Five years of a cat blogger, and it hit #30 on Taiwan's Top Grossing: can meowith keep up?

On Taiwan's App Store lifestyle Top Grossing chart, a cat-care logging app that launched barely a month ago has been sitting between #21 and #39 every day. It shows no sign of paid ads, has no press coverage, and has only 20 ratings, all 5 stars. Behind it is a blogger who wrote five years of cat food nutrition articles and whose group buys reached nearly NT$2M. The product itself isn't hard to build. The hard part is those five years. For anyone thinking of copying it, this piece mainly lays out which parts can be copied and which can't.

"Meowith's story begins five years ago"

On Oct 19, 2026, Instagram creator 「芋圓兩仔」(@ooinnfamily) posted a very long post that opens with this line. Her name is Evelyn (芋圆麻), she has two cats, 圆仔 and 芋仔, and her day job is statistical analysis.

The post tells a long story: she started a blog and wrote up the research she'd done for novice cat owners. To pick food for her two cats without hand-calculating every time, she built a "Cat Food Dry-Matter Ratio & Calorie Calculator" and put it on the blog. Last year she launched a paid "Taro Ball Family Scientific Cat-Care Notion System," tracking water intake, weight, and vet visits in one place. Then her cat Yuanzai got sick, and she realized that "records you keep day to day really help when you need to look back." Notion can't share a cat-food resource library and doesn't work well on mobile, so this year she hired a "professional team" to build an App.

The post ends with three lines: search "meowith 喵與" on iOS or Android; get a free 7-day trial with no card and no prepayment; and "comment 'download' and I'll send you the link." Early-bird subscription pricing runs through the end of the year.

What it is

A cat-care app that uses cat food nutrition as its entry point.

• Scan food. Scan a can's barcode and the app converts the nutrition label to dry matter ratios, then rates it with a traffic light by food type. Staple foods are judged on protein, fat, calcium-phosphorus ratio, phosphorus and sodium. Side dishes and snacks are judged only on phosphorus and sodium, the two that burden kidneys and heart. Prescription food is only marked "use only as directed by a vet." The website says the database has more than 5,000 barcodes and covers staple wet food, pouches, dry food, treats and prescription food sold in Taiwan.
• Log every meal. Pick food from the database instead of typing in calories. The home screen shows progress rings for the day's calories and water. If a cat vomits or has soft stools, you can link it to that meal.
• Useful at the vet. Visit records, medications and test values (kidney markers like BUN and CREA) are plotted as line charts, with out-of-range values flagged in red. A one-tap "visit summary" can be shown to the vet.
• It also has switching between multiple cats, reminders and expense tracking.

Pricing (Taiwan App Store page): "Cat Island Observer" NT$168/month or NT$1,690/year. "Cat Island Guardian," for multiple cats with one family member sharing care, is NT$249/month or NT$2,390/year. The free version lets you add one cat. Scans cost "can points," which you can earn by contributing food data. The website FAQ also says it does not accept payment to influence food data, nutrition information or ranking. For a blogger who already runs group buys and works with brands, that line matters.

How big is it really?

Not very big.

• Top Grossing: Taiwan lifestyle Top Grossing chart, on the chart every day from Oct 28 to Nov 6, at ranks 26, 21, 27, 36, 29, 31, 39, 28, 26, 33 (App Store Taiwan). It has not charted on Top Free or the overall chart.
• This chart has a low bar. On the same chart on Nov 6, the #28 app had only 6 ratings and the #40 app had 4. Around #30 roughly corresponds to a few subscriptions a day (inferred).
• Ratings: Oct 28, 18 ratings; Nov 6, 20 ratings; in the last 7 days it added only 2.
• Android: Google Play 50+ downloads (11-06). The product's own Instagram @meowith_app has 231 followers.
• Only in Taiwan. It has never charted in other stores.

Reviews cluster around the official launch in Oct 13 to 19, and they read like longtime fans: "Been waiting ages for a cat-care system. Every other app I tried let me down and I dropped them within a few days" / "The cat food database is seriously impressive, common foods are all built in" / "Logging feedings in a multi-cat household is so easy".

Where users came from: all her own

• Blog search traffic. ooinnfamily.com has run for five years, with litter and cat food comparisons and tool pages like the "sodium-phosphorus quick calculator." These already draw search traffic for "cat food nutrition." Now the app's entry point appears in site navigation, at the bottom of every article and on the calculator pages.
• Instagram comments and DMs. The launch post above auto-replied with the link to anyone who commented "download." Later posts pushed features like "cats you raise together, logged together," which focuses on shared multi-person care.
• Group-buy community. She has long run pet product group buys. Her blog says her carrier bag group buys "brought in nearly NT$2M across two rounds this year," and her first litter round "sold over a thousand boxes." The app's early-bird offer sits at the top of the group-buy page, next to the mats and litter for the next round (ooinnfamily.com group-buy page, 11-06).
• Selling a Notion template first. Her 2025-year Notion system had already gotten the same audience to pay once. The launch post says the app combines "needs shared by hundreds of cat owners." In effect, the app moves that same group from Notion onto phones.
• Having fans build the database before launch. A preview post asked people to comment "the brand + product name you usually buy," and she checked each one for inclusion. In the app, contributing data earns can points, and brands can also send data on their own. Cold-start engagement and the database are the same effort.
• Some small, organic recommendations on Threads, but very small scale.
• Ads, media, X: none found. Not finding them doesn't mean they weren't run, but at this scale, paid ads don't seem necessary.

Who is competing with it: several, but none has taken off

App Store Taiwan / US, 11-06.

The table makes one point clear: the same product wouldn't have taken off without her. mowfun launched almost a year earlier with no worse features, and its best showing was #76 on the chart, for just two days. meowith's database is more complete, its rating rules are more detailed, and it covers the medical side others skipped. Those advantages are real. But what made it stable on the chart right from launch was the people who trust her. Product quality is what keeps loyal subscribers paying once they've paid.

No one specifically chasing it after launch was found. Most of the table launched earlier, so this is parallel competition.

What we don't know yet

• Whether it can hold its rank after the early-bird period ends in Dec 31, i.e., whether payment depends only on one-time enthusiasm from loyal followers. This is the single most important open question.
• Subscriber counts, revenue, and the exact early-bird discount have not been disclosed.
• Whether the "professional team" is outsourced or partners, and whether the company has raised funding, is unverified.

If it were you

Verdict: Worth learning from, but not a great deal to copy. It runs on the founder's five years of content, trust built through group buys, and a group of Notion paying users, none of which a follower can get. Similar players without that base (mowfun, Purrzilla) haven't taken off. Its own scale is small too: a few subscriptions a day on a low-bar Taiwan chart.

Who it fits:

• Someone who is already a content creator in a niche like pets, parenting, or plants, with blog traffic or a community, who has sold something before. For you, this is a complete roadmap.
• A developer who can build an app and is willing to partner with a blogger like this. The partner matters more than the code.

Who it doesn't fit: Anyone with no audience who plans to build a "cat food scanner app" from zero using store search or paid acquisition. Taiwan already has five or six of these, all small, and in English there's an early mover like Leo.

How to do it:

1. Pick a different market, find the people before writing code. Japan and Korea have bigger cat food markets than Taiwan, and local canned food nutrition labels are just as hard to read. Find local bloggers who review cat food or have built calculators or run group buys, and negotiate revenue share or partnership. The database has to be rebuilt around local SKUs, and you can copy its crowdsourcing approach: before launch, have followers report the foods their cats eat, and reward contributions with points in the app.
2. Copy its reading rules, not its scoring. Reading staple, supplementary, and prescription foods separately is more defensible than giving each can one overall score, and it's the clearest difference between it and the English-language players.
3. Copy its pricing structure. 7-day trial with no card required; the free tier is limited to one cat and charges points per scan, which catches multi-cat households and daily scanners; the higher tier sells "shared care" for the whole family. This model works for any case where one household takes care of one subject.
4. Copy its path. Content and free tool pages → validate that people will pay with a low-cost paid template (Notion) → build the app and move that audience over. Cold start without spending on paid acquisition.

How it gets users: The partner bloggers' own channels: the tool pages on their blogs, comments and DMs on IG / Threads, and group-buy chats. At this scale, store search and ads don't help much.

When to move:No rush. Nobody in other language markets has built this category through creators yet, so the window mostly depends on whether you can find the right people. Check its 2027 January rankings before you decide.

Signs that would mean you read it wrong:

• If it stays in the top 40 of the Top Grossing chart after the early-bird period ends, or starts moving toward the overall chart, that suggests cat owners will keep paying for long-term records, the business is bigger than it looks, and it's worth moving sooner.
• If a similar app without a KOL behind it (like mowfun) suddenly takes off, that suggests the product can acquire users on its own, and the "find the people first" advice can be relaxed.
• Conversely, if it drops off the chart after January, that suggests the revenue came from one-time support from loyal early users, and the case for following it is weaker.