Police Scanner App Fortune
Share
A story about how Alan Wong went from humble beginnings to building a $100M+ fortune through creating police scanner apps.
"Alan Wong posted on Reddit in 2013 saying he was a person in his twenties who went from rags to riches during the recession. His parents were raised in the slums of China and fled to New York. His mother worked in a sweatshop in Chinatown before becoming a homemaker, and his father was a herbalist who passed away unnaturally 3 months after Alan graduated college.
After his father's passing, no one in his family had a job. He found a full-time job at Columbia University and was the only one with income. He taught himself how to create apps in his free time and created apps on weekends, hoping to make some side income. He didn't expect it to make him millions.
His most popular app was called '5-0 Radio Police Scanner' which lets you listen to police chatter around the world. He ended up having three apps in the top 100 of the App Store - 5-0 Radio, Police Scanner+, and another one. He was the only person in App Store history to have three apps in the top 10 overall in paid and free categories at the same time.
According to his verified flair on Reddit's fatFIRE community, he now has over $100 million liquid and did it all through 2-3 of these apps with almost no employees over about 8-10 years."
Sam Parr
Host of MFM and fitness influencer
Sam Parr is a serial entrepreneur and business media pioneer.
In 2016, he founded The Hustle, a business news media company that started in his kitchen with just $12 and grew to eight figures in revenue.
Sam led the charge in making newsletters popular when few believed in their potential.
After four successful years, he sold The Hustle to HubSpot, a publicly traded company. Now operating as HubSpot Media, The Hustle reaches 3 million readers daily, employs a team of nearly 100, and has been the launchpad for dozens of its staff to found their own media companies and newsletters.
Sam remains the host of the popular business podcast, My First Million, and continues to start and sell companies. He also co-founded Hampton, a highly vetted community for entrepreneurs, founders, and CEOs, and teaches people to write better through his platform, Copy That.