His app jumped to $17K/mo using this unique marketing strategy

Welcome back to Breadcrumb. Your weekly digest of people building real profitable businesses with simple AI tools.

📖 Today's story

Everyone will tell you the same thing. Post hundreds of UGC videos on Tiktok, scale with Meta Ads.

Ben Leavitt did none of that. He’s never made a Tiktok video and he never tried to go viral. But his tiny app makes $17,000 a month.

WHO

Ben Leavitt

WHAT

Follow Buddy

FOUNDED

2025

REVENUE

$17,000 a month

For seven years Ben ran a marketing agency. His whole job was helping companies grow on Instagram, so he made a lot of videos about getting more followers.

But he kept seeing the same thing. People didn't really care about gaining followers. They wanted to know who unfollowed them.

There are already many app who does exactly that - but almost all of them were shady. They made you hand over your Instagram password, which breaks Instagram’s TOS and gets your account banned.

Ben found a safe way to do the same thing. Instagram already lets you download your own data, and that file holds the answer.

So he then made one video showing people how, and it got over a million views. And that was his proof that people really wanted this.

But he sat on the idea for about four years.

Every year he’d check what it would cost to build the app, and he waited until the price made sense.

One day he finally found a developer, built the app and called it FollowBuddy.

Today it has 82,000 users and 3,128 of them pay. All of that came in without a single ad.

But how?

📈 How He Got Customers

Ben grew the app one way: YouTube search.

Think about how you use YouTube.

Sometimes you’re scrolling your YouTube looking for the next interesting video, but sometimes you wanna know how to do something.

So you search on YouTube:

"How do I fix this?" "What’s the best app for that?"

So Ben writes down every way a person might search for his problem. He checks how many people search each phrase, then picks the ones most likely to convert.

When someone searches "best app to see who unfollowed me," you don’t have to sell them hard. You just have to be the video that shows up in the search results.

Then he records a quick video for each one. Sometimes it’s just a 20 minute screen recording.

Now when anyone searches any version of "who unfollowed me on Instagram," Ben’s video is what they see. Again and again.

Now here’s the part that makes it all work.

None of these videos go viral. He’s not pulling millions of views. Most of them get a few thousand, and some only a few hundred.

But he makes the video once, and it keeps working forever. Every single day people search that question, and every single day his video is sitting right there to catch them.

One video on its own is a tiny trickle. But he keeps stacking them, and the trickles add up to a steady stream that runs every day, for years.

That slow build is how he got to 82,000 users and over 3,000 paying customers.

His app makes $17K/month last time reported and it’s still growing.

💡 Key takeaways

I hope you enjoyed today’s issue.

See you next week,
Jason Lee

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