In August 2024, Connor was dead broke. Zero dollars to his name.
Five months later, his app did $250,000 in a single month.
The app is Quittr, a mobile app that helps men quit porn. And the Quittr founder story is one of the cleanest examples of what happens when you take a proven playbook, point it at a painful problem nobody talks about, and go all-in on distribution.
The team is three guys: Connor (22, growth), Alex (19, product and dev), and Chris (17, design). Chris is Connor's little brother.
Brett Malinowski sat down with all three and pulled the whole playbook out of them: the $3K they started with, the $3 CPM creator deals, the onboarding flow that converts like crazy.
Here's the full breakdown, with every number they shared.
From dead broke to $37K in month one
The origin story starts with Connor sneaking into a hotel in Miami.
He bumped into Zach Yadegari there (yes, the Cal AI Zach). At the time, Zach was making about $1K a month from software. Connor was making zero, and he couldn't get over the fact that you could make one grand a month from an app at all.
Then he watched Zach and Blake Anderson run the Cal AI and Umax playbook to millions. Instead of just admiring it, he built a hypothesis on top of it: find a high-pain problem, make a simple mobile app, and pour everything into influencer distribution.
The problem he picked: porn addiction.
His logic was simple. A lot of men have this problem. Almost none of them talk about it. You're not going to tell your friend "I'm addicted to porn, how do I stop?" So the demand is huge, silent, and completely unserved by word of mouth.
Finding his cofounder took longer. Connor found Alex on YC's cofounder matching tool (free, anyone can use it) and messaged him on about eight different platforms, including through two apps Alex had built. Alex hated Connor's first idea. But a year later they met up in San Francisco, grabbed Chipotle, and Connor pitched the quit-porn app.
Alex's answer: "I built that last week."
So in late August 2024, Connor took the last $3,000 in his bank account and put it into marketing.
First month: $37,000.
The playbook they stole from Cal AI
Quittr didn't invent anything. That's kind of the point.
Cal AI proved the model: simple consumer app, viral short-form content, creator deals, aggressive paywall. Zach and Blake took it to a $50M-a-year business (I broke that whole story down in the Cal AI acquisition piece).
Connor copied the machine and changed the market.
The core loop, in his own words (from a tweet of his that went viral):
- → Pay a creator
- → They generate views
- → Views generate downloads
- → Downloads generate revenue
- → Reinvest the revenue into more creators
That's it. That's the whole growth engine.
The pricing makes the loop spin faster. Quittr charges $12.99 a month or $45 a year, and most people buy the yearly plan. So a big chunk of cash lands upfront, and they shovel it straight back into marketing.
They don't even sweat retention much yet. Yearly plans mean the cash is in the bank either way. (Not a strategy I'd run forever, but at this stage it funds the machine.)
One viral video did $40K in a single day.
Why they never pitch the anti-porn niche
This is the smartest part of the whole story.
You'd think a quit-porn app would sponsor anti-porn creators. They don't. That niche is tiny and everyone in it has already heard the pitch.
Instead, they buy adjacent audiences with the same underlying pain. Christian creators get the lust and temptation angle ("here are the top 3 ways to quit"). Fitness creators get low testosterone and no gains. Self-improvement creators get energy, focus, and actually being able to talk to women.
Same product. Three completely different pitches, each in the audience's own language.
And the creators never say "download this app if you have a problem." They demo it. They show the streak tracker on their own phone: "here's a tool I use, I track my streak on it." Product education disguised as a personal routine.
Nobody wants to raise their hand and admit the problem. So Quittr never asks them to. The viewer watches, recognizes himself, and later searches "how do I quit porn" on the App Store, where Quittr ranks through ASO.
One more thing they figured out early: this app has zero viral sharing. They tried "refer a friend, get $5." It flopped. Nobody shares a quit-porn app with their group chat, for obvious reasons. The product is private by nature, so every download has to be bought or earned through search. Which is exactly why the paid creator machine matters so much.
The $3 CPM creator machine
Quittr's internal rule: pay about $3 per 1,000 views.
But they never pitch creators a CPM. They pitch a retainer with a view guarantee. It sounds like this: "You average 250K views a video. Post 4 videos across Instagram and TikTok, that's 2 million views. We'll pay you $4,000, 20% upfront."
The creator hears a fat retainer. Quittr's spreadsheet says $3 to $3.20 per thousand views, depending on how good the creator is. Everybody wins.
Their biggest deal: one creator guarantees them 1 million views a month, plus bonuses on top.
The contracts also let Quittr run the creator's videos as paid ads for the length of the deal. So every organic winner becomes ad creative for free.
The outreach operation behind this is bigger than you'd guess:
- → A VA team in Pakistan (shoutout Omar) runs the DMs at volume.
- → The first line of every DM is "paid promo work." That's the line that gets message requests opened.
- → The pitch is short: Quittr, 100,000+ users, paid promo, reply or send us your number.
- → If a big creator ignores DMs but sells a $30 to $100 consulting call, they book the call and pitch the sponsorship there. (Sneaky. I love it.)
They run the deals through a creator platform that tracks the view guarantees and handles contracts and payouts, so Connor just follows up on posting schedules.
If this sounds familiar, it's the same view-guarantee model Jake used to take his push-up alarm app to $50K a month (I wrote that one up here). This is the current meta for consumer apps: guaranteed views, $2 to $3 CPMs, whitelisted ads.
The onboarding that does the selling
Connor said something in this interview that most app founders learn way too late: you can have the best app and the best branding, but if your onboarding is weak, you're lighting your marketing budget on fire.
Quittr's flow, step by step:
- → A quiz about your habits. It builds investment and personalizes everything after.
- → An education screen: the side effects of porn, the benefits of quitting, and how the app helps.
- → A review ask, placed right at the emotional peak. Those reviews are why they rank for "quit porn" searches.
- → Then the paywall, with your name on it: "Hey Alex, it's time to invest in yourself."
By the time you see a price, you've admitted the problem, seen the fix, and been addressed by name. $12.99 a month reads like nothing against "quit porn forever."
Connor claims one of the highest conversion rates in the industry. Given the revenue against their spend, I believe him.
The product itself started as literally a timer. A no-fap streak counter. That's what did the first $37K month.
Then they leveled it up: a community where users help each other out, breathing exercises, and a panic button that vibrates your phone and snaps you out of the moment when temptation hits. Ship the painkiller first, build the ecosystem after the revenue proves you should.
What you can steal from Quittr
You're probably not building a quit-porn app. Doesn't matter. The playbook transfers.
→ Pick a pain people won't say out loud. Silent problems have no word of mouth, which means weak competition and desperate search intent.
→ Copy a proven machine, change the market. Connor didn't innovate on the model, he innovated on the niche. The Cal AI playbook applied to a new pain.
→ Buy adjacent audiences, not the obvious one. The obvious niche is saturated and small. Translate your pitch into the language of neighboring audiences.
→ Pitch retainers, pay CPMs. A view guarantee at $3 per thousand views turns influencer marketing from gambling into math.
→ Let onboarding do the selling. Quiz, education, review ask, personalized paywall. In that order.
→ Yearly pricing funds growth. $45 upfront beats $12.99 trickling in when every dollar gets reinvested the same week.
Three guys aged 17, 19, and 22 started with $3K in late August and hit a quarter of a million a month by month five. That's the part I keep coming back to.
FAQ
What is Quittr and who built it?
Quittr is a mobile app that helps men quit porn, built by three founders: Connor (22, growth and marketing), Alex (19, product and development), and Chris (17, design). They launched in late August 2024 with $3,000 and reached $250,000 in monthly revenue in about five months.
How does Quittr make money?
Subscriptions: $12.99 a month or $45 a year. Most users pick the yearly plan, which puts cash in the bank upfront. The team reinvests that cash into influencer marketing, which is how they scale so fast.
How much does Quittr pay influencers?
Internally they target about $3 per 1,000 views. Publicly they pitch it as a retainer with a view guarantee, for example $4,000 for 4 videos guaranteeing 2 million combined views across TikTok and Instagram, with 20% paid upfront. Their contracts also let them reuse creator videos as paid ads.
Is the Quittr playbook repeatable for other apps?
The model transfers to any high-pain consumer problem: proven app mechanics, adjacent-niche influencer deals at fixed CPMs, and an onboarding flow that converts. Cal AI, the push-up alarm app Early, and Quittr all run versions of the same machine. The hard part is picking a pain point strong enough that people will pay to make it go away.
Every week I interview bootstrapped founders running playbooks like this one, with real numbers, on the Profitable Founder Podcast.
