0:02 Yeah, I literally don't know how to code at all. >> Meet George, a college student who had
0:07 never written a single line of code in his life. That was until he discovered
0:11 coding with AI. >> I truly believe that anyone can build a
0:15 mobile app these days. >> In just a couple months, he came up with
0:18 an idea, he built it, and then he launched it to the App Store.
0:22 >> I went from idea to the app store in 1 month. Now, that app that he built
0:27 generates over $17,000 a month. George is proof that with a little
0:31 determination, anybody can do this. And I brought him on the channel to show me
0:34 how he did it. And in this video, we'll talk about his [music] six-step vibe
0:38 coding process that helped him launch his app, the vibe coding tool he uses to
0:42 ship his apps quickly, and the marketing playbook he followed to grow his app to
0:47 over $17,000 a month. All right, this is one that you cannot miss. I'm Pat Walls,
0:52 and this is Starter Story. All right, real quick. You are about to hear a
0:56 crazy story about how George, this college kid, built and launched his app
1:00 with AI. I think you're going to love this story. And if it inspires you, I
1:04 also think you should definitely check out Starter Story Build. It is our
1:07 program where you will learn exactly how to do what George did and what he's
1:10 going to share with you today. I'll talk a little bit more on that later. So,
1:14 let's get into the interview. All right, George, welcome to the channel. Tell me
1:17 about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. >> Yeah, so my name's George Lampropolis. I
1:22 launched an app that makes 17K per month. I launched within the last 6
1:27 months and I'm excited to share how I did it today. >> All right. $17,000 a month with an app
1:31 in just [music] a few months is insane. What is the app you built and how is it
1:35 possible that you can make this much money in such a short amount of time?
1:38 >> Yeah, so Wrestle AI is like an AI wrestling coach. We use um video
1:42 analysis where you could submit videos of your match and it breaks down what
1:46 you did right, what you did wrong, and how you could improve. and it gives you
1:49 drills and actionable plans on how you can actually improve your wrestling. Our
1:53 pricing is $9.99 for the month and then $59.99 for the year. All right, so this
1:57 is my revenue dashboard. We launched Wrestle AI September 26th. So I look at
2:03 our MR MR is 8,000 from monthly subscriptions and then the rest are
2:07 yearlies, but we acrew a lot of yearlies because we attach the trial to the
2:10 yearly option. Yeah. So we've done over 2 million impressions on social media.
2:14 Download-wise, I think we're around 17,000. >> All right. So that's insane that you
2:19 vibe coded this in the last couple months and you're doing these kind of
2:22 numbers. Before we get into how you vibe coded it and how you grew it and how you
2:25 did all the marketing, I got to understand your background. Tell me a
2:28 little bit more about you and how you even got into building apps.
2:33 >> So I'm 18 right now. I'm a freshman in college. I've always hated school with
2:36 like a burning passion and I was always trying my own things, trying ways to
2:40 make money. And then at 15, I had a decent amount of money saved up for a
2:44 15-year-old. And I told my friend, I go, "Let's go all in. let's make this
2:47 [music] social self-improvement app. Our app went viral on social media. We had
2:51 10K followers waiting for our app. We had to hire like three development
2:55 agencies. None of them got it right. It took us a year and a half to finally
2:58 release the app. And at that point, the hype died and we lost just [music] all
3:02 our money. I had to pick up a job at TJ Maxx to get some money. And I think that
3:07 that was the catalyst of my obsession [music] with startups cuz I always
3:10 walked around with like a chip on my shoulder that I was kind of meant to
3:13 succeed. And when I saw that my brains won't work, I was like, "All right, I
3:16 just have to be absolutely relentless on how I attack, like [music] creating
3:19 things and starting things, and I just got to keep going until something
3:22 eventually does work." >> All right. You shared earlier that you
3:26 tried to work with developers before and build stuff. Didn't really necessarily
3:29 work out super well. But now, as I understand, you vibecoded this entire
3:32 thing, and you didn't have a crazy background in development or
3:35 engineering. Tell me a little bit more about that. Did you actually vibe code
3:40 this app yourself? Yeah. So, this all started uh six months ago around in
3:44 June. I was scrolling on social media. I saw an ad for a vibe coding platform
3:47 called Foror and it said I built seven apps in a week and I go that can't be
3:50 true and I decided to try it out. I don't know how to code at all but I do
3:54 understand the systems and how to get conversions from these apps and how to
3:58 build kind of viral ideas. So, I used Roric for whoever doesn't know is a vibe
4:02 coding platform and I also leveraged a bunch of public APIs out there to build
4:06 some of the functionality. It took me around a month [music] from the idea to
4:11 being live on the app store. From June to July 1st, that's when I launched. And
4:15 in that month, it was [music] just a bunch of attempts with chatbt and ROR to
4:19 build something that kind of works. Basically, I would try to port the app
4:23 from ROR to test flight. And it there was just a bunch of issues. [music] So,
4:27 anytime there was an issue with Expo, I would just copy the logs, throw the logs
4:31 into Chat GBT. And I kind of had chatbt as my adviser and it kind of guided me
4:35 through this [music] whole process. Now I had to hire out one developer to
4:40 integrate payments [music] and uh authentication. I spent the first week
4:45 of June on ROR prompting non-stop until I got something that I like. From there,
4:48 I passed it on to the developer. If you need something simple as integrating a
4:52 payw wall, that's a super easy task. So I paid someone on Fiverr like 250 bucks.
4:57 That took him about a week. And then the last two weeks were just spent dealing
5:01 with Apple's nonsense and rejections. >> George is proof that vibe coding
5:05 actually works. I don't know how else I can prove it to you guys, but the best
5:09 part about this is that we are still so early in this whole vibe coding thing. I
5:13 truly believe that learning to build with AI is the skill of the next decade.
5:18 And this is why I think you should check out Starter Story Build. It is our
5:21 program where we will teach you how to use AI to build anything. You'll learn
5:25 how to find an idea, build it quickly, and ship it in just a couple weeks. If
5:29 you want to get in on this and actually build something, I'm going to put a link
5:33 in the description to our iOS boot camp. In that boot camp, you will learn how to
5:37 do basically everything George did in just a couple weeks. Our next cohort is
5:41 starting soon, so just head to that link in the description if you want to
5:44 enroll. All right, let's get back to the story. The next question that I have for
5:47 you is if you were to start over today, obviously you did this in the last
5:49 couple months, but a lot of people are going to be watching this thinking, how
5:53 can I do this right now in 2025, in 2026, if you had to start over, what
5:57 would be your step-by-step process for creating a somewhat viral app like you
6:01 did if you were to start over? >> Yeah. So, step one obviously is the idea
6:05 that I think that's one of the most important parts along with distribution.
6:08 A lot there's a lot of talk now that distribution is the most important part.
6:11 I kind of push back against that because if you don't have a viral idea in
6:15 nature, distribution doesn't matter. So, in my opinion, there are three pillars
6:18 for a good idea. Uniqueness, helpfulness, and the gotcha moment. You
6:22 need uniqueness so it catches eyes. You need helpfulness so it has some
6:25 stickiness. And you need that gotcha moment that's built into the app that
6:29 easily conveys what your app does in about 5 seconds. The gotcha moment is
6:33 the moment that's going to stop someone from scrolling. Think, I need to try
6:37 this app out. That idea, the gotcha moment would be in the back of my head
6:40 whenever I'm designing apps. I go, what could be something that I could
6:43 seamlessly integrate into a [music] Tik Tok, YouTube short, whatever that will
6:46 get someone to stop scrolling. Right around the time I launched Wrestle AI, I
6:50 launched another app in collaboration with an influencer that had a million
6:54 followers. This app, however, was not a novel idea like Wrestle AI. It was a
6:58 concept similar to like RGBT and Plug AI. Both Wrestle AI and this app got
7:03 around over a million close to 2 million impressions at the time. Except Wrestle
7:08 AI was getting conversions, getting downloads, and doing really well. While
7:12 this app, Green, that I launched got, I think, 100 downloads off like 1.8
7:17 million impressions solely because this app didn't follow like the purple cow
7:21 philosophy. It wasn't something that was abstract and eye-catching. So now going
7:26 into the future, any app I build, it needs to be novel. It needs to be
7:29 something that hasn't been seen before or else your creatives won't convert as
7:34 well. So step two is designing the app. So you need to answer the question, who
7:38 is it for? What type of UI would fit the prospective buyer? And then you need to
7:42 build out the framework first and then the functionality. So I'm literally
7:46 answering these questions. Who's it for? And what type of UI would fit them? And
7:49 I'm taking that answer and literally just giving it to RO. And you also need
7:53 to have in the back of your head, how could users organically share your app?
7:58 This way, it's not just all ad spend pushing your traffic. Step three,
8:01 building out the core functionality. So, whenever I'm starting a new app, I set
8:04 aside a week to literally just sit [music] at my computer and prompt ROR
8:08 from morning till night. During this time, you're going to have to figure out
8:11 how Superbase works, if you want to implement APIs or not. ROR does offer a
8:15 ton of APIs a part of their [music] toolkit as well. But, if you want to add
8:19 external APIs like a nutrition database, if you're building out a calorie
8:22 tracker, there's there's just so many things out there that don't cost much
8:27 money. and will make your app 10,000 [music] times better. So, I highly
8:30 recommend being on the lookout for some good APIs that you can integrate into
8:34 your app. So, step four, onboarding. This is the second most important part
8:38 of your app. You can have a great app, but if you can't convert the user, no
8:42 one will know. The onboarding by nature is designed to convey what value you're
8:47 giving to the user. So, the key to making a good onboarding is copying what
8:51 already works. I would spend hours just studying other people's onboarding
8:54 processes and applying the things I saw in their apps to my app. Some great
8:59 onboarding processes are Opel, Cali, just look up whatever apps that are high
9:03 converting. Copy their onboarding and apply the same elements to your
9:07 onboarding. If I had to summarize the formula for my onboarding process, it
9:11 would be first to educate the user about what the app does. Second, personalize
9:15 the experience with guiding questions that both set up the app for them and
9:19 guides them to why they need the app. And then I would try to enact FOMO of
9:23 them not having the app. And lastly [music] is showing them the gotcha
9:27 moment. Like having them do the gotcha moment but not giving the results before
9:31 the pay wall. So the length of the onboarding process also contributes to
9:35 how many people convert. Although it does add friction, it also makes the
9:40 people who go through it have the sunken cost fallacy which causes users to at
9:44 least get the free trial. Step five, hire out what you don't know how to do.
9:48 The greatest return I on investment that I've had during this whole process was
9:51 probably hiring my developer from Pakistan. A good hire can really change
9:56 your trajectory. I got really lucky to be honest with finding good talent early
10:00 on in the process. I think a big key thing to do is sell like whoever you're
10:04 working with on your vision and they will work really hard to kind of get you
10:08 there cuz they feel like they're a part of something bigger. And another thing
10:12 is I think AI now is the great equalizer of education with tools like chat GBT.
10:15 If you can hire someone that's relatively smart and they know how to
10:20 utilize AI to learn, not just code, they'll probably be able to f fulfill
10:23 90% of your needs. If you're going to hire someone, have them work on a small
10:27 task that you think they can do. If they excel at it, then start giving them more
10:31 responsibility. Step six, this is kind of where I'm at now, and it's expanding
10:35 past vibe coding. So, vibe coding is great to release quickly and validate
10:39 ideas by building on an MVP, but once you start moving past 5K a month, you
10:42 should start investing in product quality. Now, I have contracted
10:45 designers and I have some people that work for us. Another thing is probably
10:50 discipline as you start getting these bigger numbers. I actually haven't taken
10:54 a penny out of this business yet. And I'm not going to take a penny out of
10:57 this business until we're at 100K MRR. Yeah. So, that that would probably be my
11:02 whole process. And now I'm currently in step six kind of building out past vibe
11:06 coding. And I'm just really excited for the future. >> Thank you for sharing that. That's
11:09 amazing. And it's absolutely insane that you vibe coded this in the last few
11:12 months. I know a lot of people watching this are saying right now, okay, that's
11:16 cool. You built it, but building doesn't matter anymore. It's all about
11:20 distribution. So, let's talk about it. How did you market your apps and how do
11:23 you think about marketing your apps and getting users and making revenue?
11:27 >> Yeah. So, my whole strategy when it comes to marketing these apps, it's all
11:31 been from influencers. Just influencer marketing, quick snapping, the gotcha
11:34 moment, just kind of keep going and scaling that up. I think influencer
11:38 marketing is so valuable. So much that my co-founder is actually one of the
11:41 biggest people in the wrestling influencing space. So we launched with
11:46 him. He was a great first push for us when we released we we set up a
11:49 pre-order to be on the top charts. So the day we released we were like 18 on
11:53 the app store just from his influence. And then going into month two that's
11:56 when we began to kind of saturate his audience which you always have to be
12:00 wary of. From there, I took about 500 bucks and I'm like, "All right, now that
12:03 we've saturated Kaden's audience, and we're a little bit known in the
12:06 wrestling industry." We took the money, threw it into marketing, and generated
12:11 so far. Now, we're at like 13K for this month. I'm probably going to have to
12:14 invest another 250 before the month ends. But influencer marketing has just
12:17 been great for us. >> All right. So, I mean, what I'm hearing
12:21 from you is influencer marketing is huge for you. Your app maybe wouldn't be
12:25 where it is if you didn't focus so much on influencer marketing. And I have a
12:28 lot of questions about that. What would be your playbook if you were starting
12:31 over today? What would be your step-by-step process to find and land
12:35 influencers so that your app can generate revenue? >> Yeah. So, I'll break it down in a few
12:40 steps. Um, step one, if you're just starting out, DM 100 people a day. Step
12:44 two, the first words of your DM should be paid promo and then like question
12:48 mark or paid promo for your company, etc. Influencers get hundreds to
12:52 thousands of DMs a day. They will skip your DM if your first two words aren't
12:55 something that's captivating to them. So, what's more captivating than
12:59 basically I will pay you. Step three, when starting out, I would bot your
13:02 personal Instagram account with followers and then pay to verify your
13:05 account to establish more credibility. Once you start doing a few influencers
13:09 deals, that's when I would switch from your personal account to your business
13:12 account cuz then people will recognize [music] your business account more. Step
13:16 four, stop wasting your time DMing with them. I think this is one of the most
13:20 important parts to getting a profitable deal. Negotiating is 1,000 times easier
13:24 when you're on the phone with someone and they can feel kind of your presence
13:29 and your voice. So once they respond, text them your phone number and just
13:32 say, "Hey, let's hop on a call soon." Sometimes they'll call you literally in
13:36 that moment. Other times they'll be like, "Hey, when are you available?" Or,
13:39 "I'm busy today." If they say, "I'm busy today. What's your offer?" And they're
13:43 trying to kind of hard close you. Don't fall for it. Just say, "Okay, just hit
13:46 me up when you're not busy." They're going to want your money. You're paying
13:50 them. It's not the other way around. Step five, closing the deal. The best
13:55 deals you can make are 20 to 50% upfront for four to five videos with a view
14:00 guarantee that's based on a $2 to $5 CPM. CPM is the cost per,000 views. So,
14:05 when you scroll on your Instagram and you see that they average, let's say,
14:09 25,000 views per video, you're going to make them an offer for videos for 225
14:13 bucks. Then, you're going to tell them, but you need to have a a minimum view
14:17 guarantee of 100K views. Now, if you don't hit that guarantee, you could keep
14:20 posting until you do, and then we'll pay you the [music] rest of the money. And
14:24 we would probably pay from anywhere from 50 bucks to 100 bucks up front. I would
14:28 hire a VA. There's two stages I would hire a VA. When you're just getting
14:31 started, and then when you're hyper successful, so people like Cali, they
14:35 need a DM cuz the founder is not going to be DMing these people. When you're
14:38 just getting started, you need to DM so many people to get your foot in the
14:41 door. So, you might as well just pay the cheap amount of money it is to pay
14:44 someone overseas to massively [music] DM a bunch of people. in the middle kind of
14:48 where I am now. I do all that myself because once your brand is established,
14:52 your response rate is going to shoot up. So now that our brand is kind of known,
14:56 I DM off the business account. I scroll for 20 minutes a day. Our for you pages
14:59 cater [music] to the wrestling niche, message as many people as I can in that
15:02 20 minutes. And then the next day, let's say I would hop on the phone with all of
15:05 them and close the deals. >> Okay, cool. Influencers. I mean, that's
15:08 pretty amazing what you've done and that's a great playbook. We haven't
15:11 really talked much about the app that you built. What I think is super cool
15:14 about it is this like really kind of niche space, wrestling. I don't really
15:17 know a whole lot about the wrestling world. So, I thought it would be cool if
15:20 you could just show us your app, how it works, and maybe like how the business
15:23 model is. Could could you show us? >> So, here's our gotcha moment. This is
15:27 the most important part of the app. It's where you enter the video of your
15:30 wrestling match, fill out a little bit of of information, and then you analyze
15:34 the video. It then'll [music] scrape the video for the two wrestlers
15:37 in the video. You have to pick who you are, and then it'll give you a
15:40 performance breakdown out of 10. It'll give you key observations, stuff you did
15:44 well, your strengths, your areas for improvement. It'll give you a little
15:46 like breakdown of your strategy, and it'll give you drills to improve your
15:50 actual wrestling that you can add to your training program in the app. So,
15:54 after that, we have a calorie tracker. We just revamped this thing, too. It has
15:58 a nutrition database. It has a barcode scanner. The It has like that Cali type
16:01 feature where you can take a picture of your food and it estimates the [music]
16:04 calories. I love this because it almost has the exact same stuff as My Fitness
16:07 Pal and it's half the price for their premium. Then we have practice mode.
16:11 Here it's live coaching and the coach basically explains how to do each move.
16:16 It'll give you like a little tutorial. >> Here are the steps.
16:18 >> After it'll basically ask you, here's how to do the move and you'll take a
16:21 video of you doing the move and it'll tell you what you did right and what you
16:24 did wrong. You also have your training programs and stuff like that. You also
16:26 have a calendar to track your next matches. You have a weight journal. The
16:30 whole idea behind this app was basically creating an ecosystem for wrestling.
16:33 >> All right, cool. Thanks for showing that. That's super cool. Has a lot of
16:37 cool features. I want to change topics a little bit and talk about tech stack.
16:41 How did you build this app and what tools do you use on a day-to-day basis
16:44 to make it run? >> I know we mentioned this before, but by
16:48 far the number one tool for vibe coding apps is Ror Bolt, the Vibe Code app,
16:52 Replet. In my opinion, none of them come close to how good ROR is. And I launched
16:58 my first app with the $25 a month subscription. I didn't even have to
17:00 upgrade to their more premium subscriptions. Superbase is really easy
17:04 to use as well. That's what I use for my backend and it's around 30 bucks a
17:08 month. AI inference costs, we use OpenAI. It's super cheap. I'm paying 40
17:13 to 60 bucks a month. Chat GBT premium. Now, I don't use this in the actual tech
17:17 in the app, but if you're not paying for chatbt premium, you're behind. I think
17:22 it's just the most valuable tool for 20 bucks a month is insane.
17:24 >> All right. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask everyone
17:27 who comes on Starter Story, if you could go back in time to before you had the
17:31 successful app, maybe after you kind of failed a few times when you were a
17:34 little bit younger, what would be your advice to young George or for anyone
17:38 watching this that wants to build apps quickly like you? What would be your
17:41 number one piece of advice? >> Don't complain about having too much on
17:46 your plate when you prayed to eat. Back when we were first launching Wrestle AI,
17:49 we were hyping up the launch. We had about 3,000 pre-orders, maybe 4,000. the
17:54 app goes live at 12:00 a.m. Right before this at around 11:30, the API we were
17:59 using for the AI was completely [music] down. So, I freaked out cuz our app
18:04 entirely relied on this. Not only is it broken, not only is everyone going to
18:09 subscribe and refund and I felt just so defeated in in that moment, probably one
18:12 of the most defeated I've ever felt. I was up the entire night working on this
18:16 trying to figure out a solution. The API gets fixed at around 5:00 a.m. I click
18:22 launch. I go to sleep. I wake up at like 100 pm and we're number 19 on the app
18:27 store and we've made over a thousand bucks. We're flooded with comments on
18:31 like our Instagram page of, yo, this app's so cool, blah blah blah. It was
18:35 just it was awesome. It was that was a great day. But existence is a pleasure
18:39 and the hard part is the fun part. You know what I mean? >> That's beautiful. Well, congrats,
18:42 George, on everything you've done. I mean, doing this in just a few months
18:46 and having a really successful app that hits high on the app store charts is
18:50 insane. So, thanks for coming on. Thanks for sharing all that. Thanks for being
18:53 transparent, showing all your numbers. I think this is going to inspire a lot of
18:55 people. So, thanks for coming on. >> Thank you for having me.
18:58 >> I feel fired up after listening to George. [laughter]
19:02 What a legend, man. >> But yeah, that was that was a really
19:05 awesome interview and uh it was just so fun to hear like like you said at the
19:08 beginning, like his determination to build this thing. >> Yeah. You know, there's a lot of
19:12 doubters online. I'm sure they're going to be in the comments talking about how
19:15 this is impossible or he has some sort of special help or savings or whatever.
19:21 But when I see someone like George who he's 18 years old, he's currently in
19:25 college. He's doing this in his dorm room. What more proof do you need that
19:29 this vibe coding thing is is huge. This is this is absolutely huge. And I hope
19:33 that watching stories like George shows you that that anybody can do this,
19:38 right? And as you said, determination like he it wasn't that it was easy.
19:42 Hopefully nothing in this video talks about it being easy, but as he kind of
19:47 said, AI is the ultimate equalizer, right? any answer you need you can get
19:51 from AI and you can build stuff with AI. I don't know what do you think?
19:55 >> Yeah, my big takeway is like anything is possible to build now with AI whether
19:59 it's Ror like you said or cloud code or cursor whatever the whatever tool is out
20:04 there you could do like baseball AI or like pickle ball AI or you know whatever
20:09 insert niche thing I've shared in on our build channel like my mobile app
20:12 building process and so I'm like oh this is maybe I'll maybe I'll check out work
20:15 maybe I'll check out something else. It kind of doesn't matter. It's just like,
20:17 like I said, it gets me fired up to like go build some stuff.
20:21 >> Yeah. Yeah. Fires me up, too. If you are also fired up like Gus and I am, you
20:24 should definitely check out Starter Story Build. It will help guide you
20:27 through the process of finding an idea, building it, launching it to real actual
20:31 customers, getting feedback, and building. Look, it's not going to be
20:34 easy, but the process is straightforward with a little bit of determination. I'll
20:37 put a link in the description to our next iOS boot camp, which specifically,
20:41 if you want to launch an app to the App Store, it's going to be exactly how to
20:44 do that. You're going to do it alongside other people. We're building cool stuff.
20:47 That's it for this episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. Thank you for watching.
20:50 Let us know in the comments what you thought, what kind of questions you
20:53 have, or anything else. Thank you guys for watching. We'll see you in the next
