0:00 My mobile apps generate $1,497 every single day. And in this video, I'm going to teach you three critical growth engineering concepts that you need to know to become a successful mobile app or SAS entrepreneur. I learned these three concepts not only building and scaling my own portfolio of mobile apps, but while I was the head mobile engineer at Prize Pix. Prize Pix is the number one daily fantasy sports app in the country. and I was the head mobile engineer at Price Pix for three and a half years. A lot of people don't even believe that that was me. If you head over to my LinkedIn profile, you can definitely verify that I was a very early engineer at Prize Pix and I led the team all the way from just a couple
0:45 thousand users to over 2 million users. So everything that I'm about to teach you today comes from my experience scaling prize picks to the number one app on the app store as well as my portfolio of mobile apps that I'm currently scaling to a million ARR. And I bet you by the next video I upload it will be at 1 million ARR and I can't wait to show you that. So make sure you like and subscribe for more uh content and to follow me along my journey building and scaling my mobile app in SAS Venture Studio. Let's jump in. Concept number one, funnel. Funnel is a key marketing concept that most people who know marketing know, but technical builders don't seem to know this concept of funnel. And if you understand this concept, you will become powerful on the internet and you honestly will never be
1:30 broke again. Funnels are everything in life. Everything in life is a funnel. A funnel is essentially how you take somebody from point A to point B. And in our case as internet entrepreneurs, a funnel is how you take traffic and convert them into paying customers. There are three ways to get traffic for your mobile app or SAS business. You can run ads, you can partner with influencers, or you can organically grow using SEO, app store optimization, Google SEO or YouTube, etc. You take that attention and traffic, you drive them to your app store listing. Your app store listing is like a landing page that showcases the value propositions of the mobile app that you are trying to sell the person. It's actually a lot easier than a website because you really
2:16 just have three things. You have a title, you have an icon, and then you have app store screenshots. And if you have four very strong app store screenshots, you can convert these people from viewers to uh downloads of your app. Once you get people to download your app, you take them through an onboarding process. The onboarding process is essentially your 247 salesperson. That's what I like to call it. If you design your onboarding process correctly, you can build it in a way or design it in a way where it tells a sales story and builds internal buying pressure inside the user who's going through your onboarding flow. So by the time they see that pay payw wall, they're ready to purchase. And I'm going to show you exactly how we design those 247 sales rep onboarding flows. Once the user goes through onboarding, they will
3:02 likely end up on your payw wall, at which time they will start a trial. A user will interact with your application for that first 3 days. I typically like using 3-day trials. I know that 7-day trials can be beneficial as well. Um, and you can actually get higher conversion rates when you run 7 days, but with 7 days, you need to make sure your product is very, very good. And if you're optimizing toward just getting some cash in the door and building momentum, I would highly recommend you go with 3 days. All the apps that I currently have are running with 3day trials. And of course, after you get somebody to see the value of your trial, after three or seven days, that's when you get money in the bank. And this is the exact model that our apps are running. Let me show you real quick a cool tool called screens design that I
3:49 found recently that will actually allow you to stock any successful apps onboarding flows. And it even tells you how much money they're making. So, for example, uh we can find an app. It looks like they added a couple new ones. We can find an app by going to filter and we could even say monthly revenue large. So, 50 to $100,000 in monthly revenue. It will show you all the screens of apps that are currently doing 85,000 a month in revenue, a 100,000 every month. I'm not saying 100,000 a year, saying 100,000 a month. And that's very common for mobile apps. Apps are very scalable businesses and most
4:36 successful apps do these types of figures. Once you crack the game of paid ads or influencers, initially in your early days, you will only be making a few hundred, $1,000, $2,000. Maybe if you get extremely lucky and you find a good marketing partner, you can get up to $10,000. But when you actually crack your funnel, which is what we're about to crack right now, and you have a funnel that's consistently converting at good numbers, at good KPIs, we'll talk about that in the next section of this. Uh that's when you can scale it to the moon. Get a credit card, pump some paid ads. As long as you're returning over 1.25x 25x row ads or return on ad spend. You can just keep pumping traffic through your app and just start making money. It is not easy. It takes time. It
5:23 takes iteration. It takes discipline and it takes no ego. If you're the type of person who wants to build everything all at once and you have this huge vision and you think that's going to get achieved in 12 weeks or 16 weeks and you're just going to get rich, you're wrong, my friend. We need to start small. So, check this out. Once you identify an app that's doing good revenue numbers, for example, let's look at uh uh uh uh um let's look at this AI pets, right? These AI pets are doing 75K a month in revenue. And if we go through their screens, we can watch every single step of the onboarding process. So, it looks like they have um actually I don't really like this onboarding. Let's go find a different one. Let's find is this the app that I think No, this is a different app. Let's go find an app that
6:09 has a really strong onboarding process. Okay, these types of apps have really good onboardings like ADHD and routine tracking apps. So, look at this. Somebody downloads this app. They see this homepage right here. And this is where that buying pressure begins. The secret to your future is hidden in your daily routine. So, they're selling the prospect or the person who's downloaded this app on an outcome. Success is the sum of small efforts repeated day in and day out. just science not magic built with CBT techniques. So this is building a story of the outcome and then the mechanism the unique mechanism is the CBT technique. This is the basis of marketing. People want to go somewhere and they want a unique way of getting there. Okay. So as you go through this
6:55 onboarding flow, it's taking you step by step and creating a path for you. Then it starts asking questions so that it can personalize your experience. How much sleep do you get at night? Over 57% of users don't get enough quality sleep. So, it's actually selling you on the fact that you're not getting quality sleep. And it's building a storyline. It's building internal pressure. By this point in time in the onboarding flow, you feel like you don't have enough sleep. And you feel that, hm, how does this app know that I don't have enough sleep? Now, it's going to ask you questions that continue to beat on that uh weakness of yours. Do you have a hard time getting out of bed? How energized do you feel throughout the day? What's your activity level? How would you describe your stress level? It's asking you questions that make you admit to
7:42 yourself that you have a problem. And since these questions are so relevant to you, you start to trust the app more in being able to solve your problem. That is sales 101. You get the person to talk to themselves. Okay. Then the user goes through the onboarding flow. It looks like there's a lot of questions here. It asks you, "Do you relate? Do you relate? Do you relate? Customizing your experience. This is a critical part of the onboarding process where it makes the user feel like they have a personalized uh experience or the app is learning about them. Okay, so after that personalized experience, they see a personalized summary. And this could honestly be a lot better, but it says fitness, wellness, productivity. 94% of users meet their best self. This screen is honestly not as strong as I would
8:27 want it. I would want this screen to be very social proof heavy, a true personalized road map that says this is where you are today. This is where you're going to go and our app will be the solution to get you there. Okay? So, they see this, they keep going, they ask you some more questions to confirm that you want to achieve the outcome that the app can actually sell you, which is be your most productive self. They get you to opt in. If you cancel, they give you a 50% discount as a onetime offer. And now you have successfully purchased. As soon as you purchase, you go through your first ADHD exercise. This is a critical step too. This is called time to activation or um I like to say time to dopamine. How quickly can you get the user to activate and achieve some level
9:12 of happiness, satisfaction, and completion after they put their money where their mouth is? You want to mitigate all chances of buyer remorse here and get people to keep moving along the journey and admitting to themselves that yeah this app could solve my problem. That is a crash course on how to create high converting onboarding. If you get that part right, you have a money printing machine. The next step is that trial start that we already mentioned and your job is really just to provide a delightful experience within those first 3 days. There's also stuff that you can do here uh like re-engagement such as send push notifications, you can send emails um and you can um create community and engage people to keep interacting with you outside of the app as well. So this is the full funnel
10:00 playbook. All right. Then from here comes math. But before we go to math, I I want to quickly address some questions that I got on my Twitter. if you have or X actually. If you have any questions that you want me to answer in any of these videos, you can use the link in the description to follow me on X and ask any question that you want. And what I'll do is I'll anytime I make these types of whiteboard session videos, I'll drop pictures of your tweets and I'll answer your questions here. So, before we move into the next step, which is math, I want to answer these questions here. One person wanted me to explain the full details of my equity and my revshare deals with some of the influencers that I'm working with. So, inside my Ambitious Labs venture studio, one of the uh models or actually my my most exciting model is creator
10:46 partnerships. So, I find creators who already have proven audiences. I look for people who touch at least at least at least at least 100,000 people every single month. And that's really easy. These creators I'm working with actually touch millions of people a month. Um, but if I'm you and I'm looking for creators to partner with, I think 100,000 people a month is bare minimum. You multiply that by half a percent click-through rate, that gets you about 5,000 clicks on your on your product or on your landing page, that's enough traffic to build a real business with. So, you need to be pushing 100,000 views. And those views need to be uh views that are associated with your product. So, if you think about, you know, you wanting to partner with an influencer, if you get a 100K views, and let's say for good numbers, we have a 0.1% or excuse me, uh a 1% CTR, which is
11:34 pretty high. Like you would need one viral video that shows your product in action to achieve a 1% click-through rate. That would get you a,000 um uh down or excuse me, not 1,000 downloads, 1,000 clicks. Okay? Out of those clicks, you might get 33% click to um download. So that would get you 333 downloads. Then you can run the rest of your funnel math here that we're going to talk about and end up at a purchase. Okay? We're going to talk about funnel math uh completely. But the point I wanted to make here was you need to have enough traffic to actually build a real business off of. You don't want to be partnering with people with 5,000 or 10,000 followers unless they're B2B and you can uh justify higher price points. So my uh business model is not 50/50 partnership equity. I actually value a
12:21 lot of the um marketing. So I go a little bit lower on my side of the equity, but I look for the creator to um fund the development cost. though influencer funds at least a $25,000 minimum buildout cost. This puts skin in the game for the influencer and they're committed to promoting so that they get their money back. If you give somebody your an app for free, they have no incentive to actually promote it. So my um my model or what I would recommend you guys do is you make the uh influencer pay. We charge a lot more than 25k um and then 25% revshare so that you know they have skin in the game. you are paid and then you can win off the top as well. You don't want to build a business where you just, you know, are building an app once and you have no skin in the game and the app's
13:07 not successful. That's going to burn you out of software entrepreneurship. You need to play this the right way. Find a marketer, build a product, put them together. Um, and I wouldn't work with broke influencers. If if somebody's got a following and they don't know how to make money with their following, they're not going to make money with an app. I have been contacted by many many many influencers who are broke, have no money, and they want us to build an app. But if they can't monetize their audience on their own, they're not definitely they're definitely not going to do it with me. So, um, that's the model for the creator partnership. It works really, really well. It's better than you trying to learn how to market and build at the same time. So, I highly recommend, you know, if you have already built an app or you're thinking about building an app, find creators first. Look for the market that already exists, look at the audience that already exists that they are marketing to and just build an app and position yourself right
13:53 under it. All right, cool. So if any more questions feel free to uh reply to me on X and I'd be happy to answer that. Now let's move to the second concept called unit economics. All right, unit economics are a concept that's widely taught in business school. It is a fancy word for honestly simple math. Let me give you an example of unit economics that anybody can understand. You buy an apple for $1, you sell it for $2. Your unit economics are the cost of your apple was $1 and the profit was $1. Unit economics are uh simple numbers that represent specific touch points or conversions in a sales process or in a value chain. So let me show you exactly what that means. The KPIs, okay, KPI
14:39 stands for key performance indicator. It's another word for a number that represents how well a certain piece of a system is working. A KPI is a number that represents how one thing in a system is working. And when we build marketing funnels, when we build sales systems, when we build funnels, we have key conversion points in that funnel. You need to understand this. I'm turning you as a builder into a marketer. Now, okay, I need everybody on my channel who who knows about building, who can build in Flutterflow or has or wants to build an app, I need you to start thinking like marketers. That's how you're going to get rich. You will not get rich building features your whole life. That's called a developer. You're just going to have a job. If you want to get
15:25 rich and you want to make a business, you need to understand the concept of funnels and marketing. Okay? I'm teaching people this early because I've seen so many times entrepreneurs inside of my Dreams into Apps program, they spend 12 weeks building their features with us. They do an amazing job. our coaches help them one-on-one, but then when it's time to market, they're so wired up as builders to be selling the features of their app that they don't actually sell the outcomes. Okay, so my job now on this channel is to teach you all the intersection of building, marketing, and scaling businesses. And it's going to come with uncomfortable territory where you will have to become a marketer. You're going to have to become more cunning, sly, and understand how to talk to people. Okay, so that
16:14 being said, let's jump into some financial modeling so that we understand each key conversion point in the funnel system. Okay, so the first thing we need to track is how many downloads convert to signups. Okay, so if we have a,000 downloads and only 800 of them create an account, then we know that this download to sign up rate is 80%. Okay. Then out of signups, so we have 800 signups, how many of them make it to the payw wall? So let's say out of 800, 400 make it to the payw wall. Say we have a really bad uh onboarding flow or we have a really bad um user experience for our signup and only 50% are making it to the
17:01 payw wall. That's actually not good. You want this to be closer to 75%. Okay. Then out of the people who make it to the payw wall, how many actually start a trial? So 400 paywall views, let's say we convert 25% of them, that's 100 trials. Okay. If we convert 100 trials, that's a 25% trial start rate. Okay. Now, we need to convert those free trials, those 100 trials into paying customers. Let's say we convert 30 paying users. And that's a really good conversion rate actually. 30% um trial to paid. It's a really good rate. Okay. Then we can calculate, okay, 30 time say $100 a year is $3,000. That's how much
17:49 money we made on this funnel. And in a funnel, you just put money into the top. So, let's say we bought, I don't know, sake of numbers, $1,000 worth of ads or a IG shoutout, um, or a newsletter blast or something, and we put $1,000 into this machine. Okay? $1,000 in dink. And this takes people down the funnel, right? Dink. And we end up here. I messed that one up. Oh, there you go. Our goal is to make more than $1,000 right here when we get the money. So, we put $1,000 into this machine and if 3,000 comes out, my friend, we have a profitable business. Our goal then is to spend as much money top of the funnel
18:36 and just keep juicing out money until we need to fix it. And there's going to be a lot of other variables that come up in that process like hiring influencers, running ads, you know, testing different creatives. It's not um cut and dry, but it's absolutely doable. And I teach it all inside of my Dreams into Apps program. So, if you want to build an app, but not just an app, you want to build a cash flowing business, I'll teach you one-on-one how you can turn your app into a successful startup, you can work with me one-on-one inside of my Dreams into Apps Accelerator. There is a link to apply in the description right below. But if you don't want to apply, that's totally cool. I'm still gonna be posting insanely juicy, valuable content that I wish I knew 10 years ago when I first started building my software businesses. I would have been a lot more
19:22 richer. But if you take something away and you start making money from this, I still did my job. Thank you so much. In return, I just ask that you like and subscribe. All right, so that is your funnel, right? That's conceptually how your funnel works. Now, I'll show you the financial model part of this. Okay, financial modeling is a fancy word, but essentially it just means to track things in a sheet, to keep track of all the data. If you're not measuring, you're not scaling and you don't know what's broken, I can't tell you enough, if you overco complicate your app and you have all of these different directions that a user can go down and all these different buttons and all these different features, you won't know what's broken and you won't know what to fix. every successful app doing hundreds
20:09 of thousands of dollars on screens design. Notice something. They are all sequential. They're all funnels. It's one step at a time all the way through. I hope you see that pattern. They're not taking me down all these forks in the road. They're all very isolated individual paths that they take a user down um and they can measure them and they know if something breaks in between. They have these mix panel reports here where they can see where in the funnel something fell off. All right? And I'll even teach you how to set up these funnels for your app business as well. This is where the money is made. You don't want to be guessing. You want to be looking at data. And that's how you make datadriven decisions. So, here is a sample financial model that I actually pulled
20:54 from our real financial model that we're using for Closure Coach, which is an AI sales training app that I'm currently scaling with paid ads. All right. Right now, this is the data that we're looking at. There's a couple more things, but to simplify it, to give you a starting point, this is all you need to look at. Okay, how many people download and sign up? How many get to the payw wall? What percentage of payw wall start a trial? Then we look at cost per trial. Okay, how do we do that? We do that by dividing the our marketing spend or our ad budget by the number of trials. So it's ad spend divide by number of trials. Okay, that's the formula for this. All right, ad spend divide by number of trials. Then if we
21:41 get 30% of those trials to paid, that means our CAC our cost of customer acquisition for the annual plan or say whatever subscription plan that you offer is um $33, right? 30% of people who who who take a trial are converting, which means that out of every 10 trials, we convert three of them. That brings our cost of acquisition to 33 and we charge $100 a year, which makes our net proceeds after fees. So, uh, App Store takes 30%. I don't know why that said 68. Um, which means we're making $70 after fees, which brings our net profit to $37. Can you see how that's profitable? I put $33 in, I get $37 out. Then you have
22:28 something called your uh LTGP, LTGP to CAC ratio. This is what Alex Hermoszi talks about, lifetime gross profit to CAC, the ratio of how much money you make to the money that you're putting in. So this means for every $33 I spend on marketing, I'm making $37 profit. We can then calculate what's called return on ad spend as this. For every $33, I'm making $37 net profit. All right. So, that would make our net proceeds 70. All right. So, what I'll do is I'll say um
23:13 ad spin divided by net proceeds. Oop, sorry, I'm actually wrong. Net proceeds divide by ad spend. 2.1 is our rorowaz, our return on ad spend. Anything over one means you're profitable. This is a fantastic number in the world of mobile apps and in SAS. And you're likely not going to hit this right away. But with some iteration and with some testing budget, you can get through what's called the learning process of mobile app ads and achieve this sort of ad or return on ad spend. Ideally, you just want to be over one. If you're over one, it means you put a dollar in and you get more than a dollar out. But for here, we want to be at at least 2 to one because this um
23:59 takes net proceeds after fee or excuse me, this is net proceeds after fees. So, this is actually gross rorowaz. So it's it's on our uh gross profit. So it's it's actually a really good number. Um sometimes you can even take rorow people take rorowaz like as the total money they're making. So if you do um 100ide by 33 this is going to be close to three. A 3 to one rorowaz is insanely good. I just don't personally like looking at that. I like looking at how much money I'm actually taking home into the bank account. So, I'm looking after 30% app store fees. Like, that's the that's the real rorowaz that I care about. I'm not going to fool myself and look at an arbitrary number that doesn't make any sense for the business. I want to know how much money my bank account
24:44 is getting hit with. So, your gross rorowaz is 2.1. And this is fantastic. All of these numbers are super achievable if you have a good structured ad creative, which is super easy to do nowadays because ad creatives can just be copied, can be referenced, can be stolen. You can hire uh an a uh influencer on a site like Billow. Uh Billow is where we hire our UGC creators. We pay them a hundred bucks. Um and it doesn't look like I can show you the landing page, but right here it's a marketplace for finding creators. You can pay somebody a h 100red bucks on here and get a high converting ad creative. Okay. Um that's super easy to do. and building a product. Now with AI, no code, Flutterflow, Lovable, Replet, it's super
25:31 easy to build an actual software, but structuring the funnel, that's where the business mindset comes in. That's what we help with at Ambbitious Labs. So getting a um a creative is easy. Structuring your funnel just takes a little bit of science, but you can definitely structure it. And then um having a well-designed payw wall, you can just copy it from a high-converting app on screens design. Your job is just to find a specific problem that you want to solve for someone. Find a niche or a market that you're passionate about. Find a group of people who need a problem solved, who are already looking for a solution. Place your product under that. Run the funnel. I've given you the entire playbook here. You run the funnel. You put some money into marketing. You let people download the
26:16 app. and you just do math. Your job is to look at this every single week. What I would do is literally copy this and go, you know, week of August 4th, then you would do week of August 11th, week of August 18. And you would fill these numbers in every week at the end of the week and just find one to fix. and just repeat that process every single week until you have a high converting funnel and your rorowaz is over one. Yes, you're gonna invest a few hundred dollars, maybe a few thousand dollars into ads, but the second you crack it, you can scale it to the moon and it's just always going to be making you money. And once it's cracked, your app is worth significantly more. There's a bigger pool of buyers out there who want
27:02 to put money into your uh proven funnel. and you'll know it yourself when you start seeing the the numbers go up over 100% rorowaz, you're going to want to put more money into it. Okay, so that's the basics of math, financial modeling, and unit economics. I couldn't have given you a more comprehensive crash course on that. Now, lastly, we talk about traffic. All right, traffic is the hardest part. Traffic is how you get people to start getting into your funnel, right? We can all build a funnel. We know how to build a funnel now. We know how to set up the math. But how do we get users to download? All right. Well, there's four key ways, and I even talked to you about my influencer uh partnership strategy that you could totally implement. But the other four ways range in skill level and uh
27:49 investment criteria or investment requirements. ASO is super easy. It's just app store search and optimizing your keywords to get people to download your app. Uh my app gets downloads from all over the world and app stores are really really good at indexing your app for other countries. For example, my AI sales trainer app was like top 100 in um like Australia for a while and like people from Australia were downloading like crazy. It was pretty interesting. Uh and then it also went viral in the UAE and the UAE has a really good uh market for sales. So the app stores will kind of just work its magic for you. your job is to run an app store optimization analysis. You can use tools like app figures to do the keyword research. Um, inside of our growth
28:35 program, we actually will do all the keyword research for you. So, if you're somebody who's already have if you're somebody who already has an app launched, um, you can work with us inside of our grow program and we'll coach you through how to optimize, rebuild your onboarding flow. We even ask if we have if we can get the opportunity to invest into your ad spend. We recently just partnered with an edtech founder inside of our program who just enrolled in the growth accelerator and uh I'm really excited about the specific education um problem that he's solving and we may even be investing in him long term. But anyways, you can come over to app figures um and then do your keyword research here using uh the app uh figures tools, not the keyword explorer, but you can do the keyword inspector and actually look for
29:20 uh keywords to rank for. All right. All right. Then you have organic, which is like short form and YouTube videos. I think short form and YouTube videos are fantastic ways to build organic um you could do like educational content. You could do um viral type content. You could hire viral creators. You could work with viral influencers. Um there's a lot of stuff that you can do on organic and your conversion rate is going to be a lot higher if you go organic. Influencers. This is definitely a great strategy. you need to start contacting influencers like now if you want to get with them. I love the partnership model like the equity model here or you can even do um retainer or even just pay for shoutouts. I love having people incentivized. I love growing with people, making other people rich. That's how the biggest companies
30:07 and the biggest entrepreneurs in the world think. They bring people with them and they all get rich together. The entrepreneurs who don't last are the ones who create too big of a gap between them and then their next employee or their next direct report. Like the best entrepreneurs are bringing people together. And so if I'm you, I'm not looking at how to be greedy. I'm looking at sharing the wealth and bringing people together. My entire team at Ambbitious Labs, all of my business partners, everybody I've done business with, we've always had equity in the project. We've always been incentivized on the upside. We don't want to pull a quick one. We are good people. We trust each other. We have ethics and morals and we just want to go for the long ride. And that's my uh piece of advice to you. All right. Then you have paid ads. Paid ads are expensive but highly scalable. My recommendation is that you
30:53 build the funnel, you put a little bit of time into app store optimization, organic, and just getting a little bit of traffic into your app. I'm talking 20 downloads to 50 downloads. Then you start putting a little bit of money into paid ads. I'm talking $10 a day. If you have a job, $300 a month is probably just one coffee a day if you're that type of person or one lunch a day if you eat out a lot. Like, just don't eat out. Eat at home and invest $300 a month into a machine that could potentially be a 2:1 rorowaz machine where you put $300 in and you get $600 out. And for every dollar of MR in ARR that you're stacking to your app, your in your enterprise value of your app is going up at the same time. I hope you recognize that,
31:40 right? And so, this is a long-term investment. You need to create a small pool of money that you can keep putting into paid ads or you find an investor, a rich auntie uncle, somebody who can front you the 20 to $50,000 to get through the learning phase and turn your app into a profitable machine. Okay? You can learn it all yourself. You can keep track of it because I've given you the tools. I've given you the financial models. I've given you the playbooks. But if you want to do it yourself, that's totally up to you. It will take you longer. It'll be more expensive. Or if you want to fast track and learn alongside me, who's doing it for our own venture portfolio, teaching over 1100 founders how to do it, check out the link in the description. We can build it together and go from idea to profitability and generating revenue a lot faster. My name is Alem. Thank you
32:25 for watching this video. I'll see you in the next
