Opinion
Gargicevich: Fitbod's generated workouts were weird, bad, and sometimes dangerous
“I noticed that the workouts were weird and even a bit dangerous sometimes. And like the more I used it, I was like, wow, okay, these workouts are actually bad.”
Insight
Gargicevich: Founders should copy competitors' proven ads via Meta Ad Library
“Good thing about meta ads library is that it's all public. You can go into any of your competitions dashboard and see, you know, which ads are working for them, where they're putting more money. And yeah, there's no secret sauce there. Just copy what works for…”
Insight
Many users will pay at a hard paywall before seeing the product
“Hard paywall before you sign in for the first time. It's like how many users Are actually going to pay before they actually see their product? And the answer is a lot.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gravl reached 70,000 subscribers and generated $440,000 in monthly revenue
“We launched around two years ago, and now we have over 70,000 subscribers. Last month we made over 440 K.”
Insight
Gargicevich: Most top-performing mobile app ads are UGC
“You'll see that most of the ads that work out there are
UGC content.”
Insight
Labeling a product as an AI app directly drives consumer sales
“Make sure that you are showing the users that this is an AI app because that sells now.”
Insight
Real-human 24/7 support significantly accelerated Gravl's user growth
“And one of the important things that we grew a lot with this, and that was our support. So we have a twenty-four-seven support chat inside the app, and that includes everything from articles to messages, and we'll have someone reply. An actual person, not an A…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gravl's launch post on Reddit generated over 300,000 impressions
“I posted this thread on how I build gravel. Back in the day it was called Gains.ai, and I shared kind of the technical specs around it. It got over a couple hundred likes within the first couple hours and over 300,000 impressions. Yeah, we got our first couple…”
Disclosure
Gravl scaled via paid ads in South America under $50 daily
“For us, the bigger distribution was paid ads. We started running ads as soon as we obviously added the subscription model. I still remember like running our first app, we got a subscription within the 1:10 minutes of like activating the ads. Yeah, that was the…”
Insight
Gargicevich: Restrict AI coding tools to specific files
“In terms of AI, so I try to stay kind of niche with what I use, cursor a lot, but I'm very specific with files to touch and don't let the AI just go rogue, basically, yeah.”
Disclosure
Gravl spends approximately one-third of its revenue on paid ads
“Our expense number one is Meta and TikTok, and then maybe a little bit of Google, maybe a little bit of Apple search. I'd say a third is somehow accurate. A third of our revenue that is. This doesn't include making the ads, but just the cost of running them.”
Disclosure
Gravl spends $50,000 to $80,000 monthly on payroll for 14 people
“Expense number two is salaries. It was mainly just the three of us for our first year. I did the development, and then Matthias and Aaron did the growth and ads. Since then, we've grown the team to probably maybe 13 to 14 people, give or take. There's some, li…”
Disclosure
Gravl spends just $1,000 monthly on infrastructure despite generating $440K
“And then in terms of infrastructure for running the actual app, like servers and AI builds and other tools, I'd say around a grand a month as well.”
Disclosure
Gargicevich: Building Gravl's initial MVP took two to three months
“Initial MVP took around two to three months, maybe.”
Disclosure
Gargicevich: Gravl runs on React Native, Expo, and .NET
“We use React Native and Expo. For the backend, I did .NET for most of the core functionality. I've also used Next and React to build some, like, internal admin dashboards.”
What-if
Gargicevich: We dragged our previous startup an extra year
“In our case was our previous startup. We probably dragged that for an extra year. We should have probably call it days like way earlier.”
