How a 14-year-old scaled a gamified fitness app to $14K/month

Executive overview

Most founders struggle to get their first users. Evan scaled his app, Locked, to $14K/month in four months with a single distribution channel: paid influencer partnerships.

The key is closing creators at a CPM below your app's RPM. This makes every deal profitable by design before a single video goes live.

Influencer distribution, priced below your RPM, is a repeatable, scalable growth engine for mobile apps.

Building the app

• Locked is a gamified habit/focus app with characters, XP, leaderboards, and badges
• Paywall: $40/year (3-day free trial) or $7/week; abandoned checkout offers $20/year discount
• Built in ~6 weeks: designed in Figma, developed in Xcode using YouTube tutorials and Claude Code
• Prior apps: Problem Pal (peaked at $2K/month, later sold); Clear AI (failed to gain traction)
• Stack: Figma, Claude Code ($200/month), Superwall (paywall A/B testing, 1% of revenue), Supabase (free)

Finding and vetting influencers

• Search your niche on Instagram or TikTok; open creator profiles; send a cold DM starting with "Paid promo?"
• Filter by engagement quality, not just view count — high-quality comments signal a real audience
• Niche alignment matters: creator content must naturally fit the app's use case
• Seamless integrations outperform forced placements — the app should make sense in the video
• Get them on a call before committing to any deal

Structuring profitable deals

• Core principle: close creators at a CPM below your app's RPM (Evan targets $1–$1.50 CPM vs. $2–$3 RPM)
• Four deal types:
  1. Flat rate — e.g. $500/reel or $1,200/four reels; use only with proven high-view creators
  2. CPM deal — e.g. $1–$2 per 1K views with a hard spend cap
  3. Minimum view clause (MVC) — e.g. $800 with a 600K-view floor; Evan's default structure; creator posts more if they miss the floor
  4. Bonus deal — base fee plus a milestone bonus (e.g. +$500 at 1M views)
• Always include a spend cap on CPM deals to limit downside

Launching and scaling partnerships

• Send written video requirements and a contract; set a one-week deadline for the first video
• Require the app to appear within the first 15 seconds of the video
• Track installs and revenue spikes against posting dates to measure ROI
• If a creator converts, negotiate a larger follow-on deal; if not, move on
• One Jeremiah Jones video (~1M views) generated ~$3K revenue and ~1,800 downloads for an $800 spend