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My First Million

Dumb iPhone Apps Are Making People Rich Again (Here’s how)

24 Feb 2026

Transcription

Chapter 1: What is the significance of iPhone apps in today's market?

0.031 - 9.858 Unknown

When I talk to 12 founders a week, I'm seeing six of them are crushing it with iOS apps. There's a guys that we interviewed on the channel that have an app that forces you to do pushups.

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10.239 - 22.6 Sam Parr

They're doing 30K a month. Pat is here from Starter Story.

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23.061 - 27.264 Shaan Puri

Pat, HubSpot just bought Starter Story. That's amazing. Congratulations.

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27.565 - 27.945 Unknown

Thank you.

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28.145 - 28.806 Shaan Puri

Is the news out?

29.026 - 32.188 Unknown

It is technically not closed yet.

Chapter 2: How did Pat Walls negotiate the sale of his company?

32.268 - 55.488 Unknown

So I'm going through a whirlwind. I'm going to try to put on a good face for you guys. You're seven days out right now from selling. And when this goes live, it is presumably closed. And yet you are nervous. What's that about? Well, the deal is supposed to close tomorrow. But it's the psychology of it needs to be signed, closed, wired.

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55.989 - 67.964 Unknown

Otherwise, I cannot take myself to that place yet, that place to celebrate or tell people or anything like that. And it's kind of weird doing the production process because content needs to be recorded early to go out.

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Chapter 3: What is Starter Story and how did it evolve?

67.984 - 70.707 Unknown

So it's super weird to do an interview before it's done.

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70.687 - 77.055 Pat Walls

How did you do with the negotiation? Walk us through how you approached that and how you think you did. Give yourself a score there.

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I had a number in my head before any of this conversation happened. When it just came to my head, I started talking to ChatGPT about it, having a little conversation. Before even the sale or anything, conversations happened. She said, what would be my walkaway number? I just remember thinking back what that number is.

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96.218 - 108.922 Unknown

And when I went back to the negotiation and then it sort of was that number, I was like, okay, well I made up that, that would have been my number before any sale influenced me or anything like that.

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Chapter 4: What innovative app ideas are currently trending?

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I negotiated to that number because I wanted to be like authentic in my negotiation of like, that was like truly my number, not to make up something for whatever, that was actually the number. Do you feel any bit of regret? Because you're like, oh, I got my number. I should have asked for more. Yeah, 100%.

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125.644 - 136.663 Pat Walls

You haven't made it. If that doesn't happen, that's the final stage. Maximum regret, and then it turns to maximum relief when it's done. All right, so let's explain. What is Starter Story?

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Chapter 5: How can entrepreneurs overcome personal obstacles in business?

136.704 - 157.26 Unknown

People don't even know. Starter story is a lot of things, but it started out as a side project while I was working in nine to five because I couldn't start any successful business. So I said, why not just start interviewing founders and sharing their stories online? And maybe I will find a co-founder through that or I'll find a good idea through that. Long story short, it took off.

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We found other mediums. We had the blog with the case studies. We had products. We had community. We had a YouTube channel.

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Chapter 6: What is the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS)?

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It is all built around interviewing founders doing anywhere from 10K to 100K per month.

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169.775 - 181.327 Pat Walls

Let me ask you, what'd you get right? Because this idea of, hey, I'm going to interview founders about, you know, how they did it. That's not like a new idea. And you did this only a couple of years ago. How many years has it been? Three, four years?

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181.808 - 188.925 Unknown

How long has it been? I've been in the game longer than you might think. Eight years is when I officially started the business.

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Chapter 7: How do busy people become their own biggest obstacles?

188.945 - 202.935 Pat Walls

Even eight years ago, that wasn't a completely novel idea, but you did well with it, right? You separated yourself from the pack. You made it a success. What do you think you got right? that others didn't. And I really hope it's not just like a, I worked hard, you know.

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Yeah, I think one thing that now I'm looking back, what did we get right is that we were, you had to share your revenue to get on the website. So a lot of founders at the time, they didn't want to share those things because they had investors, it was private or whatever. We made it a requirement to share your revenue on the site.

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This is something that we got from indie hackers at the time, which was big on that too.

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Chapter 8: What are the future opportunities in app development?

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Shout out Cortland who built that. But once you could see, like you don't want to read a story about a business and you don't know how much revenue they're making. You want to know how's this business doing? Okay, now I want to learn from this business. So having that revenue number at the top, that was really, really big.

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if you guys Google like starter story case studies and you could find one, and you could find this thing, it's called the Full Case Studies Database. And so early on, you were really interesting because you would interview people.

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And I always thought that I was like within a very small niche of people who like this, but I think it's actually a lot of people who like it where I love numbers, I'm obsessed with numbers. And you would do these interviews with people And they very clearly were not interviews of you speaking. It was as if you just sent people a Google Doc, the same Google Doc over and over and over again.

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And you ask questions and they typed out the replies. And then you created a graphic at the top. And it said, here's one. It says, Brewmate. I think it's called Brewmate. Yeah, Brewmate. I grew a drinkware brand to $1.1 million per month at 23 years old. And it said, Jacob. And it said, his revenue per month is $12 million. There's one founders. There's 53 employees.

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You did such a good job of just outlining those numbers. And then what you did was, once you had 100 of these, I could sort through D2C, SaaS. I could sort through all these things. And frankly, if I was just trying to clone someone's company, Yep. That's probably not the right word, but figure out what business model I want to do. Which I wouldn't. Well, if you wanted to clone someone's company.

314.426 - 315.688 Shaan Puri

What if some asshole was going to do that?

315.748 - 331.546 Unknown

Yeah. But if you wanted to research, that's a better word. You and IndieHackers were like the best. But like you had like a bunch of legends. Like you had David Houser from Grasshopper and a bunch of people like that on early on. And it was really cool.

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Every single week, I talk to founders, as I mentioned, that are doing between 10K and 100K per month and people that have sort of, their businesses have took off recently. So I like, I get to see, I get to have these conversations every single day and see like what's working like right now. We can go over some of that if you want to.

349.002 - 350.123 Pat Walls

Yeah, give us one.

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