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I have talked to a lot of successful app founders right here on this channel, and I thought I had seen everything until this. My recent app launched just two months ago, has already made more than $100,000 in revenue. Meet Raphael. He's 19. He's built over 50 mobile apps, but his latest project, he grew it using a strategy I have never seen before, AI generated influencers. So, our core growth channel for FaceKit is completely 100% AI generated influencers. So, I asked him to come on the channel to explain how he did it. And in this episode, we'll dive into how he found this crazy simple mobile app idea. How
AI influencers made him over $100,000 in 2 months and how AI may have just changed marketing and distribution forever. I promise you have never seen anything like this. You can't miss it. Let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, Raphael, stoked to have you on. Tell me about who you are, what you built, and what's your story. My name is Rafael Kramer. I've built over 50 apps over the last 6 years. And my recent app, launched just 2 months ago, has already made more than $100,000 in revenue. And today, I'll be sharing exactly how we built that from scratch,
and we're able to distribute it through a very unique method. Okay, Raphael, I'm stoked to have you on because you're doing something that I haven't truly seen work before. We're going to talk all about this AI generated influencers. But before we do, what app did you build? How is it making money? And could you pull up some of your revenue and analytics screenshots to show that this is legit? Yeah, of course. So, our app is called Face Kit. It is an app in the looks maxing space. And the way that we kind of differentiate is by actually taking a 3D scan of the user's face using Apple's TrueDepth camera, which is the same
technology as they use with Face ID. Uh you can pay per year, you can pay per month, you can pay per week. It's like a subscription model. So we started like mid January really kind of like pushing it with the organic content. And so far we've done just over $100,000 in sales. As you can see, you know, since it is organic, we do have like big spikes. Like one day we made $6,000. Um, and it's been kind of hovering around 1 to 2,000 per day. But this is, uh, these are the stats. So far, we are pretty much just completely spamming Tik Tok with our app. Uh, as you can see, in the last 2 months since, you know, middle of January, we have published over 1,300 videos. We've gotten more than 100
million views. And, you know, we've gotten through that 100,000 downloads, you know, almost 10 million likes. And, u, you know, this is across 40 different accounts. We have like a couple people uh, posting content. And 100% of our app revenue comes through, you know, posting these organic videos. That's insane. You got over a 100red million views and you sort of did it without having to hire any influencers or anything like that. You're doing it this sort of AI generated influencers. We're going to talk all about. We're going to go through the whole playbook of this and I'm going to have you show me some examples. But before we do, I want to understand a little bit about your background. Were you always in
content and building apps? How did you get here? or how do you get to this point where you have an app doing $40,000 a month in revenue? So, yeah, I've been building apps since I was 13 years old. I actually started with mobile games and I made my first $100,000 at only 14 years old through you know creating Tik Toks myself about how I was making the games kind of like trying to latch on to viral trends. Then I later at 15 16 started a company called influencer apps where we worked together with influencers to create games as a collaboration with them. Um, I got some company scaling uh experience through that. I grew to like, you know, like 10 employees uh doing like almost six figures in certain months and then I
ended up selling that company when I was 17. When I was 18, I started to get into consumer apps. Um, I've launched a couple. I already exited one and now at 19, I'm just kind of like continuing this playbook with all that I've learned and the most recent app now is, you know, doing pretty well uh with this kind of, you know, knowledge that I've been able to build up through the past couple years. Okay, cool. You're only 19. You've had a bunch of successful apps. even sold apps. Let's talk about app ideas and validation. You've already come up with a bunch of great ideas clearly and then this idea is clearly working. How did
you come up with this idea? Why did you decide to build this app? So, most of my ideas are actually through doom scrolling. So, my most profitable ideas have been me rotting in bed, kind of like watching Tik Tok, kind of like being in touch with what's going on the for you page and kind of taking inspiration from that. So, specifically for this one, I was actually on a business trip with my co-founder, rotting in bed, kind of just like watching Tik Toks, and I came across this page called Logan Reed, and this page was like a glow-up before and after, and I thought, "Oh, that's pretty impressive." Looked at the comments, and turns out that it was actually AI, and I really could not believe it cuz I considered myself someone that was able
to tell when content on TikTok is AI. But with this specific page, I really could not tell. And I knew we had reached the point where it just really is indistinguishable from reality. So I reached out to the creators and I was like, "Hey, you know, we should make an app." So we sat together, we kind of brainstormed and we came up with the idea of Face Kit. We did that and you know, now since then we've just kind of been, you know, iterating on the distribution process and the systems and, you know, the app itself. One of the reasons I think Raphael's app was successful is because he chose the right category to build in. I call these health, wealth, and relationship apps.
And if you watch the channel, you'll know that apps in this space are proven money makers. So, I decided to put this all into a list. 50 successful app ideas in the health, wealth, relationships, and self-improvement category. When you download this list, you will get all the data you want on proven app ideas in the space. Cost to start, downloads, revenue, everything. So, if you're ready to build something similar, head to the link in the description to grab the list of app ideas for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, we talked about how you came up with the idea, how you built the app, and I think the most interesting thing, and hopefully whoever is watching this right now, you're
excited to hear about your growth strategy because you did something that I've heard a lot of people talk about online, but I haven't seen someone like truly execute on this and build an app that generates revenue through AI generated content. Before we jump into all of it, I'd love if you could break down what is this content you're creating? What is your core growth channel for Face Kit? So, our core growth channel for Face Kit is completely 100% AI generated influencers. You know, this started off by seeing one AI generated influencer that we thought was so crazy that we wanted to do this, you know, 50 times. So, we built systems, internal systems, so that we could do this across not just
one account, but 50 accounts. And what is essentially happening is we're creating these realistic AI avatars that look just like people. We're, you know, creating a page for them on Tik Tok, on Instagram. And what we're then doing is posting a lot of videos before and after transformations, you know, before using Face Kit and then after using Face Kit. And what that does is it gets a lot of views cuz we're just spamming Tik Toks, getting in front of a lot of people's eyes, and then they see it, they want to have the same trans transformation, and they go to the link in the bio, they click it, and they download our app.
This is absolutely insane. We talked to a lot of people on the channel that are doing influencer marketing. While it sounds cool and easy, you have to go and reach out to these influencers. You got to pay them money. You got to do all these things. You've done the same thing, but you skipped that whole part and you generated all the content with AI and this content actually drives users and revenue for your business. This is absolutely insane and I think it is the beginning of something crazy that's about to happen in our space. Before we go into how you did this, I'd love to see an example. Could you show me like one or two examples of AI generated content that actually
generated revenue for your app? Yeah, of course. So, here is one of the pages. This was actually the original page that I had seen before making the app and I had reached out to them. So, as you can see, we kind of have a realistic looking profile here. Logan Reed, you have a profile picture. It looks like, you know, an actual person. This is kind of like a mix of real content, not real, but like content that is more personal versus actual promotions. So, we don't just want to be posting promotions every single day. Let me show you one of the videos, for example, that actually converted quite well for us with 2 million views here. So, as you can see, we have like the before and the after kind of like in a
viral format with a viral sounds. Everything here is AI generated. And then you have like the, you know, the icon pop in and like kind of like have the before and after. Uh and then you see like the actual process of him scanning his face on face kit you know getting like a 3D scan getting like you know all the interocular distance all these ratios that people in this sneer like to analyze and uh at the end it's like this is how you kind of like improve and then you know you go to his bio you click the link tree and from here you know if you haven't already just searched it up on the app store itself you can kind of like go through the link in bio to actually download it on your phone and kind of try it out
yourself and actually next to these AI influencers we also have like kind one-off stuff that we do to kind of like get viral and kind of get the app known. And this is one of them. So, this is not necessarily an AI influencer, but this is a completely AI generated video. I'll show it to you. Yeah, you right there. You're a sub three for sure. I can scan your face right now with Face Kit and prove it. That's the issue. Not sure if you understood that there, but he says, "I can scan your face with Face Kit right now and prove that you are not attractive, right?" And that's such a ridiculous thing for a professor to say, yet it looks so real that the
absurdity of it makes it go viral. So this one, you know, got within a couple days a couple hundred thousand likes, a couple not a couple million views, but more than a million views, and it did actually funnel quite a lot of traffic. We did have a spike on that day. So we have a couple of these viral videos as well next to the actual AI influencer strategy. I mean, this is absolutely insane. What I expected you to show me was just a bunch of like random AI generated videos, but what I think you're doing here, which is even crazier, is that you're actually creating AI generated
influencers where they have different content. It feels totally real. Feels like a totally real person. Maybe that's the secret here. I'm not totally sure, but I think it's super cool. I think a lot of people watching this are wondering, hey, how can I do the same? There's this huge change happening right now where you can do this and AI or and the AI content is good enough to feel real. How do I get started right now? So, if you had to start over right now and you didn't have face kit and you're starting over from scratch, what would you do in 2026 to build an app that grows through AI influencers and AI generated content? So first of all, I would try and identify a niche where it
has a very clear before and after transformation where there's a very clear pain point where you want to have one thing and then have another thing. So with this specifically looks maxing, it's like you look a certain way and you want to look better or you want to have something analyzed that's a painoint, right? So you really have to have a niche where there's something very clear and very strong. You know, ideally also very visual that you can actually create AI content that kind of illustrates that pain point and kind of sells the users on the app. The next step is getting the build out of the way as soon as possible. What you really only need is to have an onboarding and then you need a pay wall. You need to
see, can you get someone to look at a Tik Tok and be like, I want to have that same thing. Can you get someone to go to the app store, search up the FaceTit app or whatever app it is, download it, you know, go through the 2 three minute onboarding and then pay. Can you get that? If you can't get that, you can throw away the idea. So, pretty much get the build out as soon as possible. Don't spend time overthinking it. Don't spend time perfecting it. just the actual painoint packaged into an app that you can start promoting. Yeah, I see a lot of people spend days, weeks, months, even years on one idea before just getting it out there and validating and building quickly, which is what you did with Face Kit and with
your previous apps, which I think is a great lesson. Let's talk about how to actually get started with the AI influencers, right? This is the big thing here. Once you have a decent idea out there, maybe a little bit of validation, how do you get started with the AI influencers and the AI generated content? The way that we do it is, you know, it kind of depends on the niche, but the way that we do it for our niche is we create realistic avatars using Nano Banana. We try and make them look as real as possible. We try and keep them consistent over all the generations. So, you know, we can actually start building up a page that looks like a person and kind of like has that consistency of like this was him before and now this is him after. So,
once you have the actual AI avatar, the next step is really just kind of like cutting that together into viral formats. And that you can only find out through, you know, either experimenting yourself or looking around in your niche, trying to like see what is currently working for other people and then just replicate that with your own AI avatars. And then for the one-off viral videos that I just showed you before, you can use Sora, which is really good. You know, it's all about the prompting. It's all about the idea itself. You know, even if it does look realistic, you're not going to have a video go viral of someone saying, "Hey, go download my app." Like, no one really cares. you have to try and create a
viral idea first and then you know you could go film it but you can also use Sora to like just generate it. So the viral idea the viral formats that's what's actually the key here. So something that we also like to do now, especially since that we scaled to so many different accounts is kind of just have people, you know, doom scroll Tik Tok kind of like be scouting for like what formats, what type of videos, what trends are really doing well in the niche. And then once you have something or once something performs for someone, you know, we have a group chat where someone sends it in and immediately all the others just like do the exact same thing because clearly something's working right now, so why not do it 50
times? So we're always keeping an eye out for like what formats are working. We're trying new stuff. We're experimenting. And then, you know, we have like this core knowledge base within to kind of like make sure that once we do identify something that works, everyone can kind of like profit off that and, you know, have their pages, you know, perform well as well. Okay, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. It brings up a question for me, which is I think a lot of people watching this might be thinking this when they see some of the content or when they're on social media, they scroll something, they see something is real, then they look in the comments, they see it's AI. you feel like you've
almost been like fooled or something like that? It's kind of a scary thing when it happens. So my question on this creating AI generated content that is you know not real content. Where do you stand on this? Are you worried at all about the platforms cracking down on you and just what are your thoughts on this? So I mean at the end of the day my job as an entrepreneur is to identify a market that needs a problem solved and then somehow provide that and you know whether you know I provide that through paying a bunch of people to film content going and filming something myself whatever you want to do or you know if I find a more efficient method you know which is now through AI generated
content then of course I'm going to opt for that you know at the end of the day there's still going to be content funding people to look maxing apps so if we can kind of like sweep in there uh and you know do it more efficiently then I think that's uh totally fine and I can stand behind it as long as we're not actually fun funneling people to a harmful app which I do not think that it is whether you agree with the looks maxing ideology or not it is like a pretty questionable space uh you know no one really is going to be harmed by getting funneled to an app that tells you to do a skincare routine drink more water you know go to the gym that's not necessarily harmful you could even argue
that it is good because there's so harmful misinformation in the space uh which our app really tries to prevent from happening. We really try and just like show science-based stuff um and kind of like make the experience as positive as possible even though uh you know of course you know I will admit it does capitalize on people's insecurity but at the end of the day that's really what marketing is uh you know finding a pain and then solving that pain and the stronger the pain is the easier it is to sell. Okay. Yeah. I mean as you sort of mentioned is like this is going to happen whether you like it or not. Let's say that you are hiring Clippers to create content for your app and you have
another app. You can't really control if they're going to use AI. Everyone's using AI. This is kind of just where things are going. So, it's either hop on the train or get left behind. This is kind of just the nature. I wanted to do this video to show that this is what is happening on social media and it's sort of inevitable. Super interesting topic. But let's switch topics a little bit. Let's talk about the tech stack. How did you actually build this? What's the tech behind this app? Usually for other apps, consumer apps, we uh use React Native, but for this one specifically, we had to use Swift because uh we were, you know,
using Apple's feature directly, the same technology behind Face ID. For the back end, we use Superbase, pretty standard. Uh for payables, we use Super Bowl. And then for the actual internal platform that we have where we have all our clippers generating these AI avatars and these AI videos, we are, you know, again using Nano Banana. And then the only other cost really is the clippers. So, the people that we pay based on views. And last month it was about $2,000 I believe. Um, and that's on $35,000 in proceeds off of Apple's tax. Um, so we really took in like a really huge chunk
of that profit. Um, and you know, our clippers are still happy because they're able to make money off, you know, something that doesn't really take them that much time. That's awesome. I didn't realize how profitable this business was. And one thing that I thought about now is like instead of spending money on influencers, you're able to do it with AI and not have to spend money on paid ads because your content is organic. So super profitable. So anyone watching this far into the video, that's a really good sign. Last question that we ask all founders who come on Starter Story, uh, if you could go back in time and give yourself some advice before you got started or any advice for anyone
watching this right now who wants to build apps, make money online, build a profitable business and apps like you. What would that advice be? So, I would say fall in love with entrepreneurship, the game itself, the process, the difficulty, you know, people disagreeing with what you're doing, uh, you know, roadblocks, things in the way. There's always going to be struggles and it's going to be really painful and annoying and you're just going to like hit walls and be like, "Fuck, like, why did I go this way?" Um, but that's like the beauty of it to be honest. So, really try and fall in love with that process.
Um, and the beauty of like the struggle instead of just like following the numbers. Um, and then you know once you have that just kind of like know your own truth and relentlessly pursue whatever you want to pursue. Beautiful. Raphael, thank you for coming on and sharing this. You didn't have to come on and share you know this kind of secret that's clearly working for you. So I appreciate you coming on being open talking about some of the, you know, ethics or whatever behind this stuff. I think it's super interesting and I think it is only the beginning for AI content and congrats on the app that you built. Thanks for coming on.
Thank you.
