How Two Brothers Built an $85K App by Making Content First

Jack and Nick Sweeney launched their breathwork app Coherence eight months ago and have already hit $85,000 in revenue with 15,000 downloads. But here's the part that makes their story unusual: Jack didn't write a single line of code in the entire codebase. And they didn't build the app first and then try to market it. They did the opposite.

The Content-First Validation Loop

The Sweeney brothers started with content, not code. Jack was writing threads on spiritual and esoteric topics on X (formerly Twitter). Nick focused on breath work content. They weren't trying to sell anything—they were making content about things that genuinely excited them. "If we weren't just making that content for fun, we never would have discovered what was going viral and what content was gonna work," Jack explains.

The breakthrough came from a single tweet. Jack wrote about something called the "Vortex Breath" and posted it. The next morning, it was going super viral. That tweet became the seed of the entire app. The brothers had a system for validating ideas: they would test posts on X first, then repurpose winning content into Instagram and TikTok short-form videos, and if those performed well, they'd turn them into longer YouTube videos. "We basically reverse engineered the content into the app," Jack says.