Rootd's story

Rootd is "anxiety and panic attack relief right in your pocket," the #1 rated app on both iOS and Google Play, with over a 1.7 million user base. The award-winning app blends stigma-breaking design with therapist-approved features, including a panic button, gamified stats, a deep breathing tool, and lessons. Ania Wysocka started Rootd due to her own personal experience with anxiety, when few decent and affordable resources were available. Rootd now operates on a freemium B2C model, revenue-generating partnerships, B2B company plans, and a lifetime access plan.

Focusing on the niche market

With 6.8 million adults in the U.S. suffering from generalized anxiety disorder, and only 43.2% receiving treatment, there's a massive opportunity for tech to step in. Rather than going after the larger anxiety market, Rootd focused on a value proposition around panic attacks with lower volume and difficulty keywords, then added more tools and content on anxiety over time, succeeding in ranking #1 for panic attacks and #3 for anxiety in the U.S. Ania's advice: stay hyper-focused early, then expand in both product and ASO.

No funding, yes freedom

Raising venture funding gives startups the ability to scale quickly, invest, and experiment, along with connections and guidance. But there's a flip side: loss of control, as VC partners will likely want to shape a company's long-term philosophy and operations. Ania's vision from the early stage was to choose freedom over immediate financial backing, and years later the app still stands on its own, gaining trust and growing revenue while pursuing the same passion it was built on.

Eye-level engagement

Without capital to spend on advertisements, Rootd turned to actively responding to and acting on user feedback on a personal level. Whenever a review comes in, Ania personally responds, investigates the issue, makes necessary adjustments within the app, and encourages the user to update the review. This approach has addressed many 1-star reviews and significantly increased in-app engagement time.

Onboarding experimentation

As a bootstrapped app, Rootd started lean; at first there was no onboarding process at all, with users experiencing the content without guidance before eventually subscribing if satisfied. Introducing a new onboarding experience that displays a free trial paywall near the beginning of the process immediately increased in-app revenue by 600%.

Episode sneak peek

• On reviews: "Reviews help with your ranking in the app store, and if you don't have funding like Rootd, you're not spending your time on advertising, then obviously you need to focus a lot on app store optimization and doing whatever you can to rank higher, and reviews are really key to that."
• On no investors: "People are like, 'Well, why wouldn't you take investment if you have the offer?' But in my personal experience, I got to work with a lot of startups. I saw how, after raising capital, they weren't often doing what they started out doing because then their main objective is to increase the value for investors."
• On mobile app onboarding: "The biggest thing was just putting it (the paywall) closer to the front really. That had the biggest impact."
• On bootstrapping: "You just have to really think back - okay, why did I start this? Why am I doing this? And hopefully, that will help you get over some of the negative criticism. The rhetoric around bootstrapping a company is changing."

More about Ania

Ania is the founder of Rootd, the #1 rated mobile app for anxiety and panic attack relief, having designed and created Rootd's complete content and led the business to over 1.7 million users in over 150 countries. Previously Ania served as Program Director at Alacrity Canada, creating and leading a province-wide Digital Marketing Bootcamp with the BC government. She has been selected for a Developer Spotlight by Apple, a "30 Under 30" winner by BC Business, and one of "20 Women Entrepreneurs to Watch" by Founders Fund.