Meet The Guy Who Solved Growing Apps (Hunter Isaacson Interview)

Prior to NGI, I had like over 70 million

downloads on other apps that I had built

over the course of the beginning of my

career. And I think that opportunity is

still very much open. At some point,

there will be a very successful crypto

game. I think Vault kind of wanting it

to happen. People want it. It's just no

one's packaged it right. If you were

currently at 10K MR with an app, you

want to really scale and you have, let's

say, like a $10,000 budget, what would

you do? good amount of that money should

be put towards.

Today we're doing a deep dive with one

of the most prolific app builders of all

time. He's built apps like NGL and Bags.

Over the years, these have done insane

numbers. Hundreds of millions of

downloads, 8 figures revenue, all while

staying extremely profitable. This is

none other than Hunter Isacson. I've

seen some people criticize mass virality

for consumer apps. The beauty of NGL is

it's like a really tight viral loop. We

found that a lot of people that churned

out of the product ended up coming back

in. He's done a few other podcasts and

I've watched some of them, but what

makes this one special is we got super

tactical and as actionable as possible.

I asked him to go into the nitty-gritty

details of exactly what strategies he's

using to go viral and make money with

his apps. He showed me all his actual

Figma files of all his app screens. And

towards the end, I asked him pretty deep

questions about how he would use the

same strategies today with the current

trends. Let's get right into it. How's

NGL doing?

>> It's doing great. 3 years later, still

doing great. We have 150 million monthly

active users on the product, which is

way more than I ever expected to be

honest with you. Yeah, it's done very,

very well.

>> That's awesome. What do you think it

takes to be good at viral consumer apps?

Could you think of one thing?

>> I think like knowing how human beings

act when they're put in like a group

scenario, right? Understanding group

think, understanding why people do what

they do. I think that's why I've been

successful in social because I'm really

good at understanding like when a person

looks at a screen, when they look at

anything, what are they going to feel

and then how do those emotions dictate

the the action that we're requesting

them to do.

>> That's awesome. Can you just walk

through the journey of NGL a little bit

for people who don't know yet?

>> Yeah, for sure. We started the company

right when Instagram released the link

feature for everybody. It used to be

that you could only post links if you

had 10,000 followers. So, you know, only

people that were influencers basically

could ever chill anything on their

story. So, they changed this at the end

of October of 2021. And that's literally

right when we started building the app.

Like the second that we saw this, myself

and a few friends of mine, we got a Zoom

call on Halloween and we were like, we

need to build a product for this. What's

the most viral thing we can think of?

And we're like, let's build an anonymous

messaging platform on top of Instagram.

The consumer world is so small. We

thought everyone was going to do this.

We thought this was going to be like the

number one thing people were going to

build. So our focus was like how do we

build this in like as fast as possible.

We built the app in about a month, but

then it was like 6 months of nobody

using it. So it's like our assumption

that everybody saw the opportunity was

like so wrong. No one cloned us until

after we went viral. That 6 months was

very hard. We tried a lot of different

things. You know, we rebranded the app

first just designed wise. Then I changed

the name. I came up with the name NGL.

We got a sick domain ngl.link and we

basically spent money purely on how to

activate the graph. So we were like

testing here and there influencers, you

know, like $100 here, $100 there, paying

someone to post the Instagram story, you

know, Tik Toks, just trying things.

About 4 months into the sixmonth period,

we had that first like tiny little blip,

like very small, and it was from an

influencer who we paid to post the link.

She activated a school on the other side

of the world. Then it spread and

infected, you know, the other schools in

the area, but it didn't expand to

another country. It kind of just stayed

in this graph. So, we realized that the

problem was this was like more of a

lower income country. So, we were like,

well, we got to build Android. So, we

built Android very quickly. This is now

May of 2022. The second we finished

Android, we then did another round of

marketing and it was one Tik Tok that

went viral and then that was it. It

activated everybody and took over the

world over the next week. What was that

Tik Tok? It's a Tik Tok of a girl and

she's like showing one of her NGL

messages. Someone said, "Oh, I was with

your boyfriend last night or your

boyfriend said this about you." And it

was like the girl like, you know, get a

hint on who sent me the message. Right.

So, it was kind of like one of those

really funny like gotcha type Tik Toks

and it blew up. It got like a million

views very quickly.

>> That's crazy. What was the hook of that

video? It sounds kind of similar to

stuff that goes viral today. It was

really like a controversial crazy

message to get from someone, you know.

So, it was like we tried this with a

bunch of different message texts, you

know, just like funny, controversial

stuff, edgy that just would catch your

eye when you were like scrolling TikTok.

And then we always kind of related it

back into the platform of like, oh, you

can get so many messages from people and

yeah, you might be able to like

potentially find out who sent the

message super excited like, oh, I'm

going to download that. And that's what

activated like our first thousand users

in one day was from that Tik Tok. I've

seen some people criticize like mass

virality on Tik Tok like for consumer

apps and they say like even if you get a

bunch of users they'll turn out. So, but

it seems like that wasn't the case for

you guys. How did you like handle the

virality and actually take advantage of

it?

>> The beauty of NGL is it's like a really

tight viral loop. We found that a lot of

people that turned out of the product

ended up coming back in because their

friends would still post NGL links. You

know, in some countries it's like every

teenager, you know, all the 17, 18, 19

year olds, right? all those people that

are in like that that high school

college era, it's their link in bio. If

you turn out, you're going to ultimately

come back in because you're going to see

your friend post their link. Maybe it'll

be in their bio. You'll send them a

message and they'll realize, "Oh, wait.

I kind of want to do this now, too." So,

it had churn for sure, but it also had

this like very high reddownload rate,

which I think is what's allowed it to

continue to be so popular today.

>> That's interesting. Yeah. So, it really

became a habit and part of people's core

day-to-day, but then also you got that

real estate which is the link in bio.

This is consumer social like people are

interacting with each other, but you

guys are also monetized. So, can you

talk about the the revenue side of

things?

>> Yeah, for sure. I mean, the revenue is

done very well. It's a multi-8 figure a

year business. I think the the revenue

is primarily it's just derived through

weekly subscription in different

countries. It's priced differently

depending on the region and depending on

the GDP per capita of that country. So,