An app for a problem the founder had himself
Liam Du kept losing his train of thought in meetings. He knew what he wanted to say, but under pressure the words came out tangled, and the more flustered he got the worse it became. He looked for something to train the specific skill of organizing thoughts and delivering them clearly under pressure, and found speech coaching, public speaking courses, and stage-presence apps, but nothing that addressed the actual gap. So he built Wellspoken, an AI communication coach with short daily drills and AI coaching feedback. Every session is scored with the Wellspoken Index, a 1000-point measure across six dimensions of speaking, so users can track progress over time. It's available on iOS and Android.
Shipping solo without touching Xcode or Android Studio
Du gave himself one week to ship on both platforms, working alone across design and engineering. He built on Expo, using the Expo SDK for native functionality like audio recording, camera capture, and push notifications through TypeScript APIs rather than separate Swift and Kotlin implementations. EAS Build compiled the app for both platforms in the cloud, and EAS Submit pushed it to the stores, so there was no local build toolchain to maintain and no machine that needed the exact right Xcode version.
That first version shipped in a few weeks. Within a month, Wellspoken had more than 400 users, more than $500 in monthly revenue, and its first paying customer within 24 hours of launch, enough for Du to know the idea had legs.
Growing to hundreds of thousands of downloads
Roughly six months later, Wellspoken had grown to hundreds of thousands of downloads and tens of thousands of monthly active users across iOS and Android, still growing month over month, with international expansion next on the roadmap. Du has been direct that no single acquisition channel explains it. Organic App Store search and ASO work, paired with a user-generated-content campaign running dozens of creators, brought in most of the growth, while continuous A/B testing on onboarding, activation, and the paywall improved what those channels fed into.
The operational detail worth pulling out: at this scale, across iOS and Android, Du has not opened Xcode or Android Studio once. EAS handles the build and deployment pipeline, which is what let him run the app at this size without standing up a dedicated infrastructure operation.
Shipping fixes in minutes instead of days
Most releases at Wellspoken's current scale go out as over-the-air JavaScript updates through EAS Update rather than as full native builds. A native build only happens when something changes at the native layer, like an SDK upgrade or a new permission; everyday copy tweaks, paywall adjustments, and UI fixes ship the moment they're ready.
That distinction mattered concretely soon after launch. Du found a bug in the onboarding flow that, under the old model, would have meant rebuilding, resubmitting to both app stores, and waiting two to three days for review before users could even start updating. With EAS Update, he pushed the fix live in 15 minutes.
The same mechanism carries the ordinary cost of moving fast at scale. When something slips through now, the team pushes a fix that users pick up on their next app launch, instead of sitting on a broken build for the two or three days a store review takes. To keep that safe, Wellspoken runs separate preview and production update channels, so anything risky is validated against a real build before it reaches everyone.
A gap the team is candid about
Wellspoken shipped its MVP with no automated tests, a deliberate tradeoff to hit the launch timeline. That decision got more expensive as the user base grew: a regression that once would have annoyed a handful of early adopters now reaches tens of thousands of people before anyone notices. The team leans on EAS Update to fix issues quickly when they surface, but Du has said directly that catching the bug before it ships would have been faster still.
“After launch, I found a bug in the onboarding flow. In the old world, I'd need to fix it, rebuild, submit to both app stores, wait 2-3 days for review, then wait for users to update. With EAS Update, I fixed it and pushed the update in 15 minutes.” (Liam Du)
Sources
How to grow usage and revenue for your mobile app (2026-07-14)
The solo dev playbook: ship faster with Expo, EAS Build, and OTA Updates (2026-01-28)
