How Lovely grows

While scrolling the couples niche, Jack saw a competitor's video going viral on TikTok showing a lock-screen-style shared drawing. He turned Lovely's existing shared whiteboard into a 'presentation mode' in a day and started posting the next day: 8-10 second videos of him using the app, ending on the app itself, with native-sounding captions ('tag the one', 'may this type of love and care find you'). Went from 2 to 3 posts a day on TikTok, then posted the same videos on Instagram. He didn't analyze why it worked: 'if it's going viral for them, I can make it go viral for me.'

Jack launched Lovely with a simple tweet: what the app does (love notes on your partner's home screen widget), shown in context, plus the goal of taking it from $0 to $5K/month in 10 weeks. He quote-tweeted it about six times with updates and context; each one got more views because it was a story (can he hit the goal?) and a cool product. When Russian news covered the app, he tweeted about that too. When a user posted the widget used as a grocery list (16M views), he quote-tweeted it with 'I made this app, someone's now using it as a grocery list'.

Jack started Lovely's TikTok from an old burner phone on a US VPN, posting one video a day and trying formats found by scrolling the couples niche. One relationship-themed video tied loosely to the app got 150K views on its first day. He kept trying that format and engaged in the comments to lift conversion.

Every morning Jack scrolls TikTok/Instagram on his branded page or a page in the niche (being a real user of the platform), with a 15-minute timer, and uses the save feature on anything doing well, including competitors' posts and videos from unrelated niches whose format could transfer (listicles, a 6-second background video with a caption overlay). He then sets aside 30-60 minutes to make one video from the saved ideas, or a rough 'shitty video' when he has none, trying something new every day early on. For Curiosity Quench he spent about an hour a day on scrolling plus making a video for 100-200 days before finding a winner.

To reinvest Lovely's revenue, Jack is hiring people to post the winning whiteboard format on 20, 30 or 40 accounts instead of one or two, aiming for hundreds of videos a day. He thinks Instagram is the best bet for avoiding detection. He found the helpers through Twitter (people who saw his build-in-public posts) and friends in the same space who use similar posters.

About a week after the viral tweets, with daily downloads slowing, Jack changed Lovely from a hard paywall to freemium because of many bad reviews about the hard paywall and so friends could use it. He admits hard paywalls might make more money but optimizes for enjoying the work. Being freemium is why he doesn't think paid ads make sense yet.