My Two Apps Make $150K/Month Each

A few days ago, I came across this insane post on X. My app hit 3 million ARR in 8 months. I had to know more. So, I sent a DM. Hey, want to share your story? And to my surprise, she said yes. My first app, Glamma, got a million users in 6 months, and we were at peak 150K MR. Meet Nicole. She has built multiple apps to over $150,000 a month each. And when she told me about how she grows them, I almost couldn't believe it. Late last year, we were doing an average of 100 million monthly views through our now we are doing around 4 to 500 million monthly views across Tik Tok, Instagram, and YouTube. So, I brought her on to the channel to reveal everything. And in this episode, we'll dive into the two apps that each make over $150,000 a month, how she generates millions of views on her apps with a simple system, and her step-by-step playbook for growing consumer apps in 2026. All right, this one's going to be fun. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. All right, Nicole, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. Yeah. Well, my name is Nicole and I've built four apps in the past two years. My first app, Glam, got a million users in 6 months and we were at peak 150K MRR and my second app, Sprout, previously Prep AI. I grew it to around 250K MR in 8 months. And in the past 3 months, I've built two more apps. They're currently in stealth, but they are at around 200K MR and growing pretty fast using the same system. I do everything that's not coding related. So, when it comes to the design of the app, distribution, so would love to tell you a bit more about the repeatable system that I've built for all of my apps. Okay, cool. Well, I'm excited to have you on specifically for all this growth stuff. We're going to talk all about that. But before we do, can you just explain like some of the apps that you built? What do they do? What's the business model? How do they make so much in revenue? All right. So, for Glam, this is our iOS growth and this is our Android growth. Not sure why this is zero here. might be an error on the platform, but right now I think we have around 2 million total downloads. We got the first million users in the first 6 months of really going at it, scaling it. And Sprout, I recorded this in October of last year. We were at 250K MR on our revenue cat and we have steadily been growing at around 200K MR. And here's the last 30 days. I recorded this a few months ago, but this was at around 100 million views monthly. We do mostly Tik Tok and Instagram. I think right now we are steadily growing at around 4 to 500 million views across, you know, Tik Tok, Instagram, YouTube shorts. For Glamob, our target customers are usually mostly women who want to, you know, improve their makeup or skincare routine. For Sprout, usually they are college students or postcol students looking for jobs on the market. So, we hard payw wall all of our apps. When it comes to our business models, we do a weekly or monthly subscription for these two apps. Okay. Amazing. I mean, you built two apps in the 100K MR category. You have two more apps in Stealth right now. I've never seen anything like this before, and I think it's amazing. So, how did you get here? How did you even learn about building apps? What's your story and background? Yeah, so um I built GlamUp and PrepAI when I was still in college. During my sophomore year, I had an existential crisis and I went backpacking and solo traveling in Europe. During that time, I started a podcast on Tik Tok. I got like super viral off of that. I got 10K followers in the first 10 days. Afterwards, I didn't want to be an influencer, so I moved to SF. That's when, you know, I worked at a tech startup doing marketing and I met my co-founder Aaron there. He was in YC and he was in HFZ at the time. We became really good friends. And when I went back to LA to finish college, we had a call for 10 minutes. And in that 10 minutes, we decided to start an app together. And that later became Glamma Up. I love everything Nicole is breaking down right now. She figured out a distribution system that worked and that she doubled down relentlessly on it. And this got me thinking. AI has made it so easy to build apps and build features. But marketing and distribution has become harder and more important than ever before. So I decided to put together a free resource to help you get customers for your app. It's called the mobile app growth cheat sheet. And inside, we'll walk you through seven different distribution tactics that are working right now for apps in 2026. These aren't some madeup ideas that I got from AI. These are the tactics and strategies that are actually working by the founders that come onto this channel who are building apps making over $50,000 a month. This is the stuff that works and it's all right here for you to see. So, if you're ready to focus on growth and getting customers, just head to the first link in the description and you can download it for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. I'm curious here. I mean, it seems like it just kind of worked right out of the gates. How did you find the idea for Glam Up? Did you know it was going to be really successful when you first came up with the idea? How did you validate it? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at the time, I didn't know anything about apps in particular. I was actually going the real estate and consulting routes, but I did a little bit of ecom and during that time my co-founder was in HFZ and they had other founders building consumer apps. One of them was UMAX. It's a looks maxing app for guys and we loosely got inspired by it and we wanted to build a glowup app for women and makeup and we realized that there's no apps like that existing on the app store yet. So we thought that would be a really cool opportunity for Sprout. We actually started when we were trying to pivot away from the beauty space and we were trying to target more college students and postcol students because they have higher purchasing power. Interesting that these are the apps that work. they already had proven customers and playbooks for apps like these, which I love. Let's switch a little bit to growth, which is why I wanted to bring on the channel. You mentioned that you focus on the growth, the design. How have you been able to take four apps to over 100K per month? Um, at a very high level, I think it's understanding consumer apps design principles. For example, how to design the welcome pages, the onboarding, how do you prime users into converting better. So, that's on the design side. When it comes to the distribution, you need to think of the design of the app as part of your distribution. So, you need to design the app in a way that's innately viral for social media. And when that does happen, you can just start testing viral formats on social media. Once you find a winning strategy, you can just double down and scale. All right, let's talk about the distribution side of things. What are some of those numbers look like? Like, how much reach and distribution do you need to have an app to hit over $100,000 a month? for Glamma. We built it two years ago. At that time, we were doing faceless UGC's. At our peak in a month, we got around 40 to 50 million views on Tik Tok and I think around 200 million views on Instagram. For Sprout, late last year, we were doing an average of 100 million monthly views. We actually had a 7-day period where we got a total of 400 million views, which is insane. And during our most like scaling era, I would say we were managing around 200 maybe a bit more active creators at the same time. That is crazy. This is the reality of building a consumer app. You really do need to reach an insane amount of people. I'd love if you could just break down this sort of distribution strategy. If you had to start over from scratch today with a new consumer app, which a lot of people are watching our channel are building in consumer, what would be your playbook? What would be your steps to getting it to where some of your apps have been? So let's break it down. First one is finding your viral distribution strategy. I have a list of all the things that you can try out. First is Reddit marketing. Second is Tik Tok and IG faces content that includes slideshows, different variations of CTAs. Third one is face UGC. When it comes to that, you can do, you know, AI UGC or you can do actual UGC creators. And everything that I've mentioned above are more social media driven. But obviously if you have capital you can do paid ads, influencer marketing. But I would say in order to find the viral strategy, try all of these maybe around 2 3 weeks at a time and every time you try a new strategy really milk the hell out of it. For example, if you are doing faceless content, you can try slideshows, you can try videos, you can try different ways that you can do the slideshows. You know, there's so many things that you can try within one category and just keep iterating and keep testing until you find one. Second is the proper UGC system. One thing that's really important though, no matter what you do, is you need to have a deeper understanding of your app and your content more than your creators do. To get started, either you can just be your own UGC creator, but let's say if you are uncomfortable doing that, then you can just onboard two to 10 creators, train them until they go viral. Once you find that, then you can scale it and build out a proper system. So, in order to build a system out, there are a few steps. Step number one is sourcing. Whatever you do, you need to try to find the creators that fit your content strategy. For example, if it's talking head, you need to find creators that are good at yapping, that are good at talking. If you're doing reaction videos, you need to find creators that are really good at facial expressions. And over here, you have inbound and outbound. For inbound, you can do application forms. Put out inbound application forms in UGC group chats, on Instagram, on Reddit, or on websites like Syift. For outbound, you can hire some VAS to do outreach to micro influencers. And step two, it's onboarding. There are actually two substeps here. The first one is interview. You want to get on an interview with them, vibe check them, and make sure that they are taking this campaign seriously. And for the actual onboarding, I do a course for all of my apps. So, this is the creator course that I have built for Sprout. more than 50% of the creators that go through this course go viral within the first two weeks and this is completely tailored to our app. First, we have a type form and then I do a bunch of videos and modules to train our creators. There is a little example of how a module will look like. For example, when it comes to creating content, I will walk them through the content bank that we have and we always have a quiz at the end of each module just to quality check on the creators and make sure that they have completed the course. And then third step is the management. So some apps they hire influencers to manage UGC creators. Some other people they will hire their top UGC creators. Bring them on more full-time to manage the rest of the creators. Some apps they will manage them via Discord chat. You can have bi-weekly feedback calls, monthly feedback calls, whatever it is. Eventually you'll have to figure out a system that works for your working style and the content strategies that you have. And then step four is once you're big enough, it's time for you to systemize and optimize even more. For example, you can start a referral system for all of your UGC creators. You can have dashboards to analyze the growth and analytics. So, there are a lot of things that you can optimize and play around with when you're at that point. I think all in all, it's really important to turn virality into a system and a process. It might be lucky at the start to get like a viral video, but to maintain going viral, I don't really believe that it's luck. I do see myself as a very like lucky person, but I think you can always maximize the surface area of your luck. What I love the most about this kind of system that you shared is like the education component of it. There's a whole training element and by kind of systemizing it into here's what good content looks like, here's how to be successful. You had a lot more success like that and this is the future of building apps. It's not about the features that you build. It's not about, you know, using AI to code it up. It's about distribution. Your system is really, really cool and I think people watching this are going to love it. I want to switch topics a little bit and take a look at your apps that you built. Would you be able to give me a demo of these apps that make over $100,000 a month? Yeah, for sure. So, when it comes to GlamUp, there's the welcoming screen and the onboarding questions. Afterwards, you are able to choose which scan you want. You can click in and start uploading a picture of yourself where you can take a selfie. After that, if you become a paying user, we will basically scan your face and give you color analysis or glow-up guides, different makeup looks on your face, and product recommendations. When it comes to Sprout, we have the welcome pages, the onboarding questions, and then you will see different job postings according to your onboarding questions. They're all tailored to you. If you try swiping right, we will just automatically apply for you on the company website. And if you swipe left, just skip that job title. And you can do tailor resumes, all that stuff, too. Cool. And on a similar note, what do you build these apps in? And what do you use to manage all these creators and do tens or hundreds of millions of views for an app that's doing over $100,000 a month? We use React Native for app building. Revenue Cat for revenue tracking. Superwall for payw wall. You can use Post Hog for data analytics. Side shift is the easiest way to recruit UGC creators. We use atio for CRM systems and obviously you can build your own portals out depending on what you need. All right. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story, if you could go back in time, stand on young Nicole's shoulders before you built anything. What advice would you have for anyone watching this channel that wants to build apps doing millions like you? There are a lot of things from a business perspective. The advice I would give myself is try to always enjoy the journey instead of the results. There are always bigger numbers to chase, more users that you want to acquire, but staying present with who you are and just simply enjoying being a builder. I think that's something that a lot of the times people can overlook, but I think that's the best part. Well, that's great advice. Thanks, Nicole, for coming on the channel. Congrats on all your success. Hopefully have you back on the channel soon to talk more about growth, but thanks for coming on. Thank you, Pat. Have a good one. All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story. What do you think of this one? My first thought is that there's like levels to the game. Like she has this like really built out system. And I can imagine a beginner watching this feeling like I'm just struggling to post one thing and she has like hundreds of people on it. And I don't mean that in a discouraging way. It just it reminds me like there's like a beginner level and an expert and she's playing on expert mode. Yeah. I think you said it perfectly. A lot of people think, okay, well, I'll post one video on TikTok. Let's see what happens. No, this is a whole different level. And I wanted her to talk about that because that is the level that you need to be at to be doing anything serious in consumer right now. Like AI is getting easier to build obviously, but it's also getting easier to create content, whether that's scripting, production, whatever. If you're watching this right now, you need to get to a higher level than, hey, let me create one piece of content this week or this month. If you want to be in the game, this is the kind of mindset you have to have. Yeah. There I don't know where I heard it from. Probably some podcasts I listen to, but it's like when you finally see people playing at like the highest level, you you sort of like I I'm having an introspective moment of like, oh, I thought I was trying, but I'm not really trying that hard. And then I think it just I've said this before, is the most successful people it seems really have a system. We've talked to dozens of people and they just have like they've really broken it down into like the micro steps to take for growth or building or whatever the case may be. It's a whole system behind it, not just like what's on my mind today, what am I going to post today. Yeah. Know that's the difference between just wanting to create content for fun and build things for fun, which there's no problem with that and there's lots of people that are successful for doing that. Uh but then there's people that find a system, they see it works, they scale an app to 100K, and then they do it on three more apps. And in my opinion, that's the entrepreneur. That's the true entrepreneur is when something works, you keep doing it until it doesn't work anymore. And I think that Nicole is a great example of that. So, if you're looking for a system that works, we put together something special where you will see all different ways to grow a mobile app in 2026. I'll put a link down there in the description. You can download it for free to find ways to grow your app. Try a bunch of stuff. See what works. When something does, double down on it. Think it's worth checking out. All right, we'll see you guys in the next one. Peace.