Erly

What Erly Does

Erly (pronounced "early") is an iPhone alarm clock with one twist: you do push-ups to turn off your alarm. You set a wake-up time, pick a mission, and when the alarm fires, the only way to silence it is to point the camera at yourself and knock out your reps — AI analyzes the video to verify you actually did them. No snooze button, no faking it. Wake-ups feed a streak system, so every morning is a clear win or loss. The app runs a standard consumer subscription — free trial, then $9.99/month or $29.99/year — and holds a 4.8-star rating across roughly 16,000 App Store reviews. Built by 24-year-old solo founder Jake Glacer, it does over $50K/month with 200,000+ downloads in 2026.

The Problem They Solve

Jake's filter for app ideas: if a problem crosses your mind at least once a day, it's painful enough that people will pay to solve it. Waking up early passes that test for almost everyone. In college, he and his roommate talked every single night about going to sleep earlier and waking up earlier — and every morning the snooze button won anyway. When he shows people the app today, the reaction is always the same: "I need this," or "my friend needs this." Everyone either has the problem or knows someone who does.

The category had a structural problem too. Alarm apps existed for years, but they were gimmicky and unreliable — Apple didn't let third-party apps touch the real alarm system, so developers faked it with app sounds and workarounds. For an alarm, 99% reliable is broken. That changed in September 2025 when iOS 26 shipped the AlarmKit API, letting apps plug into the iPhone's native alarm infrastructure for the first time. Reliability unlocked the entire category — and a short window to own it.

The Growth Story

Jake Glacer is not the founder archetype you'd expect behind a viral consumer app. He studied accounting — four years of undergrad, a year for his masters, a CPA, and a year-plus at a Big Four firm. But he'd been teaching himself to code for four years on the side, and a string of failed businesses had drilled in one lesson: marketing matters more than building.

The idea came from his own life. Struggling to wake up early, he started texting a friend each night: "I'm going to send you a video of me doing push-ups by 6:00 a.m. tomorrow." The accountability worked. When he went looking for his next product, he turned that text-message ritual into an app — and shipped the MVP in 19 days from first commit to App Store, in September 2025. Notably, version one had no alarm at all. It was purely an accountability app for logging your wake-up.

Then came the strategic pause that changed everything. Jake knew he could build; he didn't know if he could get views. He took a full day to walk, think, and write out directions — and landed on the alarm feature, right as iOS 26's AlarmKit API made real third-party alarms possible for the first time. The alarm shipped 19 days after launch. Seven days later, his first influencer video went live, and he watched real purchases come in from it. That was the validation — not signups, not compliments, purchases.

The scaling curve was steep: first $1,000 in revenue three weeks after that first video, a $30K month in month three, a $50K month in month four. By mid-2026, Erly was doing 50,000+ downloads per month and had crossed 200,000 total downloads for the year — still effectively a one-person company, with help only around the edges.

The engine behind all of it was influencer marketing on TikTok and Instagram — but with a targeting insight that made it work where most influencer campaigns fail. Jake sent waves of DMs (mostly ignored at first) specifically to creators making day-in-the-life and lifestyle content, because his app could appear in their videos without changing them. A typical winner: a POV day-in-the-life of a college student — the alarm goes off on screen, they drop and do push-ups, the app analyzes the video and flashes "alarm turned off." Viewers don't experience it as an ad; they experience it as a morbidly relatable morning. Then the comments fill with "what's the app?" and a pinned reply — "Erly on the App Store" — converts them.