In December 2008, an internet entrepreneur named Joel Comm released a 99-cent iPhone app that played fart sounds. Sixteen days later, it was the number one app in the iTunes Store. Seventeen years later, it’s still generating unpaid media coverage, most recently from PC Gamer, Gizmodo, and Yahoo Tech in April 2026.
No marketing budget. No PR firm on retainer. No paid placements. Just a repeatable four-part playbook that generated six distinct media cycles across nearly two decades. And it’s a playbook any founder can apply to a product that has nothing to do with flatulence.
The story of iFart Mobile isn’t about novelty apps or viral luck. It’s about a founder who understood something most of his peers didn’t in 2008 and still don’t in 2026: attention is not a budget line item. It’s a system you design. Comm designed his system so well that the app has outlived countless iPhone generations and had what may be the longest-running iPhone entertainment app in history.
Here’s how he did it, and what any modern founder can apply.
Part One: Radical Transparency Before It Was A Genre
When iFart launched in late 2008, App Store developers guarded their sales numbers like classified documents. Nobody knew what anyone else was making. The App Store was seven months old, and everyone was pretending to be more successful than they were.
Comm did the opposite. He started publishing his daily sales figures on his blog. After two weeks, the app had generated $9,198 in net revenue after Apple’s thirty percent cut. By Christmas Day, iFart had sold 38,927 units in a single day, generating $27,249 in net revenue in twenty-four hours. Comm published those numbers too.
The reaction was immediate. TechCrunch, VentureBeat, MacRumors, and Ars Technica all ran pieces that effectively said the same thing: “Can you believe this guy is making this much money off a fart app?” Each story is linked to Comm’s own blog, driving traffic, validation, and more coverage. MG Siegler wrote a VentureBeat post titled “A Christmas iFart Explosion” that became one of the most-referenced pieces in App Store history.
The lesson for modern founders is not to publish a fart app. It’s to identify the one piece of data your industry treats as confidential and publish it anyway. Revenue works. So does churn, or conversion rate, or customer acquisition cost, or payroll. Pick the number your peers guard most jealously and put it on the internet. You will get written about.
Pieter Levels built his entire career on this principle. The “build in public” movement on X runs on it. Stripe Atlas founders publish their MRR charts. None of them invented the playbook. Comm did, in 2008, with a novelty app, because he understood that transparency is cheaper than advertising.
Part Two: Embrace The Controversy Cycle
In February 2009, a competing app called Pull My Finger sent Comm a legal demand letter accusing iFart of trademark infringement and demanding fifty thousand dollars. Most founders would have settled quickly or panicked publicly.
Comm filed a preemptive declaratory judgment in the Colorado District Court and blogged about it. The lawsuit became a media event. By July, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart had produced a segment about the case, with correspondent Wyatt Cenac interviewing both Comm and his opponent. The segment aired on July 21, 2009, and generated another wave of coverage across every major tech publication.
The lawsuit was settled in September 2009 with a joint product called “Clear the Air.” Nobody cared about the product. The story was the fight, and the fight was worth more than any outcome of the fight.
Modern founders spend enormous effort trying to avoid controversy. Comm understood that controversy, managed carefully, is a distribution channel. The Air-O-Matic lawsuit generated more press coverage than any paid campaign could have bought. He did not start the fight. He just refused to run from it, and he made sure the press had a good story to write.
Part Three: Celebrity Seeding Without Paying Celebrities
In November 2011, George Clooney gave an interview to Rolling Stone magazine. Buried inside was a single sentence: “I have iFart on my phone.”
Comm had not paid Clooney. He had not pitched Clooney. He had not even known Clooney owned the app. But he had spent three years making sure iFart was the canonical reference every journalist reached for when they needed to mention a silly app. By the time Clooney decided to name a favorite novelty app in public, there was only one option.
Sales went from 67 units on November 8 to 348 units on November 9. The next two days generated 431 and 432 units, respectively. A single sentence from a single celebrity in a single magazine profile quintupled daily revenue for a week.
The lesson is not to get Clooney to name-drop your product. It’s that celebrities, journalists, and cultural commentators all default to the most recognizable example in any category. If your product is the default reference, you get the free mentions. That status is built through years of consistent coverage, transparent storytelling, and becoming unavoidable in your niche. Comm made iFart unavoidable. That’s why Clooney knew to mention it.
Other celebrities preceded and followed the same pattern across the years. Helena Bonham Carter, Colin Firth, Demi Moore, David Duchovny, Robin Williams, Kathie Lee Gifford, Bill Maher, and Peter Molyneux have all referenced the app publicly. None were paid. All were organic.
Part Four: Evergreen Positioning Outlasts Everything
In April 2026, a YouTuber named Jonas Čeika fed ChatGPT a thirty-seven-second audio clip of iFart sounds and asked for a music critique. The AI praised the clip’s “bedroom/DIY texture” and compared the mood to Scorsese’s After Hours. Čeika posted the exchange on X, and within six days, it had been covered by PC Gamer, Gizmodo, Yahoo Tech, MSN, and a rheumatology trade publication in Australia.
Comm didn’t promote the moment. He didn’t even know it was happening until the coverage hit. iFart had transcended its own product category and become a cultural artifact useful for testing other things, in this case, the sycophancy of large language models.
This is the final and most important part of the playbook. A product that’s merely successful dies when the category dies. A product that becomes a cultural reference outlives the category entirely. iFart is no longer competing with other fart apps. It’s competing with the concept of “the archetypal dumb app that made money,” and it’s winning that competition unopposed.
Most founders optimize for revenue. A smaller number optimizes for exit. Almost none optimize for cultural permanence. Comm did, probably by accident at first and by design later, and the result is a product that’s been generating free press across three decades.
What Founders Building In 2026 Should Steal
The iFart playbook, in four parts: publish the data your industry hides, lean into controversy instead of running from it, build default-reference status so celebrities mention you unprompted, and position your product as a cultural artifact rather than a category entry.
None of it requires a novelty product. None of it requires 2008 timing. All of it requires a founder willing to think about attention as a system rather than a budget. Most won’t. The ones who do will still be getting written about in 2040.
Photo by Kelli McClintock: Unsplash
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