91: Focus Friend - Bria Sullivan

Bria Sullivan:

Spoiler alert, Focus Friend hit number one on the app store. I have about 200,000 download to 2 million. I've learned that the smartness and the reason why someone is successful in an Indie journey is not whether they're a good engineer or not. I think the reason that someone will be successful is their instinct for product and their instinct for marketing. Trying to get an engineer to figure out marketing, they're like, "No, I don't have to." I'm like, "No, you do."

Charlie Chapman:

Welcome to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman, and today I'm excited to bring you the co-creator behind the delightful Focus Timer app, Focus Friend, Bria Sullivan. Bria, welcome to the show.

Bria Sullivan:

Hi. So excited to be here.

Charlie Chapman:

So before we get into your backstory, I always like to give you a chance to do a really quick elevator pitch for the app. We'll focus mostly on Focus Friend, just so that people know where we're headed. What is Focus Friend?

Bria Sullivan:

So Focus Friend is a Focus timer that you can set a specific time and then you have a little bean character that focuses with you. And if you finish that timer that you set, then you get an award and you can decorate a house for your little Bean character. And it's an app I created with a YouTuber named Hank Green.

Charlie Chapman:

But first, I want to give everyone an introduction into who you are. So the three questions I always ask to kick off this conversation is, where are you from? Do you have a formal education related to what you're doing? And then we can talk about what your career was like leading up to your Indie development.

Bria Sullivan:

I am from about an hour outside of LA. Los Angeles, California. I've lived in a lot of places and now I'm back to where I'm from because I have a family now and I need lots of family help.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes.

Bria Sullivan:

And yes.

Charlie Chapman:

Makes a big difference.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. Yes, it does. And I do have a formal education in computer science specifically, but I've been making apps since 2010. I taught myself my freshman year of college. I chose computer engineering as a degree, but I didn't really know what it was. I was just like, let me just choose something. And I didn't know that programming is how you make apps. And the iPhone, I think they were on the 3GS at the time and there was a ton of different Android phones being launched. And I taught myself phone development specifically.

Charlie Chapman:

And that was native, like you were building with what, Objective-C or Java? What was the platform of choice at that time?

Bria Sullivan:

Android first, because that was the phone that I could afford at that time. And then as I really started to get into app development, that's when I got a Mac and then got an iPhone and taught myself iOS development.

Charlie Chapman:

And did you jump right into building apps and releasing them on the store and starting a business right away?

Bria Sullivan:

I was 18 when the first app came out.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. So how did that go? Were you just instantly rolling in cash and you live in a mansion in LA somewhere in the hills?

Bria Sullivan:

I wish. That was definitely the pipe dream that I had because there were a lot of people at my school that were doing that or that had known people that were doing that. There were a lot of people making apps and living off them, and that was something that I really wanted to do. But my first app was literally just a calculator type of thing. And then the second one was a little bit more successful. And again, I was an 18-year-old girl. And if anyone knows anything about 18-year-old girls, this is probably true now. We were really, really into Zodiac signs at that time. I made a Zodiac compatibility app for dating, and it was just a little app and it did well, but I had no idea how to monetize it. So again, I was not making any money, but downloads were good.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah.

Bria Sullivan:

Downloads were good.

Charlie Chapman:

I guess it was free then. It wasn't paid upfront or anything, because those were the only options.

Bria Sullivan:

Correct. Yeah, it was free.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you keep pursuing this as an Indie thing or did you go into the typical career path and get an engineering job or something like that?

Bria Sullivan:

I was Indie and I had that full intention of being Indie. When I graduated, I almost even dropped out of school because I went to school in California and I was super into the... Let's see, it was 2010 to 2014, so just startups were so fun at that time.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. You wanted to start a company out of your garage. Typical California.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. Yeah. And I went to school about a three-hour drive from San Francisco. I had driven up to San Francisco a few times and I had wanted to do that, but I had a family event happen where it just my entire career trajectory changed. I had done the internships at Microsoft and I was planning on starting a startup once I graduated, but just family stuff happened that I was like, "I can't emotionally handle starting a company anymore." And so I got a job at Microsoft and that was just, I had an offer and I was like, "This is all I can handle. I can't interview anymore." The Indie's been the intention ever since I learned how to code. So it's been a long time coming for it to reach here.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So you went traditional career route. Did you keep building apps on the side? Were you just always tinkering?

Bria Sullivan:

I kept going with the Zodiac stuff because there was another app called CoStar that had come out, a lot of different Zodiac compatibility apps. So I still kept doing that. I made a wedding registry one for a bit, but I was doing it by myself and I had been burned by someone I had worked with before, so I was just doing it on my own. And then, so from Microsoft, I went to Google as an engineer, and then I learned that you can't make apps at Google specifically without them owning it.

Charlie Chapman:

Same with Apple.

Bria Sullivan:

Same with Apple, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Because they own the store and it's a conflict of interest, I guess.

Bria Sullivan:

So I had at least written down, because when you start, you had to write down anything that you had already started working on.

Charlie Chapman:

Prior inventions.

Bria Sullivan:

So I wrote down all of the things that I had just a little prototype of. And luckily, I feel like I was covered at least. So I'm like, okay, at least if I want to work on any of these things, I should be fine.

Charlie Chapman:

That's cool. So then how did you get back into the game?

Bria Sullivan:

In 2019, around 2019, I was doing another entrepreneurship thing, helping people without formal educations get jobs at places like Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn, or just jobs in general. It was a passion of mine. I was also consulting for people's startups and helping them hire engineers and things like that. It was really fun. It was really fun working with startups.

Charlie Chapman:

I'm really curious because that's the thing that I get a lot of questions about and I don't know as well. What is, in a quick way, what do you recommend for people who are wanting to get into tech that don't have a formal education background?

Bria Sullivan:

I'm not going to lie. It was really hard. That's part of the answer of why I stopped. It was so emotionally draining for me to be working with people every day and working super hard to try and help them get there. And it was just a lot of emotional wait for them to keep getting rejections. And I'm like, I have a lot of empathy and to the point where their rejections felt like my own rejections and it was a lot. And so that's part of why I went back to Indie.

I'm like, I think that Indie might be a better route for people without formal educations. I had the itch. I was at Google and I was working with startups and I'm like, I want to get back into feeling how good it felt to be Indie again and make a product. And then for all of these people, I felt like I was also selling them a pipe dream too, of being at a place like I was working at. And I'm like, "I'm going to leave and I'm going to see if I can match my tech salary with an Indie app."

Charlie Chapman:

I am curious what you think now that it's been a number of years, do you think that the Indie route is a maybe more viable path for somebody trying to learn? Because the reason I asked that question at the beginning, do you have a formal education related to what you do is in part because it's maybe 50% of people I talk to on here that have had successful Indie apps don't have an education at least related to tech. So to me, I feel like the answer might be yes, but you obviously work with more of those people. So I'm curious what you think.

Bria Sullivan:

I think it's like a yes with a caveat. I've learned that the smartness and the reason why someone is successful in an Indie journey is not whether they're a good engineer or not.

Charlie Chapman:

That is very true. Yes, that's a good point.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. I think the reason that someone will be successful is their instinct for product and their instinct for marketing and their ability to do that hard thing that they really don't want to do. I have found that marketing is something, trying to get an engineer to figure out marketing, they're like, "No, I don't have to." I'm like, "No, you do."

Charlie Chapman:

And maybe that's actually why such a high percentage of people I talk to here don't have that formal education because I think there is this alchemy of different backgrounds that are required for this to work, as well as a very, very heavy dose of luck. That is definitely a major factor.

Bria Sullivan:

I think luck matters for some things. I think someone could get to a 50 to 120K in yearly income. I think that they can do that without that much luck, personally.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I guess that's true. I think in a lot of the stories, luck is a big factor, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a framework that you can follow.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, there's a little bit of a formula.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. Okay. So I appreciate the diversion because that is a topic that I find very interesting. But getting back to it, so you decided you wanted to get back in the game, the Indie game, and so you did. So you left the corporate job or did you do a feathering out where you worked on side stuff? I guess you couldn't if you were at Google.

Bria Sullivan:

I left, but it was all of the things in the universe happened at the right time for me to leave. I was already planning on leaving and then a pandemic happened. That helped. I was already planning on really downscaling my life. I had built up these savings. I moved in with my grandparents. A lot changed, but the universe and the whole year matched up with what I needed anyway because I'm like, "Well, there's nothing to spend money on anyway because I'm just staying at my grandma's house." Yeah. So I left in 2020 and I had not done game development before. So I wanted to get into iOS again and apps again, but I just didn't have an idea. And the only idea I had was in games. So I'm like, "Let's learn how to make games, I guess."

Charlie Chapman:

So that was your first step into this was let's build a game. You use Unity, is that correct?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes. Well, actually at first I built the app, or I had built an app in Flutter.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, in Flutter. Okay.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So I built it in Flutter and there wasn't a game engine for Flutter at that time. I wrote my own game engine.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, goodness. Okay.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, don't do that.

Charlie Chapman:

And what was the game?

Bria Sullivan:

That game was an idle clicker. It was like a little idle clicker game if you're familiar with Cookie Clicker or anything.

Charlie Chapman:

So a paper clip, you keep hitting buttons and then you got to gain the ability to make more faster-

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

That was really popular for a while.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So I did that, but I did a spin. I wanted to make a game about boba, like bubble tea.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. This is a through line through your career, I feel like. We'll get more into boba.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So I knew I wanted that Boba specifically to be the thing that makes people, that would be the subject of what I'm making. And then in the pandemic, the only lines I saw outside, even in April of 2020, were at boba shops, not anywhere else except for boba shops. So I'm like, okay, maybe this is a good decision.

Charlie Chapman:

So the game was what, you're running a boba tea shop basically?

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. And during that time, I was also learning marketing because that had been my weak spot at that time. I did a Udemy course and I think Udemy is where... There's Udacity, there's so many. But I remember it at least taught me the basics of marketing, and then that's when I started doing my own marketing on TikTok. And that's where I think as a marketing person and a product person, I feel like that's where things really, really started to change for me.

Charlie Chapman:

So you took, it was just one of those Udemy courses or something like that. It was on UGC marketing or what specifically was it about?

Bria Sullivan:

No, it was a general marketing course, just learning the basics of marketing, how to craft a marketing message. So at that time, it was still talking about different platforms that didn't exist anymore, but the concepts were still things that I could take away from. So I only finished, I want to say the first 20% of it, but I felt like I got what I needed from it understandably.

Charlie Chapman:

But you felt like it was a valuable platform to build on.

Bria Sullivan:

So that's what helped me get to... I'm like, okay, where do my customers... I know I want to reach people who are around this age group, like this type of archetype. I had a couple cousins in that age range. I called them and asked them, "Hey, what platforms do you use the most?" And they all said TikTok at that time. And so I started, that's when I learned how to become a TikTok creator.

Charlie Chapman:

So you had a game, by that point you had gotten to the point where either, was it released already by then? Okay, so you were working on a game and you started crafting a message, or at least in your head crafting a message. Did you start pre-marketing before you released it, or what's the order of operations there?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes, I started pre-marketing it, but I already had an idea of what I was building for that app. I started marketing it in around November, and then I launched it in February. So I was marketing it and getting pre-orders and all of that up until February. The app did okay. It made an income. It made an income and it was okay, but I realized it wasn't the app that these people were looking for. And so instead I started building a product.

Charlie Chapman:

When you say marketing, pre-marketing, was that these were TikTok videos showing off the app? Is that what it was?

Bria Sullivan:

And then when the app actually came out, it wasn't exactly what people were looking for. And so it did all right, but that's when I was like, I'm going to reverse what I'm going to do for the next app, because the app wasn't working to where I'm like, this is probably not worth working on. But I still had this audience that I was building. I was still posting on TikTok. And so I'm like, let me reverse it and now I know exactly what people are looking for. Let me make something based on what they're looking for and what they like.

Charlie Chapman:

That audience was... This is a personal account. The audience was following you as a person. So when you talked about the journey, it was the journey of building the app was part of this, not just like you're marketing the game as if you're a company or something like that.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. I was doing it like, "Hey, this is something that I'm making, follow along." type of thing.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. You're building an audience, which actually, this is interesting because we're going to get to building an app with an influencer and how that all plays in. But this is what you were doing, but building yourself up as an influencer from the beginning then.

Bria Sullivan:

It's interesting because I find that some people that do this end up starting to become an influencer instead of more focused on their product and that's just something that happens, but it is a good strategy and I wasn't the first one doing it. There were a lot of other game developers doing it too at that time. And TikTok 2020 and 2021, TikTok was a very fun and very easy time to get followers and get clicks and downloads.

Charlie Chapman:

So you said that this first game wasn't working necessarily, but you had an audience. Where did you go from there?

Bria Sullivan:

I started interviewing. I think that's one of the secret sauces of what even with Focus Friend's success now is just really getting to know someone and the person that you're making this for. At first, it was my friends and my family members and even myself, but it's really getting to know the person. And so I made another boba app, but it was based on what... It was a lot of iterating on what people liked and the look of what they liked. The look matters so much.

Charlie Chapman:

And how are you interviewing people? Was this calls out on TikTok followers or is this you had something in the app for people to reach out? Or how did you find people to interview?

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, TikTok followers and I would live stream on TikTok a lot. And this is before I had a kid, so this is when I had time to do stuff. Yeah. So I would just be live-streaming for hours and just ask people stuff. And then I would just ask a question and people would just be sitting there and I would draw something out and be like, "Is this what you're talking about? Okay, what about this?" I would share my screen and I would ask them, "Is this more of the vibe that you all like or is this more of the vibe that you all like?"

Charlie Chapman:

It wasn't like you were interviewing them about features or what problems are... Obviously not what problems you're trying to solve because it's a game, but it was almost like a brand marketing sessions that a big company would do, but you have the audience right there and you could in real time tweak and feel out. And I imagine from the influencer side, you're also, that audience feels like part of them is in the app now?

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So this is as you're building your second app that you're doing a lot of this. And then what was the second app? Was it also like a click style game or was it a different thing altogether?

Bria Sullivan:

This one was way more interactive. So it was still a run a boba shop type game, so it's called Boba Story. If you want to make a game ever, play games that you like and take things that you like from those things. So I based the functionality on that and I had done a spin on it and some other games that I had loved from the 90s and early 2000s. So I took elements from all those things, put it into this app and it's way more of a create your own bubble tea drink. And that was the thing that people cared about the most when I would be posting about TikToks. They would be caring about what ingredients... They're like, let me have the craziest looking boba drink. That's all people cared about. So all they cared about was, how do I make the craziest looking drink?

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. So you honed the game in more towards that than I imagine?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes.

Charlie Chapman:

You said you're running a shop, but what's the gameplay mechanic?

Bria Sullivan:

Just decorating and expanding the shop, basically unlocking more stuff. There was an inflection point. So TikTok only got me to a specific time. Once I added the really crazy ingredients, like dog boba and cat boba, it's literally like each boba pearl is a cat or a heart or star or something. That's when things really exploded because I put that behind a, you have to unlock it with a combination. I didn't do this intentionally, but now I know and I tell people, any other builder, I guess the way I had designed that screen was very easy to share and that super... First, it was a secret. There was no, "Hey, you can figure out, you can buy hints or whatever. You can't figure this out unless you work with other people." And it exploded on TikTok, on YouTube, on Instagram overnight.

Charlie Chapman:

Is this other people sharing their screen recordings or screenshots, I guess, of their crazy creations?

Bria Sullivan:

So TikTok itself, so that app launched in October and then from October to February, I'd been posting TikToks and it was doing good. I think I had around 200,000 downloads by that point. This is still amazing.

Charlie Chapman:

And just the monetization for this, is it in app purchases or is it a one-time payment thing? How was it making money?

Bria Sullivan:

Just rewarded ads. So no banners or anything like that. It's like, "Hey, if you watch an ad, then you get to exchange it for currency." So they'd watch a good 30. So that was it. From then I had about 200,000 downloads, but once I added that feature, it exploded. I went from, I think, 200,000 to 2 million in the next month.

Charlie Chapman:

And because it's ads that scales pretty linearly, or at least active users scales linearly to your monetization actually.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. Okay.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. I think it's a very strong part of my journey and I don't know if it's a good thing or not, is getting too ethical about monetization. It's something that I think might hold me back in some ways, but I specifically chose a way that you only have to watch an ad if you choose to. You can play the entire game without having to watch an ad. So I had people that were completely unmonetized and I did that from a moral perspective. Is that a good thing? I don't know. And that goes into a focus friend as well because we chose that route and we can talk about that later.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. I feel like there's, for one, the nice thing about being independent, whether it's just you or you're not beholden to shareholders or whatever, is that you can make these decisions. It's okay to just have a business that makes less money than it optimally could, but you feel better about it. I also think there's a bit where certain growth strategies work better by having that kind of attitude. Fortnite famously is like, there's no pay to play. That's the best way to really super monetize something, but it allowed things to grow faster because it was more appealing to people.

I think in your case, if one of the major growth levers was this social loop of the more people use it, the more your organic marketing grows and it's like a flywheel almost, then having it be something that more people can use, even if they're not giving you any money, they're actually potentially still contributing to the business because they're sharing it out. Obviously, who knows if that's actually true or not, but I think there's a bit where that's actually potentially even the better business move. But even if it's not, I don't think it matters. It's like if you're able to sustain yourself and you're comfortable with that, you don't have to make the most money possible by extracting everything you possibly can out of everybody.

Bria Sullivan:

It's true. However, it's hard to stay there when there are other apps that make more than us, for example, or are able to do those things. And it's hard to not change, move the goalpost for yourself. I had a goalpost of what I wanted to be at a year ago and two years ago, and I hit that and I'm past those things and I'm still not satisfied. This is a philosophical thing, but yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

No, I think this is really funny, actually. This is a running theme with the show. When I started this show in 2020, so right in your timeframe here, I felt like a big part of what we talked about a lot was it's okay to make money because in the Indie sphere, it was very like doing a subscription or utilizing a hard paywall or doing AB testing even was often really frowned upon as everything should just be about making it the best experience possible. But then we watched all these big well-known Indie apps fall down because they couldn't sustain their companies anymore. And so I felt like there was this narrative of like, it's okay to make money. There's a balance that you can have.

And then it feels like in the last few years in particular, that needle has just swung way hard to the other side where I feel like now I'm constantly preaching. It's okay to not make all of the money, you're allowed to do this, but it is hard. I imagine you run in similar circles as me where you see these people making enormous amounts of money doing small differences to what I'm comfortable doing. And I'm like, "Well, maybe I should just do this or just do that." And the tooling makes it easier and easier to do. And so yeah, it's definitely a weird balancing act.

Bria Sullivan:

It's hard when being on social media is something that is really helpful for being able to stay in the know on things and to make sure that your product is also up-to-date in what people are expecting, but you can't drown out the other voices. It's hard not to see other people reaching things. I'm like, "I think I could do that. I think I could do that too." But it makes it 10 times harder when I've made these very strict moral lines and they're very strict with Focus Friend. And so there's a potential where we have reached the peak of where we're at, hopefully not, but it's something that I think about every day right now.

Charlie Chapman:

Let's get into Focus Friend then.

Bria Sullivan:

Sure.

Charlie Chapman:

So I think that's the next one on your list after Boba Story. So you have this successful app that's running. Boba Story is still out today?

Bria Sullivan:

It's still running. I built that one in Unity, so I did not have to write the engine on that one.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, there's enough letter where you built your own engine. Yeah, exactly. So then what led to Focus Friend? What's the story there?

Bria Sullivan:

Like I mentioned, with TikTok and building my audience and seeing that it was a way for me to monetize, I was like, this is also a way to monetize an audience. So my partner is also a YouTuber and I love the creator space. If you've ever met any other YouTubers or full-time creators, he's in the science space, so they're the best people. They're so awesome. Those specific creators are the best people. I learned a lot about how they have to monetize and monetizing is very difficult. YouTube after TikTok, it's hard for them to support themselves monetarily now. It's not the 2016 people are getting $100,000 deals like they were before. And monetizing an audience, I learned with making Boba Story that this is a way that someone can monetize an audience. I was like an app. There were times that I didn't work for four months on end and I still had an income. My income did not change.

Charlie Chapman:

It's very much the passive income. Obviously there's a ton of work leading to that, but it is flexible in a unique way.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. And so I got really interested in it being a way for a YouTuber to monetize their audience. So it was something I was very passionate about and I had talked to my partner about it and I was thinking maybe one of his friends would be interested. And my partner also taught on a... Hank Green has a channel called Crash Course. He had taught machine learning on one of those channels many years ago. And I was like, oh my gosh, someone like Hank Green would be the most ideal partner to work with, but maybe one day I'll be able to work with him. I was like, "But maybe one of your other friends."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that seems like shooting for the moon.

Bria Sullivan:

Shooting for the moon, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Anybody who doesn't know Hank Green is, he's arguably in the top five at least of well-known science YouTubers probably. Is that accurate?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes.

Charlie Chapman:

In my world, at least that seems to be the case.

Bria Sullivan:

I would say so. And a lot of college students and anyone who has gone to college in the past five to 10 years has probably heard of him, or at least if they went to school for something science related.

Charlie Chapman:

Exactly. It's hard to avoid ending up on one of his explainers just because they're so good.

Bria Sullivan:

And they have a lot of free education channels. So he was someone that I was like, I really would one day that's a dream person to work with, but I thought maybe one of his other, one of my partner's other creator friends would be interested, someone with maybe a million subscribers. I would love to see if this experiment of monetizing an audience, if this is something that can sustain a YouTuber. Yeah. So that's why I was interested in it. And it just so happened that I just landed from a family vacation in Japan and I saw that Hank was about to be in town and I was like, "Jobrille, can you please see if..." I was like, "Hank is performing his standup special 15 minutes from our house. Can you please just see if he'd be interested in hanging out? I just want to meet him."

I wasn't going to pitch him and I didn't pitch him. I just wanted to meet him because I was such a huge fan of his. Him and his brother were the reason I even started being interested in watching YouTube in general. For fun, I would watch their education channels. And he's like, "Okay, I'll ask." And so Hank asked us to dinner and we're just chatting. Hank's super nice. My partner starts bragging about Boba Story. And I guess I had said something in that dinner about creators having apps or games or something. And that was it. And I had met a hero and afterward, I don't know if you are an anxious person like me, but I just afterward I was like, oh my God, this is the worst thing ever. I just met a hero. I was like, I just met a hero and I'm just analyzing every small thing that I had said to him.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah. Did I ruin it? Is this person-

Bria Sullivan:

Oh my God, was that stupid? Yeah. Does he think I'm stupid? Does he-

Charlie Chapman:

I wish they would forget everything about me. I've definitely been there.

Bria Sullivan:

I was like, I feel very observed right now. But anyway, a week later he sends me a message on TikTok and he said that he had not been able to stop thinking about something that I had said at dinner. And he messaged me on TikTok and reached out and asked for a meeting. And out of that meeting, basically came Focus Friend.

Charlie Chapman:

You can correct me if I'm wrong, but what I've gathered just from listening to lots of his content over the years, he's also pretty both savvy and enjoys the business side of being an influencer and creator. He doesn't shy away from trying different ideas and things like that. So that also feels like something that would fit in.

Bria Sullivan:

I thought he would be way more just wacky science guy, but he is way more business savvy than I had expected.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that tracks. Okay. So you're interested. So I guess it literally starts with the premise is, "Hey, I can build apps and have all this experience with monetizing on the App Store. You have a big brand." And also, did you already have ideas to pitch or was it like, let's just brainstorm and see what's something that his audience would be interested in?

Bria Sullivan:

Well, it was a no from his perspective actually from the beginning. Yeah, it was a no, but we were supposed to actually make something for one of his other channels, but the meeting was ending and I just said, as the meeting was ending, I just said, "What about a focus timer, like a crash course focus timer?" And that's when he was like, "Oh, interesting. Let me think about that. That sounds very interesting." And then the call ended and then-

Charlie Chapman:

Oh my gosh, that's so cinematic.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, I know.

Charlie Chapman:

You threw your Hail Mary and then the call ends and you don't know how it's going to... Oh my goodness. Okay.

Bria Sullivan:

Then he texted me an hour later like, "I love this idea. Oh my gosh, I love it." And then we just kept talking about what the idea could be. And so I just got to work on coming up with a concept. I drew stuff and he pitched it to his team and they were not interested. He was still very excited about the idea though. And so that's why it became a Hank Green app and not-

Charlie Chapman:

That was my next question is it's not branded as a crash course or any of his other ventures. It is just, here's this app, a Hank Green production or By Hank Green. I forgot how it's in the title.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, By Hank Green.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. Yeah. So that's why that's the case is it literally is him. It's his own thing with you as opposed to part of one of his other ventures.

Bria Sullivan:

It was going to be part of one of his companies, but no, it just became a... They didn't really understand why it would be a good idea. So then we ended up, it was like, okay, well, we're friends. We're friends now, so let's just keep doing it. We're excited about it. And I just kept working on it. And that's when I started interviewing his audience instead of a crash course audience.

Charlie Chapman:

You said you did interviews. What was the central thesis that was exciting to both of you? And then how was that shaped to what it became through all these interviews and the development cycle?

Bria Sullivan:

It was going to be way more gamey at first. There was going to be a lot more rarity and it was way more game than it was app. And as I started interviewing people, it became way more app than game because we're in that middle space [inaudible 00:35:02].

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly.

Bria Sullivan:

Where it's like a gamified app.

Charlie Chapman:

And what pushed you in that direction? I know you said interviews, but was it people specifically saying they don't want it to be a game or why did it push that way?

Bria Sullivan:

It was the way that people were interacting with the app. It just wasn't making a lot of sense. I think when it comes to someone with ADHD in particular, I think just making things very, very, very simple to understand. We had all these rarity matrixes and all of these things, and so we switched it to being like, you just earn a number of currency based on the number of minutes that you did, and that's it.

Charlie Chapman:

Which makes sense for something designed to help people focus. You don't necessarily want to be drawing them into this massive spreadsheet. You mentioned ADHD. Was that part of the initial premise as well, is that it was targeted at that audience?

Bria Sullivan:

No, it was just for Hank's audience. Spoiler alert, Focus Friend hit number one on the app store.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes.

Bria Sullivan:

So I just did it before I... So because it makes sense for the story to make this story make a little bit more sense, but we had no idea. We were just trying to do a Hank's core, core, core fans will like this app. That was the only thing we were really going for. It just so happened that Hank's core, core, core fans also have ADHD.

Charlie Chapman:

You discovered that through the interviews or Hank just knowing his audience and that organically came up?

Bria Sullivan:

It came up way, way later. So it was just interviewing his audience and he didn't even announce like, "Hey, fill out this survey." He just put it in a description in one of his Vlogbrothers videos and it was just a Google form that says, "Do you use Focus Timers?" I just interviewed all of those people and then just really got to know those people. I worked very hard on what the interview would look like and what questions I would ask, what I really needed to know about these people. And then so there was 1/2 of the interview, and then the other half was more about look, feel, what the bean should look like. So pairing those two things together, I got to know the person and then I was like, okay, almost all of these people are gravitating towards this color palette. When it comes to female audiences too, and anything gamified, the look and feel matters so much for organic reach.

Charlie Chapman:

I think it matters for productivity apps too. It's just people don't naturally pay as much attention. Certainly I'm just as guilty of that. And I think you're right in terms of it's not just for you using it, but also the how attractive is it in an ad format whenever people are seeing screenshots or screen captures or whatever.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. It's like what's going to make someone convert and the way something looks is a huge reason why people convert.

Charlie Chapman:

You said people are gravitating towards this. Are you showing multiple options and saying, is it like going to the eye doctor and they're like, A or B? And you're just honing in?

Bria Sullivan:

I showed six different art styles, six different beans and six different color palettes, something like that. And then I just said choose one and then they all go-

Charlie Chapman:

Is that a skill you just grew over time working on your other apps or had you done that professionally or had education that led you towards doing this kind of market research? Because that feels like very professional market research that most Indies I've talked to have definitely, I've never heard of anybody doing it to this level.

Bria Sullivan:

I think it's something that happened over TikTok as I was doing it on live streams. As I was asking people, it just seemed easier to, I would just show, okay, which one do you like? Which one do you like? I'm just going to show them all six at once.

Charlie Chapman:

And it organically systemized. This is one of those, I just love these kinds of stories. I don't know. There's a Steve Jobs quote. I can't remember how, I think it's him, maybe it's him quoting somebody else, but it's like the whole, when you look at the past, it's easy to draw a line through everything, but in the future it's squiggly or whatever. But I love these like, you can follow somebody's story and be like, this weird thing you did here, even if it didn't seem like it mattered, which it did, but you're just slowly accumulating these skills that become really important for things you do later in your life. I just love that kind of stuff.

Bria Sullivan:

The compound interest of skills.

Charlie Chapman:

The compound interest of skills, yes. Okay. So you're building this app over a pretty long period of time before you released it?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes.

Charlie Chapman:

I feel like I remember hearing whispers of it like a year before I even heard about it coming out.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So February 2024 was when we had started development of it and it was supposed to launch in July of 2024. I got pregnant in July of 2024 and I was having a lot of issues with my team because I had hired some people and hiring people with an Indie budget was really hard. Yeah. It's really hard.

Charlie Chapman:

Hiring people with a VC budget is really hard. Imagine it's much harder with a lower pay.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, because I was paying for everything out of my pocket up until that point and even up until the launch of Focus Friend. So I got pregnant and I had a condition called HG where it's like morning sickness all day. And so I couldn't leave my bed or even look at a screen for almost six months. So I would work as much as I could during those six months. And then we had a plan to launch in January of 2025. And I had actually interviewed with RevenueCat in December of 2025 because I was like, "Okay, I'm running out of money and I don't know if this app is going to work out." So I gave birth to my daughter 15 weeks early. My daughter was in the hospital for almost four months. So my entire journey got delayed a whole year and I did not work when she was in the hospital and Boba Story is what just sustained me until that time.

She got out of the hospital. We actually just had her homecoming anniversary a few weeks ago and then I'm like, "All right, I'm spending two weeks and I'm figuring out how to be a mom and then I'm going to start breaking my computer out during nap time. I have to make Focus Friend work or launch this." It's gotten delayed so many times. I don't want to disappoint Hank. I don't want to... He's someone I looked up to and I was just like, "Let's make this work and I'm just going to keep working and trying to make good decisions for Focus Friend."

Charlie Chapman:

I mean, knowing where this leads, this is like, 2025 has to be one of the most insane years of... ever for anybody.

Bria Sullivan:

It was the lowest-

Charlie Chapman:

Goodness.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, it was the lowest time of my life because if anyone's ever had a child in the hospital, it's the worst thing ever. It is the worst thing ever. And then hitting number one on the App Store a few months later was the best thing ever.

Charlie Chapman:

Let's get to the launch then, but really quickly, we can't not address the bean of the situation. So the main character of the app is this little bean. What's the backstory? Where did that come from? And I guess you already talked about how it developed over all these interviews, but yeah, what's the story there?

Bria Sullivan:

Hank just said Magic Bean and then we just ran with it. Yeah. And I guess he has in his Hank Green lore of his super hardcore fans called Nerd Fighters, I guess there's some bean stuff. There's some bean jokes there. He has a little furby made of beans on his desk.

Charlie Chapman:

That's the extent of it.

Bria Sullivan:

There's no reason other than his audience. It's an inside joke between him and his audience.

Charlie Chapman:

The design of it is very reminiscent of, I wish I could recall the name off the top of my head, but what is the name of that Japanese style, like the egg yolk character?

Bria Sullivan:

Very cutesy.

Charlie Chapman:

Very, very cutesy and the little bubble butt on the back. That's what makes me think of the egg. Was that something that right from the beginning you gravitated towards based on your style or was that coming out of this long interview and growth of the design that you went through?

Bria Sullivan:

It was the interviews. So I showed 20 different options of beans and art styles and everything. I had tons of different art styles to choose from. Some that I was gravitating towards, but there was a very different direction we were going in, very different, very low five. That was what we were originally going for. There's a show called Bee and PuppyCat. We were going for that and that is not what people were gravitating towards. They're way more towards some other stuff. So we changed our style based on what people were gravitating towards.

Charlie Chapman:

It feels like The Bean combined with Hank's star power, the bean is the thing that really seemed to catch people's attention and it was its own story.

Bria Sullivan:

A magical being. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

It's so cool that it wasn't just you have no... You literally worked and grinded towards that, which is really interesting and different than a lot of the Indie stories where like I was saying, a lot of it feels like luck. I think it's clear that in this case there was way more strategy going into a lot of this than I realized for sure. So you went through all of that insanity of 2025. What was the release strategy? The point is to monetize Hank's audience, so I'm guessing that's part of it. But yeah, what were you thinking going into that, I guess?

Bria Sullivan:

We had one strategy and we changed it.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, interesting.

Bria Sullivan:

And I want to say it because this is important for other Indies. Something I learned with all of the other Indie game developers, there was this hack that we would all do and just gather pre-orders for as long as we could. 90 days, I think is the max. We would try to get as many pre-orders as possible and do a big launch because you could hit number one or you could really high on the chart.

Charlie Chapman:

The [inaudible 00:45:04] method, I think. I don't think that's actually his, but I actually don't know, but I feel like that's... Because he could just come out with esoteric apps that could hit number one based on seemingly all these little hacks. And that's one that I know a lot of people try to do.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, that was something that all of us on TikTok creators would do. Because you would just post TikToks, gather wishlists or whatever, or gather all of the pre-orders and it helped with visibility and you didn't really have to have a real app. It didn't have to work. You're already getting downloads and then it's like that's all you really need.

Charlie Chapman:

And then the story of it being number one is its own propeller for the very beginning.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. But I had a friend who has hit number one a few times with their apps and he has said that he has had a bunch that have gone from up to number one and all the way down within a few months, all the way down to nearly zero. He said that the one that went up and then had a long tail and he just sold for many millions of dollars or many tens of millions of dollars, those ones that were from grinding, like nailing what the experience is from beginning to end.

And so I took that advice and I changed our strategy and I was like, "We can hit number one. We were going to just announce it and collect pre-orders and all that." And I told Hank, "I don't think that we should do that." And he's just like, "Okay, cool." So in July, I was like, "Okay, the app's ready." He posted about it on a community post on YouTube. I think we got 20,000 downloads from in that week from him just posting on a community post on YouTube, so, so much bad feedback during that time. People were so mad at us for... One, we didn't have a lifetime option, thought it was gross, that it was just a subscription.

Charlie Chapman:

What was the reason for going subscription? We didn't talk about that.

Bria Sullivan:

We went with subscription for... I think it's just something that worked well for that. They have a Patreon and subscription boxes, and that's just something that just monetization wise worked. That was something I also worked really hard on was the monetization and figuring out what worked and what felt not gross because the only thing that you really got with the subscription was being able to earn socks or earn the currency at 3X the time.

Charlie Chapman:

So you could use it all for free and there was just a benefit for supporting the app basically.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. And then there was another, and then skins to make the bean look like other stuff. But also last minute, this is where I'm like, is there some divine intervention happening? With AI, prior to where AI was at that time, I could not figure out. So I wrote this app in Unity and Unity does not have access to a lot of stuff that native apps do, but there's just a lot more users who actually use those things in React Native and stuff. So there's libraries for things like live activities, Dynamic Island, all of those things. I couldn't use any of that and of Screen Time API or it's called Family Controls. I couldn't do any of that. But with AI, I was like, "Oh my gosh, I can figure it out now." It can get me to that point of getting to, I can write the native stuff with AI or at least help write these bridges from Unity. So that's what really also helped is being able... I'm like, "Okay, all of these native functions I can put behind the pro subscriber paywall, for example."

Charlie Chapman:

And just out of curiosity for the in app purchase part of it, how did you handle that?

Bria Sullivan:

I chose RevenueCat from the beginning. I hope that paywall is something that I can use soon because I'm not sure. I think they added Unity support recently. I had used the purchases API on Unity before, but it was just going to be really hard to do subscriptions and there wasn't a lot of support for subscriptions on Unity and I didn't really know what to do. And I was like, "Well, I know RevenueCat and it works." So it was built in from the beginning and it was super easy.

Charlie Chapman:

So you announced it quietly on a community forum and people were very mad. One, because of subscriptions, no lifetime options. And then you were going to say some others before I rudely interrupted.

Bria Sullivan:

Android was missing some things, the help emails and reviews were really bad and the comments under his posts. I mean, there were people who loved it, don't get me wrong, there were people who really, really loved it, but there were also people who were really mad and I had to respond to feedback.

Charlie Chapman:

I don't know if you've talked to other people who've done this influencer-based marketing channels or monetizing an influencer brand, but it feels like it's more prone to this type of thing because people feel such a strong connection that it's not like they see a thing and then they're just like, "Whatever, that's not for me." And they bounce off. But it's like there's this personal attack, maybe even feeling where this person's doing something that I don't like, but I like this person and those clash and can cause those feelings. Do you think that rings true?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes. And that was a huge reason we made very particular decisions. There are things that every app does. They have an advertising tracking ID, for example, to do paid acquisition. If someone wants to have ads within the app so that there are people who can't afford things that they can just pay with watching ads, you have to collect some information for those ad networks. Supposed to launch before panels, but with all of the drama of my pregnancy and child, it delayed us and I really paid attention to why people were mad. And I was like, every app on your phone uses those things, but for some reason he's not allowed to. So that taught me that.

Charlie Chapman:

Because it's him. And I think there's also an element where it's like, well, he's a famous rich person, that's the mental model. And so why are they doing that? Whereas if it's a nameless, also unfamous rich person who runs a giant company or whatever, it doesn't have that same emotional connection maybe. But yeah, that is interesting because that was a pretty high profile example of somebody experimenting with monetizing their audience. And yeah, there was quite a bit of backlash from his community, I feel like.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So I learned, because we were ad monetized also in the beginning, and I had to call Hank and be like, "I think for your reputation, we should take this out. Even though we're now going to have way less people monetized, I think we should take this out." The advertising tracking thing, we also didn't do any tracking, and that's something that people really cared about. That also came up in the interviews when I was talking to people. And when I was just trying to get to know them, they often said how much they cared about their privacy and I didn't ask. They just said it and it was something I was doing.

Charlie Chapman:

So obviously it's an important thing to them that they're thinking about when they think of the apps, just generally.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So we also made the decision to not have an advertising tracking ID, which as you probably know, and everyone knows, that basically kills paid acquisition for us.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, yes, exactly. Or at least being able to do it well. You can do brand marketing style stuff, but it's very different when you can't basically run the machine and let it be like, "This is exactly how much value you're getting out of these users and so you can pay this much and now you have the money printing machine."

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, it makes my life a little bit harder and I have to get a lot more creative, but I'm just trying to look at it as this is the next skill, I guess, for me to learn. But yeah, so we got so much feedback and we're getting emails and emails and emails and I still didn't think it was going to do that well. I was like, "Okay, well, what it did, it's probably going to do 10X what we did." And I'm like, "All right, this is what's going to happen."

Charlie Chapman:

Was this public on the store by this point or was this a test flight beta?

Bria Sullivan:

Mm-hmm.

Charlie Chapman:

So this is public on the store.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. We just didn't tell a lot of people about it other than that community post. And so we got tons of feedback and I was just responding to the emails. And meanwhile, by the way, this whole time I'm still taking care of a newborn child. It was a very sleepless time of my life.

Charlie Chapman:

I imagine so. Yeah.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So it was getting lots and lots of emails. And once the emails started to dwindle a bit or people weren't complaining or I wasn't getting 10 emails or no, it was way more than that. I was getting so many a day. And once those started to feel like they were waning and I was addressing all of those things that people had issues with, I was like, "All right, Hank, I think we're ready. I think we're ready to actually do the full launch." And that's when the real genius of Hank Green really kicked in.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So how'd that go? Because it felt like it just took over the internet for a while.

Bria Sullivan:

I don't know, because he's done promo posts before. And he's said this before when we've talked to other people about it and he's like, promo posts never do well for him. They're like, "Okay, cool. Thanks. I'll help you. I'll send you some dollars for your socks, Hank, for your good cause." and move on with their life. But those videos did super well. They were very high performing videos for him and that's where I think the artwork kicks in. That's where all of the work of I want this thing to catch someone's eye immediately kicks in.

Charlie Chapman:

And not just anybody's eye, but specifically his audience. That feels like the big difference between I wrote a book, I made some socks, it's like these are interesting products that there's a Venn diagram of his audience and the product, but it's minor. And so a lot of people probably do it more to support the creator than they do for the product. But you made something that was trying to make that Venn diagram just a circle. And that I have to imagine combined with all the work on the artwork making, again, making it specifically for that audience, that had to be a big part of why it worked.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. The combo, I think a lot of people, because there are many other creator apps, but I don't think any of them have done what Focus Friend did, at least in its first week in terms of how big it was in the press. But I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong and I'm fine being wrong.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, I mean, I can't think of any. I'm sure there are. And surely there are, if you go higher up in the celebrity, I'm sure there's major celebrities that have released things that I don't necessarily know about that have done super well.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. I think Arnold Schwarzenegger's app does really well.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, that is one. Yeah. One of the, I don't remember his title now. He was the director of marketing. I think he's... Anyway, [inaudible 00:56:00], our company, that's his favorite app ever is, I think it's called The Pump. And the onboarding is like you're getting... Anybody should just go download the app just to watch the onboarding because it's like you're getting a phone call.

Bria Sullivan:

It's a motivational app.

Charlie Chapman:

Arnold Schwarzenegger, so good, so good. And actually, it's funny you mentioned that one because we've actually worked together a little bit recently because we did a hackathon that was aimed at this exact concept of apps are an interesting way to monetize an audience, apps especially directed that makes sense for that audience. And that was one of the apps that spurred a lot of this thinking internally at RevenueCat, but then Focus Friend is obviously an extreme example of that. Yeah. So he released it, clearly it resonated, but what was that like? So he did a promotional post and then what?

Bria Sullivan:

I had my RevenueCat notifications on a lot of Indies probably did. And then suddenly I was on a walk with my partner and my daughter and then suddenly my phone just starts buzzing a lot and then I'm like, "What's going..." And I was like, "Ooh, there's a lot of people buying stuff. What's going on?" And then I see that Hank had just posted about it and he just had his arsenal of messaging. So I have learned a good amount about marketing with TikToks and stuff, but this is the benefit of having someone on my side that is just a genius at what he does. He told me the angle he was going to take and I was like, "All right, whatever." Oh, also his brother, John, really loved the app. So I guess they just colluded on doing this campaign.

Charlie Chapman:

Doubled up.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, they doubled up on it and they made two YouTube videos about it. And well, the plan was just one of them. And then because after it hit number one, they did more. They colluded on posting about it and the messaging, I thought people would care more about it being a focus timer, but people care way more about... They use it almost like an Opal equivalent and they don't use it as just a timer. They use it as a screen time control app. So that's where things are getting a little bit or more interesting for me now today on the product side, but that was the angle that they went for on the messaging too. And that really resonated with people. And I was like, "Well, it's more of a focus timer, but that's where my engineering brain was getting a little bit..."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, exactly.

Bria Sullivan:

I was like, "Well, technically." But they were like, "No, no, no, listen." And I just had to trust them and they're geniuses at what they did.

Charlie Chapman:

That was the launch. It was just them doing content on their channels basically.

Bria Sullivan:

They have a combined channel together and John did one on their YouTube channel that they jointly share. And then Hank did a series of Instagram reels, TikTok, and then YouTube shorts.

Charlie Chapman:

Okay. It felt like the whole internet was writing about it. I genuinely thought when you said you switched strategies that you were going to be like, all right, so we lined up these press people, we got them on an early version, because it was like the verge in gadget, I don't know, I'm all saying them all off the top of my head because I feel like literally everybody wrote about it, but everybody who's writing about it was like as a user. And that all just came from because it skyrocketed up and his video made traction, it worked its way through all these circles.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah, I guess people were talking about it. It was the first time I'd ever had people in my life, they were like, "Oh my gosh, everyone's talking about this bean app right now."

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, wow. And they didn't know until-

Bria Sullivan:

In my own life. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

That's pretty crazy. Have you seen anybody in real life using it on a subway or something?

Bria Sullivan:

People have said it to me in person when I've said, "This is what I made." and then they're like, "Oh yeah, my God. Yeah."

Charlie Chapman:

That's so cool.

Bria Sullivan:

That was super, duper cool. And there were people emailing me being like, "Oh my gosh, I didn't know you made this app." Or, "Everyone's talking about your app right now." I got a lot of those messages and emails and stuff. Very, very, very cool. But this is actually pretty funny. We hit the top 10 and if anyone was on Twitter for a while, it was like the cool kids get to show off their top 10, that they hit the top 10. And I was like, "Oh my gosh, I did it. I hit the top 10 on the app store of overall in the app store." And then Hank's like, he texted me and he was like, "I want to be number one." And ChatGPT was number one at this time. And then we did and I was just like, "I didn't even know that that was a possibility for us." And it was the coolest thing ever. It was awesome.

Charlie Chapman:

Did you have you framed that screenshot on your wall?

Bria Sullivan:

I will. I have.

Charlie Chapman:

You should.

Bria Sullivan:

It is something I want to. Yeah. But I actually, I've got this, my App Store Award.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. So that was actually my follow-up is you have some hardware. So for those that was something on the podcast, do you want to describe what you just grabbed off your shelf?

Bria Sullivan:

We won an App Store Award. That was also one of the coolest experiences ever. And then we were... I just can't reach it. I have two more trophies right there.

Charlie Chapman:

Ooh, I know one other. I don't know what the third one is.

Bria Sullivan:

So we won the best app of 2025, Google Play. Then we also won the best personal growth app of 2025. They sent me two trophies, which I'm very happy to. So yeah, I can grab it or I can grab one of them. Here we go.

Charlie Chapman:

Ooh. All glass.

Bria Sullivan:

I'm still waiting for my RevenueCat one, but I just haven't received it yet.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, yes, yes. Have you got... Are we sending one? I don't remember.

Bria Sullivan:

A Shippie. We won a Shippie.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes. Yeah. I can go into long details about the manufacturing of those, but that's been a thing. I'm really curious about, well, any of those, but in particular, the App Store one, because I know Apple makes a pretty big song and dance of it. And you get... I think you had a photographer because your picture's on the App Store and there's a whole feature and profile about you. What was that experience like? How did you find out? And then what happened?

Bria Sullivan:

They reached out to me. So I did their entrepreneur camp and every Indie should apply to it if it still exists. It's one of those things. If you're in the developer advocate space, I think you probably know that programs get cut and reopen all the time. But I did that camp and I had been wanting to get Boba Story featured for a super long time. And I think it just wasn't working out. And I learned a lot also about how to get... A lot of mistakes that I had made with Boba Story that I had fixed with Focus Friend, what really attracts an App Store editor, and we can talk about that another time, but there's something that they're looking for. And I think I tried to do that with Focus Friend as well.

Charlie Chapman:

That's my dream talk to give is, because I feel like with my app, that's pretty much the only marketing channel I have is trying to get featured on the App Store and it's worked pretty well. But at least for me, it seems like it's mostly... Sounds similar to what you said you were trying to do once the AI tools kicked in, which is find those system integration features that they want to promote, give it live activities, give it screen time access and all the things and make part of the narrative be Apple technology has really made this possible. That's the kind of stuff that seems like gets their attention for sure.

Bria Sullivan:

I think the onboarding being really easy to understand and a little bit of design, those three things is where those meet. But they had asked me to come out for a developer showcase and I had just done a couple of things before and I was running on fumes at this point. With the Google Best App of 2025, there was so much that they were asking of me and I had just worked so hard. And then they reached out about this developer showcase and I was like, "I'm so appreciative, but oh my God, I'm so tired." I don't know if I want to go because they weren't saying I was nominated for an App Store Award or anything. They weren't saying that. So I was just like, "I don't know you all. I just want to spend some time with my family. I feel very tired." And they were like, "Trust me, you don't want to miss it." And they were just trying to support me. And then they told me that I was nominated.

I was like, "Okay, that's so amazing." And then they were really trying to convince me to go because it was based in LA. I'm an hour outside of LA and they were just really pushing for me to go. And then I got my stuff together, had mother-in-law stay with us for a bit. And then I show up, they gave me a hotel room and everything and they're like, "Okay, you're going to go take your photo or you're going to do this thing." When they brought us out to the photographer, I was just standing there and then they're like, "You won the award." And they took a picture of me accepting the award, reacting. I was like, "Oh my God." And I kept it together there, but then I had to go to another room and prepare, because I had to prepare a presentation, I had an interview. And when I got to the room, I cried. I was like, "What is going on? " This whole year started off awful and now, because this was in December and it's ending on this high.

Charlie Chapman:

It's such a complete circle. That's crazy.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. I had to go to therapy over it because it started to feel like, "Oh my God, did my daughter have to go through such a hard time just for this to happen?" My postpartum brain made this connection that if my daughter didn't suffer, I wouldn't have success. And I was like, "Oh my God, I want to throw this success away so my kids don't have to..." Yeah. It was a very, very strange thing. I've undone it, but yeah, all of that happening in one year, both good and also a like, "Whoa, what's going on?"

Charlie Chapman:

It's a lot.

Bria Sullivan:

A lot of emotions in one year.

Charlie Chapman:

Obviously released, super successful, lots of press, lots of downloads, lots of hardware, you have trophies. Now in 2026, it's a going concern. It is an app that seems like it's doing well. Do you feel like you succeeded in what you described earlier as the big pop and then you're trying not to just fall all the way down? Has it leveled off in a state where you're like, this is a sustainable business?

Bria Sullivan:

I think so. I think so. I would like it to get higher because like I'd mentioned before, the goalpost has moved. I've officially replaced the tech salary. So I've officially replaced the tech salary, so that's good. I approved my initial thesis, but I'm like, is this something another person could replicate? I'm not sure. I'm not sure about this exact trajectory, but I feel like I learned enough along the way to help someone get to, I was like, someone could get to 200K, I think as someone without a tech background pretty systematically, I think so. Opal and all the other screen time apps, be present. Those have higher revenues per month than other focus timers. So I would love to get to those levels.

That's something that would be really interesting for me. So Hank Green is known as someone who's given away the majority of his wealth. I think you know that, but I don't think the audience knows that. He's known as someone who's raised tens and ten, maybe over hundreds of millions of dollars and him and his brother have given it all away. And because of that and because of having that reputation, we made a lot of product decisions that I'm like, we probably could have made three to even 10 times what we have made if we were a lot more, we had a hard paywall, for example, or if we were more pestering or were very strategic on when you show the subscription, deciding what you put behind it, using sales and things like that to try and get people to convert.

And because of that, now my work, I'm trying to do less engineering. So I hired another engineer who's a way better at Unity engineer than I am. I have someone, like a contractor that can help with like native stuff on iOS and hopefully AI can take the wheel for Android native, but that's where I'm at right now. We're in that weird space between game and app where there's a content treadmill with a game and it's not like an app where it's a habit, but there has to be content for them to keep going.

Charlie Chapman:

You have to keep feeding the machine.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. So that's something, that's where a lot of my, where my work lies now is trying to really, it's almost like game design too, where it's like I have to figure out how this loop fits together and what features. There's tons of features still that people want. And so we have a lot of growth in terms of the product and making their product even better. I'm doing the side on marketing. So Hank did, he did that initial push, but part of his job is just to stay famous. And so he has to do his own stuff and he has other ventures that he's working on. So now it's on me to figure out how to grow the app. And that's where I'm in a CEO, CTO role right now. It's tough, but it's exciting. It's just a new set of skills for sure.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, that's so cool. I guess before we get to the end here, based on what we talked about earlier, if there's people listening that hear this and they're like, yes, working with an influencer to help them monetize their audience sounds like a cool thing. Obviously your story specifically is unique in the connections that you had, but everybody has different connections. But what advice would you have to somebody? I guess A, would you recommend people do this? And then B, is there any advice you'd have for people that are trying to go that route for things that they should specifically think about or look out for or ways to structure themselves to set up for success if they're going to try and build an app in this kind of way?

Bria Sullivan:

You have two options. If you don't have a lot of money to do paid acquisition and stuff, because it's getting very expensive to do paid acquisition. So doing organic, and you have two options if you want to do organic. I think in this day and age, if you're an Indie and you can either become an influencer for your app and there's an inflection point, it is hard to both be a good influencer and be a good developer. It's a lot of work. I did it. It's possible, but it's a lot of work. So you can either do that, you can add someone on your team that becomes the influencer that does not have an audience yet and build an audience at the same time as building your app. Or three, you can partner with an influencer that you trust. So I like to do this exercise.

This is just something that's really fun for me. I will just take a random influencer and then come up with an idea for them for what I think would do well with their audience. So this is just a personal opinion on my end because I've had to be a product manager and I've done a lot of work on this. I don't think that influencers really know what a good idea is for them to do for their audience. For some reason, they always want a social media or they want a feed of information. And I'm just like, no, I just don't think that those are good ideas for apps personally.

Charlie Chapman:

Their expertise is somewhere else by definition, unless they're like a tech influencer.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. And even so, I'm just like, no one's going to download an app to get very niche information. I just don't think so.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, and what's popular and what's monetizable are also often different things.

Bria Sullivan:

I love utility apps, and they're not too hard to build. Sometimes I like to take a niche of apps that seem easy to build and then try to pair them with influencers I think they would do well with, or I just choose a random influencer and I'm like, "Let me just design what this app could be in my head and what I think would do well for their audience." So those are two ways in terms of creating a product for an influencer and then to actually work with one, you'd be surprised.

So influencers or YouTubers creators, they don't have a lot of options for monetizing and they are way worse at monetizing than you think that they are. Even ones that do really big merch things, that's not sustainable for them long term. They get paid from brand deals. They don't have a lot of passive income. The only passive income they have is from affiliate links. So like if it's, "Oh, buy this Amazon stuff in my bio." or if they have a digital course or digital products and stuff like that. So I just like to think of apps as being a potential digital product.

Charlie Chapman:

And then is the best approach for how to... Do you think doing a split, like ownership split is the thing that makes the most sense?

Bria Sullivan:

Yes. Well, Hank and I have a lot of trust. So currently we have a split on the revenues, but not on the ownership. But that's something because if we ever want to do a sale or something like that, because it's done well, he said that he's fine with changing equity split to just being between us. But I think it makes the influencer feel a lot more in a position of ownership if they own the IP, for example.

So it's like they own the IP and this is where it's hard and I just have to say what I did and hopefully this works out and everyone has to just figure out what works well for them because Hank upfronted the money, a lot of the money from the beginning, or at least we had an agreement, but I chose to not get paid for the work. That's something I chose. I chose that my money is going to come from the other end after launch and from the revenue. Because if you don't do that, then it's going to be like they get 80%, you get 20%, for example, in terms of revenue on the other side, if they upfront a lot of money to pay you in the beginning.

Charlie Chapman:

It's a risk analysis, I guess, there.

Bria Sullivan:

Yeah. Yeah. So I chose to not get paid and to just support myself through Boba Story while making Focus Friend and all of the money went to contractors and just all of the artwork and stuff like that. So that's up to another person of what's comfortable to them. A lot of people told me that I was dumb for doing that. They said that I should be getting paid 200K, for example, for the work of actually making the app. And I'm like, well, if he was going to a dev studio to make his idea for an app, that makes sense, but this is just a collaboration. And a lot of influencers or creators, whatever, they don't have 200K to just give you. There are some that do. And there's another AI coaching app made by some New York Times person. I forgot his name, but yeah, I'm not sure. But I know they're at 2 million ARR, whatever, but he funneled a million dollars of his own money into making the app and most people aren't going to be able to do that.

Charlie Chapman:

I would guess that there's a big benefit to there being equity and upside for both parties. Once it gets going, it's easier to work on it when you get to... After it's launched, it's a lot easier to keep working on it and care about it when you have equity in there. And it's a lot easier to continue promoting it if you on the creator side have equity in it. And so that shared upside feels like it makes a lot of sense in this kind of setup.

Bria Sullivan:

And they are also very distractable and distracted. So don't expect to have someone who's really like a co-founder... That's really, really in it and they might be for a few months, but then they're going to be like, okay, I've got other stuff to do because the development cycle just takes a long time. So choosing the right one matters a lot.

Charlie Chapman:

That is amazing. I think we've reached the current point in time. I'm excited to see everything you do from here. But before we end, I got to ask you the question that I ask everybody to end the show, which is, what's a people or person out there that have influenced you in your work that you'd recommend others check out?

Bria Sullivan:

There's a woman named Laura Roeder. She's the founder of a company called Paperbell right now. She has sold two SaaS companies and she talks a lot on her platforms about having a very balanced motherhood. And she was able to, I think, get to 15 million in net worth just from her SaaS companies that she sold. She has two kids and she just spends a lot of time with her family. She's found that delicate balance of someone who spends a lot of time being present and also very, very, very good businesswoman. So that's someone that inspires me right now.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh man. Okay. That's awesome. Yeah, I'll have to check her out. Cool. All right. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This was super fun. And I don't know, it's one of those stories that I feel like I knew the story. And then as we're talking, it's like I didn't know almost any of the real story. And so this was super good. Where can people listening find you and your work?

Bria Sullivan:

I'm not really on a lot of social media right now other than maybe LinkedIn. So just Bria Sullivan on LinkedIn.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, thank you all for listening. Launched is part of the RevenueCat Podcast family. If you'd like to learn more about the growth side of mobile app businesses, you should check out Sub Club by my friend, David Barnard. And check out, of course, revenuecat.com to learn about the easiest way to grow and monetize your mobile app business. 

For Launched, you can find Launched at launchedfm.com, and we're pretty much all over the internet. Usually the handle is Launched FM, including our YouTube channel, which is where you could go. And if you're watching, you saw the amazing trophy collection that Bria has been collecting. So definitely check that out if you are into the visual side of video podcasts. And yeah, that's all I got. So I will see you all in two weeks. Bye!