Daniel Kwon - He made $2.2M from building simple apps. Here's how (no-code)

“there was this one video that was already going viral for some other AI writing tool startups. Um, it was a video of some kid getting caught in his class”

“We were really leaning into the emotion that I myself, as a student, felt at the time, and and many students, um, that we were assigned so much busywork during school, and none of it really even led to a good job.”

“I was like the solo UGC creator, kind of faceless, founder-led style content”

“We did test paid, but didn't like the margins on it, so it kind of just ended up being like a passive asset income stream”

“the moment I saw that, I looked over to my co-founders and said, "We need to make a bypass tool." And one of my co-founders, Dante, he prototyped it in Figma that same night”

“some of the newer videos, um, which were made by some UGC creators, that's like a Snap-style caption where it's filmed natively in the Snap app.”

“Our school basically threatened to sue us. We got a letter of intent, a cease and desist cuz we were using their logo on our website, and a couple different schools.”

“there were some competitors of ours that would pretend to acquire us and then just basically take info from us, and we just we had no clue.”

“We made way too much sour candy, so we're putting it on sale. Not the typical junk you see filled with sugar and chemicals, but real fruit covered in real sour.”

“So you can often put a flash sale on an item, and that automatically boosts both the product and the brand on TikTok Shop in terms of getting it in front of people on their For You pages.”

“FinalBoss Sour is a VC-backed company. They make millions of dollars a month, but the content feels like it's being shot in the founder's kitchen, in their bedroom.”

“how how gamified the product is, how they do limited drops, uh how there's a character associated with the brand, they teach so many lessons in terms of product, which makes the actual organic marketing, storytelling that much easier.”

“We just used carousels about fans of Solo Leveling being excited about the idea of the system existing in real life.”

“most of the influencers and meme pages we worked with were happy with like a $1 to $2 CPM, and typically we're looking at around like a $6 or $7 RPM.”

“So everyone already wanted an app, and there were already a couple out, but none of them were optimized. They had no long onboarding flow, no social features. They weren't optimized to convert, actually.”

“These are just like podcast clips of of Bryce Crawford, who's huge influencer in the Christian space. And then there's other clips on the page of basically just hooks that I farmed from looking up the phrase "Bible reading."”

“So Duolingo was kind of getting canceled at the time, and we thought it would be really funny and viral if we built off of that momentum wave”

“we got rid of the AI chat feature and turned it into more of like a custom devotional feature where it would generate a devotional for you, but all the customer-facing copy does not contain AI.”

“we think the bigger play is is K-factor and basically getting people to invite prayer buddies, prayer and and accountability buddies, for consistently reading the Bible.”

“We literally ideated or conceptualized with like AI and just some calls. It was like a two-week build. Two-week build alongside a two-week growth sprint. Yeah, I mean, the app broke a ton.”

“Also, look up phrases that are loosely related to the problem or the problem you're solving or the community you're targeting, and stitch those videos.”