This is the one I've been promising you.

The first ever My First Dollar founder breakdown.

I got on a call with Ernesto Lopez. He's 22, based in Miami, and his apps do over $1M a year in revenue.

A couple of years ago he was doing Door Dash and Uber Eats just to survive. Now one of his apps is sitting at number 34 in the US App Store.

His first app hit $20k/month in 30 days, almost entirely through UGC and influencer marketing.

He walked me through his whole playbook. Here are the bits I think are most useful.

Full interview is here if you want to watch it → click to watch

Ernesto finds viral formats by scrolling TikTok and Instagram. But he doesn't copy from big accounts. He copies from accounts with 1,000 to 10,000 followers.

The logic is simple. A video that went viral on a 100k follower account had a head start, but a video that went viral on a 3,000 follower account went viral because the format actually works.

When he finds one, he puts it into Premiere Pro and breaks it down second by second. Hook duration, text positioning, music choice, cut timing. Then he rebuilds his own version on top of that.

This one was my personal favourite.

Ernesto records about 50 reaction clips in one sitting. Then he has 2-3 versions of the app demo. He mixes and matches.

Same reaction, different demo. Same demo, different reaction. Same everything, different text hook.

Plug and play.

He posts 10 of these a day and Instagram doesn't flag it. His last two videos were basically identical and both hit 100k+ views.

4 million views in a single month doing this on his personal Instagram.

I love this tip the most because it's a system. It's reproducible, testable, and you can hand it to someone else to run.

If you're broke and building, Ernesto's advice:

Once money comes in, hire 1-2 people at $10-15 per video with a $100 bonus if they hit 100k views. No upfront risk.

For influencers, he pitches "$1,200 for 1 million views" instead of "$1.2 CPM." This way he only pays if they go viral. Again, no upfront risk.

And now he's replacing human creators with AI-generated UGC, which is pushing his margins from 30% back towards 70%.

An 18-year-old built a “quit gooning” app using an AI influencer.

He never showed his face, but the first video still hit 30 million views.

30 million views that converted to $0 because he had no call to action.

The videos he posted after with clear CTAs made him $10,000.

The takeaway: views for the sake of views are just ego fuel. Views with a CTA are revenue.

Full interview → click to watch

Question for you: is there anyone you want me to bring onto the My First Dollar pod next? Reply and let me know. I’ll do my best to get them to come on and share their sauce.

See you next Tuesday.

You've got this.

- Rob