David's primary acquisition channel from day one was French influencer marketing. He identified that no one in France was targeting women with a sugar-quitting app, and used a tool called TopYappers.com to scrape TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to find influencer profiles who had previously worked with similar apps. He then sourced their emails and fed them into Linkedin.ai to run outreach campaigns. He specifically targeted French-language influencers, which gave him an uncrowded niche. This influencer strategy drove the bulk of his 60,000 downloads in 5 months, with paying customers converting to ~900 subscribers. He supplemented this with TikTok Spark Ads (boosting existing organic influencer videos) and Meta ads, though those were more recent additions (~$100/month spend on Spark ads).
Stopper (Stoppr)
Mobile app helping women (Gen Z) quit sugar cravings via subscription
7 moves, in order
- Idea Validation (Pre build)Google trends and tiktok instagram research
Searched 'stop sugar' on Google Trends — confirmed 5-year upward trajectory. Then searched the same keywords on TikTok and Instagram and found a large volume of women influencers already creating content around quitting sugar, confirming organic demand.
Validated niche as high-growth before writing a single line of code - Idea Validation (Pre build)Sensor tower competitor revenue analysis
Used Sensor Tower to look up the revenue of the competitor app (Quitter) and confirmed it was making ~$200K/month after 3 months, proving the niche had real monetization potential.
Confirmed competitor MRR ~$200K/month, de-risked the clone decision - Build (Month 1)Ai vibe coding cursor
Downloaded the Quitter app and screenshotted every screen. Used Mobbin.com and screen.design.com to pull all screenshots at once, imported them into Figma via a Figma plugin, then used Cursor (AI coding tool) to prompt screen-by-screen replicas. Changed colors from black to pink, swapped 'quitting smoking' content for 'quitting sugar', and targeted women aged 13–25. Full MVP built in ~2.5 weeks; Apple App Store approval took another week.
Full MVP cloned and live on App Store in ~1 month - Month 1 (Launch)French influencer outreach
Used TopYappers.com to scrape TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for French influencer profiles that had worked with similar health/wellness apps. Extracted emails and fed them into Linkedin.ai to automate outreach. Focused exclusively on French-language influencers, a market with no direct competitor for the sugar-quitting niche.
$5,000 MRR in the first month of revenueMRR $5.0k - Months 1–5 (Scaling)French influencer outreach
Continued scaling the influencer outreach flywheel — finding new French influencer profiles via TopYappers, doing email outreach, and getting them to post about Stopper. This remained the core and dominant growth channel throughout the first 5 months.
60,000 downloads and ~900 paying subscribers in 5 monthsMRR $12k Users 900 users - Month 5 (Current)Tiktok spark ads
Started running TikTok Spark Ads (~$100/month) to boost reach of existing organic influencer videos, amplifying content that was already performing without creating net-new ad creative.
Increased views on existing influencer content; exact incremental revenue lift not statedMRR $12k - Month 5 (Current)Meta ads
Began running paid ads on Meta as an additional acquisition channel alongside the influencer strategy.
Recently started; no specific outcome numbers stated
8 years as a quantitative trader gave him strong analytical instincts for validating market opportunities (trend data, revenue estimation via Sensor Tower). He also specifically targeted the French market — a non-English-speaking country where the competitor app (Quitter) had no localized presence — dramatically reducing competition for influencer mindshare and App Store visibility.
french_influencer_outreach
No channels explicitly called out as failures. Meta ads and TikTok Spark ads were recent additions and not cited as primary growth drivers yet. The transcript does not mention any tactics that were tried and abandoned.
I vibe coded a $12K/month mobile app (Stoppr Breakdown)
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