How Cody Ko Took "I’d Cap That" App To 4 Million Users In 4 Months

Cody Ko, a senior at Duke University, wanted to learn app development. With no formal background in coding, he picked up a book and taught himself iOS development.

To put his new knowledge to use, Cody envisioned a frictionless, humorous photo captioning app.

The Genesis of "I’d Cap That"

Cody created "I'd Cap That," an app that allowed users to select or take a picture and automatically apply a humorous caption from an internal database.

The name itself is self-explanatory. Cap stands for Caption.

Captioning photos wasn’t a new idea, but he aimed to do it better. He built a database of funny captions with friends over beers.

The results were often hilarious - like adding "addicted to cocaine" to an innocent photo of someone studying. This helped massively with sharing.

Navigating Challenges Apple’s Review Process

Cody's app was initially rejected for inappropriate content so he implemented a timing system for the caption database.

Knowing the Apple review process would take about a week, Cody coded the app to release cleaner captions initially, which would be approved.

After 7 days, the app would unlock all the edgy, potentially controversial captions.

The Rise to #1 in the App Store

The app's success came from its social sharing features. Integration with iOS 5's Twitter API made it easy for users to share their captioned photos. This product-led viral sharing, similar to Wordle, led to:

• Daily doubling of downloads

• 4 million users in 4 months

• #1 position in the App Store

• Surpassing major apps like eBay and Google

Despite its popularity, Cody initially struggled with monetization and had no business experience to guide him.

A startup CEO from Palo Alto reached out, offering to buy the app for $50K (half in cash and half in stock). Cody accepted the offer and joined the company.

His first task was creating "I’d Cap That+," a paid version of the app. Upon launch, it generated an impressive $200K almost immediately.

Over time, various iterations of the app (e.g., "I’d Cap That 2" and "I’d Cap That 2 Plus") collectively earned around $500K.

In 2024, "I'd Cap That" would easily make 5x-10x more as memes have made it to the mainstream and TikTok provides insane distribution. Old ideas often work.

Top Tweets of the day

1/

Your environment dictates your behavior unless you are extremely special and its very rare to be special. James Clear talks about why environment matters more than motivation in Atomic Habits.

One reasons why America thrives is because everyone is surrounded by winners so winning is a natural behavior.

Always exceptions to the rule but the rule stays.

You can find a 10x engineer from India at a 1x price if you are willing to work hard on finding the hidden gem and train them but the probability is much higher for you to find them in America.

The price won't be 1x in that case but the probability will be much higher even though 1.4 billion Indians vs 334 million Americans. Where it gets better is you can get a 10x Indian engineer at a 5x price and get 2 for 1 but then you waste more time instead of more money.

One example to notice this is you put the same Indians in America and you see them thriving in Elon Musk's companies due to H1B. Same person. Different environment.

2/

A lot true now than it ever was before.

AI can do moderation extremely cheaply than humans and can moderate 24 x 7.

Pieter Levels uses AI moderation on his chats and it is pretty cheap at $8/month.

It auto mods the Telegram chat for Nomads with thousands of people in it, auto mods city reviews that is crowdsourced, auto generates pros and cons for each city, and many other things.

Someone even built a AI moderation for chat as a SaaS and it has essentially replaced a human moderator from a 3rd-world country that costs $1000/month with a $50/month SaaS.

3/

Building LLMs is overrated. Build an AI wrapper instead.

At the end of the day, 4-5 winners (maybe 2-3) will win the LLM race. Just like Olympics.

On the other hand, AI Wrappers will mint 10,000+ multi-millionaires.

Rabbit Holes

1. How to Build a $66,667 SaaS by Timo

2. Permission Priming by UserOnboard

3. Trends in AI agents by /r/Entrepreneur

What’d ya think of today’s masterpiece? Hit ‘reply’ and let me know—don’t hold back, I can take it (probably). 😜

First time here? Join the cool kids’ club.

Also, I’m on X because apparently, tweeting is still a thing.

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2. The Ultimate Guide To Social Listening (LINK)

3. Destroy competitors ranking with Blackhat SEO (LINK)