How I Built a Social App That Made $2M in a Year | NGL Founder Story

Manav: Hunter Isaacson, co-founder of Bags and NGL, with over 300 million-plus downloads combined, is an American entrepreneur, product designer, and viral growth hacker. Before we get into everything, I want to quickly mention how I found you — I've been obsessed with mobile apps for the last six months, and I saw a few people on Twitter, yourself, Nikita, and Blake Anderson, posting amazing insights about growing mobile apps. I just wanted to thank you for that.

Hunter: My pleasure, man. That's exactly why I do it — hopefully people get value out of it.

Manav: Amazing. So a few things I wanted to ask — why did you decide to focus specifically on social apps early in your career? I feel like creating a social app is a masterclass in human psychology. Why pick such a hard thing to do?

Hunter: I didn't think it would be as hard as it turned out to be, honestly. I was 18, had just graduated high school, had an idea for an app like most 18-year-olds do, and genuinely thought it'd be easy — "oh, this'll take six months, I'll be a billionaire by 21," the classic young-person delusion. I spent the next two and a half years failing. Somewhere in there I realized, okay, I'm way over my head, I don't actually know what I'm doing.

But yeah, it is all about psychology, mostly because with social apps you're essentially selling air — you're selling a feeling. It's not like a SaaS business, not like a fintech business. You're purely selling: can you engineer the right dopamine response, the right chemistry in someone's brain, to get them to enjoy the process, enjoy the app itself, versus an actual product or service. That's why I think it's all psychology.

Manav: In a way you're selling friendship.

Hunter: Yeah, belonging.

Manav: You're selling a way for people to connect with each other.

Hunter: Exactly — a very intangible thing.

Manav: I read that you launched a bunch of different apps before you found the one that really took off. Can you talk about Leaderr and Zoom University, the ones before NGL?

Hunter: Sure. Leaderr was my first app — I was 18. The idea was basically Foursquare for Gen Z — you go to real-world locations, earn points, get ranked on leaderboards with your friends, make content around it. Very real-world-oriented app. Then COVID hit, and it was just, well, this is over. I'd managed to raise $150,000 at 19, burned through all of it, but learned a lot.

About six weeks after that app failed, I built Zoom University with a couple of friends — actually with one of the same friends last night, which is funny. The idea was simple: COVID was happening, college kids were bored and lonely and wanted to hang out with people, and it had perfect branding built-in, since "Zoom University" was already a meme online. We made Facebook groups, pushed content, and the first version of the product was literally built around Zoom meeting links before we built a real app. That one did a couple hundred thousand downloads — the first thing that actually worked, and it gave me the confidence that this was possible.

Manav: Did you ever get a notice from Zoom to take the app down?

Hunter: I've gotten lots of cease-and-desists — I collect them at this point. Got one from Zoom, yes.

Manav: Was your original thinking around social apps something about network effects?

Hunter: In a way, yeah. Inherently it has to be shareable — for a social app specifically, that's the most important thing I focus on.

Manav: So what was the inception of NGL — can you talk about anonymous messaging apps?

Hunter: NGL was the brainchild of me and a couple of guys. Instagram had just launched link-sharing for every user — previously you needed 10,000 followers to get that feature. The moment it launched, I remember getting on the phone with friends like, what are we going to build? Very quickly we landed on anonymous messaging for Instagram, because it was the biggest opportunity — we'd already seen apps like Sarahah and Yolo do really well on Snapchat before us, so we figured we could replicate that on a bigger channel, Instagram.

It took about six months from building and launching it to actually going viral — basically crickets for six months, nobody used it. But I always had a feeling it would work — I just knew it needed enough initial density to break through, to get clusters of friends all sharing it at the same time. Once that happened, it went massively viral.

Manav: How do you validate whether an app idea is going to work or not?

Hunter: Honestly, it's hard to validate — I don't have a formal process. It's more about the core metrics I care about: making sure people get through onboarding, that retention is decent, churn is minimized early on, that you can get some level of monetization. You need to actually get to real numbers. A lot of people give up on an idea before they've even reached that point. So my thing is always: exhaust all your options first. If you've genuinely exhausted every option and it's still not hitting, fine, move on — but most people quit before they've actually tried every channel and activated everyone they could.

Manav: Do you think TikTok is the channel right now for promoting apps?

Hunter: Right now, yes, I think it is. Me and my friends were running TikTok fresh-account strategies back in 2019 — we were doing this years ago, and really heavily in 2020. We were figuring out the algorithm's tricks years before most people. I think it's definitely the place to be for apps right now.

Manav: And you eventually pivoted to Bags. Let's talk about the inception of that idea, and what trend you were noticing.

Hunter: I've been in crypto since 2017 — joined when Bitcoin was $1,000. I was a broke high school student, so I didn't buy much, but I loved it, thought it was world-changing technology, and wanted to build in crypto eventually. Actually, my first app, I wanted it to be crypto-native, but it was just too hard back then technically — still pretty hard now, honestly.

What I really believe about crypto is that personal sovereignty and financial freedom really matter, especially to our generation. Financial education in this country has been lackluster to nonexistent, and I think young people, Gen Z especially, have really struggled with financial literacy, investing, spending, all of it. So my thinking was: if we put this on crypto rails, make it social, make it fun, we could build something like a bank for Gen Z and Gen Alpha.

Manav: Let's talk about Pump.fun — it really democratized meme coins. I read a stat, might be off, that over 7 million tokens have been created on Pump.fun.

Hunter: Tens of thousands a day.

Manav: Why did you decide to make Bags a mobile app instead of a web app?

Hunter: Mobile felt like the bigger opportunity, honestly. I looked at the biggest crypto apps and a lot of them were on web — I figured let's just go mobile, since I understand mobile better, and I also think crypto needs to go native mobile to really break out. You have to be in the App Store — it's part of the trust factor, especially for financial apps.

Manav: How is Bags different from Robinhood?

Hunter: Bags is focused mainly on Solana and Solana-based coins right now. Eventually I'd like to support stocks, bonds, everything humanly possible, even bank accounts — but right now we're focused on where the attention actually is, which is meme coins on Solana. That's why we started there. But the idea isn't for Bags to stay that forever. I really wanted to build a business I could evolve over five-plus years — more of an "adult company," if that makes sense, hire a great team, build a strong tech stack, create a real moat. With meme coins specifically, you're mostly just monetizing attention and news cycles.

Manav: Can you talk about how meme coins are kind of a new form of casino — gambling disguised as entertainment?

Hunter: Yeah, for sure. It's all about betting on attention, honestly — the internet as a whole is just betting on attention, and meme coins quantify that directly. There's good and bad to it. I do think we're in a period right now where a lot of people are tired of meme coins, at least in their current iteration — but every crypto cycle brings a new asset class. Last cycle it was NFTs, before that ICOs. I think we haven't seen yet what this cycle's defining asset class is, because this is genuinely a different kind of bull market — we've got a pro-crypto president now, loosening regulation, things are going to shift fast.

There's also just the trend of people spending so much time online — a lot of people don't want to physically go to a casino and play poker in real life, they'd rather be on their computer doing four things at once, and a lot of people don't even want to go on Rollbit or Stake and play casino games with crypto — they'd rather just get the same rush by buying a meme coin, since it's essentially the same thing, just simpler.

Manav: I want to talk monetization — with NGL, what was the business model?

Hunter: NGL is subscription-based, weekly subscription — a small percentage of the hundreds of millions of users end up converting. It's essentially a premium tier that gives you insight into the people sending you messages. If you want to know who these people are, roughly where they are, that kind of thing, you can access that. It's still anonymous — we don't reveal the sender's actual name, mostly because we don't know it. There are rare cases where we do know, and if so, we do display it, but for the most part it's about giving you more understanding and functionality around who's messaging you.

Manav: I like that you've targeted Gen Z with most of your apps — even on YouTube, the biggest demographic is Gen Z, which is who creators like MrBeast target. I'm not Gen Z myself, I'm a millennial, but I'd love to understand more about Gen Z's habits and behaviors. I have friends who are 21, 22, and comparing myself at that age to them now, I feel like I was so much less sharp than they are.

Hunter: Gen Z is very different. I think they care a lot about a few specific things — belonging and community, probably more than any generation before them has. They also care a lot about impact, in a social sense — though "impact" doesn't always mean positive impact the way we'd think of it, sometimes it's more like, can I get views, can I get clout, can I get attention? They care about pushing a narrative forward.

I think Gen Z has really struggled with instability. We grew up post-2008 — our parents were dealing with financial stress — then COVID hit while I was in college, when a lot of my friends were in high school, college, or just post-grad. I think Gen Z has suffered a lot, and we also live in kind of a post-truth era, where "my truth is my truth," everything's relative — which is fascinating for the social dynamics of the generation, because I think it's made them a very caring, compassionate, and sensitive generation, largely because we've never really had stability — it's just been a 20-year stretch of instability.

Manav: And Gen Z doesn't really believe in higher education anymore.

Hunter: No, they don't.

Manav: Or the 9-to-5.

Hunter: No — the narrative's shifted a lot, from exploring STEM degrees toward creator paths.

Manav: Which is kind of a sad reality, in a way.

Hunter: It is, in a way. But it's just incentives — people are motivated by incentives.

Manav: Absolutely, it's all about incentives.

Hunter: That's beautiful, honestly.

Manav: In terms of Bags, how do you monetize — is it mainly transaction fees?

Hunter: Yes — we take a small fee per transaction, buys and sells, not on sending or receiving obviously. We pass back between 50 and 75% of those fees. So if you drop your Bags link, your friend signs up and trades, you earn a share of his fees. If you buy a token and someone sees you bought it on their For You page and they buy it too, you get a cut of that fee. I'm really trying to build a structure where the people benefit, not just the platform — we give back the majority of what we collect.

Manav: For people watching this thinking, "Hunter, please help me launch a mobile app" — can we break it down? From my understanding, you hire a designer on Figma, then hire developers — but what's your actual process, step one from ideation to launch on the App Store?

Hunter: Step one, ideation — a lot of it is just thinking the idea through. Sometimes I'll do a write-up, sometimes it's more of a word-salad brain dump, just getting everything onto the page. I try to figure out the core experience — what's the core loop, is it shareable, what's the core onboarding funnel. Once I know that, I jump into Figma, start designing, branding, colors — I usually design onboarding first, since I need to nail down what data I actually need from accounts.

Depending on the app, onboarding can be long — more of a funnel that ends in some kind of monetization event — or, like with NGL, extremely quick, a couple of steps you get through in fifteen or twenty seconds. Once I've figured out onboarding and the data I need, I go screen by screen and design the whole thing.

Then I take it to my devs and ask, what do you think, are there technical issues you think we'll run into, is this too complicated? A lot of the time they'll just say, "that's going to take a week, do you really want to do that?" And I'm like, no, obviously not — so a lot of it's prioritization. Once we've nailed down that core app flow, the devs build it, and we go through iterations — different builds, TestFlight versions — I'll take screenshots from TestFlight, draw on them, get everyone fixing problems. Then we submit to the App Store, and after that, the whole goal becomes: how do we drop a thousand people into this and see what they actually do.

Manav: How do you approach organic marketing initially?

Hunter: TikTok is usually a great way to see what you can get — TikTok UGC, working with agencies, creators, people I know, just testing different formats. Once you find a winning format, you use it as an ad, cut variations of it, and run them on fresh accounts. It's actually funny — that's literally what we're doing right now with Bags. We'd been focused purely on the technical side, building a really good, reliable, fast, performant trading app, and now we're shifting toward: how do we activate more people, get more funded accounts, bring more people into the app, make it better for everyone.

Manav: I've personally hired a lot of people from Ukraine — really good talent out of Europe. I've also hired from India, but I've had better luck with Eastern Europe specifically, Ukraine and Belarus.

Hunter: That's amazing.

Manav: I have an engineer in Poland, actually.

Hunter: Really? I've genuinely had amazing experiences with developers specifically in Europe — haven't worked with many in India or Asia, but Europe's been great luck for me. All my engineers on Bags, at least, are based in Europe.

Manav: How do you find them?

Hunter: A lot of it is through networking, through social media, and then just interviewing really thoroughly. My head of operations did something like 60 interviews at one point — shout out Stu — he just talked to everybody and built out a catalog of what kind of talent is actually out there. But hiring is genuinely hard, especially in crypto. It's complicated, there's minimal API documentation — I had to learn a lot of the technical side myself by being a builder, and I didn't realize how hard it'd be to find someone who knows React Native, understands Solana, is Web3-native, and can actually communicate well.

Manav: Especially with meme coins — people using Telegram trading bots, gas fees, transaction fees, it's a lot.

Hunter: Yeah, it's a mess, honestly — a whole other thing you have to figure out.

Manav: I actually read a bunch of your tweets and want to have you expand on a few. First one: "The App Store is a pure meritocracy. Getting to number one overall, which I've done multiple times in 150 countries, is extremely difficult. There are no shortcuts to the top spot."

Hunter: I genuinely believe it's a pure meritocracy. There's no real way to fudge the numbers, no fraud that I've ever seen — it's very hard to game. If something goes to number one, it goes number one because people are actually using it. I think it's a business that's radically fair in that sense — everyone's operating on the same software, building on the same rectangle, the same phone, everyone's given the same tools, and whoever assembles them into the right package wins. I think it's pure, honest, almost a source of truth — the App Store is really a window into pop culture and how we experience society, because we experience almost everything through our phones now.

Manav: Do you think it's fair that Apple takes 30%?

Hunter: No — that's basically a mafia tax, honestly, we could do a whole separate podcast just on that. No, I don't think it's fair. I think it's fair they take something, just not 30% — and every single developer would agree with me on that. Unfortunately we live in a world with basically two dominant platforms, so unless a third player comes out of nowhere and builds a new phone and OS that people actually adopt, we're kind of stuck. And the 30% is rough — a lot of people don't realize this, but if you qualify for the small business program, under $1 million a year, you have to apply first, and if you go over that threshold, say you make $1,010,000, it's not tiered — you go from keeping $850,000 of a million to keeping $700,000 of that same amount overall. It's not quite fair. I think the system needs an update, because more and more young people are going to get into building apps, and a lot of them are going to get turned off by having this silent partner that approves or disapproves everything you do.

Manav: Next one — I heard you say this on another podcast: "If you build companies for the seven deadly sins, you'll become rich and successful." Can you explain?

Hunter: If you look at the seven deadly sins — greed, lust, all of them — I think those are the most electrically charged emotions there are. If you want to really get someone hooked on a product, you tap into those emotions, and it pulls them in. It's true, unfortunately — there are a lot of dark patterns in app building, a lot of weird stuff happening behind the scenes, especially at the big companies. But I don't think it's unique to apps — it's true of any business. If you build around the sins, appeal to them directly, you'll basically always make money. You're probably just not going to have a great positive impact — that's the trade-off.

Manav: One trend, for the older audience who don't use TikTok — "looksmaxxing." Can you explain what that is?

Hunter: I actually learned about looksmaxxing from my friend Blake Anderson, who built UMAX — he sent it to me right before he started that company. Looksmaxxing is basically about making yourself look better, caring about your physique, your clothes, everything — becoming the best version of yourself, versus just letting things slide.

Manav: Interesting.

Hunter: I don't think looksmaxxing necessarily means guys trying to look like a jacked, chiseled "Chad" — it's more just genuinely taking care of yourself.

Manav: So that's another category people could build around — a lot of opportunity there. What do you think about the rise of AI? One of the apps in this space is Cal AI, which Blake was also part of, but I was a little skeptical about the accuracy of AI estimating calories in food. How do you feel about that?

Hunter: I love Blake, I love Zach — great guys, amazing product. I think AI is just going to keep getting better across the board — whatever it can do today, give it three months, six months, a year, and it'll be noticeably better. On accuracy, I think Cal AI is actually pretty accurate. Obviously it can't know everything — it doesn't know if food was cooked in butter versus seed oil, for example, which changes the true macros — but it's genuinely quite accurate, and I love what that whole group is doing.

Manav: It's smart, because the real pain point is something like MyFitnessPal — I've used it, and after two days you lose interest, because manually inputting calories is so boring, whereas just snapping a photo is way, way easier.

Hunter: Way easier.

Manav: You've said something like, "everything in your life is your fault, the good things and the bad — adopt this mindset and you'll go very far."

Hunter: True. I think people default to blaming others when they really should look at themselves first. That's something I'm always trying to get better at — it's not something you just figure out one day, it's more a process over time, realizing, when something bad happens to you, how did you contribute to it? Sometimes, rarely, you genuinely didn't — but almost always, you can find some way you did. So it's really about radical acceptance and personal honesty. Total ownership.

Manav: I love that. Why social apps specifically — why not gaming, fintech, health and wellness?

Hunter: I did dabble in other categories, but social was just the most fun, which is why I stuck with it. I did eventually reach a point where I wanted to move toward fintech, which is why I built Bags. But social was genuinely fun — I was building social apps back in 2017, 2018, 2019, and I remember the LA consumer tech scene in 2020, 2021 being so small, everyone knew each other, it was basically one group of friends all building apps — "this one's number one," "now my buddy's number one," "now I'm number one on the App Store." It was a fun moment in time. Now I'm very much focused on fintech, mainly on building Bags.

Manav: Imagine creating something like TikTok — how valuable would that even be right now?

Hunter: Extremely valuable. My first mentor was actually the former president of Musical.ly — he was there from the very beginning and led the ByteDance acquisition. Crazy what happened with that company — one of the most valuable assets in the world now.

Manav: For someone who's 21 right now and wants to get into this industry, how would they get started?

Hunter: I like to say: pick a skill. If you look at consumer apps, there are really three core skills you need — engineering, product, and growth. That can be one person, three people, five people, doesn't matter, but you need all three represented to actually launch. With NGL, I did product, one co-founder was the engineer, the other did growth marketing — that combination worked. With Bags, I do product, my co-founders do engineering, and we share growth.

So my advice for a 21-year-old: look at design, look at engineering, look at UGC and TikTok growth, and figure out which one resonates with you, because you'll need to be one of those people to attract complementary skills from someone else. That's really how you start building a team. If you network with other people your age, you'll find a lot of extremely smart, motivated 21-year-olds already building things. You just need one real skill, and then be a little bit known for it within your circle — a school, a small town, whatever it is — and once that's carved out, you can go find people to fill out the rest of your "skill tree."

Manav: How did you find your co-founders?

Hunter: We were building apps in the same space and connected that way — some of it online, yeah. Funny story, I met my Bags co-founder during COVID — I'd known him for years by that point — we originally met in a Discord server called Gen Z Mafia.

Manav: That's funny.

Hunter: It really is — a lot of the top crypto founders right now were actually in that same Discord group back in 2020. It's still a pretty small community, honestly.

Manav: I want to put you on the spot a bit — I know you consult with people now. What kind of companies do you consult for?

Hunter: Mostly apps I'm genuinely motivated to help — occasionally websites, but almost exclusively apps, across a lot of different niches. I've worked with a lot of different companies.

Manav: I do want to talk a bit about health — can you share your own journey there, what you've learned?

Hunter: I'd say my health "awakening" was probably around 2020 — that's when a lot of my awakenings happened generally. It's been a slow process since. I really got dialed in starting around 2022, mostly because I remember talking with my doctor, who's a longevity-focused doctor, and he said something like: if you start taking care of yourself now, by the time you're 30 or 40 it's going to be a completely different scenario than most people. So I've got a great biohacking doctor now — I do a full blood panel every six months, I'm on supplements daily, basically giving my body everything it needs to be at peak performance.

Manav: What supplements, specifically?

Hunter: A lot. Amino acids, shilajit, DHEA, a bunch of things aimed at more energy, more focus, more stamina — it's really about peak performance. Sleeping a little less but getting more done, staying more focused, minimizing brain fog, that kind of thing.

Manav: Interesting — shilajit is actually a product that originates in India, I've been taking it for a while, it's amazing.

Hunter: Really?

Manav: Yeah, I grew up in India, so I know exactly where it comes from — I'm honestly a little surprised it's become such a thing here.

Hunter: That's great to hear.

Manav: On TikTok Shop, you see a lot of Indian products right now — hair care, soap, whatever it is — and they're crushing it.

Hunter: Yeah, for sure.

Manav: I want to close on work-life balance and a day in the life for you — I ask because I'm chronically online myself, even though I've mastered my sleep, I use a Whoop and I've been hitting a consistent 100% sleep score, but I'm still chronically online. How do you deal with that?

Hunter: It's definitely one of the problems of our era, I think, and I think everyone struggles with it. For me, a day in the life — I wake up semi-early, usually around 7, sometimes earlier depending on the day. I go to the gym most days, try to eat pretty healthy in the morning — at minimum some raw milk with creatine mixed in, or I'll make eggs or something. I try to do four to six hours of deep work, that's the goal — though sometimes that's really just me sitting there banging my head against the wall trying to figure out answers to problems. I do a lot of calls with my team, my co-founders, partners, that kind of thing.

Honestly, my life's pretty boring a lot of the time because I work so much. The balance piece is something I've been actively working on the last couple of months — traveling more, hanging out with friends more, having more enriching experiences, making more memories, because I'm 25 now, and I feel like this is really the time in my life to travel and actually live, while also continuing to work and execute.

Manav: One app I found recently on the App Store is Timeleft — have you heard of it? It basically puts you on a random dinner with four or five strangers every Wednesday, all around the world.

Hunter: I've heard of it, yeah.

Manav: In terms of app ideas — what other part of the industry would you want to build in, or where do you see opportunity right now?

Hunter: Personally, I'm really motivated to build in consumer fintech, because I think it's the biggest opportunity tied to the biggest wealth transfer event of my lifetime. That said, I wouldn't recommend jumping straight into consumer fintech if you're just getting into apps — it's genuinely hard.

The areas I'm honestly most bullish on right now are niche internet communities — building apps for those specific communities, around behaviors that already exist. There are tons of subreddits, Facebook groups, that kind of thing, where you could build a specific product that monetizes really well and gets you to $100,000-plus a month in MRR just serving that one niche group — and it's super easy to target those groups specifically on TikTok. A great example is exactly what Blake did with looksmaxxing — that was an emerging community on TikTok, he built a product for it, and it worked. I think that's honestly the best way for most people to get started: find a behavior that already exists on the internet, optimize around it, and put a paywall somewhere in that flow.

Manav: Amazing. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Hunter, I really appreciate your time.

Hunter: My pleasure, man. This was great.