Headway App Hits $200M
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A story about how a Ukrainian entrepreneur built a massive book summary app business.
"There's this company called Headway App that was created 5 years ago in Ukraine. They take popular books and summarize them. The promise is basically: instead of reading the book, they've already read it and summarized it for you. In under 15 minutes, you can get the gist of what's in the book - the big ideas explained to you. You can either read it or use their AI to listen to a 15-minute audio summary.
They've done this for 1,500 of the most popular books. People pay a simple $12-13 a month subscription. They've bootstrapped this business to $200 million in revenue with 30% profit margins. They just raised funding at a $2.3 billion valuation.
The way this business grows is through ads on TikTok and Facebook. Their hook is basically 'My boss thinks I'm a genius and thinks I read 150 books a year, but actually I just use Headway.' It's become an absolute juggernaut built out of Ukraine."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.