How To Build A Viral App & Make Millions From It #379 Notes

How To Build A Viral App & Make Millions From It #379 Notes

One of my favorite podcast episodes of all time. An in-depth dive on someone who says they want to build a $10 million dollar app in 3 months and actually does it. The types of questions we ask impact the quality of our life and this is a prime example of it.

(02:04) - Palmer Luckey recap

• A word that describers Palmer Luckey=> a truly independent thinker, and very enthusiastic.

(05:43) The Sara's List Hostile Takeover

• Saraslist.com, Sam's girlfriend became a multi-millinoaire by simply joining relatively safe fast growing startups
• Pretty much companies raising or have raised a Series C. She was employeee 1000 something at Airbnb and Facebook. She stayed there waiting for her stock to vest, and during that time it would 3-4x in value.

(12:24) Shaan makes an offer

• Instead of making money (doing sales), focus on the recruiter feed which 10-30k.
• Packy McCormick charges $25-50k to do deep dives on companies. He generates close to $100k a month. This is the power of leverage and a personal audience.

(32:57) Nikita Bier & Gas

• Nikita Bier started an app called TBH (anonymous polling test). Went viral, after 2 years figuring out how to generate virality. Sold for $40 million. (about 5 years ago)
• "I'm just thinking about creating an app geenrating $10 million in 90 days." => rebuilt TBH.
• Says things on Twitter like "now we're adding 1000 people per hour "
• Hey man how do we download it? => "It's geofenced to 3 high schools in Georgia"
• When Sam and Shaan talk to him Nikita uses very technical language like it has a k Factor or a blank but we're seeing that user retention stagnates at this thing the turn happens at three percent like it was density that's cool
• "I don't see it when I go to my App Store chart like you know social free apps he's like we put it in the games category under puzzles he's like he's like that way we're gonna like stay away from competition until we flip the switch and we're like whoa."
• "Pay to figure out who voted for you."

Relaunched in 4 high schools in Alabama, his social launch strategy:

• The most valuable thing you can have is a reliable way to test your app so like can you get this into a a small network like like a high school where most people know each other or know of each other of a thousand people quickly because if you could do that you could test it in one high school see what the data says and then you could tweak the app launch in another High School do it again he's like that reliable like Petri dish to test in is the most valuable thing.
• They take the high school name and they take the brand name of the thing and they would make the account private and they would go follow every kid who had like you know class of whatever 2022. Um in that high school they would follow all of them so then the kid would say who followed me uh it has my high school name in it they click it it's private.
• To see the profile you've got to follow back so they would they would request to follow so a whole bunch of people requested to follow he's like but we would not accept anyone and it's like this is like you know the Dennis then at 4 pm on the day before launch which uh the day of the launch when everybody gets out of school you know we have a guy in a truck watching people leave the school as soon as they do we hit accept requests we accept everybody's request everybody gets a notification at the same time and then they go to it the bio basically says download the app see who likes you you download the app 45:28

Conclusion

• In a matter of like seven days I believe he starts tweeting out the results and letting us know and basically within like seven days give or take five days I don't know exactly it was doing a million daily it had a million daily users was adding 30 000 new users an hour users were answering 3.2 million polls per hour in a brown like 10 days I believe he's hit a million dollars in sales and are also around 10 days in it was number one in the App Store
• "unless you built the number one app in the app store like you know don't talk to me type of type of attitude"