70% of mat's paid users come from one platform & it isn't X.

ask anyone where a small ios app should go find paying customers and they’ll say x. it’s the obvious answer. everyone on x is building something, everyone’s hunting for tools, all the founders sit in one feed. why would you look anywhere else.

matwidget.com a widget app built by@rahulbhadoriiya. you take cutouts of your photos, arrange them on a mat, stick it on your home & lock screen. that’s the whole product. it started catching attention on x, one post did that thing where it goes a little viral, and suddenly people were showing up to try it.

x did its job. it just wasn’t the job everyone assumes.

the app stayed in beta until it hit around 2,000 users, and almost all of that came off x. which is genuinely a lot for a small ios app with no budget and no ads. so this isn’t a story about x failing to get users.

it’s more that x was never asked the paid question. there was nothing to pay for at the time. free product, free users, everyone happy.

then paid switched on.

my read, and you can disagree with me here, is that x is probably the best place on the internet to find people who’ll try your product and one of the weakest places to find people who’ll pay for it.

so instead of just leaning harder into x, the content got repackaged. the x post became an instagram reel, which pulled way more reach and a completely different crowd. then it became posts on threads.

and threads is where it got weird

around 70% of mat’s paid subscribers come from threads now.

not from one big viral moment either, which is the part people get wrong when they hear a number like that. it’s 2 to 4 posts a day, plus replies, over and over, boring as hell, nothing clever about any of it. and it’s still running. still landing roughly 8 to 10 paid subs a day.

zero ads, not 1 dollar of spend anywhere in this story.

reddit was a probe, not a channel

worth being honest about this one. the reddit post pulled about a thousand impressions and brought in a properly global audience, people from places that had never shown up in the numbers before.

did any of them pay? we don’t know. attribution on reddit is a mess and nobody was tracking it properly, so the honest answer is it stayed useful as a signal.

that’s a completely fine way to use a platform, by the way. you don’t have to marry it. you can walk into a room full of strangers, ask if your idea is stupid, take the answer, and leave.

nobody could have predicted threads

there’s no deck anywhere that says your iphone widget app will find its paying users on meta’s twitter clone.

and if the sensible thing had happened, if one platform had been picked to go all in on, it would have been x. obviously it would have. x was the one showing early signs, x had the momentum.

which is why you should never buy the “pick one channel and dominate it” advice. it’s not wrong exactly. it just quietly skips the hardest part, which is the picking.

everyone talks about choosing the channel like it’s the easy step and grinding is the hard step. it’s the other way round. grinding is easy, anyone can grind. the picking is where people lose half a year.

so make the picking cheap

one idea, four platforms, repackaged for each. the same thought becomes a post on x, a reel on instagram, a text post on threads, a question on reddit. you do the thinking once. only the packaging changes and packaging takes twenty minutes.

you spend a week finding out what you’d otherwise spend a quarter assuming.

then when something moves, pile onto it. spray wide, concentrate where the money shows up, and be honest with yourself about what “moves” actually means. reach isn’t moving. replies aren’t moving. money moving is moving.

the part that’s easy to skip

none of this works unless you keep going after the first win.

that viral x post was the perfect place to stop. it had numbers, it had dopamine, it looked like proof. and it was proof, just of something else. it proved people wanted the thing. it didn’t prove anyone would pay for it.

the people who actually pay turned up two platforms later.

so what’s the platform you’ve been ignoring because it doesn’t feel like your kind of audience?