u/LatterBat6140

I built an app that essentially lets you bet on yourself on sticking to habit using tokens which you can get stuff like gym memberships, water bottles, studying essentials etc. with. I built the MVP sometime last year just to test the concept and invited some of my friends to test it.

It’s been going well, we’re just upgrading now to an actual version after I heard this story.

I wake up to a text from my friend saying my app made him walk home from a night out. When I asked how? He explained he was drunk out of his mind and checked his and said he needed to hit 10k steps, he was 2k off at this point. He checked uber prices - £25 to get home to which he said no to 🤣. He then decided to walk 2 hours back home just so he didn’t lose his tokens and remained at the top of the leaderboard with his friends in the group (which he did).

I love this story, it shows the concept works and really propels me to create the app properly and keep upgrading it and release it to the public.

Has anyone had a similar, compelling story when building their app?

p.s. I told him to never walk back alone at that time again. Im glad it’s something we can now laugh at

I built an app that essentially lets you bet on yourself on sticking to habit using tokens which you can get stuff like gym memberships, water bottles, studying essentials etc. with. I built the MVP sometime last year just to test the concept and invited some of my friends to test it.

It’s been going well, we’re just upgrading now to an actual version after I heard this story.

I wake up to a text from my friend saying my app made him walk home from a night out. When I asked how? He explained he was drunk out of his mind and checked his Winnabit group that he said he needed to hit 10k steps, he was 2k off at this point. He checked uber prices - £25 to get home to which he said no to 🤣. He then decided to walk 2 hours back home just so he didn’t lose his tokens and remained at the top of the leaderboard with his friends in the group (which he did).

I love this story, it shows the concept works and really propels me to create the app properly and keep upgrading it and release it to the public. DM me for the waitlist link.

Has anyone had a similar, compelling story when building their app?

p.s. I told him to never walk back alone at that time again. Im glad it’s something we can now laugh at

I built an app that essentially lets you bet on yourself on sticking to habit using tokens which you can get stuff like gym memberships, water bottles, studying essentials etc. with. I built the MVP sometime last year just to test the concept and invited some of my friends to test it.

It’s been going well, we’re just upgrading now to an actual version after I heard this story.

I wake up to a text from my friend saying my app made him walk home from a night out. When I asked how? He explained he was drunk out of his mind and checked his Winnabit group that he said he needed to hit 10k steps, he was 2k off at this point. He checked uber prices - £25 to get home to which he said no to 🤣. He then decided to walk 2 hours back home just so he didn’t lose his tokens and remained at the top of the leaderboard with his friends in the group (which he did).

I love this story, it shows the concept works and really propels me to create the app properly and keep upgrading it and release it to the public. DM me for the waitlist link.

Has anyone had a similar, compelling story when building their app?

p.s. I told him to never walk back alone at that time again. Im glad it’s something we can now laugh at

I’m a full-time engineer building an app on the side, and right now I’m trying to grow a waitlist for it.

About a week ago, I started posting on Instagram and TikTok to get signups… and honestly, the learning curve has been way steeper than I expected.

Before I started, I had this naive thought like, “I’ll just post consistently and the account will grow over time.” Which isn’t what happened AT ALL.

I even bought a course on short-form content creation to try and speed things up, but applying it in practice has been harder than I thought.

My first TikTok completely flopped. I made the mistake of going with an educational-style video right out of the gate. People always joke about getting stuck at 200 views. Mine got 117 😬

After that, I switched things up and started filming more real-life content of me actually talking about the app, thinking that putting a face to it might help. It did (a little). One of those videos got around 4.2k views (after I promoted it).

For context, I used to make YouTube gaming videos years ago, so I’m not totally new to recording and editing. But that was 5–7 years ago, and short-form content today feels like a completely different game.

At this point, I feel like I’m experimenting blindly a bit. For those of you who’ve managed to grow accounts or build waitlists through short-form content, what actually moved the needle for you early on? Was it consistency, hooks, trends, storytelling… or something else entirely? Any advice (or hard truths) would be really appreciated.