this video is about the most important principles and methods for developing a viral app my name is Blake Anderson and I'm the first person to build three different mobile apps that have each generated millions in profit and millions in downloads in just one year the apps I built are Riz GPT umax and Cal I'll be using these apps as examples during this five-part series which is brought to you by Apex our mission at Apex is to produce highquality tools and content to help you improve your health success and purpose in life let's first Define the objective of viral development and explain why it's important viral development seeks to minimize the amount of friction from your first line of code to millions of users we'll be focusing on single player utility apps apps that don't have social functionality and also don't require some overly complex back end the development stage isn't about coming up with some crazy new ideas but it is arguably the hardest and most time intensive part of the process this is where most people give up and where you are most likely to fail if you're a developer this video will help you move faster in the future and if you're new to coding this video will help you get started the first half of this video will be about principles which shape how you think about development the second half will be about methods which will help you actually begin to develop your application our Three core principles are number one a growth mind set number two deep work and time blocking and number three Progressive overload our Three core methods are number one use react native with Expo in cursor number two set up backend infrastructure and number three learn how to prompt principle number one growth mindset first off anybody that says you can build a functional application in just 1 hour using AI is completely lying to you sure you can build an application that performs maybe one function for yourself as an individual but you won't be able to build a production level application that you can distribute to the market now that said anybody that says that you can't go from zero to a fully functional application in just one month with AI is also lying to you as usual the truth is somewhere in between the biggest barrier to development for beginners is not a lack of technical skill it's their mindset I built R GPT with barely any coding experience I used AI as my personal tutor and assistant I think it's very important to note that you shouldn't view AI as doing all of the work for you but you should view it as a very effective tool and a tutor in general you need to cultivate a growth mindset within yourself one where if you're unable to build the app in 1 hour like the gurus say you're not going to get fed up and quit and at the same time push yourself to your limit and move as quickly as you possibly can not settling for the notion that it's going to take you a year to build something if you have a growth mindset you can get started today even if you're not completely ready and know that over time you'll figure out exactly how to make it work your first version will be bad that's okay R gpt's first version was terrible but it worked and that's all that matters principle number two deep work and time blocking development requires focused uninterrupted time if you've never built anything technical scientific or very quantitative in nature before you will likely have to push your mind to deeper limits than it's used to people that have spent a lot of time on social media often have a difficult time making this transition going from a world where things move extremely fast to a world where you have to go extremely deep and isolate yourself from everything else the key here is to remove everything that could possibly distract you for prolonged periods for example you could block 4 hours of deep work for coding no phone no email no distraction actions just you your code editor some Ai and stack Overflow this is not about working more hours it's about making your hours count set specific goals for each session build a camera interface finish up onboarding add in a pay wall don't just code aimlessly create a plan and execute the apps that fail aren't the ones with bad code the biggest failure you can make as a developer is not shipping bad code but not shipping anything at all because you didn't set aside the time to get it done principle number three Progressive overload just like in weightlifting you need to gradually increase difficulty this applies both to your product and your coding skills for your product start with the absolute minimum feature set raise GPT upload screenshot get response umax upload face get ratings Cal upload food image get calorie for yourself as a developer start with easy applications if I had tried to build umax or Cal AI first I would have had a much more difficult time they are simple apps but they would have taken at least twice as long to build as Riz GPT as a result I may have never gotten to the Finish Line at all over time you can add new features to your products as well as take on bigger and more difficult projects in the early days you might spend 10 hours debugging something that should have taken you one but this is the value of progressive overload because next time you might be able to do it in 5 hours and then 3 hours and then two and eventually you're good enough to get it done in the 1 hour that it's supposed to take build ship learn method number one use react native with Expo in cursor this is my recommendation for your front-end development stack react native will be your primary development framework Expo is used to simplify the workflow and cursor is valuable because it's the best AI code editor the goal here is is to be able to learn front end as well as ship your products as fast as possible this stack will let you build for IOS and Android simultaneously you'll be able to ship updates extremely quickly and you can use AI to accelerate your development when I first started I used Swift UI but to be honest if I were to restart today I would have used this stack that I recommend there's certainly exceptions to this rule so don't over complicate it I generally air on the side of do first learn second so if you're a developer and you have a different stack that you currently use that's totally fine but for beginners I think that this is by far the best stack to learn in 2025 method number two set up backend infrastructure to be honest this is a highly contentious topic I'm not an expert here but I'm going to speak on experience as well as from what I've seen other successful applications do first off use superbase or Firebase these Services can handle user authentication database management file storage API endpoint setup and more for pay wall testing and monetization I recommend using super wall this will enable you to AB test your pay walls as well as offerings at different points in your app with different designs in real time finally if you want to use AI functionality in your application I would recommend using anthropic the Builders of Claude or open aai the Builders of chat GPT you can search up their API endpoints on Google you should read their documentation to understand how their API endpoints work finally you should always say up to date with all of the newest AI technologies that you can possibly use to improve the functionality of your application or for coming up with new features as a whole when it comes to backend infrastructure there's a lot of custom setup that you can do but I generally prioritize letting the big established platforms do the heavy lifting for me method number three and this is the most important method learn learn how to prompt AI Beyond just app development this is probably the most important skill of the future here are my key principles for Effective prompting number one be specific and structured you need to break down your complex tasks into smaller ones if you don't give the AI examples of what you're looking for it probably won't do a great job because it just has to guess it's very similar to working with another human be very specific about what you're looking to get out number two iterate and refine I say this all the time when you are operating or working on something where you have a short feedback loop and you can get quick data based on what's working and what's not for example in marketing you need to iterate and test out different strategies the same applies here for prompting you should test out different ways of speaking to the AI different ways of explaining what you're looking for and over time you'll figure out the prompting techniques that work best number three save your prompts I have a number of different prompts that I use for different tasks when I want AI to generate code for me according to some project that I'm working on I'll use specific prompts about the format that I'm looking for when I'm generating scripts for Content I will use different prompts over time you should build out an arsenal of prompts based on the different sort of use cases you have for your AI development content creation marketing design ideation and more as an example if I'm looking to build an application with AI and I want to get the initial UI layout I'm not going to say hey can you build an app where I can upload a screenshot and then it gives me responses for girls I'm going to say hey can you give me one button in the center that says upload screenshot and has white text within it and red text around it and then when I press that you pull up the photo library module at which point I can upload an image which will then call the open a API right and you see what I'm doing here it's not just like hey can you do this very blank thing for me but rather hey here's exactly what I'm looking for now can you help me set the structures in place and then over time I'll iterate and go back and forth and figure out the structure that I'm actually looking for and I'll save the prompting techniques that work best whether it be tangibly saving them or just storing them within my mind remember that AI is a co-pilot and not just an autopilot the better your prompts and the more clear your direction is the more value you will get out of it like like all skills it will take time to learn and improve but it is probably the best investment that you can make in yourself thanks for listening guys in the next video we're going to cover how to distribute or Market your application I'm making many more videos in the future so be sure to subscribe to stay up to date and check out our website at apex.nc to see what we're building