Headway · B2C · book summary app
Grow a simple app purely on paid ads, without outside funding
$200-300M a year, 30% margins, doubling yearly
Workedpaid-social
What they did
Headway (15-minute book summaries) grew on straight performance marketing and paid ads arbitrage while bootstrapped, pushing persistently despite not solving an obviously painful problem.
What happened
$200-300M/year, 30% margins, 2x YoY.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Dan Vykhopen - This app makes $2m/year using this ridiculously easy strategy“But they kind of just kept pushing and figured out paid ads arbitrage to scale to $2-300 million a year”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Massive: Post 'if I built this, would anyone want it?' on LinkedIn before building8M impressions and 5,000 comments from ~500 connections
- Massive: Collect a waitlist with LinkedIn posts like 'top 200 companies hiring now'40-50K sign-ups, but only ~0.5% signed up at launch and almost none paid
- Massive: Post on Hacker News and send heartfelt personal messages to scraped emailsFirst 100-500 paying users; ~$20K MRR after 8 months of grinding
- Massive: Pitch the app as 'Tinder for jobs' instead of describing the AIFounder estimates 2-3x more views and better creator reply rates
- Massive: Check Stripe or RevenueCat after each viral video to see if it soldNow 3-5 viral videos a day and can't tell which ones convert
- Massive: Post comedy skits aimed at college studentsCollege students didn't convert at all; skits miss the problem
- Massive: Open with 'Stop using LinkedIn to apply to jobs', not 'Indeed'LinkedIn hook: ~1M views, high conversion; Indeed: 11M views, only ~$20K MRR
- Massive: Make 80% of videos remakes of formats already going viral; 20% new ideas
- Massive: Relaunch your stalled UGC creator program with fresh energyAn 11M-view video in 4 days, but only ~$20K MRR; program died
- Massive: Scale creator videos from 500K to 3-4M views a weekNo more conversions than at 500K views a week
- Massive: Pay influencers a monthly retainer to post about the appGot views but few conversions; followers weren't job hunting
- Massive: Change your subscription pricing behind a hard paywallRevenue doubled; no details on what changed
- Massive: Use paid ads to learn what converts instead of guessing with organicRevenue up 50% from ads; method not described
- Massive: Copy a proven onboarding from another app and focus on ads instead
- YOGABODY: Run ads that name a very specific pain, like 'run 10+ miles with tight hips?'Converted Dan after 6 ads despite a painful checkout; ads live ~2 years
- Sorce: Film a friend 'discovering' the app, with two faces and a moving cameraGoes viral consistently with one or two formats; widely copied
- Dupe: Have a creator repeat one format for weeks, building on any 6K-view videoSame format went from 382 views to 1.7M; founder says it converts very well
- PrepAI: Recreate real people's job-offer videos with actors; sell in the commentsDan calls it illegal; commenters caught on and videos are being taken down
- Neuro Gum: Sign up ~100,000 TikTok Shop affiliates for a product everyone can useDan guesses nine-figure revenue
- Masterschool: Front your bootcamp with an AI quiz funnel offering 100% scholarshipsRevenue tripled in under a quarter from a $50M/year base
- Minutes AI: Sell the same note-taking app to older users instead of students~3x TurboLearn's revenue on 1/5-1/6 of the downloads