who are using your app for free will give you nothing. Damn. you you think you're not charging them. They don't give a right? Who gives a crap? So, that's what I that's my philosophy. And here's some other reasons why you should go paid first, [snorts] especially if you're just trying to test out some new concept. Builds a brand. We've seen it.

ASO works better with paid marketing. Why? If you look at you look at the dating space for crying out loud, nobody searches for dating. They might search for hookup. They don't search for dating, right? They will search for Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, all that. It's very brand. If you look at meditation, calm, headsp space, they out the search volume on those terms, on those brands, outrank meditation. All right. Test your messaging. See if you're what is the problem that you're truly trying to solve. Understand your target market.

Are they parents? I know a lot of Facebook experts will tell you that you should go broad, but what we've seen on our end is actually getting targeted works better, especially in the early days. We have a parent app and we found that zero to two the best. 0ero to2 moms 0ero to2 I'm sorry moms can't be 0 to2 moms with zero to two kids are the best for us. So that's that's how you understand it, right? You can test it through meta.

How much it costs? Obviously, we all know you know that. By the way, we need to come up with a better acronym, CAC, right? And then lastly, you build that flywheel. You build that flywheel. So, you know, if you spend a dollar, you make two or you make a $150, you could keep spending that dollar until you obviously hit a scale. Somebody's at my door. James didn't say this, but I had to put him in this. But when you run paid ads, that is the hardest truth you can see because ifo doesn't work, you're like, "Ah, no big deal." Right? But paid ads, you're spending that money. So, you know for sure if it's your creative, it's your messaging, you just know for sure you're getting a slap in the face essentially. Lastly, I know this is a popular topic right now, but content first, right? And I think this is true for any app that's out there. Content first. So, here's the old way. You build an app, you hope people want it, and

then you're like, Steve, why am I not getting downloads? Well, here's a new way you can test viral content. Now, I'm not one of these like young influencers who can create content like this and get viral. I don't know how to do this, but I know it works. You validate demand. You create the video of the app. You validate if people want it through the views and interactions, and then you build the product. And so, where's the >> Okay, that was a little sneak peek. All right, let's watch this video. So, this is one of my past guests, Ethan, and he graded this video.

Let's watch it. >> Oh my god. [laughter] >> I made an app that makes it look like you're live streaming with tens of thousands of people watching to see how people might treat you differently when they think you're famous. >> There's 54,000 people. >> Once word got out that I was famous, people just started staring at me. >> And they just kept coming up to me. >> Holy you have so many viewers. Who are you? >> I'm viewers.

Who are you? >> Who the are you? >> I then met this really cute girl and told her not to do anything too crazy because 20,000 people are watching. >> Oh my god. >> If you want to experience what's it like to be famous where people can't get enough of you, check out my app, Parallel Live. >> Parallel Live. Now, look, Ethan's a great content creator. I'm not that gifted like he is, nor do I have the balls to do something like that. But he did it and he created this app be he created the app after the video and called it Parallel Live. Right. So, let's see how well it's doing. It's made It's a little bit behind right here, but it's made over 1.2 million since its launch. This is he's made a little bit more than that. You know, we had him on, but I just wanted to give you that. Made in October 2020. Just remember those dates. Remember those numbers. Don't have to remember it. I'm going to tell

you anyways. And then Fifi came out, competitor of his. Somebody copied him. That came out in 2023 and it's gone on to make four million, right? But here's the cool thing. Look, in 2020 when Ethan first made this app, even literally in 2021, there was no search volume for a fake live stream. Now, I went looking for this. I thought in my head when I talked to Ethan, I was like, "Bro, you created this category. I think you created this category." And I went and I looked at some of the ASO tools just to see the historic search volume of this term. And 40 is pretty dang high. And it was it went from nothing to something. And so that's what the content first strategy allows us to do. I've talked to a lot of different developers that are literally just using Tik Tok organic to like and then they have this UGC form 60 60 UGC's. This is like a playbook. So I'm going to share that playbook that people have shared in

the past with you. This is Joseph Choy. He runs Consumer Club and so I'm going to give him credit, but this is what I got from it. You can use a tool, create some ads of create some videos of your own, see what people are doing, and then test and validate your own videos. It's free, literally, if you got if you're brave enough to do it. All right, here's another guy that talked about it. Look, I feel like I'm more of a journalist and a hacker and all that stuff. If you ask me, Steve, how do I do that? I'm like, I don't know, bro. I'm telling you what other people have done. But I've talked to a lot of people who have done just that. they've used Tik Tok organic to just grow their app. All right, if you want more proof, you know, believe me, I'm gonna give you more proof. All right, this is the app that we bought making a few thousand dollars. The reason I bought it was it was getting downloads. They were just charging three

bucks lifetime free lifetime offer. Three bucks. The payw wall was hidden in the setting set in the settings tab. I was like, but they were number one for two keywords that I was trying to go after for a client. I like, man, this app is awesome. They could be doing so much more. And I proved it, right? We took this app that was just making a$1,000 a month. Bam, with a new payw wall, new onboarding, increase the pricing to $60 and bang, $8 to $10,000.

Screw adding more features. Like, obviously, we want to add more features, but we want to validate that the need is there, too. Here's a chart that I like to show, too. Hard payw wall, soft payw wall. Anybody not know what a hard payw wall is? Nobody's brave enough to raise their hand. All it means is there's no X. Pay or get the f out of here. All right. This is something that I started try doing. This is a little bit behind, but I can't see the exact year, but I started this Twitter account way back in the day. And I wanted to be an entrepreneur back then. I was just a entrepreneur side hustler doing all these things. I started this account.

The reason why I'm telling you this is I tweeted this back in 2012 and I was like, you know, I woke up feeling like I got a couple of kids. I've been married for a very long time. Just want to work from home. want to work from anywhere, you know, do some marketing related because that's my passion and I want to help others. And it was through creating content like six months later after this in May of 2013, I launched my first few episodes of what was then called mobile app chat. And that completely changed the trajectory of my entire career. I wouldn't be here speaking in front of you know all these awesome people that I've got to meet if not for creating content. That's all it was content. So, here's the logo I designed myself. Looks pretty good, right?

And then here's when I decided to go on YouTube. This is 2016. Way younger looking Steve. But I started doing this just in my office at home. And again, that completely changed the game for me. And a friend of mine, I was talking to her, she was on the podcast, and she's like, "Steve, what advice do you have for me? You know, I want to be a consultant. I want to grow." And I was like, "Just share content." That was the advice I gave her and I was like, I didn't know anything about anything. I was just like, look, that's what I did that helped me. Just share some content.

I didn't piece anything together because I'm dumb. But I started seeing a lot of LinkedIn content. I started liking it. Started sharing it about herself. I have an event after APS London in 2023. I host an event the day after she comes up. She said, "Steve, I came from Israel just to say thank you." And I was like, "Okay." She's like, "Look, I literally started creating content on LinkedIn. Now I have more clients than I could possibly imagine. That's not true for just like if you want to be a consultant. That's true for any freaking business in my opinion. You know, if you follow Gary Vee, that's it. We're all media companies, right? So, hey, look, James, thank you. Is this your lock screen? I got this from your lock screen. By the way, look, we've been able to accomplish like much more than I ever dreamt possible. I acquired this company called Indie App Santa because I believe distribution is so important.

Indie Apps Santa is just like app advice again. It's like AppSumo Groupon for apps. So if you got deals and you want to promote it and you want to get some traction for your app, that's what this service did and we decided to acquire it like last year. Would I be there? So last thing I want to end with is a quote that I loved, especially in the early days of my career in this space was there's a bazillion ways to do it. You can go literally outside and they'll be like do this, do that, do this, do this, do this. Do what works for you, right? I know pay walls, I know ASO, I know Apple search ads. Like, I don't know if there's anybody better than me, frankly.

But I know those very, very well. Do I know viral Tik Tok? No. Do I want to explore? Yes. But I'm going to do what works for me. And I think a lot of times when I talk to developers, marketers are there. Should I do this? Should I do this cuz I heard this and like what do you like? What are you good at? What's your true problem? And let's go solve that problem. So, there's a bazillion ways to do it. Find the way that works for you.

That's it, ladies and gentlemen. That QR code is nowhere but the YouTube channel. So, if you do me a favor, go ahead and check out the YouTube channel.