When other consumer app founders were chasing virality, Zakhar Azatian was building a factory.
He had been around long enough to recognize the pattern. Years as an iOS developer, then product manager, building products that worked and closely watching the ones that didn't. Same mistakes every time. Founders copying what bigger players did, running ads without a real testing system, and convincing themselves that growth was either going to happen or it wasn't.
When he launched BeHard, he wasn't interested in hoping. The app helps people stick to structured self-improvement challenges. Miss one task, you restart from day one. Simple mechanic, serious commitment. And from day one, Azatian treated distribution the same way he had always treated product: as something you build methodically, not something you wish for.
He started with $30,000 of his own money. No investors, no safety net. App Store Optimization before paid ads. Organic content before influencer spend. Each channel earned its place before the next one opened up.
Two years later, BeHard has over 1 million users, $490,000 in monthly recurring revenue, and a 4.9 on the App Store. Users have quit drinking, lost weight, broken habits they had carried for years.
We interviewed Azatian because the how here actually matters. In this conversation, he breaks down the exact acquisition system behind BeHard's growth, why he produces up to 500 ad creatives a month, and what building a consumer app on your own money teaches you that a funding round never could.
Before BeHard, Zakhar built products across multiple industries and countries. This section traces the path that led him here.
1. You started coding at 16, spent years as an iOS developer, then moved into product management, then co-founded a romance fiction marketplace, and now you're running BeHard. That's a lot of ground covered. What's actually pulling you from one thing to the next?
I’ve always been driven by the desire to solve problems and make a real impact, but the transition from engineer to PM to founder is really a natural evolution of taking on more responsibility. Engineering taught me how to build, but moving into product management showed me the addicting power of directly influencing metrics and seeing users react to those changes. I want to spend my life building things that actually help people change their lifestyles, and having that full-stack experience—from coding to user acquisition to monetization—gave me the exact foundation I needed to build a successful business on my own.
2. At some point you decided to leave Ukraine, move to San Francisco, and start over. What were you looking for that you couldn't build where you were?
The move was heavily shaped by the war in Ukraine. That period changed a lot for me personally and professionally, and it pushed me to rethink what I wanted to build and where I wanted to build it from. I wanted to work on something more impactful, and moving to the US felt like the right step for that next chapter.
3. MyPassion reached 2 million users, and you built the team from scratch while a war was happening in your home country. What did that period teach you, beyond the standard startup lessons?
It taught me that building a startup is already hard, but doing it while your country is at war adds a completely different level of pressure. It forced me to stay focused, make decisions under uncertainty, and keep building even when life around you is unstable. It also made me much more honest with myself about what I want to spend my life building.
BeHard turns self-improvement challenges into a structured, gamified system. This section covers what it is, how it works, and why it exists.
4. You were going through 75 Hard yourself when the idea came to you. What specifically felt broken about the tools that existed, and why did that gap feel worth building a company around?
What felt broken was that most products were really habit trackers, not challenge products. A habit tracker usually leaves all the structure to you, and if you skip something, nothing really happens. What I wanted was a product built around a real challenge: clear rules, daily tasks, and real consequences if you fail. I had gone through that experience myself, I understood why it worked, and I saw that it could become more than a personal tool — it could become a real company.
5. The restart mechanic is interesting. Miss one task, go back to day one. A lot of app designers would soften that to keep users from churning. You kept it hard. Why, and what does the data actually show about how people respond to it?
I kept it because that is the whole point of the challenge. If you remove the consequence, it stops being a challenge and becomes just another tracker. From our reviews and customer interviews, I saw that a lot of users actually liked that seriousness — they liked that it felt real and that the commitment mattered. It does not fit everyone, but for the right users, that all-or-nothing mechanic is exactly why it works.
6. You run a freemium model. How did you figure out where to draw the line between free and paid, and how do free users factor into your growth thinking beyond just conversion targets?
I treat that as an experimentation problem, not a fixed rule. Free users can join challenges, and paid gives extra features that make the experience better, like reminders, trackers, insights, and other support around the challenge. The right paywall depends on what you are optimizing for — conversion, retention, or LTV — so I look at monetization as a system of ongoing tests, not a one-time decision.
Zakhar treats user acquisition as a system to be built, not a result to be hoped for. This section unpacks the 4-phase pipeline behind BeHard's growth.
7. You've said growth is an engineering problem, not a marketing one. What do you actually mean by that, and where do most technical founders go wrong when they try to figure out distribution?
I mean growth should be treated like a system: you run experiments, measure results, identify bottlenecks, and keep iterating. It’s closer to engineering than to guessing. A lot of technical founders make the mistake of building before validating, or they try one channel, it does not work immediately, and they give up. Usually the real problem is that they have not built a repeatable flow of experimentation around distribution.
8. Walk us through the four phases: ASO and Apple Search Ads first, then organic content, then micro-influencers, then paid advertising. Why does that order matter? What goes wrong if you skip ahead?
I would not say there is one perfect universal order, but for us the logic was simple: start where there is already demand, learn fast, then expand into harder channels. We began by trying to capture existing traffic around challenge-related searches and social interest, then added influencers, then scaled paid channels more seriously. What usually goes wrong is when founders skip straight to expensive channels before they understand the market, the economics, or where their early traction is actually coming from.
9. You used ASO and Apple Search Ads as a validation tool before scaling anything else. What were you looking for in that early data, and how did you know when you had seen enough to move to the next phase?
At that stage I was looking for basic proof: are people searching for this, are they downloading it, and can the product eventually work economically. The first version of the product is just an experiment, so I want to understand whether I have a distribution problem, a product problem, or both. Once I see enough signal that users want it and that the economics might work, then it makes sense to go deeper into the next channels.
10. You're producing around 500 ad creatives a month and want to reach 1,000. Walk us through how the testing system actually works. What happens before a single ad gets made?
Before anything gets made, we study the specific platform and use tools like Sensor Tower, Foreplay, or AdSpy to understand what competitors are successfully running. We build a library of proven visual patterns and user pain points, but we never just copy them exactly—we adapt the market's best practices to fit our unique product mechanics. From there, it's a sheer volume game: we launch the creatives, evaluate success rapidly, kill the losers, and immediately iterate on the winners to keep the factory running.
11. You study competitor creatives before producing your own, then add a unique angle rather than copying directly. What does that process look like in practice, and which tools do you rely on to do it well?
I start by looking at what already works in the market, because that gives you a useful signal, but I do not like copying directly. Usually what works is taking a proven market pattern and combining it with something specific to your product and audience. For research I use tools like Sensor Tower, Appfigures, ad libraries, and social platforms themselves, but the real value comes from testing fast and seeing what actually works for your users.
12. BeHard is seasonal, with demand spiking around New Year and summer. How do you plan for those peaks without just throwing more budget at them when demand is already up?
You have to prepare for the seasonality three to five months in advance. We use the slower months to run our creative factory, testing out which marketing channels, content formats, and messaging will actually perform at a baseline level. By the time the peak season hits, we aren't guessing; we already know exactly which creatives and platforms are profitable, allowing us to confidently push heavy budgets into systems that are already optimized.
BeHard has grown entirely on reinvested revenue. This section explores what bootstrapping actually demands from a founder's decision-making.
13. You started with $30,000 of your own money and no safety net. How does that change the way you think about growth decisions, compared to a founder who has raised a round?
It forces you to view every dollar of revenue as immediate fuel for the next step, rather than having the luxury of burning cash to blindly capture market share. Because I was bootstrapping, I couldn't just look at long-term LTV; I had to carefully manage Day 1 ROAS to ensure I had enough cash flow to survive the month. It gave us the freedom to build what we wanted without VC pressure, but it demanded that every single marketing dollar proved it could return a profit before we scaled it.
14. At what point did it make sense to bring in contractors for marketing and growth, and how do you tell whether someone actually knows performance marketing versus someone who just sounds like they do?
t makes sense when you have some money to invest and you clearly understand that your bottleneck is in a marketing channel you do not know how to scale yourself. To evaluate people, I look at their real history: what they launched, what budgets they managed, what profitability they had, what creative strategy they used, and how well they understand analytics. Good performance marketers usually think in both creatives and metrics, not just one of those.
15. A lot of founders treat early revenue as proof that things are working and reinvest carefully. You treat it more like fuel. How do you think about the reinvestment cycle, and where does most of the money go right now?
For me, revenue is part of a growth cycle. You make money, reinvest it into marketing, creatives, analytics, and people who can push the business forward, and that should bring in more users and more revenue again. I do not think about it like a dividend business — I think about it as fuel for the next stage of growth.
No growth system works perfectly from the start. This section gets into what failed, what it cost, and what Zakhar would do differently.
16. Looking back at the four phases, which one took the longest to figure out, and what did the experiments that didn't work actually look like?
For me, influencer marketing is one of the hardest channels to really figure out, especially once you already have traffic coming from other places. Attribution becomes messy, and it is easy to think something worked when it did not, or the opposite.
17. You've pointed out that tech founders often burn money copying bigger players or wait too long before measuring whether something is working. What's the most expensive version of that mistake you've seen, or made yourself?
The expensive version is spending on a channel before you really understand what success looks like there. You can spend serious money, get installs, and still not know whether the business case is working because the users do not pay or the retention is weak. Copying what works for a much bigger company is also dangerous, because their resources, brand, and economics are completely different from yours.
With 1 million users and $490k MRR, BeHard has proven the model. This section looks at where Zakhar takes it from here.
18. You've hit 1 million users and $490k MRR without outside funding. What does the next stage of growth actually look like for BeHard, and does the system you've built today need to change to get there?
The next stage is less about one trick and more about building a company that can keep generating new growth points. That means better retention, more creative output, more experiments, better systems, and continuing to improve the product instead of treating it as finished. The core mindset stays the same, but the machine has to become stronger.
19. If a technical founder came to you today, consumer app, limited runway, no paid budget yet, what is the one thing they need to get right in the first 90 days before they start spending?
You need to pick the right niche and find where free or cheap traffic already exists for that product. If you do not have money, you cannot act like you do, so you need an idea that matches your reality and a place where you can get early distribution organically — Reddit, TikTok, communities, whatever fits your market. If you get that wrong, everything after becomes much harder.
So, first you must validate your idea on paper before you write a single line of code. Build a Notion table and score your ideas strictly on your Interest, your Expertise, and most importantly, the Opportunity—demand, revenue proof, competition level, and timing. Once you find that perfect intersection, build a simple MVP in a week, launch it, and rely on organic channels and product-channel fit to get your first users before you ever consider spending money on ads.
