How Alexander grew his iOS app to MRR $1,500 plus.

Meet Alexander Picard.

Alexander was born and raised in a small city outside of Philadelphia called Harleysville.

This is his startup journey.

The story told by Alexander Picard

The early days

My first love / passion I discovered was basketball and then around the age of 6 or 7 my dad introduced me to Apple. Thats when I found my second passion, tech.

Grew up and went to school to play basketball, I was an avid gamer but always had an itch to create ‘something’. After school I tried to play overseas basketball, ended up not making the cut.

Started working my mom’s company selling audio visual systems. Wasn’t in love with it and that itch to start creating something was getting bigger.

Becoming an entrepreneur

I decided to quit my job and live off savings to push my startup idea and teach myself design and code. The first app I built was a hyper location based chat app that I worked on from 2017 to early 2020.

The idea came to my head when I was at a food court and I thought it would be cool if you could dive into a chatroom with other people in that food court.

You would find chatrooms by scanning the map so you could find the exact location of people you wanted to chat with.

The app had chatrooms for stock conversations, football / basketball games, parties, and more.

I went through two accelerators with this product and was able to grow it to 4k users. Couldn’t keep any users though, retention was terrible and I couldn’t find a way to make money. Then Covid hit and people weren’t going out which completely destroyed my app.

I then pivoted the app to a live streaming app focused on helping creators make money. The idea was that when a creator would go live in order for someone to watch that live they would have to buy minutes that they can use watching the live.

The app had minute packages that were $0.99 for 15 minutes, $1.99 for 30 minutes and 3.99 for 60 minutes. If you bought a 15 min package you could be in a live chat for 15 minutes before getting kicked out. The stream would make money per minute from each view in their stream.

It was doing really well, had about 1000 users, 50 active streamers and each streamer would consistently make $4-9 each stream. It would take years for some streamers to make $1, the issue was getting the adoption.

It was just no possible to get the consistent users on the app when there was no one going live.

Family time … and time for the next project

In 2021 I had a son 👶 so I ended up shutting down the streaming project and focusing on family / thinking of my next idea.

One thing that happened after my son was born was that I was constantly sharing photos with family / friends. Having to go to my favorites in my photo album to share them started to get cumbersome since I had so many favorite photos of my son.

I thought to myself how cool would it be if I could just add my favorite photos to my keyboard so that I could share them from my keyboard way quicker since these photos would have names attached to them.

I also started thinking about my previous startup journey and how I was constantly sharing the link to download the app or the website link. Copy and pasting got really annoying, why not have it ready to share right on your keyboard?

That’s how OneTap was invented. From that idea on I and my co-founder Om Chachad started mapping out the whole product until we launched it.

What is OneTap?

OneTap is an app that allows you to share content on Mac that you’re frequently sharing or need available to share like your resume, link to your portfolio, etc right from your keyboard with OneTap Keyboard shortcuts.

OneTap Keyboard Shortcuts live on your keyboard allowing you to access them whenever your keyboard is active.

Building and launching

We started working on OneTap in early 2021. At the end of 2021 we got accepted into the University of Albany tech partnership program. This program consisted of cohorts of students who would pick submitted ideas from the public to work on for a semester.

OneTap (Actually called ZoZo at the time and until 2023 where we rebranded to OneTap) was one of the ideas I pitched and it ended up getting selected.

These students built an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) that we were able to get out in the market and start testing. We just shared it on X as much as possible showcasing how it worked and people reached out to me asking to test it. That is actually how I met Om Chachad.

OneTap beta launched in June 2022 and we launched the app in September 2022.

Usage and customers

OneTap got its first 100 users the first two weeks of our beta. We closed the beta with 400 users. They all came from X. I shared the link to join our TestFlight (Beta) build and people were signing up like crazy.

Today we have almost 10k total users, 1200 monthly active users and about 400-500 daily active users. MRR varies between $1,500 - $2,500.

Promoting the product

We’ve been bootstrapping OneTap since day 1. We did a couple of creator promo’s (like tech influencers posting about OneTap) to find the type of creators that drove in the best results.

Then I started really diving into App Store search optimization (ASO) and that’s what really drove in serious growth. We get 95% of our new users each month from people browsing / searching the App Store - which is free marketing by the way.

Most of my time goes into learning more about ASO and how I can use it to drive more users into OneTap. I have written a blog post about my ASO learnings.

I also found that smaller creators in our niche drove in way more results than working with the big time creators out there. We’re not directly working with any of the smaller creators. But when they decide to review our product on their own we often see some positive impact.

And finally - please download OneTap and try it out.

If you want to connect with Alexander you can find him on X.

If you’re looking for someone to design, build or help your app with ASO, Alexander also do freelance work and you can email him here.