This Founder Got 50m+ Downloads with 40+ Apps

Meet Ryan Thorp, founder of Fload, an AI powered platform designed to help mobile apps grow on autopilot. Ryan has years of experience scaling app businesses, and now he's building tools that give teams instant insights into their app performance. He and his team have launched 40 plus mobile apps with over 50 million downloads, building a scalable app studio model instead of relying on a single hit. He gained early traction leading growth at Reflectly, scaling it to 4 million ARR and later became co-founder, CMO, and COO of Reflective Apps, scaling a portfolio of productivity and lifestyle apps. Today, he's here to share the blueprint of how Flo is disrupting the market.

And you went from selling Instagram accounts in Bali to pay off your student debts, then you ended up joining Revolute where you saw Revolute growing to like 4 million users using viral loops. Can you talk a little bit what you learned at Revolute and how they grew so rapidly?

Revolute was my first the first job out of university. Um you know I was still sort of studying in France at the time got there as like the first growth hire but some of the things that really sort of stood out is from their marketing perspective was they were super super focused on community uh in the in the early stages. they knew that they had to get their hyperengaged just call it like most engaged active users to share the word of of Revolute. So it was a real combination of you know great product with great inbuilt product viral mechanics like referring friends, split payments um and then part of the growth model was really just building out that organic word of mouth as as as actively and as engaged as you could be. um from myself going to every event across the UK in Ireland, giving out Revolute cards, talking to everybody, um developing as many partnerships as we possibly can because Reboot gave us no budget in the in the first like probably until like 2020. Um they never actually really had any quotequote marketing spend. Um so any sort of uh community based role, any kind of PR was a huge thing as well. Um, and then just really rock solid product virality was what kind of got it over the line until then sort of the paid engine started coming in and brand and bunch of other layers.

So were they primarily focused on paid ads or UGC or what was their main growth engine

for Revolute?

Yeah. Uh again yeah it was again it was it was community it was um product product growth uh initially first rolled into community and then rolled into uh PR and then rolled into referrals which was to be honest that was the bulk of it and then affiliates as well which is you know you have a large network of blogs and newsletters and you know every kind of partnership that sat within the umbrella of financial advice or you know travel hearts these kinds of things.

Got it. So you ended up uh starting this app studio and you were part of this app called Reflecty which had hit 3 million AR at one point. Um I want to in this podcast I want to give a playbook to people who are starting new mobile apps on how to find creators, how to run UGC campaigns, how to uh run influencers and also how to run paid ads. But let's start with UGC like how do you guys typically source creators for your apps?

Yeah. So um sourcing creators from you know how it was a couple years ago versus how it is today. A couple of years ago there weren't all these platforms that are currently available now. I think there's a lot of different platforms where they have a whole kind of army or uh big bank of creators that have already sort of pre-approved to be um content creators for you. The the oldfashioned way though is literally just going on Tik Tok, typing in or your or reals for example, typing in the keywords that are hyper relevant for your app. So if it's a habit tracker, you type in habits and you just scroll through until you and you start building a list of the creators that are making videos that are great, maybe are like sort of diamonds in the rough. They need it. They've got a little bit of potential, but they're not, you know, tens of thousands of followers. And those are the people you want to reach out to, build relationships. They usually have their emails in the bio in the profile. Uh or you can find their Tik Tok and go directly to Instagram and find them on Instagram as well. And then you can message them that way. Uh because you can't always access the the messaging platform on Tik Tok uh from from the beginning. And yeah, avoid any kind of agents or any kind of third party people who are taking a cut or trying to you know manage these creator people. you want to go directly to the to them to the creators and you want to build relationships directly with them. So yeah, old fashioned way just scroll by keywords, create a list. New way is there's a bunch of different banks of platforms that have lots of influencers or some content creators that are within your niches.

And when you typically reach out to these creators, what are you offering? Are you offering a retainer or are you offering like a one uh like a one video or two video package? usually. So, usually it starts off we pay per video. We think, you know, there are models that are out there now where it's only paid on CPN's, but like at the end of the day, the the creators are still doing, let's say, an hourly job for you, hourly work to put time into making content and learn your instructions. So, they should be compensated for that. I think that's fair. And then there's a bonus structure on how many views they don't get if it's uh if it's organic driven.

What payment uh structure are you doing with these creators? Like is it a $1 CPM bonus or uh how do you typically pay these people?

Yeah. So we think it's uh it's quite fair that you go down the route of sort of paying on a video basis. These creators at the end of the day they are making content for you. They are putting in hours to to help you with this. I know the new models at the moment are just pure CPM focused, like performance-based, but I find, you know, that's getting harder to uh to operate. And I don't think it's like super scalable at just pure CPM focused cuz unless unless like I don't think you're going to get the best talent who are just and I don't think they're going to be making the videos in the right way. That's maybe the way that you sort of train them to make the videos. This is how we used to do it, but this is how I think that's how things are going now. People are going much more towards performance-driven deals,

but how do you come up with an app idea? I know not every niche is equal, right? Like there's niches that you can inherently do much better. So, how do you think about that?

Standard practice is, you know, you go on Reddit, you go on uh Tik Tok, you look at the comments, you look at the feed, you go where the audiences are. But the problem is that's like okay advice if you know what audience you're trying to find. Usually the the money is in the niches. That's for sure. But it feels like now apps are going in a place where there's a niche and there's a niche of a niche and there's a niche of a niche niche. you was like rather than be like a habit tracker, it's like a fitness habit tracker. And then rather than a fitness habit tracker, it's like a fitness habit tracker for over 40s. And you kind of need to take like demographic plus geographic plus keyword term plus gender maybe and then that becomes your audience that your target market. Um and then you have to think okay what what product or out or or or app you know solution fits in that and is the market big enough and will the market pay for it? Is there evidence for that? Um and then sometimes uh looking at also your own like background history of you know what is your leverage as a person uh to make you actually interested enough to follow through and go all the way through and actually make the product make the app. um like you know for example let's say you are 40 years old you've had some health conditions uh but it's very specific to you know a male health condition that's over 40 and there were these routines that I came up with because I figured out how to reduce the need to have this and that becomes then your hyperfocused target playbook and I have the backstory and the and you know the the story and the narrative and the brand of like going through this pain. So then I know truly how to build that for the customer. That is the personal way of doing it or there's you find that person specifically and you build the app for that person very indepth um you know it could be building it for your mom or your dad or for example someone close to you and that gives you more inspiration to then go forth with it. You know, one thing I've observed, if you go on app store.com and use filter by revenue and see the top 100 apps, I think 70 to 80% of those apps are like photo video app. They help say edit edit photos, edit videos. What do you think about that?

Uh, I mean that makes a lot of sense. Uh, like you know some of the biggest apps on the app store are basically photo video apps. um and everyone and the the target adjustable market is pretty much like everyone um in some level of creative creative thing. And I think the uh the thing is as well um the fact that you can just put nano banana and make it irraasa um just sort of it's an easy it's easy like it's it's not a complicated app and it's a good first app to go down and if you can find the right niche it's a good bit way to get a bit of experience in launching and putting an app out there and learning the trades kind of like you know because they've found that sweet spot you know and you know platforms like you know targeting even older people uh I don't think truly has been fully unlocked yet either.

Yeah, I think AI changed the game a little bit because uh Cali for example, right? They My fitness pal was it had a huge problem like every time you had to like manually do so much like you have to put all your details but just taking a photo and it did telling you what the calories are was it it makes it like it almost dumbs it down for the consumer.

Yeah, exactly. And I think there's going to be this like push and pull effects of the easiness of doing all this stuff. Um I kind of think you know if things come easy people don't appreciate um the knowledge or the outcomes that come as a result of getting it easy. So hypothetically let's say you're always able to count your calories. There's no, it feels like there hasn't been any enough struggle to like get you to a point to really appreciate uh how I'm trying to think how to word that. There's there's some there's something in there as things become super easy, we're going to be so disconnected from sometimes the outcome. It almost feels like Yep.

How do you typically run paid ads and what's your give me some secret sauce?

Yeah. So, uh, our paid ads, um, to be honest, it usually took a very, we were running so many, you know, thousands of ads sort of in a very short period of time usually. So, we like to keep our structure pretty simple. We would just do a level one and a level two and a level three campaign. And you can kind of split that any other way you want across all the different, you know, geographies and things like this. But that was usually the framework. Level one, we would just throw any video that had any kind of organic traction into with like a 10 $20 spend and then let that run for one or two days depending on what your

target you know CPAs are, CPIs, you know, cost per trials, whatever the metric you're aiming for. you will have like a basically a you a boundary of success and if it falls within that boundary of success, you let it ride. Uh and then you just duplicate it again into a level two campaign which is a little bit more expensive, maybe $100, $2, $400, $300 maybe, see if it works at that next level. Uh because ultimately what you're trying to do is you're trying to find the bite point where a video might perform up to and just let it ride at the edge of that bite point for as long as possible. Who is an ideal ICP for Fload?

The initial ICP is um well anyone who's sort of rolling out their their first app or their their group of apps or anywhere upwards of you know 100k MR. Um it's that kind of that sweet spot where you're maybe not big enough to hire an entire team. You might have been burned by hiring like lots of agencies and or you know and you just need that little co-pilot assistant uh person or team of agents to give you an idea of like what is what benchmark should you be aiming for? Um like what is you know what what should I be testing every single week? What pricing should I be looking at? And it should be doing that all automatically for you in the background without you really doing anything. Um, and that hopefully gives you that extra, you know, extra bit of advantage. Um, because there's basically a fork in the road, right? You're either going to be a fully agentic uh, app that is growing with agents or you're going to do everything manually. And naturally, the compounding effect of not doing it aically will mean that all your competitors that are going to sort of ride off into the sunset.

It's almost like a Shopify sidekick for your mobile apps.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So, you know, if you just start an app, it will have full context of your asset of your app and it will tell you what to do next and it will go and do it for you uh in terms of growth kind of. Yeah. like Shopify has this sort of layer to it. So this is Yeah. And a agent work, you know, it's like AI 1.0 was always chatbot. A AI 2.0 is fully agentic. You effectively turn them on and then you let it ride.

Okay. Last thing before we wrap up, I kind of want to ask you your honest take on web app versus mobile apps. What do you prefer? Uh I would say I prefer mobile apps. Um we tried the web experience. Um now I think what is great about mobile apps is although you are paying the tax to Apple um after doing the whole web related experience I actually think what Apple gives for the tax is actually really worth it. especially if you already have some organic traction. Um the discoverability layer is a basically the tax on then doing all the marketing for you, all of the payload processing for you and at a certain scale. Um that is super super valuable. We did the the web experience and you know just got hit with sort of chargeback problems and all these different layers which if you are just a you're a pure app person mobile app person you don't really know all these hurdles that Apple are actually solving for you and I also think like the mobile phone is not going away for a long period of time and I think the mobile app space is only going to get better um and everyone in the world has access to the app store there. There isn't really I mean I guess there is the Mac app store but yeah who's really using those as like web apps specifically

or or something like what would you do differently today you know like I mean you you've done 40 apps like you I'm pretty sure you've burned a lot of cash on wrong things along the way we all do u like what was something like you would do differently today

a lot of the software that is connected with mobile apps uh initially starts off obviously like quite fairly priced um but gets dramatically more expensive as you become bigger which actually really eats into margins a lot. So I think we we cut a lot of our subscriptions to a lot of services. Uh but that was so we could be more lean and be more cost effective. So I think I would have done that probably a bit earlier before, you know, if you have lots of apps, you have lots of like CRM systems, lots of, you know, product analytic tools, like all these different things, before you know it, you're paying hundreds of thousands of dollars a month sometimes for stuff that you're not actively using, but you're told that you need to use this stuff to be successful. Um, I would yeah, I would just be very really cautionary. I think even more so now there's like a lot of uh ways that you can kind of you know build smaller versions that are more useful to the zero for no money at all.

Yeah this has been a common debate of like instead of paying slack build an in-house Slack you know a lot of people are doing that nowadays.

Yeah I think yeah just I think you can now think a little bit more creatively around it. um more first time in history probably that that is possible and

so I think yeah be and also when you're early um you don't have a lot of cash anyway so just being frugal and sort of structuring that yourself is is is also quite helpful.

Amazing. Thank you Ryan for coming on the pod. Where can people find you and where can people learn more about what you're building today?

Uh yes so find me on Twitter or X they call it. Um, hello Ryan J. Um, and then if you are interested to learn more about mobile growth agents, um, just go to Floads f l o a d.com and you can just book a demo with me. Um, we can talk growth, we can talk products, we can talk anything. So yeah, thank you Vio.

Thank you. Let me stop this.