Fixing real bypasses helped a focus app grow 15x revenue
FocusLock is an that locks a phone and blocks distracting apps. Its main promise is that the lock is genuinely hard to get around. were about 300 a year ago, later peaked at 2,000, and are now holding around 1,700 during school break season.
Revenue grew from under $50 per month a year ago to $750 in the last 30 days, with the number shown on . In mid-2025, growth was stuck around 200 to 300 , and adding random features did not change much. The turning point came when a customer kept finding ways to bypass the lock and sending each new method by email.
Each fix led to another test within days, creating dozens of back-and-forth emails. After those repeated fixes, even that customer could no longer break the lock, and the core product became much stronger than it would have been from guesswork alone.
Key points
- FocusLock is an for locking a phone and blocking distracting apps.
- grew from about 300 to a peak of 2,000, and now sit around 1,700.
- Revenue rose from under $50 per month to $750 in the last 30 days.
- Random feature work did not move growth, but fixing bypasses did.
- Repeated customer breakage reports became a practical quality test for the app’s core value.