Making $$$ with IOS apps

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
There's this 19-year-old guy, George, and he used to work at TJ Maxx. And today, he quit TJ Maxx because he's making hundreds of thousands of dollars building mobile apps using AI.
We go through how he does it, all the sauce, all the tactics, and he explains it in just a really simple way that by the end of this episode, you're gonna really understand how you can build a consumer mobile app that makes hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars a day with AI. Now, I'm not saying that everyone's gonna be able to do it, but I think that what you'll learn from this episode is that we are living through a time when it is possible now to come up with ideas, mobile app ideas, that have AI integrated into it and build using AI that could actually generate real money. This is the sort of stuff that could be a side hustle, could be some passive income, and it could just be a cool little app that you build that doesn't make money, but is just fun to build. So enjoy this episode with George. I thought it was really interesting and I'll see you at the end of the episode.
George is on the pod, and he's gonna tell us how to scale your mobile app to 10K a month, easy mode. You've got my curiosity peaked. George, by the end of this episode, are people gonna learn how to do this? Are you being for real?

**George Lampropoulos** (1:27)
Yeah, so the goal is to give you the basic framework on how to get to 10K a month as easy as possible. 10K a month, all it really is when you break it down is like 333 bucks a day.
So to get there, all you really need to do is do one to two things right. And you should get there relatively quickly.

**Greg Isenberg** (1:49)
All right, well, show me how, my friend.

**George Lampropoulos** (1:53)
Yeah, so first, a bit of social proof for why you should listen to me.
I built my first app, or second app technically, WrestleAI, completely in public. It got over 100,000 downloads and made close to 200K in revenue.
And now I've been building two other projects in stealth, and both of them are on track to hit their first, one of them is on track to hit 15K this month, the other is on track to hit its first 10K month this month as well. And I've been working cumulatively about three to four hours a week on each of them. So it's not always time in that gets you the results.
It's by following a basic playbook that can get you there fast. Okay, so the three things that make a successful app, in my opinion, are a good idea, a product that matches the idea, and then distributing that idea to other people. So the idea is really important. And my advice to everyone is always solve your own problems and create something you're passionate about. Because when you're sitting there and working for like 10 hours on your app, you know what I mean? You want it to be something that you actually genuinely resonate with. Otherwise, you won't have that same... When you're talking to influencers, when you're talking to people about your app, they can tell whether you truly believe in your own mission. And if you don't, it becomes harder to convince these people to kind of join you for cheaper rates, let's say. So I'm really big on creating a product that you're very passionate about. For me, it was wrestling. I wrestled for like all my high school career and my middle school career before it got cut short by COVID.
I love this sport. The sport genuinely changed my life. So I wanted to build an app for myself when I was a freshman in high school. What would I have loved to have on my phone? That was the idea. And your idea, it should be simple, have one clear problem, one clear solution. It should be specific, built for a defined audience. This way, once you know who your audience is, you could then reverse engineer how to find them. For example, I knew my audience was wrestlers, so I reverse engineered my For You page on my phone to be only wrestlers, so I knew exactly who I had to sponsor to get in front of the right audience. And number three is it should be sellable. People should be willing to pay for this solution today.

**Greg Isenberg** (4:16)
There's one thing missing from that, in my opinion. So you used the examples of WrestleAI, CalAI.
I mean, the question we have to ask ourselves is, what are ideas that now AI has unlocked, right? So people have been building mobile apps since 2008, and it became increasingly harder to build something that people are going to download and pay money for. Until two things happened, actually. AI came, anyone could create something, but even more than that, you can create these AI-first experiences that just are better than the existing experiences. Like CalAI, you can take a picture of your spaghetti, and it'll tell you how many calories it has. And then the second thing is, well, that's actually the main piece. It's just like you're creating more value for the customer, right? So it's like, how important do you think that is to the idea?