How our app made $100K in 90 days | Starter Story

A few weeks ago, a tweet caught the attention of the founder of Starter Story: an app called HLRide had generated $100,000 in revenue in its first three months, driven almost entirely by a single TikTok account. The founders, Nikita and Yevgeny, built the app from their bedrooms in Serbia and Poland, and they agreed to share the exact playbook that got them there. Their story is a case study in a growth-first approach to product development, where the marketing strategy came before the product itself.

The Idea Came from TikTok, Not a Whiteboard

Nikita and Yevgeny didn't start with a brilliant product idea and then figure out how to sell it. They started by watching TikTok. During their research, they noticed a flood of videos about "AI humanizers"—tools that take AI-generated text and rewrite it to bypass AI detectors. The topic was clearly hot, with proven demand and viral content already circulating. Their logic was simple: if other creators could get millions of views on this topic, they could build a tool for it and promote it the same way. In just two weeks, they built HLRide, a simple app where a user pastes AI-generated text, clicks "humanize," and receives text that reads as human-written. The primary users are students and marketers who need to avoid detection by tools like Turnitin or GPTZero. The product was built to fit a marketing channel that was already wor