How We Built a $5K/Month TikTok Analytics App
Who are you and what business did you start?
Hey, I am Felix and with my co-founders Dennis & Mike I've started developing viral.app this April and successfully launched mid of May. With viral.app, we are building the easiest way to track & analyze unlimited short-form content on TikTok, Youtube & Instagram.
We built B2C consumer apps before and were looking for a solution to track dozens of internal as well as external UGC accounts and couldn't find one. So we started solving our problem buy building our own. 7 weeks after launch, we've reached $5k in MRR purely organic from posting about viral.app on X.
We've also launched a few free tools such as worlds first TikTok audience reach checker & a TikTok MCP server!
More to come!
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How do you come up with the idea for viral.app?
In winter 2024, we wanted to explore new projects and started diving into B2C consumer apps. The plan was simple: create an easy to understand single-feature AI-wrapper and set full focus on distribution. We wanted to crack the code to go viral.
We started setting up dozens of TikTok accounts, spent hours negotiating with gen z student creators, tested countless AI UGC tools and worked on going viral. We hired a working student to track our performance and manage everything. Time spent on just keeping an overview on what works and what not increased week-by-week. We started looking for a tools to help us keep track but were left unsatisfied with what we found. At the same time, a real UGC marketing hype exploded among consumer founders.
So we made a bold bet, stopped developing apps & side projects and went all-in into building the ultimate tracking & analytics tool for any short-form video marketer. viral.app was born.
How did you launch viral.app and get initial traction?
From the idea to launch we prepared to win our first customers on X/Twitter. My co-founder Mike was already posting about the consumer app space for some time. We identified that organic reach in the right bubbles is needed to get started, so we decided to build in public on X.
Our launch announcement got 50k views and led to more than 100 sign-ups and a large number of trials (manually sent out). The first direct subscription followed the next day :)
We used Polar for payments and it did not support subscription trials. So we were forced to launch with a hard paywall and handed out free 1 month discount codes manually. This way we learned that it takes more than a just an MVP to get people into a $80/m subscription with a hard paywall. But we also learned that giving out discount codes in exchange for feedback and support is a great way to win early supporters!
What was the growth strategy for viral.app and how did you scale?
Here's the breakdown of how we currently try to grow:
X: main focus is still X. We share lots of updates & case studies to demonstrate our product. By doing so, we try to piggyback viral topics in our target group (e.g. Cluely marketing tactics). One post about the multi-account strategy of Cluely went viral, got 80k views and led to multiple new subscribers. We usually only soft-shill our tool and this leads to people ask about "what tool are you using" in the comments. This helps boosting the reach of our posts.
SEO: we are heavily hunting backlinks for SEO and are wiriting some quality articles whenever we have time. So far this has not yielded any traffic, but we see it as a longterm investment. We also tried AI content in a separate blog but its not yet ranking well on Google. Either Google is already slashing AI-generated articles or we need to dive deeper and find other reasons to fix our SEO.
Affiliate: we are preparing a wider affiliate outreach on X and Youtube.
Product: we try to incorporate viral mobile app tactics into our B2B SaaS. Our analytics dashboards nudges markteters & builders to share screenshots on X to show off their performance. This way we can create organic virality.
LinkedIn: all three of us try to max out our weekly connection request quota within our ICP group. We crosspost most of our X announcements and content there (adjusted to LinkedIn style)
Reddit: we are using a tool that always sends us the most relevant posts to interact with so we can provide valuable replies and soft-market what we are building.
Free SEO "tools": we are building out a few free tools that should add value to our target customers and act as lead magnets on X, LinkedIn but also via SEO. Here are two examples: TikTok audience analytics tool & TikTok MCP server
Example of viral X post:
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What were the biggest lessons learned from building viral.app?
We probably missed quite a few customers & conversions due to not having free trials available. It was really frustrating seeing so many people bounce at the paywall. This made us implement a very low-priced entry tier. From what we can observe, some people use this plan to test the platform and then upgrade once they decide to fully use the tool. This might be a learning that could be applicable to other builders bootstrapping a higher-priced SaaS. Once trials are available with our payment provider, we should A/B test this approach.
Every week we see new hyped products launching left & ride that could be complementary features to viral.app. It's often not easy to stay focused on solving your core target problem first before jumping on other features. Right now we believe that it makes more sense to be the best in one thing rather then being just good in multiple features but the doubts of missing out regularly come back.
Building a reliable SaaS serving enterprise clients takes more time and iterations than initially expected.
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More about viral.app:
Who is the owner of viral.app?
Felix is the founder of viral.app.
When did Felix start viral.app?
2025
How much money has Felix made from viral.app?
Felix started the business in 2025, and currently makes an average of $60K/year.
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Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
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