Bootstrapping a Movie Recommendation App (with Kyle Cords)

Welcome to the Frugalpreneur podcast. I am your host, Sarah St. John.

This episode is what I refer to as a showcase episode where I feature a bootstrapped entrepreneur, and they briefly share their tips, tricks, tactics, techniques, and tools that help them bootstrap their business and the successes and failures along the way.

My hope is that each of these showcase episodes will provide at least one valuable takeaway that you can implement right away in your own bootstrap business journey. Now, onto the episode.

Hi, my name is Kyle Cords, and I am the founder of Omlist, which is hopefully the last movie recommendation app you'll ever need.

And a bit about me and my history of how I got to this point is I actually came up as a TV writer in Hollywood for the past decade, and then when Covid hit, I saw how fragile the ecosystem was and I wanted to start my own businesses.

And I'd always dreamed of making a movie recommendation app that was decentralized, because most of movie recommendations as they are now are just mass aggregators of average rating Systems. So essentially 400 people like this 5 out of 5 stars or 4 out of 5 stars. But that doesn't really custom make things for you.

So I wanted to create an app that was more about catering to who you are rather than trying to make you average.

So what the app does is that you swipe on it, you like or dislike things, and then it creates a unique profile for you and eventually generates a list. And the more you interact with the app, the more evolved your profile becomes and the more accurate the recommendations get for you.

And so I wanted to create something that was more about how do we have people that taste similar to us, basically helping us find the things that we love that we haven't seen yet. Because I just see how much time is wasted on how people find things on a daily basis. I saw it for a very long time. I did it myself.

And so I think it was so important to me to try to create something that saved people time, because the average person spends a half an hour on Netflix every day when they're trying to find something new. And if you do that every day for your whole year, that eventually is a whole week of your waking life. So I wanted to give people that time back.

The first step that I took to bootstrap my business was actually research everything else that I thought could be similar. And sometimes there was apps or ideas that I had that I found, and I was like, oh, this is great, I don't have to make this.

But when it came To Omlist's memory recommendation applied. I knew that nobody else was doing what I wanted to do and so. And I thought I could create unique experience for people.

So how did I bootstrap my business? First off, I saved a lot of money from my previous gigs in Hollywood.

I've always saved a lot and I knew it was like a moment to really invest in myself and so that was what I did. And I tried to do it on the leanest budget possible just to keep spend low.

But the first thing I needed to do was find a designer and then I had to find a developer and those are really hard as a non technical person. So I read a lot of business books, I read a lot of blogs.

Like Paul Graham's blog from YC was really incredible and it was super important to me to try to like own my mistakes. And I think so many people go out and raise VC money and it makes it other people's mistakes.

But I just like really wanted to build something from zero to one with my own means and so I did that. And I think you can do it too.

You just have to be really focused and like a laser and not spend too much time just in product building because actually marketing is a huge part of it. And so yeah, so your distribution system is everything.

And just finding your first initial customers as quickly as possible will help you in the long run. So my biggest, I'll go with my biggest failure first because I think it informed my biggest success.

So my biggest failure was actually trying to do it all as a no code solution. And what is no code? No code is basically dragging and dropping features into your app.

But at a certain point I couldn't fix the bugs that were in the app because it was with that specific no code tools services. And so I had to completely restart from scratch in like months of time was lost and thousands of dollars.

And it was really heartbreaking, but it just showed me that some shortcuts actually are just off the edge of a cliff and then you have to kind of pick yourself back up for it.

So if you're going to create an app, you need to just start with coding first and finding a developer or learning how to do it yourself because then you can scale that.

And my big, my biggest success with Omlist, the movie recommendation app, is that I actually launched it just this past month and I'm getting active users coming back to the app and I'm getting about five to 10 new users a day, which is incredible as a me marketing everything myself and getting it on the App Store. You wouldn't believe how many hurdles there are.

I have a YouTube series that goes through all the steps that it takes to bootstrap an app@kyleofcords.com kylecords.com or kylefcords at YouTube. And it goes through all of those steps that make it so difficult.

And most of my friends that are coders have never launched an app, even though they have a bunch of projects that they've worked on, but they've all talked themselves out of finishing it because it is so difficult.

There are so many things from just the legal paperwork that you need to the bugs that you need to fix, and then putting it out there and maintaining it is its own experience. And so I think a lot of people don't realize that anything on the App Store is kind of a miracle.

So my best tips or tricks for bootstrapping your app is obviously don't be financially stressed. You need to be able to have a certain amount of savings to try this.

So the best time to start your business is actually when you have and are working for another business. So the stress is not going to help you.

It will just make the product worse and it might make you push on things that violate what your inherent idea for your product is.

And so I think the best tips and tricks is to like stay healthy, stay balanced and just stay in the race as long as you can because it's a long road and you need to pace yourself and take care of yourself. So I think getting as much sleep as you can is the best performance enhancing drug out there. That's at least what my partner tells me all the time.

So I try to listen to her whenever I can and that's what my advice is. And specifically for apps and bootstrapping your business, I think reading about what other people have done is actually super useful.

And there's a ton of products out there and or books that you can in YouTube videos.

Just search and see if you can find find things that help accelerate your process because research will save you so much time and errors that you'll fall in yourself. If you're going to defy what somebody says, you should be at least acknowledging of what they've said.

And so I think that that's something that I've really learned is just researching as much as possible. And the books that I've loved the most are Essentialism, the Mountain is you and Good to Great. So I think that that is really important.

There's so much time in our lives that are just like sucked up into decision making. And that's what I'm trying to solve with Omlist is can I get you something that you love quicker and faster than anybody else?

And it's been a really crazy road just bootstrapping this myself. But having it on the App Store, having you be able to hear this is such an achievement and I feel so proud of it.

And if you're on your own bootstrapping journey, just know that it's unique for everybody, but we're all in it together.

And so if you are wanting to reach out to my website KyleCords.com or look me up on YouTube or any of the socials, I'm happy to share what I thought or just engaged so you can find me there and just keep at it. Honestly, it's. It's such a rewarding journey and sometimes it can feel really dark, but you just gotta get to the other side.

So just stay with it and you're not alone. Check out Omlist and we should be rolling out more features soon. And thanks for listening and taking the time.

I hope you enjoyed that episode and were able to take away a valuable nugget of information that you can implement right away in your own business. If you feel your story would be valuable for the listeners of this show, please visit Free Frugal Show Guest.