I bootstrapped 1 Second Everyday, a modern day video journal, to millions of users & millions in ARR. AMA!

Hi! First off, sorry for the delay, my dad's been in the hospital since I posted this and I'm just finally catching up to everything 🙏. We do all our communication over Slack, Zoom, Threads, Notion, and before covid bi-annual company retreats somewhere in the world.

I'm a product guy, so I won't be able to get into the nitty gritty on the tech side, our amazing CTO would be best to get into the details, but we use... Github, AWS, Heroku, Jira, confluence, Sendgrid, Instabug, Figma, Intercom, and I'm sure I'm forgetting a bunch. We've tried a lot of things over the years. If you're looking for something more specific let me know :)

Hi! First off, sorry for the delay, my dad's been in the hospital since I posted this and I'm just finally catching up to everything 🙏.

1. My original background is in 3D VFX and animation. I was working in advertising, but I was not creatively fulfilled. And I was constantly working 100 hour workweeks on crazy deadlines. I saved up half my paycheck (living frugally) for 2 years so I could afford to quit my job. I've spent my entire life trying to keep a diary, but I couldn't never stick the habit of writing about my day every day for longer than a week. When I quit my job I wanted to finally start a diary I wouldn't forgot to do after a week, so I decided to lean into what I was already good at... video. This is back in 2011! The iPhone could finally shoot in HD and so I thought... what is the minimum I need to capture per day to remember my day... and that's how 1 Second Everyday was born.

It wasn't intended to be a company, or an app, it was just an idea for myself to start journaling. And it worked! It was only then that I realized maybe others would benefit from this and so I googled "How do you make an app?".

Eventually I found devs that could help me bring my vision to life. So I do think my background in video and design helped tremendously, but I had to start from scratch in terms of tech and "building a company"... that involved finding people I knew and didn't know to round out a team that could go all the way. And sometimes finding the right people takes time.

2. The first couple of years of the company were extremely rough. I'm convinced that if I had raised VC funding, the company wouldn't have made it. We were too early to grow quickly back then. You couldn't share video on social networks, hard drives on phones were tiny, I could go on and on... but we were profitable since Day 2 because we charged for the app on the App Store and that allowed me to chug along for the first couple of years until I found the COO/Co-founder... a CTO... a CPO... and as time went on the market for what we were doing grew organically.

During those years some video app with millions in VC funding would launch and I always thought we were done for... but we just keep moving forward trying to ignore the noise... we launched at the same time as Vine... and now... RIP Vine... we only spent what we could afford to spend, but every year we did better than the last so overall we knew we had something special, but it took a while to realize it :) The #1 biggest challenge for all those early years was probably Android. I made the mistake of building an Android version in 2013 before we had the resources to support it. It took like 7 years for us to get the Android version of the app to a place we were proud of. Long Story short... I tried to bite more than we could chew too soon because I was getting a dozen emails a day asking for an Android version. Sometimes what your users want is not something you're ready to provide and do it well.

I hope some of that was helpful! 🤞

Hi! First off, sorry for the delay, my dad's been in the hospital since I posted this and I'm just finally catching up to everything 🙏.

I have a bit of an unusual story for this. I had zero money to fund this, so I spent months putting together a Kickstarter for this. And we ended up getting the most backers ever for an App on Kickstarter. Til this day I believe! This was back in 2012... early days of Kickstarter, so once the project got funded it blew up and got a ton of press. 12,821 people backed the project and so the day we launched we already had 12,821 users. And we were forced to make the app free for 24 hours on the app store, so word got around that the app was free for just a 24 hour window. At the time there were tons of blogs and twitter accounts that would let people know when an App became available for free. By the end of our launch day we were next to Instagram on the App Store rankings.

While that was awesome in some ways... it was also awful... Apple only gave us 100 testflight invites in a year... so we went from 50 beta testers to 50,000 users in 24 hours and the app was sooooooo buggy... we got a customer support ticket every 5 seconds... it took months of patching up the app. I do not miss those days... I answered every single customer support email... many hours of every day.

But... in those conversations of our users... everyone was extremely nice and excited to use the app and til this day we get the most amazing emails from our customers telling us we're the most important app on their phone. We have customers with 8 years of every single day of their life logged :) So even back then answering every single support ticket I was convinced we had something special so I put my heart and soul into it :)

Anyways... Thanks Miguel!

Hi! First off, sorry for the delay, my dad's been in the hospital since I posted this and I'm just finally catching up to everything 🙏.

I posted some stories in the above questions, but one that comes to mind... there was a guy that stole the idea for 1SE from watching my TED talk about the ideal... he used my TED talk to raise capital to build an app for the same thing. He copy and pasted word for word everything I wrote in my Kickstarter page and put it on the front center of his website... and he launched before we did...

Those were some of the darkest days of my life to be honest...

But eventually, his app died and Today we're still here. Over the years there have been countless instances of "we're not gonna make it", and we just huddled and came up with ways to get thru it and that's a testament to our brilliant team. We've hired excellent humans and we've been able to defeat every existential challenge so far 🤞

Thanks Kevin!

Hi! First off, sorry for the delay, my dad's been in the hospital since I posted this and I'm just finally catching up to everything 🙏.

We're an iOS/Android App, so we don't get a lot of traffic on our website. Most of our downloads come from word of mouth (we don't do any Ad spend), press, social media, and Apple features us a lot. We even got "Best of 2019" from Apple: https://9to5mac.com/2019/12/03/apple-announces-best-apps-and-games-of-2019-from-new-york-event/

And this past New Years we got over a million downloads just in a single day actually. BUT to be fair, New Years day is by far the biggest day of the year for us every year. We were the #1 App in the USA and 20+ other countries around the world. You can probably look up these stats from Sensor Tower, which is what we use for this type of thing.

Not a scam 😇

This makes my night Primer! I've had a rough couple of days with family stuff so you just raised my mood significantly :) Hugs from Brooklyn!