My App Made $120K in 24 Hours

Decided the long-term vision and the minimum feature set needed to convince people to buy lifetime access (the 'minimum launchable product'), then planned the launch around the build timeline. Recorded a YouTube video walking through every feature in the app as it was, stating the current limitations and what would be built next. Offer: buy lifetime now with absolutely no refunds; anyone who wants to try first waits a couple of months for subscription plans. Buyers' feedback then shaped many features built in the following months.

Three lifetime tiers instead of one low price: ~$109 for a limited feature set, ~$199 with more features, $349 for everything planned (the full vision). The two cheaper tiers act as a reference that helps sell the most expensive one and capture skeptical buyers. Warns against pricing low out of fear the product isn't ready.

Pre-launch ran about 1 month and 1 week to the PlayPauseBe customer list. Email 1: storytelling, reveal nothing, create interest. Email 2: more story, reveal a bit, show the physical product pushed to the back with something new in front so readers can't tell if it's another physical product. Next: unveil what was 'behind the red curtain', show the app, explain briefly why, and link to a video of Umberto presenting it. Toward launch: explain how the limited lifetime deals work. Never reveal the price before launch day so people judge features and vision, not price. Built the content buffer (emails, graphics, videos, landing page, ad creatives) before any promotion. The most representative emails were later published as blog posts.

Lifetime deals were limited both in number of spots and in time window; recommends 5-7 days maximum so people decide instead of procrastinating.

Created a Telegram group with all the early lifetime-deal adopters. Because they paid up front, they report bugs and send detailed feedback rather than churning; many features in the following months were based on it.

Before building, talk to 5-10 people in the target market about the problem without telling them why you're asking, to get unbiased reactions (per The Mom Test). Floga did this with some of PlayPauseBe's physical-product customers.

Alongside the email warm-up to the existing list, ran lead generation (ad creatives, landing page) to reach people who had never heard of the brand, then warmed them up for a few weeks. No platform, spend or results given.

PlayPauseBe launched its first product, a deck of yoga cards for building sequences, on Kickstarter. No campaign details given. The experience taught Umberto how to launch and later carried over to Floga's lifetime-deal pre-sale.

Starter Story repeatedly runs email sequences and lifetime-deal offers at set times of year such as Black Friday and year-end. Pat argues frequent deal emails are standard marketing and people can unsubscribe.