After building between 50 and 100 apps, Frederik Riedel coded a weekend prototype to solve his own social media habit. When he accidentally triggered the app’s blocker just 20 seconds after installing it, he knew he had a real business. In a conversation with Charlie Chapman, the one sec founder breaks down how a single tweet drove months of growth, why ironic social media advertising works, and how an indie developer ended up with peer-reviewed research and a US patent.
The weekend prototype that proved itself in 20 seconds
Frederik Riedel had been building apps since he was 14 years old. By 2020, he had shipped somewhere between 50 and 100 apps—at one point releasing a new app every week, and even breaking App Store Connect tools that didn’t expect developers to have that many products.
But his most successful app started simply as a tool to solve his own problem during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Frustrated by how much time he was spending on Instagram and Twitter, but unwilling to go cold turkey, he built a prototype that intercepted social media app openings and forced him to do a brief breathing exercise.
The validation was immediate. “I built the first prototype on a weekend, put it on my own phone,” Frederik recalls. “Actually, when I installed the app on my own phone, 20 seconds afterwards, I accidentally ended up opening Twitter and I ran into my own app. And I was like, really, okay, I’m onto something here.”
Even the developer who had just written the code was operating on autopilot. Within two weeks of using his own prototype, his screen time dropped by 50%. He spent another two weeks polishing the app and released it as one sec.
Why the best screen-time ads belong on social media
When one sec launched, a simple screen recording of the app in action on Twitter went viral, driving thousands of downloads in the first few days. That single organic tweet fueled growth for months. But when Frederik wanted to scale, he turned to an ironic strategy: paying for ads on the very platforms his app was designed to block.
He started running ads on Instagram, and the results were explosive. “My revenue was kind of like doubling every single month,” he says.
The strategy worked because it was the ultimate form of targeted advertising. “Of course on social media, I find my target group of people that spend a lot of time on social media and want to spend less,” Frederik explains. Every single person scrolling through Instagram was a potential customer, and the ads caught them in the exact moment they were experiencing the problem one sec solves. It was the digital equivalent of his earlier strategy for a climbing app: putting physical posters up in climbing gyms.
The 57% constant and the power of peer-reviewed indie apps
Most indie developers rely on App Store reviews for social proof. Frederik went a different route: he partnered with the Max Planck Institute to conduct rigorous scientific research on one sec’s effectiveness.
The collaboration started when a researcher who used the app reached out. They set up an opt-in study where users donated their usage data. Frederik was hoping for a statistically significant 12% reduction in screen time. Instead, the data showed a massive 57% drop.
“All the experiments that we ran, they were always showing numbers around 57% reduction, which is kind of like almost seems like a nature constant of attention that you can steal from someone without noticing it,” he says.
That research became a massive competitive advantage. In a market flooded with snake-oil productivity apps, one sec had peer-reviewed evidence. Therapists began recommending it to patients. The app became a proxy for researchers who couldn’t get data directly from Meta or Snapchat, leading to partnerships with Stanford, Cambridge, and the governments of Germany, Denmark, and the UK.
Why an indie dev filed a US patent
With the research proving the app’s massive effectiveness, a friend from Silicon Valley pushed Frederik to do something unusual for a solo developer: file a patent.
The logic was simple. If the intervention worked this well, the big tech companies would eventually notice. A patent wouldn’t necessarily stop them from building their own version, but it would change the dynamic.
“This is the only way you can protect yourself from getting copied at some point,” Frederik says. “At least I wanted to give the big companies a reason to talk to me first before just copying or stealing my idea.”
It was an expensive and energy-intensive process, but having the peer-reviewed research data made the application much stronger. The US Patent Office approved it, giving this bootstrapped indie app a protective moat usually reserved for venture-backed startups.
In the full episode, Frederik also talks about getting an email from Apple for being an underage developer, how he manages a team of 18 people with zero management layer, and why he thinks Mastodon is the perfect non-addictive social network.