The Superwall Podcast · 2026-01-27
Jack Friks - He Went From Struggling to Make $1 From His App to Turning Down $1M
Solo founder Jack Friks on four products. Curiosity Quench peaked at $15K in a month after he copied a viral 4-picture 'hobbies' slideshow and posted it ~400 times; a Superwall template paywall with a free trial lifted it from $500-1K to $2-4K/month. PostBridge, his scheduler, reached ~$20K MRR and drew a declined $1M offer from Gumroad's Sahil. Doof hit $1K in 30 days. Lovely (couples love-note widget) got 100K downloads in ~10 weeks from viral build-in-public tweets and a copied app-demo video format.
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Numbers mentioned
| Subject | Metric | Value | Quote |
|---|---|---|---|
| Curiosity Quench | users Users in the first two months | 1,000 users approximate | “And then it kind of blew up in the first two months. I got like a thousand users.” |
| Curiosity Quench | revenue Current revenue, not worked on for a year | USD 500–1,000/month estimate | “And now it makes like, I think, $500 to $1,000 a month. Like, I haven't worked on it in a year” |
| Curiosity Quench | time to milestone Time to get the app to actually make money | 8 months approximate | “but it really took like probably me like eight months really get that off the ground to actually like make money and realize that downloads don't equal money.” |
| Curiosity Quench | revenue Peak month, around September-October 2024 | USD 15K/month approximate | “At its peak, it made $15,000 in 1 month, and that was because of quite a few viral simple videos I made related to it” |
| Curiosity Quench | activity volume Times the same hobbies slideshow format was posted, over about a year | 400 videos approximate | “I made that video like 400 times, but the first like 100 times I made it, um, I knew- I noticed it got like a ton of views.” |
| Curiosity Quench | views Total views from the repeated hobbies slideshow format | 5M views approximate | “You know, 5 million views later, you still get a lot of downloads, even though it's not directly about the app, because it's so many views.” |
| Curiosity Quench | views One hobbies slideshow that included an app screenshot; 47,000 likes (September 2024) | 1.8M viewsper video | “You got 1.8 million views and 47,000 likes, and you also included the, uh, screenshot of the app.” |
| Curiosity Quench | downloads Baseline daily downloads during the first ~8 months (YouTube, talking-head TikToks) | 50–60 downloads/day approximate | “compared to my like 8 months of like, I don't know, 50 downloads a day, 60 downloads a day, and hitting 1,000 downloads a day from these like videos” |
| Curiosity Quench | downloads Single day after a hobbies slideshow hit 2M views | 1,000 downloads/day approximate | “Like, I was just thinking, "Oh, my gosh, you know, this hit 2 million views, and I got like 1,000 downloads in a single day."” |
| Curiosity Quench | revenue For ~5 months with the credits shop / poor paywall | USD 500–1,000/month estimate | “was like kind of my light bulb moment for making money with this app after like 5 months of, I think, $500 to $1,000 with my poor paywall” |
| Curiosity Quench | revenue After switching to a Superwall template paywall with a free trial | USD 2,000–4,000/month approximate | “and then after that, it kind of started going up to like, you know, $2,000 to $3,000, $2,000 to $4,000 a month.” |
| Curiosity Quench | time to milestone Time to make and post a day's video with PostBridge scheduling, vs about an hour posting manually | 10 minutes approximate | “Then it would only take me 10 minutes to make it and post it versus if I posted it manually.” |
| PostBridge | offer value Public acquisition offer from Sahil (Gumroad), declined | USD 1M/one-time approximate | “But Sahil from Gumroad kind of casually offered like a million dollars, saying he'd buy PostBridge for a million dollars.” |
| PostBridge | revenue At the time of the $1M offer | USD 12K/month estimate | “Not sure if that was the best decision considering it was only making, I think, like 12,000 a month at the time” |
| PostBridge | growth rate Month-over-month growth around the time of the offer; has since slowed | 30–40%/month approximate | “It's been growing It was growing like 30, 40% over a month.” |
| PostBridge | mrr Current MRR per host | USD 20K/month approximate | “Yeah. Yeah, it looks like it's still making around 20k MRR, so you're getting the cash flow.” |
| Doof | revenue Revenue in the first 30 days (challenge goal met) | USD 1,000/month approximate | “And then, yeah, I mean, I got to like $1,000 in revenue, I think, in the first month.” |
| Doof | views One meme slideshow in the reused format ('people who eat like this feel good...'), app only in the caption | 5M viewsper video approximate | “Like some one of them hit 5 million views on the left there, and like it kind of blew up, and that got like a bunch of downloads for that month” |
| Lovely | mrr Public launch goal: $0 to $5K/month in 10 weeks | USD 5,000/month goal | “I think 10 weeks I wanted to bring it from $0 to $5,000 a month.” |
| Lovely | downloads Downloads from Russia the day after launch, after Russian news covered the launch tweet | 10K downloads/day approximate | “And like 10,000 people the next day after I launched it downloaded the app from Russia, which was kind of insane to begin with.” |
| Lovely | views A user's X post showing the love-note widget used as a grocery list; 32,000 likes | 16M viewsper post approximate | “Uh, they replaced the love note with a grocery list. Um, and then that got like 16 million views, um, 32,000 likes, and it's basically pointing people directly to my app.” |
| Lovely | downloads Overnight downloads after Jack's quote tweet of the grocery-list post (300,000 likes) | 40K downloads/day approximate | “Like, I made this app, someone's now using it as a grocery list, uh, and that got even, you know, 300,000 likes. That brought 40,000 downloads overnight.” |
| Lovely | mrr MRR added by the viral tweets and Russian news, before any TikTok | +USD 2,000–3,000/month estimate | “That added, I think, 2,000 MRR or 3,000 MRR just from that like the Twitter tweets and the Russian news.” |
| Lovely | views Second TikTok, a relationship-themed video without the app; brought ~100-200 downloads | 150K viewsper video approximate | “my second one I posted hit like 150,000 views at the time the day I posted it.” |
| Lovely | downloads From the 150K-view relationship TikTok | 100–200 downloads estimate | “but this probably brought, I think, like 100, 200 downloads, so this is one of these formats that is not a piece of gold” |
| Lovely | views Fifth TikTok in the shared-whiteboard app-demo format | 490K viewsper video approximate | “that think the fifth video really blew up, 490,000 views” |
| Lovely | views First Instagram Reel in the whiteboard format; several later ones reached 1M+ | 300K viewsper video approximate | “And as you can see here, the first one I posted had like 300,000 views, and a bunch of them hit like, um, you know, a few million, a million, a million.” |
| Lovely | conversion rate Views -> downloads for the 8-10s app-demo videos, relative to the 2x2 slideshow format | +20 x estimate | “So, this obviously converted like 20 times better than the 2x2 slide shows, and this is kind of where I've iterated to at this point.” |
| Lovely | users ~100K total downloads in ~10 weeks, from viral tweets plus the app-demo format | 102K users approximate | “Yeah, so 102,000 users, 10,000 proceeds, and I think the MRR is about 4,200” |
| Lovely | revenue App Store proceeds since launch (~10 weeks) | USD 10K approximate | “Yeah, so 102,000 users, 10,000 proceeds, and I think the MRR is about 4,200” |
| Lovely | mrr ~10 weeks after launch; goal was $5K | USD 4,200/month approximate | “Yeah, so 102,000 users, 10,000 proceeds, and I think the MRR is about 4,200” |
| Lovely | marketing spend Paid so far to people setting up accounts to post the winning format at volume | USD 1,000 approximate | “I've already paid like, I think, 1,000 bucks is like what I've paid so far reinvested, and then the accounts are getting like set up now.” |