Runify · B2C · ranked running app
Put your app up for pre-order so thousands download it on launch day
3,000 pre-orders in ~2 weeks; leaderboard hit its 1,000 cap in an hour
Workedpr-launchaso
What they did
First goal after design was getting a two-tab, no-onboarding V1 approved by Apple so the app could be listed as a pre-order while it was still being built and marketed. Pre-orders auto-download at release and Apple emails users that the app is live. Kept the listing up ~2 weeks. Pitfall: pre-orders require a release date; he pushed it back every 2-3 days, forgot once, and the buggy build auto-released to ~1,000 users, so he had to revert to pre-order.
What happened
3,000 downloads the moment it launched; the leaderboard filled to its 1,000-user cap within an hour, solving the empty-social-app problem. One accidental early release drew ~20 complaint emails.
- Stage
- launch
In their words
The Superwall Podcast · Caleb Dean - I speedran an ai app from 0 to $100k exit in 26 days“So we had like a two-tab, no onboarding, like the bare bones of what a running app would have to be to be approved to then actually get on the App Store, and that allowed us to put our app as pre-order.”
“I think we only had the pre-order up for couple- maybe 2 weeks, but through that we had 3k downloads, and it also meant we had 3k downloads the second we hit launch”
“I was pushing it back like every 2 or 3 days, and I just completely forgot.”
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