In a recent vlog by fast-rising entrepreneur Luke Belmar, there was a conversation that caught the attention of viewers. Amongst Belmar's travels and interviews with famous people, there was a young man wearing glasses who stood out in this vlog, and this sparked a lot of curiosity among the viewers who commented on the video.
People were asking questions like, "Who is that guy?" and "What's the name of the guy at the 6-minute mark?" His ideas sounded so smart and some people in the comments wondered if anyone knew the name of this marketing genius.
The interesting thing is that the young man sitting next to Luke Belmar in the video is Hunter Isaacson, a serial entrepreneur in the tech industry who currently owns the social media Q&A app called NGL – perhaps you might have used the app before without knowing about him.
What Luke Belmar’s video doesn't reveal is that Isaacson has quietly made $30 million in his early twenties by building apps from his bedroom. He's a genius who prefers to keep to himself and knows more about making money online than almost anyone else.
Isaacson has an Instagram account that's set to private, so he has never publicly shared his money-making secrets—until recent.
In an exclusive interview, the owner of a $50 million app revealed exactly how he transitioned from a regular 9-to-5 job to making millions from the comfort of his own home. He shared the specific strategies he used to build an app that has become a number one hit, and chances are you've probably used it yourself.
Hunter Isaacson, founder of the NGL app
From college dropout to app millionaire
Isaacson's journey began right out of high school at age 18, when he first got the idea to build apps. Despite getting into the prestigious USC Marshall School of Business, he knew entrepreneurship was his true calling.
"I remember being at the opening orientation and looking at my parents and siblings. In my mind I had already made the switch," Isaacson recalls. "I knew that when I started college I was not going to graduate because I knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur."
For the next two and a half years, while still enrolled at USC, Isaacson devoted himself to his first app - Leadr, a "Gen Z version of Foursquare" involving check-ins, points, and leaderboards. But he readily admits he made every mistake in the book.
"I spent two and a half years just learning how to fail," he says. "I hired outsourced developers that just basically built a nothing project because I wasn't managing them correctly."
As painful as it was, Isaacson credits this period of repeated failure as the most important stage of his entrepreneurial education. He realized he was stuck in a cycle of "impostor syndrome," merely pretending to be successful when he actually needed to buckle down and learn real skills.
Isaacson cold-messaged a friend on Instagram who had already built and sold an app, despite being only a year older. They met for lunch, where his new mentor told him point-blank: "Everything you're doing is wrong."
That tough feedback was exactly what Isaacson needed to hear. When the pandemic hit in early 2020, he saw it as a chance to restart with the right mindset. Noticing a friend's Instagram story seeking a designer for a new app, Isaacson jumped at the opportunity.
"I wasn't really good at building the whole app, but I really liked design," he realized. "As an entrepreneur I think there are different kinds of founders - engineering founders, marketing founders, design founders. I was a design founder."
The second project
The app Isaacson helped design, called Zoom University, allowed two guys and two girls to match up on a 4-way video chat - think online double dating. It took off immediately, reaching the top 10 charts within a month of launch.
The key was creating a comfortable environment, Isaacson explains. With a 7-to-1 girl-to-guy ratio, Zoom University tapped into the insight that women feel most at ease with a close girlfriend by their side. Guys similarly appreciated having a wingman along. The result was natural, fun conversation rather than awkwardness.
Isaacson took this lesson about prioritizing user comfort to his next project, a friendship-finding app called Wink. As part of a talented team, he helped grow Wink to 30 million downloads, mainly among teens and young adults. However he learned that endlessly adding new features doesn't necessarily improve the user experience.
"It's actually refining the features you have that makes a product really good," Isaacson realized. "Build an app for X, and don't add all the bells and whistles when you start. Build a very core MVP and launch it quickly."
This minimalist philosophy paid off with explosive growth for Wink, driven by incentivizing users to post about the app on Snapchat in exchange for in-app currency. Isaacson took note of how powerful it can be to leverage an existing social media platform for distribution.
The blockbuster app that made millions in minutes
All of these hard-learned insights came together in Isaacson's blockbuster hit: the anonymous messaging app NGL (Not Gonna Lie). After six years building nearly a dozen apps and generating 150 million collective downloads, NGL proved to be the 24-year-old's crown jewel.
The concept is simple: NGL lets users anonymously solicit candid messages and questions from their Instagram followers. After downloading NGL and posting their unique link to their Instagram Story, users sit back and wait for the unfiltered responses to roll in - crushes admitting their feelings, friends sharing support, haters slinging insults. NGL's AI moderates everything for hate speech and harassment.
Launched in 2021, NGL exploded to 110 million downloads in its first year alone, making it the most downloaded anonymous messaging app of all time. For Isaacson personally, NGL made him $10 million in take-home earnings in the first year. Not bad for a pandemic side project built for under $10,000.
The app topped app rankings in more than 75 countries and became a sensational trend for Gen-Z users.
The secret behind the NGL app’s success
So what was the secret sauce behind NGL's breakout success? Isaacson credits a hyper-focused commitment to simplicity and speed.
"The faster you ship, the faster you win. Teams that ship fast win," he asserts. "Every successful app puts users in a sandbox for their first time...You want to get the user through the 'aha moment' as fast as possible."
For NGL, that magic moment came when a user posted their link, received their first anonymous message, and felt that thrill of uncensored connection. The entire process took 60 seconds.
But achieving such simplicity required months of painstaking iteration behind the scenes. After a soft launch failed to gain traction, Isaacson and his co-founders spent four months relentlessly tweaking and testing.
"We changed the name of the company, the branding...I did a lot of changes on the design and the flow and the funnel," Isaacson says. "We launched quickly then spent four months optimizing, doing test marketing, UGC, influencers, all these different things to see what happens."
Then, a single viral TikTok changed everything. Posted by a young woman in the Middle East, the video showed her dramatically reacting to a juicy anonymous message received through NGL. It racked up over 1 million views overnight.
Within a week, NGL's daily downloads skyrocketed from 1,000 to 1.5 million. Soon the app was onboarding nearly a million new users every hour, crashing the founders' analytics dashboards.
Unsurprisingly, NGL's rapid rise attracted acquisition interest from all sides. But Isaacson says he's playing the long game.
"There's really two options: either another big app buys you or private equity buys you," he explains. "NGL is more of a consistent revenue generator and a phenomenal company, but there is a ceiling. I want to build something where the ceiling is higher."
Master your craft - then build a rocketship
For aspiring app entrepreneurs looking to follow in his footsteps, Isaacson offers some hard-earned wisdom. Rather than chasing overnight success, he advises first honing a specific skill set that can form the foundation of your business.
"Just pick a skill and become really good at it," he suggests. "Design, engineering, marketing, whatever you gravitate to. There's always money to be made."
Once you've developed an expertise, Isaacson recommends linking up with other talented people working on complementary skills. Even if you're only 17 or 18, your future co-founders are already out there grinding.
"Meet them, because those are the people who will help you build rocketships," he says. "For me that's how I've always done it."
But no matter how skilled your team, Isaacson cautions that the app game inevitably involves much more failure than success. Personally, NGL was his eighth app, and the only one he considers a real home run. The key is to stay in the game.
"Every entrepreneur's first stage is just learning to fail," he believes. "I look at failures as just your portfolio."
Above all, Isaacson credits one overarching strategy for the massive wins he's experienced: make your users feel like they're part of a movement.
In NGL's early days, that meant the founders personally responding to every user DM to make them feel appreciated. They religiously reposted positive comments, shouted out individual users, and promoted a "love wall" of supportive messages. The goal was cultivating a sense of community around the app.
"Part of making users feel safe is hyping them up, making them feel good, like they're part of something really cool," Isaacson says. "We realized everything we do is about making this a fun, safe experience."
Conclusion
Today, with well over 100 million downloads, celebrity endorsements, and revenue in the tens of millions, NGL has undoubtedly given Isaacson a life-changing success. But he's still the same humble, hungry entrepreneur who first set out to teach himself mobile app design four years ago.
The only difference is that now, one of the tech world's best-kept secrets is finally stepping out from behind the curtain. His message to the next generation of app dreamers?
Dream big, start small, and never stop shipping.
