I vibe coded a $17K/month mobile app

His co-founder Kaden is one of the biggest wrestling influencers. They hyped the launch to his audience and set up an App Store preorder so downloads would land on release day and push the app into the top charts. By month two they had saturated his audience and moved to paying other influencers.

Starting out: DM 100 people a day; the first words of the DM are 'Paid promo?' or 'Paid promo for your company' so busy influencers don't skip it. When a creator replies, text your phone number and say 'let's hop on a call soon'; negotiate on the phone, not in DMs. If they try to hard-close over text ('I'm busy, what's your offer?'), say to call when free: you're the one paying. His playbook also says to boost a personal Instagram account with bought followers and paid verification for credibility at first, then switch to the business account after a few deals, and to hire an overseas VA for mass DMs at the start. Now that the brand is known in wrestling, he DMs from the business account himself: scrolls a wrestling-tuned For You page for 20 minutes a day, messages as many as possible, and calls them all the next day to close.

Offer 4-5 videos for a fee priced at a $2-5 CPM against a minimum view guarantee, paying 20-50% upfront. Example: a creator averaging ~25K views per video gets offered 4 videos for $225 with a 100K-view minimum; $50-100 upfront, and if they fall short they keep posting until they hit the guarantee, then get the rest.

Ideas need uniqueness (catches eyes), helpfulness (stickiness) and a 'gotcha' moment that conveys what the app does in ~5 seconds and stops the scroll in a TikTok or Short. For WrestleAI, that is uploading a match video and getting a scored breakdown. Around the same time he launched Green with a 1M-follower influencer, a me-too concept like Rizz GPT and Plug AI. Both apps got ~1-2M impressions.

Studied high-converting onboardings (Opal, Cal AI) for hours and copied their elements. Formula: 1) educate the user on what the app does; 2) personalize with guiding questions that set up the app and show why they need it; 3) create FOMO about not having the app; 4) have them do the 'gotcha' moment (e.g. upload a match video) but don't show the results before the paywall. A longer onboarding adds friction but creates sunk cost, so users at least start the free trial.

Plans are $9.99/month and $59.99/year; the free trial is attached to the yearly option, pushing trial users into annual subscriptions.

Spent the first week prompting Rork from morning to night until he liked the app; used public APIs for functionality; pasted Expo/TestFlight error logs into ChatGPT as an advisor. Paid a Fiverr developer ~$250 for about a week to integrate the paywall and authentication. The last two weeks went to App Store rejections. Advice: set aside a week of nonstop prompting per new app and look for cheap external APIs (e.g. a nutrition database).

Hired a developer from Pakistan. Start new hires on a small task they should handle; if they excel, give more responsibility. Sell them on the vision so they feel part of something bigger. A smart hire who uses AI to learn can cover ~90% of needs. After passing ~$5K/month, he added contracted designers to invest in product quality.