How This 25 Year Old College Kid Built a $500K/Month App Empire
SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Nathan Latka
4.6 • 683 Ratings
🗓️ 15 July 2025
⏱️ 29 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Sid Bendre and his co-founders at Oleve built a $6 million ARR mobile app empire with just 6 people, generating $500,000 monthly revenue and 10-30% profit margins from their education apps Quizzard and Unstuck.
Their first TikTok video exploded to 2.3 million views overnight, converting to 10,000 users instantly, and they've since scaled to 4 million total downloads by running 6-7 A/B tests simultaneously and building AI agents that automatically find app store arbitrage opportunities.
In this episode, Sid reveals their exact "milk the alpha" playbook for building million-dollar apps in any market, including their viral TikTok formula, paywall testing strategies, and how they're using AI agents to replace entire marketing teams.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Sid Bendra and his team at Olive just hit $6 million in revenue with only six people. |
| 0:04.9 | You're about to see exactly how a 25-year-old Stanford student built a mobile app empire generating $500,000 per month. |
| 0:11.5 | Their first TikTok video exploded to 2.3 million views overnight, turning into 10,000 users instantly. |
| 0:17.9 | Now they're pulling 20 to 30 percent profit margins while most startups burn cash. They've cracked |
| 0:22.5 | the code on viral mobile loops, generated 4 million total downloads, and built agentic systems |
| 0:27.2 | that find market arbitrage automatically. You're about to learn the exact paywall strategies, |
| 0:31.9 | viral content formulas, and team structures they use to milk alpha in any market. Plus, you'll |
| 0:37.3 | discover how they're building AI agents to replace entire marketing functions |
| 0:40.6 | and why Sid believes any founder can build a million dollar app in 12 months using their |
| 0:45.3 | playbook. |
| 0:46.0 | Hey, folks, my guest today is Sid Bendre. |
| 0:48.4 | His team is building something really remarkable. |
| 0:50.4 | You can almost think about like a holding company, but didn't start out that way. |
| 0:52.7 | They launched a tool called Quizert, actually back in January of 2023. And Sid was thinking about joining Palantir doing the big thing before another group of hackers said, Sid, you got to come join us. So he joined as a third co-founder. They've just skyrocketed the charts on Apple. It's really a mobile viral loop play here related to the academic space. We're going to jump into how they've built a $6 million revenue company with a very small team |
| 1:14.1 | and all the growth loops, the struggles, the tactics, everything they learn and are learning right now. |
| 1:18.6 | Sid, you ready to take us to the top? |
| 1:20.2 | Ready to jump right in. |
| 1:22.1 | Cool, man. |
| 1:22.9 | Hey, let's not bury the lead. |
| 1:24.3 | This is sort of what hooks everybody. |
| 1:25.6 | Then we'll get into all the fun stuff, the technical stuff. What is revenue today and what's team size? Yeah, revenue today is six |
| 1:31.5 | million ARR. Team size, we recently expanded. So now it's six people. Amazing. Okay. So just to be |
... |
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