We Built a $2M App: This is How We Grew It

As, building apps in 2026 has never been easier. But one of the questions we still get is, "How do you get people to download your app?" There's a ton of info online, but I wanted to hear from some guys who know what they're talking about. We built an app called

Gleam that hit top 10 in the app store, and we did over a million dollars in ARR. So, meet Charles and Kelvin. There are two guys who've built an app to over a million dollars ARR and they've gotten a combined 500 million views on their apps online. They

are pretty much experts at distribution. So, I invited them onto the channel to break down their framework for getting views and downloads on their apps. In this episode, we're going to walk through what everyone gets wrong when it comes to growing apps, 10 specific examples of the type of content you should be posting every

single day, and ultimately their advice on what it takes to grow an app here in 2026. If you've built something and you're feeling stuck about getting users, trust me, you do not want to skip this episode. Let's dive in. Welcome to Starter Story Build. All right, Charles and Kelvin, welcome

to Starter Story Build. Super excited to have you both on the channel. Could you just share with us who you are, what you built, and a little bit about your story? We're Charles and Kelvin. We built an app called Gleam that hit top 10 on education at the app store. We did over a million dollars in ARR, over 500

million views across socials. Kelvin and I both come from an engineering background. So when we first started building apps, we were good at the technical part, but we sucked a lot when it came to distribution. We were failing a ton. We were extremely demotivated. But eventually, we found a framework that worked for us. And

the purpose of this video is we want to share that exact framework, the exact playbook that took us from zero to over a million dollars in ARR. So you guys can do the same. Hey guys, I'm Kelvin. I do most of the product and design at Gleam. Also do some of the distribution. So

Gleam is a way to learn and improve at communication skills, whether it's getting better at conversation, making friends, or preparing for an interview. And we have bite-siz lessons as well as interactive practice to help you get

better at your communication skills. Cool. So yeah, you have some crazy numbers, right? Before I spoke to Charles initially, he talked to me a little bit about this like framework and how you grew this, through socials and whatnot. So for people watching, what are

know, through socials and whatnot. So for people watching, what are we going to get by the end of this video? So we want to share our exact playbook that we wish we knew when we first started out that took us from zero to over a million dollars in ARR. It was really helpful for us, but hopefully we

can take that and make something helpful for you guys as well. All right, what we're going to dive into in just a second is going to be really awesome. I think you're going to really enjoy hearing about all the different ways that you can try and grow your app here in 2026. If you're enjoying this conversation, we have an extra resource for you at the link in the description.

It's called the mobile app growth cheat sheet. Inside, you're going to find seven different tactics that other successful app founders have used to grow their apps. It's 100% free to download. Just head to the link in the description and grab it. All right, let's get back to the story. Let's get into that framework. What is the first step or first place we're going to

start? This is explaining distribution like you are a 14-year-old. The biggest difference between consumer apps and B2B SAS is that it is primarily a game of unit economics. And the goal of all distribution is to optimize this one

ratio called LTB to CAC. It's how much lifetime value do I get and how much does it cost to acquire that user, right? So there's two main ways in which most apps scale. The first is through organic, which is by making videos yourself, posting them on Tik Tok or Instagram, and then scaling that through

UGC programs or working with other creator agencies. And it also tends to come with the best margins if you have a video really hit. And usually the cost of acquisition here is going to be relatively low, but the lifetime value will also be a little bit lower. On the

other hand, you have paid ads. And in this case, you're paying for eyeballs. There are a lot of different channels of which you can do paid ads through. You can do Meta, which is probably the most famous one. And paid ads tends to work really well if you've had some experience in it before, or if

your app monetizes really well and you have the entire like funnel figured out. And the question is like how do you decide like which one to start with? Right? For most people, I would probably recommend starting with organic because it is the cheapest. And I assume that most people that are

watching this podcast are going to be bootstrap founders and you're not going to be raising insane amounts of venture capital or anything like that. So for the rest of this video, we'll be primarily focusing on organic because I think it is what will be most applicable for the audience. If we were

to start over again, 99% of the time we would recommend organic to start off with. Primarily being that when you do start off with organic, you can double dip. You can make a video that can go viral and convert. But if a video does convert and go viral on organic, when

you do come around to paid ads, usually you can repurpose the same video for that. That being said though, I do think a lot of people treat paid ads at something that is intimidating. And usually it is at the very beginning, but it is also necessary and extremely important. Like if you think

about all the app studios that have scaled to millions of dollars a year, they usually scale with paid ads, right? Like you look at Cali, they started with organic, they went to paid ads. And that's for a reason, right? Because paid ads you can scale and the feedback loops over there are also really fast. I

feel like every app founder that we bring onto the channel it's like these are the paths organic spamming Tik Tok and Instagram or version of that or paid ads and we have featured a ton of founders on the channel that have done like one or the other. So yeah let's take us to the next step. So step

two is really understanding what you're looking for. Right? So in middle school I saw this diagram all the time. A paradox between good grades getting enough sleep and having a social life. and you can only choose two. I think this is very similar to the consumer distribution game. And there's three

different things over here which I've put on like a triforce, right? There's virality, there's conversion, and there's repeatability. The thing to understand is that these create a formula. Your revenue is going to be equal to virality multiplied by conversion rate multiplied by

repeatability. So if any one of these is zero, then the whole thing will be zero. So at a high level, it is can you get people to watch your content? Can you get people to want the product and can you continue doing it to scale? And if you find all three, then that's when you really have a winner.