24 // Growing a portfolio of AI consumer apps
🇮🇹
Joined February 2018
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Grado ✨ retweeted
Minecraft modpacks are singlehandedly responsible for intervening in the development of children and teaching them the basics of complex system dynamics, thus raising their IQ by 10-35 points on average
Easy to go from 0 -> $50k MRR when you're scamming kids and claiming that a $1 purchase is worth $49.99 of MRR.
He then proceeds to lie about it on X - making a few thousand $ worth of sales look like $50k MRR.
This guy is selling a scam "Reveal your soulmate" AI slop funnel via ads to kids, with a shady trial that converts to a $49.99/month subscription (written in fine print).
The whole thing is borderline illegal lol.
Honestly, I've been following Arib for a while, and I can say that most of the stuff he does is legit.
But this is an insane play, and I feel like people have to know, especially when you're tricking them into believing this BS.
May this serve as a lesson not to believe everything you see on here.
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11 months later, we officially hit 500,000 users and a 7-figure run rate 🎉
100% bootstrapped while completely crushing all of our VC-backed competitors.
A year ago, I predicted we would hit 1 million users by the end of 2025. At that point, we had just a few thousand users and no proof to back it up.
Tweeted that into existence below.
It was an utterly insane goal. In fact, we didn't hit it.
Do I care? Absolutely fucking not. Hitting 500k users in under a year is still an unbelievable achievement.
This is proof that in order to win, you MUST be delusionally optimistic.
If you can internalize the future, it becomes one of the most powerful hacks you can install in your brain.
Setting crazy goals is easy, but not nearly enough. The hard part is convincing every single cell in your body that you're going to succeed.
This was all possible thanks to the insanely talented team we're building at Blackboard.
If you'd met them, you'd also believe you could achieve anything.
10M users in 2026. And I mean it.
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
Most people are terrible at judging their own decisions
We judge our decisions by how they turn out, not by how well they were made
A good decision that goes wrong gets rewritten as a fuck up
A terrible decision that works out becomes proof of our genius
That's hindsight bias
A founder I know launched into a new market. Bigger TAM and better unit economics. On paper, it was a strong bet. Then the market shifted in ways no one could have predicted. Now he's pivoting again.
Bad outcome does not equal bad decision
The better framework is to think in bets
Every real decision is made under uncertainty. You're never choosing certainties, you're choosing probabilities. The only honest question is: given what I knew at the time, did I make a positive EV bet?
You can lose a 70/30 and still be right
You can win a 30/70 and still be wrong
Poker players understand this. Over the long run, outcomes converge to decision quality, but individual hands lie.
Once you separate outcomes from judgment, a few things change:
- You stop being afraid of reasonable risk
- You learn faster from failure instead of rationalising it
- Being wrong feels like variance, not a character flaw
Most people don't avoid risk because it's irrational: they avoid it because they're terrified of retroactively condemning themselves
Thinking in bets fixes that
We take many bets every day, and small positive EV compounds exponentially over time
Don't ever confuse luck with skill, in either direction
[End of broadcast]
unpopular opinion: if your app has a hard paywall, it's not a product, it's a funnel.
i often see people on my TL not knowing the difference.
hard paywalls are not inherently bad, but people often treat them as the solution to all their app problems.
a hard paywall it's not a solution for your broken product, and it's definitely not always the most performant.
when we AB tested hard paywalls on our app (500k users), the RPU halved.
just make sure you know what game you're playing.
Hiring Engineers at Blackboard Studio! [Europe only 🇪🇺]
We're a software holding company (B2B & B2C) building the next generation of AI products, currently counting 200,000+ users across all of our products.
Join a team led by passionate builders and design enthusiasts, ex-sneakers, shaping the next generation of software products.
Looking for mid-senior engineers with experience in building from the ground up, and highly passionate about product.
Tech stack: Next.js, Typescript, React, Postgres, Redis, Docker
AI skills required: Vector DBs, RAGs, Prompt engineering, Self-hosted models
Fully remote / Must be based in Europe
DM me or shoot us an email:
<blackboard.studio>
1M by EOY
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
Looking for cracked iOS/SwiftUI devs that can make this app the best in its category
Schizo scaling this to 1M users by EOY
Send portfolio in DMs
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
How we hacked TikTok to scale our first consumer app to 12k users and $6k MRR in a single month.
Last month, me and my team wanted to try something new and have some fun, so we decided to launch an app on the App Store.
Keep in mind we never launched a B2C product before.
We thought this would be a small project we could launch in under a week, and have fun marketing it.
We created an MVP in a few weeks and started scaling it immediately via organic content on TikTok.
This was no ordinary strategy, we set up a team of 5 people to scale content across many different profiles.
The initial thesis was, could we take a working product from the US and adapt it to the European market?
So we focused all our efforts on a single EU market, and it turned out we were right.
A month after the launch we're at 12k users, growing at a rate of 200% per week, without any sign of stopping anytime soon.
Now we're 100% focused on making it a killer product, and once that's done we'll start the expansion into other major EU markets.
Like this if you want me to break down the TikTok strategy that we used and how we plan to hit 1M users by the end of the year.
I am looking to hire a COO/Ops Manager for a serviced agency business.
Must have experience in running DWY agency operations and working with b2b clients.
Remote (US/EU) + high comp.
DM for details.
When a user signs up you can add it to Stripe and add a 14-day trial period to the recurring subscription price, then you wait for the invoice_paid webhook to know if the user activates their subscription while on trial
You have to create a product with 2 prices, a one-time charge and a pay-as-you-go
Then initialize the checkout with both of those prices
