"Last summer, Bria Sullivan was getting ready to launch her app, an adorable companion called Focus Friend meant to help people manage their screen time. Her outlandish dream was to get 100,000 downloads. She'd been building the app with Hank Green, a creator with a huge audience, so she thought maybe, maybe, Focus Friend could be a top-10 app in the productivity category. Even that felt like a stretch, though. "Our category has ChatGPT, it has Google," she says. "I mean, productivity includes Gmail!""
"But in August, thanks to a lot of promotion from Green and his also-famous brother, plus a bunch of media coverage ( including from The Verge), the app started to take off. It hit the top 10 in its category. Then top 10 on the overall charts. When it hit the #4 spot, Green told Sullivan he wanted to reach number one."
Bria Sullivan launched Focus Friend as a companion app to help people manage screen time, initially hoping for about 100,000 downloads. She built the app with creator Hank Green and quietly released it on iOS. Heavy promotion from Green and his also-famous brother, plus media coverage including The Verge, drove rapid growth: the app moved into the top 10 of productivity, then the overall charts. It climbed from #4 to #2 and on August 19 reached #1 on both the iOS App Store and Google Play. Sullivan prioritized the iOS success and received congratulatory messages and celebratory videos.
Read at The Verge
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