The Hail Mary pitch
Bria Sullivan had already found success with her game Boba Story, but she wanted to experiment with monetizing a creator’s audience through an app. After a chance dinner meeting with YouTuber Hank Green, she secured a pitch meeting. The goal was to build something for one of his educational channels, Crash Course.
The meeting didn’t go well. The team wasn’t interested, and the answer was a polite “no.” But as the call was wrapping up, Bria threw out one last idea: “What about a Focus Timer, a Crash Course focus timer?”
That single question changed the trajectory of the project. While the Crash Course team still passed, Hank Green himself loved the concept. An hour later, he texted her to say he couldn’t stop thinking about it. They decided to partner up and build it specifically for his core audience—the “Nerdfighters.” It was a reminder that sometimes the best opportunities come from simply putting yourself in the room and refusing to let the meeting end on a rejection.
Live-streaming user research on TikTok
Rather than building in a vacuum, Bria used her existing TikTok audience to validate the app’s design in real time. During long live streams, she would draw different art styles, show color palettes, and ask her viewers directly what they preferred.
She presented six different variations of the app’s central character—a “bean”—and let the audience guide the direction. “When it comes to female audiences too and anything gamified, the look and feel matters so much for organic reach,” she explains. “It’s like what’s going to make someone convert, and the way something looks is a huge reason why people convert.”
This public validation ensured that by the time the app was ready, it already matched the exact aesthetic preferences of its target users. The original, lo-fi “Bee and Puppycat” style she initially favored was scrapped entirely based on this immediate, unfiltered feedback.
The backlash of monetizing a fanbase
Partnering with a massive creator solves the distribution problem, but it introduces a unique set of challenges. When Focus Friend quietly launched via a YouTube community post, the initial reaction wasn’t purely celebratory.
Despite getting 20,000 downloads in the first week, Bria was flooded with angry emails and negative reviews. Users were upset that the app used a subscription model instead of a lifetime unlock, and they were highly sensitive to standard app practices like ad tracking. Because the app was tied to Hank Green—a beloved public figure known for his philanthropy—users felt a personal betrayal that they wouldn’t feel toward a faceless corporation.
“I learned that,” Bria says. “Every app on your phone uses those things, but for some reason he’s not allowed to.” To protect Hank’s reputation and maintain trust, they made the difficult decision to strip out advertising tracking IDs entirely. It was a move that essentially killed their ability to do paid user acquisition, but it preserved the core relationship with the audience.
Why creators make terrible product managers
Bria’s experience with Focus Friend taught her a crucial lesson about creator partnerships: influencers rarely know what makes a good standalone app.
“I don’t think that influencers really know what a good idea is for them to do for their audience,” she observes. “They always, for some reason, they always want a social media or they want a feed of information. And I’m just like, no, I just don’t think that those are good ideas for apps personally.”
Her advice to developers looking to partner with creators is to act as the product manager. Creators understand their audience’s content preferences, but developers understand utility. The most successful collaborations happen when the developer steers the product toward a clear, functional use case—like a focus timer—rather than trying to build another content feed.
In the full episode, Bria also talks about her journey from learning Android development in 2010 to winning an App Store Award, the reality of being a solo developer while raising a newborn, and why she believes product instinct is far more valuable than pure engineering skill.