My Social Media App Makes $20K/Month

January 19th, 2026

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About
Business

Ben

Founder, FollowBuddy

$250K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

FollowBuddy

followbuddy.com

from Toronto

started November 2024

$250,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

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Who are you and what business did you start?

My name is Ben and I built the first fully Instagram complaint Instagram Unfollower tracking app. The app is called FollowBuddy and our customers range from the average Instagram user wondering who their real friends are to a business owner looking to clean up their IG following list.

FollowBuddy is unique in that it is the only fully compliant app that shows you who unfollowed you on instagram. Other apps are violating Instagram's TOS and users of these apps are at risk of losing their instagram account just from using them. They have bought fake reviews to hide this fact and thousands of people each month are paying for a scam. E.g https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reports-unfollowers-follower/id1481469888 (read their actual reviews). These scam apps are why we built FollowBuddy in the first place. As a social media strategist I was getting dozens of emails from people freaking out that they lost their IG after using one of these apps. So eventually we built FollowBuddy and making it happen was a wild story but I am happy to say we now bring in over $20k a month.

How do you come up with the idea for FollowBuddy ?

The idea for the app came from all of the messages and emails I got over the years from people who had used our competitors and been kicked out of their Instagram or lost the account completely. My team and I went to work to see if you could find this information safely and created a method called "the Compare Lists Method" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxg23jyw_ss&t=184s we selected a random list sorting tool and taught millions of people how to use. But this method was pretty hard, very complicated and didnt actually show you who unfollowed you, only people who didn't follow you back. I had wanted to build this shortly after making this video but didn't have the money to really try until about 2 yeas later.

My background is in marketing, I have been running a YouTube agency helping SAAS companies & podcasts grow on YouTube. My videos alone on this subject are well over 2M+ long form views so I knew there was a massive market here and people were opting for the scam apps out of necessity as they were the only option to show unfollowers (even though the apps full on don't work).

I validated the idea by first launching a super simple version on web and funneling traffic from my existing videos to it.

How did you launch FollowBuddy and get initial traction?

I was already getting about 4k search based views per day on videos covering this exact subject so I just added the link to the web app to the description and pinned comment of those videos.

The feedback was mostly positive, the only real complaints was that it wasn't free. We had trained people to use the free method for multiple years so even though this was much better, many users didnt understand the difference nor the problem itself so they were frustrated by the cost but those that used the tool loved it.

I still believe this was the right approach. I think builders are really sleeping on YouTube search traffic.

Making our first dollar was pretty boring, we made it our very first day our very bad web app was live. This gave me the reassurance that I needed to build this.

I learned how much goes into building a saas that you can't possible appreciate unti you have done it and sold it to the public.

What was the growth strategy for FollowBuddy and how did you scale?

YouTube SEO is a cheat code. There is way less competition as everyone chases viral pops on short form. 95% of our sales come from organic YouTube traffic. I have multiple channels that I have established ranking authority for social media and software related videos that I use to capture high value keywords to let people know FollowBuddy exists and that it is completely safe. I use YouTube becuase it converts like crazy and the recurring views that come from ranking in search is tough to beat.

I have 3 different channels where I will make many videos covering high value keywords (often the same ones across multiple channels). This makes it possible to rank multiple times in the top 3 for high intent keywords.

This worked because of the trust and intent associated with a person doing this behavior. When someone goes to YouTube and searches to solve their problem, they are an extremely warm lead that wants to solve this problem. I know when they find my videos they won't fall for a scam app that puts their account at risk to it was extremely motivating to attract as many search views as possible.

Focus on search based content. Solve a real problem and take feedback from people who are trying to solve this problem and can actually afford to solve it.

What were the biggest lessons learned from building FollowBuddy ?

This project was the hardest of my business life. I went through 4 different dev teams and the tool was completely re-built 4 times. First engineer didn't take it seriously (was a friend) and quit 80% through building the MVP. Second dev told me they could finish the 20% needed but actually lied and started from scratch because he didn't know the language it was built on but didn't want to lose the opportunity. He was a bit of nightmare to work with and I eventually walked away. The third team had dozens of people stacking slop that eventually led to a barely functional product which led to the hard decision of building it again from scratch for a fourth time.

How I found my current engineers was realizing something big. All the engineer I had worked with before were hiding that they were using ai (I could tell from the code) so it finally clicked that I should find engineers bragging about using the AI tools, not pretending that they don't. That's how I ultimately found my engineering team.

FollowBuddy Acquisition: How much did FollowBuddy sell for and what was the acquisition price?

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