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App Masters: https://appmasters.com/

Steve on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevepyoung/

Newsletter: https://intelligentartifice.kit.com

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth: Welcome to Intelligent Artifice, a part of the Mobile UA Show. Intelligent Artifice is a deep dive on how AI is transforming growth and performance marketing. Since 2018, over 250 plus episodes, we’ve been deconstructing how the best growth marketers actually win. And every week, I sit down with one operator shaping the future of growth in an AI world.

Shamanth: My guest today is Steve P. Young. Steve is the founder of App Masters. When I interviewed him in 2019, he was known for ASO and for getting apps featured by Apple and for winning. Today, his focus is further down the funnel, paywalls, onboarding, and monetization. I thought this would make for a great episode because we get into Steve’s story and what drove his own shift. In this episode, Steve explains what changed for him. He walks through his tentacle strategy for choosing what apps to build and grow. He shares the numbers behind buying and financing an app and tells the story of the paywall test that proved one of his own assumptions wrong. There’s so much to learn in this episode, and I’m excited to share this with you all. Let’s get into it.

Shamanth: I’m excited to welcome Steve P. Young to Intelligent Artifice, the one and only Steve P. Young, president of AppNation and the all-around awesome, awesome dude. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve: Shamanth, thank you so much for being here, man. I’ve seen, we’ve known each other for so long. I think we first met at AGS when I saw your presentation. I was kind of like hosting and helping out Louie for the first-ever New York one, and the fact that we’ve stayed in touch for this long is just, that’s why I love the app space, man. I’ve made so many good friends along the way, and so definitely consider you one of them.

Shamanth: Yeah. The respect is very much mutual. I’ve seen and followed your work for very, very long. And, you know, when I was preparing for this interview, I was like, oh, looking at Google Drive, looking at the scripts and I was like, oh, the last time I spoke to Steve was 2019 on the podcast. Not the last time I spoke to you, but the last time I interviewed you was 2019 and I was actually looking at the script, so that was crazy. And you talked at the time about how to get featured by Apple, right? And right now, your focus is very, very different. Because at the time your big focus was app store optimization, working with Apple, working with the stores, really the storefront was the big focus at the time. And right now it is paywalls, onboarding, monetization. What happened?

Steve: Yeah. Well, we still do ASO, but what happened was, look Shamanth, I think I saw, I did a couple of different retreats. I still love doing them and you came out to the one that we did in Barcelona, but we had a retreat in Bali with a past client of mine. He happened to live there, my wife wanted to go there. So I was like, let’s do it in Bali and let’s do a retreat there. Maybe I can expense some things. But we did one and it was five people, one from Korea, one from Singapore, one from Morocco. It was just five of us in Bali and he’s from the Netherlands originally. We were just in a room just talking shop.

Steve: And that client, we had worked together and we launched his new game and I loved the game. It was like Scrabble meets Solitaire. And we soft launched it, got it number, like, five under word games in the Netherlands. We got it featured by Apple. We drove tens of thousands of downloads for a very limited budget. And Shamanth, he, you know, that was like a couple of years ago at the time. And two years later, he was like telling me, Steve, I almost had to shut down the company.

Steve: And I was like, why, dude? What happened? Like I thought we did everything right. We have, we got downloads. He’s like, yeah, but they weren’t making money. And so I started thinking, okay, that’s crazy. How come more people aren’t talking about the monetization aspect? Everybody’s talking about downloads at the time. And then they, I did more retreats, and they were telling me like, hey, this paywall during the onboarding process, Joel, my buddy Joel told me that that was working and that was driving 2x more sales.

Steve: And I was like, paywall on onboarding before they actually use the app? And he’s like, yes, Steve, I AB tested this. I saw double the revenues. So I started talking about that too. And then what I also noticed Shamanth was like, you know, I come from the web days. So obviously, a lot of people, like, apps are only around since 2009, 2010. But in the web space, I also noticed that around the 2010 range, people were starting to talk about CRO.

Steve: And one of the guys’ blogs I used to follow, he was talking about a lot of conversion rate optimization. That’s what CRO stands for. He was talking a lot about like different tactics working. And so I tried out different tactics. And one of my tactics was actually in a book called Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown, somebody I work with and that was a case study that we did. And so I was like, okay, let me leverage what I know from the CRO side on the web and try to bring that into the app space. Because I see the trend happening to be talking more about monetization because I saw that trend happening on the web. And so let me try to be a little bit early on that trend. And so that’s what started it all, my friend.

Shamanth: And you were very early. So, yeah. And, you know, I think that is very interesting that you borrowed ideas from the web, which now that I think about it makes sense, because human nature is the same wherever you are, web or mobile. I also, nevertheless, I also think it was incredibly brave of you to actually make that switch and jump from ASO and downloads to further down funnel. Because even though you were leveraging the work, you know, some of the work off the web, you were still in many ways starting from scratch and also orienting your team around that, which is never easy. So kudos to you for doing that. And when preparing for the call, you said, look, our approach really is around what we call the tentacle strategy. Very intriguing name. So I’m not going to steal your thunder. Go.

Steve: Thank you.

Shamanth: Go, Steve. I love it.

Steve: The, so what I would say is, Shamanth, I’ve built a couple, a bunch of apps that have done absolutely nothing. And I started thinking like, and I wanted to brand it, and so I started thinking like, demand first. How do you build an app that actually already has search volume? So I’ve already had this like sort of strategy in my head, and then sharing it, you and I both have an audience, and having an audience helps because then I can like relay that information and then they help me build it. And so I started thinking, all right, all the cool kids have like some branded name for their strategy. So let me take this and let me call it the tentacle strategy. And so what I start off with is I’m gonna show my screen a little bit. So first off, at a high level, the tentacle strategy is simple. It’s you have a big old octopus.

Steve: And let’s say the octopus is a big app like Calm. And that’s the octopus. And the octopus obviously has a bunch of tentacles. So underneath Calm, you have meditation, which is what they’re primarily known for, but they also have this thing called soundscapes, and then sleep stories, which they branded, trademarked by the way, so you can’t call your app by sleep stories. But they have sleep stories or sleep meditation. Then they have focus, so focus music and green noise. And so with this tentacle strategy, what you’re trying to do is trying to compete with, well, look, Calm can’t, before I back up a little bit, Calm can’t rank well for all these keywords from an ASO perspective. They can only leverage a few of them and they’re going to focus on the big ones. But there’s these niche keywords like green noise, and we have an app called Green Noise. It’s literally just called Green Noise app.

Steve: But where we can then leverage that tentacle of Calm’s because there’s already baked-in demand and you can do keyword research and I can break down what the search popularity score you should aim for, you can then see that, hey, not a lot of people are focused on green noise. Why don’t I build an app with green noise in there, make it a primary thing. Yes, could I have focus music? Absolutely. Could I have sleep stories? Absolutely. But I’m going to leverage that tentacle and knowing that there’s enough search volume, we can build out a decent app with just that tentacle. So it’s sort of like the foundation for being profit first, building apps. And then you can obviously scale and that’s where you come in, Shamanth, you’re really good at scaling and taking apps to the next level. But for me, it’s like using ASO, finding search volume and then building an app so that you don’t have to look for distribution later. It’s baked in.

Shamanth: Yeah, I think that’s very, very smart. Also just because, you know, Calm, they probably do like TV ads and they’re a big brand. But like you also said, they can’t rank for every one of these. And if you’re the best green noise app ever, people are going to download you and not Calm. You know, or at least if they’re searching for green noise. Is the volume lower? Yes. And you can certainly look at ways to scale that and expand that. You know, de-risks a lot of your approach.

Steve: Yeah. And you know what’s crazy, Shamanth, like back to the like just everything coming together, connecting dots backwards. So in 2022, before I even had this strategy, we were trying to rank for this keyword for another client, and then we bought an app that was number one. It had a search volume of 30. It was two keywords around search volume of 30, you know, it’s Apple’s score. And it was getting about 100 downloads a day, but it was only charging a one-time fee. And I was like, you know what? Let’s, so I approached the developer and she wanted to sell it. So I was like, okay, cool. And so we ended up buying it and we took this app that was making about $1,000 to $2,000 a month to $8,000 to $10,000 with no additional downloads. All we did was an onboarding with the paywall because the app didn’t even have a paywall on the onboarding.

Steve: So, added an onboarding paywall, increased the price from $2.99 one-time to $60 per year, instantly went from $1,000 to $2,000 to $8,000 to $10,000 with a hard paywall. And to your point, yes, Green Noise will have less volume, but it’s way more niche. So if somebody’s searching for Green Noise, they’re way more likely to pay you than if you were targeting like meditation, which they might want, lots of different topics, and you just never know. So it’s more niche and higher converting.

Shamanth: The example that you just gave also underscores how critical building paywall monetization can be. In that same exact product, you did nothing else other than change the monetization plan. And, yeah, that’s impressive. And just to switch gears a bit. Today, in the world of AI, anyone can build an app.

Steve: Sure.

Shamanth: Today you can… what, claim they can one-shot… I don’t know, anyone can build a simple enough version of an app over a weekend. A week max, I would say. What changes about… number one, what ideas would you go after?

Steve: Mhm.

Shamanth: And the way you would unlock early growth for these apps, in a world where everyone’s going to be able to make apps.

Steve: Yeah, I think, you know, what I always say is leverage what you’re good at. Like, you know, when you said, hey, why did you shift to monetization? It’s like, I already had a background in it. So I was already starting a little bit further ahead than what other people might be like, hey, let me get into monetization. I know nothing about it. Like, my marketing is my background and, you know, I just love this stuff so much. So I would say stick with what you know. The other thing more tactical I would say is that tentacle strategy, one thing that I didn’t share was the category that you build in is super important as well. And as you scale and you work with Shamanth to try to scale your app, it’s important to have a high LTV per install, right? Like revenue per install, this is RevenueCat’s report and it does by category.

Steve: So what I’ve been really primarily focused on is the health and fitness category because as you can see from this chart, if you’re watching the video, you can see it has the highest revenue per install. And that’s what we’ve typically seen time and time again, the app we bought in the health and fitness category. And in the health and fitness category, you can do a hard paywall, which means no X on the paywall. Either pay us, start a free trial, or get the heck out. So I like that category. And then what I would say is, obviously the tentacle strategy relies a little bit by ASO and I know about ASO quite a bit, but if you are like a great content creator, you know, I had Nicole Chung on who was a great content creator and she’s built multiple, you know, apps with 100,000 MRR and using a UGC strategy. And she’s great at making things go viral.

Steve: And I’ve talked to other people, Ethan from Parallel Live where they’re really good at making things go viral. So you, if you’re good at UGC, figure out what’s a viral feature that you can build within your app and that’s Nicole’s playbook. She builds a, she figures out what’s a viral feature, tests that, make sure it can go viral, and this is what Ethan did, and then he built the app. And so, tentacle, great for me because I know ASO, but if you’re a great content creator, do that. Now, if you’re just technical and you don’t know anything about marketing, then I would say, learn a bit about marketing. But in a, in a space about…

Shamanth: Watch this podcast.

Steve: Yeah, watch this podcast. Hit rewind. But, you know, like, other people have done, like, Facebook ads and you’re really good at that stuff. And so it’s like, leverage what you know best, but figure out where the demand is first and then in a, in a world where now we the marketers, Shamanth, are the cool ones, I feel like, you know, you’re going to have to really figure out the distribution and channel-market fit versus, like, channel-product fit versus, you know, product-market fit.

Shamanth: Yeah.

Steve: Yeah.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And if I might say… a little bit.

Steve: Sure.

Shamanth: Viral feature. What’s an example of a viral feature?

Steve: Oh, I got you. I already, I already have it. It’s a LinkedIn post that I created. Let me share this with you. I have the video, so.

Shamanth: Please.

Steve: You like how you can just throw anything at me and I have something, right? Right, Shamanth? Come on.

Shamanth: That’s why you’re the president of AppNation.

Steve: Yeah, yeah, there you go. Thank you. I’ll take that. So here, I’ve got this from, now hopefully Nicole doesn’t mind that I’m sharing this, but this is something that Nicole kind of talked about too on the podcast. So I just found the video. I was like, you know what? I want to find the video. So here is what she talked about on our show as well as the visual. So here’s what she means. So the before and afters. So here is the video that Nicole, that I was searching, ChatGPT helped me. But you can see this.

Shamanth: Okay.

Steve: So that alone where it sort of has the before and after, that video went very viral, that type of viral video, and the feature is get a makeup recommendation based off of your skin. And so that is sort of like that viral feature where you can see the before and after, the app has that before and after. Here’s the makeup products you should use to get that before and after. So that’s sort of

Shamanth: Right.

Steve: what I mean. And this, and she talks about like viral, if I may, one more thing, viral content versus viral format. This is a viral format that you can apply to any type of, you know, we have a blonde white lady, but we can do this for anybody, an Asian person, somebody, so any anything can work.

Shamanth: With AI, you can basically just spin up an army of blonde women or an army of…

Steve: Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Shamanth: Right. And I think this is amazing. And I think something analogous I’ve noticed is that a lot of subscription products, before-after has always been a thing. You know, you always saw, like, split screens and then… There’s something interesting I’m noticing in a lot of scaled ads lately, and we are also making ads like these: it’s very long-form narrative videos. And I’ll give you an example of this, right? So we make like two and a half, three minute videos which is like, here’s a character, and again, this is an example. There’s, here’s a character, they… and we are making this up for the sleep apps because I can’t disclose what we’re working on. But, you know, you gave the example of sleep and meditation. Here’s a character, they’re so stressed out, they’re so, John is so stressed out.

Shamanth: John, John’s boss warned him that he’s going to get fired. And John’s like, oh my goodness, I’m just drinking six cups of coffee every day. I don’t know what’s going on. And John’s like, what’s go… John meets his buddy, his buddy says, here’s an app. John goes, uses the app. Then John’s like, spent one week, two weeks. And so we really flesh out the before and after, the character as a narrative, and show that transformation. And there I just see a number of scaled apps today doing this, again with the help of AI. It isn’t a big lift even with AI, but I’m seeing this, that a number of scaled apps… This is something we’re doing too.

Steve: Yep.

Shamanth: I think again goes on to show just the transformation is such a very, very powerful lever.

Steve: Yep.

Shamanth: And you talked briefly about you buying an app. Talk to me about what the process of buying an app typically looks like and what makes it worth doing.

Steve: Yeah, so I always like to start small. So that 2022, we bought that initial app. It was, you know, a lot less. It was only for, you know, let’s say $30 to $50,000. And then I bought Indie App Santa for a similar price range. And so I started, you know, like dabbling into purchasing, acquiring companies. And so when we bought this app, back to the tentacle strategy, the sellers, the developers actually followed the YouTube channel, our YouTube channel and sort of implemented their app and they got it to half a million a year. And I was like, interesting. So when I came across this, I already knew the keyword. I was just too lazy to build it because it required hiring a trainer, filming and all that stuff. And I was just like, I didn’t do it. But then I saw the numbers and I was like, I should have done it. Dang it. But anyways, so when we bought the app, I worked through Evelyn, Evelyn Herrera, a great broker.

Steve: She showed me like listings and I was like, I want that one and I want to talk to the developer. But the way I see it is simplified. So I like working with the brokers. It’s a little bit easier because they can sort of tell buyers that, hey, this is what you should be expecting. Because I’ve done a lot of cold outreach with buyers and they just never respond or they’re not in the mode, or they just think their app is worth a lot more than what you might think. But the simplified version, I think this is sort of in my opinion, I’m not a financial expert, I’m not giving you financial advice, but in my humble opinion, you can take an app and the most simplified version is, let’s say the app is making $10,000 a month, right? And that’s a six-figure app. It’s amazing. It’s using ASO and I’ve seen apps like this that have come across me.

Steve: So, let’s say you have to pay, let’s say 3x. So that’s $300,000. And it’s pretty easy to take out a loan for that amount, especially if you’re in the US, right? So if you’re worldwide, I don’t know those things, but in the US, it’s not too hard, especially if you have a good company that has some, you know, pass in it. So you can take out a loan for $300,000, let’s say $350,000, which is what we did too. And then it’s a small business, it’s a, I think it’s called an express loan. It’s a little bit easier to qualify for. But I know that it’s a 10-year loan and I have to pay about roughly, just for math, easy math purposes, $5,000 to pay off that loan. Now, the app that I’m buying already generates $10,000. So if I believe that let’s say Green Noise is going to continue to grow and it has and it’s stable and there’s good recurring revenues already, well, guess what?

Steve: I just bought an asset where I’m profiting $5,000 a month and I paid three years, so I have seven years, technically, right? Like I’ve made up enough money to pay for that three years because that’s what the 3.5 is if it’s averaging about, you know, $120,000 a year. So I have seven years to kind of figure out what else to do, right? And if I continue to scale it, I’m always gonna be profitable. And we have real numbers and I can show you like the app that we bought that’s half a million, you know, we are profitable on a monthly basis and, you know, we paid a shitload more than the 350, but yeah. That’s sort of why I like this model.

Shamanth: Yeah. No, I think that makes so much sense, right? So if it’s generating 10, you’re paying five to the bank, you’re basically profitable every single month. And you have a lot of time to figure out what to do with it. And if I might ask a follow-up on that.

Steve: Sure.

Shamanth: In a world where again, anyone can ship an app in a week, do you think it still makes sense to buy an app versus, you know, you just noticing that opportunity and just vibe coding it yourself or having somebody do it for you?

Steve: Yeah, so here’s what I found. So I can give you exact numbers and I won’t share my screen because I don’t want to give it. But in let’s say April we got the app, we profited about 200 bucks. It’s including ad spend, right? We were spending about $12,000 in April, so it’s only 200 bucks. But in July we profited $7,000. In August with ad spend, we profited about $4,000. It was a downturn because, health and fitness space. In a world where you can build anything, distribution is the most important. And so what I’ve discovered with this purchase, Shamanth, is because of my ASO skills, I’m able to further grow it. So I’m number one for a lot more keywords than when I first bought the app. It was number one for a few keywords. So to show you like it doesn’t take that many keywords. And now I’m pretty much number one for that entire niche, right?

Steve: So I’m able to leverage it more. Now that ASO would not have been that successful, my work on that ASO, if it was a brand new app. And so it sort of balances between the two because there’s revenue already, because there’s thousands, tens of thousands of ratings already, my ASO work a lot more efficient than just having five ratings and all that stuff. And then plus, like, I’m in a good financial situation where I can leverage this stuff. And if you’re not, then you’re going to have to, you know, build. So we are building it, but I am also looking for new opportunities to purchase apps. Once I’ve sort of, you know, gotten some of these loans done in a way.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, no, I think that makes sense, right? Because if you’re doing a brand new app, you’re basically starting from scratch. And you know, if you’re buying something, even if it’s not optimized, they have some history with Apple, they have some history with potentially Meta, and you’re building on that. They have reviews and that’s what you’re building on improving versus starting with a clean slate. You might even vibe code, maybe, the Green Noise app, and that still has that element of risk because you have a clean slate. Right, if I understand it correctly.

Steve: Yeah, absolutely. And you’re great at like scaling stuff with ads and so it’s like you find an app that’s already profitable, that’s doing well organically. I mean, you can take it over and just scale it all the way with ads, right? And so, yeah, like leverage your superpower.

Shamanth: Superpower. For sure, for sure. And we started talking about paywalls and onboarding.

Steve: Yeah.

Shamanth: So, obviously, the data is so very critical and I know you really look very, very intensely into the data.

Steve: Yeah.

Shamanth: Can you think of a test or an example where you were very, very confident and the data was like, no, that’s not what’s going to really work.

Steve: Yeah. Let me think of one. The, so there’s been a lot of times where I’m wrong, right? So I’m not and usually, like most people, I just forget about the times I’m wrong, Shamanth, and just focus on the times I’m right. But I think the best one is the hard paywall. I was very much against it and so when we bought that app, I was like, I don’t see an X on the paywall. And my technical co-founder partner at the time, no longer with him, don’t like the guy. So if he’s listening to this, he knows who he is. But anyways, the what I would say is he built it that way and I said, okay, let’s just launch it because, you know, he already built it. Like, let’s let the data decide. And he was right. Like, when we had to put the X in, Shamanth. So our trial activation with the hard paywall was around 13%. When you put the X in, it dropped to 6%. But the kicker is the trial-to-paid does not change.

Steve: It was flat. It was 35% whether it was a hard paywall or a soft paywall. And so we just made double the money when we had the hard paywall. So that’s the one that I was completely wrong on. And now my advice, Shamanth, is if you got a brand new app and you’re in the health and fitness category, launch it with a hard paywall. Like if you can do nothing else to your app, let’s say you’re getting downloads but you’re not getting the conversions, nothing confirms product-market fit than having a hard paywall because most people will activate and you have to really pay attention to that trial-to-paid rate. So that’s the one that I was completely wrong on and now I’m a big proponent of.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that makes so much sense because intuitively you would think, oh, let’s make it easy for the user by X-ing it out. Let’s let them try the app, right? And that’s a very valid justification. But you’re right, you know, if you, like, hey, you don’t have a choice, you either pay up or you don’t, it helps you validate the product-market fit completely. All right, here we go.

Steve: Here are the real numbers. I’ve got a visual. I always got a visual. So here’s 2022. This is when we bought the app and then again, it was only making this much when we bought it, about $1,000 to $2,000, and then when we slowly changed to a hard paywall, it started going up, and then went to $10,000. And then when we had a soft paywall right here, it went down to $5,000 and then we got the hard paywall back up around mid-August and then in September we went back to the $8,000 to $10,000 range. So this is crazy. I was just absolutely wrong on that one.

Shamanth: Crazy, crazy, crazy. Yeah, yeah. And I’m also just curious, again, to the extent you’re comfortable sharing, as you’ve switched to working on paywalls, monetization and as you’ve also switched to actually buying and operating apps of your own,

Steve: Yeah.

Shamanth: How has your team composition changed? And again, you can disclose this to the extent you’re comfortable.

Steve: Oh, I’m, thank you for giving me the out. Look, I think the, the agency that I can probably operate my own apps with just, like, a handful of people. Like maybe me and the developer alone and maybe an editor, and that’s it. Like I don’t need that many people to operate my own portfolio. But the thing is, I feel very grateful for my position. I was born, I told you before we hit record, but I was born in Myanmar, Burma, and came to the US when I was six years old. And so I feel very fortunate. Burma’s going through some, its upheaval and stuff, and military dictatorship and all that stuff. And so I feel very grateful for everything I have.

Steve: I wouldn’t be in the position I have if my parents didn’t decide to take that leap and leave their own country where they were very comfortable in, had a comfortable life to become completely uncomfortable just for the sake of their children. And so, I’m very grateful for that. And part of the reason that I still have the agency is I still love what I do, but like it is like a complete mental drain. But it’s also to support the team, right? And I feel like talent’s everywhere. And so our team’s in India and the Philippines and, you know, they may not have the most opportunities that we have in the US. So for me, I want to give back to people and I have some employees, I had employee… well, I have one employee in Myanmar and that’s part of like, you know, and like I’m trying to do my best to kind of support them. This is why I told the team. I was like, look, I don’t technically, the apps make enough for me to be okay.

Steve: Don’t… I don’t want to, but I want to do it because we built a team. This is what I started out with. And the other thing I love about having the agency is I can test a lot. I have a lot more data versus just my app, I can only do so much with my app, but I can make some recommendations, we can do a lot of tests. So, not that I would ever stop doing the agency, but that’s how the composition has shifted a little bit. And for me, it’s like diversifying, like what brings me joy and I always just want to do at my age, Shamanth, what brings me joy.

Shamanth: Yeah, yeah, no, I did not know that. Thank you for being open about that. Yeah, so, you know, clearly you’re balancing what gives you joy and what lets you contribute and be giving back to certain communities that are actually very, very talented.

Steve: Yeah. They are. Yeah.

Shamanth: Amazing. Yeah. I hadn’t thought that about you, so thank you for sharing that. How has that shifted, you’ve been putting your own money into marketing? Or, you know, I don’t know how actively you spend on ads on your own apps. How has it been?

Steve: It’s been a lot of fun, actually. To be completely honest with you, because like obviously I can see immediate growth, I can test a lot of things, I can be more aggressive with our own apps. And so I do love it. Like when I, I mean no offense, I love working with all the clients, okay? So anybody that hears this, but like what lights me up is when I’m talking about our own apps because it’s your own thing, like it’s your own baby, right? I can help a client, I love helping clients and we have a lot of clients where, you know, I’ve helped one of them, we’ve been working for four plus years, go from like side hustle, even though the app was doing well, to now he’s a full-time entrepreneur and his apps are growing like crazy now that he’s gone full-time.

Steve: So I love those stories and I love still helping people, but I would say I’ve been in a good position so that I can spend and not be completely like focused on the numbers and be like okay with some of the ROAS. But I feel like it’s so much fun to just see the impact and yeah, I just feel like it’s so much fun. And I’m in a position because of the agency to have fun like this, but I feel like it’s a lot more fun to work on my own apps than… We’re only spending about anywhere from, let’s see, on a monthly basis, I mean, on the high end $12,000, $13,000. So it’s not like relatively speaking a lot of money, but yeah, it’s been fun. I’ll say.

Shamanth: Gotcha. This has been incredible.

Steve: Thanks, man.

Shamanth: You know, I really thought we would go deep into paywalls and onboarding and we did. And we also heard about your own journey, which, thank you for being very open about it, and that was something I didn’t know, and, you know, this is sort of thing that also it’s one of the things that lights me up, and I want to do these podcasts because I learn new things about people I’ve known for a very, very long time. Thank you for taking the time to share everything. This is a perfect place for us to wrap, Steve. Before we go, can you tell folks how they can find out more about you and all the magic you do?

Steve: Yeah. I mean it’s pretty simple, just AppMasters.com or just look for App Masters on YouTube. That’s where most people find us.

Shamanth: Wonderful, wonderful. And we’ll link to that in the show notes. And yeah, this has been incredible and as always, so much respect for everything you do, Steve.

Steve: Same. It’s all, the feelings are all, the warm and fuzzy feelings are all mutual, my friend.