Jack Friks - He Went From Struggling to Make $1 From His App to Turning Down $1M

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.

Jack found an Instagram post with ~1M views: four pictures with a funny caption listing 'most attractive hobbies'. He remade it with hobbies from his app, using pictures of the app's widgets so viewers could tell where they came from, and a new caption. He posted it ~400 times over about a year across two accounts and reposts to TikTok and Shorts. Roughly every 20th video had the app itself in one of the pictures. He posted a download CTA as a comment and pinned it early, because thousands of commenters argued about the hobby lists and in the process saw the pinned comment. He never changed the format because making something new takes more effort than reusing what works.

Before finding the slideshow format, Jack marketed Curiosity Quench for months on YouTube and with talking-head TikToks, including ~400 days of him showing an app demo.

Curiosity Quench originally sold confusing 'Quench credits' in a shop that users had to find themselves. Jack first added a RevenueCat paywall, which he found clunky and hard to customize, then moved to Superwall templates (adding his logo, colors and one asset) with a free-trial option. Over 3-4 months he tested headers, copy and which features to gate, looking at dollars per user.

Posting daily to two accounts and reposting to TikTok and YouTube Shorts took about an hour a day. Jack built PostBridge, a scheduler where you upload a video once and pick every channel, and batched content for a week or two at a time (or scheduled on the day).

Doof was built as a public challenge: make a mobile app in 30 days and take it from $0 to $1,000, marketed on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. After a week of trying new formats with nothing popping, Jack went back to his tried-and-true slideshow format with a food meme ('people who eat like this feel good, sleep good, and poop good') and the app only mentioned in the caption ('feel good today by downloading Doof'). Goal: content that doesn't look like an ad. Used a standard Superwall paywall template.

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'.

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.

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.

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.'

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.