A French high schooler turned his math account into a billboard for his app: AXIOM got 7,000 installs in one month

AXIOM is a French high school math app, launched less than two months ago, with nearly 10,000 installs on Google Play. It hasn't been covered by any media, and we've seen no paid ads. Almost all installs come from its CEO: a math YouTuber who is around seventeen and still in high school. Below: how he turned followers into users, whether students will pay, and whether you can copy the playbook.

A video on "how tall is a tchiki brrr really"

On Oct 14, 2026, the TikTok account @chadsciences posted a vertical video titled "Combien mesure vraiment un tchiki brrr ? 📏": using proportions and similar triangles to work out how tall a brainrot meme character popular with French middle and high schoolers really is. By Nov 6 the video had 580k views, 34k likes and 10k shares. Its last caption line, like almost every video this account posted this month, reads "#axiom AXIOM 👉 lien en bio", meaning AXIOM, link in bio.

The bio itself says only: "AXIOM Dispo sur AppStore et Play store".

The account belongs to Lou Dolbeau. His YouTube channel ChadSciences has 114k subscribers, and long videos often get 100K to 800K views. Ouest-France wrote about him in March 2025, when he was 15 and attending high school in La Flèche, with the channel at 35k subscribers. His personal Instagram bio now reads "100k Yt · AXIOM CEO".

What it is

AXIOM splits three years of French high school math (Seconde to Terminale) into 52 chapters: logic and reasoning, probability, functions, vectors, all the way to integrals. In each lesson you don't read a textbook. You drag a point with your finger, pull a vector, arrange a row of counters, and the figure updates instantly. Once you spot the pattern, the formula is revealed. The store page's first line is "Math is not a memory problem, it's an explanation problem." There are no ads.

The free version gives 2 lessons a day. The AXIOM Prime subscription is €8.99/month or €59.99/year. The Android developer is listed as Axiom Science, launched Sep 12. The iOS version launched in September under a personal developer account, navid gahier (copyright listed as Ramanujan Labs). Whether he and Lou are partners or contractors can't be determined from public information.

Why it took off in October

Looking at the Play install curve (AppstoreSpy estimates; don't take single-day numbers too literally):

Roughly 10-18 installs came in the 10-30 days from 12 to 7,300, about three quarters of the total. It has only charted in France, where its best education free-chart rank was #66 (10-29), and 11-06 was #104.

This lines up with changes on the TikTok account. On Sep 11 he posted "AXIOM Disponible sur PlayStore et AppStore" to announce the launch, then barely posted for a month. From Oct 7 he started adding #axiom, and from Oct 9 he was posting 3 to 8 videos a day, each ending by pointing to the app. In October the account posted about 120 videos in total, for roughly 5.2M views (TikTok video pages, 11-06 counts). The top performers: "tchiki brrr" 580k, "8 parts en 3 coups de couteau" (cutting a cake into 8 pieces with three knife cuts) 360k, "π contre √2" 350k, "l'anneau infini" 220k, and "Elwan VS Louise en maths ?" 210k.

The videos blew up in the middle and late part of October, and installs hit their peak in late October too. In November single videos dropped to a few thousand or ten-odd thousand views, and daily installs fell back to a couple hundred. Rough math: in October, about 1,000 TikTok views produced about 1.5 Play installs (estimate, iOS not included). One thing doesn't quite line up: frequent posting started around Oct 9, but installs only turned up around 10-19, a gap of about ten days. It could be lag in the install estimates, or people may need to see several videos before they tap the bio (inference).

Other channels play a supporting role: the YouTube channel's top link now points to axiomscience.app/download?source=youtube (with a source tag, so you can tell which route the traffic came from), the official YouTube account has 5.4K subscribers, Instagram posts the same batch of videos, and the website links to a Discord. Nobody has mentioned it on X in the past two months, and I found no press coverage or paid acquisition.

The videos and the app are the same thing

These videos aren't "download now" ads. They're small math paradoxes: can Hilbert's infinite hotel fit one more guest once it's full, is 0.999… equal to 1, which is bigger, π or √2, how many shuffles does it take to mix a deck of 7 cards. Each one explains "why", and the app explains "why" too: you try it with your hands first, and only at the end do they tell you the name. Someone who watches a video and thinks "so math can be taught like this" lands on the same approach in the app, so conversion is smooth.

The topics are chosen well too: brainrot memes, Minecraft land claiming, Boursorama bank referral bonuses, two classmates comparing math scores. These are things high schoolers are talking about right now, and creators without a big following can learn from that.

Will students pay?

This is AXIOM's weakest link right now. The iOS French store has only 17 ratings, 2.53 stars (11-06), and almost all the bad reviews say the same thing. Here are a few from Oct 20 to 26, the week the traffic spiked:

• "Fais miroiter une version gratuite alors que l'abonnement est obligatoire après trois jours": it makes you think there's a free version, then after three days you have to subscribe. "Plagiat complet de duolingo", and "especially the one by ChadSciences, I used to really like him." (2 stars)
• "je suis un enfant je suis au collège mes parents ne veulent pas payer l'abonnement": I'm a middle schooler, my parents won't pay for the subscription, so how am I supposed to learn math? (1 stars)
• "Le principe de l'application a l'air vraiment intéressant… mais il faudrait un mode gratuit comme duolingo": the idea looks really interesting, but it should have a free mode like Duolingo. (1 stars)

The early reviews were actually good, like the Oct 11 4-star review: "great for building math intuition." So the content and the product itself are recognized. What's stuck is the price and the paywall. Its users are 15- and 16-year-olds with no money of their own, who have to convince their parents. On the iOS French education Top Grossing chart it reached #88, with estimated monthly revenue below $1,000 (est.). It has no Play ratings yet.

Who it's competing with

The slot for "French, aligned to the high school syllabus, hands-on" is almost empty. But it didn't break out because the slot was empty. It broke out because the CEO is the person these students see every day on their feed. The same app published by a developer with no following would have a much harder cold start on TikTok.

How many people know about it?

Very few. No media outlet has written about the app (Ouest-France wrote about the person, and it was before the app existed). X has 0 discussions, revenue isn't public, and I found no copycats. Its exposure is limited to the TikTok and YouTube circles of French high schoolers.

If it were you

C. Worth learning the playbook, but not really worth copying the product. AXIOM's installs come from its founder's own following, which followers can't replicate. What it proves is that "fans will come download," not that "students will pay." The bad reviews are concentrated on the paywall.

Who it's for: someone who is already an education creator in a particular country and subject (tens of thousands of followers on TikTok or YouTube, mostly middle and high schoolers), or a developer who can strike a revenue-share deal with someone like that. On languages, high school math in German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese (Brazil) is worth a look. Start by searching TikTok for "math paradox" accounts in each local language, and look for ones with over 100K followers that haven't built a product yet.

Who it's not for: anyone without a content channel who plans to rely on store search or paid acquisition to get started (students pay little and don't pay for things themselves, so paid acquisition is hard to make work), or anyone who wants to target the English market (Brilliant is already there).

How to build it: follow AXIOM's format. Split the curriculum into dozens of levels by local syllabus, each a few minutes long, with hands-on work first and formulas after, and no ads. Don't copy its paywall: the student side needs a free tier that people can actually keep using, and the money should come from parents (offer a per-semester or per-exam-season price alongside monthly), with the paywall placed most prominently right before exams (inferred).

How to get users: turn the creator's account into a referral account. The bio only contains the download link, and every video ends with a line like "link in bio." Topics are paradoxes and current memes, 3 to 5 posts a day, held for one month. Tag every link with a source parameter. Based on AXIOM's October numbers, roughly 1M views bought about 1,500 Android installs (est.). Start by running your own numbers against that.

When to start: follow the school calendar. The best time is to start posting a month before the first mid-term test or final exams of the semester. If you miss that, the next window is revision season before graduation exams the following year.

What would show you got it wrong: (1) if AXIOM switches to "free to use + paid extras" and its iOS rating climbs back above 4 stars and it holds a top 50 spot on the French education Top Grossing chart, that means paying works, which is more worth doing than C; (2) conversely, if after November Lou's video views stay around 10K and Play daily installs fall into the double digits with no second channel taking over, that means this was a one-time conversion of fans, and even the founder can't keep growth going; (3) if a similar product shows up in another country (an education creator building an interactive syllabus course themselves) and passes 50K installs within three months, the playbook is replicable, and the opportunity is in your language, so move fast.

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Data and sources: Google Play installs and French education chart rank (11-06; daily new installs are AppstoreSpy estimates); App Store French ratings and reviews (id6799700069,11-06); TikTok @chadsciences profile and video view counts (11-06 statistics, times in French time); YouTube @ChadSciences and @axiomscienceapp; Instagram @lou_dlb01 bio; Ouest-France 2025-03-08; the axiomscience.app website and Play store page (11-06). Places marked "est." or "inferred" are estimates and inferences.