I built probably 10 apps that all failed. Louis is a guy from Canada who spent years building apps that went nowhere. Until one day, he decided to try something different. Instead of just building another app, I studied TikTok. Before writing a single line of code, he found a real problem thousands of people were talking about in plain sight. Then he simply started making content about it and the rest is history. Immediately after building, it hit the top of the app store and in just one year, it made over $800,000. From this video alone, we made $12,500 in sales in one day. This story blew my mind, so I asked Louis to come onto the channel and break down exactly how he did it. In this video, we'll dive into how to find your idea by studying TikTok comments, the simple video he created that generated $12,500 in sales, and his step-by-step playbook on how to build apps if you were to start over today. I launched this app one year ago as a site project and it really changed my life. This one is a good one. You cannot miss it. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Alright, Louis, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story? My name is Louis. I built a makeup app called GlowUp. I launched it a year ago as a site project. It makes around 15K per month right now and it grew from 0 to 100K user in around three days and generated a total of 800K in revenue. Okay, before we get into how you came up with the idea for this app, which I think is actually really, really interesting, I do understand what this app does. It's a makeup app. Can you explain it? Yes, so GlowUp is an app that lets you try makeup looks with AI and the problem we solved is really to help women find the best makeup look for them without having to go and buy and buy it on their set themselves. It's a mobile app, so iOS and Google Play. We do subscription models, so we do a 999 per week and then you get access to unlimited AI makeup looks. So our monthly revenue at the moment is 15K per month. We've got a total number of users, around 2 million people. We get around 70K paying customers. One crazy thing is that we got to number one in lifestyle in the app store and number four in the free mobile apps category. Okay, I mean, that's insane. You had an app that's top of the app store. Before we get into how you grew this thing and the idea and all that, I want to understand a little bit more about your background. How do you get to the point of building apps and having a top app in the app store? I did software engineering for around two years and just dropped out because to me, they were not teaching the right stuff. And then when I dropped out, I really just worked hard and focused on building mobile apps. My first one did no revenue at all, but I just continued building and building more apps. With that, I created a portfolio of apps and then started working for startups kind of two years later. I kind of came back to building my own apps. And then a year ago, I started working on Glowup and now I'm building other apps and writing philosophy books and the site as well. Okay, so one of the reasons why I want to bring you on the channel is how you found the idea for this, how you found the idea for an app that went almost number one in the app store. Before this, you had built a bunch of apps and they got no users. What was different about this app and how you found this idea? So my apps before were more for me. I just had an idea and was building them. And then once it was finished building, I would start marketing, but then I would get no views or no users that would just go to the next ideas and it would be my kind of cycle. But for this one, me and Michael Fonder wanted to create a new app together and we saw that the makeup niche was just super big. So we just kind of started looking at TikTok makeup videos and looking at the comments section. And with these comments, we kind of started doing content around this idea of like getting your makeup look and the products that you need. So we did content first because for most of my other apps before, we were just building and building without showing to user what we had and it always failed. This one, I really just wanted to be sure that we could market it and it kind of just went viral. So we kind of knew that we had an idea that would work. So I kind of just built the app super quickly, super MVP style and then it took like three days to get 100k users. So by looking at comments section, you really just feel what people are wanting and you just try to come in and solve whatever they're asking for. And I think that is really the way we kind of got our success. Okay, so finding ideas through TikTok and validating your idea through TikTok, then creating the content, then finally launching the app is genius. I also want to dive into the actual creating content side of things. Once you do sort of find that idea after doing research, what would be your playbook if you were starting over from scratch to start a TikTok account and start creating content that gets a lot of views? So step one is you're just warming up a TikTok account in the USA with a new iPhone. You just buy a USXM card. If you're in the US, you're okay, but if you're out of the US, you just put it in and then you buy a VPN that is in the US 24-7 and then you download TikTok, you create your account and you start watching videos in your niche, scroll and like some videos, comment on things for 15 to 30 minutes per day and it set up your algorithm to think you're not a bot and you're just someone normal. You do that for around three days. When you're looking for a niche, it's really good to look at hashtags. So for us, we can just look at the biggest hashtags on TikTok and makeup was one of the biggest ones. So then we just kind of start looking inside that niche. So really, if you're thinking of a niche, just look at the hashtags of that niche. How many videos are posted? How many views are getting? And this will show you if it's a door that is open for you to start posting content and get views from it. So step two is just start posting because you've looked at a lot of videos by warming up your account. Try and replicate the trend that works well with your app idea on it. And you do that at first just once a day and you just wait to get the engagement in. And once you see traction after a couple of days, you can post as much as you can four to six times a day. And the goal is really to find a trend that is easy to reproduce faceless if you cannot do video yourself and a way to kind of replicate it lots of times so you can post on a bunch of accounts and multiple times a day. What Louis did in one year is impressive. He basically went from simple MVP to $800,000 in revenue. But when that revenue started coming in, something shifted. He realized that he had a real business on his hand. His app went from a simple side project to a real actual full blown business. I've been there before and while it's fun to build and ship, but once you start actually making money, you have to start thinking like a business owner. And that means tracking expenses, managing cash flow and the dreaded taxes. This is all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes that builders don't think about until it's too late. And this is why we are partnering with zero on this video. Zero is a cloud based accounting platform that works for every type of small business. It handles bills and payments all in one place. So you can make sure your business runs smoothly. Zero automates your bookkeeping so you can spend time doing what you love. Building, shipping and of course marketing. And right now you can get 90% off zero for six months using the first link in the description. But if you want to get that, you got to click that and check it out. Thank you to zero for partnering with starter story on this video. All right, let's get back to the interview. So step three is adding an anchor link. When a video start getting good views, it's a couple of thousand over 100k. You can add a anchor link to the video, which is a download now button. So the user doesn't have to go to your bio and click on the link. It really just sees the video and sees the link, clicks on it and it opens up the after page. Most of our downloads came from our anchor link and it's really useful. But mostly when the video is going viral, if you put it under a thousand views, it will just kill the video. Step four is just creating other accounts. So you do the same steps again. You can do two to three accounts on the same phone. If you want more, you just buy another phone and use the same steps. The more video you post, the more money will come in. So I repeat, we had around seven accounts posting eight to twelve times a day. So that would be my playbook if I was to start again. I've seen that now UGC and influencer as well works very well. It's just it cost a lot. If you have a bunch of money, I would say try UGC, try influencer. If you have no money, just start content by yourself, post space lists or post UGC with yourself. It would be my playbook. Thanks for sharing that playbook. That's amazing. I'd love if you could get even more specific and actually pull up one of your TikTok videos. That went viral. Show me some of the numbers behind this video and why you think this thing worked and went viral. For this example, at this video, that got us close to 48 million views with two million likes. And from this video alone, we made around 12.5K in sales in like one day with 60K downloads. So this video, I think went viral because we tried to really push our engagement a lot. So what we did is in the comment section, you'll see a bunch of people sharing their code or asking for code because in the app, we say to the user, if you invite three friends, you'll get a free makeup look. And user would see the video, then download the app, see that they can share the code and just come back to the video, rewatch it and share the code in the comments. That really exploded the engagement. And we added as well the anchor name around 500K views, which made the downloading the app super easy. So the flow was just perfect for users to download the app, try to pay for it. If they don't pay, they come back and they engage again with the post, which boosted. Okay, we haven't really talked much about the actual app that you built. I love if you could show off the app, show off the onboarding, show what the app does and just give us a quick demo. Could you do that? So the app is glow up. It's just a app that lets you kind of try makeup on. So the onboarding is quite long. The goal is to kind of make the user feel it's personalized. So a couple of questions about sensitive skin, wrinkles, what makeup look you like, what's your skin tone. And these are all used to get the actual results. And then we do ask to leave a rating, a review. Usually they leave a five star review. Then the reviews gets pretty high in the app store. And then you get the results, which is you, the makeup, again, I'm a guy, so the results is not the best. But then you get all the products that you can just buy and the makeup routine, how to put it on. It's kind of the app. So the app is subscription based. So we do 999 per week or 3999 per year for unlimited makeup look. And that's our only way of making money. Thanks for showing that. Let's change topics a little bit. You built this app. What tech stack did you use to build it and what tools run this company? So my favorite tech stack for MVP is Flutterflow. It's a Flutter based local software that makes development super fast. It's kind of like Webflow. You're just going to drag and drop. It's very useful and makes development so much easier. For backend, I use Firebase, Google Cloud Functions, for external APIs with auth and database as well. For payment, I use Superwall and for event tracking, I use Mixpanware. And on a similar note, what are the costs to run a business like this? And what are the profit margins look like for an app like this? A profit margin are around 90%. It always depends on user usage. But if a user used the app, it means they paid. So it's kind of good in a way if you pay for software. But mostly like backend, it's like a thousand a month. AI could be 500 bucks a month. And marketing could be zero if you're posting or more if you're using a VA or using a UGCO inference. Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that being transparent about all those numbers. Last question that I have for you that we ask everyone who comes onto the channel. If you could go back in time and stand on young Louis shoulders, give him a piece of advice. Or for anyone who's watching right now that wants to build apps like you and hit the top of the app store nearly, what would be your advice? It would be to move first and adjust later. Never wait for the perfect time because there's no perfect time. So each just take action before you feel ready to learn fast from your mistake, but from your success as well. And to just keep building and building. If you stay focused and you grind a lot, one day you'll wake up living the life you want to dream about. My other piece of advice is that you can have your capitalistic endeavor and whatever niche. You don't have to be an expert. You don't have to know everything. You don't have to love the idea. And you still have to come back to your passion. Makeup is like not my passion. I don't know anything about it, but it's my capitalistic endeavor and it's lovely to make money out of it. Great advice. Thank you, Louis for coming on and sharing all this being super transparent, open about everything you did. I think it's amazing. Congrats on your success and thanks for coming on. Thank you. I'm going to let you in on a little secret. Building a successful app in 2025 is not about your tech stack or what tools you use. The secret as you're seeing in this video right now is content, TikTok content specifically, and I can prove it. This is the number one thing I've realized after interviewing hundreds of founders on this channel. If you can get this part right, everything else just works. So knowing this, we decided to put together something special for you, a free course that goes over the five different TikTok playbooks behind five successful apps from founders. We've interviewed right here on this channel in each playbook. We'll go over how to find ideas, how to create content and how to blow up anything that you create. This course is 100% free. So if you want to grab it and check it out, this is one that you cannot miss and it will not be free forever. So if you are ready to get serious about content, TikTok, understand how this thing really works, just click the link in the description to check it out. All right, guys, that's it for this episode. Thank you again for watching and showing up every week. I'll see you in the next one. Peace.
