today we will be exposing BTOC viral apps apps that charge $4 a month $10 a month $20 a month you've seen these apps on Twitter X they're making millions of dollars how this week we will be exposing the notso secret strategy that these apps use to print millions of dollars without further ado let's get into it okay so I got Gus here gus is a researcher at Starter Story he's put together a massive list of BTOC apps doing this strategy we're going to go over a very specific example so Gus if you want to kick us off hey so I was doing some research by research I mean scrolling Twitter and let me share my screen and show you the tweet that I saw that really intrigued me so shout out to this guy whoever he is Gam and this was a couple days ago he said "We entered a tick we've entered a Tik Tok multi-accountled hyperrowth era for apps." And then he lists all these different apps some of which I've heard of like I've heard of TurboLearn we've obviously talked to the guy from Calai and then a bunch of others that I had never really heard of and he just lists the app how much they're making how many views they're getting etc etc and got a good amount of views on this tweet right and so it als it reminded me of we recently published a video with David Park two i have it pulled up here it's the $10 million AI SAS playbook and if you haven't watched it go watch it but in this he talks a lot about right how they grew Jenny Aai and he talks a lot about how they did it through all these Tik Tok accounts which I thought was super interesting and so when I you know when I was looking at this tweet I just thought let's like go see what some of these apps are doing how much they're making what these Tik Toks look like cuz I I just kind of had to know so I just picked three so let's look to the let's look at the first one maybe before before I jump in what changed and you know now why is everybody doing this that's a good question and I don't know if I'll we might cut this but I don't really know what changed i wonder if what changed is like some people started doing it i don't know who that some people are maybe someone like Jenny and other apps like that started doing it and now all these apps are like hey let's let's try this too and it's working tik Tok had a moment right where it was like going to be taken down in the US but it came back i wonder if people realized or in that you know couple days when it was offline or really one day we're like damn this is a really powerful tool let's like max this out that would be like some that'd be some off the you know cuff ideas of that be interesting to see what you think or what people watching what they think but yeah that's kind of some thoughts there yeah my thoughts are like that it's just this idea has I guess something that can be gamed and it reminds me of like once once SEO was proven and a proven strategy and because everyone's eyeballs were searching on Google then it became this thing where and this is a few years ago where you would just pay for backlinks and you could game the algorithm to and just throw a ton of money at the algorithm and and just like stuff keywords into pages and that sort of And there was this just this moment of time where you could just go bonkers on SEO just by throwing money at the problem this feels like that version of that for the Tik Tok era but I could be wrong i don't know if this will last forever but it's clearly working now yeah as you say that it reminded me of like I just saw this tweet like it was like 2021 or whatever when there was all these like threads on on Twitter going around that were just like blowing accounts up yeah and that was another I think kind of moment in time like this where like people realized oh this work is working right now let me let me do it i remember reading all these threads about people or business or whatever it was books and I think it's like Dicky Bush another guy that we you know you've interviewed on starter story he talked about he's talked about that like that's when he started growing his account and so I wonder if this is like a similar this feels like one of those big moments in time where if you act fast you can rack up a lot of dollars and also build a you know generational wealth type of business in a very short span of time yeah agreed okay so let's go into the first one then the first one I just picked from this list was Lockit App 300,000 MRR etc so just to show you what this app is which all these apps are just so funny to me this is a essentially it's a friendship app where you can have a widget on your phone that has like a real time or updated picture of what's going on in your life uh think of it kind of like a Snapchat and I you you showed me this actually but there's an app called or a website called sensor tower where you can kind of get some information on these apps and according to sensor tower last month this app had a million downloads 300k per month you know number I don't I don't know how much this matters but 13 in social networking and if you look at the like review store you can see like ratings it's like 400,000 ratings holy smokes i've never even heard of this damn app which is crazy maybe I'm too old but you know there's like millions of people using this app my gosh it's pretty sick right and their pricing where did I find them their pricing is like it's like $3.99 a month or $36 a year yeah something down here you could see that but you know so going back to this tweet it was like 20 but I just picked three so do you want to see those first or you want you have any thoughts on this okay so you're you're confident that they're growing their business through Tik Tok or I guess that that tweet said it but you went and found out yeah I went and found like I found their main account and then three other accounts oh so they're multiple accounts yeah multiple accounts that are affiliated i think that's the play is like these are these influencers that are posting about the app so let me just show you one i think it'll make sense so this one is a guy called Caleb's Journal don't know who he is but let's just look at the most popular ones and obviously actually that's I saw this interesting if you don't want locket content wouldn't follow which goes to show this is what this guy's posting about so let's just look at one of these 13 million views he says I'm crying hold on let me I'm crying my little bro asked me to get this when I moved out and sure enough it's the Locket app that he's kind of showing off 13 million views so that's one you think men are actually using this app or they like they think this guy's good-looking so they want to use it a little controversial but I I would find it hard to believe that dudes are using this app yeah i mean I would go in the comments and and take a look this isn't relevant but in the comments you probably see all women in there yeah so this one you move away from home and your brother asks to do this together sure enough the Locket app oh my gosh one more let's just look at one more leaving for college my mom made the whole fam get this what do you think it is the locket app and these are getting I mean I obviously started for the popular one but 13 4 million 2 million crying because my mom asked the whole fan to get this what do you think it is the locket app same thing he just does his he flips his phone shows his phone and does it and and it's kind of the same like I'm crying i'm emotional and I'm crying literal tears it's almost like a bait and switch too is like by the time the fourth time you watch this you're like god damn it lock it up again yeah what the cuz I lock it up again that's funny actually but so that's just one so let me show you just another one but there's this one ka's Lens let's just look at popular the app of the summer 8 million views what do you think it is the locket app not only is it the locket app it's the same exact format where Oh yeah you're right it's one line and then it shows the screen yep so like it's perfect i wonder if these people are real that's another question but millions of views hundreds of thousands of views my best friend did this me something to do with their attractiveness too right for sure 100% and let me just show you the last one and then we'll comment on it again so this one Morgs Gabrielle don't know who you are attractive looking person how my life looks when this is another this the other girl was saying the same thing like you finally deleted Snapchat and downloaded this instead constant updates moved away from college does that sound familiar we still do this every single day what do you think it is lock it out and do they have a link in their bio or or how are they i'm curious how the affiliate interesting they don't not this one some of the others I'm going to show you do either getting paid on views or or something because it'd be hard to track yeah these are just three of I mean I saw like 15 of these accounts that are more or less doing this influencer marketing thing for the Locket app oh my gosh this is I mean this is amazing research and yeah so back to the numbers right a million downloads a month 300k per month and number 13 social networking app on in the app store this is crazy i mean it just shows that there is no secret this this this is the best kept not so secret thing that's working for apps and every time I talk to founders I get on I'm getting on the phone doing a lot of interviews with founders they're always sharing this story i just talked to someone who I can't share who it is but they got to 1 million in 90 days 1 million MR in 90 or ARR in 90 days through a few strategic Tik Tok formats that's crazy so I have this calculator okay so if you want to figure out how much a business is actually making it's actually really simple you have to make some assumptions on certain things because not everything is fully researchable but it's pretty easy to get an industry standard so did you This is my little calculator here and you guys I'll put a link in the description so you guys can plug anything into here you can use this for your own app your own idea or just to test and check out what other apps are making do you know how many views or impressions this app is getting that's a good question according to this tweet it said 150 million views 150 million so I'll type that in 150 1 2 3 1 2 3 and then how many downloads were they getting you said it was a million per month yeah a million a month so that would be like.7 I think yeah so if they're getting 150 million views what percentage of those are converting to downloads and that's that number right there is actually.7% not even one yeah less than 1% that makes sense right how many people watch the thing and just scroll over and move on to the next one so a low app download rate makes sense and also shows you you know you can back your numbers into this and if you wanted to build a business that made $100,000 a month you can go and put your numbers in here then the next thing that I look at is well what we know for sure is how much money they charge what was the number there $3.99 a month at 36 a year some just 36 3.99 a month so let's say $4 oh yeah a month yeah $4 a month and then what we have to figure out is what their paid conversion rate is so if they get 1 million downloads what percentage of those convert to paid users i actually don't know so I will go into chat GBT and I can search what is the typical conversion rate of a BTOC app in the iPhone in the in the app store yeah I'll type that in and it'll give us a range probably app Store page view to install install the signup onboard user 1 to 5% often less than 2% so let's just be conservative and we will plug in that they are doing a conversion rate of 1% maybe 1.5 we could do and you can see how much money this business is actually making so then the other one that I like to put in there is churn as well churn is not that important for when you're first starting out but you can see how this business will grow over time so I'm going to actually ask what the churn is too what is the typical churn and churn meaning how long do they stay on at what percentage of customers fall off because it is a subscription app typical monthly churn 5 to 10% good churn less than five excellent churn less than three so I maybe we'll say that there are six% churn so on 150 million impressions 1 million turn to downloads 15 15,000 of those turn into paying customers i think that number could be higher if they had a certain payw wall but that means that they get 63,000 in new revenue but that is not 63,000 per month that's 63,000 in new revenue per month so if you put it in this table here because it is a monthly recurring revenue business you can see how much the MR grows each month so if you were to start this business today and those were all to stay constant by the 12th month you would have a $500,000 per month business yeah and you can see what that looks like here by month 30 you'd have almost a million dollar per month business that's the power of a recurring revenue business as long as you can keep those numbers constant that's not a guaranteed but that's how I can see how much money this business is making that's wild obviously the the huge assumption is that this all continues right that the attention and all that continues but there's certainly a like period of time like we said at the beginning right now where maybe this is like really working and so it's like you're you're going all in on this if I'm that business right like hey this is working let's go like like push that's what David talked about I think in his YouTube video was like outreaching to as many of those people as possible and getting them to promote your stuff yeah yeah if you don't do it now it'll be too late by the time you get it to work so the best founders are the ones who really make it are the ones who act with urgency but you know what I think is also interesting before we go into the next one is I think one thing that also changed too is that there's like more so a willingness to pay for something like this cuz I I remember a few years ago precoid pre you know where we all work from home and and you know we're all digital and it's different generation for sure i remember when apps would be when apps would charge money nobody would pay for them right cuz most apps were free and people were just not willing to pay for digital things i just I just remember that like oh you paid for an app why would you pay for something that is usually free google's free all these things are free but nowadays people are willing to pay for the locket app they're willing to pay for digital solutions apps and things like that and obviously there's billion-dollar companies built on apps that's one of the bigger changes too when I think of what is the why is this working now is there's this combination of algorithms changing and consumer willingness to pay and that's like maybe like the deadly combo right now like we said it reminds me of the Calai guys you know that you interviewed a while back i think this was part of their strategy that I saw hiring a bunch of like fitness influencers to use their app and getting a bunch of downloads growing to however many millions okay but well before we on before we move on to the next one I do want to share one little thing shameless plug uh but these Tik Tok examples these businesses that are growing like wildfire they're proof that the most important thing for your business is attention right features don't matter product doesn't matter anymore attention is the name of the game by attention I mean uh marketing strategies that get eyeballs on your product sharing your product simply sharing your product online and just testing your product in public and getting feedback and getting validation from real people when you get attention on your product it solves all your problems it will tell you if you have a good idea it'll tell you if you don't have a good idea and it'll give you the information necessary to either fix it or double down that's why at Starter Story we have the attention database inside dozens of examples of real world posts that you can use copy and paste to grow your business i've had me I've seen members of Starter Story use these templates get tens of thousands of views thousands of customers it works just like the examples we showed doing the same things works just head to the first link in the description if you want to get access to it our team is adding more and more every day when we find stuff like we're talking about today all right now back to the episode all right let me show you the next one yeah so the next app is called Couple Joy and it's a relationship app i don't know love tracking and long distance whatever cute widgets things to chat with your partner about 8,000 ratings let's look at the sensor tower data so according to this we're getting 500,000 downloads last month similar revenue and it says 19 19 in in the lifestyle category the pricing on this one where is it this must be different different types right $12.99 13 to 40 bucks a month i'm sure there's something about like the amounts of messages or whatever you can send so similar to the last one I found a list of you know 10 10 15 Tik Tok accounts and I just dug into a few that I thought were interesting so it's going to be no surprise but they're all going to be kind of similar so here's this one nessa and Ruby Couplejoy content and you we're talking about the link right couplejoy.app nessie let's just look at these just this is like crazy right like hand over face we found a secret way to get connected let me guess what it is nessie it is probably the Couple Joy app couple joy days together blah blah blah there's that one another one hand over the face you're telling me I've been in a longdist relationship oops i think I skipped it two years just found out this app lets me send messages to his lock screen what do you think it is couple dry so that's like all these right and so similar hand over face something shocking is happening but let me show you what the shocking thing I just found is and it's that app that's one example here's another one this is this means like living a longdistance relationship and it's similar we'll see you tomorrow and this is actually a slideshow and it's the couple joy app oh my god three million views three million views million views two million views and then the last one is I don't know kenna Daily don't know who you are Kenna sure you're cool if you're real but similar distance couple joy op/kenna pictures with my beautiful boyfriend millions of views thousands of views another similar handoverface thing so you kind of you kind of get the point there right it's like all of these people are doing the same thing and getting millions of views and in this case they do have a let's see what happens here yeah it takes them to download with obviously the reference probably or the the tracking link Yeah I mean that's a couple joy clear this is clearly this is working the couple joy and the locket app have two things that I noticed that are the same is that they like to show off the feature where you can put something on your home screen customized right you know that's a I think that's a newer feature on iPhones too by the way that would that's what I was going to say and like you know I I I share with a lot of the Starry members about you know like how can you find a business idea that takes off it doesn't sound like a crazy change in the world but iPhone adding customization to the home screen enables new businesses never before could that be done but it's cool because everyone stares at their iPhone and pick up their iPhone 100 times a day that is the quote unquote killer feature that may enable these these apps have grown so fast i think that is actually something that you could probably do for anyone that's looking for business ideas here how could you do that for founders could you put your revenue MR on your home screen connected to Stripe i've seen someone do that before or let's say you are I don't know put your net worth or finance or the other thing that I think that I want to mention if we can dive even deeper than just Okay here's a couple cool Tik Toks there's another thing I noticed about these two apps and their style is what I I tell starter story members about too is it the importance of intent so a lot of people think "Oh I'll just go post on TikTok about you know what I have for breakfast that day or I'll post about even the problem that I'm solving." But if you don't actually every single example you showed me that has millions of views and clearly what's working for them is they address the problem or they have some sort of hook or something like that and then they switch it and they show the actual app right imagine if they did that without showing the app you wouldn't care about the app you just care about the person every single video they show you the actual app in use or being used or they're they're associating the problem that they're solving or whatever with the app that's really important i see a lot of people not do that so they'll create hey you know me and my boyfriend we're doing long distance but then they don't show the app nobody's going to know about the app right the intent is really important so if you just you know share with people what you're having for breakfast that day but you don't show them your product then creating content creating Tik Toks is pointless right yeah no that's such a good point right cuz you can go viral on Tik Tok or Twitter or whatever for some stupid you say or some hot take which happens all the time which maybe you know something crazy could get 20 million views or 100 million views but something with intent Yeah will get you more users that reminds me of like right on Twitter this week there's been the whole Have you seen this like the fitness guy i saw this a little bit saratoga or something yeah Ashton you're right ashton Hall but there was no like intent behind this right may maybe there was i mean the tips for men he did he did end up linking his his stuff here you know got 6 million views there but I don't know my my point in bringing that up is just like the intent maybe of these Tik Toks is more direct than just like some crazy influencer posting his daily daily thing yep yep yeah not that we're like in the business of giving advice or whatever but like that people should do that people should be cautious of that maybe doesn't maybe who cares like just go for it if in this world kind of thing yeah i'm kind of torn by it to be honest like I think there's something that's a little bit unethical about creating content that is purely designed to be algorithmic and is potent like some of the examples that you shared have potentially bad intentions like you know if that person saying I'm going to college every day when maybe they're 26 years old and they graduated college four years ago i don't know if that's the case for that one but I can see a world where that becomes more normalized to just create content for the sake of content it's a it's a different generation for sure but there does something I do have a bad gut feeling about about doing that but at the same time you know short form content is entertainment at the end of the day so you know is this is this real or is this fiction if I watch a movie right now it doesn't have to be real it's fake and I can still enjoy it and be entertained by it i don't know what do you think i think I was thinking about like Well to answer that question yeah I think maybe it's just getting old where I'm just like h you know this is so fake and who buys this you know i'm looking at all these apps and I'm like would I ever like download something off of this this is for a specific target right i've I feel like I've been targeted for other things like there's an app I always see it's called Opal it's like a focus app and I've I've gone through the flow of like oh let me click this link from here and whatever so maybe maybe it's just like I don't resonate with these because it's not like my target but there's other I'm sure other apps and Tik Toks that I've seen that have totally gotten me yeah true but yeah I think another part of this feels like uh and this is obviously on like me as a consumer or us on consumers is like these are just kind of spamming us in our face every day and like you almost like don't even see it which is crazy like you don't or I feel like I don't see like all the ads that I'm lowkey getting cuz that's kind of what this is right i don't know what to make of that that's kind of crazy to me it's cool I guess but I think that's a good point is that these are just ads right have you ever gotten mad about advertisement yeah when the commercial comes on and you yell at the commercial how much you hate that commercial that's okay that's just a commercial like who cares and like when you're right now we're like hyper analyzing these guys pages and you know we're going to their page and we're seeing that they're doing the same thing over and over again that's not the typical behavior of someone that's browsing Tik Tok you know they're just browsing Tik Tok and one of those might come up and it may catch their attention and that's that's okay really just an maybe it should they should be disclosing that it's an ad in some way or or eventually these social media companies will will do something about it and say that this is an ad but at the end of the day that's just an advertisement who cares move on with your life go touch some grass and none of this stuff is real so you might as well do it if you want to build a business and make some money yeah yeah that's crazy all right last one this one is a study app which you know we see billions of study apps don't we this one is called Einstein Homework Helper nice just ace your exams some kind of study tip etc thousand thousand reviews funny scam do not pay saved my GPA wait wait but it says scammed yeah I guess so that's funny okay so according to this one Sensor Tower data again 70,000 downloads last month so a little less 90K revenue 93 in education worldwide there's actually a couple of This doesn't matter but there used to be like a a different app called Fineman and now this one's called Einstein but let's go into their Tik Toks and find some people that are promoting this so we got StudyB Princess and dog over there yeah can you hear her sorry yeah I'm getting a delivery she doesn't like anybody sorry if you could hear that in the background i was trying to ignore okay study B Princess they are low-key promoting this app so you know it's it's the same playbook right the the the difference here is like they're they're kind of like it's almost like there's these informal like what did you get on your exam today and what did you use to study i got 68 did you study a little bit the one that did get an ace what did you get or what did you use does it come up that fineman where's another example how to use Einstein AI what's your GPA so that's one example let's look at nurse bunny notes when someone says they use chat GB study I don't use that what do I use instead einstein AI or Yeah Ein Einstein AI homework helper what did you get on the exam blah blah blah einstein AI is what I used to study and then you know let's just look at one more same girl no you're right it is the same or similar girls no no that girl is the same i have I'm I'm a super recognizer so I recognize faces that's the same girl oh yeah that's funny on two different accounts that's funny there you go right no I think so i think so yeah so it's fake i mean but they're like pretending to interview people in the street but Yeah and then this is the playbook right just over the shoulder looking at my exam wow promoting promoting Einstein i like this one because it's a little bit of a smaller one i mean I see 70,000 downloads but number 93 in education that's by no means small right but if I plugged that into my my revenue generator there bring that up yeah let me pull that one up because you know the one that we showed was so big it was crazy to lock it up like that's like pretty sick but I want to see what the for someone who's watching this who might you know be able to build an app with AI in our AI build accelerator which you should check out we'll put a link in the description what can you do with 100,000 views right so how many impressions did that one get let me share my screen here 18 million views okay that's 18 million views per month so that's a little smaller that's like about 10 times smaller than the one we talked about first i'm guessing that the app download rate is higher cuz you know when you get to really big scale says 70,000 views or downloads 70,000 downloads that's actually quite low so I just going to get it to that point 70,000 let's say maybe point4 72,000 and what was the I'm guessing that the conversion rate on that one is going to be high because people want to ace their test right yeah just to be conservative let's do a 4% conversion and what was the pricing on that one pricing was $12.99 13 a month okay so that's more expensive than the $4 one so I take 13 and the churn on that one is probably pretty good actually because you know they're in high school or whatever so and they need it for multiple tests so yeah the MRR on this one after it looks like they're probably adding 37,000 in new revenue per month with just simple Tik Tok strategy and then I always like to look at my little growth chart because subscription businesses grow let's see at month 12 they're doing 346,000 per month which is about a $5 million business maybe just just a little less but crazy that's just helping people it's an app for high schoolers right yeah high high schoolers or probably anyone in in school education middle school college yeah huge market those are three examples there you know the takeaway for me is just like they're just running the same playbook and we see that so much i feel like we've talked about that before here find something that works and just repeat it over and over again until it doesn't yep yep and that's something that you know we can talk about how it's unethical or you know a little bit scammy maybe whatever but at the end of the day this is what's clearly working it's getting views the algorithm is a lot you know is serving people what they want to see and I was talking to David Park who started Jenny AI which is like a AI writing tool they they do this kind of strategy for people who want to write their papers in college and he kind of said like well people are actually just creatures of habit right i like to watch tennis matches over and over and it's the same players and to someone who's not interested in it it's really boring and it's the same thing over and over again but it entertains me and I would have no problem someone putting tennis content in my feed like that right we're creatures of habit and you know it even goes to the top like think about yeah sports like I mentioned or for example Saturday Night Live or the Tonight Show they all have formats that work and they've done it over years and they're really popular so maybe that's a way to think about it too is like if that's working it's really not creativity is really not these aren't artists doing this you know clearly business and that's okay yeah you're right yeah i think uh there should be like no shame in in posting stuff or or getting people to post your stuff because our attention spans are so short and just like just go for it that's kind of my takeaway is like in terms of getting attention on your product or whatever if you're going to use these avenues like Twitter or Tik Tok or whatever it's just being shameless about it i think the last thing that I I'll say is just like it was interesting to see how cuz these are only like three examples for each of these apps i could have shown you 15 and so that's interesting to me like the multiple accounts all kind of shilling the same thing i couldn't tell you what that does to the algorithm or whatever but there's got to be something there where it's like if it's just one or two maybe it won't show you as much but if there's 15 or 20 there's something else there i didn't I don't know what to make of that but yeah yeah I think there's something there yeah David Parkana maybe a little bit had a little bit of a conspiracy going that they looked at like your SIM card to see if you're legit and like these accounts get deleted and banned sometimes so if you lose one of them that you have others to help back you up so maybe it's a little bit of a hedge that's actually interesting i didn't think about that yeah cool and like I said those were just three i could have shown you 20 examples like this so a little went a little bit of a rabbit hole and it was kind of fun in terms of like seeing just what these folks are doing apps are doing crazy well I hope this is helpful for people who are watching this thank you Gus for going and doing the research for you guys let us know in the comments if you like this format we really dove deep into kind of like tick tock formats and short form formats which you know it's crazy to think about how much economic value is driven through just one format right you we saw one format locket app format get used across basically that format borderline created millions of dollars of value one simple video it's kind of crazy to think about how a company can be built off of content where it used to be the other way around so that was Cool what should we cover next let's see what I find on Twitter this week let us Yeah let us know in the comments if you want us to cover other marketing strategies i thought I thought that was really interesting and uh we'll be back next week with another episode thanks for watching guys