Yoga app Floga hits $10K/month. Pre-launched unfinished, it raised $120K in 24 hours

Umberto Mezzadra, founder of the yoga app Floga (floga.io), was selling paper before he built an app. In 2020, he launched a yoga card deck, PlayPauseBe, on Kickstarter, pulling in over $200,000 (about ¥30 million) in the first month alone — a fully analog product with no power source or screen.

Extending the same brand, he later shipped an app. In May 2025, he pre-launched it while it was still unfinished, and sold over $120,000 (about ¥18 million) in the first 24 hours. Because it bypassed app stores, there were no platform fees, and the full amount stayed in-house. By the time Indie Hackers published its article in June 2026, Floga had about 4,000 active users, with monthly revenue from subscriptions and annual plans combined at about $10,000 (about ¥1.5 million).

What makes this case worth examining is that both “$120,000 in 24 hours” and “$10,000/month” come from the same company and the same product, despite differing in both magnitude and character.

Floga’s timeline

Mezzadra’s career isn’t a straight line. He studied economics, worked in corporate roles, failed at a funded startup in 2012, and went on to work as a ski instructor and fashion photographer. He returned to tech around 2016, as an advertising and growth strategist. PlayPauseBe was a side project he started with a partner during that time.

A brand that sold “putting the screen down” steps inside the screen

Floga is an app for both yoga instructors and practitioners. The stack is Flutter (a single codebase for iOS/Android), Firebase for the backend, RevenueCat for billing, Vimeo for video delivery, and OneSignal for push notifications, a combination not unusual for solo/small-team development. Firebase costs at launch ran about $25/month (about ¥3,750).

But there was one problem predating the technology. PlayPauseBe had sold “stepping away from the screen” as its core value proposition. For that brand to launch an app looks like a contradiction. Mezzadra didn’t hide from this. He handled it by explaining upfront, publicly, why he was building an app and stating its role explicitly. Papering over the contradiction risked losing trust with existing customers.

Another constraint: Mezzadra himself isn’t a developer. He lacked a standard against which to judge when something was “done enough,” and had to fight the urge to keep expanding the spec. The result is that Floga launched with only two yoga styles included.

The decisive move: deciding to sell something that didn’t exist yet

The exact moment the trajectory changed can be pinpointed: the decision to abandon the standard sequence of finishing a product before listing it in an app store.

The before-and-after numbers are stark. Before the pre-launch, Floga’s revenue was zero. Twenty-four hours after the pre-launch, revenue exceeded $120,000. The product wasn’t finished in that window. What changed was purely how it was sold.

That sales approach had four components: selling before completion, selling through owned channels rather than app stores, offering a one-time lifetime deal instead of a subscription, and capping the number of slots with a deadline while stating explicitly that there would be no refunds. In Mezzadra’s words: “launch to warmth instead of silence.”

Why this approach raised $120,000

Naming the tactics alone doesn’t reproduce the result. The mechanism that worked breaks into three parts.

The audience is the first part: it went beyond “warm” to “already paying.” The people who spent over $200,000 through PlayPauseBe’s Kickstarter weren’t merely interested in yoga; they had an actual track record of opening their wallets for this specific brand. A free prospect list and a list with a purchase history are different things, even at the same headcount.

Selling outside app stores is the second: it had a double effect. The 15-30% fee not being deducted is the more obvious half. The more essential point is that selling outside a store makes it possible to sell “an app that doesn’t exist yet” at all, an app store, which requires passing review before a listing can appear, structurally can’t support this sequence.

The scarcity design is the third: no refunds, limited slots, and a deadline flipped buyers’ psychological state from “considering” to “deciding.” Mezzadra states that not offering a refund policy drew out commitment over hesitation. At the same time, this pre-payment also fixed the spec on the development side: “charging from the start, even before the product is finished, forces clarity.” Launching with just two yoga styles was possible precisely because of that forcing function.

There’s also a validation-interview step preceding all of this. Mezzadra met with prospective customers without revealing the app concept and without steering them toward a solution, just listening to the problems they had. His own summary: “polite encouragement feels good but teaches you nothing.”

$120,000 turned out to equal a year’s worth of subsequent revenue

Here’s where the numbers deserve scrutiny. Stack up $10,000/month for 12 months and you get $120,000. In that single pre-launch day, he received roughly a year’s worth of what would come afterward, all at once. It looks like an impressive number, but flip it around: this $120,000 carries zero recurrence into the following months.

Further, a lifetime deal is less like revenue and more like a permanent liability. Buyers keep using the product without further charges, but Vimeo’s video-delivery costs and Firebase costs keep accruing as long as usage continues. There’s no guarantee that the $25/month infrastructure cost at launch won’t rise as the user base grows.

The ratio of about 4,000 active users to $10,000/month is also worth confronting directly. Divided simply, that’s $2.50 (about ¥375) per user per month. Since the subscription price isn’t disclosed, this can’t be stated definitively, but if the plan runs roughly $10/month, that implies roughly 1,000 people paying on an ongoing basis, with the rest being non-paying continued users centered on lifetime-deal buyers. This is an estimate, not a disclosed breakdown, but at minimum, the monthly figure makes clear that not all 4,000 users are paying monthly.

There’s one more risk. Development depends on a single developer in Lisbon. How far this setup can scale, given that a non-engineer founder can’t judge spec completeness, isn’t something the article addresses. Mezzadra describes a future vision as “the Apple of yoga,” bundling app, physical product, an instructor-training school, and a community, but the current track record is 4,000 active users and $10,000/month.

What can and can’t be carried out

What’s replicable is the procedure: a validation interview that asks only about problems without showing a solution, charging before completion to force the spec to lock, using slot limits and a deadline to force decisions. The discipline of cutting scope to two features. And the design of selling outside a store to avoid fees. These are transplantable into fields unrelated to yoga.

What isn’t replicable is the foundation this procedure rests on. The list of existing buyers who paid $200,000 through Kickstarter can’t be built in a day. Neither can a decade’s worth of instinct in advertising and growth work, nor the brand’s worldview. The advice to “launch to warmth” only functions when a warm audience already exists. If it doesn’t exist, the thing to build first is that audience, not a physical product or an app.

Reversing the sequence, this case isn’t really “a story about succeeding with an app.” It’s more accurately read as a story about re-monetizing, in a different format in 2025, the customer base built by the 2020 card deck.

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