How @CodyKo Made The #1 App in The App Store While in College

Name: How @CodyKo Made The #1 App in The App Store While in College
Uploaded: 2023-10-06T18:18:29+00:00
Duration: 59 s
Channel: Sam Parr
Description: In this first‑person recount, a senior college student describes how he taught himself app development by buying a book and creating an app called…

6 Oct 2023 · 1 min

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In this first‑person recount, a senior college student describes how he taught himself app development by buying a book and creating an app called iCapThat (also known as CapThat). The app lets users select or take a photo and automatically overlays a humorous caption from an internal database of drunkenly generated phrases, presented in white font. To evade Apple’s review restrictions on inappropriate content, he programmed the caption database to be time‑locked, releasing the “dirty” captions only after the typical one‑week review period, allowing the app to pass review. The strategy succeeded, and the app rose to the #1 spot in the App Store, surpassing major brands like eBay and Google. Despite the rapid success, the creator admits he lacked any knowledge of monetization or business strategy and was unsure how to profit from the app.

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I was a senior in college and I was like, I really want to know how to make an app. So I just bought a book, taught myself. I know it was called CapThat or iCapThat. iCapThat. You would select a picture from your library or take a picture. It had like an internal database of funny captions that we all just like got drunk and came up with. And so it would automatically apply one to the picture in white font. But like all the captions were sort of general enough where people thought there was like AI going on. Like, what's an example? A stupid one would be like, you take a picture of someone in here and it'd be like addicted to cocaine or something like that. And people would see that and be like, oh, he is. Yes, that's so true. It got rejected by the Apple review board or whatever for being inappropriate. So I wrote some code so that the internal database was timed because I knew the app review process took like a week. After 7 days, it would release all the dirty captions. So I got by the Apple review system. Amazing. It was the number one app in the App Store above like eBay and Google. And I'm on campus like, I don't know what to do because I know I should be making money from this, but I'm not. And I have no idea how to make money or anything about business.