The case at a glance
- Total downloads: 100+/day, two weeks post-launch
- ChatGPT-referred downloads: 50+/day
- Ad spend: $0
- Time from strengthening his comparison pages to 100+/day: "a few days," by his own account
- Platforms live: 1 (iOS), with Android and more localizations in progress
- Revenue, pricing tiers, paywall conversion rate: not disclosed
He didn't invent demand. He hunted for it with AppMagic, looking for apps climbing fast, then read reviews and Reddit threads to find out whether users resented the winner. Strong demand plus an annoying leader is the whole thesis. The app is Circle, an iOS AI social media simulator: you post as you would on a real network, AI characters follow you, comment, argue with each other, DM you, and remember you over time. Freemium, paywall and tiers still being tested. Stack is PostHog for the onboarding funnel and paywall views, App Store Connect for download sources, his own site for the comparison pages, and ChatGPT temporary chats as a test instrument.
What he's actually selling: answer engine optimization, not App Store SEO
The product isn't the app. The product is the answer to one question: "I'm fed up with X, what else is there?" Input a complaint, output an honest comparison. That page shipped in days with no backend and no infrastructure. The app is downstream of it.
Two things make the mechanism work.
A page titled "alternative to X" inherits X's entire marketing budget. Every dollar the leader spends creating awareness creates a searcher with a complaint, and the complaint has a predictable shape. He writes plainly about what the leader does well, where it frustrates people, and how his app compares. Honesty isn't a virtue signal here. It's what makes the page quotable by a machine that has to stand behind its answer.
The second is language. Most indies launch English-only and fight in the most crowded room on earth. He treats each locale as a separate funnel with researched keywords rather than translated ones, because people in different countries don't phrase the complaint the same way. He localized the screenshot text too, and says that moved the needle. An English-only page can only ever be cited in an English answer.
He didn't build an audience. He intercepted one mid-complaint.