Ignite Marketing: The Real Growth Engine Behind Profitable Apps with Jonathan Maxim | Ep296

Jonathan Maxim (0:00)

How do I create an unlimited source of money for ads? One option is you can make the app profitable. When it comes to the engine, you can keep re-investing everything. So I'm really passionate about making founders get profitable, monetize ASAP, because once that engine's running, same thing with our business, right? We put $1 and we get five bucks out consistently. So it's like, when you have an engine like that, you can just hit the gas. And that's something I think a lot of people never get to that stage. They never have a true growth engine and they can just turn it up like a dial. But ultimately, that's the cheat code they're all looking for.

Brian Bell (0:54)

Hey, everyone. Welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we are thrilled to have Jonathan Maxim on the mic. He is the founder of Viral App Launch, where he spent nearly a decade helping founders go from zero to meaningful scale through user acquisition, monetization, and investor readiness. Thanks for coming on, Jonathan.

Jonathan Maxim (1:09)

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me, Brian.

Brian Bell (1:11)

Well, I'd love to start with your background. What's your origin story?

Jonathan Maxim (1:15)

The part that really sticks with me from my background is I tried, you know, tech was booming when I was coming out of college, and I was like, I got to get out of corporate, I got to get into tech. I made this app, an app that gives you rewards for working out. So you run two miles, you've got a free tank top, you do 30 miles in 30 days, you're entered to win $1,000 in prizes. And I consumed all the podcasts, read all the books around it from Silicon Valley, only to find out that that was a little bit of a farce. And I ran that company for four years. I got it to about 50,000 users. I even had Kevin Hart give me an LOI to invest 2 million bucks. So I thought I was doing all right. Well, that deal fell apart and legal.

And then at that point, I had 46,000 users who were not paying customers on my app, and the company couldn't support itself, and then it essentially imploded. If I had just done one thing different in that journey, if I had just put monetization into my app from the beginning, this company would have been paying for itself.

Let's just say that 10 percent of my users turned out to be paying customers, they're paying 10 bucks a month. That's 4,600 paying customers times 10 bucks is 46,000 bucks a month. Obviously, I could have sustained the business if I was doing that. There was a few key mistakes that I made in my journey that I just pray the next founder doesn't make because when you go and follow exactly what Silicon Valley is saying, they will mislead you. In my case, they were saying, hey, go focus on getting free users, make this thing viral, make this thing blow up, make it the next Facebook. But practically what the business needed was revenue. So I called the lottery mindset. I had adopted the mindset that my app is going to go viral. I'm going to meet a big shot investor, which actually did both of those happen. But the funny part is that obviously didn't pan out.

I'm here to correct that story for the next founder who goes and builds a business hoping that it just falls into place. It doesn't. It's intentional actions.

Brian Bell (3:05)

Did you try to convert to paid as a Hail Mary at the end?

Jonathan Maxim (3:09)

I should have.

It was too little, too late. I was just so burned out at that point. I had been working on the company for four years. I had spent all 130,000 that I had saved up from working in corporate, burned through all of it, put myself like 30K in debt. And I was cooked. I just didn't have any more juice in me. And that's an important lesson to you, right? Like I ran myself into the ground. And a lot of founders, I think, make that mistake, especially for following the narrative that I was.

Brian Bell (3:33)

Yeah. So you went from building your own apps to helping hundreds others launch theirs. What was that first moment where you realized that distribution is the whole game?

Jonathan Maxim (3:42)

Well, totally by a strike of luck, TikTok emailed us in 2019 and wanted to expand to the US. So I actually had a chance to work on TikTok's launch, and we started in US and then to Brazil and UK, and ultimately ended up in Italy and Thailand and all these other places. Obviously, distribution is the whole play, right? In that campaign, we recruited a hundred influencers and had them posting about TikTok in order to get a bounty or a reward and then my team got paid based on how many verified users we sent. So the performance engagement, they would pay us nothing if we sent them no users. But that really showed me not only the power distribution of like having affiliate partners and having channels that you have real data on and you know how profitable they are, but also that's what makes TikTok what it is.