My Two Apps Make $150K/Month Each

Inspired by Umax, a looksmaxing app for men built by founders in the same HF0 batch as her co-founder, they built a glow-up app for women focused on makeup, after checking that no app like it existed on the App Store yet.

Moved away from the beauty space (Glam Up) to target college and post-college students looking for jobs, because they have higher purchasing power. Built Sprout (originally PrepAI): swipe right on a tailored job posting and the app applies on the company website for you; also tailors resumes.

For Glam Up (2024) they ran faceless UGC on TikTok and Instagram. She designs the app itself to be innately shareable on social (visual results like color analysis and makeup looks on your face), then tests viral formats and doubles down on the winner.

Work through a list of distribution strategies, 2-3 weeks each: Reddit marketing; faceless TikTok/Instagram content (slideshows, videos, different CTA variations); face UGC (AI UGC or real creators); and, with capital, paid ads and influencers. Within each category exhaust variations (e.g. slideshow vs video, different slideshow styles) and keep iterating until one goes viral, then scale it.

Onboarding has two steps. 1) Interview every creator to vibe-check them and confirm they take the campaign seriously. 2) Put them through a creator course built for that specific app: a Typeform intake, then video modules (e.g. a walkthrough of the team's content bank for creating content), with a quiz at the end of each module to quality-check and confirm completion. She builds one course per app.

Know the app and content better than your creators. Either be your own UGC creator or onboard 2-10 creators and train them until they go viral; once a format works, build a system and scale. Her system: sourcing, onboarding (interview + course), management, then optimization. Management options she lists: Discord chats, bi-weekly or monthly feedback calls, or promoting top creators to manage the rest; at scale add a referral system among creators and growth dashboards.

Match creators to the content strategy: talkative 'yappers' for talking-head videos, expressive faces for reaction videos. Inbound: post application forms in UGC group chats on Instagram, on Reddit, and on sites like Slasher. Outbound: hire VAs to reach out to micro-influencers. SideShift is her pick for recruiting UGC creators.

All apps are hard-paywalled; the scan results (Glam Up) and core features require a paid plan. Business model is a weekly or monthly subscription. Paywalls run on Superwall, revenue tracked in RevenueCat.

Apply consumer-app design principles: welcome pages, onboarding questions that personalize the result (job postings tailored to answers in Sprout, chosen scan in Glam Up), and priming users to convert. Treat the product design as part of distribution by making outputs innately viral for social media.

After Glam Up and Sprout, built two more apps in 3 months and grew them with the same design + UGC distribution system.