Pushback of the Week, August 31, 2025

An App That Helps Young Men Quit Porn

According to surveys, four out of five men in the U.S. have watched pornography within the last year, and 57% watch porn at least once a month, with a substantial number watching it daily. Alarmingly, the ubiquitousness of smartphones in the younger age groups means that porn-watching has also become increasingly normalized among preteens and teens, with 12 being the average age of first exposure.

Young entrepreneurs Alex Slater and Connor McLaren, who admit that they partook themselves until they got on the “male self-improvement” bandwagon and quit, decided to create a subscription-based app, Quittr, to help young men—their Gen Z peers—do likewise. The Quittr onboarding process features a wide-ranging intake questionnaire that not only assesses how long the new subscriber has been “hooked” but dives into the details of porn addiction, asking questions such as, “Has your exposure gotten more twisted?” Other features include a personalized plan with goal-setting, a tracker (to see how long the user has gone without porn), a panic button (for those inclined to relapse), and a content blocker.

Quittr’s founders have also been savvy enough to include a community component that allows subscribers to “share experiences, exchange tips, celebrate milestones, and find encouragement from others.” Slater describes this as important to their particular market niche: “There was a massive underserved community of young guys who were just struggling, had no one to talk to because it was embarrassing, and were fighting this on their own.”

McLaren agrees that the timing was right for an app targeting their generation: “We saw a shift with Gen Z expressing the fact that porn’s bad…. It wasn’t really cool to watch porn any more, it was kind of just like: you’re a loser if you watch porn.”

Apparently they have assessed their market accurately, because by August 2025, the app—marketed through influencers and social media—was bringing in half a million dollars a month.