My App Made $120K in 24 Hours

There's a well-known secret in the app space right now, and it's arguably the fastest way to see whether your idea is good or not. Well, I met a guy who executed this perfectly. I had zero experience with mobile apps, so I wasn't sure it would work. Meet Ombberto. He built a really simple mobile app, but instead of launching with a free trial, he did something different. And in 24 hours, he made over $100,000. This is the best way to validate your idea. Most people might tell you this strategy is a bad idea, but Ombberto had a playbook and it worked. So, I asked him to come on the channel to break it all down for me. And in this episode, we will dive into how a very simple strategy generated over $100,000 in a single day, the exact email sequence you can copy for your product, and why this strategy might be the smartest move for early stage products. If you're building something and planning on launching soon, then this is one that you cannot miss. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, guys, before we dive in, if after watching this episode you feel inspired to build, well, you're in luck. We built a 9-day boot camp that will take you from an idea to a real working mobile app, and I'm going to be talking a little bit more about that later. But for now, let's dive into this awesome episode. All right, Ombberto, welcome to the channel. Tell me who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Thank you. I'm the founder of Floa, a mobile app for yoga teachers and practitioners. Uh we pre-launched it in May 2025 with a lifetime deal, and we generated over $120,000 in just 24 hours. And today, I'm going to break down exactly how we generated those $120,000 uh this fast. We're going to talk all about launching your app. That's what hopefully this video is going to be about cuz you did this really well. But before we do, I just want to understand what did you build? It's an app. It's a product. Can you just show me what you built and some of the revenue dashboards behind it? So, Floa is an app for yoga teachers and practitioners. And here I can show your revenue cut the what happened during the launch days. Uh, as you can see, we launched on May 5th at uh 2 p.m. So, by the end of the day, we generated $17,000. So, now we have a recurring revenue business model. We have different tier. We have a monthly, quarterly that is available only on our website and then a yearly subscription. So at the moment we have about 4,000 active users um between paid and uh free approximately right now we're going we're doing between 9,000 and $10,000 a month. Okay, cool. Thanks for sharing all that. That that's amazing that you built this and crushed it on the launch. Let's go a little bit back to your background. How do you come up with this idea? How do you build this cool yoga app that's crushing it right now? What's your background? So my path to building an app was not linear at all. Uh I'm not a developer. I study economics. I had a brief experience in the corporate world. Then in 2012 I raised seat funding for a startup that failed. And uh after that I stepped away from tech completely. I became skil worked as f fashion photographer. So I did a bunch of things and then I came back into the startup world around 2016 and uh at the time I was working as an advertiser and growth strategist and I helped uh several companies scale and that's where I learned how to launch and position uh products. Then in 2020 during COVID, my girlfriend and I created PlayosB as a side gig. Uh it was a brand focus on yoga decks of cards uh that help yoga teachers and practitioners build their sequences and practice them mindfully. We launched our first product on Kickstarter and generated over $200,000 in the first month and actually the the the whole brand was about mindful screenfree practice. So from there to basically launching mobile app was kind of a big plot twist even for me. But what happened about a year and a half ago is that I started feeling that what we had built till that moment could evolve in something bigger. And the question was what if I took everything we created from uh the physical business and transform it with technology. Okay? So bring it further with technology without losing the mindful core. And one evening I literally sit down I I sketched the concept of an app and uh thought okay we can make it. And a few months later I found a good developer and uh and then we start building FL. Okay cool. So you're kind of operating in this physical world. You've done some physical product launches on Kickstarter. Maybe you learned a little bit about how to launch a product which that's what this video is going to be about today. cuz when we chatted earlier, you mentioned that from essentially scratch, you generated over $100,000 in the first 24 hours with this kind of launch playbook, this LTD playbook, which I think is like one of the most effective ways to just get off the ground running if you're launching an app, if you're launching a project, if you're launching anything. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? How did how are you able to build something and then make $100,000 in essentially 24 hours? What happened? Okay, so a lifetime deal basically is a deal where a user pay uh for lifetime access to the app. So the first thing I did was to figure out the long-term vision of the app and decide when we would have been ready to start monetizing. And my approach here is always to monetize as early as you can. So I prefer to build the product and simultaneously uh building a revenue engine that sustains it. We looked at what was the minimum set of features that we needed to basically convince people to get a lif deal. Then I planned the whole launch sequence. So email, landing page, videos, ad creative. So the full machine at the same time I also did some lead generation to reach people that never heard about us. Uh so there there was a totally different approach of course and uh basically after a few weeks of warming up the audience uh and showing of course the app. So basically what what I did is to record a YouTube video where I went through exactly all the feature present in the app and I basically said okay the app is going to is work like it worked like this right now we're going to de develop these other features if you want it you can get it now lifetime but there is absolutely no refund uh if you want to try it you're going to wait for a couple of months uh till when we open the subscription plans so we got around if I remember well between 500 and 600 100 early customers and that was extremely valuable because uh if someone invested is going to be interested in making the app work. So it's going to give you some very good suggestion. It's going to cheer you up even uh so the value you get out of this is uh is huge really because a lot of feature we introduce in the next months were based on the feedback we were receiving from this early user. We could have not done it without them. Personally, I love how Ombberto is sharing everything about how he made $100,000 in a single day. But we can sit here and learn from every launch strategy in the world, but none of that matters if you never build anything. And that is why we created the iOS playbook. It's a 9-day sprint where you will go from an idea to a real working app in the App Store. And you'll do all that without writing a single line of code yourself. We'll walk you through everything. Generating ideas with AI, building with AI, designing your app, and actually getting it live on the app store. Once you build your app idea, then you can start putting Ombberto's launch playbook into practice. So, if you're serious about building your first app, just hit that link in the description below to start your 9-day journey for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay. Yeah. So this is the thing that when I talk to a lot of founders uh and they question doing a lifetime deal like I'll never be able to get revenue from these users in the future. But my feedback and what you mentioned there is that the most important thing is just to get people to care and commit to your app and get these early users. Don't think about these users as users who won't be able to get revenue in the future from. Think of these users as really really valuable data and people that may spread the word about your app or show your app to other people. And as long as you do the LTD over a short period of time, you get to pull forward all these committed users who may not actually use your app if there was a free trial or they weren't there. So you're it's almost like building an early community. I think it's one of the best ways to launch an app if you're bootstrapping like you are. So that's super cool. I want to dive in a little deeper to the actual launch sequence because you mentioned that you were able to basically send out some emails and then generate $100,000. I'd love if you could dive in deeper to that launch sequence. Like what did the emails look like? What was the strategy? How were you able to generate $100,000 in essentially 24 hours? So, uh here we have uh some of the emails we sent during the the pre-launch sequence. The pre-launch lasted for about a month and one week. These emails, the most representative, we transform them in in some blog post. And here there is a storytelling. We don't reveal anything yet, but we create interest and we put the basis for people to understand what we're going to show them in the the following weeks. Then this in the second email, there is still some storytelling going on, but we reveal a bit more here. We create a bit of um confusion towards our our users, the our existing list, meaning that we put our physical product on the back and then something in front which they they can suspect is is another physical product or something completely different. So we create a lot of curiosity and then uh here this there is another email. I don't remember if we sent other in the middle just these are just the most representative ones but here we unveiled uh basically what was behind the red uh curtain and we showed the app and uh and we we explained pretty shortly why we did it and we link to a video where we present where I present the the app at that uh specific moment and uh and yeah and then we build up towards the launch and towards um the end of the of the pre-launch as I like to call it. We uh explain how it's going to work with the um lifetime deals which are always uh limited in a number and limited in the in time frames. And this gift to liver to basically reduce the procrastination that uh basically everyone has uh and it works very very effectively. And another thing, I never ever show the price a product before the the day of launch because otherwise people are going to make the personal decision based on price. During the warm-up campaign, they need only to evaluate the purchase of the product based on the features and uh and the the long-term vision. Okay? If you put the price, you kind of ruin the whole thing because there's going to be this other element that I cannot unsee anymore. And so never show the price before the actual launch date. Okay, Ombberto, thank you for showing this. I mean, this is amazing that you published all this on your blog for anyone to read and and be helpful for anyone who wants to watch a lifetime deal. If you've made it this far into the video, I just want to say that this right here is amazing. Like, this is so helpful for people who want to launch something and maximize that launch. If you're watching this, we'll put a link in the description for you to be able to download all these. My recommendation if you're launching anything, maybe take these, copy them, plug them into an LLM and see how you can kind of build this sequence for your product. Uh because the building of curiosity and the positioning that you had is is really really smart. And I imagine you got I imagine you learned a lot of this from your experience with physical products in Kickstarter. This is something that I see a lot of people successful with launches do something similar to this. So, thank you for sharing that. I want to talk a little bit more about coming up with a great product idea, a product idea that's going to sell well, if you were to do a launch. What would be your playbook if you were starting over with all your experience in building digital products and having successful launches? What would be your playbook if you had to start over right now for anyone watching this who wants to have a great launch? Well, step one, validate before you build. before you even write a line of code or start uh building the actual product uh I would talk to five to 10 people in the in your target market uh ask them about the problem you're trying to solve but never tell them uh why you're asking so you want an unbiased honest uh reaction okay so in our case we did this with some of our physical product customers and we got some really good feedback exactly because we didn't lead them and there is a great book about how to do this properly I suggest you to read it is called the mom test uh it's very simple and it gives some uh interesting insight about uh this as a second step I would put define your minimum uh launchable product so once you have validated your idea the next question is what is the minimum development stage where the app can convey the app or the product can convey enough value to get early adopters to pay for it. Uh once you know uh what that looks like and uh also you have an estimate of how long it takes to build it, you can start planning everything else uh around that timeline. And then uh step three uh build your content machine before you start promoting. That's uh that's extremely important. Uh so before you you start any lead generation or lead nurturing, you need a buffer uh of content ready to go. So email graphics, videos, landing pages, all of it. And there is another important thing uh which is put yourself in uh the user's shoes uh because there are things that are obvious to you that are building the product but needs to be explained simply and clearly to the end user. Okay. So for example when we launched our physical products nobody knew us so we had to create trust and also educate them on the specific platform so that when they had to make the choice they were ready to do it without hesitations or or doubts. Step four pricing. Uh this part is crucial. Don't just throw a number, structure it. And I see a lot of founders that price it very low because they're scared that nobody will buy because the product is not ready and for other reasons. And I believe this is a mistake because you're leaving serious money on on the table. So what I did was create three tiers. The first tier gave lifetime access to a limited set of uh of features and the price was around $109. The second tier in our case, we priced it at around $199 and uh we included more features. And then the third tier you give uh everything you plan to build. So the full vision and in our case we price it at $349. Also the psychology here is that the first two tiers actually help you sell the the most expensive one because they create a sort of reference. Okay. And they also capture those skeptical users that are not really sure about the product. Then step six uh launch mechanics. I recommend you to be completely transparent. Show how GAP is working. Be clear about exactly what is there, what are the current limitation and how also you you plan to improve it and then set a clear line. So no refunds okay otherwise your lifetime deal getized and if someone has some doubts or want to try it first they can wait for the subscription model which is going to come afterwards. Again uh another thing limit the time and limit the number of spot. So five to seven days maximum in my opinion. This force people to make a decision instead of procrastinating and this worked uh very well. Okay, cool. So I mean that's an awesome playbook. I think a lot of people watching this especially if they're building Bootstrap, they're trying to have a great launch to really kick off their product and set it out for success. This is amazing. So thank you for sharing that. I want to push back a little bit on the idea of lifetime deals in, you know, if you were to ask like an investor or, you know, someone that's more uh raising money for their business, uh they might say something like lifetime deals are bad because you're forgoing foregoing all future revenue from a customer. And you know, on paper, if someone were to value your business, they might say, "Well, actually, you know, it's not that valuable because they've you've gotten all the revenue uh upfront and then there's now no more opportunities for revenue generation." So, what do you think about this? Do you regret doing the lifetime deal at all? And what would be your response to this? So, no, I don't regret doing a lifetime deal. uh because I strongly believe that when you're early uh you don't have data, you don't know your LTV, you don't know your churn, you basically have assumptions, right? And uh a lifetime deal converts those assumptions into real money in your bank account. There is another thing that uh people don't talk about that much. Uh this is incentives. Monthly subscribers have optionality. Okay, lifetime buyer has commitment and uh this change everything. So, uh someone paying monthtomonth if something breaks or if there is a bug can just stop stop the subscription uh give you maybe a bad review and no feedback while somebody that that purchased the app, okay, is interested in to making the app amazing. So, they're going to report backs, they're going to send detailed uh feedback. In our case, we even created a telegram group with all these uh early adopters and this has brought us enormous value. Last but not least, there is a lot of people that just hate subscriptions. Among these people, the willingness to pay lifetime is easily three to five time more compared to a yearly plan. So, if you do the math right, uh early stage, a lifetime deal is the smart smartest move you can make. Uh you're basically raising capital from your customers without giving away equity, control, board seats, and getting amazing feedback. So I don't think there is uh anything better than this. Yeah, I mean I I agree. Sometimes I think about lifetime deals as just a pricing strategy. If you can understand if someone's going to subscribe to your app for 24 months, what is the total amount of revenue you're going to get from that? Well, you can price your lifetime deal, collect that cash upfront. If you do that, you're really not missing out technically on revenue. So I think that's cool. I want to switch topics a little bit and understand what you built. Would you be able to give me a little demo of this yoga app that you built? I'd love to see. Yes, of course. This on the top is uh our first feature. It's called sequence builder. So, you tap on a yoga style and you have bunch of poses. Okay, this is Zata vinyaza. It's very intuitive. You can swipe up to select the pose. You can filter by category, chakras, benefit. Uh we even have an intelligent feature which suggest you poses that make sense after the one you you have selected basically. And uh if you tap on uh on a pose, you also have detailed videos about how the pose is going to work. There is uh a ton of useful information for uh teachers and practitioners. And then tapping next, you can personalize further. You can move things around. You can uh personalize the time in each pose uh right of left side. Uh you can go on the detail again. And then you can start your practice. and you're basically going to be uh guided on your personalized practice that you have built. Cool. Okay. Well, let's on that note, I' I'd be curious what's the tech stack behind this app that generated $100,000 in about 24 hours. So, we use Flatter for uh the development uh Firebase, which cost us around $25 a month. Uh then revenue cut to handle subscription and we host the video on Vimeo. We already have Vimeo for our other business, so videos are there. and uh one signal for push push notifications. Okay. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on starter story, if you could go back in time and give yourself advice before launching this digital product or even before you got started in entrepreneurship, what would be your advice to young Ombberto or anyone watching this who wants to do what you do? Well, stop waiting for perfect. Perfection is just fear disguised in as preparation. The real breakthrough happens the moment you put something which might be unfinished in front of real people and uh there you get feedback. Feedback can be uncomfortable and so if I could speak to myself to my old self I'd say move sooner, ship earlier and trust the process. Uh you learn faster in public than uh you ever do in private. Well that's great advice. Thank you Alberto for coming on sharing all this being so open about the launch sequence. I think it's going to be really helpful for a lot of people watching. Let us know in the comments what you thought about this launch strategy. Lifetime deals. I love it. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Producer Gus, what did you think about this one? I thought the coolest part was Yeah, I really like how he broke down like all the email sequences, like how he warmed up his audience. It was really like tactical and it's cool that he published all of them. So yeah, that's kind of one of the first things I'm thinking about after this interview is wow, like if I ever want to launch something, I'm just going to go to his blog and kind of check out what he wrote and try to like implement that. That's the first thing. Yeah. What what did you think? The the moment he said that I had experience with Kickstarter launches that everything clicked for me. I was like, "Okay, I see." Uh this guy knows how to launch products. And so hopefully a lot of people watching this realize that too and realize there's a lot to learn from this. He took his experience launching a physical product and collecting cash upfront which is the whole concept of crowdfunding and he sort of transferred that over to digital products which are I think the future and a great business to be building. I think this is an underrated strategy. I mean we have lots of videos on the channel about lifetime deals. It's very like you know it's not the most traditional way of doing things. If you were to raise money as a VC they would say hell no, never do this. But as a bootstrap business to get off the ground running and be able to collect $100,000 upfront, that's a huge boost to the business. Not only are you collecting revenue to help invest in the business, you're getting motivation to keep going because you have all these customers that are excited about it and you have this road map you can build. And a lot of people want to crap on this strategy. But I actually think that um you know just from what I see I talk to a lot of founders a lot of really successful founders that now have lots of MR and sell their business and all this stuff. They started with a lifetime deal because it's a great way to get started. Yeah. I was thinking about this you know at Starter Story you know we've done a lot of these like email sequences and like you know lifetime deal things at certain times of the year. We've seen that like Black Friday or end of year or some other like you know. So, we've kind of done this a lot and I've been part of that like writing the emails and getting that set up. A lot of people crap on this idea, but you've, you know, you've done it a bunch. So, what do you think? No, I mean, go sign up for most digital products. Look at companies that are like really successful ones like companies that are doing millions per year or sometimes even like billion-dollar companies. Go sign up for their products or their emails like under the free email list and you'll notice that they send crazy amounts of emails, crazy amounts of deals. U go sign up for any ecommerce product and look at what happens during, you know, a Black Friday or memorial sale. They're always running deals. They're always running discounts and they're sending lots and lots of messages over email and text. This is marketing. It's sales. It's marketing, right? This is what big companies do. And I think a lot of people watching this are afraid. I don't want to bother people. I don't want to, you know, feel like I'm spamming them or whatever. But this is what you need to do if you're in marketing. If you go and see these huge companies doing it, you don't have to do it as aggressively as them, but it is what is essential to build a business um you know, to stand out in the sea of all these other products. So that would be my response to that is like it's that's that's part of the game. We did it because I saw a lot of other people who are very successful that were doing it as well. And people can just unsubscribe if they don't want to see it. So, thank you guys for watching. Let us know what you thought about this lifetime deal strategy. I put a link in the description to get a little bit more about this strategy specifically and how to find an idea that can make hundreds of thousands of dollars in 24 hours. Hope you enjoyed it. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.