Daniel Heintzma - I speedran a new app from 0 to $2m/year in 6 months (here's how)

“One of my co-founders started like an Instagram account and started posting like these videos. Basically, the concept is like how I cook on Hinge.”

“which I'd recommend doing, is we had like proof of willingness to pay from our audience. And so what we did was in the first couple weeks of posting on Instagram, we asked our followers to DM us for a profile review.”

“The text is like based off of another page that I saw that was doing quite well. I think the TikTok was called TikTok account was called like Men's Improvement, or something like that.”

“So, we like designed the background in Figma, and then we did like an Excel sheet where like it auto-populated all the all the slides. So, it would take like seconds to create each one. And so like only within like an hour or two, you can like batch up a month's worth of content.”

“I actually started off with doing the these like aesthetic carousels where it was like more of like these pictures in the background which were fully unbranded. If you're starting a brand new account, and it's like fully branded, I almost feel like it wouldn't have gone as viral initially.”

“we got this um one influencer. His name was Defund Simping. Um we were working with a few different influencers, but he was one that um we really enjoyed working with.”

“I feel like it's very similar to like a sales funnel where like you clarify like why they're there, explain and label their problem, and then sell the dream result.”

“If you let people upload photos before the paywall, you risk them leaving the app and then not not never coming back again because they would have to go like to their other app and then upload screenshots.”

“we noticed that people were going through this flow like multiple times, more than we had anticipated. And so we added this as a way to like like further monetize the power users.”

“The biggest upsell of this app, actually, is we added these photo packs, which is AI-optimized photos”

“We defaulted the annual plan in order to like collect more revenue upfront to fuel the growth. We also tried out weekly plan, but that's like a lot slower growth, right?”

“a lot of my focus like when I joined the team was focusing on features that would improve retention and get people to stay subscribed through the trial period”

“a groups feature, like a community feed where people can join their friends and then like stay accountable together and log foods together.”

“Another one was like streaks. So, making sure that people would come back on a daily basis to log their meals. Things like from the most retentive apps like Duolingo.”

“We get people like to take pictures and they can upload it to like Instagram their Instagram story and show off like how many how much weight did they lose or how much weight did they gain. And so we get a lot of people like uploading that to social media.”

“With every single video that influencers post, they show three core screens, which is like the the camera, the loading screen, and the food detail page.”

“for Cal AI, it's a calorie tracking app where you're like tracking your your meals, whereas what they're selling as a product themselves is the fitness coaching. And so, it doesn't conflict, right, with our app.”

“paid ads also is when Cal AI took uh had a like a big inflection point is when we started like really ramping up on paid ads.”

“we launched Robinhood Crypto, which like got went really viral when I was there. And that product went from idea to being launched within a matter of a month”