My name is Samuel and I run three apps making $35,000 per month. You might think you need to come up with a completely new idea, but I just met a guy who does the exact opposite. His strategy is simple. One, find an app that's working, and two, make it 1% better. If it's already successful, I know it's validating. But don't be fooled. He's not just copying and pasting, and in this episode, he breaks down his meticulous method for finding winning ideas and turning them into successful apps. We'll get into where the best ideas are hiding in plain sight, how to validate fast so you don't waste months working on a failed project, and the playbook for researching and replicating successful apps that you can put into practice today. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, welcome Samuel to the channel. Thanks for coming on. Tell me about who you are and what's your story? So my name is Samuel Rondeau. I used to have a full-time job that I quit it a few years ago, and I taught myself to code on YouTube, and now I run three SaaS apps that are making $35,000 per month. Okay, cool. So before we get into all your apps and how they grew, you said that you actually taught yourself how to code. How did you do that? And could you break that down for us? So yeah, actually, I used to be an optician and I had zero coding experience. At the time, I wanted to rebuild a tool I was using for Instagram, but this time I wanted to build it myself using code. I ended up following a 15-hour course on YouTube, and every time I learned something new in the course, I immediately tried to apply it to that tool I was building. So if you just watch a course, most of the time it's not enough because you end up losing yourself in the languages you will probably never use, and you don't really see why you are learning what you are learning. But yeah, it all started like this following a YouTube course, and it quickly became a passion for me. Cool. All right. Well, for anyone watching this today who wants to learn how to code, how to build apps, what would be your advice, what would be your framework or playbook, or how you'd get started? If I were 18 years old now, I don't think I would learn to code the traditional way. I would probably just use AI coding tools, and with AI today, you can literally build like 90% of most apps. So my framework today would be one, pick a real project, to ask ChagGPT what you need to learn to build it. So for example, you go on Google, on Twitter, and you find the product you like, and you take a screenshot of that page, and you ask ChagGPT how can I build just the landing page to start, and three, build step by step asking ChagGPT for help at each roadblock. I would of course ask him to use modern technologies like Next.js, Node.js. That's awesome. What I really want to talk about is ideas and finding successful ideas. You have multiple successful products, and you share with me your strategy for how you found those. Could you tell me a little bit more about that? I'm someone a bit lazy, and I don't have unlimited energy. So I have one rule that is really crucial for me is to never build something that doesn't already exist and isn't already successful, or at least getting some traction. So this way I reduce my chance of failure, and I increase my chances of success. So usually to find products idea, my number one source of idea is Twitter, especially around communities like SolarProno, Indiacare, Berlin Publix, etc. And then I look for things that are working or products that I personally like. Here are my four keys filter. Number one, I would use it myself. Number two, I can see that it already works. And three, they are not spending thousands on marketing, meaning there is a true demand. And four, the product is simple enough to maintain. If a product passes this filter, then usually I'm confident it was building it. Okay, let's go a little bit deeper on that. When you come across ideas online, what is the actual criteria that you're looking at? What are some of the numbers and websites and things that you look at to know if this is worth building and if this is validated? So first, the most important thing I look for traction. The best signal you can find on Twitter is when a founder shares their MRL screenshot or Stripe screenshot. I know that sounds basic, but honestly, it's the ultimate proof that the tool is working and that people are paying for it. Second, I analyze how they are getting their customers. So I use href to check their traffic sources. So are they getting customers only from ads or are they also ranking on SEO? If they are growing with both ads and SEO, that's a very good sign because it shows a strong demand and it's usually easier to replicate that their success. If they rely mostly on SEO, it can be harder because SEO takes time, but it's still doable if I'm patient. And third, I check if the product is technically something I can build and maintain easily. I don't want to build a product that will make me lose sleep, maintaining a complex backend. Simplicity is very important for me. And finally, I ask myself, do I actually like the product? Because there's nothing worse than working on a project you don't care about. If I don't enjoy using it myself, I won't have the motivation to keep going long term. So in short, traction first, analyze traffic sources, check if I can build it easily and make sure I like the product. That strategy is cool and it's amazing to have it kind of all boiled down, but I want to hear how it actually applied to your actual apps that you built. How did that strategy specifically work? So actually the first real app I built was Usartemis and at that time I didn't use that strategy and it was a mistake because I ended up building an email finding tool that had for competitors big names like Apollo, Lemlist and stuff like that. And it was so difficult to maintain. So after Usartemis, I really decided to build something that will be easier to maintain. And that's how I ended up building Story Short. So I saw a post from a guy building a tool to automate a posting Faceless video on YouTube, TikTok, etc. And the numbers were crazy. So I started to investigate is it hard to build and where is the traffic coming from? The really good thing with this one is all the traffic was from Facebook ads, which means I can replicate it literally in a week because Facebook ads, you just have to start it and you have the traffic. So I went for it. I built the tool, launched ads and Story Short. I grew very fast. So with Story Short, it was 100% the process I described earlier and validated the idea. I saw there a clear demand. It was simple product and it was a market that was personally interested in. Alright, before we finish talking about how Samuel grew his apps to $34,000 per month, let's talk about something a lot of solo founders struggle with design. You've got a working idea. You know it solves a problem, but suddenly you've wasted hours taking screenshots just to figure out how to make your app look good. That's where Mobbin comes in. Mobbin is the world's largest library of real world mobile and web app designs. Over 1.7 million people from Airbnb designers to indie devs use it to find inspiration, study flows and build smarter, not slower. You can search thousands of actual product screens by keyword, flow or even style. Whether you need an onboarding flow, paywall layout or just a clean sign up form, Mobbin shows you exactly how the best apps do it so you don't have to start from scratch. Whether you're building your first app or your 10th, it's a massive time saver. Just click the first link in the description to check out Mobbin. Thank you to Mobbin for sponsoring this video. Alright, let's get back to Samuel. Alright, so I mean on that note, can you break down the three different businesses that you built that are all successful? Okay, so I built usertimes.co. It's a LinkedIn strapping tool that is making around $15,000 per month and has around 10,000 customers. I have StoryShore.ai which is an AI video generator for TikTok and YouTube that is making around $20,000 per month and has around 4,000 customers. And Capacity.so which is brand new, it's an AI coding tool that is making currently $900 per month and has around 50 users. Okay, that's awesome. So we talked about the ideas, we talked about the framework for finding ideas. Let's talk about what everyone wants to hear about which is once you find the idea, how do you grow the business, what growth strategies are you using and how do you know which ones to do. So I always start by running ads. It's always the first thing I do. So I do it on Google and Meta, depending on the product. Sometimes it's better on Google, sometimes it's better on Meta. It's the fastest way to validate and test the market. And as soon as I get some traction with ads, I move to the second part of the growth which is SEO. I think too many apps rely only on ads and never got a single visitor from Google. Of course, SEO takes time but once it works, it's almost free traffic and it compounds. I also use Facebook's YouTube channels to grow my apps. I even created a feature inside StoryShore for this. The idea is that StoryShore will automatically publish daily UGC style video about your product on YouTube channels, TikTok and Instagram. You can create multiple channels that talk about your product every day on autopilot. So depending on your niche, this can bring crazy results over time and it works really well. And finally, I do affiliate marketing. I did it for all those three apps, especially on StoryShore. It's super important because not only does it bring clients at a fixed cost but it also creates virality because I have many people doing YouTube videos about StoryShore writing articles so it brings SEO results and people are more likely to share your product with the early commission. So in short, my growth stack is one, start with ads. Two, build SEO as soon as the abstraction. Three, use Faceless YouTube channel to drag attention also on TikTok and Instagram. And four, run an affiliate program to boost virality and get customers at a fixed price. All right, cool. Well, on a similar note, let's talk about tech stack. I know you don't come from a software engineering background, but what stack do you build your apps in and how do you deploy these? So all my apps are built with the next GS and Node.js for the coding part. I use Htref for the SEO analysis and I use also AI tools for writing articles. So for the SEO, so I was using SEO which is really great, but now I just switched to a new one called Outrank.so. It really automates the writing of articles, post it automatically on your blog and I use myself for deploying my apps, try for payments and yeah, that's it. That's great. On a similar note, people who are watching are probably wondering, okay, you're telling us how much money your business is making, but what's the profit? What's the cost to run this business and how profitable are these? Well, user chemists cost me around $4,000 per month and StoryShore cost me around $5,000 per month. So it costs a bit less than user chemists because user chemists, you have to run instances to automate many things. So it's quite expensive and capacity, I can't tell yet, but it will be quite expensive because we have to run instances to deploy a website each time. Cool. You built a bunch of successful businesses. Some things have worked, some things haven't. What did you learn while building those businesses that surprised you? What really surprised me is that you don't need to innovate. You just need to see what is working on AX in communities and forums and build your own alternative, your own version of the product. If you like the product and see that it's working, just clone the idea, build an MVP in two weeks and launch ads immediately. I think people are always over-complicated this, but simple boring tools are what make the most of money, I think. Great. And last question that I ask everyone who comes onto the channel. If you could go back in time and stand on Samuel's shoulder when you're an optician, what advice would you give him to get started to build apps and make money online? My first advice would be, of course, to use AI coding tools. At that time, there was no coding tool, but today you can use so many AI coding tools that I think that I wouldn't have learned to code. Two would be spend time learning Google ads and Meta, even X ads, as many ads you can learn. Three, launch as soon as possible, skip the boring parts of building a SaaS like the password, user pages, setting pages. Just launch the minimal basic products and run ads to test demand right away. Once you get traction, focus on SEO. It will bring compounding free traffic over time. And even if one day you want to sell the tool, having SEO traffic is also very valuable. And automate as much as you can. Use automation tools, so like Outrank, StoryShots, etc. to automate posting, article creation, as much as you can. Finally, once you have growth and customers coming daily, I would finish the product, bring new features, etc. All right. Well, that's great advice. I love your strategy. I love the business of your building. Thank you for coming on the channel, Samuel. And I hope everyone watching this learned something, and you're going to build cool stuff because of it. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Pat. I love Samuel's story because it goes to show that you don't need to invent a brand new idea. You can go find something that's already working and just make it a little bit better. With the right process and the right approach, anybody can build something successful. An inside starter story build will show you how to build apps the right way. In just two weeks, you'll find an idea, build it with AI, and ship it out into the world. Over 1000 people have already joined and shipped their first apps. So if you want to finally bring your idea to life, head to the link in the description and check out starter story build. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
