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How to Build a $200M App Without Showing your Face w/ Chris Josephs
Explore episode
Jul 10, 2026
Where this was said
The Pelosi Tracker Origin Story
At 2:28 · chapter starts 0:44
The Pelosi Tracker didn't start as a media empire — it started as a desperate growth hack. Chris Josephs was building IRIS, a social investing app designed to create a shareable layer on top of Robinhood and Fidelity portfolios during COVID's retail trading explosion. He noticed tweets about Pelosi's stock trades going viral and saw an angle: what if people could automate following her trades? He recreated her portfolio inside IRIS, got behind a camera, and posted a TikTok. The result was instant: the app shot to the top 50 in the App Store, NPR reached out for the company's first media interview, and the concept took on a life of its own. The personal TikTok account grew to 100,000 followers, and the app racked up 250,000 to 300,000 downloads — entirely organic. What started as a performance-led growth stunt had become the seed of a media empire.
How a TikTok Growth Stunt Became a $1.5B Fintech Business
Chris Josephs didn't set out to build a media empire — he needed downloads for a social investing app. One TikTok video saying 'want to know Nancy Pelosi's next stock trade? Download IRIS' sent the app to the top 50 in the App Store and kicked off a journey to $1.5 billion AUM.
Early conversion: 50–60 downloads per 1K views
In the early viral phase, the Pelosi tracker TikTok videos converted at 50–60 downloads per 1,000 views — an unusually high rate due to the novelty of the concept.
IRIS app: 250K–300K organic downloads
The original IRIS app hit 250,000 to 300,000 downloads with zero paid marketing, purely through organic TikTok content around the Pelosi tracker.
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