Gravl · B2C · AI gym workout app
Post a 'how I built it' thread on Reddit with the technical details
300K impressions, a couple thousand users, and bug reports that proved demand
Workedpr-launchcommunityvalidation
What they did
Posted a Reddit thread on how he built the app (then called Gains AI), sharing the technical specs. The audience was developers who like tech and may find the gym intimidating. The app was free at this point; the flood of bug reports and feature requests was the signal to add a subscription and start ads.
What happened
A couple hundred likes in the first couple of hours, 300,000+ impressions, and 'a couple thousand' first users who actively used it and sent feedback.
- Stage
- launch
- Effort
- One thread
“I'm a massive supporter of, of Reddit as a distribution channel. I posted this thread on how I built Gravl, back in the day, it was called Gains AI, and I shared kind of the technical specs around it. It got over a couple hundred likes within the first couple hours, and over 300,000 impressions.”
“I feel like a lot of them were actually using the app, and then we started getting feedback about like bugs, and feature requests, and we're like, okay, we're onto something.”
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More from this episode
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- Gravl: Start paid ads the day you add a subscription, once people want the appFirst subscriber within 10 minutes; ads are the main channel at ~1/3 of revenue
- Gravl: Translate the app to Spanish and run ads in South America for under $50 a dayWorked from the start and still does; US ads seen as too expensive
- Gravl: Pay creators ~$50 a video and copy what competitors run in Meta's ad library
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- Gravl: Put a hard paywall right after onboarding, before people even sign inFounder says 'a lot' pay before seeing the product; no rate given
- Gravl: Offer 24/7 in-app chat answered by a real person, not AIFounder says they grew a lot with it and users value it; no numbers