ReadHim

Is he playing you? Know for sure. (6M+ views, $1100 MRR)

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The Vision— Aiming for the Buzziest Launch Award

It was September 1st, halfway through the RevenueCat Shipaton. My co-founder Joseph and I had just discovered the hackathon, and we had less than 1 month to ideate, build, and grow our app. Furthermore, we had never launched anything to the App Store before. However, we were committed and focused towards building something worthy of success in the RevenueCat Shipaton.

So we decided to focus our efforts on ONE SINGULAR mission: to definitively win the Buzziest Launch Award. We agreed to do whatever it takes to aggressively, strategically, and creatively market our app to blow up our user base as fast as possible. Thus we began ideating.

We knew to achieve our goal, we needed an app that:

  • Solved a real problem that other apps weren't solving
  • Had the potential to go viral very fast
  • Offered a lot of value yet was simple and straightforward
  • Was marketable and had the potential to explode on social media

After intense brainstorming, we came up with the idea of ReadHim.

What is ReadHim

ReadHim is an app for women to vet out guys they are speaking to romantically. Joseph and I are both in our early twenties, and we have heard SO many times from our female colleagues and friends as to how they had to deal with a manipulative guy on Hinge, a toxic partner, or a guy with commitment issues, etc.

ReadHim offers a simple solution to this problem. Women can upload screenshots of their text conversations with guys they are speaking to romantically, and the app uses optical character recognition plus a fine-tuned GPT-OSS-120B endpoint to evaluate any red flags, manipulation patterns, and the romantic intention of the guy (what does he want from her). Then, in the texting style of the girl, the app offers recommendations as to what to text him in order to get what SHE wants out of him (relationship, friend zone, etc.).

The app is simple, but solves a real problem. It filters out the emotions, and gives women a clear, evidence backed verdict offering them clarity in regard to the intention, maturity, and quality of the guy they are talking to. Additionally, the report is shareable via iMessage, and the mildly controversial and meme-able nature of the app makes it prime for explosive growth and virality on social media.

Development and the role of RevenueCat

After ideation, we started wireframed the app in Figma on September 2nd, which took us a couple days. We then started coding out the front-end with SwiftUI and developed a Vercel API endpoint for our OCR and AI analysis pipeline.

RevenueCat made it an absolute breeze to authenticate users who were subscribed to our app or had an active free trial, and made it super easy to set up our paywall. We were concerned that setting up the paywall, payments, and entitlements with Apple JWTs would be time-consuming and complicated, but RevenueCat allowed us to set all of this up in just a few hours. What an incredible time saver!

We ended up testing and optimizing our app, and finally submitting it to review on September 9th. Due to our inexperience with publishing iOS apps, along with some misunderstandings by Apple, we had to go back and forth with them like 5 times before they finally approved our app the night of September 18th (note: we also launched a UI/AI model update to the app on September 24th based on initial user feedback to further improve the user experience and output quality). But now the real challenge began. We only had about 10 days to blow up our app!

Explosive Growth via Social Media Marketing

Joseph is a TikTok marketing savant (this is Jay writing this). At just 20 years old, he bought a McLaren due to how well he has been able to make content go viral on social media. He's had brands pay him fantastic commissions to scale their products and get sales.

Our strategy with social media marketing was to leverage Joseph's social media know-how to blow up our ReadHim Instagram meme page through relatable apps for women, and then use this as a funnel to our app, with a special discount code. Our Instagram page amassed over 5.2 MILLION views in the 1 month that we were live in the competition, and resulted in numerous app downloads.

Additionally, we partnered with a prominent TikTok influencer (Trinity Blair, 2.3M followers on TikTok) to grow our app. Trinity was in the dating advice for young women niche, which we felt was a perfect fit for our app. This deal with Trinity got us over HALF A MILLION views across TikTok and over a thousand downloads.

All together, our social media marketing campaign gathered us over 6 million organic views in the 1 month that we were marketing ReadHim. This is exactly the kind of attention we needed to drive users and increase MRR.

Creative Marketing Stunts

We supplemented our aggressive social media growth strategy with one of the most insane creative marketing stunts Devpost and the RevenueCat Shipaton have ever seen.

We contacted our buddy who owns a nightclub downtown, and asked to partner with her to promote our app on a weekend night when there was tons of foot traffic. We had our supercar buddies pull up to the event, and place ReadHim banner posters we had printed out on their windshields. We got a robot dog to dance in front of the supercars and greet passer-byes to captivate their attention to the app, and have them sign up for a free trial. This stunt had a ton of success, and resulted in tons of downloads and many successful conversions to paid subscribers.

Results

The results of our campaign speak for themselves. In just 10 days, our app went from zero to:

  • $1100 in Monthly Recurring Revenue, and amassed a couple hundred free trials.
  • 6 Million Organic Views across Instagram and TikTok

And this is just the beginning. If this is what we could do in 10 days, imagine what we could do in a few months... or even a year... or if the judges decided we were worthy of winning the Buzziest Launch Award and our app was on the New York Times billboard 😉. The potential is really high.

A Huge Thank You to RevenueCat, the Sponsors, and the Judges

Thank you so much for taking the time to check out our submission. A ton of hard work, strategy, and dedication was put into building out ReadHim. We are grateful for this opportunity, and are excited to see how we will continue to grow our app.

We hope you enjoyed our submission, and kindly ask that you consider us for the Buzziest Launch Award. We certainly think we have a solid shot! Please feel free to check out ReadHim on the App Store and send us your feedback! Thanks for everything.

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