Summize｜Three young talents, 24 hours, it’s that easy to top the App Store charts!

If you looked at the App Store's top paid apps charts in the United States on Sunday, March 27, you'd have noticed that familiar game names like "Minecraft" and "HeadsUp!" were still on the list.

Who would have thought that 24 hours later, an unknown learning app called Summize would overtake them all and top the list.

You can download Summize for just $0.99, which quickly scans books or news and summarizes them. For today’s test-takers, this is a dream come true.

In an interview with Tech Insider, the three teenagers behind Summize explained how they reached the top of the App Store charts in just 24 hours with almost no publicity and an advertising budget of less than $25,000 .

Carter Bjorklund helps Summize shine on social media.

Rami Ghanem (left) developed the app, and Aiden Craig (right) worked with Bjorklund on marketing.

Smart social media campaigns

Summize has two marketing gurus: Carter Bjorklund, 18 , who now lives in Minnesota, and Aiden Craig, 16, who is from Canada and is home-schooled.

In mid-March, Craig met Rami Ghanem, then 18, a developer at Summize, at the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas.

"He always has endless textbooks to read, so he hopes to find a way to solve the problem once and for all," Craig mentioned in the interview.

There are only three common methods for app promotion: targeted Facebook ads, endorsements from social celebrities, and extensive media coverage, but Summize abandoned all of the above methods when it was launched on March 9, keeping a low profile and mystery .

It wasn’t until March 27 that social media started to hype up Summize. Since the advertising budget could not exceed $25,000, Craig and Bjorklund applied for many fake accounts to promote their products, and also paid for social influencers to help them build momentum, such as Vine's @okaymoe and Instagram's @jerkful.

“We’re influencers ourselves, so we already have a lot of connections. This promotion was a piece of cake,” Bjorklund said.

Instead of simply having social influencers post tweets, they used fake accounts to follow the development of the tweets. “When influencers are promoting something, we can analyze the data, including public engagement, event impact, etc.,” Bjorklund said.

“The idea is to be creative and try to change the form of advertising as much as possible,” he said. “We want to integrate the app into interesting tweets, and sometimes the quirkiness of tweets is enough to go viral, but ads don’t have that kind of appeal.”

Many apps rely on fake social media accounts to promote themselves, but Bjorklund and Craig believe theirs is a success because they are so careful.

Craig and Bjorklund declined to reveal how much they spent on publicity, but stressed that they paid out of their own pockets and that the budget did not exceed $25,000. They also don't disclose how much they spend on hiring people to post tweets.

“Their ads were just ads,” Craig said of other app developers. “Our strategy was refreshing: We wanted to make the ad viral and get as much exposure as possible, while clearly explaining what Summize was and why users needed it.”

The results speak for themselves, as they watched Summize leap from No. 80 on the App Store’s paid list to No. 4, and then climb to the top spot.

Summize 's popularity peaked when it shot to the top of the App Store charts. At midnight on March 29, Craig tweeted his congratulations and attached a screenshot of Summize winning the first place.

Mixed response

Since appearing on the list, Summize has caused a strong response among students, which can be described as a mixture of love and hate. There are both five-star reviews and one-star reviews that are considered completely useless.

“We weren’t trying to make a killing with this app or make some crappy product,” Craig said. “We put a lot of time and effort into making sure it worked.”

As an application developer, Ghanem's other public project is an enterprise software package, which is the project that landed him on the TV show Dragons' Den (a business investment reality show).

To be able to scan and summarize text content, Ghanem claims that Summize uses a series of patented technologies. Ghanem confirmed that there is no artificial intelligence component to the current iteration of the app.

Summize claims that its ability to display content, preferences and keyword analysis is like the "encyclopedia Cliffsnote" that students dream of (Cliffsnote is a well-known American study guide website).

If you scan a psychology book, every new word will appear. Imagine if it were a history book, with the dates of all the major events clearly stated.

I used the app to summarize recent Uber news and found the results, while not absolutely accurate, to be satisfactory .

Bjorklund said that users who had problems with the camera were either not taking clear pictures or taking several pictures at once. He said that for the app to work it must scan the entire text and there must be a sufficient amount of text content. They said that in subsequent new versions, the team will work on making instructions clearer.

Summize denied the allegations that the team spent money to get positive reviews on the App Store. “The early positive reviews on the app are genuine and authentic,” Ghanem said in an email. “We have a strong team behind the app and these reviews are genuine thoughts on the app.”

Enjoy the glory moment

Despite the mixed reviews of the app, Bjorklund, Craig, and Ghanem have become the focus of media attention due to the success of Summize. Ghanem said he has received investment interest from numerous venture capital firms, but declined to disclose the specific names.

Summize was also picked up by Product Hunt, which introduces new apps and products to the tech community. Although there haven’t been many reports about the app, the actions of these three young people prove that they just want their intelligence to be widely noticed. They plan to promote their product on Facebook and Snapchat next.

The popularity of Summize will keep it popular in the App Store. The developers told Tech Insider that the top-ranked app is estimated to earn $15,000 in revenue per day.

Regardless of how Summize performs in the future, it has already beaten those apps that cost a lot of money and rely on celebrities, and this is what the three teenagers behind Summize are most proud of.

If you look at the cover pictures of Bjorklund, Craig, and Ghanem on Twitter, it's the same picture.

At least for now.