How I Build Profitable Mobile Apps SOLO (for beginners, with ai, all my secrets)

in this video I'm going to teach you everything that you need to know to come up with an app idea build it launch it and turn it into a real Revenue generating business without needing to know a thing about coding if you're new to the channel welcome in my name is Alim founder of ambitious Labs I've built dozens of apps all the way from idea to millions of users I was formerly the head mobile engineer at prize pick and now I'm the founder of ambitious Labs a no code accelerator where I teach entrepreneurs just like you how they can build their own profitable apps themselves without needing to know anything about coding so let's jump in Step One how to come up with a good app idea the best quote I heard in 2024 and I'm carrying it Forward is replicate then innovate and that's never been more applicable when you're coming up with new business ideas often times entrepreneurs fear competition and they think that oh if this app already exists that means I shouldn't build mine and that couldn't be further from the truth competition is another word for validation competition is a very healthy thing in business and oftentimes you will see that businesses intentionally will compete with another because they know they are stronger and they can outperform in various areas of the business and potentially differentiate themselves for example you might see two different gas stations on the same intersection you might see something like a Chevron and if you're in the South you might see a quick trip quick trips love to open up where existing gas stations are because Quick Trip knows they can win on customer service good food a selection of great drinks Slurpees coffee and more so whenever they see a busy intersection with another gas station and an open land they don't fear that opportunity they think of it as validation that there is demand for gas and petrol at that area and they know that they can win on their good customer service so if I'm you I'm looking for opportunities on the App Store on Reddit on on apps that might even be just webon apps you can go check product hunt. com to find other apps that already exist maybe they're just on the web or maybe there are apps on the App Store that have poor reviews these are two ways that you can win and build an app that is better in one way or another you can take a web app that already exists and convert it into a mobile app or you can take a mobile app that might be far low on the rankings of the App Store and you could go through the reviews and see where it's lacking there are many many apps built by developers that launch and get abandoned and many times people are looking for those types of apps to really solve their problems and so when a customer leaves a poor review on an app that's actually an opportunity that customer went out of their way to put effort into typing a critical review critical reviews and bad reviews are actually good things in business because it tells you that hey there's somebody out there who was really counting on you to deliver that value and solve a problem for them often times businesses actually look for bad reviews too many times businesses they try to get five stars and five stars and they lure people in to give good reviews but the real growth in business comes from when people give you poor reviews I learned this from my time at prize picks where anytime we we got a poor review we would all as a full Company rally around that review and see what each department had to do from analytics to customer support to product to engineering we would all pitch in and see what we had to do collectively to make sure that the product was so good that that review would lead to 20 more five-star reviews so just to recap how to come up with an idea one look for apps with poor reviews that you can improve on or two look for existing apps that you know you could be better than by differentiating one idea I gave you was to find an app that exists on the web and you could bring it to a native mobile app you can go to sites like product hunt. com another Pro tip is to go to acquire.

comom and see what apps are already in the market for sale that have real value you could just pretty much build the exact same thing as what somebody's already trying to sell and you know hey if I can get the app to meet those numbers the same numbers that are on aire. com you now have an asset that could be worth a lot of money step two let's talk about how to build your app and there are many ways to build software products but I know that the tech stack that I'm about to lay out for you is proven to work it's proven to generate Revenue it's proven to scale to millions of users and so for all the trigger fingers out there I want you to just really trust the experience that I have building software for over 10 years and I know that there are so many different types of people out there you might have a little bit of coding experience you might be a professional software engineer you might have 15 plus years of it experience you might not know a thing about coding so the tech stack that I'm about to lay out to you is friendly for beginners it's friendly for the advanced me as somebody with 10 years of experience I love this Tech stack and now I teach it to hundreds of entrepreneurs who have literally no coding experience and they do really really well with it so trust me on this one all right so if you're trying to build a web application right now my favorite tool is bolt. new it's an AI powered app builder that generates real react or nextjs code under the hood as you are prompting it with AI this is a code level solution so even though you're prompting the app is actually being generated by real code so you will have to be exposed to some real code and understand the ins and outs of how software development works and if you were very new to full stack software development I would kind of try it out get to know how it works but then you should hear me out on this next part where I talk about building mobile apps so if you're building a mobile app I'm a huge fan of flutter right now and especially if you don't know how to code you can use flutter flow to drag and drop point click and build a highquality flutter uh front-end application flutter is the number one mobile app development framework over react native over native script over all these other mobile technologies and flutter flow has built a fantastic interface for any beginner to learn how to use it so if you learn how to build an app with flutter flow you actually will understand the fundamentals of full stack app development and you will know exactly what's going on under the hood so that when you do approach a tool like bolt.

new you'll be a lot more versed in in app development you'll understand the core principles you'll be able to debug and fix problems faster however bolt. new is still fantastic and there are plenty of of tutorials out there and I may even do a full course on bolt um for free on my YouTube channel so if you're interested in learning more about AI app building startups entrepreneurship make sure you subscribe for more free content on flutter based mobile application development and AI powered application development as I'm certain that this is going to be the next big wave and Empower anybody to build their own online tech startups so with flutter you can choose from a variety of databases and there are two databases in particular that most no code app Builders are using right now Google Firebase and superbase if you're a beginner I highly recommend Firebase it's a Json or nosql database that you can easily learn you're just reading and writing Json objects Json stands for JavaScript object notation and it's just an easy way for apps to transmit data um back and forth so Firebase is very easy in that you can read and write data quickly it handles your authentication and your sign up and sign-in Services it handles storage so if somebody wants to upload an image or you want to manage profile pictures all of that is handled on Google Firebase if you're a bit more technical you understand spreadsheets you like data you like a little bit of a challenge superbase will be a good fit for you it has authentication storage just like Firebase but the main difference is that the database is actually a SQL database which is just like a spreadsheet it uses columns and rows instead of like a Json object that you just read and write um to a database like Firebase okay so if you're a bit more technical you like data you have experience there superbase might be a good fit for you awesome so we've gone through the front end and the back end now let's talk about apis a lot of builders that I talk to at ambitious labs are looking to build applications that either read in data from third parties or integrate with third parties you integrate with systems or read data using something called an API which stands for application programming interface essentially these are the building blocks of the internet that allow you to connect to various applications if an API exists you can easily integrate with it and tools like flutter flow and even bolt. new can make rest API calls and integrate that data directly from the front end however I also see a lot of Builders who want to build their own custom apis and create their own workflows say you want to build an AI powered app or you want to integrate with an existing process in your business you can use a no code API Builder called build chip it's drag and drop pointand click and allows you to create highly flexible apis without needing to know a thing about coding you do need to understand the fundamentals of API calls inputs outputs but once you understand those fundamentals you can build the most powerful automations right now in 2025 and Beyond AI apps are absolutely crushing it and present an amazing opportunity for making money by solving really Niche problems using AI I'm building an AI sales coaching app through my experience hiring appointment ERS to Help Me Grow the enrollments team at ambitious labs and I've been very exposed to a lot of other companies and my friends who run agencies who also have sales teams I realized that a lot of the sales teams time goes into training and a lot of sales managers out there are running role plays every single week so I actually used AI to build an app called Closer Academy it is an AI sales coach that essentially runs role plays and scenarios with sales reps to help them overcome their objection handling skills be a better sales rep improve their close rate and do so much more um that's a really typ problem that I found through my experience that I'm solving using Ai and I'm going to charge somewhere around $24.

99 a month for it or $200 a year to use that app that's just a very small problem and the crazy thing is I'm charging $24. 99 a month and my app is no more than 15 pages it's a sign up and signin system a very basic onboarding that uses my proven self- selling onboarding techniqu which is proven to have very high conversion rates as a user downloads your app and goes through the pay wall there's a pay wall and then there's maybe five or six core screens that's it the root of it is that it solves the problem in the simplest form possible so when you're building with these tools you want to make a simple solution you do not want to over complicate it and add a ton of features when you're building your front end your back end and your apis you need to just prioritize solving the problem at its core getting the app out into the user hand as fast as possible and then letting your users drive that feedback that is the key here cool so now we've talked about the front end the back end apis for payments payments we can use stripe if you're building a web app and if you're purchasing uh physical Goods through the app or you can use Revenue cat if you're building a mobile app and revenue cat is specifically for mobile apps that allow you to just double tap the lock button on your phone and a user can purchase those inapp purchases the main difference between stripe and revenue cat is based on Apple and Google regulations if you are purchasing digital Goods such as access to an app you need to use Revenue cat and Apple and Google require that you go through their inapp purchase protocol however if you're building like a Marketplace app where you're purchasing things offline and you're delivering goods and services offline then you can use stripe So Physical Goods stripe digital Goods Revenue cat if you're building a mobile app if you're building just a web app then stripe is just fine all right let's go into the final part of this video and arguably the most important and potentially even the reason you're here how to Market your app and turn it into a real Revenue generating business we've been working with dozens of Builders every single month at ambitious Labs launching their apps and they always have the same problem they launch their app they get their friends and family to use it and now it's time for them to bust out of that first-degree Network and start scaling their app to more and more users and so I'm going to go over a few different marketing strategies starting from most expensive to least expensive however before you start marketing your app you absolutely need to have have this one thing implemented in your app before you start marketing for traffic product analytics product analytics is essentially a fancy word for saying you need to measure how users are interacting with your app you can use a tool called mix panel mix panel is a free product analytics platform and they offer $50,000 worth of credits for startups and almost all of you will qualify I'll make sure to leave a link in the description for mix panel you need to have mix panel set up and installed on your app and most importantly you need to have what's called an onboarding funnel report when a user downloads your app they are essentially going through a funnel to go from a download to a paying customer and if you follow myself selling onboarding technique that I teach everybody inside of Drams into Apps you'll know what I mean essentially when a user downloads they will sign up and then go through an onboarding flow to personalize their experience almost every single successful app has an onboarding flow and if you design it correctly you can achieve conversion rates up to 35% which is around the conversion rates that I'm seeing industry leading apps which should be the optimal point and one app that I built virally at one point I was getting 38% conversion rate so that means out of 100 downloads I was converting 38% of them into either paying customers or trials so an onboarding funnel flow in mix panel looks something like this and it's going to allow you to track how many of your users are falling off during your funnel you absolutely need this because as an app founder with an app in Market you don't want to be making decisions based on emotion you want to always be looking at the data and you can't make effective decisions if you don't have a report that's telling you how changes in your app are affecting your app's performance over time your goal after you launch is to make your report go from this to something like this notice how many more users are completing the funnel from version a to version B that is your life as a startup founder it will take time so once you have this funnel report set up we can measure how many users are completing it and we can start marketing our app and start looking for traffic in various sources so now let's jump into how to get traffic for your app all right now let's talk about various advertising strategies for you to get traffic into your app number one paid ads paid ads are expensive but they're interesting because it's all about a math equation you put a dollar into Facebook ads you know how many downloads you'll get and based on your mix panel funnel report you'll know hey for every 100 downloads I'm converting 30% of them into trials and out of those trials I'm getting maybe 50% a trial to paid conversion rate and you can create a very consistent stream of of user acquisition and pretty much play the math equation game the downside of paid ads is that you have to have a lot of money to play with it I'd recommend not starting with paid ads unless you have at least $10,000 that you can confidently spend behind pushing traffic to your app and you have the effort and the time to be consistently optimizing that funnel and iterating on it and disclaimer you need to be ready to lose that $10,000 because it could be that you didn't design your onboarding flow the right way you you didn't incorporate the self- selling onboarding flow you didn't you know ask the right questions or you're not marketing the a consistent message from the top of the funnel ad to what's going on in the onboarding flow there's so many things that could go wrong if you do it on your own and you try to just run paid ads um it can go really really bad however if you do it the right way it can be very scalable because it's a money in Money out equation all right number two organic short form this is what most successful Builders are doing right now and I highly recommend that you do this too organic short form means making short form Tik Tok and Instagram real videos and you take shots at going viral like literally you spend all day every day or even a couple hours a day every day and you just try to make one viral video you look for a video that's already gone viral and just copy it or get your own spin on things the best way is to copy it though because Tik Tok loves when other creators are jumping on Trends because Tik Tok is optimized to create Trends so it's actually a good thing if you're copying uh an existing video that works because Tik Tok loves to be able to push one pattern because they know people like to watch it so if I'm you and I have an app launched I'm going to go on Tik Tok and I'm going to find videos that are already going viral and simply just change it to be my own style but copy the architecture of the video have a really strong hook have an interesting body and try things to keep people watching the video again and again because Tik Tok and Instagram reals they optimize for two things uh view through on the hook so is your hook catching the user's attention for at least 5 seconds and then how many times is the user watch watching the video over and over again if you do those two things right you're absolutely going to go viral once I launch my app closure Academy this is what I'm going to do like I'm not spend any money on paid ads I'm just going to be making one or two viral videos every week every you know maybe every day if I have time and I'm just going to try to go viral and push a bunch of traffic to it this is an absolute cheat code and content is an asset because content will always produce you traffic and nowadays with Instagram reals and Tik Tok it's just so easy to like get people to watch your videos because the algorithm is in your favorite you could also be making long form YouTube content this is especially useful if you're building a B2B based app because in B2B you don't need thousands or millions of customers you just need a few hundred customers who really see the value in the solution that you're providing them so making YouTube content about your Niche can actually produce you a lot of high value lifetime customers so if you like making videos you can definitely try out YouTube you can start small all you need is a laptop with the webcam and uh a software like Loom and you can start making videos about how you're solving a specific problem so short form and long form content is the best way to get traffic and you don't have to pay anything for it it's just a matter of you putting in the time but it's also not great for people maybe who don't want to be behind the camera and I get that so that leads me to number three which is cold Outreach you can use cold Outreach tools like drippy.