Preston Whitmore

17 Building mobile apps

[James Camp 🛠,🛠 @JamesonCamp]

The most asymmetric upside in the world is making content online.

It's changed my life. It's how I built my first business. I've watched it make multimillionaires out of several friends. With nothing but an iPhone and an internet connection.

The irony is that the algorithms have gotten so good they can smell who actually lived what they're talking about.

So the move is dumb simple. Go do things. Then come back and talk about them.

The ones crushing it in the algo are the ones living life outside of it.

[Preston Whitmore @prestonloric]

@vitaliidodonov MRR

[Preston Whitmore @prestonloric]

I started posting on TikTok and Instagram two days ago, funneling people to my waitlist for my next app.

So far, 10 people have signed up, and the early feedback from my audience has been great.

My goal is to ship within the next week, with the app hopefully approved and live on the App Store about two weeks out.

In the meantime, I’m posting three times a day with a CTA on every third video. None of the videos have taken off yet, but it’s only been two days. My target is 200 people on the waitlist by the time the app launches.

From there, I’ll keep building in public, bring on UGC creators to promote the app, and test faceless formats across two separate accounts. Once I find an organic winner, I’ll start running ads.

The road to $10k MRR starts now.

[Preston Whitmore @prestonloric]

I’m 17 and I’m betting everything on myself.

Last March me and my friend started a detailing business. Just a couple buckets, some product, and a willingness to outwork everyone. By the end of summer we’d scaled it to $10k/month. We were posting every day, booking cars back to back in the heat. The money was real and most people my age would’ve been thrilled to keep that running.

But detailing has a ceiling. There’s only so many cars you can do in a day, only so many hours you can trade for money. I didn’t want to trade hours for dollars for the rest of my life. I wanted to build something that could scale while I sleep. Something that was actually mine.

So I walked away from it and went all in on apps. And it wasn’t a hard decision at all. The second I saw what was possible with software I knew detailing was too small for what I’m trying to build. Walking away was easy because I already knew I needed something bigger.

I started 3 months ago with my co founder and we have not slowed down since. I’m working 10 to 12 hour days, sometimes more. I wake up thinking about apps and I fall asleep thinking about apps.

Most people think building the app is the hard part. It’s not. Anyone can build now. The entire game is distribution. So that’s what I obsess over. Getting the app in front of the right people, understanding the math behind CAC and LTV, building onboarding that converts. There’s no magic sauce to it, it’s a system, and I’m learning every piece of it.

We’ve shipped 2 apps and gotten a decent amount of downloads and subscriptions. Nothing crazy yet, but enough to prove people want what we’re building.

I don’t have it all figured out, and I’m not acting like I do. I’ll fail, probably a lot. But every time I do, I’ll learn from it, adjust, and keep moving forwards. Most people give up because they need results now. I don’t. I’ll keep going for as long as it takes, and I’ll make it happen no matter what.

So here’s me putting it out there. I’m going to build something huge in this space. Not might, not trying to. I will. And I’m posting this so a year from now, two years from now, you can look back and see that I did everything I said I was going to do.

This is just the beginning.