Reid Moncada - He went from 0 to $150k by building an ai fashion app (no-code)

Six friends sent the founder a viral TikTok of Max, a student who had built an outfit generator for himself in class. The founder reached out on every platform (LinkedIn, Instagram, a guessed email) before there was a product. Crawl: set up a sub-account ('Fitted by Max') and paid $20 per video for him to post about his fashion; videos got 20-30K views with no product. Walk/run: when Max graduated with nothing lined up and lived in LA, he went all in and got vested equity plus a revenue share (a percentage of all app revenue), which rewards him for going viral more. Equity grows as he puts in more work. Target creator profile: 1K-50K followers, good at getting views, with a real passion that matches the product (Max's favorite thing is getting dressed), before they know their worth; 50-100K-follower creators expect bigger payouts or equity. Max's posts are reposted on the main TikTok account and on Instagram Reels.

Post lots of organic videos; when one hits, put ad dollars behind that same video. The ad does not hard-sell ('download this app'); it is a compelling video that invites people to follow the journey, and downloads trickle in. No platform, budget or targeting details given.

The team is 'chronically online' and splits ideas into two buckets: trending metas, memes and inside jokes to jump on, and evergreen content. Every video needs a split-second hook, then shows the product; the pitch is 'follow along as we build this' rather than 'download this app'. The breakout video was simply 'How to use the Fitted closet', a plain product demo from a creator with an engaged audience. Each video is cross-posted on the creator's TikTok, the main Fitted account and Instagram Reels, and winning formats are repeated (a 136M-view outfit video was followed by a 60M one). Channels are diversified because the algorithm has dry periods.

With $10K raised from a friend, the founder flew the devs and the creator to an apartment in Palm Springs for a week to build the product and make content side by side. When a video hit 2M views on the first day, they added a waitlist.

Product choices are reverse engineered from what hooks people on TikTok. The first viral video ('I made an outfit generator') showed demand, so the outfit generator became the first tool. Now the team teases features and taglines and watches engagement; e.g. a 'stalking my boyfriend's closet' video about a web-only feature hit, so it is coming to mobile in the next update. They also watch whether hints about resale get people asking for it.

The creator co-founder is a 'day-zero' team member who interfaces with the community. His audience comments and DMs what they want, what is bad and which features to add, and the team weighs the roadmap on that. He also sits in design meetings and some product and engineering calls so he has context to promote specific features.

The first product was a web app; it did OK but did not convert and growth stalled. The founder paid $1,400 for a 15-minute call with Nikita Bier, who advised going mobile. The team spent six months building the mobile app, then launched it alongside a video that went mega viral.

The app is currently hard paywalled, which the founder says limits user growth and churn is high. In the next two updates the app becomes entirely free with unlimited uploads, with some features paywalled, to win market share instead of MRR. Then he plans to go all in on partnerships and influencer, celebrity, athlete and brand marketing.

Partnership and integration with Poshmark: from a piece in the Fitted closet, a button lists it on Poshmark. Part of a plan to become an AI resale marketplace.

Scanning every clothing item is the slow part of onboarding. A TaskRabbit partnership (announced the day after recording) enlists its 20-30K taskers to digitize and catalog users' closets; closet organization is already a top-15 task on TaskRabbit but taskers had no tool to put the items in. A joint campaign with influencers and busy people is planned.

Summer collaboration with Paramount: Fitted was the official virtual closet of Clueless, a mid-90s film that featured a virtual closet.

Launched the Fitcoin token on the Believe launchpad (ICM), and built a Twitter community around the app's future. Plan: tie the token into the product so consumers, brands and speculators all bid on it, and sell it behind a normal in-app paywall so users join without noticing. Modeled on Dupe, which lets users earn its token by shopping and redeem it for gift cards, and on Duolingo's gems.

To make building a closet frictionless, the team built a tool that scrapes all of a user's online receipts and adds the items to the closet, and a quick-add where a selfie adds what you are wearing. Also planned: talk-to-your-closet AI tools, weather integrations and widgets for better outfit suggestions.

Around 2020 Breathwrk brought on a core creator who was deeply into breathwork, whose audience overlapped the target market, and gave them meaningful equity and upside. They kept iterating until a content playbook worked, then repeated it.

After the founder had nearly given up on TikTok for the laundry service, an early investor took over the account and posted a simple screen recording of the site explaining what it does.

Built around the 'flex your neck worth' audio/tagline: a planned flow where users quickly share the most expensive pieces in their closet to Instagram or Twitter. The founder's reasoning is that many young people have four to five figures tied up in clothes and want to show it off.