The world changed 2 months ago, and I've been gatekeeping this cutting edge agentic system for creating apps & scaling them past $20k/mo.. for context I own 12 apps and I personally make $70k/mo
I retired my mother and Wife here in the beautiful city of Miami thanks to apps, and I hope this article can help you do the same.
This guide will show you how to automate building and marketing the right way,
To go from $0 to $20k/mo with your app. we will discuss:
1. Choosing your app idea with AI 2. Building your app with AI 3. All marketing angles for your app 4. Automating your marketing with open claw 5. how to scale past $10k/mo
but enough yapping lets front flip right into the sauce.
Step 1: Automated App idea & Validation with Agents
99% of people fail their app development journey as soon as it starts.
they get a little idea in their head spend 4 months building their dream app perfecting every button and color... then they launch it
and literally 2 people download it, your mom and you this is the dumbest thing you can do.
before you agents write a single line of code you need topick a niche and validate your app ideato make sure people actually want it.
here's the proccess i follow for every single app i build:
first, find a painful problem.
find something people struggle with every single day that you can solve with an app. some examples you can send to your agent:
once we have a problem to solve. Eddie ( our open claw agent ) does all of this research for us automatically.
If you don't have open claw setup heres a guide on how to set it up in 3 minutes:
so we tell our agent tell Eddie to go to https://screensdesign.com/
and basically look up a few competitor apps then download the onboarding from the top 3 based on revenue, you need to have browser control setup for this, otherwise just do it manually
Eddie will download their onboarding, and get back to us with the structure of the onboarding an a prompt to create a complete new design based on the combination of the top 3 app in that niche.
Which is ideal, if you know you are in a great niche and your onboarding cooks, as long as you are able to bring attention to the app.
you will make a lot of money.
but if you get attention for your app and your onboarding sucks, you likely will be disappointed
thats why this step is so imporatnt
All big apps usually follow the same structure which is the same one Cal AI and all the million dollar apps use.
Innovating within your niche:
you can take this one step further and have Eddie use the free itunes api https://performance-partners.apple.com/search-api
he will use it to scrape all the 1 start reviews from your competitors. and get back to you with a plan on how to make the app stand out even more.
so by the time we get started building, we have an onboarding structure, a design prompt ready and a moat based on negative reviews from our competitors.
all validated by apps already making money.
Step 2: Building your app with Rork
building an app in 2026 is a joke. seriously. it has literally never been easier.
if you followed the previous step correctly your agent should have sent you a prompt that you can send to rork along with some refference screenshots.
@rork is the #1 app builder in the world right now, it can literally ship directly to the appstore in 2-3 clicks.
the key to building a great app is in the prompt, if you send a vague prompt the outcome will not be anywhere near as good as if you sent a detailed prompt based on a reference image.
For example I one shotted this app using Rork and this video of me using my own vibe coded app got 1,000,000 views on X
and it was made using the proccess described above
its extremely important to add images along side the prompt for best results with Rork.
so the workflow is like this,
first send all your refference images to chatgpt, along with the prompt below which will make GPT spit out a huge prompt on how to replicate the reference images you sent it in a way Rork can understand.
then you send that prompt that chatgpt gave you to Rork + also add your reference images. and within a few minutes you will have a working app.
you can also get more design inspo from Pinterest, Dribbble, and your competitors. then repeat this prompt proccess for new features until you finish your app.
when the app is looking crisp just slap a paywall in ther I use super wall or revenue cat, not much difference between the two.
then send it to the appstore, make sure you send your coding agent these guidelines to avoid getting rejected
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
Me and @maubaron just launched a new app following these exact steps It is called Steplock on the appstore, already making money.
Marketing your app autonomously with agents.
once you get your app into the App Store its time to get some money. and money follows attention.
i wrote another article on how to market your apps the traditional way. but in this article we are discussing how to market with agents.
heres the article in case you want to read it: https://x.com/ErnestoSOFTWARE/status/2014110519913857122?s=20
now before you automate anything, you need to understand what the 5 main marketing channels are and how they work, otherwise you wont know what to do and how to go viral.
- UGC ( costs money )UGC stands for user generated content.
basically hiring college students to post 30 to 60 videos per month. the game with UGC is volume.
i usually pay $10-15 per video + view performance bonuses
2. Influencers ( costs money )
this is one of my favorite methods because 1 good influencer can literally kick start your entire app.
above is an example influencer video from one of my apps
i hire influencers at $1 CPM meaning 1000 views = $1 paid to them.
if they dont perform you dont lose money. if they go viral you get a ton of app sales.
They are a better option than UGC for going viral quickly, but usually more expensive and harder to close.
in my experience 1M views = $2000 to $5000 in rev depending on your app niche and onboarding.
also, cap deals at $1,000 CPM.
3. Faceless content ( free )
most underrated method. and most people completely mess it up.
Above is a tiktok page that is use to market 1 of my app its ran by my cofounder and gathers millions of views per month
Faceless content is very simple, what you want to do is find a viral format then replicate it endlessly.
try to make the feed look as similar as the image above, if your faceless account looks like a random Pinterest dump you are cooked.
4. Founder led content ( free )
pick up your phone and film content. find a viral format and put your spin on it.
I've also done this myself, I found a viral format, replicated it and generated 2.7M views with 2 reels.
if you have no money to put into creators you should still be making founder led content.
it builds that viral sense in you, which you can later teach to your creators.
5. Paid ads ( costs money )
paid ads are the best growth channel. because once you crack on good creatives, whether it be from influencers or UGC or founder led content
you can push those behind ads and once you get a good CPA ( cost per acquisition ) and find a few winning creatives you can scale endlessly.
@maubaron and I scale most of our apps purely with paid ads.
How to actually automate your marketing with Open Claw
So now that you understand all 5 marketing channels, lets talk about how to automate your marketing with agents.
most people discover Open Claw and immediately run to X to post about how they automated their Google Calendar.
bro. thats not it.
there are real life changing use cases for this tool and im about to break them down.
here is the problem we had.
to run a real faceless content operation at scale you either hire an agency for $30k a month or you are doing it yourself 8 hours a day.
both of those options are terrible.
so what we did is we found a few viral faceless accounts, and had eddie study them for example this one:
then we hooked up eddie to viewtrack.app api.
This allows him to analyze any content across X, YT, Tiktok and IG Eddie analyzes the views, the hooks, and the comments and starts learning about marketing on his own based on hard metrics not your gut feeling.
here is a perfect example of one of our youtube channels making 732K Views/mo completely on auto pilot using this strategy.
@maubaron talks more about this automation on his article
then we hooked up our accounts to viewtrack.app to get the analytics for our own accounts as well
we then feed the api key of Viewtrack to Eddie, and Eddie can now self improve by looking at the views, engagements, comments and hooks from each of our videos and double down on winning formats.
Thats the way it works.
we also handed Eddie our full influencer system.
the influencer proccess has 6 steps:
- finding and reaching out to influencers our VA send 100 dms/per day
- intro and getting their
- negotiating the CPM deal via telegram
- contract signing and onboarding with viewtracks api
- daily follow up to make sure they post
our influencers consistently get millions of views and we make a 2x to 4x return every single time.
before you give Open Claw a system to automate you have to build that system yourself first. run it yourself. understand every single step. then hand it to Eddie.
you cannot automate what you dont understand. build it first. then let Eddie take over.
AI INFLUENCER + REACTION HOOKS Finally, another way to automate content with Eddie is by hooking him up to Arcads api
And have him generate a ton of reaction hooks or even fitness influencer b-roll footage
or whatever fits your app. Then having eddie overlay a snapchat hook
and post it. This is personally my favorite method. because we have gotten millions of views with reaction views and AI.
And thats how you build apps to $20k/mo with AI agents,
this technology is really like 2 months old right now
its cutting edge, and It's pretty insane what you can get done with a team of agents helping you automate every step.
now, I don't think you should automate until you understand what you are automating, otherwise you will just be automating the wrong things.
hope this article helps you get a clear overview on how to get started.
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