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Most people build an app and have no idea it's going to work and then they're shocked when it makes zero dollars. But what if I told you before you build you could predict that it will work? We took the app from 3,000 to 10,000 MRR in less than 8 months. This is On and he has a simple three-step framework that can tell you if your app idea can actually grow before you waste months on it. What we do to understand what is the right thing to build or what is the right thing to scale is going to TikTok and locate three things.
It's called the VSC framework and he used it on his own app that now makes over $10,000 a month. Every phone has two to five TikTok accounts. You're looking at 15 to 20 TikTok accounts right now. I asked On to come on to the channel to break down the VSC framework and in this episode we'll dive into how to know if you can get millions of views on short-form, how to know if short-form is actually scalable for your app, and why getting views versus downloads are two completely different things. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story.
All right, On, welcome to the channel. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. My name is On Neill and I am building Flame. It's an app for couples where we help you connect with daily rituals. Just really simple. We give you a question a day which allows you to connect with your partner. Sitting at 250,000 downloads right now, 50 million organic views, and we took the app from 3,000 to 10,000 MRR in less than 8 months. And I am here not to tell you my origin story but to tell you about the system that made it happen. We call it the VSC framework.
I love this VSC framework cuz it's a great way of thinking about what is the right idea to build and we're going to get all into that. But before we do, can you show me your app that you built, the app that makes over 10,000 MRR? Also, pull up some of your revenue screenshots to prove this is legit. So, Flame is a daily ritual app for couples. What we do is we give couples a question a day, an AI relationship coach which is trained on every answer you give it, and we built it for the 80% of couples who say their relationship needs work, but won't pay $200 for therapy. So, the product works on a subscription model, and we're currently in the middle of a sales proceed. I can't pull up the numbers right now, but this is last year
from when we took the app sitting at roughly 3,000 to 10,000 all the way just by using organic TikTok. Then, this is what I'm semi-famous on Xbar is my ugly tracker. Every single TikTok account we have is on the sheets. As you can see, the cumulative views we're sitting at right now are roughly 58 million, which is over a period of the last year. So, I'll show you some of the TikTok content later as well and show you how do we exactly go around putting these pieces of content out. All right, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. Looks like a super cool app. What's your background? How do you get to a place where you're building super cool consumer app that's doing over 10,000 a month?
My origin story starts as a gym bro. So, I launched a fitness chain in China. We scaled it to 50 million ARR across seven locations, and then I moved to Europe. I worked for a German scale-up. I took them from a 40 million Series B to 200 million Series C, and throughout this process, I learned a crucial lesson. I understood that distribution has become the moat, and that should be the focus of every founder out there. I moved to New York, which is where I launched Flame. The reason behind Flame was because I saw there were a lot of apps out there to help you find a partner, almost none to help you make the relationship better afterwards. Started building Flame with my then French girlfriend. We started using the app to
build a relationship. I also used the relationship to build the app based on what I learned, and we're married, so I guess it worked. Classic entrepreneur, um you know, solving their relationship through building an app. I love it. So, how did you come up with the idea for this app that now makes over $10,000 a month? I mean, you guys are busy, right? And you understand that when you're busy, your relationship often takes a backseat, and we wanted to build something for the relationship. We wanted to build your relationship dashboard where you could connect with
it on a regular daily basis. You had to invest 2 minutes every day to answer a question about your relationship. You could not see your partner's answer until you answered as well, and this allowed you to discover about your relationship a little bit every single day. The VSC framework that On is about to share is gold cuz it's exactly how he grew his app to over $10,000 a month. This is the number one question I get all the time. Pat, how do I actually grow my app? Well, this is exactly why we launched the organic short-form playbook, which is a free download where we will break down how successful app
founders that we've brought right onto this channel are growing their apps today with organic short form. Inside, you'll find tons of free content, including how to reverse-engineer viral TikToks, how to find formats that actually work, and how to get millions of views on your app for free. If you're serious about actually growing your app, then head to the link in the description, and you can download it 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. What I think is really interesting what I wanted to bring you on the channel is you had this framework, which is how to think about how to validate an idea and how successful an app idea could be before you even come up with the idea or even before you even start building the idea.
So, could you break down this framework for me? I think it'll be useful for a lot of people watching this who maybe have an idea or want to find an idea of how to essentially predict or know that an idea will be successful in 2026. What we do to understand what is the right thing to build or what is the right thing to scale is going to TikTok and locate three things. First one is V, viral. Has this format, has this kind of content, has this pain point, has it gone viral before? What we mean by virality is has it hit over 100,000 views on multiple pieces of similar content from accounts under 5,000 followers. Now, you'll ask me like, "Ankit, why is 5,000 important? You know, why could it not be coming from an account with million followers?"
It's because when it's under 5,000 followers, the content goes viral not because of that account's reach, but because of the content itself. Second is scalability. You need to grind, man. You need to put out volume. It's a volume game. It's about how much can you put out? How much can you understand what's working, what's not. At one point, we were putting out 150 pieces every day to test a single hook. And for this volume, I always say pick something that can be scaled. Can you produce 100 of these without burning out? How? Either you use AI-generated content, which has become incredible. You look at Kling 3.0 videos. You look at SeedAndSpark videos. The kind of content that's being created is really close to realistic videos. Or the
second thing we also did is we hired UGC out of Eastern European countries and Russia. And it was literally $1 for a 60-second video. You go on a channel like work.ru. And it's like the Fiverr of Russia. And you can find this UGC for this cheaper price. Then the third, which is the most important, convertibility. You can go viral on social media by taking a format that's already working and creating on the video like that. But if it doesn't convert for your product, it's not worth anything. How do you determine this? When you're trying to find the right kind of content, you go on the content and you see the comments. If it's promoting a product, are people asking for the product? Are they saying that
hey, what's the app? What's the product? Where can I find this? If they're just saying lol or I don't agree with this or it's just com- commercial, it probably might not work well for conversions. Now, this is in a nutshell what I define as the VSC framework. And this is what saved our asses last year and saved my company from dying. Okay, cool. I love the VSC framework. So, could you show me a piece of content that has all three of these? Well, what I'll do is I'll start with a piece of content that doesn't actually. So, when we look at this piece, we see that it's fitting the V part of the framework. Then S, it's scalable as well. As you can see, it's slideshows
created with Nano Banana with a text overlay on them, not complicated to create. Then the third part, when we come to the convertibility element, what we do is once we put out our content, we scan the comments. If they're not asking about the product, they don't mention the product, I would say that's a bigger sign that it's not going to lead to high conversions. Of this video that got 120,000 views, I think we got nine or eight trials started. Now, this one worked really well for us. Now, there's a highly engaging text overlay where a woman is stuck in a long-distance relationship where she's saying, "How do you not mess it up? How do you not lose it?" And then when we go on to the next
slide, this is where we plug our product in. It's a slideshow. And what we do then is we comment seed within this. Every one of these comments you're going to be seeing is going to be promoted from that account itself or from another account we have. Now, this is a way we notice we can get high conversion on the content when we don't get a lot of organic traffic through. We go in from all the other accounts we have and we drop in comments on the comments that are already coming in. And this led to roughly a 1% conversion rate for us, which is really high for organic social. Okay, thanks for sharing this. I mean, what I think is super cool is the amount of like scale and experimentation that you're doing here and you kind of
mentioned this earlier before, but you had like a whole spreadsheet where you track all the content. I think that's super cool. Could you show me that spreadsheet and kind of explain how you use it and how people could maybe create something similar? So, this is the beautiful spreadsheet. Now, what we do here on the leftmost side is we track all the accounts, what phones are on, and then the important work starts from here where we're tracking what is happening with the account. Is it on warm-up phase one, two, is it paused, is it healthy, unhealthy, stopped, blocked, etc. Then we switch to understanding what channel is it on. Does it have TikTok only? Does it have TikTok and lemonade?
Does it have TikTok and Instagram? So, as you can see, Pat, some of them have reactions, some of them have slideshows, some of them have other kind of content. My team goes in every single day and they track how many views are we getting on the videos, how many likes are there, and then they leave notes in the comments on what is working, what is not working. Why? Because this helps us understand what part of the video performed well, what would should we try to replicate today, what should we not try to replicate today. Another cool spreadsheet we have is where we track the hooks and how they're performing individually. Based on this, if this is working, then we'll iterate on it the next day and the next day by changing small wordings
or putting the placement differently. Um one of the secrets we had is we were having a woman who was reacting on the camera. We discovered that if we put the text right on her neckline, so not on her face, right on her neckline, the video performed the best for some reason, right? This is something we discovered after putting it out every single day. All right, well, I love this spreadsheet and if you're cool with it, I'm going to put it as a link in the description that anybody watching this can download this template for free if they want to do the same thing and implement the VSC framework and track all their content. So, I will put that down there in the description if you're okay with
it and you can download it right now for free. Let's switch topics and talk about this app that you built. Could you just demo this app to me? Show me the app that you built that makes you $10,000 a month. We're sitting on the homepage right now as you can see on the homepage, we've got me and my partner put up there and then we have the daily question. The question of the day is, do you prefer to be the little spoon or big spoon while cuddling? Moving out of that, once I answer this question, what happens is then the AI is training itself based on every answer it receives.
All right, so we've got a flame AI built into the app, which when you open you have different modes of the coach you can employ. So, there's a naughty coach, there's a gifting genie if you want to gift your partner something. Some of the part which I love about the app personally is also the bucket list where we allow you to create a bucket list with your partner. You can plan your memories, things you want to do together. And my favorite is the memory, right? Now, there's so many beautiful memories couples have which they can cherish together. We allow you to keep track of those memories in a timeline, which is private just to you and her. And this is how the app works. The whole point is providing people with a daily
ritual, a daily way to connect with their partner, keeping the love alive, keeping the spark alive. That's awesome. I just love how simple it is, you know, solve a small problem, just helping couples connect in a small way, and be an app that makes over $10,000 a month. On a similar note, could we talk about the tech stack? What are the tools behind this $10,000 a month app? For building, we have a simple set of tools, Cloud Code plus Cloud Design, OP, and RevenueCat that allows us to manage a monetization. Mixpanel, we're also using the free tier right now. Then, TikTok native analytics, I think it's the best. No other tool can compete with it. You can see the retention, you can see where people are dropping off, what's happening. Then,
you also use Hexfield. And the last part is just having a portfolio of infrastructure, right? I mean, look at this. 1 2 3 4 5. Every phone has two to five TikTok accounts. You're looking at 15 to 20 TikTok accounts right now. This is the infrastructure we use to manage the distribution phase. Okay, cool. Well, thanks for sharing that. Last question that we ask all founders who come on to Starter Story, if you go back in time before you build this app, what advice would you have for anyone that's watching this who wants to build an app that makes $10,000 a month? I would say the biggest thing would be if you want to make sure your app makes money and it's not just sitting on your phone, you need to employ systems in
place. People chase what I like to do. They believe that I need to create the right kind of content. No, you need to create enough content. Make more content, push out more volume, understand what's working, what's not working, what's working, double down on it, create more of it. Well, that's awesome. Great advice on super cool story, super cool framework. Thank you for coming on and sharing. I think people will find it useful. Thank you, sir. Gus, producer of Starter Story, what did you think of this app? Well, if the app itself, really cool. I feel like I could use it in my personal life. I think it's easy to look at this and be feel a little like overwhelmed.
Like, oh man, like how am I'm to do all this? How am I going to track everything? But like I think you mentioned at some point in the interview, like this is what it takes, right? Even the people that we bring on that are successful that maybe we don't go super into like the growth or whatever, every single person is on TikTok, on Instagram, posting, tracking, everything. So it's a reminder of like if I ever want to be serious about something like this, this is the game. Yeah, I mean just think about what's the last founder that we had on this channel that said, "Hey, I don't have to do any marketing or it's purely passive or it sells itself, right?" There it doesn't happen. This is what's actually
working and you can see an app like this which is, you know, it's not a brand new idea. There's plenty of couples apps out there. It's not some brand new idea, but you can really make anything work if you put in the work in terms of creating content distribution. You had framed it in this way somewhere in the interview as like try to analyze like what idea do I want and does it have any components of this framework that can work? Cuz I've certainly built things before just from an idea in my head and then I'm stuck like, "Oh well, how do I tell people about it? I have no idea. I didn't do any work on the marketing side."
Well, shameless plug. This is exactly what we talked about in the organic short-form playbook which is our playbook that has examples of successful UGC or organic short-form playbooks. If you download this right now, you'll be able to watch the actual content and the actual playbooks that founders are using right now to build successful apps and that's something that we specifically talk about is creating content that has product intent, right? You can create something that goes viral, that's cool, but it doesn't have that conversion element. We talked about this in the organic short-form playbook and I will shut up about it now and let you download it. It is right down there in
the description and you can watch the whole thing. It is the real deal. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.
