Meet The Guy Dominating The App Store

How do you build a portfolio of 30 apps

with over 50 million downloads?

>> Yeah, probably more to be honest. I

haven't really kept count.

>> You build a factory. Ryan's team built a

system so effective it turned one of

their apps into the number one most

downloaded app in the US beating Tik Tok

and Google.

>> We heard of like Tik Tok at that time,

you know, Google, Chrome, all the other

apps that everyone downloads every day.

But seeing the number one downloaded app

on that day was just insane. But the

crazy part, even with the factory, they

still couldn't explain [music] their

biggest hit, a creator who repeatedly

got tens of millions of views for

reasons they still don't quite

understand. Top left one, 66.9 million.

It just went super viral. We tried to

replicate the same video across 20, 30,

40 different content creators. Didn't

work. She did another video back to

back, hit again. I don't know why. It's

just makes no sense to me.

>> So, how do they build a predictable

system around unpredictable results?

First, they built an in-house university

to train an army of 250 content [music]

creators and turn them from amateurs

into professionals who understand all

the relevant metrics.

>> We had a really large content creator

army that we built inhouse, effectively

created our own kind of university

teaching them how to make good ads, good

content [music] for us.

>> Second, they created a three tier ad

scaling system. Every video gets a $20

test. Winners graduate to a level two

campaign with a bigger budget. And the

top 1% of those become level three

evergreens that get 90% of the [music]

ad spend.

>> You might get to a point where you just

have the same video running at level

one, level two, and level three, just at

different scale spends. That was

effectively the model.

>> Third, they mastered seasonal ad buying

arbitrage, spending 75% of their entire

annual ad budget in January when the

cost to acquire a user is 50% cheaper.

The first week of January is effectively

the Super Bowl, the Black Friday of

results where you just have so many

market tailwind wins with you. We would

spend effectively like 75% of our ad

budget within the first month of the

year.

>> Ryan's whole approach was not based

around trying to find [music] a viral

trend or just ride waves of hype. It was

to build a machine that could test

thousands of videos, identify winners,

and scale [music] them systematically.

we could allocate certain amount of

content, maybe thousands of videos

across [music] the portfolio in as

profitable a way as we could based off

of the metrics that was coming off the

back of the the [music] ads that were

being created. And in this episode, Ryan

opens up the entire playbook. How to

build a creator army from scratch, his

[music] three tier system for scaling

ads from $20 to millions of dollars and

how he's now building an AI employees to

run his entire playbook for him. We are

creating AI employees for your mobile

app and then in the background while you

sleep, it's just going to grow your app.

It's going to find problems. It's going

to make sure that they're fixed. This is

a masterass in building an industrial

app growth factory. Let's get into it.

This is the Superall podcast and I'm

Joseph Choy, founder of Consumer Club.

The members in the Consumer Club Discord

and the founders I interview on the pod

build apps at a median of about a

million dollars ARR. In my conversations

with dozens of these founders every

week, one thing I've noticed is most of

them AB test their payw walls to

increase their conversion rates and make

more money. Now, most people know that

one of the best ways to AB test payw

walls is Superwall. But one thing you

might not know is Superwall has a lot of

data on the thousands of apps that use

their payw walls. So recently, they

actually put together a tool that takes

422 profitable paywall experiments and

put those into a paywall experiment

generator where you can upload a

screenshot of your own paywall and it'll

give you an experiment idea to increase

your revenue. You can use it for free at

paywallexperiments.com.

All right, let's get into the pod. So

you have 30 apps in your portfolio and a

few of them have 7 figure AR. It was

Reflectly your first app in the

portfolio?

>> Yes. So, Reflectly was the original app

that was built back in 2017 and then at

the time it was the AI journaling app

before AI was a thing. It was kind of

just a combination of machine learning

and then from 2017 to 2020 uh we scaled

that relatively large. Um mainly we had

just a really good arbitrage with

Facebook ads. Um we were doing micro

influencers at the time. So finding UGC

before it was a hot topic uh is one way

of doing it. Um, so we had influencers,

usually content creators in local

countries speaking like the local

dialect and getting them to convert

really well on Facebook ads.

>> Interesting. So you'd find micro

influencers, but you wouldn't have them

actually post their content organically.

You would just pay them to read a script

and then you'd use that as an ad.

>> Yeah, exactly. So um and and it became

got to the point where it was so uh we

couldn't predict the videos that were

going to win. Um, it was just a

combination of trust that they are going

to come up with, you know, how

influencers are, they come up with the

wildest videos of like babies crying in

the background, bad uh lighting, and

those were always the videos that seem

to catch and work.

>> How much revenue was Reflectly making at

its peak?

>> Uh, app its peak was probably doing

three 34 million AR.

>> Okay. Wow.

>> We were spending the exact same

effectively.

>> So, net net we were we weren't making

massive progress. Um the charts look

great but we were spending a lot of

money to maintain that level.

>> Interesting. Were you going for an exit

because you sold the company eventually?

Like were you okay with the kind of like

the break even profitability or did you

want to get to like profit eventually?

>> Yeah. Well, it's a it's a really good

question. It opens up a whole whole line

of discussion. Um so it was around 2020.

We were hitting these numbers. as we

were growing really fast and we had all

these uh different investors who are

curious and interested in kind of

scaling that and focusing on becoming

like the next calm or the next headsp

space. Um but to be honest we didn't

quite believe it ourselves. I think co

was about to start was happening was

sort of around that time. Um and we

didn't know how reliable Facebook ads

were going to be. iOS 14 just came in so

the tracking got worse. So the ability

to just scale it to 10 20 30 40 50

million AR just didn't seem realistic.

And I think that's kind of a case study

of how we've been over the years trying

to do what we think is realistically the

best idea. And what that led to was we

had another option. So we were able to

acquire a habit app called Done. It's

now called Do Habit. And we acquired

that and it came with a portfolio of

extra apps as well. Yeah. So we we

acquire we acquired this one. It came

with another five or six apps kind of

like as a bundle. And what was really

great about this is we paid uh a pretty

good price for it, but it was quite

undermonetized. Um there was room for

growth. We knew that there was

improvement in like pay walls and inapp

subscriptions that we could make. And so