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From panic attack to a million-dollar app: how Anya built Rooted without writing a line of code

From panic attack to a million-dollar app: how Anya built Rooted without writing a line of code

26 May 2026

Anya built Rooted — an iPhone app for panic attack and anxiety relief — to over 4 million downloads and over a million dollars in revenue. She had no coding background, no product background, and no venture funding. She had a panic attack in her fourth year of university and a notebook.

This article distills an interview with Anya on Pat Walls' Starter Story into what actually worked: how she knew the problem was worth solving, how a non-technical founder actually ships an MVP, and the four-step playbook she used to go from zero to millions of users.

The idea came from her worst moment

Anya was in her fourth year of university, far from home, with no family doctor, when she had her first panic attack — "seemingly out of nowhere." She didn't even know what a panic attack was. She scrolled through the App Store looking for something to help and found two categories: clinical tools that felt like medical journals, and hypnosis apps that didn't feel serious.

There was nothing for the acute moment — when someone is actually having an attack and needs to know what's happening and what to do right now.

That's where Rooted was born. Not from market research. From a gap she had personally fallen into.

How to know a personal problem is worth building

Anya's validation wasn't a survey or a pitch deck. It was a combination of two signals:

  1. Existing solutions were missing something concrete. She downloaded every app in the category and read the reviews. The same complaints came up over and over: nobody explained what a panic attack is, and nobody offered a concrete path through one in the moment. That gap was observable in other people's words, not just her own experience.

  2. Early users asked her to keep going — despite the bugs. The first prototype was broken and incomplete. The first few hundred users still said: keep going. Not "nice," not "interesting." Keep going.

If you're confident other people are experiencing your problem, it's worth just launching an MVP to see if what you've created will help them.

Notice what she didn't do: she didn't listen to naysayers. She was, in her own words, "obsessed with getting the idea out there" — and she needed to prove it herself. That's not arrogance; it's a realistic description of what it takes to hold momentum through months of low validation.

Shipping an MVP without code: notebook → wireframes → student dev

Anya had zero technical background. Her process:

  • Step 1 — Paper sketches. She drew flows in a notebook. Focus: how should information be presented when someone is completely overwhelmed? Not fancy design — radical simplicity.
  • Step 2 — Wireframes in Photoshop/Illustrator. She taught herself just enough to be able to communicate what she wanted. Not to produce the final design — to make sure a developer could understand her immediately.
  • Step 3 — Failed agency attempt. She approached an agency, got a quote she couldn't afford. That delay cost time — but spared her from building the wrong thing with the wrong team.
  • Step 4 — Student developer. A student dev volunteered. Within a few months the first version was out, funded by her own savings.

The entire MVP was a single button: the "panic attack button." Tap it → a guided sequence walks you through the attack. Plus a breathing tool and short lessons on what a panic attack actually is.

That core button hasn't changed much over the years. It's the aha moment that actually resonates with users. What's changed is the design around it.

The lesson isn't "everyone should wait for a student developer." The lesson is: Rooted's core value was a single interaction. She built that — not an "ecosystem," not a "platform." A button that solves an acute problem.

The growth game: three tactics that actually worked

Rooted grew slowly. ~10,000 downloads in year 1. ~100,000 in year 2. A million in year 3. Then the curve accelerated. Three things drove the growth:

1. Active, genuinely helpful social media presence

Not "growth hacking." Anya sat literal hours reading posts about anxiety, writing helpful comments, and linking back to Rooted when it was relevant. Today, she says, the same tactic works — but never lead with "download my app." Answer the actual question first. Use your app's lessons as raw material. Value goes before the link.

2. Cold pitches to journalists

Anya initially didn't want to be "the anxiety girl." She learned that putting a personal name on a story is actually what makes editors bite. She found journalists writing about mental health, found their LinkedIn or email, and pitched. The response rate was low — but the hits were enormous: Cosmopolitan, Women's Health, Time Magazine. All from cold, organic emails. For a small app, one big placement is worth a hundred B-list ones.

3. App Store Optimization as a closed loop

This is the non-obvious one: ASO isn't just keywords on the product page. It's a circle that has to close:

  • The product page promises X.
  • The product delivers X.
  • Users describe their experience in the same words as the product page.
  • Reviews reinforce the keywords Apple's algorithm already sees.

The loop is sacred. If any link breaks (the product doesn't deliver what the page promises; the page doesn't describe what users actually experience), ASO stays weak no matter how much you fiddle with metadata.

The four-step playbook Anya would give you in 2025

  1. Build a product that actually delivers what your page promises. That drives both positive reviews and word-of-mouth. This is the foundation — no marketing trick fixes a product that doesn't hold up.
  2. Listen to your user reviews. Everything you need to know is usually written there. Your own assumptions about what the user needs are often wrong.
  3. Continuously optimize App Store presence. Anya ships an update every week. That signals to Apple and to users that the app is alive, which itself strengthens ranking.
  4. Partner strategically. B2B contracts with wellness organizations, therapy groups, and psychology practices have become a non-trivial growth channel — the kind of distribution that's extremely hard to copy.

The metric that matters most: not revenue, not downloads

Rooted tracks user reviews as the primary metric. Not revenue, not DAU. Current rating: 4.8/5. Anya's thesis is that in mental health, trust is the ultimate distribution channel — and that a 4.8 on the App Store does more for organic growth than any paid ad spend.

Concrete proof: they measure that users feel better from a panic attack within under two minutes using the app. That's not a vanity metric. It's the product's reason for existing, quantified.

I think our focus on tracking user reviews and quality over revenue has been a big factor in why we've grown.

It's a counterintuitive choice: nearly every SaaS and app guru says "track revenue first." Anya's argument is that in a product whose value is emotional safety, the user's voice is the leading indicator — revenue is a lagging outcome of it.

The uncomfortable advice: celebrate the small wins

Anya spent two and a half years working a four-day-a-week job while building Rooted three days a week. "No weekends, no social life for years." She nearly burned out multiple times.

Her one retrospective regret isn't strategy or product decisions. It's that she didn't celebrate the small wins:

Looking back I realize those were the most awesome moments. But I was just focused on the next thing, ready to get to the next thing.

This isn't soft talk. It's a pragmatic observation: if you don't register progress when it happens, the motivational fuel runs out — and without motivation a solo founder doesn't survive a three-year growth curve.

Three takeaways

  1. The acute moment is the product. Rooted was built around a single interaction — what should someone do during a panic attack right now? Find your equivalent of the "panic button." Everything else is packaging around that interaction.
  2. ASO is a closed loop, not a keyword game. The page, the product, and the reviews have to say the same thing. If one link breaks, the whole chain weakens — no matter how much you optimize metadata.
  3. In trust-based categories, reviews beat revenue as a leading metric. For mental health, health, parenting, finance — the user's voice is the distribution channel. Track it first; revenue follows.

Based on an interview with Anya, founder of Rooted, by Pat Walls on Starter Story. Rooted has been downloaded over 4 million times and generated over $1M in revenue since its 2019 launch.