Benji's earlier apps (before Snag)
Film the videos yourself when you can't pay creators; hire an editor on a package deal
Filmed thousands of videos for earlier apps; no results given
What they did
- Stage
- Earlier apps, as a college student with no budget
- Effort
- Thousands of self-filmed videos
In their words
I Built A $30K/Month App: Here's My Exact Process [Idea, Build, Marketing]
Pat WallsAnd building nowadays, according to you and basically everyone else that we talked to on Starter Story, takes four to five hours. So, this part shouldn't be hard. What's the next step?
BenjiStep three would be distribution. So if you don't have money to hire UGC creators or influencers, start filming them yourself. I filmed probably thousands of videos for my previous apps by myself. And then you can find an editor to edit your videos at scale, have a package deal, to run them as paid ads.
Pat WallsYeah, the greatest skill, I think, right now is the ability to create content and know how to get views and engagement in this sort of algorithmic TikTok world that we live in. That is probably my favorite one. What is the final step?
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Interview 100 creators, keep the best 10, pay a monthly fee plus per-view bonus~10% of interviewed creators pass; $1-2K profit per 100K views; one video hit 240K views
- Turn creator videos with 50K+ views into Meta ads; test at $50 a dayOne ad took ~$3K of spend before returns went negative; more videos needed to keep scaling
- Start from the ad pitch, sketch in Figma, then build with Claude Code in hoursGets a working app (no back end) in 4-5 hours; used for 45+ apps
- Charge a few dollars a month for access to free stuff worth hundredsFounder credits it for a very high conversion rate; no rate given
- Email people who cancelled to win them back
- A/B test your paywalls
Tags: tiktok, self-filmed, video-editor, no-budget