Stopper

David built the MVP in 3 weeks by directly copying the onboarding structure of a competitor app called Quitter (a quit-adult-content app making $200k/month), replacing the niche with "sugar cravings." He did not reinvent the wheel — he changed the copy, colors, and target audience, then launched with influencer marketing immediately. For the very first users, he reached out cold to ~100 influencers on Instagram and TikTok by searching keywords like "quit sugar," "no sugar," and "stop sugar" in each platform's search bar and For You Page. He DMed and emailed them across all available channels (including Linktree-linked emails), offering $1,000 for 4 videos per month with a guaranteed minimum of 1 million cumulative views. He paid only 20% upfront, with the remainder contingent on hitting the view milestone. From that initial batch of 4 influencers, he got "a few million views" in month one and generated $5,000 in revenue — though profit was only ~20% after paying the influencers.

Built an X/Twitter audience of several thousand followers by publicly calling out app founders who shared revenue screenshots without naming their apps — this gave him credibility and distribution before launching. Also had a 12-year background as a quant (Python/JS scripting), giving him technical self-sufficiency.

tiktok_instagram_influencer_marketing

Affiliate/coupon tracking links were given to influencers but users rarely used them, making attribution unreliable. High churn (70%) meant revenue was entirely dependent on sustaining a constant high volume of influencer-driven views — when views dropped from 30M in September to 2-3M in October, MRR fell significantly from the $13k peak. Organic/non-qualified views did not convert well. David also concluded paid ads (Meta) would likely outperform influencer marketing for sustained revenue but hadn't yet implemented them.