How two college students rebuilt their app to reach $30K MRR

Executive overview

Eyal and Yahli Hazan launched a sports betting analytics app, drove 20 downloads a day with influencer marketing, and still couldn't break $2K MRR. High trial conversion but near-zero paid conversion revealed the product itself was the problem.

They shut down all marketing, spent four months rebuilding from scratch, and relaunched. Paid conversion jumped above 50%. Ten weeks later they hit $30K MRR.

Distribution without a good product creates a ceiling, not a business.

Diagnosing a broken product

• High download-to-trial rate (45%) masked a broken experience — only 13% converted to paid.
• Trial-but-no-retain signal means users believed in the idea but were let down by the app.
• The original app required users to manually check bets across sportsbooks — users wanted answers, not tools.
• Superwall and PostHog surfaced the drop-off pattern; the team had to be willing to act on it.

The rebuild decision

• Shut down all marketing for four months — no revenue growth, only engineering and design.
• Rebuilt around the core insight: give users the right answer, not a research interface.
• Relaunched April 15 at $1,700 MRR; went all-in on marketing for the NBA playoffs the following month.
• Paid conversion exceeded 50% immediately after relaunch.
• Hit 40K MRR peak and 2,000 downloads in a single day within 2.5 months.

Four-step playbook for building a great app

1. Know exactly who you're building for and what their specific pain point is.
2. Listen to your data — two numbers tell you everything: trial conversion rate and paid conversion rate.
3. Obsess over analytics — track feature clicks to find your most compelling value proposition; use that in marketing.
4. Scale through influencer marketing — their 70th video hit 600K views and pushed ARR from $8K to $38K in three days.

Tech stack and unit economics

• Built on React Native with TypeScript and Python for ML and data fetching.
• Database: Neon. Revenue and paywalling: RevenueCat and Superwall.
• Data APIs: ~$100/month. LLM costs: ~$20/month. Neon: ~$10/month.
• Marketing spend: ~$10,000/month.
• Overall margin: ~50%.