Invite dozens of REDnote followers to beta test for a month before launch

Pat Walls… super cool because hopefully there's a lot of product designers on here watching this right now that maybe two, three, five years ago weren't able to build things because they weren't technical. But you, because of AI coding, you were able to take your really great design skills and now actually build stuff. So let's talk about this. Can you give me the timeline of how long it took to build this and exactly how you built it, what tools you used?

RyanI started around May 2025. It actually took a while for us to get the first version up and running. So after a few weeks, we finally got a simple Pomodoro timer done. Then we started fleshing out the concept and the mechanics, like how to show the cat animations. By August, we finally had the first version ready. We invited dozens of people on REDnote to beta test it. We spent about a month gathering feedback, fixing bugs, iterating on it. The app launched August 27th. We had about 3,000 downloads in the first week, but it wasn't really a smooth sailing. There were so many bugs, even after a month of testing. Some of the bugs were pretty serious, like data not syncing between devices. It wasn't until around December or January that we had a relatively stable version. During that time, we had a few small viral moments on REDnote, but the app truly took off when some Instagram influencers started sharing app collection posts featuring us, and one of them exploded and hitting over 2 million views. Uh from there, someone in Taiwan saw it, shared our app on Threads, where it went viral all over again. That chain of events essentially doubled our downloads and revenue overnight.

Pat WallsThat's super cool. And as I understand it, this is mainly for Chinese and Taiwanese markets. Is that where most of your users come from?