The Story
Eyal and Yahli Hazan are two college students who built PropGPT - a sports betting analytics platform that uses machine learning to analyze picks. They launched, got great initial traction with 20 downloads/day, but were stuck at $1-2K MRR for months. Almost nobody stayed after the trial.
Instead of pushing harder on marketing, they did something counterintuitive: they shut down all marketing and spent 4 months completely rebuilding the product from scratch.
After relaunching, they hit $30K MRR in just 10 weeks, with a peak of $40K MRR and 2,000 downloads in a single day.
Key Insights
The Problem: Great Distribution, Bad Product
- •Had influencer marketing figured out
- •20 downloads/day right off the bat
- •High conversion to free trial (48%)
- •But only 13% converted from trial to paid
- •Stuck at $1-2K MRR
What the Data Told Them
- •High trial conversion = people liked the IDEA
- •Low paid conversion = the PRODUCT wasn't delivering
- •Users wanted answers, not tools to find answers themselves
- •Original app made users do too much work
The 4-Month Rebuild
- •Shut down all marketing
- •Pure engineering and design work
- •Rebuilt to give users what they actually wanted
- •Relaunched April 15th at $1,700 MRR
- •Hit $40K MRR peak 2.5 months later
4-Step Playbook for Building Great Products
Step 1: Understand your ICP and their pain points
- •Who exactly are you building for?
- •What problems do they actually have?
Step 2: Listen to your data
- •Track conversion at every step
- •High trial, low paid = product problem
- •Be humble about your product
Step 3: Obsess over analytics
- •Track where users drop off in onboarding
- •Track every feature click
- •Identify your most compelling value prop
- •Use that in marketing
Step 4: Scale with influencer marketing
- •Followers engage deeply and convert faster
- •One viral video can change your entire business
- •Their 70th video hit 600K views → ARR jumped from $8K to $38K in 3 days
Business Numbers
- •$30K/month revenue
- •40,000+ downloads
- •3,000+ paying customers
- •48% conversion to trial
- •$3.30 revenue per download
- •~50% profit margins
Tech Stack
- •React Native (mobile app)
- •TypeScript + Python (ML algorithms)
- •Neon (database, ~$10/month)
- •RevenueCat (revenue dashboards)
- •Superwall (paywalling, 20 cents per conversion)
- •PostHog (analytics)
- •Data APIs (~$100/month)
- •LLM costs (~$20/month)
- •Marketing (~$10K/month)
Key Advice
- •Have a co-founder to lean on when things get hard
- •Be honest and scientific about demand
- •If your product sucks, no amount of distribution will save it
- •Use analytics to understand what users actually do, not what you think they do
Resources
- •Follow Eyal: https://x.com/eyali__
- •Follow Yahli: https://x.com/YahliHazan