Flow Tracks To $192M

A story about how two twin brothers from Belarus built Flow, a women's health app that grew to $192M in annual recurring revenue.

The founders were raised by a single mother who was a librarian. At age 15, one of the brothers worked full-time after school - 8 hours of school followed by 8 hours of work. To make money, he taught himself coding from textbooks and started writing and publishing books about what he learned, eventually publishing over 1,000 books.

When the iPhone App Store launched in 2008, they saw it as a huge opportunity like the early internet. They started building health apps, with their first two attempts failing. But they believed "success is the sum of your attempts" and those first two failures contributed to Flow's eventual success.

They created Flow as a simple period tracking app. Their key insight wasn't about building the product themselves, but rather "building the company that would build these products." They started with basic tracking features but expanded into what they called a "women's health super app." At one point, 10% of adult women in the US were using their tracker.

The company is now part of a holding company called Palta that owns several successful apps including Prisma and Xyng. The holdco has raised $100M in funding and employs hundreds of people in Lithuania, leveraging the talent advantage of hiring skilled European developers at lower costs than Silicon Valley.

The founders didn't create a fake origin story about personal passion for women's health - they simply saw an underserved market where talented builders weren't focusing and believed they could create value there.