How We Built It: $85K Mobile App | Starter Story

Jack and Nick Sweeney built a breathwork app called Coherence that has generated $85,000 in revenue and over 15,000 downloads in eight months. Their average monthly revenue is $11,000, with a best month of $22,000. The key strategic choice that set them apart: they built the content before they built the product. Jack, who had a background running a 20,000-subscriber YouTube channel, and Nick, a former Division I cross-country skier who recovered from a career-ending injury through breathwork, used social media as an idea validation engine. They did not write a single line of code until they had market evidence that people wanted what they were making.

Content as a Validation Engine

The brothers reversed the typical startup order. Instead of building an app and then trying to market it, they started by making free content about breathwork and nervous system regulation on X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok. Jack wrote threads on spiritual and esoteric topics; Nick focused on breathwork. They treated social media as an "idea battleground." A post would go up on X, and if it got traction, they would turn it into a short-form Instagram or TikTok script. If that performed well, they would expand it into a longer YouTube video. The logic was to move "upstream" from short, cheap formats to longer, more impactful ones, but only after validating that the topic resonated.