How to Scale Without Doing Everything Yourself with Jonathan Maxim

In this episode of Success Leaves Clues Podcast, our guest is Nancy Chu, founder of Nancy Chu & Co., a coaching practice for senior product leaders. After nearly 20 years in engineering and product management, including leadership roles at Meta and Roku, Nancy made the decision to bet on herself following a surprising layoff and transition into full-time coaching. In this conversation, Nancy shares the lessons she learned from redefining her identity beyond corporate prestige, narrowing her ideal client profile, and building a coaching business focused on helping senior product leaders land high-paying roles. She explains why consistently showing up and controlling your inputs matters more than chasing engagement, why hiring help should be viewed as an investment rather than an expense, and why coaches should focus on the value and proven outcomes they provide rather than simply selling their time. Nancy also opens up about the mindset behind asking for help, the importance of continuous reflection, and how separating your fulfillment from outcomes you cannot fully control can lead to healthier and more sustainable success.

You can find him on:
https://www.viralapplaunch.com/
linkedin.com/in/jonathanmaxim
www.youtube.com/@viralapplaunch
https://www.instagram.com/itsjmaxim/
https://www.instagram.com/viralapplaunch/

Transcript

Jonathan Maxim 0:00

So I had these two investors going in different directions, right? And that, of course, tore the business apart because I was trying to please one and the other at the same time. And so we help these founders like yourself avoid those common potholes. Don't get split in half as a business trying to do one thing and the other. Instead, follow a proven, simple roadmap that's sequential and it will make it profitable as you run the business.

Davis Nguyen 0:25

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues, the podcast where we interview business owners on how they built their businesses and the hard lessons they learned along the way. My name is David Swin, and I'm a business coach and the founder of Purple Circle, where we help business owners achieve their first six-figure, seven-figure, and eight-figure year, all without sacrificing their quality of life. Before becoming a business coach and before founding Purple Circle, I started and scaled several seven and eight-figure coaching businesses and have been a consultant at several businesses doing over $100 million each, including some that are publicly listed and doing over a billion dollars each. In every episode of the podcast, you're going to learn lessons that took our guests years to learn, and you'll be able to learn that in minutes. No matter if you're a new business owner or an established business owner, every episode is going to give you the clues in order to elevate your business.

Pedro Stein 1:10

Welcome to Success Leaves Clues Podcast. I'm Pedro, and today I'm joined by Jonathan Maxim, CEO and founder of Viral App Launch, where he helps startups acquire users and connect with investors. Jonathan previously helped launch TikTok in the US, founded the fitness app Vea Fitness, and has contributed to Forbes, an entrepreneur on app growth strategy. Welcome to the show, Jonathan.

Jonathan Maxim 1:43

Thank you for that uh warm introduction. Better than I could do for myself, so I'll take it.

Pedro Stein 1:49

Dude, you're the one to blame, right? It's all your work. I'm chilling here in Brazil. I'm telling you what you did, but you're the one to blame. Okay, now, uh great to have you, right? And uh I'm kind of a comic book nerd myself, you know, Jonathan. So I love the origin stories, the the first editions, right? So let's rewind a bit because every entrepreneur has that moment where they look at their life and say, Yeah, I guess this is what I'm doing now, right? So when was that for you, man?

Jonathan Maxim 2:20

Well, I worked in corporate for two years, and you know, that was an awesome experience. I have no regrets. I was actually I I felt like I was on a rocket and I was doing really good. You know, I brought the entrepreneurial work ethic to the office, which was a bunch of people who, you know, middle age, middle management, just not excited about life. So I brought a lot of gusto and energy in. And then two years into my dream job, uh my department got merged with another one, and I lost my position. And so I had to apply elsewhere in the company. And so I went from you know, being on an upward, up into the right trend to being like on a slow death uh position. And I had already started my fitness app at the time, and yeah, one of my friends he he had thrown in the, you know, he said, I'm quitting, like do it with me. And so we both made a made a commitment and posted a video on Facebook way, way back then, you know, 2015, I think it was. And um yeah, so that's how I took the leap. And it was a pretty foolish leap looking back at this time. Um, but you know, as you suggested, I had to burn the ships. And once you burn the ships, then it's like, well, there's only one way up, or only one way, and that's up. So it's the the path that I've been pursuing.

Pedro Stein 3:36

Hmm. Okay. And can you walk me through, you know, because I I was in corporate for a while, worked in banking, worked at a consulting firm here in Brazil, Ernest and Young. And now I'm a business owner, right? So when I left corporate, it was almost like an identity shift for me because it's like you have this weld oil machine running in the background, and now you have to do all by yourself, at least in the beginning, right? So, can you walk me through that identity shift for you? If it was easy, was it scary, you know? Because you're coming from a pivot, uh, a merge uh department from the company you had in the dream job, right, for two years. So, how did that felt like, you know?

Jonathan Maxim 4:18

Well, I think it as you can imagine, it didn't feel good, you know, as I I went from having a big ego around my work to getting humbled and getting, you know, my my ass handed to me in a way. And I think that's great. I think that's great for everybody. That's that's one of those experiences that really, you know, they say you don't know your limits until you test them, right? Like that's one of those experiences tested, like, okay, how good do I actually think I am? You know, I just lost this role that I thought I was crushing it in. So, you know, I I left. I wanted to be the one to say it's over. But ultimately, you know, I saw the the darkness forming. So that was a tough experience. Um, but I was too young, dumb, and naive to understand the gravity of what I was doing, which is good because I wouldn't have done it if I truly understood the cost. I, you know, I invested over $100,000 that I had saved up for corporate. I put it into my first startup. And I made some some really key mistakes that a lot of first-time app founders made. The number one being that I didn't monetize the app. And so I put all that money in and then wasn't getting paying users out of it. And so that was a humbling and expensive lesson to learn. But ultimately, it put me in a position where, you know, I had figured out how to make apps go viral at that time. So my app went viral like three different times. And so at that point, I actually had a tool set that was really valuable. And that's ultimately what ended up leading me to working with companies like TikTok. Those actually the exact strategies, one of them I used on the TikTok launch that I had learned back when I was a first time founder. And so, yeah, it's messy. Yeah, it's not pretty. And yes, everything has to be built from scratch, including payroll, HR, processes, systems, compliance, out of office, you know, all that stuff has to be accounted for. And that's a lot more than most people know that they'll have to do or would ever want to do. I would never want to do that stuff. I just had to uh by default. And so it really, it really tested my limits. And and again, I I think that's the best thing that we can do in life is to test our limits and push them as much as we possibly can. And, you know, there's no good story that comes from being, hey guy, I was pretty average and I did a pretty decent job and I made decent money and lived an okay life. Like there's no memories, there's no no core memories unlocked doing that kind of stuff. You know, you you you essentially die a slow death. And I'm I'm proud to say that I was uh willing to go to the bottom uh to feel the distance between the bottom and wherever I am right now, which is definitely not at the bottom. So that's a really great lesson in humility and and and grit and work ethic and all these things that just make life beautiful, you know. It adds dimension and flavor and layers to life.

Pedro Stein 7:03

Awesome. Okay. Now, what I would love to understand, if you could uh share here, is like, I mean, Viro app launcher business has been going on for what four years now, right? And I understand there is sometimes an evolution to the people you start serving, and who do you serve now? I'm not saying that's happening or that happened, but sometimes it does happen, right? Sometimes we attract a certain type of people that we're we don't attract in the early days. Something changes and all that. So after you got rolling, who are the people that showed up, okay, and the evolution of your avatar, and who do you serve now?

Jonathan Maxim 7:42

Well, that's a great question, and I think every entrepreneur needs to ask themselves that question, which is not just who's coming to my doorstep, but who do I actually work like working with and who can I actually get incredible results for? So that goes back to when I was an agency owner at a company called KJ. And I you know worked with I think 150 clients in the six years that we were in business, seven years. And the ones where I always loved working on it were the tech startups. Because I was a growth hacking agency, we were doing mostly tech marketing. So that's what landed us uh with TikTok as well as Triller and Universal Music and some other big names in tech. And I just loved it. You know, the culture is great in that industry, and people are respectable, and you know, it's not like a bunch of scammers and grimy people. They're just none of that. It's just not the way it is. People are, you know, generally professional, and they're doing things that are really changing the world. It's an awesome to be a part of that cutting edge of technology. So that's what I always have jumped about. So anyway, uh, we looked at the 150 companies that we launched in that time and we said which ones are the most successful, most profitable, most enjoyable to work with, and as they say, ELF, elf, uh easy, lucrative, and fun. And it was it was them. And so that's where viral app launch was born from from the Phoenix of KJ when we uh closed that down. So since then, it I again, any entrepreneur needs to be looking at the trends that form in the data. And in my case, you know, we've launched uh 200 plus apps at viral, and you know, another hundred or so at KJ. So we got a lot of data to look at, and it's the the three audiences that we typically work with are the investor-backed startups. That's typically uh a gentleman over 50, 60 years old who's built and sold a company and raised money from his friends and family. The next audience that formed was the bootstrap millennials, people like myself, and we have a different program for them. Uh, we have an accelerator that's like kind of you know education, empowerment, execution, kind of this wraparound sport system. And then we have the the do-it-yourself programs built for the people who have quit their jobs and are bootstrapping and are white-knuckling it. So those are the three main audiences that formed, and of course, they have different characteristics and different pros and cons of working with those different avatars. But what's great is that I know my avatars, I know what they are dealing with intimately because I did it as well, and that makes it very easy to do marketing because when you know you're talking about a millennia, you know, just say 30 to 45 years old, who's got a tech startup who's working in corporate, I know exactly what to say to somebody like that. Like, you know, this isn't about quitting the rat race, this is about becoming your own boss. That's the kind of messaging that resonates with them. Whereas the you know, the older gentlemen who have investment, they're looking for more, hey, I want an A-Z execution team who can take this thing to the moon. I'm willing to pay for it. You guys go be my workhorse. And so each each audience in business is to be talked to you in a personal way. Um, and that's that's just something that's been very valuable because it makes it makes our marketing very effective, you know, and we can speak to one person with them.

Pedro Stein 11:06

Okay, so different avatars, as it sounds like. And I would love to do uh a quick game of pretend with you right now. And uh I would love for you to pick one of them, like you if you feel like it's your bread and butter, you know, I would love to pretend I'm one of those. So the main offer, however, that fits you, okay. So, first of all, what I would love to understand is like how would I be able to find you, okay, marketing-wise, pretending I'm the ICP, I'm your avatar, okay, for one of those offers. How would I be able to find Jonathan Maxim and Viroapp Aunch?

Jonathan Maxim 11:41

Well, I think the tougher time is gonna be not finding us because we are everywhere. Uh, if you're in my audience, you've probably seen my face like five times a day. So we have 150 videos going out a week on Instagram and all of our short form videos, so TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, etc. I post twice a week on YouTube. Uh we run, we spend over a thousand dollars a day on ads. So, you know, if you've engaged with any of my content, you're not only gonna get served more of it, but you're gonna get retargeted with ads.

Pedro Stein 12:13

So okay. So let's pretend we're still in the same game of places to hide. Love that. Okay. We're still in the same game of pretend. I'm your ICP. I'm I've watched a couple of your ads, right? Through it, YouTube, you post there. We have Instagram running and all that, which you just described it. Let's say what you have out there really clicked for me, right? I can see you guys can help me. That resonated with me. So I do the outreach. Okay. I'm like, hey, how does it look like to work with you guys, right? We can speed up the sales process a little bit. We can say there's a line man, you guys realize I'm a fit. I realize you guys are fit, right? Um, so could you give me like a little peek behind the curtain of how does it look like to work with you guys and the outcomes I can expect?

Jonathan Maxim 13:05

Well, our promise is 10,000 users and 20 investor introductions, so that's the main thing that people will come to the program for. That's what people want, but what they need is a profitable app. And so our focus in the accelerator, which is, as I mentioned, empowerment, it's the guidance, consulting, advisory for me and my team, education, courses, and video modules to teach you how to do the actual tactics and to put things in proper order. And then execution, we actually will run the marketing techniques and some of the product, and you know, we do multiple aspects of the business. So our program covers five core components marketing, sales, product virality, and capital raising. So these five core pieces of every startup are uh it's pertinent that a founder does because if you let's just say we launch and get you your first 10,000 users, if you do not have monetization built in, that's gonna cost you 50k in you know, marketing and services, but it's gonna bring you zero dollars, right? So we always build the sales strategy right into the product right from the beginning. So these are these are counterintuitive ideas to a lot of what people like yourself have been taught in Silicon Valley media. So they're gonna push you to not monetize your app, they're gonna push you to go to investors, they're gonna push you to go B2C and be the next Facebook, but it's just not realistic. You know, that you're talking about 0.1% of startups who are actually funded with, you know, 10, 20 million from Silicon Valley Venture VC. It's it's it's a fairy tale that makes good headlines, but it's not a practical business. And so that was the the mistake that I fell into. Even even advisors and investors when I was working on via MyFitness app back in the day. I had Kevin Hart give me an LOI to invest $2 million in a company. And I asked him what direction he wants to take the company, and he specifically said, I want to go B2C, meaning we need to keep the app free, focus on making it go viral, and I will endorse it and get my big audience behind it. Meanwhile, I had other venture capitalists, Mark Cuban's healthcare venture fund, wanted me to go B2B and sell this as a means for doctors to track their patients and make sure that they're staying on the preventive health plans. So I had these two investors pointing in different directions, right? And that, of course, tore the business apart because I was trying to please one and the other at the same time. And so we helped these founders like yourself avoid those common potholes. Don't get split in half as a business trying to do one thing and the other. Instead, follow a proven, simple roadmap that's sequential and it will make it profitable as you grow the business. So that's that's really what the accelerator is all about. And you know, it's immersive. I get on, you know, every week with my group of founders and we talk for an hour and a half and just strategize and redirect and clean things up and optimize. So there's an immersive component to it as well as an educational component. And so if as long as a founder is willing and ready to grow and to do the work that's needed, not the work that feels good, they'll be very successful in the program. But we always fall back into our old bad habits. And if if we don't stick to the plan, things don't go to plan. So that's that's the thing I'm mainly trying to work on because most founders, we're in an amazing time. You can make an app before the end of the day, and you can have your business built and ready to go, and you can bring it to me and say, hey, let's launch this thing. But what comes with that is first of all, a lot of first-time tech founders. A lot of people have not worked in software. They don't need to know the product development lifecycle, they don't know user experience, they don't know UI, they don't know user journeys, they don't know product roadmap and planning, they don't do tracking and analytics. Like these are things that are foreign, right? These are not going to be seen in other industries. And so a lot of them get caught off guard with that. They're just not prepared to be a tech CEO. So I try to teach them about those fundamentals so that they can be equipped themselves, not telling them what to think, but teaching them how to think and how to approach this. And that's the tough part for a lot of people. So that that's why it's good when you know we can work week over week together and ensure that, hey, if you're going a little bit off course, for example, one of the bad tendencies that founders have is they will go and build too much product, especially with AI, adding new features, et cetera. And it ends up making the product too confusing, and then users don't use it because you got to educate users. They've never used your app before, right? So people will overinvest in product and causes this layering calcified effect on the product, makes it difficult to use and buggy and slow and things like that. So I always try to prevent founders from making that very common mistake. Keep them on track, like, hey, let's go make some money on this thing, and then when people are asking for new features, then you can go better.

Pedro Stein 18:01

Okay. And what would you say, um, Jonathan, is like a main misconception you get from your potential clients or avatar, right? That they're thinking X is right, and you're like, no, no, no, wait a minute. We're talking about Y. You know, it it's not necessarily what you're thinking it is. Even I understand it's almost like a customized approach, but I would love to see if you can uh spot some patterns that you're seeing being re repeated in front of you, you know, like a main misconception for people listening, you know, that potentially are considering launching an app.

Jonathan Maxim 18:40

Well, definitely the first one. Like once the product is live, you need to go get users on it. That's the most common mistake is people will continue building product and never launch. It feels good, you know. It's like the hard part is launching. So they're gonna do what feels good, which is add features to the product. Most of what happens is they'll put their product onto the app store and nobody downloads it. And they're like, well, obviously it must not be that strong of a product if nobody's downloading it, so let me go build more product. But again, ends up layering up features and causing all these off-street user journeys to happen when people just don't do anything because there's nothing bringing users to the platform. So that's the number one mistake that I see. Another very common mistake, I'm gonna tell you a quick story about a founder who called me yesterday. Super successful mortgage broker. He's got a big staff and he makes a lot of money and he's building this product for dads. I really love the product because I'm a dad too. And um, he's like, man, I just want to move faster, I just want to do more. And and I I don't know like where should we be going? Where should I be channeling my effort right now? And he's like, I could go and share this with my dad network. He's got access to big, you know, all the mortgage brokers in the US, things like that. And it's tempting, right? It sounds awesome. Okay, we'll get 100,000 users here, we'll get 20,000 users over here. This this is the misconception that happens. I think, oh, more users that means better, either more investment or more success or whatever, but they're not making the connection in their mind that when you get 100,000 new users on there, if they're not paying them, it's 100,000 nothings on there. And so that's I I redirected him and I said, let me zoom out for a second here. First of all, you're not gonna go work on more product. The product is super strong as it is. I said, Next, you need to look at your data. So I pulled up his funnel. So impressions, clicks, register, registered users, free trial starts, purchases. That's his whole funnel, right? And I went through the data with him and I said, You're getting a lot of users on. You're getting a lot of people registering, you're getting a lot of people free trial. This guy's 70% of the users are starting a free trial who come onto his platform. The average is like 10%. So he's massively overperforming on the free trial start rate. Super good sign, right? That means people love the product, they need it, they got a serious pain point around it, they're ready to grow as dads. But at the bottom of the funnel, he only had, I don't know, a handful of people purchasing. So there's a gap, a constraint between the free trial and the purchase. And I said, Andrew, that's the number you need to focus on. What happens after they start a free trial and when they purchase? Why are they all dropping off? Why are 90%, 80%, 95% of those people leaving? That's what he should be focused on. But as a guy coming from the mortgage broker industry and being in sales and all these other things, the things that come to mind for him are like go publish it on this big network, go add more features, go do this, go do that. And all of that was not the stuff he should be doing. All he should be doing is focusing on making more ROI off of his product. So he could spend a few days improving that user journey from you know, zero to seven days when they purchase. But he would have never thought of that on his own. He's not a tech CEO. Why would he have? Right. So I walked that, I walked him through that, and that's called constraint analysis, is finding where the constraint in the business is and then releasing that constraint. And he'll probably spend a couple days fixing it, and he's gonna go from he's gonna double his profitability by doing that. So instead of wasting money on acquiring users right now, literally, because none of them are paying and paying customers, he's gonna double his conversion rate in the app simply by doing that. Make twice as much money, twice as much profitability off of the platform. So that's the opportunity, right? So but but the world throws you all these distractions. So-and-so is going viral on TikTok, you know? And if I were to ask him, like, hey, why does that guy going viral on TikTok capture your attention? It's because he's getting a lot of reach, but that doesn't make it meaning he's making money. And even if he is getting people from his TikTok to a platform, let's just say he was sending all the traffic to data up. Remember, 93% of the people are not paying, or 97%. It's like huge, huge drop-off. So it wouldn't, like the traffic wouldn't even be any good in his case. So again, it's all of these shiny objects, and this is why the era of AI is such a uh a low-key curse. It's a huge blessing for people who know what to do, but for people who don't know what to do, people who ask the AI what to do, it's just gonna tell them the consensus of all the averages out there and say, you know, go do this, go do that. You know, it'll tell it'll always tell you yes. So that that's the the risk that every founder runs these days. And that's why it's it's so mission critical that I'm in this space right now to correct the people from, you know, I have one founder who spent uh 275K building his first version of the app, got a million dollars in investment, rebuilt the whole thing, so now he's $1.3 million into it. And then he never launched, by the way. And then when he finally launched, after like three years and $1.3 million of investment, comes to me and he says, Hey, I'm ready to launch, but I want to rebuild the product first. I'm like, Well, you just spent $1.3 million building version one and version two. Now you want to build a version three. And he had signed up for a developer he was paying $50K a month to. And I'm like, oh my God, you're gonna use the last of your money and you're gonna have nothing to launch and you're gonna be on your ass. So I intervened and stopped him and you know, helped him build the product back right. But that's how much money he wasted trying to get to launch without ever making a dollar on the product. Literally $1.3 million in, $0 out. So that's how costly it can become. And a lot of founders think that I'll raise money and then I'll grow and my problems will go away. No. Raising capital does not remove the problems of the business. The founder does. And that's that's really my big lesson for founders is don't go and just do everything based on your gut feel or your creative uh impulses. You need to you need to understand the inner workings of the business that you're in. Same goes for any business, but that one especially.

Pedro Stein 25:00

Interesting. Okay, you know, you brought up some topics there, and uh I'm thinking about a question for you. You mentioned AI, you mentioned a developer. You're in the launching apps space, right, with fire app launch. Uh so I'm curious about your take on uh the vibe coding, you know, with AI and people doing that and launching through vibe coding itself, not even using developers. Like, do you have a stance on that? Like, do you think that's a good thing, a bad thing? Well, I mean, what do you think about that?

Jonathan Maxim 25:32

It's it's it's very much a double-edged sword. So for me, it's good because I know that, hey, the the principal rule is only build one product for one pain point, right? You got one problem, one solution. What a lot of people do is they'll have one pain point and they'll build 10 different solutions to the same pain point in a single product. And that's how you end up with a product that's difficult to use because it's hard to figure out how to use one feature of an app, let alone 10, as a first-time user. And most app founders don't put an onboarding or a tutorial into their app, so they don't even explain to people how to use it. So you're literally talking about a 0% retention rate when somebody goes and just builds an app with AI. And then the tendency, the natural tendency is to keep improving the product. But improving the product is that should be improving that one core journey, not adding features. But what most people do is just add features. So, yes, vibe coding is awesome, especially if you're using for actual coding, it's super powerful. But you you need to understand these principles before you get into it. One problem, one solution. When you solve that problem and that problem is making you multi-millions of dollars, then you can go solve a different problem, but you only solve one at a time. And if that problem is not deep enough, painful enough that it is worth building the solution around, then you need to be addressing a different problem, not adding solutions to a problem that is not actually that sharp and stringent.

Pedro Stein 26:56

I love how you talk about, in a way, the user interface, right? Uh, the experience of it. Like I'm thinking right now, like uh Netflix comparing to Prime Video, like Netflix has been in the game for so long, it's so much easier for me at least to navigate through it, right? Or maybe I'm more accustomed to it. It could be that. But that is so important on teaching uh the user on how to even use the tool, right? I know it sounds uh sometimes so ridiculous, but some people they they forget because they're 10 steps ahead of the tool, thinking about tweaking something super advanced and they forget about the basics, right? Now that is so cool. Um I'm just thinking out loud for a second here.

Jonathan Maxim 27:37

And uh I'd love to let me let me let me expand on that thought for you. So people use what is familiar to them. So you you want to build an app that looks like something that they already know how to use. That's the first step of making an app easy to use. For example, if it's a social app, make it look something like Instagram, but make your core feature different than Instagram, right? Maybe it's not posting videos and reels. Or maybe it is, but it's built just for a specific niche. And that can work well too. But uh this is one of those things that I I happen to have an undergraduate degree in UI and UX design, so I just am equipped with that information from before. But imagine yourself coming into this. You don't know what a user journey map is, you don't know what a product roadmap is. Maybe you do, but most people don't. Understanding the UI and UX component is critical. That is the product, right? Like that is, those are the steps a user's gonna go through using your product. And I remember when I first built mine, even I skipped over that. I remember thinking, oh, this is like such a pain. I don't know why I'm doing all this. This is just like black and white flowcharts and stuff like that. Like, I'm just gonna make it sexy. And then I actually designed it myself because I'm a designer. And it didn't work very well, you know, it just didn't work very well. So people are coming into it with uh very underequipped knowledge-wise, but thankfully AI can just teach you. But again, if you don't know what to ask, for example, you probably wouldn't have known to ask, like, hey, what's the optimal user journey to build for a first-time founder? It can be very tough. And so that's why I'm so ardent about sharing these messages because everybody has the opportunity to build. You're probably gonna build an app soon yourself. So I want to equip you with the with the basics. Because if you go into it without that basic fundamental understanding, you will build a very heavy product, one that's slow, it's got too many features and tends to crash and be buggy. Why? Because you're trying to make it better, better, better, add more and more and more to it. Um, but if I can just sit tell you right now from the get-go, just build one core feature and make it a feature that is really valuable, that makes your job very easy. Now you don't have to build this big convoluted complex app. You can just say, okay, I'm just gonna do eight and you know, B.

Pedro Stein 29:52

I love that, man. I I get it, the mission, right? Okay. Now let's shift gears for a second here, because you've been four years in the game, right? With firewapp launch, almost four years. And I'm curious where you're taking all this, right? Looking ahead, where do you see the business going? Are you thinking about scaling, hiring, or is there a next step you're excited about?

Jonathan Maxim 30:12

Yeah, no, we're we're definitely scaling fast. I mean, we're marketers in-house, so we know how to uh basically grow the business on demand. So we're our our goal is to help a thousand founders launch, and at this point, we've helped 300 of them, 350 of them. So a little ways to go before we hit that kind of key milestone of helping a thousand founders. But my vision is to bring it in person. You know, I made it a digital business in the beginning, and it's just the in-person experience has become so much more important and valuable. So I'd love to open up a proper uh studio and accelerator and bring people in person, including my team, um, as well as the founders. I think it'd be a much more immersive experience. So that's my hope. Um but we're getting into other categories. We uh are acquiring a company that does social media marketing, we're acquiring a design studio, and we're acquiring a developer job. So we're actually gonna be able to service the whole opportunity, the whole business under one roof. And so that's the expansion plan. Um, but we're still focused on just making sure that these founders launch effectively and intelligently for now. Um those product, those projects are are happening in parallel in the background. They're not uh in the front right now, just because right now it's just all about making the founder's jobs profitable and getting that process to be uh failure proof, you know, leaving no opportunity to drop the ball.

Pedro Stein 31:33

Got it, creating the bulletproof plan. Okay. Now let's step in into a little bit here in the sci-fi zone. You know, I I mentioned I'm a comic book nerd, so there's that. And I would love for us to pretend we have a time machine in front of us, okay, Jonathan. And you can go back in time four years ago when you opened shop, right? Uh, Varro app launch, your own business, and you can give yourself one piece of business advice you wish you knew back then that you know now, right? What would that be?

Jonathan Maxim 32:06

Don't be scared. A lot of our decisions are whether intentionally or unintentionally guided by fear. And especially when you're entering a category where you don't know the business well, you can be gun shy. And I think that's the biggest uh the biggest risk to the business because you don't hit home runs if you don't take big swings, you know. So for me, I I designed the business, I knew exactly who I was gonna serve, I made, you know, the exact offer and program that my clients wanted, and I even tested it. I ran marketing around it. I tested a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million users guaranteed, and I looked at how those different messages performed against each other. Ultimately, 10,000 users got the best results for me, so that's the one I went with. I did a lot of what I would consider pretty smart planning. Why? Because I had done it before. But what I didn't do is that I didn't go balls to the walls like I should have. And when I say that, I mean there was a time when I was spending 200 bucks a day on ads. I remember I got ballsy and I took a risk and I ramped it up to $500 over the course of a month. And I was like, I just want to see what happens, you know? Well, our business doubled in revenue. And I'm like, wow, that's awesome. And then I maintained that for, I don't know, six months, maybe nine months longer before I did the next big step up like that. And of course, the next time I did a big step up, revenue doubled again. So all those in-between periods, those three, six, nine month periods where I was like, oh, I'm gonna go, you know, work on this, work on that while you know things are stabilizing. I could have just been grown the whole time. You know, when there's revenue coming in, you can always find a solution to any problem that you have. You can hire better talent, you can hire faster. There's so I was I was just nervous, you know. I just didn't want to let go of my money that easily. Even though I had proof that it was profitable, I could have just kept investing in it. And so that that was the main mistake that I made is not um just hitting the gas and just figuring it out. Instead, I want it to be safe and steady, and I do regret that, but uh made a change since then.

Pedro Stein 34:24

Interesting. Okay. You know, and uh second stop we're gonna have here in time, you can select a uh a moment in those four years, and you might have more than one, right? But I want a top of mind for you, which is like a moment that everything clicked for you in a way. You were like, oh, this is why I started this, you know, something that you felt so fulfilled that explained the entire journey in a way. Do you have one of those?

Jonathan Maxim 34:52

I have them every day, and and and when I when I get that feeling, it's when I see a founder winning. Uh, because I will hammer these strategies into their head, and they don't always adopt them, regretfully. For example, one thing that people always take too long to implement is the pricing strategies that I recommend. How do you make more money off of your users? They'll do it, they'll dilly-dally around a little bit. But when they actually implement it, that that case Andrew I was talking about earlier, we rolled out a new onboarding and his free trial start rate went from 5% up to 50% and then up to 70%. So he's literally like 10xing his ROI simply by changing the onboarding in the app. So that's super rewarding for me to see. When I saw him with the 70% free trial start rate, those are crazy numbers. Like the highest I've seen historically is like 30, 35%. So seeing them win like that and knowing that his investment is now made good and he is now going to get rich off of this, that makes me so happy. Why? Because the little boy in me was a founder who made the same damn mistakes when I was younger. And I wish that somebody had just told me that. I wish somebody had just grip, shook me by the shoulders and said, monetize this via app, monetize it right now. Don't do anything else. Don't do anything else until you start making money on this. I wish somebody had just forced me to do that. And so I learned that lesson over the course of you know four years and $100,000. It didn't need to be wasted. So if I can do that for the next founder, I'm a happy camper. And that's really what makes it rewarding.

Pedro Stein 36:20

Oh, that's awesome, man. It's avoiding other people's pitfalls that you now realize you didn't have to go through, but it's fortunate that you're here to help them. And I love that. Okay. Now, if someone listening wants to connect with your follow your work, okay, Jonathan. And we're gonna have all the links in the description. But where's the best way for people to find, you know, your business and connect with you guys?

Jonathan Maxim 36:44

Absolutely. Um, we have a lot of free resources for founders because frankly, a lot of founders don't have much resources. So we created a bunch of free stuff for them. Um, stuff to help you prepare for launch, stuff to help you guide through your launch. Pretty much everything is available on YouTube. Um, if you just search viral app launch, you'll excuse me, you'll see us there. Um, if you want to connect with me personally, just shoot me a DM on Instagram. I actually have a free one-hour masterclass that goes through the whole process from zero to a million users every step of the journey. It's 83 different projects and tasks, and it's a very in-depth uh training video that is just something I made for my team. It's not like sales content or whatever. So if you're interested in launching an app, maybe you already have a vibe coded app, find me on Instagram at it's J Maxim, I T S J Maxim. Shoot me a DM and just say Pedro, and I will send you that playbook or sorry, that uh masterclass on how to launch an app for free. Because, you know, again, if I can just help another founder not lose money on their product for another day, um that's a good day for me.

Pedro Stein 37:48

That's a win. Love that. You know, I gotta highlight a few parts of the chat we had today. Okay, so give me a second here. Um, back to the origin story, right? Jonathan, you were telling me you were two years into your dream job and you lost the position because there was a merger that happened and all of that. That really hits home for me, right? I here in Brazil, I got into my dream job in banking, and I'm not sure if you know what happened in 2008 in the US, that actually the subprime crisis impacted me here in Brazil. Well, I had nothing to do with that. I kind of in a way blamed myself because my father was here in Brazil, a VP of a bank, you know. So, I mean, uh it's really a soul-wracking journey. And when you you you go through some stuff like that, and down the road, I eventually became an entrepreneur, right? And you have your ass handed over to you, right? It's like, hey, dude, you know, all the plans you made, yep, not gonna happen. So, in a way, as much as sometimes it's not your fault, right? You were killing on the job in the job and not your fault. External factors. It's hard to not have that self-criticism into yourself, like, hey, is this that I did something wrong? Like, that's the immediate response, at least for me, as it sounds like for you in a way, right? So I get the journey. So there's that. Um, also, another thing that caught my attention is that you mentioned that you didn't monetize the app. So that showed me, and you keep you kept hammering down on that, right? An entire episode. That tells me you have skin in the game, right, Jonathan. You were like, okay, I did this, guys. Don't do that, you know. Monetize the app. So I love that because you've been there and you've done that, right? It's not just about talking from theory. You you lived the you had the experience four years, 100k, right? That's what you told me. So uh in a way, it brings me back to when I was being onboarded by you, right? Here in our game of pretend. It's like give them what they need, you mentioned. Like at the end of the day, what they need is a profitable app, right? That's what we're they're looking for, what they really, really need, okay? And monetizing it seems like the go-to route since you mentioned that, okay. Now, last but not least, I would say it's you know, there's a quote you said around the episode, like it's like people don't tend to remember average, right? So I I had uh I had a lot of teachers in my family, right? My wife is a school teacher, my brother also owns an AI company here in Brazil, and my brother, my my dad actually was a dean at a university. And they all of them all said the same thing to me. I always remember the best and the worst at the class, but I never remember the C's, right? The guys in the average, like nobody remembered them. So either for good or bad, you have to stay, you had to stand out, right? So I love that quote. Now, this is just my long-winded way of saying, Jonathan, that I appreciate what you do, and I appreciate you sharing here with me today so openly, you know, about your journey. It was great having you on.

Jonathan Maxim 40:59

My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on, Pedro, and I hope I can save a founder at least a dollar here.

Pedro Stein 41:06

Hope so.

Davis Nguyen 41:07

That's it for this episode. This episode, as well as this podcast, was brought to you by Purple Circle, where we help business owners elevate their business to six, seven, and eight figured years, all without burning out. If you're looking to grow your business as well as get the time freedom that you are looking for, visit us at join purplecircle.com and see what we can do to help you and your business.