A “Duolingo for general knowledge” has hit 20,000 monthly downloads and $10,000 MRR.
And they did it with just two accounts and a simple freemium model.
Meet GenK: World General Knowledge:
GenK is a microlearning app that turns spare minutes into quick daily culture hits. At the moment, they sit in the top 100 Education apps in the U.S, Spain, and France.
The app is free to download, and users pay a subscription if they want access to unlimited learning.
For growth, GenK keeps it very lean.
They only run one Instagram account and one TikTok account.
They have millions of views across both, but most of those views are paid. Only a handful of videos have real organic traction.
The first breakout video was a daily vlog from a girl showing how she stays cultured even with a packed schedule. The video took off after they pushed it both on Instagram and TikTok.
It reached 4.7M views on TikTok and 1.3M on Instagram, but most was due to a paid boost.
In the video, she does a skit with a friend, shares culture facts she learned from the app, then smoothly transitions into an app promo.
Another strong video is a selfie-style clip followed by an app demo from a guy who pitches GenK as the app for people who want to be cultured but are lazy.
That one did well on TikTok too, with 3.7M views, again mostly paid.
On Instagram, their first hit used the hook:
“Finally an app for culture fanatics“
On top of this, they are running paid partnerships with French, Spanish, and English influencers who create content around culture.
With two accounts and a few winning creatives, they reached $10K MRR.
The real next step is not to spend more. It is to turn those “stay cultured in spare minutes” angles into a repeatable organic growth engine. Will these formats remain winners?
Their collection is available on Shortimize:
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