[Journey] Building an iOS & Android App Empire

@nakamura - just ordered Mac Mini, I am claude code monkey, let's rock! xD

Nice man, with those numbers do you pay a lot of taxes in your country? Or are you a digital nomad and don't pay taxes anywhere?

@nakamura Can we expect your book to be released this month?

Nicololo said:

Nice man, with those numbers do you pay a lot of taxes in your country? Or are you a digital nomad and don't pay taxes anywhere?

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the income is for my company, so its not personal income, so its not for personal tax

Amanda375eq said:

@nakamura Can we expect your book to be released this month?

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i will try to

@nakamura How would you approach marketing of a SaaS product that is just starting out?

uchdollar said:

@nakamura How would you approach marketing of a SaaS product that is just starting out?

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do everything as fast as possible as much as possible.

every social media channel
medium.com
reddit
landing page + backlinks

all can be automated with AI anyway

To automate marketing, do you run OpenClaude on a Mac Mini?

nakamura said:

You are absolutely right. Its not only that it takes so long to get the job done if you hire a dev, its also you need to spend so long telling/explaining them what to do, how to get it right, and so on, then you must deal with their personality as well.

yes, basic knowledge is definitely important and can help a lot, makes it so much faster overall



Well, I can only speak for myself. Its important you optimized your ASO for these keywords you are targeting: Title, subtitle, keyword field. For me, it always took 3-4 days until I saw results. In App Store connect you should see a spike in downloads if you ordered downloads.

Besides this, I would recommend to make paid ads (google, search ads, facebook) while running these keyword campaigns in order to make everything look more legit. in the end of the day it is apple and apple's algorithm that decide whether your app should climb the rankings or not. For some low competition keywords I can literally just buy 5 keyword installs and it goes from #70 to #1. While others require hundreds, if not thousands of downloads per day. I had one campaign that where I would have 200+ downloads per day for one keyword and it went from #5 to #4. Why? Because my competitors probably spent a shitload of money on ads for these countries and got thousands of downloads per day.

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hey do you still do this? only because i hear you speak less about it these days..

Nicololo said:

To automate marketing, do you run OpenClaude on a Mac Mini?

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no, i havent touched openclaw at all because it requires too much time to set up to make it useful.

instead i am using claude code channels. i have to macbook pros, the older one (m1 pro) is on 24/7 and connected to claude code channels and I simply message it from my iphone with imessage to do certain tasks.

for automated marketing i am using n8n.

goldengate2334 said:

hey do you still do this? only because i hear you speak less about it these days..

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currently i am not running keyword installs anymore. it seems like apple has changed their algorithm and they seem to be less effective now.

nakamura said:

no, i havent touched openclaw at all because it requires too much time to set up to make it useful.

instead i am using claude code channels. i have to macbook pros, the older one (m1 pro) is on 24/7 and connected to claude code channels and I simply message it from my iphone with imessage to do certain tasks.

for automated marketing i am using n8n.




currently i am not running keyword installs anymore. it seems like apple has changed their algorithm and they seem to be less effective now.

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okay now a days you are running only google

nakamura said:

no, i havent touched openclaw at all because it requires too much time to set up to make it useful.

instead i am using claude code channels. i have to macbook pros, the older one (m1 pro) is on 24/7 and connected to claude code channels and I simply message it from my iphone with imessage to do certain tasks.

for automated marketing i am using n8n.




currently i am not running keyword installs anymore. it seems like apple has changed their algorithm and they seem to be less effective now.

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Thank you for your reply. I'm just wondering why it wouldn't work anymore. Surely Apple's algorithm likes downloads.

darshanright said:

okay now a days you are running only google

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darshanright said:

okay now a days you are running only google

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I think he said he uses organic like:

• TikTok
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Reddit

And he does Google and Facebook ads on the weekends.

goldengate2334 said:

I think he said he uses organic like:

• TikTok
• Facebook
• Pinterest
• Reddit

And he does Google and Facebook ads on the weekends.

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Yes, but I will get more into paid ads now.

The best thing is to do everything all at once. So far my marketing has been quite shit. I could probably 10x my revenue if I would only focus on it.

Wallpaper downloads might be a bit outdated no?

nakamura said:

Yes, but I will get more into paid ads now.

The best thing is to do everything all at once. So far my marketing has been quite shit. I could probably 10x my revenue if I would only focus on it.

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Can you share what your cost per install via Google Ads is? And what percentage of people convert? Menas, subscribe?

Syosin said:

Wallpaper downloads might be a bit outdated no?

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who is doing that?

darshanright said:

Can you share what your cost per install via Google Ads is? And what percentage of people convert? Menas, subscribe?

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Even if I would share this, the number wouldnt be represenative at all:

- it heavily depends on the niche
- it heavily depends on the app onboarding itself
- because of iOS attribution its not correctly showing
etc.

nakamura said:

who is doing that?


Even if I would share this, the number wouldnt be represenative at all:

- it heavily depends on the niche
- it heavily depends on the app onboarding itself
- because of iOS attribution its not correctly showing
etc.

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Yes, I understand, but please share.

AllOutAnime said:

Why do you do it organically instead of just using Ads on all platforms?
Sometimes I wonder if all the hassle of the automation and being undetected is worth it and I just should use Ads to scale faster.

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ads can scale faster-but organic is what makes it stable. The sweet spot is combining both, not replacing one with the other.

I think this is kind of every vibe coder’s dream now. I’m sure everyone has creative ideas in their head. I really want to do it too, but honestly it feels a bit overwhelming to start

Update

April has been great. I published 4 new apps. Two of them already start to make money.

Revenue:

Not exactly sure how much money I made but must be something between 80-90k in total.

Spend:

I spend less money on ads. I guess a real business person would think I am an absolute idiot because they would immediately reinvest the money into growth. I spent around $1k for ads. Mostly Google Ads and Meta Ads.

API costs were around $3k USD. Other costs, for example Appsflyer, were around $200.

My RevenueCat subscription was about $800. LOL. Really, at one point you gotta ask yourself....should I really pay $800 per month for this? Its insane actually. But right now it is really beneficial for me because I do cross-platform (Web, iOS, Android) and its the perfect solution to handle memberships, etc.

Then, Apple takes a 15% cut (I am in the small developer program) and Google Play also takes 15% fees. Stripe takes a few %.

The income is balanced in this way:

iOS App Store: 70%
Android Google Play: 25%
Web / Stripe: 5%

So my guess is the overall PROFIT is around $70k. MRR $45k. ARR: $540k

Next steps for May:

- Publish 2 apps
- Update 2 apps
- Improving existing screenshots for my best apps using GPT-Image 2 (it does a really amazing job!) to get a better conversion rate in the app stores
- Setting up more social media accounts and start autoposting on them (all AI generated and auto posting), mainly YouTube shorts, IG, TikTok, Pinterest
- Making Google Ads and Meta Ads for 2-3 apps
- Improving SEO for my money sites and also buying high quality backlinks and doing PR

I will try to do the autoposting stuff first so it can work while I do the rest.

So yeah, I try to keep up the momentum and try to make the best possible decision for the apps. I might sell one of the apps sooner or later for $500k+. Recently I get a lot of emails from companies.

I dont usually talk about this stuff, but my ultimate goal is to make enough money to buy a nice condo in Bangkok and also an apartment in Japan (either Tokyo, Kobe or Fukuoka). I guess right now I could just sell all these apps and make $700k or more and reach this goal, but I think it has more potential so I wanna keep growing.