I'm Sarah and I built Stella, a manifesting app, which crossed over $300,000 in MRR in 2 months. >> This is Sarah Pearl. She launched her very first app and today that app makes over $340,000 per month. When she told me about her story, I was blown away because this story is not really about the app she built, but is rather the beginning of a much bigger wave that is about to happen on the App Store. >> Women are going to dominate this app space and men should prepare for that. >> So, I asked Sarah to come on to the channel to break it all down and in this episode we'll dive into the insanely simple app she built that now makes hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, why she thinks everyone is building apps backwards and the next wave of app builders that nobody will see coming. This is one that you cannot miss. So, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. Welcome Sarah. I'm super pumped to have you on the channel. Tell me about who you are, what app you built and what's your story. >> I'm Sarah, also known as Hot High Priestess, and I built Stella, a manifesting app, which crossed over $300,000 in MRR in 2 months since launching. I'm excited to share about the power of personal brand and the power that comes with being a woman in this space and how it's actually an unfair advantage. >> I will we're going to talk all about that. But first of all, congrats. $300,000 MRR in 2 to 3 months is insane. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it. So, let's talk about the app that you built. Can you pull up the app and also pull up some of your Stripe or revenue screenshots to show that this is legit? >> So, this is Stella and basically you tell it all of your dreams, all of your desires, and it will create these custom visualizations that you can listen to from your future self who already manifested it. >> >> It also has affirmations every single day completely custom to you. Things like you'll get an affirmation every day like, "Today I'm looking at the App Store and seeing my app hit number one on the App Store and things like that. So, within the first two months since launching, we hit 300k MRR. And I think this is a little lower than it actually is. We're like at about 350, 360 MRR. We have 12,000 paying customers. We've had, I believe, over 200,000 downloads, which is super cool. Our conversion rate is really high. That's part of the power of having a personal brand is people are already bought into you. So, this is my Instagram. I have 1.2 million followers on Instagram. Yeah, I post of manifestation content. And this is my TikTok with 2.8 million followers. Combined views have generated over a billion views on TikTok, which is crazy. >> Okay, cool. The first thing, I just want to nail this objection while the audience is watching this right now. They're going, "Hey, I don't have any followers. Like, clearly it was so easy for you because you had this massive audience." What would you say to someone like that who's probably watching this right now? >> Well, since launching Stella, I actually created a brand new TikTok. And since then, it's been a couple months now. It's grown to over 40,000 followers. I have another TikTok account with over 700,000 followers that I just like spam post on and I have consistently going viral on every account that I ever make, right? I could start a new account today and probably guarantee 50,000 followers in the next three to four months. So, it's not so much a question of like, do you already have a personal brand as much as it is, do you have the skill of virality? And when you master the skill of virality, then you can create a personal brand very fast. >> Okay, cool. Amazing. Obviously, you have a huge social media following, which we are going to talk about that in a second. But before we do, let's talk about how you get to this point where you have now an app that is making over $300,000 a month. What's your background, and then how did you decide, "Hey, I'm going to build an app"? >> I've always been super entrepreneurial and I've always had like a sixth sense about virality and content. And so, literally, the first three videos I ever posted on TikTok went viral. And ever since, it's just been like one viral video after the next and I just immediately saw an opportunity for building a personal brand even though I was in college studying to be a teacher. After that I started monetizing my social media and then I want to say about a year and a half ago I launched a brand on TikTok shop which also has been super successful making like seven figures a month. I've kind of dipped my toe in every sort of business model that exists that you could have with a personal brand and then I saw the opportunity in SAS and in the consumer app space. I saw the power of AI at the time as well and how easy it was to vibe code an MVP of a product. I also saw that there was a huge gap in the market where there were all these apps that weren't necessarily designed to solve female issues because they were designed by men. >> I love this app that Sarah built because it's simple and it's crazy just how fast you can build and ship apps like this nowadays. I know I've said this a million times but this is the year of building on iOS and if you watch the channel you'll know that it's one of the biggest opportunities on the internet right now which is why we launched the iOS bootcamp. It is our 100% free program where you will learn exactly how to build and launch your own iOS app from the tech stack to use to the workflows to build. You'll build your own app in just a few days ready to ship to the app store. So if you're ready to build your idea head to the first link in the description and you can get started 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Let's talk about how you came up with the idea for this because you can have a personal brand and you can launch an app and you can do 10k a month, 20k a month but you launched something and did 300k per month pretty much right out of the gate. So clearly this idea was good. This manifestation app or how did you come up with this idea and how'd you know this is something that could be a multi-million dollar app? I'll start off by saying I don't think most men would have come up with this idea, right? And so I think that's actually the unfair advantage of being a woman in this space is there's so many of these problems that we experience as women that we're like, I wish an app existed like this, but a man would never think to build an app like that, right? The reason I was able to create this app was, you know, I listen to meditations and visualizations, and I saw that there was nothing on the market that created custom visualizations or meditations for a person. And I was like, it would be really cool if there was a way to like customize these visualizations specifically about the exact goal that I want. And I was like, well, we now live in a very unique time in human history where we can literally create an app to do that for you, right? You can use AI to customize something like that. And so, that's how the idea came to be. >> That's super cool. Let's talk about what you just mentioned there, which is like, AI tools can do this thing. So, let's talk about how you actually built this. You had the idea, it was really powerful, it almost made you emotional when you saw, "Hey, this is what I can do with AI." How did you then turn it into an app? What tools did you use, and how long did it take to build this? >> I used, you know, Cloud Code, literally just normal Cloud, to be honest, has incredible design capabilities. Google AI Studio was huge for me. I'd say my biggest piece of advice around this is like, speed is the number one ingredient towards success in this industry. The faster you can whip up an MVP and test it, the sooner you will have a product that actually performs. I think from start to finish it took us 2-3 months to build the entire app. In terms of how fast I whipped up an MVP, I think it might have been in 2 days. >> All right, so, the next question that I have for you is a little bit different than I would typically ask on Starter Story, but it's something that I've noticed. When I look at my YouTube analytics, it is literally 93-94% men, like, actually. And if you look at our channel, you'll notice that it's always men, it's all men. When we talked earlier, you had some interesting opinions about this, the future of entrepreneurship. Hopefully, there are a lot of young girls or ladies watching this that can get inspired. What do you think the future of building apps, being online, is for women? >> I would say women are going to dominate this app space, and men should prepare for that because women dominate distribution and the only thing that was standing in the way of women building the number one app on the App Store and an app that makes 300k MRR is the fact that many women just don't know how to code and there was a technical barrier. And now with AI and tools like Cloud Code and Cursor, that technical barrier has been eliminated to a large degree, right? And it's only going to get better from here and majority of influencers are women. I also think it's important to note like >> >> biologically women command attention. We also know how to have community. Like we just have this sixth sense about it and that's ultimately what's going to determine the people who win in this space as well as the fact that like the best product doesn't win, the best known one does. When I talk to women, there's actually a huge demonization of AI amongst women. I don't even know if men know this and I think some men are demonized for using AI, but like when women use AI in their products or just in general, they're like completely like canceled online often times. For me, when I was first getting hate online or criticism, it really affected me and I wanted to quit social media. However, I love to reframe and so when I started getting hate online, I actually started viewing it as a good thing. I was like, "This is boosting my videos in the algorithm. My most successful videos are the most controversial ones." >> That's awesome. Well, you said something earlier which I really loved which is that women are going to build all these hundred thousand dollar per month apps because of one thing, women own distribution. So it's just a matter of time before the technical gets easy enough and we live in this social media world, anybody can build anything. So let's talk about that distribution piece. Take this app, how did you get tens of thousands of users to see your app, download it, install it and pay for it? >> So if you have a personal brand and if you have a following, if you can go viral, you could sell anything. I mean, I could sell air and it'll sell, right? First piece is how do you create a viral personal brand and it's actually so easy. You find a niche, you look up the most viral content that's performing in that niche. You study core human psychology of what gets people to move and literally keep recreating viral content. If you have a video that hits, like recreate it to infinity. I've been recreating the same viral content for years now and it still continues to go viral and perform and convert. And once you have a video that really pops off, you want to like work backwards and ask yourself, what is a product that I could naturally insert into this video that would help the virality and also solve a problem that people are facing. Their first thought would be like, I need to close out of TikTok and go download this right now. >> Okay, cool. Let's go a little bit into the specifics of this. You kind of mentioned that there's one format you do over and over and often times when I talk to app founders that are crushing it, there's usually like one video or one format that has led to like the majority of the sign-ups and the revenue. Would you be able to walk me through just one of those examples of a video that has just crushed it for you? >> So, this is one of the most viral pieces of content that I ever put out. My mind is worth millions. I don't work for money, money works for me. I am always at the right time. My name is spoken of amongst the most successful people. I get paid to exist and it is always working out for me. >> How can I remember all these? >> You can actually get custom affirmations on your lock screen every single day using my app Stella. >> Boom. >> I say the affirmations and then the guy asks me, how can I remember all of these? And then I'm basically like, just go use my app Stella. I would say the first thing is typically when I make my affirmation videos, I will start it with like, repeat these affirmations for 7 days or listen three times. When you see something like that, your first instinct is, let me save this video because if you have to repeat it for 7 days, like you're going to have to come back to it. When someone saves a video, then it increases engagement. There you go. And in general, this is very savable content, right? People want to like listen to an affirmation another day. So, if you can make content that naturally gets shares or saves, that's going to make it go viral every time. Another thing is, I would just say I'm really good at creating affirmations, so that also is why it goes viral. So, if there's something that you are really good at or you have like a unique spin on, that contributes to it. Another thing I really like to do on Instagram specifically is use ManyChat, so I'll tell people comment download and I'll send you your custom affirmations. And then they download the app. And actually in the ManyChat, I tell them I'm like, "Hey, if you review the app, like let me know so I can thank you personally." So, that also helps. Some of the videos I mention Stella, but I don't show the use case and then that'll usually convert a little worse. I would say some of the best converting stuff is actually this, where this got 300k views, but it converted super well. >> >> So, you know, they see that, they're like, "What's the app?" There's this fine balance you have to find between videos that go viral, but then also videos that'll specifically demo the app or convert well. >> That's awesome. I love simple apps. So, the fact that you don't have a million features, I think is super cool and shows that you're solving a good problem rather than building a bunch of things that people don't need. Last question that we ask everyone who comes on the channel, if you could go back in time before you're on social media or maybe before you decided to actually build an app even though you had no technical experience, what would be your advice that you would give to yourself or for anybody watching this who wants to build apps like you? >> Mhm. Well, I would start by saying that I think spite is the greatest motivation that you could ever have. Peace and love doesn't build empires, pain does, quite frankly. And so, I truly believe that usually the most successful people in the world, the reason they started was because someone didn't believe in them, some system worked against them. I just want you to know, if you're going through a really difficult chapter, you're actually in the luckiest season of your life because you have the most amount of fuel that you will ever have. Everyone works front to back and I think the reason a lot of my products have been so successful and so fast is because I actually work backwards. Create the content and the distribution first and then I create the product. And it becomes so obvious. When you're creating content, it is so obvious where the gap is, what you could easily add into your content that would perform well as an app. Create the content, see what people are saying in the comments. Oh, I wish this existed. Oh, I'm struggling with this. >> >> That is the blueprint, right? And also I want to say one last thing. I think there's so much copy paste in this industry in the app space and I think what made Stella so successful is an app like this didn't exist. I innovated. I pioneered something. I encourage app founders, especially women, to invent something in this space that solves a problem that hasn't been solved before. >> That's great advice, especially on creating content first. I have a lot of people who come to me and they say, "Hey, what app should I build?" And I say, "Don't build an app. Go build content. Then you can find your app idea once you do that." So, I think that's great advice. Thank you, Sarah, for coming on and sharing your story and inspiring hopefully a lot of young ladies out there, a lot of people out there. Thank you for coming on. >> Thank you for having me. >> All right, Gus, producer of Starter Story, what did you think of Sarah and the manifestation app, Stella? >> Awesome. I mean, she's got her stuff together and it was just cool to hear how she talked about building and the opportunity. I don't know how many women will see this since our audience is like 93% male, but I hope that anyone who watches this like will learn a lot from what she said. The app itself, I mean, it's manifestation, not my thing per se, but it just goes to show like there's a whole sort of market of probably products and apps that because I'm a dude, an old dude at that. I was looking at my gray hair during the interview. I was like, damn, that's not my niche. And so, it's just a good reminder like >> Yeah, no, I think we do have a very male audience, but I'm hoping that this video gets somehow algorithmic magic. Like it gets showed to a bunch of women out there who want to build, are building, thinking about building cuz I have two sisters, so I know they have all these things they do, like that sounds sexist, sorry to say that, but >> >> It's not good. >> I get canceled, I'm sorry. >> All things they do. >> My sisters love a couple things that just remind me of this, like tarot card reading. Horoscopes is a big one, too. And I just think there's this huge opportunity. So, yeah, if I get canceled for this, uh I'm sorry, but this is this is my final starter story video. >> That's funny. And then, yeah, I just to like the personal branding, I mean, that's the number one thing people are going to say, right? It's like, oh, of course she made 300,000 because she has millions of followers online. Of course that's why she is making so much money, it's because she has a big brand. But also, on the back of that is years of creating content and figuring out what her audience wants and sort of aligning, manifesting this into existence. >> This is going to be the change. Developers used to be kings because they held the keys to the kingdom with their development skills. But now this is gone. The kings and queens are now content creators. This is the future. It's going to get even crazier over the next couple years. So, if there's anything if you're watching this right now, create content. But you still got to build an app. You still got to build something. So, we're going to put a link in the description, our iOS bootcamp, where you will come up with an idea, you will build it, and you will ship it to the world very, very fast. Which again, is something that Sarah did. Shipped her V1 super fast. So, check that out in the description. It's 100% free. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. Let us know what you thought in the comments. Otherwise, we'll see you in the next one. Peace.