The 25-Year-Old App Designer Who Achieved 250 Million Downloads Without Marketing
The 25-year-old app designer who achieved 250 million downloads did so through purely organic means, investing zero dollars in traditional marketing campaigns.
This remarkable achievement represents one of the most impressive examples of viral growth in the modern app ecosystem.
The young entrepreneur’s companies have generated over $50 million in revenue over the past few years, establishing him as a significant force in the social media application space targeted at Generation Z.
His journey illustrates how understanding user psychology, creating frictionless experiences, and leveraging existing social platforms can lead to explosive growth without traditional marketing expenditures.
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Table of Contents
The Birth of NGL
His most successful venture, an anonymous Q&A app called NGL (short for “not gonna lie”), has amassed over 250 million downloads since launching in 2022.
The app reached the number one position on app store charts in more than 150 countries worldwide.
The concept behind NGL is remarkably straightforward – it allows users to post a link on their Instagram story or other social platforms.
When friends tap this link, they can send anonymous messages to the original poster, who receives these messages within the NGL app and can then reply publicly on Instagram.
“It’s just like an anonymous version of Instagram’s existing feature,” explains the app designer.
This simple but powerful concept tapped into the fundamental human desire for honest communication without social constraints.
The application offers premium features as well, including various link tools and analytics, serving both everyday users and content creators.
The Journey to Success
Before creating NGL, the young entrepreneur had already developed seven other applications, experiencing both successes and failures along the way.
His first app, called Leader, was essentially a Generation Z version of Foursquare that allowed users to earn points by visiting different locations.
Unfortunately, when COVID-19 hit in 2020, the app’s core functionality became irrelevant as people could no longer travel freely.
Rather than becoming discouraged, he quickly pivoted.
Just six weeks later, he built an app called Zoom University with some friends, addressing the problem of college students feeling isolated during the pandemic.
This app functioned as a college double dating platform with live video, allowing pairs of friends to match and chat with other pairs.
This creative solution to pandemic-era socializing garnered several hundred thousand downloads and reached the top 10 in the social category.
Finding Mentorship and Building Experience
The early success caught attention in the industry.
The former president of Musicly, who had led the billion-dollar ByteDance acquisition, recruited the then 21-year-old designer.
Under this mentorship, he helped build half a dozen applications, the most successful being Wink – one of the largest “make new friends” apps in the world.
Wink addressed the problem of young people having fewer connections on Snapchat compared to Instagram by creating an easy way for users to connect their Snapchat accounts and start swiping left or right to find new friends.
This application achieved approximately 60-70 million downloads, further developing his understanding of viral mechanics.
The NGL Breakthrough
The idea for NGL came in October 2021 when Instagram rolled out a feature allowing all users, not just those with over 10,000 followers, to post links in their stories.
The app designer and his friends immediately recognized this as an opportunity to create a viral application, though they initially believed many others would have the same idea.
Surprisingly, the app saw almost no traction for the first six months after launch.
The breakthrough finally came in April-May 2022 when they paid an influencer about $50 to post an NGL link on her story.
One of her followers, a popular high school student in New Zealand, used the app, which then began spreading throughout the school.
The initial growth remained limited to certain regions, particularly New Zealand and Australia.
The team realized that the app wasn’t spreading as widely as they hoped because many potential users had Android phones, but NGL was only available on iOS at that time.
They quickly developed an Android version, launching it just three weeks later.
The Power of Viral Loops
To accelerate growth, they created approximately 5-10 TikTok videos.
One of these videos reached a million views, triggering explosive growth.
From that point forward, they never spent another dollar on marketing, yet achieved 250 million downloads through entirely organic means.
“We did all 250 million downloads with no marketing, zero dollars, 100% organic,” the app designer explains.
The growth was astonishing – from approximately 1,000 downloads per day, NGL suddenly exploded to 1.5 million downloads daily within just a few days.
At its peak, the app was being downloaded at a rate of 90,000 installations per hour.
The Psychology of Virality
The success of NGL wasn’t accidental but by design.
The app creator explains that the key was creating an extremely effective viral loop.
The user experience begins when someone sees a friend posting an NGL link on their Instagram story.
This immediately provides social proof and makes the app seem trustworthy – if a friend is using it, it must be acceptable and safe.
“Your first experience with NGL is seeing your friend post it,” he explains.
“You immediately have this stamp of approval that your friend thinks it’s cool, and therefore it is cool because that’s how young people work.”
After tapping a friend’s link and sending a message, users encounter a prominent button offering them the chance to “get their own messages.”
Having already experienced how the app works from the sender’s perspective, they’re comfortable downloading it themselves, creating a powerful cycle of adoption.
Optimizing for Rapid Adoption
The app’s onboarding process was intentionally minimalistic – just one simple step requiring users to enter their Instagram username, with no login, authentication, or phone number needed.
This approach eliminated friction in the sign-up process and allowed users to start using the app immediately.
“Our onboarding is extremely simple,” states the designer.
“When it was going viral, our onboarding was one step, which was literally just type your Instagram username.”
This simplicity extended to the entire user experience.
Every screen features one central action – typically a large, obvious button that sometimes pulses or wiggles to draw attention.
This design philosophy eliminates user confusion and hesitation, guiding them naturally through the intended flow.
The Friend Graph Concept
One of the most fascinating aspects of NGL’s growth strategy involved targeting what the creator calls “friend graphs” – interconnected networks of people who know each other through school, work, or other social contexts.
“The friend graph is just like the amount of people that you know and that I know, and the mutual friends that you and I share,” he explains.
By getting enough people within a single friend graph to use the app, it would naturally spread throughout the entire network, then jump to connected networks as users shared it with friends in other schools or communities.
The key threshold appeared to be around 1,000 users within a short timeframe.
Once that critical mass was achieved, the app could permeate the entire friend graph and then expand outward exponentially.
Monetization and Scale Challenges
NGL monetizes through weekly subscriptions, with pricing adapted to each country’s GDP to ensure accessibility worldwide.
Premium features include hints about message senders (location, phone type) and the ability to see who has viewed your link.
The subscription approach proved successful, but the app’s explosive growth created significant challenges.
As download numbers skyrocketed, the team faced technical issues with scaling their infrastructure.
Software providers occasionally turned off services due to the unprecedented volume of API requests, and the costs of maintaining these systems rapidly accumulated.
Complicating matters further, Apple’s payment system delays payouts by 60 days, creating a cash flow crisis.
“We had to take a loan at one point because we had to pay for all this software that we just couldn’t afford because we didn’t get paid yet,” the app designer recalls.
The first three to six months after going viral were extremely challenging, though the situation eventually stabilized.
Current State and Future Vision
Today, NGL continues to perform remarkably well, generating approximately 100 million downloads annually without any marketing expenditure.
The app has transitioned to a largely autopilot state, requiring minimal intervention from the founding team while continuing to generate significant revenue.
The young entrepreneur has now shifted his focus to a new venture called Bags, a consumer cryptocurrency trading app.
This platform aims to combine cryptocurrency trading with social features, allowing users to follow friends’ trading activities and learn from top performers.
“I wanted to build a business that I could build for more time and that could be something that evolves with me and also evolves with the industry itself,” he explains regarding his new focus on cryptocurrency.
Design Principles for Viral Success
Throughout the conversation, several key design principles emerge that contributed to the success of NGL and other applications:
Simplicity Above All
Every screen should have one obvious action for users to take, typically represented by a large, prominent button.
This eliminates confusion and guides users naturally through the intended flow.
Minimize Friction
The sign-up process should be as simple as possible, requiring minimal information and steps.
For NGL, this meant just entering an Instagram username without any authentication or verification steps.
Meet User Expectations
Products should work the way users intuitively expect them to work.
When experiences align with expectations, users perceive the product as high-quality and trustworthy.
Visual Psychology
Small visual cues like pulsing or wiggling buttons can significantly increase engagement.
Color choices also matter – NGL uses red and orange, colors associated with food brands like McDonald’s and Wendy’s, because “people like tapping red buttons.”
Create Anticipation
Strategic use of loading screens or progress indicators can create anticipation and make the final result seem more valuable.
These “moments of anticipation” prime users to appreciate what comes next.
Conclusion
The story of this 25-year-old app designer illustrates how understanding human psychology, creating frictionless experiences, and leveraging existing social platforms can lead to extraordinary success without traditional marketing expenditures.
His journey from building his first app at age 18 to achieving 250 million downloads and $50 million in revenue demonstrates the power of persistence, adaptation, and learning through failure.
For aspiring entrepreneurs, particularly those interested in creating viral consumer applications, his experience offers valuable insights into product design, user psychology, and growth strategies.
The success of NGL wasn’t merely about building a useful product but creating an experience that naturally encouraged sharing and spread through existing social networks.
By designing specifically for virality and understanding how ideas propagate through friend graphs, he achieved what most app creators only dream of – massive organic adoption without marketing costs.
As he now turns his attention to the cryptocurrency space with Bags, he brings these same principles of user-centered design and viral growth mechanics to a new frontier, potentially revolutionizing how everyday users interact with digital currencies just as he previously transformed anonymous social messaging.
We strongly recommend that you check out our guide on how to take advantage of AI in today’s passive income economy.
