Romain Torres
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, 100%. As you say, they try to put the keyword in the title and then there are a ton of other techniques to do that. I think a very good blog on this topic is the blog from AppFigures. It's a tool that lets you search keywords and identify new opportunities for new keywords.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And there are so many techniques, like using the title, obviously, is a good one, optimizing your conversion rate on the App Store when people visit the page so that they download and Apple understands that it's good traffic and that the app is relevant for them. Optimizing the number of reviews, the growth rate is important too.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
There is also those minor techniques like when you launch a new app, the first day is actually very important because Apple gives you an initial boost on the keywords and looks at the conversion rate that you get on those apps. on the app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And if on during this initial boost, you get a very high conversion rate on, let's say you, you, you launch a new AI calorie counter app and people, when they search for it and they see you up, they download it. Then you will get like a flywheel, a positive flywheel of downloads and it will keep staying high actually. So the launch is very important.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Other techniques is like these people, they sometimes do ads. not because they want to be very profitable on ads and optimize the ads, but just because they want to have more reviews, more traffic, so that it creates this flywheel of optimization for the rankings. And even though they still focus on the ranking, they benefit from the traffic of the ads. Does that make sense?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And they do these beautiful covers where you see a kid who would have designed his wall in his house with a couple of posters and stuff like that. And he does it from a link, basically from a Spotify link. And it recently popped up on TikTok. It was super viral. And to me, there are a lot of interesting insights from this one.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah. And another one, just to finish on this one, that I think was interesting. I think there was a keyword that was popping world Pilates. And I see a lot of apps that start to rank on this keyword. So I just wanted to show you an example of a new opportunity. I don't know how new and how good this opportunity is, but that's an example of something people identified, and it's growing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And they made an app for that, and they used it in the keyword.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Maybe AppFigures or... Yeah, that might be AppFigures that you are looking for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And that's a perfect transition to the next kind of virality style approach. Because research is one very good way to get ideas, and lots of people get very good ideas from research, not on the App Store directly, but on other websites.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And by the way, I did this simple thing that everyone can do, which is I created an automation that sends me every new app that ranks in the top of the app store in each category. And it's a pretty good indication of something is popping up and maybe there is an opportunity because this app just joined the top of the app store and it's quite new.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And it probably means that there is something there and you can do something similar. But the one I wanted to talk about, UMax, that we already covered, and I'm going to talk about other apps because I think you have already covered this one and lots of people have covered it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But it's interesting because they discovered about the idea because it was popping on Reddit and TikTok, like the looks maxing trend, which is like how to maximize how you look as a man, was something that was popping on Reddit and TikTok. And That's how they got the idea of the app. So it didn't come from the app store. They didn't see the keyword popping in the app store.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
It came from other software. So a hundred percent, I think like using, and that's what we did with the text to speech app, like finding trends that are outside of the, of the app store, uh, but that are already proven to work. on the web is a very good way to go. There was recently this Suno AI product, which creates AI song from text.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And a ton of apps have been created basically replicating this idea in an app using the APIs of Suno AI or other APIs. So yeah, 100%, that's a very good way to spot a trending app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Another very interesting one. I think it's quite small still, but it's an app that I've seen trending recently that is very smart about the organic marketing strategy. So again, that's the second strategy that I've seen people do. And it's basically about How do you manage to get free traffic basically from TikTok or Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts, basically short videos platforms?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
One, it's very hard to come up with a way to consistently come up with good ideas, because this one is so unique, such a unique idea. The second one is this app does something that is very that is very important when you are thinking about a new app idea, is that they embedded the marketing flow inside the concept of the app itself.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
showing your product in a smart way that feels organic and that would get a lot of views and so this app is basically an app to find people to travel with and i think it's over optimized in terms of monetization they are very good at acquiring users but the second part of like how do you monetize the app they could do much better and it could be much more profitable
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But what they do is basically they do those reels on Instagram that are very native to the platform. They really don't look like ads. They just look like content you would watch on Instagram, right? Traveling, dolphins, beautiful people, stuff like that, that will just do very well on Instagram anyways. And they include the app in the video.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So this one, how can I find friends that I can do cool shit with? They put some music and then they show the app and they integrate it in a very smart and organic way. And they just post again and again and again on their own account. And they found a way, like a repeatable way, because they basically do the same video again and again and again.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
They have a repeatable way to have peaks of downloads for the app and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah. A hundred percent. Uh, that's, uh, what lots of these people do. I mean, sometimes they are very good at content themselves. For this specific case, I don't know. Sometimes they aren't very good at creating content. And there is this guy who has an app, Parallel Live. He basically creates fake lives.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And when you open the app, it looks like you are having hundreds of followers or thousands of followers in a live session. And it's he does very good organic videos and he goes viral repeatedly. And he's the one, the founder is the one making the videos.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And there is like this dating app recently, also a French app, Gigi, the CEO, she raised money with Sequoia and she has a team, but she still creates content for her on TikTok and with her own face and is doing super well. So sometimes they do post themselves because they are very good at content, but sometimes indeed they outsource this to other existing creators.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
A cool example I've talked about recently on Twitter is like, a young kid who created a calorie tracking app. So AI calorie tracking app looks like a terrible idea that tons of people have done already. This is really interesting.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, it's crazy to me. So the guy is 17 years old. He... created that's the i think the second app he creates the first one was an alarm clock uh from like people who wake you up, like David Goggins, like wake you up to so that you are motivated. And he reached out to me and I was like very impressed by this idea. And then he came back with another idea, which is what the calorie tracking app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And in my mind, I felt like, don't do it. That's the worst idea ever. Like there are already a ton of calorie tracking apps, like MyFitnessPal that's on all the real estate for the ASO, but he still did the app and he did amazingly well so let me show you the app so then the app name is cal ai and It looks like he's working on a new app, which we can see here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So basically, when you create this wall with the app, and I don't even know how to call it. I think they call it vision boards. with the Spotify link, then what to do next with it. And the next step is basically to share it with your friend, either share it directly through iMessage with the link. And they did this very well done invite flow where you can show the exact app
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
He released a new app on September the 16th. But yeah, the app we are interested about here is the first one. But watch closely the second one. It's probably going to do super well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Exactly. Yeah, that's crazy. So the way you can research this one for the listeners who want to understand how they did it and I can quickly go through it is basically to search on Instagram and TikTok in the search bar, like stuff like Kalei. Let's show them exactly how they did it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
All right. So we are going to look at Instagram and then looking to the TikTok. So that's the Instagram account. And in this case, I'm pretty much confident that they didn't post most of the content. Most of the content was other small micro influencers who didn't necessarily have big audiences. But the beauty of this channel, TikTok Organic, Instagram Organic, is that now you can...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
do a lot of it and get a lot of views without having so many followers because the platforms want to push the content. And then they want to push creators to create more and more. And you can get rewarded by the platform by just making very good content. And so on this case, I'm looking at the Instagram account because most of the time they are tagged in the videos or they post together.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So that's a good way to identify who posted those videos initially or to try to trace back the actual micro-influencers they used. So probably they found this guy and paid him to create content like this. Super simple content, gym content, I understand. And the goal of the video is, one, to understand how to go viral on Instagram or TikTok Reels. So how to make very good videos that...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
even if you don't promote it, will get a lot of views. But then you also want to integrate your app inside the video, which is the hard part. Basically, you have to figure out a way to be very good at getting views, but also be very good at converting those views into downloads. And you don't even need to put a link or whatever.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Most of the time, people just close the app, go to the app store, and search for the name of the actual app. Uh, the more organic you are, the better it can do. Sometimes they don't even put the name of the app in the video and people find them in the comments. Um, so that's the strategy. Now let's try to find, um, the videos on Tik Tok. I'm looking on another screen. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Again, we see a lot of content from their account, but also content from other accounts and. This one might be interesting. So basically they show, so it's an app that you take a picture of your meal and it will tell you how many calories you have in it. And I'm not sure if this is Kalei actually or a competitor, but basically they probably do the same strategy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
They found this account and they probably paid them a couple of hundreds of bucks or a couple of thousands of bucks. And then the video did super well organically. So usually it's like being a VC, right? You invest in 10 startups, nine will fail, and one will pay for the dividends of all the other startups. TikTok organic is kind of the same.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
It's the lottery, but the more you do it, the more you understand what's going to go viral. So you try to find a lot of creators, try to have them post content. Hopefully one of these content will go viral. And then you try to replicate the formula of what was going viral with these specific creators. It makes sense, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Correct. Yes. They will also do some paid and we can talk about that too, by the way, of how to grow. And that's the founder. So it looks like he creates content himself in this video. So this guy is making like 300 or 400K per month with the calorie tracking.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
like the design that you have made, and send it to your friends. Or even through TikTok, because kids, those days, they are creating more and more content. And they are on TikTok themselves. And it's very easy to share those on TikTok. So I think it's a very good example of an app that, from day one, and they were released early September. I was checking on Sensor Tower. The app just got released.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Exactly. He's tweeting all the time pictures of himself in the school class and telling about the teachers, telling him he should listen more. That's so funny to watch. Do you want me to go through the first strategy, like the paid ads one?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, perfect. So let me think about a good example for this one. Let's go to Sensor Tower again. And I think we could look at this Turkish company, Codeway. So they have a, let's start with this one, actually. So this one is a plant identifier app. The name of the app is Picture This. They own multiple apps, including three or four planet identifiers. And this one is huge.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
With just one single app, they make $7 million of revenue per month. So that's huge. It's huge. It looks like a very small niche, but they are making a ton of revenue on this one. It's like almost 100 million revenue per year that they are making with these apps. And 90% of it comes from the first picture of this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, it just made the product work, right? It just made it better. And yeah, as you said, same for the calorie tracking apps. Well, I remember a lot of apps where you can take a picture, but they just didn't work before AI. So let's look at the ads. And now the thing I want to highlight here for these
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
plant identifier apps, and I'm not even sure this is the same app or another one, but they iterate like crazy on ads. They don't just do a couple of ads and see if it's profitable because most of the time it won't. If you just start running ads, you do 10 ads and you get a lot of views, a lot of downloads, But to be profitable, you need to be crazy about optimizing every single detail.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And this is what we did in our previous company. PayDad was our main channel to grow our apps.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
are not doing like tens of ads every month you are trying to do like thousands of ads every month to find profitability because you need to find the perfect angle to promote the product and as you can see here they tested like 30 000 videos which is like an enormous number of creatives to test and again in the same way as now they can do this product and now it works with ai
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And they already got millions of visitors on the website, and it's just the beginning. And yeah, it shows how important it is to think about the marketing funnel when you do an app, even before building new features and building the products.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
That's pretty much the same thing for marketing. They can now test 30,000 ads. The only kind of teams that were able to do that in the past, like maybe five years ago or three years ago, even two years ago before AI basically, were the gaming studios. Like if you look at companies like Candy Crush,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Or companies like King and companies like that, they were already testing a ton of ads before AI because you only needed a computer to promote your product. You basically need to get some screen record of the game and maybe add some text overlay on top of it. And this was possible without AI, even though now AI makes it even easier.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But the opportunity I see here for mobile apps is that now with AI, you can do the same strategies that they did in gaming, which is you create all of your ads from a computer. You basically think about the ad and you don't need to hire an actor. You don't need to talk to anyone to make it happen. You can do everything with like...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
a tool like ArcAd, which is my company that I'm doing now, or just text-to-speech with tools like 11Labs, and then using a video editing tool that everyone can use, like even a seven-year-old can use now, and match the pieces together to make a very good ad. So do you want me to quickly go through how to make those actual ads or maybe another example of companies like that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Exactly, exactly. And that's what led us to create ArcAds because we really loved making apps and it was a very profitable business.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But now we saw this opportunity as even bigger because now all of those app studios, and we are actually not working only with apps, obviously, but all of those companies, they are looking for ways to scale the creation of ads and AI makes it like 10 times faster and 10 times easier to create ads. at scale. So maybe let me share my screen.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And we are going to go to ArcHeads, which is the tool we created to help people do that. So it's quite simple. So basically, the way it works is you have this white empty box right here where you write your script. So let's say you want to promote a plant identifier app. You would say something like, hey, I always have issue finding the best plant. And maybe you want to try this idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And you would write a script. So basically, you will type a script right here. And then you would go through a library of plants. hundreds of actors. So you would have people in every situation, every age, every demographics. So I don't know, if you are doing a calorie tracking app, maybe you want to select people in the gym and generate a video of someone in the gym.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So maybe we can look at preview here. And so you can select one or multiple actors. Click Next. Maybe listen to the preview of how they speak. Click Generate. And just like that, in a couple of minutes, you will get your videos that will basically match the script that you wrote right here. And it will look something like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And now, if you want to promote your app and try 20 different angles in one day, it just takes you maybe an hour to figure out 20 ways to promote the app and generate the 20 videos, and maybe then put them into an editing tool and add some screenshots of the app, remove the background behind the actor, which can now be done with one click with AI again, and just make 20 final ads.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
that you can test today and you will see that one of them will do like two times better than the other ones. And then that's the starting point for you to iterate and to make a lot of different angles, different variations until you find the one that is winning for you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
A hundred percent. Yes. Uh, that's what, uh, I'm going to show you, uh, maybe a last example of that, but that's the next step to scale. So if you are just starting out, obviously I would recommend starting on the U in the U S because not only the market is bigger, but the conversion rate for subscription apps is much higher in the U S people tend to pay much more, uh, for, for, for these apps. So
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
The step one is to make it work in your initial market. But step two, then once you have done that and you kind of hit a ceiling in terms of like how many people you can reach is to basically do the same thing. Take the ads that are working in the US and localize them in every single country. This company is very interesting. So it's one of our clients for ArcAds, and they do a ton of AI ads.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And this is a Turkish studio. They make $8 million of monthly revenue with a ton of apps like cleanup, phone storage, cleaner. Again, as you said, ideas that are not very new. And I think sometimes they acquire existing apps online. sometimes ideas that aren't quite new, like the AI Tutor, Math Helper, or AI Art Generator.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And then they use AI to do a ton of ads to iterate on not only the angles, as we just saw before, but also the languages, trying to do the same ad in Spanish, French, and every single location where there is opportunity.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Follow ASO to localize the app and rank better on search, which is something that some people might not bother doing because like they don't care about adding an additional 20 K or 50 K of monthly revenue, but maybe you do. And that's a cool opportunity.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, 100%. I've seen so many people do well. And actually, we did a weight loss app for women. It was our approach to niching down to one specific audience. And an existing app is also a very cool strategy. I've seen so many examples of that. You know, the company behind Tinder, they own multiple apps, like dating apps for Latinos, dating apps for gay people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And it's basically the same app wrapped for different niches. And that's such a very good way to promote. And I even saw one that was pretty interesting recently. So... There is this Bible chat app that was like basically an app that wrapped the Bible and you can talk with it through like a chat GPT-like interface. And it was doing super well. They do a ton of ads and they do very well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But then... new apps in the space started to pop out. And one of those was Bible for Women that is constantly in the top of the app store, which looks like a weird niche. But again, yeah, this idea, as you said, like taking an app that is working and proven to work and niching it down to either a country or a specific audience is often a good idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah, so arcads.ai if you want to run some ads. Twitter, you can look for Romain from Arcads and you will find me on Twitter. And I try to break up cool apps that are popping. And yeah, that was great. Thank you for having me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Awesome. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
100%. And actually, I think it would be more relevant to talk about that because that's exactly what I did in my previous company. We did an intermittent fasting app, like other apps that were nothing revolutionizing. that already had a little bit of competition, but we executed the product and the growth very well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And yeah, so let's jump into it and share how you can embed AI to do that and to grow faster. There are two things you need to nail when you do an app and it's the product, like the onboarding flow, the actual product after the paywall and the gross. And in our previous company with my co-founder Dylan, what we did is we clearly separated the role.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
He was in charge of building a good product and I was in charge of growing the product.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
If you need those two things, then you have a chance of making a very profitable app, which is why it's such a beautiful business. You don't need a big team to grow that. And I think AI can help you in... both of the things. It can help you with the product development. I've seen a ton of kids learn how to code app with ChatGPT. And let's share my screen and show you one example of that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
They basically learned how to code in maybe three weeks or six weeks and build an app that was literally making millions of yearly revenue. And then they use the AI too to grow the app. So let's share my screen and show you one example of that. So the first app I had in mind is Umacs. You probably have heard of this one already. And I think he's 21, 22 years old.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
It's a very smart kid who basically taught himself how to code with ChatGPT and released the app. And the app is super simple. And actually, it's by design, obviously, because he didn't have the skill to make a complex app. But it's actually something you are looking to do. when you do this kind of app because you want the flow to be as straightforward as possible.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So people only have one thing to do in the app, which is use the core feature and then proceed to the payment. So yeah, this one is very interesting because they grew with... organic TikTok. So basically what it means is they developed the app and then they found very small creators to promote the app on TikTok, Instagram, and make viral videos. So we can go into the details of that if you like.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
That's one of the ways you can grow a mobile app. I think there are three main ways to grow a mobile app. The first one is TikTok organic, like these guys. And I can show you a ton of other examples of people who did very well with this strategy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
The other method, which is the one that we use in our previous company, and that I'm going to show you a couple of examples too, which usually are the biggest companies in terms of revenue, is are the paid ads strategy. So basically, you make an app, and then you do very good ads for Facebook ads, TikTok ads, Google ads. And the third way is Apple Search.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
So it's either ASO, Apple Search Optimization, or ASA, which is Apple Search Ads. And it's basically the search result when you type for a keyword in the App Store. And it's also a very good way to grow an app. And I can show you a couple of examples of that too.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And lastly, maybe one last strategy, which is more of the verse strategy, which is not the one I know the most, but the strategy is basically virality, like having embedded in the flow, like an invite flow that is very well done. Some people on Twitter like Nikita do this, they are the masters of this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
I don't really master this way of doing it, but it's also, and usually they feed the product with initial traction through one of the three methods I told you, and then it's like, uh, catch the fire. Uh, it's sort of fire for, for the app to grow virally, which is like something that is really beautiful to which happened to the verse app. Uh, but yeah, I think those are the three main ways.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
What do you want to do? Do you want me to go through every single example for every single strategy?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Because I think- 100%. Yeah. And I mean, I even think with AI, there are opportunities for those viral apps that need like a very small niche of people, like in high school to install the app. Because now if, let's say you want to like get the initial, like the first 20 users, like those one or 2%, it's very hard to get them. Even like-
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Even if you want to get those 20 users, maybe you need to go to the school physically, which can be weird for a 30-year-old to do that. Maybe you want to run a couple of ads, but it's very hard to target a specific audience like this. But now with AI, you could very easily do one ad specifically for Carmel Catholic High School and another ad for another very specific high school.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And in the hook of the ad that you do, You will do, hey, you are Carmel Catholic High School. Did you hear about this new thing that's happening? And it's very hard to scale that if you don't use AI, because you will need to have influencers in every single school. But with AI, and we can discuss that afterwards. It's now possible to even kickstart this strategy of virality.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
But let's start with the ASO one. ASO, so Apple Search Optimization, is basically the art of being number one when people type a keyword in the App Store. It's very similar to search engine optimization, but it's in the App Store, basically. And here, the challenge is to find, when you are thinking about new ideas, is to find a keyword that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Yeah. All right. Let's do it. Have you seen this new Verse app that was popping this week?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
doesn't have too much competition yet, but has enough volume for people to rank on it. And we actually did that in the past at the beginning of, with one of our apps that was like this keyword text to speech. A lot of people were typing in the app store to find apps to like transform text into speech.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And there was some web products like 11 Labs, et cetera, but there were no products in the app store yet. And For some reason, people need an app to do that. For example, if you want to clone your own voice, it's easier to do it with a mobile phone than with a web product. So we created an app that does that. And it grew super quickly organically just with ASO and people searching for it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
I came across another interesting company that does this exact strategy. Usually those companies are not huge because you are limited by the volume of search in the app store. And you cannot do intent-based marketing, which is like showing an ad to someone who is scrolling Facebook and they didn't even know they need this app yet, but you show them that they need the app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
In this case with ASO, you are only looking for people who already are searching the keyword, which is kind of limiting, but it's very profitable. So let me share my screen again and show you an example of that. Okay. So the name of the company is Rimone Holding and Even though they don't do a lot of revenue, it appears on Sensor Tower.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Tell me more. Yeah. So to me, this app is kind of interesting because I'm not sure I can even easily describe what it does. And I feel so old saying that. But basically, it's an app that transforms the playlist, like a Spotify playlist, into something visual.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
I'm pretty sure they do much more than that because the revenue number is capped to 5K on like a... If you do less than 5K per month on an app, it will just show less than 5K. But if you addition all those apps, they probably make much more than... 5K. And so they find those weird keywords like fan noise. Some people search for that. Some people search for green noise.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
Some people search for anime girlfriend AI or noise cancelling apps. And they are very good at identifying keywords people are looking for, but that don't have so much competition yet. It looks like the noise one was a hit for them, because they have the broad noise app, the green noise app, the fan noise app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to build a $400k/mo AI App using ASO, Organic Growth, and Paid Ads
And very often, those studios, those mobile app studios, they repeat the same ID multiple times with the same technology, but with a different keyword or a different marketing. Yeah, so I will stop here. Maybe you want to comment something, but that's one very interesting that I found in the app store.