Charles Liu and Kelvin Zhang are engineers. Building the app was the easy part.
Getting anyone to download it? They sucked at that. Their words, not mine.
They failed enough times to get demotivated, then found an app distribution strategy that took Gleam, their communication skills app, to over $1 million in ARR and top 10 in the App Store's education category. Along the way they racked up 500 million combined views across their social accounts.
This week they came on Starter Story Build and laid out the whole playbook: the one formula they optimize for, the 10 content formats they test, and exactly what they pay UGC creators.
I pulled it apart so you can run it.
The app: Gleam, $1M+ ARR teaching people how to talk
Gleam is "Duolingo for social skills". Bite-size lessons plus interactive practice for conversation, making friends, and interview prep. It runs on a subscription (currently $12.99 a month on the App Store).
Here's what makes their story useful to you: Gleam is an education app. It is not naturally viral.
Nobody screenshots a communication lesson and sends it to the group chat. Charles says this straight up in the episode: they never got the luxury of a product that markets itself, so they had to get good at distribution the hard way.
If you're building something boring (most of us are), that's the interesting case.
Start with the only ratio that matters: LTV to CAC
Charles explains consumer apps like you're 14, which I appreciated.
Unlike B2B SaaS, consumer is primarily a unit economics game. Every distribution decision optimizes one ratio: how much lifetime value you get from a user versus how much it costs to acquire them.
Two ways to scale that ratio:
- Organic: you make videos yourself, post on TikTok and Instagram, then scale through UGC programs. Cheap acquisition, best margins when a video hits, slightly lower LTV per user.
- Paid ads: you buy eyeballs, mostly on Meta. Works when your funnel and monetization are already dialed in, and the feedback loops are fast.
Their recommendation for bootstrapped founders: organic, 99% of the time.
Not because paid is bad. Because organic lets you double dip. A video that goes viral and converts organically becomes your best performing paid ad later. You test for free, then pour money on the winner.
That's the same reason I keep telling founders you can go viral without followers: the algorithm doesn't care who you are, it cares whether the video works.
The formula: revenue = virality x conversion x repeatability
This is the core of the episode.
Kelvin and Charles treat every content bet as three multiplied variables. Can you get people to watch it? Can you get viewers to want the product? Can you keep producing it at scale?
If any one of those is zero, your revenue is zero. A million views times zero conversion is zero.
They walked through the three traps, and they fell into all of them first:
Trap 1: optimizing for view count. Attention is not demand. They've seen videos do 2 million views and generate 20 downloads. Their own animated skit about "the average male experience" did around 15 million views and converted badly, because it was pure entertainment with the plug buried at the end.
Trap 2: over-engineering repeatability. This one is for my technical readers. Engineers love systems: scripts, mass-generated TikTok carousels, automation everywhere. But automating a format you haven't proven is just procrastination with extra steps. Take out your phone, record the video yourself, keep the feedback loop short. Scale after the signal, never before.
Trap 3: under-optimizing conversion. People hate being sold to. The formats that convert follow "show, don't tell": Cal AI never says "download Cal AI", it just shows someone snapping a photo of food and the calories popping up. PushScroll shows push-ups adding minutes to your screen time. The demo is the ad. Curiosity does the rest.
That third trap applies way beyond consumer apps, by the way. Attention you never turn into a sale is wasted work, which is the whole argument behind the lead nurturing strategies playbook on the B2B side: capturing interest is step one, converting it is the business.
And the line from the episode worth writing on your wall: you only need ONE format that hits all three to scale to $100K MRR. You don't need five agencies or ads running on four channels. You need one format, run for longer than feels comfortable.
The 10 content formats they test
"I don't know what to create" is the most common excuse. Here's their actual menu, with their honest read on each:
- Talking head: the classic. Easy to start, but hitting virality + conversion + repeatability requires genuinely good creators, and those are hard to find.
- Skits: street interviews, "what's your GPA" style videos.
- Animations: great for entertainment, and a real moat if you build an animation team. Kelvin's pro tip if you animate with AI: add "use Disney's 12 rules of animation" to the prompt.
- Motion design: harder to do, also a moat if you do it well.
- Challenges: public speaking challenges and similar. Best when timed with trends.
- Wall of text: agencies love these because they're easy to pump out. Kelvin's verdict: mid. They saturate fast and convert poorly. Fine for cheap testing.
- Founder-led: their strongest recommendation. You become your own creator, you learn to think like one, and your face becomes a trust layer on the product.
- Series: high-quality series build brand because people actually remember them between scrolls.
- Memes: great for volume if you're culturally tapped in. Won't convert much.
- Product demo: the holy grail when your app is visual enough to be the payoff of the video. This was basically Cal AI's whole influencer playbook.
What still works at the end of 2026? All of it, according to Charles, with one condition: novelty. Copy what's working, then innovate on at least one axis. Gleam couldn't win on product demos (education apps don't demo sexy), so they innovated on talking head and animations until conversions showed up.
How they test: become a robot for a week
The bottleneck is not ideas. It's emotional.
You know you should post daily. You don't, because every video feels like a decision.
Their fix: separate research from execution. At the start of the week, do one deep research session and collect every format bet you believe in. Then schedule them across the week and execute like a robot. No judging mid-week, just inputs.
Everything is an experiment until something works. Then go deep. Charles's phrasing: there's way more milk in a winning format than you expect.
The UGC playbook: finding, filtering, and paying creators
Once a format works with your face on it, you scale it with other people's faces.
Where they find creators, in order of underrated-ness:
- Reddit (r/UGCcreators is the one they've used)
- Creator communities (ask your existing creators for intros, the network compounds)
- Universities (clubs and frats are full of people who want money)
- UGC platforms
- Cold DMs to good UGC creators on TikTok and Instagram, then a call (Charles's personal go-to)
Filtering matters more than sourcing, because you'll get more applications than you can handle. Their filter: send a doc and verify the person has gone viral before. Past virality predicts future virality. Shortlist, then hop on a call so they know a real human runs the brand.
The numbers, since everyone asks:
- $10 to $25 per video depending on format
- A minimum view threshold (500 to 1,000 views) before the base payment triggers, to enforce quality
- Milestone bonuses around $0.50 to $0.80 per thousand views
- Payouts framed as "after 10 videos" instead of "every two weeks", so creators finish their retainer (you still pro-rate if they bail)
Budget-wise: starting is free, you post yourself. For a first real creator campaign with more than one or two people, have a few thousand dollars set aside, and reinvest revenue once conversion shows up.
And their retention advice surprised me. Your best creators WILL get offers from venture-backed apps paying triple. You don't retain them on price, you retain them on relationship: a big iMessage group chat that feels like family, Discord later when you've grown. Culture as a moat, in the least corporate sense possible.
One warning before you outsource any of this: know what good looks like first. A general who can't ride a horse can't lead cavalry. Agencies will never care about your app the way you do, and if you've never made a converting video yourself, you can't tell a good creator from a confident one. I wrote a full guide on how to hire UGC creators if you're at that stage.
Their final advice: treat it like a maze
The cost of building is near zero now. So is the cost of distributing.
Which means the only edge left is feedback loop speed. How fast can you turn out a video? How fast can you prototype a test?
Kelvin's mental model: the consumer app game is a maze. You're at point A, the exit exists somewhere, and nobody hands you the map. You explore directions, find small treasure chests (a video that slightly outperforms), follow those corridors deeper, and backtrack without drama when they dead-end.
Gleam's million in ARR wasn't one genius move. It was reps.
I interview bootstrapped founders about playbooks like this every week.
Real revenue numbers, real failures, from people a step or two ahead of you. If this breakdown was useful, the podcast goes deeper.
Listen to the Profitable Founder Podcast
FAQ
What is an app distribution strategy?
An app distribution strategy is your plan for getting users at a cost below their lifetime value. For consumer apps it comes down to two channels, organic content and paid ads, and one formula: revenue = virality x conversion x repeatability. Gleam's founders recommend bootstrapped founders start with organic because testing is free and winning videos can be reused as paid ads later.
How much does Gleam make?
On the episode, Charles and Kelvin say Gleam passed $1 million in ARR and hit top 10 in the App Store's education category. The app charges a subscription, currently $12.99 a month, and the founders have generated over 500 million combined views across their social accounts.
How much should you pay UGC creators for app content?
Gleam pays $10 to $25 per video depending on format, with the base payment conditional on hitting 500 to 1,000 views, plus milestone bonuses of roughly $0.50 to $0.80 per thousand views. They frame payouts as "after 10 videos" rather than biweekly so creators complete their retainers.
Should you start with organic content or paid ads for your app?
Organic, 99% of the time, if you're bootstrapped. It costs nothing to post, the margins are better, and a video that converts organically usually performs as a paid ad too. Paid ads matter later: most app studios that scale to millions eventually move there because budgets scale and feedback loops are fast.
