Thread by @StevenCravotta

How I built @PuffCountApp, and leveraged TikTok to help 150k people quit vaping.

👇🏼👇🏼👇🏼

It all started when I was a junior in college and Juul hit the mainstream markets. Prior to this time I couldn’t buy a cig off someone if I wanted to because no one smoked nicotine. But almost overnight everyone I knew had a Juul. They were passed around like candy at parties.

I myself got caught up in this habit and quickly realized how expensive and unhealthy the habit could be. It was no easy task to just quit nicotine. Unknowingly we had all become addicted to that sweet feeling accompanied by fruity flavors.

I knew this was going to be a massive problem and people needed a solution. There were no quit vaping products at the time so I saw an opportunity. I quickly sketched out what I thought would be a good interface and started a design contest on @99designs

I got 105 submissions for the contest and ultimately chose the design you see today on the AppStore. Then I took the designs, a write up of the functionality of the app, liquidated my entire crypto portfolio and started getting quites from mobile design companies. I was ALL IN

After 2 months of development I officially launched Puff Count and now had to figure out how to market this thing. I tried paid ads / influencer deals and they all flopped. The

most successful attempt was a TikTok influencer who got me like 20k views and maybe 100 downloads. But their video sucked! They didn’t care about the product as much as I did. So I swallowed my pride and started making TikToks even though it was the socially cringe thing to do.

Looking back it was the best decision I have ever made. Around 100 videos later my TikTok profile is at 80k followers and has over 30M views. All of Puff Count’s downloads are driven exclusively from organic TikTok. $0 spend on paid marketing.

Building this product has been the hardest challenge of my life and theres a lot more that could be improved. But comments and reviews from people who have quit their addictions with the help of Puff Count remind me why I need to keep building.

If you enjoyed this thread be sure to give me a follow and follow PuffCount on TikTok 🙌🏼