Yeah, I literally don't know how to code at all. Meet George, a college student who had never written a single line of code in his life. That was until he discovered coding with AI. I truly believe that anyone can build a mobile app these days. In just a couple months, he came up with an idea, he built it, and then he launched it to the App Store. I went from idea to the App Store in one month. Now, that app that he built generates over $17,000 a month. George is proof that with a little determination, anybody can do this. And I brought him on the channel to show me how he did it. And in this video, we'll talk about his six-step vibe coding process that helped him launch his app, the vibe coding tool he uses to ship his apps quickly, and the marketing playbook he followed to grow his app to over $17,000 a month. All right, this is one that you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, real quick, you are about to hear a crazy story about how George, this college kid, built and launched his app with AI. I think you're going to love this story. And if it inspires you, I also think you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. It is our program where you will learn exactly how to do what George did and what he's going to share with you today. I'll talk a little bit more on that later, so let's get into the interview. All right, George, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah, so my name is George Lampropoulos. I launched an app that makes $17,000 per month. I launched within the last six months, and I'm excited to share how I did it today. All right, $17,000 a month with an app in just a few months is insane. What is the app you built, and how is it possible that you can make this much money in such a short amount of time? Yeah, so Wrestle.ai is like an AI wrestling coach. We use video analysis where you could submit videos of your match, and it breaks down what you did right, what you did wrong, and how you could improve. And it gives you drills and actionable plans on how you can actually improve your wrestling. Our pricing is $9.99 for the month, and then $59.99 for the year. All right, so this is my RevenueCat dashboard. We launched Wrestle.ai September 26th. So I look at our MRRs, our MRRs 8,000 from monthly subscriptions, and then the rest are yearlies. But we accrue a lot of yearlies because we attached the trial to the yearly option. Yeah, so we've done over 2 million impressions on social media. Download-wise, I think we're around $17,000. All right, so that's insane that you've vibe-coded this in the last couple of months, and you're doing these kind of numbers. Before we get into how you vibe-coded it, and how you grew it, and how you did all the marketing, I got to understand your background. Tell me a little bit more about you and how you even got into building apps. So I'm 18 right now. I'm a freshman in college. I've always hated school with a burning passion, and I was always trying my own things, trying ways to make money. Then at 15, I had a decent amount of money saved up for a 15-year-old, and I told my friend, I go, let's go all in. Let's make this social self-improvement app. Our app went viral on social media. We had 10k followers waiting for our app. We had to hire three development agencies. None of them got it right. It took us a year and a half to finally release the app, and at that point, the hype died, and we lost just all our money. I had to pick up a job at TJ Maxx to get some money, and I think that that was the catalyst of my obsession with startups, because I always walked around with a chip on my shoulder that I was meant to succeed. And when I saw that my brains won't work, I was like, all right, I just have to be absolutely relentless on how I attack creating things and starting things, and I just got to keep going until something eventually does work. All right, you shared earlier that you tried to work with developers before and build stuff, didn't really necessarily work out super well, but now, as I understand, you've vibe-coded this entire thing, and you didn't have a crazy background in development or engineering. Tell me a little bit more about that. Did you actually vibe-code this app yourself? Yeah, so this all started six months ago around in June. I was scrolling on social media. I saw an ad for a vibe-coding platform called Rourke, and it said I built seven apps in a week, and I go, that can't be true, and I decided to try it out. I don't know how to code at all, but I do understand the systems and how to get conversions from these apps and how to build viral ideas. So I used Rourke for whoever doesn't know is a vibe-coding platform, and I also leveraged a bunch of public APIs out there to build some of the functionality. It took me around a month from the idea to being live on the app store. From June to July 1st, that's when I launched, and in that month, it was just a bunch of attempts with ChatGBT and Rourke to build something that kind of works. Basically, I would try to port the app from Rourke to Test Flight, and there was just a bunch of issues. So anytime there was an issue with Expo, I would just copy the logs, throw the logs into ChatGBT, and I kind of had ChatGBT as my advisor, and it kind of guided me through this whole process. Now, I had to hire out one developer to integrate payments and authentication. I spent the first week of June on Rourke prompting non-stop until I got something that I liked. From there, I passed it on to the developer. If you need something simple as integrating a paywall, that's a super easy task. So I paid someone on Fiverr, like 250 bucks. That took him about a week, and then the last two weeks were just spent dealing with Apple's nonsense and rejections. George is proof that vibe-coding actually works. I don't know how else I can prove it to you guys, but the best part about this is that we are still so early in this whole vibe-coding thing. I truly believe that learning to build with AI is the skill of the next decade, and this is why I think you should check out Starter Story Build. It is our program where we will teach you how to use AI to build anything. You'll learn how to find an idea, build it quickly, and ship it in just a couple weeks. If you want to get in on this and actually build something, I'm gonna put a link in the description to our iOS bootcamp. In that bootcamp, you will learn how to do basically everything George did in just a couple weeks. Our next cohort is starting soon, so just head to that link in the description if you want to enroll. All right, let's get back to the story. The next question that I have for you is, if you were to start over today, obviously you did this in the last couple months, but a lot of people are gonna be watching this thinking, how can I do this right now in 2025, in 2026? If you had to start over, what would be your step-by-step process for creating a somewhat viral app like you did if you were to start over? Yeah, so step one obviously is the idea. I think that's one of the most important parts along with distribution. There's a lot of talk now that distribution is the most important part. I kind of pushed back against that because if you don't have a viral idea in nature, distribution doesn't matter. So in my opinion, there are three pillars for a good idea. Uniqueness, helpfulness, and the gotcha moment. You need uniqueness so it catches eyes. You need helpfulness so it has some stickiness. And you need that gotcha moment that's built into the app that easily conveys what your app does in about five seconds. The gotcha moment is the moment that's going to stop someone from scrolling, think, I need to try this app out. That idea, the gotcha moment, would be in the back of my head whenever I'm designing apps. I go, what could be something that I could seamlessly integrate into a TikTok, YouTube short, whatever, that will get someone to stop scrolling? Right around the time I launched Wrestle.ai, I launched another app in collaboration with an influencer that had a million followers. This app, however, was not a novel idea like Wrestle.ai. It was a concept similar to like RizGBT and Plug.ai. Both Wrestle.ai and this app got around over a million, close to two million impressions at the time, except Wrestle.ai was getting conversions, getting downloads, and doing really well, while this app, Green, that I launched, got, I think, 100 downloads off like 1.8 million impressions. Solely because this app didn't follow the purple cow philosophy, it wasn't something that was abstract and eye-catching. So now, going into the future, any app I build, it needs to be novel. It needs to be something that hasn't been seen before, or else your creatives won't convert as well. So step two is designing the app. So you need to answer the question, who is it for, what type of UI would fit the prospective buyer, and then you need to build out the framework first and then the functionality. So I'm literally answering these questions, who's it for, and what type of UI would fit them, and I'm taking that answer and literally just giving it to Rory. And you also need to have in the back of your head, how could users organically share your app, this way it's not just all ads been pushing your traffic. Step three, building out the core functionality. So whenever I'm starting a new app, I set aside a week to literally just sit at my computer and prompt Rory from morning till night. During this time, you're going to have to figure out how SuperBase works, if you want to implement APIs or not. Work does offer a ton of APIs a part of their toolkit as well, but if you want to add external APIs like a nutrition database, if you're building out a calorie tracker, there's just so many things out there that don't cost much money and will make your app 10,000 times better. So I highly recommend being on the lookout for some good APIs that you can integrate into your app. So step four, onboarding. This is the second most important part of your app. You can have a great app, but if you can't convert the user, no one will know. The onboarding by nature is designed to convey what value you're giving to the user. So the key to making a good onboarding is copying what already works. I would spend hours just studying other people's onboarding processes and applying the things I saw in their apps to my app. Some great onboarding processes are Opal, Kalii. Just look up whatever apps that are high converting, copy their onboarding, and apply the same elements to your onboarding. If I had to summarize the formula for my onboarding process, it would be first to educate the user about what the app does, second, personalize the experience with guiding questions that both set up the app for them and guides them to why they need the app, and then I would try to enact FOMO of them not having the app. And lastly is showing them the gotcha moment, like having them do the gotcha moment, but not giving the results before the paywall. So the length of the onboarding process also contributes to how many people convert. Although it does add friction, it also makes the people who go through it have the sunken cost fallacy, which causes users to at least get the free trial. Step five, hire out when you don't know how to do. The greatest return on investment that I've had during this whole process was probably hiring my developer from Pakistan. A good hire can really change your trajectory. I got really lucky, to be honest, with finding good talent early on in the process. I think a big key thing to do is sell whoever you're working with on your vision, and they will work really hard to get you there because they feel like they're a part of something bigger. And another thing is, I think AI now is the great equalizer of education, with tools like ChatGPT. If you can hire someone that's relatively smart and they know how to utilize AI to learn, not just code, they'll probably be able to fulfill 90% of your needs. If you're gonna hire someone, have them work on a small task that you think they can do, if they excel at it, then start giving them more responsibility. Step six, this is kind of where I'm at now, and it's expanding past vibe coding. So vibe coding is great to release quickly and validate ideas by building out an MVP. But once you start moving past 5K a month, you should start investing in product quality. Now I have contracted designers, and I have some people that work for us, another thing is probably discipline as you start getting these bigger numbers. I actually haven't taken a penny out of this business yet, and I'm not going to take a penny out of this business until we're at 100KMRR. Yeah, so that would probably be my whole process. And now I'm currently in step six, kind of building out past vibe coding, and I'm just really excited for the future. Thank you for sharing that. That's amazing. And it's absolutely insane that you vibe coded this in the last few months. I know a lot of people watching this are saying right now, okay, that's cool, you built it, but building doesn't matter anymore. It's all about distribution. So let's talk about it. How did you market your apps, and how do you think about marketing your apps and getting users and making revenue? Yeah, so my whole strategy when it comes to marketing these apps, it's all been from influencers. Just influencer marketing, quick snapping the gotcha moment, just kind of keep going and scaling that up. I think influencer marketing is so valuable, so much that my co-founders, actually one of the biggest people in the wrestling influencing space. So we launched with him. He was a great first push for us when we released. We set up a pre-order to be on the top charts. So the day we released, we were like 18 on the app store, just from his influence. And then going into month two, that's when we began to kind of saturate his audience, which you always have to be wary of. From there, I took about 500 bucks and I'm like, all right, now that we've saturated Kaden's audience, and we're a little bit known in the wrestling industry, we took the money, threw it into marketing, and generated so far. Now we're at like 13K for this month. I'm probably gonna have to invest another 250 before the month ends, but influencer marketing has just been great for us. All right, so I mean, what I'm hearing from you is influencer marketing is huge for you. Your app maybe wouldn't be where it is if you didn't focus so much on influencer marketing. And I have a lot of questions about that. What would be your playbook if you were starting over today? What would be your step-by-step process to find and land influencers so that your app can generate revenue? Yeah, so I'll break down in a few steps. Step one, if you're just starting out, DM 100 people a day. Step two, the first words of your DM should be paid promo, and then like question mark, or paid promo for your company, et cetera. Influencers get hundreds to thousands of DMs a day. They will skip your DM if your first two words aren't something that's captivating to them. So what's more captivating than basically I will pay? Step three, when starting out, I would bot your personal Instagram account with followers and then pay to verify your account to establish more credibility. Once you start doing a few influencers deals, that's when I would switch from your personal account to your business account because then people will recognize your business account more. Step four, stop wasting your time DMing with them. I think this is one of the most important parts to getting a profitable deal. Negotiating is 1,000 times easier when you're on the phone with someone and they can feel kind of your presence in your voice. So once they respond, text them your phone number and just say, hey, let's hop on a call soon. Sometimes they'll call you literally in that moment. Other times they'll be like, hey, when are you available or I'm busy today? If they say I'm busy today, what's your offer? And they're trying to kind of hard close you, don't fall for it. Just say, okay, just hit me up when you're not busy. They're gonna want your money. You're paying them. It's not the other way around. Step five, closing the deal. The best deals you can make are 20 to 50% upfront for four to five videos with a view guarantee that's based on a $2 to $5 CPM. CPM is the cost per 1,000 views. So when you scroll on your Instagram and you see that they average, let's say, 25,000 views per video, you're gonna make them an offer for videos for 225 bucks. Then you're gonna tell them, but you need to have a minimum view guarantee of 100K views. Now, if you don't hit that guarantee, you could keep posting until you do and then we'll pay you the rest of the money. And we would probably pay from anywhere from 50 bucks to 100 bucks upfront. I would hire a VA. There's two stages I would hire a VA. When you're just getting started and then when you're hyper successful. So people like Cal AI, they need a DM because the founder's not gonna be DMing these people. When you're just getting started, you need to DM so many people to get your foot in the door. So you might as well just pay the cheap amount of money it is to pay someone overseas to massively DM a bunch of people. In the middle, kind of where I am now, I do all that myself because once your brand is established, your response rate is gonna shoot out. So now that our brand is kind of known, I DM off the business account. I scroll for 20 minutes a day, our four year page is catered to the wrestling niche, message as many people as I can in that 20 minutes. And then the next day, let's say I would hop on the phone with all of them and close the deals. Okay, cool. Influencers, I mean, that's pretty amazing what you've done and that's a great playbook. We haven't really talked much about the app that you built. What I think is super cool about it is this like really kind of niche space wrestling. I don't really know a whole lot about the wrestling world. So I thought it would be cool if you could just show us your app, how it works and maybe like how the business model is. Could you show us? So here's our gotcha moment. This is the most important part of the app. It's where you enter the video of your wrestling match, fill out a little bit of information and then you analyze the video. It then will scrape the video for the two wrestlers in the video. You have to pick who you are. And then it will give you a performance breakdown out of 10. It'll give you key observations, stuff you did well, your strengths, your areas for improvement. It'll give you a little like breakdown of your strategy and it'll give you drills to improve your actual wrestling that you can add to your training program in the app. So after that, we have a calorie tracker. We just revamped this thing too. It has a nutrition database. It has a barcode scanner that it has like that CalAI type feature where you can take a picture of your food and estimate the calories. I love this because it almost has the exact same stuff as my fitness pal and it's half the price for their premium. Then we have practice mode. Here it's live coaching and the coach basically explains how to do each move. It'll give you like a little tutorial. Here are the steps. After it'll basically ask you here's how to do the move and you'll take a video of you doing the move and I'll tell you what you did right and what you did wrong. You also have your training programs and stuff like that. You also have a calendar to track your next matches. You have a weight journal. The whole idea behind this app was basically creating an ecosystem for wrestling. All right, cool. Thanks for showing that. That's super cool. It has a lot of cool features. I want to change topics a little bit and talk about tech stack. How did you build this app and what tools do you use on a day-to-day basis to make it run? I know we mentioned this before, but by far the number one tool for vibe coding apps is Rourke. Vault, the vibe code app, Replet, in my opinion, none of them come close to how good Rourke is. And I launched my first app with the $25 a month subscription. I didn't even have to upgrade to their more premium subscriptions. SuperBase is really easy to use as well. That's what I use for my back end and it's around $30 a month. AI inference costs. We use open AI. It's super cheap. I'm paying $40 to $60 a month. ChatGBT premium. Now I don't use this in the actual tech in the app, but if you're not paying for ChatGBT premium, you're behind. I think it's just the most valuable tool for $20 a month is insane. All right, well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we asked everyone who comes on Starter Story. If you could go back in time to before you had the successful app, maybe after you kind of failed a few times when you're a little bit younger, what would be your advice to young George or for anyone watching this that wants to build apps quickly like you? What would be your number one piece of advice? Don't complain about having too much on your plate when you prayed to eat. Back when we were first launching REST LAI, we were hyping up the launch. We had about 3,000 pre-orders, maybe 4,000. The app goes live at 12 a.m. Right before this at around 11.30. The API we were using for the AI was completely down. So I freaked out because our app entirely relied on this. Not only is it broken, not only is everyone going to subscribe and refund. I felt just so defeated in that moment. Probably one of the most defeated I've ever felt. I was up the entire night working on this, trying to figure out a solution. The API gets fixed at around 5 a.m. I click launch, I go to sleep, I wake up at like 1 p.m. And we're number 19 on the app store and we've made over a thousand bucks. We're flooded with comments on our Instagram page of, yo, this app's so cool, blah, blah, blah. It was just awesome. That was a great name. But existence is a pleasure and the hard part is the fun part. You know what I mean? That's beautiful. Well, congrats, George, on everything you've done. I mean, doing this in just a few months and having a really successful app that hits high on the app store chart is insane. So thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing all that. Thanks for being transparent. Showing all your numbers. I think this is going to inspire a lot of people. So thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. I feel fired up after listening to George. What a legend, man. But yeah, that was a really awesome interview. And it was just so fun to hear. Like you said at the beginning, his determination to build this thing. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of doubters online. I'm sure they're going to be in the comments talking about how this is impossible or he has some sort of special help or savings or whatever. But when I see someone like George, who he's 18 years old, he's currently in college. He's doing this in his dorm room. What more proof do you need that this bot coding thing is huge? This is absolutely huge. And I hope that watching stories like George shows you that anybody can do this. Right. And as you said, determination, like he it wasn't that it was easy. Hopefully nothing in this video talks about it being easy. But as he kind of said, AI is the ultimate equalizer. Right. Any answer you need, you can get from AI and you can build stuff with AI. I don't know. What'd you think? Yeah. Maybe takeaways like anything is possible to build now with AI, whether it's Rourke, like you said, or Cloud Code or Chris or whatever the whatever tool is out there. You could do like baseball AI or like pickleball AI or, you know, whatever insert niche thing I've shared on our build channel, like my mobile app building process. And so I'm like, I have maybe I'll maybe I'll check out work. Maybe I'll check out something else. Kind of doesn't matter. It's just like, like I said, it gets me fired up to like go build some stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Fires me up too. If you are also fired up like Gus and I am, you should definitely check out starter story build. It will help guide you through the process of finding an idea, building it, launching it to real actual customers, getting feedback and building. Look, it's not going to be easy, but the process is straightforward with a little bit of determination. I'll put a link in the description to our next iOS boot camp, which specifically if you want to launch an app to the app store, it's going to be exactly how to do that. You're going to do it alongside other people or building cool stuff. That's it for this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thank you for watching. Let us know in the comments what you thought, what kind of questions you have, or anything else. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
