One TikTok. 28,994 downloads by dinner.
Heather Hopkins founded Hulah, a dating app where every guy has to be endorsed by a woman to join. She grew it on short-form video with zero ad spend: creators she cast herself, scripts she wrote herself, posted every day.
On July 31, 2023, one video did 2.3M views and 28,994 App Store downloads in a single day. Another did 4.7M. Meme accounts reposted the content to tens of millions more. Hulah reached 400,000+ active users and was acquired on December 31, 2025.
Along the way she hired agencies, and hated it: slow, vague, and nobody treating her money like it mattered. Hoppylane is the company she wished had existed. Now she builds and runs creator programs for consumer apps and SaaS products, the same way she built Hulah's.