Peter Gillan - My App Makes $600k/Year Using This Easy Growth Strategy (copy me)

“we discovered this one format we call the fade-in. It's about six seconds long, just fades in from black and shows an image.”

“No, I think the key is to do micro-adjustments. But AI makes that very easy to do. You can find one hook and you can just change a couple of words from it. You could change, for example, with this image here, you could change it to light mode background.”

“But they really scaled their revenue just by copying this format. And whereas we had, you know, one, two accounts posting, these guys were ripping like maybe 10 accounts, and quite quickly, I've seen their download volume starting to really ratchet up.”

“But we have always tried to think, "How does this look as a screenshot?" Cuz ultimately, it's those screenshots are what make us money.”

“This is our main account, and it's all just two- to three-slide carousels, which perform really well for us. I think historically this has probably been a lot higher converting than Instagram. In the past year, it's probably worked less well, just cuz you've got so much competition”

“And then we also had this little timeline thing we made in Canva, which was where we as you added up things, you could see like the Easter Island head you've lifted, a Stonehenge slab, different things like that.”

“So, we got a lot of comments about people saying like, "I lifted, you know, I benched-pressed 220 lb for five reps. What is that?" And then we would just stitch that video.”

“Turned out we just had a bug and everyone opening the app was getting hit by a hard paywall and couldn't go to another workout unless they paid.”

“I think the main variable that's changed is how often we show a paywall, and also how hard that paywall is.”

“But we had this real insight that, what if we actually were to quantify how strong people were and enable them to assign some sort of status to their strength?”

“Look for whatever's working, not just within your industry, but in other industries. You know, if there's like a finance tracking app that's taking off, look at their formats and be like, "Okay, how could I actually reformat this, reskin this, and make it more relevant to the workout niche?"”

“We've worked with agencies a little bit before, but I think with agencies the incentives never fully align.”

“We got a lot of grant funding from government agencies back in Northern Ireland.”

“That was one of our competitors that copied the strength score, but they kind of evolved it and went down the full gamification route. It was like League of Legends for the gym, which was such a great insight to see. They just went down one hyperspecific niche and ended up performing brilliantly because of it.”

“I think it's mostly they've grown via their influencers, but they'll do different workout routines for each influencer, and they're all quite professional runners.”

“That's one of the reasons we're working on our new app, because it's an isometric, tile-based game. If you try to get Claude or something like that to do it, right now, it can't.”