Luck plays a huge role in everything, but by all accounts this team created one of the best apps to grace the App Store. This wasn't a generic automation app.
Agreed. It may have been luck that they were successful at first (I honestly have no idea), but it seems very clear that they took whatever advantages they had and how to execute on them to continue to make a great product and keep improving it. By the time you get to today I think it's fair to say they earned their place. They're pretty far past where luck alone would take you.
I was at the same MHacks I think! My team won a smaller prize, but we didn't really do anything with the app afterward. It's pretty cool to see a hackathon project with a successful exit. This is very good marketing for hackathons in general.
Luck.
There's probably a dozen automation tools out there. There are dozen chat and dating apps as well.
Yet all the effort and attention is focused on becoming a lottery ticket.