How Alex Made An App That Got 80k+ Users In 1 Month

### The Story
- In summer 2016, Pokemon GO took over the world. Alex saw a need for an app to figure out where certain Pokemon were, so he and a friend quickly created a Yelp-style crowd-sourced app tying Pokemon to locations (pulled from the Yelp API). Alex worked on the Android app, and the friend owned by back-end.
- The app immediately saw immense traction, going from a few dozen to a few hundred to a few thousand (3,000+) new installs *per day* within just a week. **After less than a month, the app had been used by 80,000+ people.**
- Alex ran into copyright issues publishing the app as it used Pokemon images. Despite the app being free, ad-free, and not even asking for donations, it kept getting rejected. To hack around this, a server-side flag was created to turn off the images as the app was in review and turn them back on when the app got approved.
- Google Play eventually found out about the trick and took down the app for copyright infringement. However, the app was impressive enough at this point that Alex could include it on his resume, and it helped a lot getting interviews and giving him something to talk about during them.

### Learnings
- *Building a marketplace is extremely difficult* - A marketplace product is one that's a platform and requires a certain amount of some valuable resource in order to be useful: It's not useful on its own in a vacuum. For example, Uber needs a supply of readily available drivers to be useful. In this app's case, it needed data on Pokemon locations, which had to be provided by users.
- *Don't expect users to use the product properly* - In fact, don't expect your users to not be jerks. The app suffered a lot initially as users were uploading blatantly fake data of legendary Pokemon showing up in the wild - Legendary Pokemon hadn't even been released yet during the app's lifespan!
- *Be proactive and think through edge cases* - Zooming out from the prior point, it's just good to do this in general no matter what kind of software you're building, whether it's an entire app or a small feature on some already existing product owned by a FAANG company. Understand how things can get weird and address those scenarios accordingly.

If you want to learn how to build your own side projects, check these out:
- [[Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/AI4zi759PSGn6RwIFT6f/masterclass-how-to-come-up-with-100k-users-app-ideas-you-can-build-for-free/)
- [[Masterclass] How To Build And Grow Tech Products To 500k+ Users For Free](https://www.jointaro.com/lesson/OEuX0KMhcnNSTJ50Voee/masterclass-how-to-build-and-grow-tech-products-to-500k-users-for-free/)

If you're interested in the code of the Android app, Alex took the time to save it here: [https://github.com/Gear61/GO-Database](https://github.com/Gear61/GO-Database).

The Story
In summer 2016, Pokemon GO took over the world

Alex worked at PayPal and then as a tech lead across Course Hero, Meta, and Robinhood. He's now building Taro, empowering software engineers to be happier and more effective.

The beautiful thing about software is that it can be built anywhere. Build personal software projects to make yourself more lucrative to employers or even improve at your current job.