Flo spent a year and a half building his app and made $300 a month.
Not $300K. Three hundred dollars. After 18 months of work.
Then one creator from Colombia messaged him, and about a year later the same app does over $35,000 in MRR. That's 10,000% growth from a single influencer partnership. One partner posting three videos a month. He never built a TikTok army or hired a UGC farm, and he didn't touch paid ads until the very end.
Pat Walls had Flo on Starter Story to break down exactly how the deal works, and it's one of the smartest distribution stories I've heard this year.
Here's the full episode:
18 Months of Building, $300 to Show for It
Flo is a solo developer from Germany. Computer science degree, taught himself iOS development, worked as a mobile UX lead. The classic technical founder profile.
His app is called Monai, an expense tracker that uses AI to kill the data-entry friction. You say "coffee at Starbucks, 50 bucks" and it logs the transaction, tags it, categorizes it. It hooks into Apple Pay through Shortcuts so purchases log themselves. Minimalist design, no tabs, none of the bloat you get in other expense trackers.
He built the first version in a month or two, on purpose. His previous app took 2 years to build and nobody cared when he launched it. Lesson learned.
Then he spent a year and a half doing everything the internet tells you to do. Posting, launching, iterating.
Result: $300 MRR.
"I tried doing it all by myself and only made $300 per month," he says in the episode. A lot of founders at that point conclude they don't have product-market fit and kill the project.
The app wasn't the problem. Nobody was seeing it.
The Message That Changed Everything
Here's the part I love: Flo didn't find the influencer. The influencer found him.
A big content creator from Colombia was using the app, found Flo's social handles inside it, and reached out to collaborate. (Burn this into your brain: put your socials in your app. It's free distribution surface area.)
They negotiated terms and the creator posted his first video about Monai at the end of 2024.
Within a week, MRR had 10x'd.
That first video plus a follow-up took the app from $300 to $7,800 MRR in about a month. A year and a half of grinding, beaten by two videos from the right person.
How the Influencer Partnership Is Actually Structured
The deal structure is why this kept working instead of fizzling out like most sponsored posts do.
The terms today:
- A percentage of profits (they started with a revenue share and switched; revenue share didn't scale well)
- Plus a fixed monthly retainer
- Three videos per month on the creator's main channel. That's it.
Because the creator's upside is tied to profit, he behaves like a co-owner, not a contractor. Flo says he's "constantly thinking about what to do and how to make the greatest videos." The creator comes up with all the video ideas himself. Flo never has to brainstorm viral hooks.
Compare that to the usual playbook: DM 100 influencers, pay $300 per post, get rushed content that converts nobody.
Three story-driven videos a month, made by someone with skin in the game. They don't always get millions of views, but the views they get convert at a high rate.
I wrote before about founders giving creators equity to solve distribution (see how an influencer equity deal took AbMaxx to $55K a month). Flo's version is the lighter-weight cousin: profit share plus retainer, no cap table surgery, same alignment.
The Growth, Video by Video
Flo built a little tool that overlays video posts on his revenue chart, and the pattern is brutal in the best way:
→ First video (end of 2024): simple app walkthrough. $300 to $7,800 MRR with the follow-up.
→ Next video, also short: another $5K+ jump, to $13K MRR.
→ A quiet stretch. Lots of testing, no viral hit. (Even in the best partnerships, there are flat months.)
→ June: Apple invited Flo to WWDC. The creator turned the trip into a story video that did 1.7 million views and added almost $5K MRR.
→ Latest video, built around a feature users had been begging for: pushed the app past $35K MRR.
Notice what carries the later spikes: stories. The WWDC invite, the feature users had been begging for. Once the audience knew the app existed, plain walkthroughs stopped being enough.
Also worth stealing: Flo A/B tested his paywall with RevenueCat and found a hard paywall with a 7-day trial beat freemium for Monai. When a video hits and 100K people open your app that week, the paywall decision is worth real money.
Flo's 5-Step Playbook for Landing a Partner Like This
You're probably thinking: cool, an influencer found HIM. What about the rest of us?
Flo and his partner put together the playbook they'd run from scratch in 2026:
Step 1: Find aligned partners
Match on lifestyle, tone, and audience before anything else. Flo wanted someone with charisma who actually replies to comments (your buyers will have questions), and someone who isn't purely a tech reviewer. His partner is tech plus lifestyle, so the audience cares about his story, not just specs.
Step 2: Warm up the relationship
Follow them, comment on videos for a while. Creators notice recurring names. No time for that? Fine, just be upfront instead of faking a month of fandom.
Step 3: Make the outreach specific
"I love your content, let's collab" gets deleted. Reference one video, one moment, one joke. Something like: "I really liked how you made such a little detail look so cinematic in that video."
Step 4: Connect the dots to your product
It shouldn't read as "I want to pay you, make something for me." Show the overlap. For Flo: his partner's audience values aesthetics and clean tech, and Monai is a minimalist app with heavy AI under the hood. Obvious fit, once stated.
Step 5: Signal willingness to pay, early
Flo calls this the most important step. Lead with "I understand the value of what you do" and name the opportunity: pull Sensor Tower data and show that similar apps in the niche make $50K to $100K a month with the right distribution. You're handing the creator a mental model of what the partnership could become.
Three bonus tips from the episode:
- Keep it brief. Creators get hundreds of emails a week.
- Record a short personalized video saying their name and referencing their content. Almost nobody does this, which is exactly why it works.
- Look outside the US. Flo is German, his partner is Colombian, and the Colombian App Store market made him a six-figure business. Pat mentions founders crushing it in France and Argentina the same way.
The Stack Behind a $35K/Month App
For the builders, here's what runs Monai:
- Xcode, native iOS (free)
- Claude Code on the max plan ($100/month, and he says he uses it extensively)
- RevenueCat for revenue stats and paywall A/B tests (~$400/month)
- Appwrite for backend, auth, and database ($25/month)
- OpenAI for simple tasks, Anthropic for deeper analysis (~$200/month in API costs)
- Helm for App Store Connect sanity ($175 lifetime)
- Figma, free plan
Under $1,000 a month in tooling for a $35K/month business, and the biggest line item is the paywall testing tool that found him his best-converting paywall. Fair trade.
What I'd Steal From This Story
Three things jumped out at me watching this.
First, the obvious one: Flo's app was "yet another budget tracker" in a graveyard of budget trackers, and it still works because distribution beats novelty. Gus says it straight in the episode: what matters is the distribution. If you want the wider map of channels, I broke down how Gleam built a full app distribution strategy to $1M ARR.
Second, one aligned partner beats twenty transactional ones. Every founder I've interviewed who "did influencer marketing" and won had one creator who really hit, even when they contacted dozens. Flo just skipped to the end state and locked that one person in with profit share.
Third, be ready for the spike before it comes. When a video does 1.7M views, you suddenly have support questions, onboarding drop-off, and leads leaking everywhere at once. Flo's app handles the load because the product automates the busywork (voice entry, Apple Pay logging). The same thinking applies to your backend operations: if you set up business automations before the traffic hits, a viral week compounds instead of melting your support inbox.
And Flo's one regret? Waiting on Meta ads. The creator's videos turned out to be great ad creative, and the few weeks they've been running paid have already shown strong results. "We could have made a lot more money if we got on that train sooner."
Content first, then gasoline.
FAQ
How do you structure an influencer partnership for an app?
Flo's structure: a percentage of profits plus a fixed monthly retainer, in exchange for three high-quality videos per month, with a contract behind it. They originally used a revenue share and switched to profit share because it scaled better and keeps the creator thinking like an owner. Profit share, equity, and retainer-only are all viable; the common thread is giving the creator real upside.
How many influencers do you need to grow an app?
Monai went from $300 to $35K MRR with exactly one. The episode's argument is quality over quantity: one aligned creator with skin in the game outperforms twenty paid one-off posts, because they keep iterating on what converts instead of delivering a video and disappearing.
How do I find influencers to promote my app?
Start by putting your social handles inside your app, because creators who already use it may reach out to you (that's exactly how Flo's partnership started). Otherwise: shortlist creators whose audience and tone match your product, warm up the relationship, send a brief and specific pitch referencing their content, and signal early that you expect to pay. Don't limit the search to US creators.
Does influencer marketing work for boring app categories?
Monai is an expense tracker, one of the most crowded categories on the App Store, and it still 100x'd. The videos that moved revenue were story-driven (a solo dev's journey, a WWDC invite, a user-requested feature) rather than feature demos. If a creator can tell a story around your app, the category being "done" doesn't matter much.
Flo found one person who believed in his product enough to bet on it. That's distribution, but honestly, it's also just not building alone anymore.
Every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast I sit down with bootstrapped founders doing $100K to $10M a year and pull out exactly how they grew, with the actual numbers and deal structures on the table.
