From 2016 to 2018, I was one of the Internet’s leading authorities on men’s sexual health.
Not because of any credentials or special expert insights. But because I was a decent writer and very, very good at search engine optimization.
If you searched topics like “last longer in bed,” my blog was typically in the top 3 spots on Google, if not the top spot, receiving millions of visitors per year just to those pages.
Absurd? A little. But it was a thoroughly entertaining period that taught me enough about SEO to start my marketing agency, which combined led into being able to do the kind of work I do today, like going deep down the crypto rabbithole, writing a sci-fi novel, and building a writing app.
Anyway, readers who stumbled across my blog around that time might remember that I came up with a rather clever way to monetize all that search traffic. I hired someone to build an app specifically for helping men practice kegel exercises, published it on the app store, and then linked to it from all of the blog posts.
I thought it might pay itself off in a year or two then provide a little stream of passive income. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Over the past nine years since Stamena was released, it earned a whopping $380,000.
At its peak it was earning $5,000 to $10,000 a month, and even though it fell off significantly in the last few years, it was still making $600 to $800.
Over the years I’ve tried to find a better home for it. I moved on from this topic area a long time ago and it felt somewhat misplaced in my portfolio of projects. But the conversations kept going nowhere, and it kept depositing money each month, so I figured it would just die out eventually.
Until last week! A buyer reached out over Twitter, and as of last Tuesday, Stamena has a new home.
So I thought it would be fun to reflect a bit on how this app got made, how it sustained itself over the years, and, if you’re so inclined, how you might try to replicate something like this yourself.
Also heads up that the audiobook for Husk is now available! I’m extremely proud of how this came out, so if you’re looking for your next great sci-fi listen, check it out.
Genesis
I did not grow up dreaming of one day launching a kegel app. I wrote and published the first “last longer in bed” article in one drunken go, and was wholly unprepared for what was going to happen when I did.
The article immediately went viral on reddit, and for years it was in the top few spots on the /r/sex and /r/everymanshouldknow subreddits.
As an aside, it’s entertaining to think about what “going viral” meant back then. Twitter was mostly for updates like “eating a sandwich.” Instagram was still for photos. There was no TikTok. Hell people still had Facebook pages. Makes me feel a little old.
That traffic spurred a quick update on Google’s end, and within a month or two I was getting thousands of visitors per day to that article. I quickly followed it up with a few related pieces, and watched as my blog grew from 2,000 to 10,000 to 20,000+ visitors per day.
With the traffic coming in, I started to wonder what I should do with it. Ads felt wrong, affiliate was tempting but boring, and I knew there had to be a better strategy.
Digging through my site activity, one thing stood out. There was already an app for practicing kegels that I was sending hundreds of clicks a day to. The app cost $1.99, so I started doing the math on how much money I might be earning her per day.
If even 10% of the visitors I sent were buying it, which would seem high normally but I suspected was low given how strong the intent was, then the app was earning anywhere from twenty to hundreds of dollars a day.
So could I build my own version, swap out all of the links to go to my app, and make some income off it? It was worth exploring.
Building
If I were doing this today, I would build a V1 myself by vibe-coding it following the process in Build Your Own Apps.
But, alas, this was 2016, AI was a distant fantasy, and I did not know how to code in Swift or React Native.
Thankfully I had a newsletter, and through it got connected to Alex Gross who ran an app development company. We had a couple of calls where I talked through what I was thinking, and he offered to build it for about $4,500.
That was a ton of money to me at the time. I was only a year out of college and had limited savings, but I figured if my math was correct on how much it could earn once plugged into my site then it would pay itself off within a year.
If I was wrong it would be a painful loss, but not the end of the world. Or if I was underestimating, then it might earn back multiples of what I paid to develop it. The opportunity felt like it had asymmetric upside, so I said yes.
Without the newsletter I’m not sure how I would have found someone good. I could have looked on Upwork, but that can be hit or miss. And I could have asked friends for introductions of course, but I didn’t know anyone at the time who had launched a mobile app. It was considerably harder back then, so I got very lucky that Alex happened to be on my newsletter.
From there things were straightforward. Alex and his team built the app, sending me screens and demos for feedback along the way. A few months later it was done and ready to launch.
Launching
In a decade or so of launching stuff online, I’ve done a number of “hard” launches where I try to make as much noise as possible around the launch, and a number of “soft” launches where I just put something out and start slowly mentioning it and sending people its way.
Stamena was very much a soft launch. I published a blog post but didn’t follow it up with any kind of aggressive marketing to send people to download it. And aside from that, all I did was replace every link in the existing blog posts with new links to it.
No product hunt, no influencer outreach, no trying to get on podcasts or get links from affiliates. It was about as light as it could be.
But it worked! In the first month it made nearly $1,000, and in month two it hit $3,500 officially paying off the investment.
Growing
It sounds ridiculous but that’s basically all I did for the app.
Linked to it in all the blog posts, added a few more specifically targeting Kegel keywords, and let it do its thing.
Every year since 2016, I’ve thought something along the lines of “This probably won’t last another year.” But it kept going. It declined with my blog traffic, but the sales kept coming in.
Part of what kept those sales going was the App Store’s SEO and recommendations. It amassed over 2,000 reviews with a 4.7 average rating, which I’m sure helped make it appeal to people naturally searching for something like it in the app store.
I also think not making it a subscription app helped me. Once Stamena started to do well, competitors popped up to try to eat my lunch. But most of them went for a subscription model which I suspect turns off a certain number of users. So being the popular one-time-payment option may have given me some staying power (hah).
To be honest though, I don’t know very much about how people found it or bought it. I stopped thinking about it or putting effort into it around 2017. But it just kept going.
Selling
Since 2018 or so, I’ve entertained finding a buyer for Stamena. Once I moved away from the topic and knew I wasn’t going to put more effort into growing the app, I figured it would be better off in someone else’s hands who could make the most of the attention and customers it had already garnered.
I’ve had probably a dozen conversations with individuals or companies about buying it since then. A few were companies that made other sexual health products, a couple were influencers, but none of them really went anywhere.
One of those was Zach, who reached out to me in 2023. Honestly this was solid outreach and I dropped the ball here, I think I never responded to his email.
But to his credit, he kept reaching out, and two years after his first outreach we made a deal over Twitter in a couple days.
Zach was a total professional with this process. Legal agreement was simple, we only haggled over price briefly, and within a few days the deal was done, the money was in my bank account, and he had the app.
How It Feels Now
I’ll admit to a tiny bit of sadness at seeing Stamena go. Not regret, I’m happy with the deal we struck and I think Zach will do a great job with it. But just a natural sadness with a small chapter of my life ending.
I am very excited to see what he does with it though. The best reason not to make a deal like this would have been if I seriously believed I was going to put energy into juicing it’s growth, but I’d much rather work on Covici and my books.
So long Stamena. It’s been a fun ride.
Thanks for reading! Grab a copy of Husk if you want a great sci-fi read, and look for the prequel novella coming out sometime in November.
I learn something about people everyday. Very cool
This was a fun read, thanks.