How I marketed my Screen-Time app to $1,000,000 (with a $0 budget)

Over the course of 1 year our app Pushscroll has made over $1M in total iOS and Android proceeds. Our users did 28M Push-Ups in total.

In this article I'm going to explain to you Step by Step how you can start from a $0 budget and scale to $100k MRR just like we did.

Retweet 🔁 this article and Follow so you don't have to search for it again at 3am.

We started with influencers and lost all our money.

The first $5,000 we had saved up for this app, we dumped it all into influencers, thinking that influencers are the best way to grow an app.

When in reality it's very tricky to get it right. You could lose a lot of money right away.

Cal ai made it look easy, but in reality a lot of influencers are going to be duds.
If you're just starting out, I wouldn't recommend starting directly with influencers if you're on a tight budget.

You must be prepared to have an influencer completely flop, which was the case for us.

This was a real blessing in disguise for us tho, because it forced us to make our own organic videos.

Step #1 - The Viral App Idea

If your app idea is not viral yet, this is literally the first thing you should change right now.

Or if you don't have an app yet, make sure it's a viral idea because this will make marketing 10x easier.

I'm probably gonna say this in every article that I post from now because it is literally the most important business decision you will take, because it's so consequential.

Making your idea just even 5% more viral can have a huge impact on your entire business journey, so make sure you nail the virality of your app idea.

Essentially, it boils down to this:

A) Make it Visual 🖼️

Can you explain the value proposition of your app from just one or two visuals?

Cal ai is taking a picture of your food.

UMax was scanning your face and seeing your looksmaxxing stats.

Pushscroll has the push up tracker and app block screen.

The value proposition of the app has to be clear without even reading any text, without any verbal explanation, because that is what you have to expect from brain-rotted TikTok and Instagram users.

Now, that being said, that doesn't mean your app has to be as simple as a rock, right? It just has to click visually, because if you think about it, our brains process images 60,000 times faster than text.

B) Make it Novel 🤩

Another huge factor is the novelty factor, and why I personally don't recommend straight-up copying an app pixel for pixel.

What I would recommend is taking something that works and finding a novel spin on it, where you can get an initial two- or three-month novelty boost from Instagram, which, let me tell you, is extremely helpful.

Our app, when we advertised it in the early days, there was only really one big competitor that did videos about a similar concept, but, to be honest, there weren't any good videos about this idea, so we had a lot of novelty to squeeze out.

Now, today, people who copy our app are not having as big a success as we had starting out, because the novelty factor wore off quite a lot.

Make sure to find a novel spin on on an idea, something where people are going to be like, "I've never seen this before. Let me watch this a bit more."

C) Build it 🔨

The best way to do this is using an AI app builder like @SuperAppIOS (they sponsor this article, but I'd say this anyway).

Remember the novelty window from earlier? It closes fast. If your idea takes 6 months and $15k in dev costs, someone else ships first and eats your novelty boost.

Super App Ai fixes exactly that. You describe your app, it writes actual native Swift code. Not a web wrapper like most no-code tools (those get rejected by Apple constantly). It follows Apple's design guidelines, which is why 90%+ of their apps pass App Store review.

It also wires up your backend (Supabase) and subscriptions (RevenueCat), literally the same stack we run Pushscroll on, and gets you to a TestFlight build in hours.

Two things I like:

You own your code 100%, it's local on your Mac. No lock-in.

Their CTO personally helps builders in their Discord.

Build your idea before someone else does: Build with Super App Ai

Step #2 - Learn the blueprint of virality.

When you watch people on Instagram that go extremely viral with a simple talking head video and you're thinking, "It cannot that hard to go viral," what you're not seeing is the mastery in script writing and delivery that person might have.

When you break it down, you will notice a lot of tricks being used to really squeeze out the watch time and skip rate of the video (which is really the most important 2 parts).

I want you to go follow those people right now (not a sponsored post btw):
- Mino Lee
- Ken Tjandra
- Personalbrandlaunch Ava

Learn everything you can from them, since they're probably the best experts on virality. They will be able to teach you what you'll read here alot better than me.

That's how I started out, actually.

What you'll also learn is how to be good on camera, which is a skill that you need to build. You need to be good on camera, and you need to be comfortable speaking.

When I started out, I was not good on camera, and I can attach a video here so you can see how bad it was lol:

Now compare this to now, alot more energy and engaging:

In general, make sure to bring energy in your videos and not sound bored like I did in my first few videos.

I'll try to summarize the core teachings of the three people I showed above as quickly as I can, but I still recommend you go to their channels and really watch every video and really understand virality like a science.

A) Get a good Hook 🪝

The first step, and you hear this all the time, is just get a good hook. You can see exactly how good your hooks work in the skip rate metric on your videos (how many people skip within the first 3 seconds).

A bad hook has a skip rate of 50+ %, those hooks are usually cooked on purely organic marketing (sometimes they work on paid ads).

A really good hook, has a skip rate of <18%, those will almost always go viral.

And what makes a good hook?

There has to be a curiosity gap: for our videos for example it’s the curiosity of something that could actually stop your doomscrolling addiction, and also the curiosity of the seemingly out of place pushups.

It has to be novel and original, another reason why my videos went viral is because the idea for this app is very new.

perceived trust, it has to appear that the viewer will eventually get what you promise them in the hook.

it needs emotion. I sometimes use the keywords “doomscrolling addiction”, two very powerful words.

clear and concise, make sure the language is grade 5 or lower. and remove any words that are unnecessary.

(Optional) you can also make your hook hyper specific to one persona ("As a broke unemployed 24 year old college student"). IG is really good at finding that specific persona to watch your video.

Bonus points if you can support your hook with clear visually interesting elements. Maybe in my hook I could have been doing Pushups.

If you're starting out, use hooks that already work. Personalbrandlaunch Ava has a really nice list of them. (i.e. find hooks of videos with a minimum of 50k likes.)

B) Increase watch time 👀

This part is just as important as having a great hook. Here's what actually keeps people watching after you've already got them:

Create mini curiosity gaps throughout, not just in the hook. Hint at something you'll explain later ("I'll get to why that mattered in a second") to keep people from swiping.

Save your best point for last. If you're doing a list or steps video, never front-load the best insight. People stay because they sense something better is coming. If your 3rd point is the weakest, viewers feel cheated and drop off before the end (which kills your completion rate).

Speak in past continuous tense when telling stories. "I was driving to the mall when I saw a blurry figure" hits way harder than "I went to the mall and saw something scary." It puts the viewer in the moment instead of summarizing it, since summaries kill watch time.

Use examples, not generalities, and make them hyper-specific. Names, numbers, dates, exact feelings. Vague statements give the brain nothing to hold onto, so it wanders. Specificity forces attention. e.g. "2 months ago, i lost 34 kg"

Match music/sound to the emotional beat of each section, and don't overdo tone shifts. A mismatched song (drums on a somber story) breaks immersion. Realistically your video probably only has one real tonal shift, so don't force multiple music changes just because it's "trendy."

End with a clear, practical takeaway. People are more likely to rewatch (which boosts your algorithmic push) if they walked away with one specific thing to do, not just vague inspiration.

Cut anything that isn't earning its place. Speed = perceived value. If a sentence feels redundant, cut it, since every second you save is a second less someone can bail.

Bonus: B-roll matters more than people think. Even 10 seconds of B-roll in the first 30 seconds gives the eyes something new to look at, which resets attention before the mid-video drop-off zone.

Step #3 - Copy paste adapt

All of the methods above only work when you have a solid baseline to work with, so here's what i recommend: Research any of your competitors and when you see a video with at least 50k Likes, use that hook or format for yourself. NEVER copy a video pixel for pixel, instagram really likes novelty in a proven format.

Here's the detailed method:

Follow ~10 creators or competitors in your niche to start

Search your niche keyword (for us, something like "doomscrolling" or "screen time") and watch videos in full

Note what's going viral and build your content ideas around that

Pay attention to the pain points other creators are hitting, since those are the same pain points your potential users have

Ideally you look up direct competitors that have a similar app to yours, they already might have a few viral videos for you ready to adapt.

Scroll your For You Page and fully watch content in your niche, not your own feed. Your default feed just reflects your own interests, not your customer's.

When you have a video that works for yourself, repeat it until it doesn't work anymore.

Step #4 - How to get views that convert. 💸

Let me start this section with a quick example. Our competitor (I won't mention their name) currently is doing a very attention grabbing format which shows the product in a really rushed way. Here's an example of such a video:

His videos routinely get 1M+ views, his most watched video did 50M views.
But with an average of like 40M views per month his app is barely scraping by, making roughly 6k MRR.

This type of video might makes sense if you want to warm up your account or you really don't care about scaling and just want to get a bunch of views for vanity. But forget about using a video like this for meta ads, this just doesn't work (trust me, we tried ALOT).

You could argue this video is great for UGC, but honestly i'm not bullish on reactions type UGC at all, TikTok is already banning ugc accounts left and right, spamming fast content (reactions and rushed demos without any substance) just ain't it anymore. it's slowly dying out.

The problem is, views != high intent users, and when you're doing videos you should never only look at the views your video makes as the primary metric, but look at a blend of comments, shares etc, and if you're just starting out, look at revenue/user spikes if you can clearly see them.

The only important metric you should be looking at, is: "How much money did my video make from new subs"? not: "How many views did my video get?".

But how do you actually get a high converting format?

It's simple: don't rely on text only videos, actually talk and put in effort into your videos, clearly presenting the value proposition of your product within the first 10 (ideally 7) seconds of your video. Use high retention editing, pattern interrupts (switching up the rhythm or emotional tone of your video) and solid storytelling. Here's the perfect example of a video that converted like crazy:

This video gave him 200k+ users from 8M views.

Here's a video that did really good for us, 200k new users from that video aswell.

BONUS - Engagement Hacking

One method that also really helped us was to use Manychat, a tool that allows you to send automated DM's as soon as someone comments on a IG video. (Manychat plz sponsor me)

Here's why this was an insane hack:

1. People see other people commenting "App" and want to join in. One of my videos got 200k comments all commenting "App" that's essentially 200k installs from that one video.

Commenting like this increases social proof, you might even get an influencer or two commenting aswell

3. Instagram sees a ton of comments and pushes your video further, giving you more views, almost like a turbo.