App Store Startups

Swipes was a productivity task management app that achieved significant early success with 500,000+ users and multiple awards, including first place at the Evernote Platform Award. However, after 6 years of operation, the founders failed to achieve sustainable product-market fit or a viable business model, ultimately shutting down in June 2019 due to founder burnout and resource exhaustion.

Playdate was an on-demand social networking app that matched users to meet based on shared activities, growing to 5,000 monthly active users and a 7-person team over 2 years. The startup burned through $30-40k by trying to monetize through venue coupons post-MVP, but failed due to poor user retention from grassroots cannabis giveaways, inability to solve the chicken-and-egg problem for geographically dense matching, and slow organic growth. Logan shut down the company on February 22, 2019, after realizing Playdate had become a zombie company with no viable path to growth or investor interest.

Gulp was a college-launched app designed to let bar-goers pay cover charges digitally instead of using ATMs. Though the founders acquired 2,500 users (25% of the campus bar-going crowd) in one month with creative grassroots marketing, the startup failed due to broken unit economics: they made only $0.52 per cover while spending $1.50 to acquire each user, and lacked alternative monetization beyond a $.99 convenience fee.

Cesar Kuriyama created One Second Every Day, a video journaling app, after taking a year off work inspired by a Stefan Sagmeister TED talk on sabbaticals. He pitched his mockup at a TED audition and gave a main-stage TED talk that went viral (2M+ views), validating the idea before building. He raised $20K through a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign (11,281 backers) and launched the app in January 2013, achieving 50,000 downloads on day one through organic word-of-mouth and the free 24-hour launch window.

Sulamon Ali founded Tiny Co in 2009 to create mobile games for the newly launched iPhone App Store. Their first game, Tap Resort, generated $500-600K in revenue in its first month through a partnership with mobile ad network Tapjoy. After raising $18M from Andreessen Horowitz (with Mark Andreessen joining the board), they scaled to $20M revenue in year one and $40M in year two, but hit a wall when Japanese mobile gaming competitors drove customer acquisition costs from $1 to $9, destroying their unit economics and leading to significant monthly losses.

Yo Shirt is a mobile app enabling users to design and order custom on-demand apparel directly from their iOS device. Founded in 2014 by Ben Williamson (former senior-level Apple engineer), the company raised $1.1M in a priced equity round in early 2015 and reached $3M in revenue by end of 2015, with projections to hit $10M in 2016. Growth was driven primarily through strategic brand partnerships (notably Fallout Boy, which generated over 1,000 units in a single tour activation) and organic marketing including Apple App Store features.

Laundra is a peer-to-peer marketplace for laundry services, launching in early 2020 with $900k in seed funding. Jennifer Meyer joined as CEO in July 2023 and found the company doing $5k/month in revenue from 30 customers after the original founders ran out of funding. The company relies primarily on organic search and word-of-mouth with virtually zero marketing spend, and is now raising $750k at a $3M cap to accelerate growth through paid marketing.