Hunter Isaacson - Meet The Guy Who Solved Growing Apps

“Like, the second that we saw this, myself and a few friends of mine, we got on a Zoom call on Halloween and we're like, "We need to build a product for this. What's the most viral thing we can think of?"”

“So, we were like testing here and there, influencers, you know, like $100 here, $100 there, paying someone to post to Instagram Story, you know, TikToks, just trying things.”

“You know, we rebranded the app first, just design-wise, then I changed the name. I came up with the name NGL. We got a sick domain, ngl.link.”

“So, we realized that the problem was this was like more of a lower income country, so we're like, "Well, we got to build Android." So, we built Android very quickly.”

“Someone said, "Oh, I was with your boyfriend last night," or "Your boyfriend said this about you."”

“We found that a lot of people that turned out of the product ended up coming back in, because their friends would still post NGL links.”

“I think the the revenue is primarily, it's just derived through weekly subscription. In different countries, it's priced differently depending on the region and depending on the GDP per capita of that country.”

“And it's way easier to get a download by saying, "Get your own messages," than saying, "Hey, download this app."”

“The home screen, it's a two-step. Copy your link, then share. When you tap share, you're given this screen. These are animated GIFs, and then it tells you, you know, click the sticker button, click the link button, you know, add the link to your story, and then frame the link, right?”

“A big lesson I learned with apps is just how do you make it like one flow, one funnel, and don't overcomplicate it, and just focus on like a North Star metric? In the case of NGL, our North Star metric was like, how many people are posting a link, and then they're posting like at least two replies?”

“And we're like, let's just like embrace the meme. So, we like went on meme pages and posted content and just like funny stuff.”

“But if you have your best friend with you, and you're going to get two guys that come in, and we had like, as you can see, there was like a little group chat, and then a private chat”

“The V1 of this app was actually done over Zoom, which was funny, like sending meeting codes. And then, we built this app very, very quickly.”

“So, we kind of just had the idea, let's build like a really simple way to just like swipe on people, like Tinder, and instead of adding them on the app, it would just add them on Snapchat.”

“It did very well in the early tests that we kind of did for it, but I think the reason it didn't work is because, at the time, influencer pricing was crazy high.”

“This app did very well. It blew up. I think it went close to number one, and it had the same thing, where like you would tap share, tap more, scroll down to Faves, and it would open it.”

“we make a a 1% fee on transactions, and then we pass back the majority of that fee to your friend who invited you to the app, or if you're in a group chat, someone posts a token, you buy it from them, then they'll earn some of that commission, as well.”

“Our spin on it, though, is we do a 1% royalty. Not just earning on the LP transaction, actually earning like on every single trade.”

“We integrate with MoonPay. That's our main provider for this, and they help us on-ramp through Apple Pay.”

“I always like adding social elements. I love adding, you know, invite screens, forcing users to share.”

“This app actually never made it to the App Store, which is funny. It died in TestFlight. It took two and a half years to build this app.”