Sunny Dulay
Founder of Breakthrough, a white label wellness app platform
Where to hear and read about Sunny Dulay1 episode or test
Sunny Dulay founded Breakthrough, a white label platform that lets wellness influencers each run their own mobile app. The most useful lesson is to pick influencers by engagement rate rather than follower count and to tie offers to dates users care about, which got Breakthrough almost a million downloads with no paid ads.
follower number does not mean anything
Early Stage Strategies to Drive App Subscriptions
Sunny Dulay: the story and the lessons
1What Dulay built at Breakthrough
Breakthrough lets wellness influencers each own a mobile app. It describes itself as only fans but for wellness, mobile first. The platform can launch a new app in a single day.
An influencer sells to their followers through their own app instead of relying on social reach.
Breakthrough reached almost a million downloads with no paid ads. The downloads came in about two years across 66 influencers, with zero dollars spent on paid advertising.
Growth came from influencer audiences, giveaways and in-app challenges that pull a community into the app quickly.
Influencers both love and hate the platform. They are the business and can never turn it off, so engagement numbers weigh on their mental health.
2How Dulay's team picks and reaches influencers
Breakthrough judges influencers by engagement rate, not follower count. The team wants at least 1% engagement, above the median, and checks median engagement and audience demographics with an analytics tool. An account with 300,000 followers and 0.01 to 0.1% engagement might yield about three downloads.
One partner with 400,000 followers and about 10% engagement drove 200,000 app downloads with no paid ads. As Breakthrough puts it: "follower number does not mean anything".
Breakthrough emails big influencers with personalized mail merge, not DMs. DMs from strangers land in a hidden inbox, and influencers ignore generic "let's build your app" pitches. Mail merge tools such as Streak allow automated follow-ups with personal variables.
The team's summary: "email works like magic".
Breakthrough recruits where influencers already gather. For meditation, it pulled a list from Insight Timer, which has 6,000 meditation coaches, and emailed a qualified subset. Cold email to that list got very high open rates.
Giveaways that require a story post bring friends into the app. Entrants win prizes such as a yoga mat or a $100 gift card, but must post the app in their story so their friends see it.
This is part of how the apps got many downloads fast with zero paid ads.
Breakthrough niches its apps down to rank and convert better. Stretching instead of general home workouts ranks higher in search and lifts conversion. Breakthrough's stretching app is number one for that term and has 200,000 downloads.
3How Breakthrough times offers to holidays and crises
Dulay's apps built a promotion around International Yoga Day. On June 21, the yoga apps ran a free yoga challenge and a 50% off promotion. It was the biggest revenue day of the previous year.
Holiday lists come from a Google search or from ChatGPT, then the team picks the dates that fit its category.
Breakthrough opened a free yoga challenge when Covid lockdowns began. The challenge was free to everyone, with no plan to earn from it. Subscriber numbers kept climbing every week afterward.
People saw the value of the content even though it was free.
Early Stage Strategies to Drive App Subscriptions
Three early stage founders share the scrappy tactics they used to get revenue before they had big budgets: a two-step paywall, email offers outside the app, quizzes, partnerships, and influencer and community work. The standout results are a 16.4% download to trial or purchase rate, 942 activations from one partnership, and almost a million downloads with zero paid ads.
Breakthrough lets wellness influencers each own a mobile app. It describes itself as only fans but for wellness, mobile first. The platform can launch a new app in a single day.
An influencer sells to their followers through their own app instead of relying on social reach.
Breakthrough reached almost a million downloads with no paid ads. The downloads came in about two years across 66 influencers, with zero dollars spent on paid advertising.
Growth came from influencer audiences, giveaways and in-app challenges that pull a community into the app quickly.
Influencers both love and hate the platform. They are the business and can never turn it off, so engagement numbers weigh on their mental health.
Breakthrough judges influencers by engagement rate, not follower count. The team wants at least 1% engagement, above the median, and checks median engagement and audience demographics with an analytics tool. An account with 300,000 followers and 0.01 to 0.1% engagement might yield about three downloads.
One partner with 400,000 followers and about 10% engagement drove 200,000 app downloads with no paid ads. As Breakthrough puts it: "follower number does not mean anything".
Breakthrough emails big influencers with personalized mail merge, not DMs. DMs from strangers land in a hidden inbox, and influencers ignore generic "let's build your app" pitches. Mail merge tools such as Streak allow automated follow-ups with personal variables.
The team's summary: "email works like magic".
Breakthrough recruits where influencers already gather. For meditation, it pulled a list from Insight Timer, which has 6,000 meditation coaches, and emailed a qualified subset. Cold email to that list got very high open rates.
Giveaways that require a story post bring friends into the app. Entrants win prizes such as a yoga mat or a $100 gift card, but must post the app in their story so their friends see it.
This is part of how the apps got many downloads fast with zero paid ads.
Breakthrough niches its apps down to rank and convert better. Stretching instead of general home workouts ranks higher in search and lifts conversion. Breakthrough's stretching app is number one for that term and has 200,000 downloads.
Dulay's apps built a promotion around International Yoga Day. On June 21, the yoga apps ran a free yoga challenge and a 50% off promotion. It was the biggest revenue day of the previous year.
Holiday lists come from a Google search or from ChatGPT, then the team picks the dates that fit its category.
Breakthrough opened a free yoga challenge when Covid lockdowns began. The challenge was free to everyone, with no plan to earn from it. Subscriber numbers kept climbing every week afterward.
People saw the value of the content even though it was free.