Andrew

🚨BREAKING: Claude can now see what’s going viral. Every morning, Volume scans 10,000+ posts across 19 niches and tells your agent exactly what content your business should make to go viral and market your product. This is insane.

last month was almost $10k on Trybe alone even had a $3k week in there still figuring out which brands consistently print though what brands have been paying well for you guys lately? 👇

California sober used to mean you smoke weed but don’t drink but now there’s a Bay Area sober where you don’t drink or smoke but you abuse Adderall and Zyns

son, this is genuinely terrifying 😭 this is a golf ai caddie app, prolly making ~$50k mrr they found one format that works and instead of posting it once they’re running it across multiple accounts at the same time the whole thing is ai illustrations, easily made with gpt image 2 golfers are a rich ICP btw, way bigger purchasing power than most niches on tiktok and nobody’s making slideshows for them you’re clearly one format away from $10k mrr

this fitness app has built one of the cleanest organic funnels i’ve seen on tiktok Arrow is a workout + macro tracker but their page barely feels like an app page they post stuff gym people already want to swipe through: -> exercise tier lists -> ranking every gym split -> perfect push / pull days -> muscle growth breakdowns same visual style on every post, same audience, same problem set the page is already at 184k+ followers and 9.3M likes the smart part is the content attracts people trying to improve their training then the app is literally built to help them do exactly that content first, product naturally sitting behind it

We grew from $5M → $20M ARR this year with influencer marketing Our secret? An AI agent sourcing influencers while we sleep Today we're making it available inside Arcads

two of the worst app opening experiences ever

How Arrow got 100k organic downloads in 6 days after launch: We had been posting on TikTok for over a month - getting up about 200+ posts with no traction, and the first sign of life was an 800-view slideshow of my predicted 1 rep maxes. I was bartending at night to pay bills in Fort Lauderdale, and I would go to the bathroom every hour or so to post another slideshow and check our pre-launch waitlist. After that first 800-view slideshow went up, we had 5 people on it when my shift started. By the time I left we had 82 signups. I was fired up. The next day I posted another slideshow ranking how hard certain gym milestones were to hit and included the corresponding in-app achievement - hitting a 225 bench, logging 500 workouts, etc. This was the first post that did well - it hit 150k views, and I watched the waitlist go to 5,200 overnight. Pairing the fitness milestone with the in-app achievement is what made people understand that there was a product behind the concept, leading to the waitlist growth - it was the best high I have ever felt. The list kept growing after that. Right before launch we had over 70,000 people on the email waitlist, and we put 10,000 of them on TestFlight by sending an email with detailed instructions on how to join the pre-launch beta. (This was very difficult/confusing for consumers, Apple should improve this). When we finally launched, the waitlist converted and we kept posting organic TikTok slideshows 2-3 times a day, ultimately hitting 100k downloads in 6 days. We hit about 30 million views in the month of launch. It took us about 8 months to ship the whole thing from start to finish. We had no funding and no previous experience, no AI tools to lean on and we over-scoped the first build because we were learning how to make the product at the same time. Lots of mistakes along the way but through the scrapes and bruises we figured it out.

This app does $100k/month and every screen of its onboarding breaks a different Apple rule. I went through the Prayer Lock onboarding and I get why one article called it a masterclass. It asked me to rate the app TWICE before I’d done anything. The paywall says FREE in giant letters with “no payment now”. The $39.99/yr you’re actually signing up for is the smallest text on the screen. I declined and got an exit offer: $0.76/week, the real charge is nowhere on that screen. And there’s a discount countdown sitting in my dynamic island and on my lock screen as I write this 😭 Every one of these converts, that's exactly the problem. The devs following the rules are the ones losing.

Here's what we know: 1. First decrease in "App Store" revenue in history in the US. (includes games) 2. Non-gaming (apps) is still up 14.6% YoY globally. Gaming down 4.5%. 3. Web share of revenue on RC rose 31% over the last year, from 20% of revenue to 26% of revenue. So app2web is happening We're gonna keep digging, but I think we're seeing a combination of gaming's long running decline, some US specific trends in app2web, and possibly some spend consolidation. It's hard to tell. But I'd hesitate to cherry pick this one data point to fit the "end of apps" narrative. More at 11.

Apple just removed my app from App Store. It brought me $5k a month and was my only income source...

Apple suspended payouts for both of my apps. This is what happened and how we're addressing it: I woke up at 4am extremely hungover to two emails from Apple with the same warning stating that payouts on Arrow and Scratch were paused until further notice for high refunds. Refund rates are fine in our main markets. In some countries the yearly price is just too high - Scratch is $150 a year, and Arrow was $80 a year in some of those territories, so when people get charged they are more likely to request a refund. Scratch is a golf app. Since most of the course data provided by our course API is in the US, we delisted everywhere except the US and Canada. The countries that had the highest refund rates generated little revenue, and the refund rates were a real threat to the account. If the product isn't for sale there, those refunds go to zero. (We also luckily use app2web in the US so we've still been collecting payments despite the payout suspension.) This may look like overkill, but the #1 rule is avoiding death of the business (making sure Apple doesn't terminate the developer accounts) - We can relaunch those geographies later with a more conservative strategy based on our existing data. In Canada we dropped Scratch from $150 a year to $50 a year and built an in-app settings flow so someone can get to their iOS subscription settings directly to lower the refund rates there as well. For Arrow we cut prices by territory using historical refunds and willingness to pay, and we made the price clearer on the paywall. I expect this to be a sufficient solution. Both developer accounts got the same notice at basically the same time. They're different legal entities. The only overlap I can see is my personal Apple ID sitting on both. One hell of a coincidence. We emailed Apple communicating our changes to address their concerns and they got back to us a few days later, saying they'll review the accounts in 30 days and will revisit the account status then. Major thank you to @ereniroh @johnappscaler and @Petertaughtme for helping me with this.