Sub Club by RevenueCat

On the podcast: The past, present, and future of Meta ads, tactics to scale subscription apps on Meta, and why you should probably exclude younger audiences in your targeting.

Key Takeaways:

⍰  Why Meta Ads? Its vast reach and precision targeting make Meta the best platform for discovery. Ads seamlessly integrate with organic content, providing a native experience for users and transparency for advertisers.

📈 Simplify for efficiency. Kick off with broad targeting within a consolidated account structure. As your understanding and budget deepens, become more targeted with tailored ad variations. 

🎯 Strategic targeting tips. To elevate conversion rates early on, sidestep users under 25 or 30 and prefer manual campaign setups. This initial focus enhances control, paving the way for more automated refinement later on.

🧘 Navigating SKAN with patience. Prioritize trial events and give the data time to crystallize into actionable insights. Rushed evaluations can deceive; allowing at least a week can provide a more accurate picture of your campaign's impact.

🦾 Harness creative diversity and precise placements. Scaling up means evolving your creative approach to suit distinct audience behaviors across Meta's diverse platforms. Meticulously analyzing demographic and placement data ensures your ads resonate more profoundly with your target audience. 

🖥️ Tips for better ads. Study native content and competitors to design ads similar to what users already see. Test new creatives in separate campaigns to protect your main campaign’s performance.

About Guest

👨‍💻 Independent consultant who helps subscription apps unlock Meta as their primary growth channel.

📈 Marcus has over a decade of experience with a background in both gaming and consumer tech, working with companies like Forge of Empires, Blinkist, and Tandem. You can also find him on LinkedIn sharing practical advice on Meta Ads, Web2App, optimizing paywalls, and improving user onboarding.

💡 “Don’t target too narrow. These algorithms usually need a lot of reach so they can use the data to find the right audience for you. If you apply a ton of targeting restrictions on top, then usually you pay a premium for targeting more granularly while performance is not necessarily better.”

👋  LinkedIn

Episode Highlights

[9:18] Before and after: How Meta ad marketing changed after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT).

[17:56] Working within limits: The pros and (multiple) cons of SKAN 3.

[20:36] Into the Meta-verse: Why subscription apps are uniquely situated to benefit from Meta ads.

[23:40] (Best) practice makes perfect: How to optimize Meta ad campaigns to find the right audiences and maximize ROI.

[32:56] Right on target: Unlock your app’s advertising potential with more advanced creative and placement strategies.

[35:06] The other half of the equation: Ads are just the beginning of the customer journey — make sure your entire funnel is a seamless and compelling experience for potential users.

[48:25] Get creative: For the best ad performance and ROI, create ad content that matches what your users are looking for on social platforms.

[52:13] The future is bright: Upcoming developments like SKAN 4 and Meta’s Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) should make creating and analyzing Meta ads easier.

On the podcast: The many failures of his recent app launch, the surprising results of his first-ever A/B test, and the many reasons why you shouldn’t plan a big app launch.

Top Takeaways:

🔄 Continuous evolution over big bangs: For subscription apps, frequent updates create enduring value, outpacing the impact of sparse, major launches. This steady stream of enhancements keeps your app relevant and signals relentless improvement to your audience.

🌱 Opt for flexible launches: Avoid putting all your hopes in one major launch. A strategy that includes multiple, smaller launches allows for adaptability and maintains your app's presence against the backdrop of an unpredictable news cycle.

📰 Press is unpredictable: Understand that media coverage does not guarantee app success. The broad reach may not always align with your target audience and many factors are outside of your control. Keep swinging, though, as some hits will indeed make a substantial impact — just keep your expectations in check. 

💰 Adopt value-based pricing: Pricing should reflect what customers value in your app, not just the costs to provide it. Value-based pricing doesn't necessarily mean charging more, it just means charging the perceived value. Users don’t care about the costs of providing a service.

🔍 A/B testing insights depend on the nature of the cohort. The origin of your app's users — e.g. via launch events or organic growth — plays a crucial role in interpreting A/B test results. What did or didn’t work for one group isn’t necessarily applicable for the next — so test and draw conclusions appropriately. 

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Growth advocate at RevenueCat and indie developer of apps like Launch Center Pro and Weather Up.

🍎 Although he’s neither a designer nor a developer, David has been building the kinds of thoughtful, intuitive apps he wants to use since the App Store first launched in 2008.

💡 “The tough thing about getting attention is you do have to do something unique… and that’s the trade-off. The calculus for me was, ‘Let’s wait and try to make a big splash with all these things.’ But really, we could have already launched the widget, and just adding interaction would have gotten attention.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode Highlights:

[11:04] Just ship it: Don’t try to release a ton of new features at once — you’ll get more attention and benefits by releasing incremental updates.

[23:11] Failure to launch: What’s the worst that can happen on your app launch day? A major Apple announcement!

[32:09] Riding the wave: Offering a launch-day sale on your app is a great way to increase conversions when you release a major update.

[36:16] The value of value-based pricing: Set your app’s price based on your target customer’s perceived value of your solution, not your idea of how much it’s worth and costs to run.

[42:54] Dog-fooding the ’cat: David used several RevenueCat features (like Paywalls and Experiments) to set up and monitor the results of the Weather Up 3.0 launch.

On the podcast: RevenueCat’s 2024 State of Subscription Apps report, the state of the app industry more broadly, and why a slight drop in renewals in 2023 isn’t as bad as it may seem.

Key insights:

📈 Optimize conversion rates: With a 1.7% average conversion rate from downloads to paying subscribers, there's a wide gap indicating room for improvement. North America shows higher conversions, spotlighting the need for regional price optimization.

🗓️ Persistence pays off: The top 5% of apps outearn the bottom quartile by 200 times a year post-launch. If year one is tough, consider pivoting or trying a new approach.

🗺️ Strategic focus is key: North America leads in app revenue, but don't overlook markets like South Korea, Japan, and India. Choosing the right platform and regional focus is crucial.

💲 Retention is crucial: A 14% drop in subscriber retention highlights the need for apps to focus on retaining users who truly value their service. It's vital to distinguish between loyal users and those less engaged.

📱 Reactivation grows with scale: While over 10% of churned subscribers resubscribe, reactivation becomes significantly more impactful as your app grows. Early on, prioritize acquisition and retention over win-back campaigns.

About Guests 

🎙️David Barnard is Growth Advocate at RevenueCat and host of this very podcast.

👋🏼David’s LinkedIn

💻Jacob Eiting is the CEO of RevenueCat, a self-proclaimed computer person, and often co-hosts this podcast with David. 

👋🏼Jacob’s LinkedIn

Links & Resources

Check out RevenueCat online

Episode Highlights 

[1:31] Weathering the storm: After several years of turmoil in the subscription app industry, things finally started to settle down in 2023 — and app businesses are thriving.

[7:12] The business of intelligence: AI technology leapt forward in 2023, and mobile AI apps saw big wins.

[14:07] Stop guessing, start acting: The benchmarks in the 2023 State of Subscription Apps report can help you make data-driven strategic decisions.

[17:37] The state of the (app) union: Five key takeaways from the report that identify industry trends, potential pitfalls, and emerging opportunities.

[38:44] First impressions matter: Most trial starts occur within 24 hours, so make sure your user onboarding experience is compelling.

On the podcast: How to build a content marketing flywheel, the importance of content that’s inherently valuable, and why you shouldn’t give up on content marketing even if your early attempts only get a few views.

🛠️ Validate your app idea with minimal resources. Use a simple mock-up and some way to drive paid or organic traffic to gauge interest before development. Fares Ksebati tested demand for an app that didn’t exist by collecting emails via a basic website. This lean approach confirmed interest with over 200 sign-ups, showcasing an effective, low-cost validation method.

🌱 Startup accelerators: a selective boost for early ventures. For newcomers like Fares, accelerators are goldmines for skills in customer discovery and networking. They're most valuable for startups without a solid network or those aligned with the accelerator's focus. While they sharpen your pitch and connect you with mentors, their benefits may wane as your business matures. Choose one that fits your app's niche for the best impact.

🏃‍♂️ Content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint. Fares’s journey with MySwimPro underscores that content marketing requires patience and passion. Initially focusing on answering common swimming questions, the strategy wasn't about quick wins but building trust and brand over time. Early content may not drive immediate app usage spikes, but it lays the foundation for brand recognition and credibility. 

💸 Great content transcends user acquisition and unlocks direct monetization. Establishing a significant online presence, particularly on platforms like YouTube, offers dual benefits: attracting new users and generating revenue through ads and brand partnerships. This strategy highlights the power of creating engaging, value-driven content that not only draws in subscribers but also opens additional revenue streams.

🔍 The biggest mistake when experimenting with paid acquisition is not having the right analytics in place. Success in paid acquisition hinges on robust analytics for tracking campaign effectiveness and the ability to quickly adjust strategies. Without confidence in attribution and the ability to iterate quickly, budgets can be wasted on ineffective ads and you won’t be able to scale.

💬 Effective value communication eases the shift from free to paid subscriptions. Transitioning users from free to premium features necessitates a clear demonstration of added benefits. While consumers are increasingly willing to pay for software, that comes with higher expectations. But it’s important to remember that some users will always complain about price, regardless of cost, while some will always be willing to pay for the most premium subscription. Getting pricing right is a constant balance of qualitative user psychology with data-driven insight. 

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Co-Founder and CEO of MySwimPro, an app that provides personalized workouts and training plans for swimmers.

🏊 An accomplished swimmer himself, Fares created MySwimPro to help swimmers of all skill levels improve their performance — even if they don’t have a team or coach.

💡 “With content marketing, you have to do one of three things: You have to either educate people, entertain them, or inspire them. Now, if you're really good at any one of those, that's great. But if you're amazing, you can do multiple at the same time.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Fares on Twitter
• Check out MySwimPro
• Watch MySwimPro on YouTube

Episode Highlights:

[3:41] Fake it ‘til you make it: In 2014, Fares validated the idea for MySwimPro by driving traffic to a website for an app that didn’t exist yet.

[10:07] Don’t reinvent the wheel: Use tools that already exist (like Google and YouTube) to find what potential users are searching for and get the word out about your app.

[19:38] Changing the channel: Your app should have a presence on the social channels that best fit the brand and marketing acquisition funnel you’re trying to build.

[23:59] Content marketing pays off (literally): Monetize your marketing content with ads and brand partnerships for an additional revenue stream.

[30:33] Start simple: These days, making great marketing content is easier than ever — all you need is a smartphone and an inexpensive microphone.

[42:12] The price is… wrong?: Some of your users are willing to pay more than what you’re charging, and developing new pricing packages can unlock more revenue.

On 25th January, Apple published its guidance on how it would comply with the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA). The response, in keeping with Apple’s response to other demands for reforms, effectively disincentivizes most apps from taking advantage of the changes. The changes are complex and confusing, and the answer to whether apps should make changes isn’t completely black-and-white. 

To help developers navigate these changes, we pulled together an “emergency” episode featuring RevenueCat’s CEO Jacob Eiting and Head of Product Jens-Fabian Goetzmann, Runway CEO Gabriel Savit, and Nico Wittenborn, founder of Adjacent. 

Here are the discussion’s key takeaways:

📲 The DMA Reforms How App Stores Work in the EU — The DMA mandates that app stores, like Apple's, cannot enforce the use of first-party app stores or in-app payment systems in the EU. Android already supports third-party app stores (sideloading), so Google’s focus has been on offering alternative payments via “user-choice billing”. For Apple, which does not support sideloading, the EU reforms have needed to be much more significant.   

🔓 Apple Releases Opt-In New Business Terms — Apple’s response was to introduce an optional new set of business terms with a dizzying number of changes to fees and choices for developers. By opting-in, developers unlock new ways to distribute their app and charge users, but doing so comes with changes to and additions to fees paid to Apple. The changes are complex enough that developers have to analyze the implications very carefully.  

🌀Fee Structure of the New Terms is a Complex Maze — Apple's new terms introduce a convoluted fee structure, where reduced commissions are coupled with the Core Technology Fee (CTF), where developers pay €0.50 for the first annual install over a 1M threshold. The CTF includes not just first-time installs, but first annual re-installs and updates from first and third-party app stores as well. This install fee effectively means that any high volume low average revenue per user (ARPU) app is likely to lose out by accepting the new terms. 

🛑 Third-party App Stores Unviable for All but the Biggest Players — The new terms aren’t so rosy for potential new “marketplace apps”, either. New app stores will not be exempt from the CTF, making the first 3M downloads of the marketplace app itself cost the operator €1M — €0.50 per install over the 1M download threshold. And then apps within that marketplace also have to pay the CTF fee. This means that opening a third-party app store is unviable except for the very biggest attempts or for stores that have a high-charge per install (e.g. a game marketplace where users pay a relatively high one-off fee per game).     

🔍 There Might Be Strategic Opportunities, but They Remain to Be Seen — Yes, most apps seem to be better off sticking with the original terms. But there might be opportunities for niche apps. For example, apps that have a low volume of installs but high ARPU (by having a costly yearly subscription, for example) might be able to absorb the CTF, even considering yearly updates. An additional as-yet unexplored change is that Apple has introduced 600 new APIs, meaning that there’s an opening for new third-party applications and integrations.   

About Guests

📱Gabriel Savit is CEO of Runway, a release platform for iOS and Android apps. Find Gabriel on X and on LinkedIn.

💲Nico Wittenborn is Founder of Adjacent, an early-stage VC firm. Find Nico on X and on LinkedIn.

😺Jens-Fabian Goetzmann is Head of Product at RevenueCat

Links & Resources

• These aren’t the only concessions Apple has recently had to make. Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ordered that Apple needed to allow developers to link to alternative payment methods in the US. Read more about what those changes mean.
• On the RevenueCat blog, we’ve written up an overview of this podcast and included additional details that weren’t covered on the podcast and/or have come to light since the recording.

Episode Highlights

[2:31] What is the Digital Markets Act (DMA)? It’s a series of directives set by the EU that aim to limit the dominance of large tech platforms, dubbed “gatekeepers” (of which Apple and Google are a part), and provide more choices to developers and end-users.  

[10:34] The principal decision that developers need to make in response to Apple’s changes is: do we switch to the new terms or remain on the old? Right now, there is no indication that it’s a two-way door. 

[13:34] When opting into the new terms, there are effectively four separate models: stay distributing through the App Store using Apple’s IAPs; stay distributing through the App Store but use alternative payment providers; distribute instead on a third-party marketplace using alternative payments; or distribute on both the App Store and third-party marketplaces. 

[15:47] The Core Technology Fee (CTF), in the new terms, charges developers €0.50 per first annual app install on installs above the 1M threshold. This includes first annual reinstalls and updates, and it’s the CTF that is fundamentally making the economics of new terms unviable for most developers. 

[30:24] Why haven’t third-party marketplaces taken off on Android? It’s probably down to the size of the opportunity. Most apps, even if they’re multiplatform, make most of their money on iOS. Now that the possibility of third-party marketplaces is available on the most profitable platform, it suddenly becomes worth looking into.

[41:41] There are instances where creating a third-party marketplace would be financially beneficial, such as a premium game distribution platform — higher-priced games ($20+) would negate the disadvantages shown by the CTF. 

[47:03] Unless things change, 99% of developers should probably not switch to the new terms. At best, it’s a bad idea, at worst it’s a huge distraction with the risk of owing Apple more in fees than revenue generated. There is a small subset of apps that could benefit, but those apps know who they are, and they’ll find a way to test the waters and mitigate the risk involved.  

[52:48] Another opportunity is the 600 new APIs that Apple is making available. It’s too early to say what that opportunity will look like, but there are likely to be some innovative third-party applications to come out of it.  

On the podcast: The strategic pitfalls in modeling Total Addressable Market, how freemium should work, and why Surfline’s current success was actually 38 years in the making.

Key Takeaways:

🎯SAM not TAM — The total addressable market (TAM) provides an overview of the market's potential size, but it's too general for strategic purposes. The serviceable addressable market (SAM) more accurately reflects the market portion you can realistically capture.

$ Understanding Price Sensitivity — Price sensitivity involves three key elements: Purchasing power (your market's ability to buy), commitment (likelihood of investing in your app), and value proposition (the value your app offers).

⚖️The Freemium Balance — Success in freemium models hinges on balancing increased conversions with retaining free users. If prioritizing one over the other becomes necessary, focus on retention to allow time for app improvements.

📈Growing Freemium Conversion Rates — A small percentage of free users convert to premium. The strength of freemium lies in its potential for increased conversion rates as your app improves and retains free users over time.

🤝Monetizing Through Partnerships — For free users, displaying ads can monetize the audience that may not convert. For premium users, focus on partnerships offering exclusive deals or benefits to enhance value and average revenue per user (ARPU).

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Vice President of Strategy, Business Development, and Analytics at Surfline, an app that provides surfers updates on current wave conditions.

🏄 An avid surfer himself, Paul joined the Surfline team because he was passionate about the product.

💡 “The biggest issue that I see with most companies that are going out to market and putting together their commercial strategy is they'll use TAM and they'll model everything off of that… But in reality… it's really important to figure out what the serviceable addressable market is.”

👋  LinkedIn
🏄‍♂️ Check out Surfline

Episode Highlights:

[4:11] The 38-year-old startup: Surfline was originally founded as a 1-800 phone number in 1985 and added consumer subscriptions in 2001 (before Netflix did!).

[5:57] When TAM fails: Total addressable market (TAM) is an unrealistic number for modeling the number of users you’re likely to get — instead, calculate the serviceable addressable market (SAM).

[14:46] Different approaches to TAM: You can calculate TAM from the top down or bottom up, whichever makes more sense for your business.

[19:04] The formula for price sensitivity: To effectively price your app, you need to understand (1) your users’ purchasing power, (2) your users’ level of commitment, and (3) the strength of your value proposition.

[24:40] Keeping the “free” in freemium: Remember to balance conversions with free user retention — it’s much easier to convert existing free users than it is to acquire brand-new users.

[37:48] Ads for all: Consider partnering with relevant brands to provide special offers to further monetize your paid subscribers.

On the podcast: Scaling to $5M in ARR on paid ads, positive and negative results from 121 A/B tests, and why they still haven’t built an Android app. 

💡 The Power of a Single Metric: Concentrating on just one key metric can be remarkably effective. In the early stages, it's common to take on too much. By zeroing in on a solitary metric, it becomes simpler to iterate and conduct large-scale testing.

👀 Subscriptions as a Market Fit Gauge: The subscription model acts as a litmus test for your app's value. Gating access early and observing if users are willing to pay offers clear evidence of your app's worth.

💬 Flexibility in Attribution Methods: There's no one-size-fits-all approach to attribution. Various apps adopt diverse strategies. Often, straightforward methods like asking users about their discovery path during onboarding can be the most reliable.

🤳🏼 Prioritizing Creativity in Paid Marketing: If your strategy leans heavily on paid marketing, expect to dedicate at least 80% of your efforts to crafting creative content. For smaller teams, collaborating with content creators and influencers can be an effective strategy for scaling. 

📱 Choosing a Single Platform for Initial Launch: Easing early-stage challenges is feasible by focusing on a single platform. Many startups overextend by launching on multiple platforms simultaneously. Opting for a single platform, such as iOS, allows you to concentrate your limited resources on achieving initial milestones before considering a broader launch.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Founder and CEO of Opal, an app that helps users limit their screen time and find focus.

📱 Even though iOS includes screen time management tools, Kenneth and his team believed they could improve the experience – and that users would pay for it.

💡 “Essentially, if you get people to pay for your products… that's a pretty strong signal that you have something pretty valuable.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Kenneth via LinkedIn
• Check out Opal: https://www.opal.so/ 
• X: https://twitter.com/kschlenker 

Episode Highlights:

[1:09] A three-phase approach: How the Opal team tackled building a subscription business for a screen time management app.

[4:54] When ad spend is worth it: Opal implemented paid marketing from the beginning – and it paid off.

[10:44] Attribution made easy: Sometimes the simplest method of finding out where users came from – just asking them! – is the most useful.

[13:08] Contracting creatives: Consider hiring independent contractors who care about your mission to build your ad content.

[17:22] From premium to freemium: Many apps (like Duolingo) start out free, then add paid subscriptions later. Opal is doing the opposite.

[25:53] Work smarter, not harder: Releasing your app on a single platform (instead of iOS, Mac, web, and Android all at once) can save your team a lot of time and money.

[30:07] Lessons from 121 A/B tests: Prioritize the bigger swings that will significantly increase your uplift early on.

On the podcast: How to pitch your app to the press, the importance of focusing on differentiation, and why customizing your pitch to an individual writer is so much more effective.

Top Takeaways:

PR for user acquisition (UA) is best suited for acquiring very specific users. If you’re looking for big numbers then there are better channels to use. But PR allows you to pinpoint your UA to reach smaller, higher-intent audiences, such as early adopters or power users, who help you fulfill a particular goal.

When working with PR agencies or consultants, know what kind of outcome you’re after. For apps that just want to reach a wide audience, a firm focused more on outreach at scale might be sufficient. But most apps will benefit more from a strategist who will help craft deep meaningful stories over the long-term.

When pitching, think about the writer, not just the publication. Find the writer who will have the greatest personal interest in your story — not only will your pitch success rate be higher, but the subsequent write-up will be much more meaningful and useful to you down the road. 

Keep your email pitch brief and your press-kit comprehensive. Use the subject line and body copy to highlight uniqueness; feel free to use images but keep it brief. Your press kit, however, should provide enough detail for the journalist to write their story out-of-the-box — but don’t go as far as to write it yourself.

To effectively pitch your app to TechCrunch, specifically, focus on what sets your app apart. A well-executed idea with quality design is just the starting point. Elevate your pitch by highlighting unique features and differentiation. Adding personal stories can further enhance the appeal and depth of your pitch.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Former Editor-in-Chief of TechCrunch.

✍️ With over 14 years of experience as a tech journalist, Matthew is an expert in the art of the pitch.

💡 “Those stories tend to be the most potent, valuable, and interesting long term, especially for early-stage companies. You convert somebody into a believer, a believer in the thing that you’re doing, the thing that you’re trying to accomplish, the mission that you have. And those writers will become sort of chroniclers of your progress over time. If you’re able to capture one or two of those [writers] ... to get into the minds and hearts of individual writers at a publication, it’s so much more valuable than, ‘Oh, we got covered by Publication X.’”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Matthew via LinkedIn
• Check out TechCrunch - https://techcrunch.com/ 

Episode Highlights:

[1:12] Pitch perfect: How to pitch your app to a tech reporter in a cold email (that they’ll actually read).

[14:01] Stand out from the crowd: A competitor’s downtime or failure may be a good opportunity to market your app, but it isn’t enough — you need to highlight your app’s differentiating features, too.

[18:05] Know your audience: Choose not only the right publication but also the right reporter to write about your app.

[26:41] Broad versus targeted UA: Getting your app featured in a publication like TechCrunch can help you acquire a highly interested group of users (early adopters, power users, and people who will send you feedback).

[38:12] The big leagues: What TechCrunch is looking for in a pitch.

[45:15] To PR or not to PR?: Whether or not you should work with a PR firm depends on your app.

[48:18] The whole kit and caboodle: Create a press kit that makes it easy for a journalist to tell your app’s story.

On the podcast: Phil's Subscription Value Loop framework, what it means to create robust value for customers, and why A/B testing shouldn't be your first step in price optimization.

Top Takeaways:

📈Quantitative growth models can help inform your growth strategy. These models are built around key user actions and growth loops incorporating variables like acquisition, retention, and monetization. They serve not just to align the company around common growth objectives but also as a tool to identify strategic leverage points for driving user and revenue growth.

📲The subscription value loop can model successful consumer subscription apps. This loop, devised by Phil Carter, is a framework for consumer subscription apps that focuses on value creation, delivery, and capture. It identifies the most impactful areas to allocate resources, aiding in decision-making for product development and marketing strategies. It emphasizes the importance of balancing value creation for the user with the business's need to capture value, ensuring a sustainable and efficient growth model.

🔁The 4Rs of value creation — robust, rapid, repeatable, remarkable — emphasize creating a product that solves real customer problems with strong product market fit, delivering value quickly, ensuring long-term engagement and value through repeatable benefits, and being compelling enough to spark word-of-mouth promotion. This framework guides in developing products that not only meet immediate user needs but also maintain their relevance and appeal over time.

💲Value delivery is efficiently connecting users to your valuable product. The playbook of relying on paid marketing to acquire users no longer works, due to increased app store competition and reduced efficiencies caused by ATT. The healthiest subscription app businesses are built on a robust organic acquisition strategy as a foundation, where paid ads are supplementary.

🎯The 5Ps of value capture — paywall, pricing & packaging, payments, promotions — focus on the strategic elements crucial for monetizing a subscription app. Paywall strategies should, as well as adopt general best practices, be tightly aligned with the nature of the app; pricing & packaging perhaps offer the greatest leverage for later-stage apps; payments is about an awareness of alternative payment methods and ensuring you have a clear and transparent payment flow; and promotions should be thoughtful and targeted.

About Guest:

👨‍💻Founder and CEO of Elemental Growth, an advising consultancy focused on helping app businesses unlock their potential.

🔁 Phil developed the Subscription Value Loop, a framework for understanding how to maximize growth in consumer app businesses.

💡 “If you don't have a repeatable value prop that can sustain long-term retention, and your primary growth loop is paid ads, that's where you see a graveyard of companies that have just completely failed.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Phil via LinkedIn
• Check out his website - www.philgcarter.com
• Find Phil on X: @philgcarter
• Check out his Consumer Subscription Growth Course

Companies Phil has helped:

• Quizlet (https://www.quizlet.com/)
• Faire (https://www.faire.com/)
• Ibotta (https://www.ibotta.com/)
• Matter (https://hq.getmatter.com/)
• Save My Exams (https://www.savemyexams.com/)
• uDocz (https://www.udocz.com/)
• Knowunity (https://www.knowunity.com/)
• Rise (https://www.risescience.com/)

Episode Highlights:

[0:44] From consultant to growth guru: Phil’s journey into the subscription growth world began with mission-driven app businesses like Quizlet.

[5:25] What you need to know to grow: Any quantitative growth model will be “wrong”… but you’ll learn so much building one, you should still do it.

[8:30] The Subscription Value Loop: A framework for identifying product-market fit, building a remarkable solution, and investing profits into shoring up your competitive advantage.

[13:48] The 40% rule: Determine product-market fit by how disappointed customers would be if they could no longer use your app.

[23:05] Perfecting the elevator pitch: A great app onboarding experience is snappy, immersive, and packs a punch.

[33:32] Avoid churn: Build repeatable experiences designed to bring users back again and again.

[38:24] Go viral: Find out how to get and keep your users talking.

[45:37] Organic is healthier: In today’s crowded (and post-ATT) app stores, paid ads can’t realistically be your primary growth lever.

[50:22] Keep the engine running: Balancing how much value you capture versus provide can be a challenge — especially when it comes to free users.

[1:11:12] The price is right: How to determine the optimal packaging and pricing for your app.

On the podcast: Profitably scaling TikTok ads, price optimization, and what the team learned from burning hundreds of thousands of dollars on Instagram ads.

Top Takeaways

📈 Use Micro-Influencers for Early Growth: Niche influencers with between 10k-100k followers provide a direct source to a highly relevant audience. Ladder incentivized Instagram influencers, while the app was in a very early stage, by offering a revenue share; this reinforced the collaborative nature of the partnership and made it financially viable for Ladder. (00:02:39)

💲Adapt Your Pricing Based on Your Core User: Be adaptable with your pricing model based on customer research and feedback. Ladder shifted from a higher price point to a lower one as they learnt more about what value proposition was for their core users. To reach this conclusion, they surveyed their users and analyzed the data using Van Westendorp's pricing analysis. (00:19:36)

🕺🏽Maximize TikTok by Tailoring Your Content: Whereas on Instagram you’re gradually building up an audience, on TikTok you should assume posts are reaching a unique audience every time. This means content on TikTok needs to be made for TikTok — it needs to either entertain or educate, edited in the TikTok style, and should work in isolation without prior knowledge. (00:41:04)

🕸️Using a Web Funnel to Optimize Ad Spend: Ladder efficiently targets the right TikTok audience by directing them to a web quiz. This strategy quickly reveals user preferences, bypassing longer conversion funnels. By embedding pixels in quiz questions, they gain real-time insights into ad performance, enabling rapid optimization of ad spend. (00:49:38)

🪜 Building a Retention Mechanism within the App: By building your product around retention metrics, you’ll naturally build a retentive product. For Ladder, its use of team chats are wildly popular, creating accountability and motivation in its users. And because these social elements drive so much consistency and retention, they work hard on driving users to these chats as quickly as possible. (01:04:49)

About Greg Stewart

📱CEO and Founder of Ladder, a fitness app dedicated to providing the world's best strength training plan from the world's best coaches, every single day.

💪 Greg took Ladder from zero to a million dollars in ARR with a zealous early focus on product iteration.

💡 “As a consumer business, I have learned that there is no muscle more important than growth — investing in growth, product-side growth, [and] retention. To have those learnings and that dial being controlled outside the building now makes no sense whatsoever to me.”

👋 LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Connect with Greg via LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Greg on X

‣ Join Ladder

‣ Ladder on X

Episode Highlights

[0:54] Covid obstacles: Ladder launched during the pandemic but was initially geared toward gym goers. Early UA wasn’t about focus on revenue, but on product iteration to validate product-market fit.

[4:35] Loyal followings: Instagram microinfluencers were a key part of Ladder’s early strategy for driving UA — aiming for “perfect alignment” with fitness coaches.

[8:34] Onboarding: Ladder had a specific method for recommending programming based on lead source.

[12:41] From influencer to team member: The right partners were a fundamental part of Ladder’s success, not as a creator or tool-based platform but as a consumer business.

[16:46] Hardcore product iteration: Greg and his team built a set of tools for coaches after they hit a million dollars in ARR.

[22:54] Honest ad lessons: Instead of focusing on ad optimization and efficiency, Ladder asked how to tell the right stories to the right people.

[24:40] Decreasing price: The team went deep on analysis before lowering the price, with a single-minded commitment to Ladder as a customer-based business.

[30:35] New Year’s resolutions: A lack of growth following their best month ever mobilized Ladder to create a framework leading to effective growth loops.

[34:07] TikTok tactics: With diminishing returns from their Instagram efforts, Greg and his team decided to forge a new path via TikTok, which ultimately paid off.

[39:20] Money where your mouth is: “Organic is the best indication of winning content,” Greg says. But engaging content needs an effective CTA. The roundabout but telling answer is to understand your customer and provide value rather than paying too much attention to acquisition or monetization.

[48:29] CTAs that work: To reel them in, be upfront and direct to customers — and offer verifiable results.

[49:56] Hacking algorithms: Web quizzes are winners for identifying buyer personas, driving a critical move for managing spend.

[57:05] Bye-bye, LTV:CAC: Payback period is much easier to grapple with than variables that are out of the control of the team, helping Ladder to iterate on its annual offering thanks to a good handle on retention.

[1:05:06] High retention: Relentless focus on the customer’s view and experience is the key to driving UA and retention.

[1:14:56] Skeptical prerogative: Rather than building copycats and raising money, ensure there’s a clear differentiator around which the entire business is built. That way lies growth and scaling.

On the podcast: Landing PR for a niche app, negotiating strategic partnerships, and pretending to have an app helped validate that he should build one.

Top Takeaways

🚀 Validate Early and Build Smartly: Start by validating your app idea with minimal investment — even just an image or a spreadsheet. Once validated, focus on creating an MVP that delivers core value to your users, allowing for effective market testing and valuable feedback. (01:06—11:00)

🎯 Mix Up Your Early Marketing: Early on, explore a mix of marketing tactics, both paid and organic, such as Apple Search Ads and targeted PR. Adapt quickly to focus on strategies that drive early user growth and traction. (11:00—14:06)

✍️ Craft Ready-to-Publish Stories for Media Pick-Up: Develop complete, compelling narratives about your app. A story that's ready-made and engaging eases journalists' workloads and increases the likelihood of your app getting featured. (12:34—15:58)

🤝 How to Close Early Partnerships: When approaching potential partnerships as an early app startup, remember that you’re a risk, so highlight your business’s reliability and responsiveness. Be proactive and flexible in negotiations, demonstrating your commitment to deliverables and reducing perceived risk to partners. (17:02—22:55)

🌐 The Broader Impact of Partnerships: Recognize that the value of partnerships extends beyond direct metrics like user acquisition. They are instrumental in building credibility, social proof points, and establishing a presence in your niche, which leads to organic growth and further collaborative opportunities. (34:41—38:13)

About Adam Allore

👨‍💻 Founder and CEO of Wavve Boating, an app that provides a better marine navigation experience that’s easy, collaborative, and fun.

⚓ Adam initially wanted to build a nautical navigation map that he would use, until he organized himself a booth at a boat show that ultimately led to him building the app thanks to overwhelming positive feedback.

💡 “The quantity of emails that we got was one thing, but seeing people light up and get excited by the app and experience that I built was what gave me that confidence to quit my job, pursue this thing full time, and make the beta a reality that I was telling people about.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources

‣ Connect with Aaron via LinkedIn

‣ Check out Wavve Boating

‣ Adam talking about the Wavve App

‣ Wavve Boating on X, formerly known as Twitter

Episode Highlights

[1:10] Ahoy, sailor: Working as an engineer, Adam realized that people struggled to read nautical navigation maps, which provided the inception point for Wavve Boating.

[4:53] Fake it till you make it: Taking the scrappy route can sometimes be the best path to kickstarting your idea — even if it requires a bit of hustle.

[7:26] Just build the beta: Even the bare MVP can be enough to attract investors and users. Unique product insight is where the margin really comes from.

[11:18] Gaining traction: Adam took a shotgun marketing approach before landing on app-based PR hits with a promising community element.

[17:15] Press power: Aaron assumed the initial press outreach kickoff would drive major user growth — it added value and drove recognition in the space (and yes, some user acquisition).

[20:26] Proactive negotiation: Potential partners (especially large ones) may view small startups as a risk — subscription app developers should aim to mitigate that risk.

[26:14] Basement finance plan: Panic led to solid planning as Adam reached out to the local angel network to raise capital and get things going, including a deal that represented his first foray into B2B sales.

[29:24] Market flows: Deep link usage for the paywall was one thing, but what really paid off for the app was ensuring it was as easy to activate and use as possible.

[32:05] DevOps on the cheap: Building for the addressable market of one company could pay off bigger if you take that idea elsewhere — if you know the business. Be careful about which projects you take on, as they may ultimately prove distractions.

[35:00] Partner-driven UA: 25% of Wavve’s total UA comes from partnerships. But plenty of users come through untracked and organic channels.

[37:29] Leveraging reality: Get the PR right, and landing partnerships can quickly snowball into further opportunities.

On the podcast: The ultimate freemium strategy, making low-risk bets with potentially asymmetrical outcomes, and how Aaron bounced back after almost running out of money.

Top Takeaways

📐As an app startup, while in the early stages of growth, you need to find the one KPI that you’re going to choose to focus on. “Startups can do one thing, barely,” says Foss, so find the KPI that shows that your app is working as intended and that users are finding value. For Nomorobo, this was robocalls blocked; if this KPI grew, then the app was doing its job and users were signing up.

🚀 Not every launch needs to go off with a bang. For Aaron Foss, there’s too much that can go wrong. Soft launches allow you to launch when you’re ready, not when your deadline says you are. You have the benefit of seeing and catching bugs before your app becomes overwhelmed with users.

🌱 To grow organically, and only organically, requires that you find the growth “hacks” that leverage what you already have. For Nomorobo, this meant making use of a free web user base to promote the paid app; programmatic SEO landing pages built using the data they were collecting; and using that data to outreach to the press with relevant stories.

🔎 The benefit of growing slowly and sustainably is that constraints lead to greater focus. When raising money to accelerate your business, it’s easy to overextend and do too many things at once. A slow, gradual approach forces you to focus on what’s the most important thing right now.

🛣️ Freemium works best when you consider it a user acquisition path, not a revenue model, and when those free users deliver additional business value. Being free will bring you more users, but what else do those free users deliver to your business? For Nomorobo, free users on the landline side bring in data to improve the mobile product, which can then be upsold to turn free users into paid.

About Aaron Foss

👨‍💻 Founder of Nomorobo, an app that stops annoying robocalls and spam texts forever.

💪 With a background in programming and an MBA, Aaron built an entire product to stop robocalls from the ground up.

💡 “This is Apple’s world: We just live in it. How insane is it to start an app company building an app that is against App Store rule?”

👋  LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Connect with Aaron via LinkedIn

‣ Check out Nomorobo

‣ Check out this Mixergy interview about Aaron’s entrepreneurship journey

‣ Read up on how Aaron beat robocalls for good

Episode Highlights

[1:25] The end of apps?: Aaron was between selling his last company and looking for the next challenge when the clarion call came from the FTC to tackle robocalls.

[3:46] From telephony to commerce: For Aaron, $50K signaled that there was a big incentive to solve the problem of robocalls. The size of the bounty drove him to try to develop an innovative solution using existing technology.

[12:26] Close to the chest: Getting a product out validates whether spending your life building it is a good idea or not. Aaron found that the only way to win the competition was using SimRing, but he didn’t go into detail when pitching it.

[13:39] Post-win gameplan: Twilio (and a lot of negotiation) was the key to building the foundations of early Nomorobo.

[17:44] Monetization turning point: As one of the first subscription apps with in-app purchases, Nomorobo’s inflection point was the introduction of mobile apps. It turned out that a price point of $1.99 was cheaper when running with Apple.

[21:47] Big bang, no thanks: The demand to solve the problem of spammy robocalls meant Nomorobo never needed to do any paid acquisition.

[25:43] Hiring decisions: Going from solo to building a team is never an easy leap. Aaron found that the first step was to break off customer support, and another key was to work with contractors while remaining small and scrappy.

[30:59] Relaxed raising: The company found that raising on an as-needed basis worked perfectly well for their setup, but it didn’t come without its trials. Case in point: the white-knuckle $944 in the bank account that Aaron admits they were lucky to pull off.

[35:16] Top growth levers: While Nomorobo never paid for advertising, it had to grow. How did it manage to, and why is landline protection still free?

[42:38] Press management: With landline freemium strategy and programmatic SEO locked down, the next phase was managing press and getting featured by Apple.

[47:41] Life-changing money: Like Frank Sinatra, Aaron did things his way. He shares the story of the eight-figure exit.

[53:17] Value creation: If you want to run a business, it must create value. The more value you create, the more money you make.

On the podcast: How to profitably scale performance marketing, hard vs soft activation, and why you should keep an extra close eye on your marketing spend in November.

Top Takeaways

⬇️ To effectively scale your performance marketing, grasp your app's funnel from the top down. Start by honing in on app installs, enabling both you and the algorithms to learn. Progress down the funnel — optimizing for different app events as you go —  but be prepared for corresponding budget hikes. Throughout this journey, continually test and iterate.

⏲️ Test your ATT prompt timing, starting with first app launch. While the ideal placement for an ATT prompt may vary per app, consider starting your tests with the prompt at first app launch. Surprisingly, this timing has shown minimal impact on sign-ups, trials, and conversions in some cases. Use this as a baseline for your own tests to find the most effective timing for your app.

🎨 Feed your always-on campaigns with rigorously tested ad creatives. Start with a control and multiple variants differing in one element. After identifying the best message, test it across various design formats. This iterative process builds a portfolio of effective creatives for your always-on campaigns, where you can, ideally, leave them untouched as you continue the testing process.

⏯️ For a clear view of product-market fit, track hard activations. These are meaningful actions — such as listening to multiple stories — that reveal user commitment. Don’t make the mistake of thinking a trial-start makes a user engaged. Use these insights to refine the user journey. Make it as easy as possible for users to reach the desired level of engagement.

🍂 Master the seasonal ad cycle: November is a tough month for ad spend, so pivot to awareness campaigns to navigate the rising costs. Come December, particularly after the 15th, you’ll find a rebound in favor of digital products as e-commerce spending drops. This period, often referred to as “Q5,” is also an excellent time to leverage gifting strategies and New Year messaging.

About Hannah Parvaz

👨‍💻 Founder of Aperture, a full-service growth partner making good companies better by helping them to change the world in a positive way.

💪 Hannah has helped hundreds of apps grow, and was previously recognized as a 5-star mentor at GrowthMentor, taking home both App Marketer of the Year and Consultant of the Year awards. She previously worked with learning app Uptime, narrated journalism app Curio, drink app DUSK, and music app DICE.

💡 “Every app is different: Everyone needs different levels of success, but also everyone has a slightly different strategy.”

👋  LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Aperture

‣ Hannah’s website

‣ Interview with Hannah on Business of Apps

‣ “Tips for Creating the Right Mindset for Business Growth” interview with Hannah Paravaz

‣ “How to talk to your customers in order to make winning ads with Hannah Parvaz”

Episode Highlights

[2:01] Personal growth marketing: Former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty said, “Growth and comfort do not coexist.” Hannah feels this is true of her professional trajectory — an encouraging reminder for everyone in the app space.

[5:02] Scaling performance marketing: The first question you need to ask is, How are you measuring what you’re scaling?

[8:25] The measure of success: Hannah recommends A/B testing and analytics to build out funnels.

[11:05] Post-ATT ad performance: Experimenting with creatives relies on specific goals and tests based on one control and multiple variants. Lots of experimentation and analysis are the keys.

[16:02] Conversations with customers: Android’s Google Play store isn’t quite as stringent as Apple’s App Store, but customers need to know how many trials and installs they’re aiming for in order to maximize the growth they need.

[18:17] Subscription focus: Hannah takes a blended perspective to subscription apps, looking at funnel steps and where the biggest opportunities are, then moving into product.

[20:52] Action hierarchy: Developers need to figure out how many first meaningful actions and core actions must take place for users to truly activate.

[25:31] Finger in the air: Tracking ROI in the early stages ****is a guessing game, but once reality matches expectations, the activation average always becomes clear.

[31:26] The blended perspective: Optimizing performance starts with looking at each channel in isolation and closely monitoring performance.

[34:31] All the leaves are brown: Halloween brings a curse that lasts throughout November — a tough season for marketers and advertisers. Costs skyrocket, then drop on December 1 for “Q5,” which lasts until the beginning of January.

On the podcast: Spinning off a new product from secondary product market fit, the journey of getting into YC, and the give and take of raising venture capital.

Top Takeaways

🥾 Ground expectations for launching a bootstrapped business — prepare for years of challenges and minimal initial revenue while adapting, learning, and growing over the long term.

💰 Bootstrapping versus raising capital depends on you: Venture capital accelerates growth but increases accountability and responsibility, and you need to decide how you want to grow and whether you want to take that on.

📚 The B2B success playbook is about customer retention and iterative improvement, while B2C is high-risk, high-reward. Early success is harder, so tailor your approach and expectations based on the landscape.

➗ Diversification is a double-edged sword, and being a multi-product app business is still a challenge, making focus crucial. Leverage existing user data and resources to identify truly synergistic opportunities, while staying true to your core mission and expertise.

📱 Diversified app growth means balancing cross-promotion and unique growth strategies — but not all distribution tactics translate seamlessly between apps.

About Martín Siniawski

👨‍💻 Co-founder and CEO at Podcast App, a fast-growing podcast player now backed by Y Combinator (W18).

💪 Having founded Streema with 10 million monthly users, Martín is now focused on scaling paid acquisition at Podcast App. The two apps have a combined 100 million downloads.

💡 “My first rule of multi-product companies is to try not to become a multi-product company.”

👋  LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Podcast App

‣ Connect with Martín on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Martín on X, formerly known as Twitter

‣ Listen to Martín on From Zero to 1M

Episode Highlights

[2:37] Wandering in the desert: Bootstrapping Streema was the perfect way to learn and make mistakes.

[6:10] Masochistic motivations: Getting momentum going with Podcast App came from Martín and his co-founder observing a growing trend of people moving from radio to podcasts.

[10:03] Rise and fall: The first attempt to raise funding failed, thanks to a hard-nosed interview.

[15:36] Interview prep round #2: The second interview at YC went much better for Martín and his co-founder with the help of hindsight from their bootstrapping experience — and a lot of thought.

[17:32] How big do you want to grow?: Involving other people introduces higher stakes and more responsibility, but it can also seriously accelerate your business.

[20:52] B2B vs. B2C: Martín and Jacob differentiate between the two ways of doing business.

[26:09] YC interview tips: Martín dives deep into the second interview.

[29:07] Winning SEO optimization: Initially focused more on ads, the Podcast App doubled down on subscriptions and recently became a multi-product company with 130,000 subscribers.

[35:05] Distribution speedrun: Acquiring users has come naturally for Martín and his co-founder, and he considers distribution to be a major factor in a successfully executed vision.

[37:47] CAC LTV as product-market fit indicator: Martín is focused on making it work — the bottom line is whether or not they have a viable business.

On the podcast: The B2B opportunity for B2C apps, the App Store alone being bigger than most Fortune 500 companies, and which current or future company will build the Berkshire Hathaway of consumer subscriptions.

Top Takeaways

📱 The App Store ecosystem is far from saturated. With a nearly doubled revenue from content being purchased since 2019 and hosting close to a billion subscriptions, the Apple App Store shows that there's still plenty of room for growth and opportunity. Despite debates about consumer fatigue, these numbers signify an ecosystem that is not only surviving but thriving.

👮 The regulatory spotlight could spark change in App Store fees. Amid increasing pressure from global and domestic regulators, the question looms: Will Apple and Google adjust their app store fees? If they do, it's not just a legal win, but also a potential cash flow boost for app developers. The decision could also be a tactical move for Apple to win back transactions currently lost to alternative payment systems.

🤝 The boundary between B2C and B2B is becoming increasingly fluid, offering a new avenue for growth. Brands like Peloton and Headspace, which thrived in the B2C space during the pandemic, are now venturing into B2B. This isn't a pivot but a strategic expansion, rooted in the belief that what consumers love, businesses will too. This trend underlines the potential of consumer-centric design in unlocking new business opportunities.

3️⃣ The Three C's: Content, Commerce, Community. Companies face three key challenges: acquisition, conversion, and retention. Content lures in users, commerce seals the deal, and a robust community keeps them coming back. It's not just a formula; it's the backbone of today's thriving subscription apps.

🤔There are untapped categories ripe for disruption.

While we often see a couple of dominant brands taking over established categories like dating or fitness, there are still numerous untapped markets in the consumer subscription space. Categories like Femtech and family management are just the tip of the iceberg, presenting just a few examples of the opportunities that await innovative apps.

About Eric Crowley

💼Partner at GP Bullhound, focusing primarily on mergers and acquisitions, capital raises, and advisory transactions for technology companies.

📈 With more than a decade in investment banking and edtech growth, Eric focuses on transactions for U.S. and Europe-based growth-stage CSS, adtech, digital services, and fintech companies.

💡 “Who's the Apple of female health? Who’s the brand you go to that is by far the best, [where] you don't question it, you buy it? There isn't one. There should be one, and — for something that happens millions of times a year — why isn't there an Apple of female health?”

👋  LinkedIn and X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out the CSS 2023 report

‣ GP Bullhound

‣ The evolution of consumer subscription apps

‣ Future subscription trends

‣ What venture investors look for when buying an app

Episode Highlights

[2:05] Doubling iPhone numbers: Apple’s consistently high growth sees 90 billion in profits this year.

[6:23] Apps are the internet: More people want to use apps over internet sites thanks to superior UX and UI, signaling more investment into apps.

[10:27] App economics: Consumer trends clearly indicate that apps have a lot more room to grow.

[15:01] Regulator attention: The growth of in-app purchases is pressuring Apple and Google to open up payments.

[21:48] Berkshire App-away: From textiles to hundreds of over $300 billion in revenue in 2022, the trajectory of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway portends what may soon happen in the app world.

[26:39] Making M&A waves: Eric talks through some recent significant CSS buyouts.

[29:12] B2B2C: B2B and B2C are blending, with movements between the two showing what Eric calls “growth extension,” rather than pivoting. But will they cannibalize each other?

[34:46] Three Cs: Content, commerce, and community are leading to more UGC.

[41:11] Becoming the Apple of X: So-called “category killers” show where the greatest potential for success in the app space lies.

[49:44] It could be you: Nearly 80% of companies featured in the annual CSS report raised or sold for a great exit.

On the podcast: whether or not to increase your price, how to execute if you do, and why price increases often impact growth more than retention.

Top Takeaways

💳 Should you raise your app’s prices at all? It’s one of the most impactful ways of increasing lifetime value and revenue so the answer is yes: you should definitely consider raising prices. But it’s a balancing act. How do you not sacrifice long-term growth for short-term gain?

🌟 Avoid customer backlash by reaffirming the value proposition. Asking people to pay more for the thing they’re already getting is a tough sell, so reaffirm your value proposition by simultaneously launching new or teasing upcoming features ****to avoid customer backlash.

💰 Look at your retention metrics to determine whether or not to raise prices. Above-average retention metrics might indicate that you’re leaving money on the table and should consider a price increase — but if they’re not healthy, focus on product and retention first.

📈 Price increases tend to affect acquisition more than retention. Strong price increase execution means less churn from existing subscribers, with a little more pressure on new user acquisition.

🏆 Add tiers to give users options and strategically raise prices. Bundle higher tiers with extra features or introduce lower tiers for your core user base.

About Reid DeRamus

👨‍💻 Growth PM at Substack, a newsletter publication platform that provides writers and creators with infrastructure, payment, analytics and design to publish their work and send to email subscribers.

💪 Reid helped launch and grow Hulu, Crunchyroll, and HBO Max, taking his learnings and starting a company called Yem that helped individuals and small teams build their own media empires. Yem was then acquired by Substack, where Reid is now a Growth PM.

💡 “I need to figure out the value that my existing subscribers are getting [and] make sure I'm reinforcing that. But I also need to be mindful of how it'll slowly expand from my core audience today, too, if I want to continue driving subscribers.”

👋  LinkedIn | X, formerly known as Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Growth Croissant

‣ How To Increase Your Price

‣ How To Improve Retention

‣ Boosting Retention with Better Onboarding

‣ Improving Retention with Audience Surveys

‣ Connect with Reid at LinkedIn

‣ Reid on X, formerly known as Twitter

‣ Substack on X, formerly known as Twitter

Episode Highlights

[1:13] Price increase: Raising prices is a great way to boost customer lifetime value and revenue but executing it well is a balancing act — with tradeoffs.

[5:40] Consumer sentiment: Asking customers to pay more for the same product is a tough sell. Take a cue from the standard set by Netflix and Spotify by teasing changes and with marginal — not double — increases.

[9:26] Subscription 101: Substack is a great analogy for consumer subscription apps. Health metrics can be “too good,” with writers significantly underpricing their work and not aggressively marketing.

[17:22] Surveys: Surveys don’t only help establish core price, but also what the most passionate fans might pay relative to core subscribers.

[19:18] Be sure to tier: Streaming platforms and a few pioneers in the subscription app space are leading the way in what is likely to become the default business model within the next five years. “Not all subscriptions are created equal,” Reid highlights.

[22:42] Hitting the ceiling: At what point are you bumping up against your total serviceable market?

[24:46] On reaching 12 million: Having a deep relationship with your audience can pay off much more than having the best video player, payment engine, website or app. It’s about persistently asking how you can deliver more value.

[27:51] Back to surveys: Figuring out where core users are finding value comes from surveys via Google Forms, or face-to-face on Zoom calls.

[31:47] Balancing act: There’s no universal right answer to drive business growth. Early on, find initial traction with a relentless focus on product-market fit.

On the podcast: “Black hat” app optimization, the benefits and drawbacks of hard paywalls, and why, despite Apple and Google’s best efforts, so many apps still use dark patterns and even blatantly break the rules.

Top Takeaways

🎩 Lots of (even the top) apps continue to deliberately break app store rules — even if you don’t break them too, you need to know what black hat strategies you’re up against. (3:46, 13:25)

🔍 Running “keyword install campaigns” mobilizes a large number of people to search for a particular keyword and download the app, tricking the app store algorithms by increasing app relevancy — and rankings — against that keyword. (7:21)

🔐 Don’t be afraid to lock down more content, use a hard paywall, or get more “aggressive” with paywall visibility. If people can use an app for free, they will. (18:59-37:09)

📊 Opinions don’t matter — data does. There are contrasting approaches to onboarding and monetization, so test what’s right for your app and look at the data. (40:01)

✅ Fully optimize your onboarding and your paywall through tinkering, then stabilize to drive revenue via the top of the funnel. (45:46)

About Steve P. Young

👨‍💻 Founder and CEO of App Masters, an app marketing agency that helps grow apps faster, better, and cheaper.

💪 Steve has spent over a decade growth hacking millions of app downloads, and knows the black hat strategies many top apps use to game the system.

💡 “My opinion does not matter. Everything is based on data.”
🎅 Steve also runs Indie App Santa, an effortless way to promote your app and boost downloads quickly.

👋  LinkedIn | X

Links & Resources

‣ Check out App Masters

‣ App Masters on YouTube

‣ Connect with Steve at LinkedIn

‣ Steve on X

‣ App Masters on Facebook

‣ Steve on Instagram

Episode Highlights

[1:40] Knife to a gunfight: App Store ethics aren’t cleancut. How can you play by the rules when so many apps are using dark patterns to get ahead?

[5:03] Do what you gotta do: Black hat strategies like review-buying are just too tempting not to use in the journey from zero to one.

[8:31] Relevant hacking: Keyword install or boost — similar to ASO — campaigns are still possible to get higher in keyword rankings — as long as you have the right keywords.

[13:25] Legal disclaimer: Even if you don’t like cheating, knowing what competitors are doing is crucial to planning your own strategies.

[14:43] Very edgy: Steve dives into his top “edgy things” for increasing visibility and revenue.

[18:59] No hard paywall: When a growth hacking tactic yields thousands of organic downloads, why put in the X? Data talks, until Apple comes around.

[26:16] AI wall: Given the costs of running AI models, you’re giving away value if you don’t have a hard paywall.

[29:48] Scammy territory: There’s a fine line between bannable black hat strategies and gaming the system.

[34:52] Lock it up: Steve suggests locking as much as you can behind a paywall: Beware giving away value for free, and always look at the data.

[40:01] Your opinion does not matter: Keywords tell us which apps to build.

On the podcast: The right way to raise prices, the painful lessons from picking the wrong tools, and why you should respond to every single app review.

Top Takeaways

✍️ Start surveying as soon as you start developing, and don’t stop. Identify your MVP by understanding customers early on, and develop new features with key customer insights when you’re growing.

📈 Bundle extra value if you must raise prices to soften the blow of a tough sell and demonstrate attentiveness to customer needs.

🧰 Cheaper, easy-to-integrate tools might not scale on infrastructure and unit economics, which could lead to a painful re-engineering process down the line.

🏗️ Plan for scalability from the start by adhering to solid software engineering principles and ensuring your tooling integrations are easily switchable.

🤑 Provide premium support for a premium product price. Respond to every store review — each interaction leaves a lasting impression on customers and drives loyalty.

About Vince Mayfield

👨‍💻 Co-founder and CEO of TalkingParents, an app that helps divorced or separated parents manage communication and share responsibilities.

💪 Vince and his partner jumped from professional services to building a scalable app with $10 million in ARR.

💡 “People like to compartmentalize elements of their life and they don't want to have a million apps.”

👋 LinkedIn

Links & Resources

‣ Connect with Vince on LinkedIn

‣ Check out TalkingParents

‣ TalkingParents on Instagram

‣ TalkingParents on Facebook

‣ TalkingParents on Pinterest

‣ TalkingParents on X (formerly Twitter)

‣ Get TalkingParents from the App Store

‣ Get TalkingParents from Google Play

Episode Highlights

[1:35] Origin story: Making money while we sleep is the ultimate goal — Vince talks about how he moved from agency to product company to $10 million in ARR.

[4:44] From hired gun to product growth: Lack of app monetization and not understanding customers early on may make pivoting to a product focus challenging.

[7:59] Risk management for risk mitigators: How do you make money from the court system? Easy: Switch focus to the real customers.

[10:32] Freemium tinkering: Vince dives into the app’s early strategy for monetization and subscription — burning through close to $1 million in the process.

[12:59] Chartered surveying: When it seems like an app is charging too little, asking customers what features they want and need is the ticket to nailing down value.

[15:59] Downhill slalom vs. uphill climb: Raising already low prices can be delicate, but bundling additional value with a rollout often softens the blow. Look for opportunities to layer on deeper value.

[28:33] Nudges and needs: From surveying to app instrumentation, Vince and his partner had to understand the customer journey before making the right moves.

[32:08] The ultimate tool belt: Not paying attention to how apps can scale from the very beginning is an easy mistake for app developers to make — especially when using tools.

[38:28] Best-in-class assessment: Starting with best-in-class tools isn’t always doable, but adopting good software engineering techniques as you go is a satisfactory quick fix.

[41:28] Lightning round: Vince talks about why support matters and how that translates into running a business and customers’ responses.

On the podcast: Setting sensible goals for paid marketing, how to measure and learn from the results, and why a single ad creative can completely change the trajectory of a company.

Top Takeaways

🥅 Set clear and realistic goals before investing in paid UA — and make sure you can afford to experiment. It can be tough to get to ROAS positive, and even tougher to get that return quickly.

💰 Monthly ad budgets should ideally start at $10-20k for big, algorithmic platforms — increasing data volume for optimization — while lower budgets call for exploring non-algorithmic platforms and influencer marketing.

🤔 Successful ads are built on in-depth, comprehensive user understanding, including their triggers and responses to different messages — before investing in advertising.

🧪 Test and iterate radically and substantially in the the quest for the ideal creative: Promising concepts need further refinement and tweaking, especially given the unpredictable nature of what might work.

🤝 Focus on conversion rates, not just high user engagement

for ad campaigns — low conversion can negatively affect overall performance, and ad platforms like Facebook and Google aim for a balance between engagement and revenue.

About Thomas Petit

👨‍💻 Independent subscription app growth consultant.

💪 Thomas has worked with hundreds of clients and helped manage tens of millions of dollars in ad spend.

💡 “Know your expectations and know what you're after… a lot of people don't ask this question in a deep enough way.”

👋 LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ David’s talk at Mau Las Vegas

‣ Revisiting the Fundamentals of App Marketing Post IDFA — Thomas Petit

‣ Check out MADV - Mobile. Ad.ventures on Substack

‣ Connect with Thomas on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Thomas on Twitter

‣ Get involved in the Sub Club community

Episode Highlights

[2:50] Minimum viability: What does it take to start making paid UA work? The answer depends on what you want to achieve with it.

[9:44] The early bird catches the worm: If you know what you want from the get-go, Thomas explains why starting paid UA early might not be a bad strategy. But only gamble what you can afford to lose.

[14:00] A word on Facebook: If running on a tight budget, Thomas “strongly recommends against” buying ads on Facebook because of targeting and demographic challenges.

[18:44] Cash moves everything around: The guardrails around scaling on algorithmic platforms necessitate a five-digit monthly budget minimum. Below $10-20k a month you’re operating in a very tough spot.

[24:57] Good Ol’ Google: Operating on low budgets, choosing keywords for Google searches may still work. Using a simple landing page builder is an avenue to explore — but only very early on when you need to assess SEO and imagery. The three checks are: goals, cash, and ARPI.

[31:31] Scaling paid UI: Thomas goes deep into how to scale paid UI, and how MMPs and SDKs play into that.

[39:56] The measure of success: It’s critical to assess evolving trends based on changing spend. But attribution isn’t (and never was) an exact science. Look at whatever tools you have at your disposal for an estimate.

[45:39] His toolkit: Thomas talks about the tools he uses for modeling incrementality across product and subscription lifecycle events.

[53:44] Let’s get creative: With growing automation, getting ads right is crucial. Messaging, USP, and understanding your audience all factor into effective ads. Don’t rely on intuition.

[1:05:01] USP: There’s no secret formula for a single, winning USP, but you need to test it to understand what users react to.

[1:09:41] Spanning the gap: Some successful ads are indirect and don’t transition. The relation between downloads and transitioning is a tough nut to crack, but teasing and explicitly explaining it’s an app are good ways to try at least a slight transition.

[1:13:26] Clickbait install rate: Beware of the delicate interplay between clicks, reduced install rate, ad spend, and ROI.

On this episode: balancing mission and monetization, the challenges inherent to referral programs, and why Lose It! had to abandon a big push into paid user acquisition.

Top Takeaways

🆓 Excellent free products need a large user base to upsell — messaging millions of users about special offers can deliver fantastic returns. (10:32)

🚂 Extend onboarding for increased trial engagement by asking more personalized questions to boost trial start rates and tailor the user experience. (14:43)

👏 Celebrate user success to drive word-of-mouth marketing and organic growth, while strengthening the bond between users and your brand. (25:47)

🥇 Encourage setup of premium features during trials while carefully A/B testing each feature for user resonance. (31:49)

🏃 Identify key actions to boost user conversion with the power of data analysis: Target users with discounts or special offers to entice them to upgrade to a premium subscription. (36:29)

About Erin Webster-Shaller

👨‍💻 VP of Marketing at Lose It!, one of the first health and wellness apps on the App Store.

💪 Erin has been responsible for determining whether new features should be premium or free, as well as running A/B testing for messaging.

💡 “There’s a lot of gimmicks in the weight loss industry: We try to be authentic and real with what this product can help you do — but also not oversell it [and] promise something that isn’t realistic.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

About Paul Apollo

👨‍💻 Senior VP of Operations at Lose It!.

💪 Paul has been with the company for nine years and has spent nearly that entire time in growth marketing.

💡 “We want to make sure that there is an excellent free product available for anybody who wants access to it.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Lose It!

‣ Work with Lose It!

‣ Connect with Erin on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Erin on Twitter

‣ Connect with Paul on LinkedIn

Episode Highlights

[1:45] Mission-driven: Lose It! founder JJ Allaire was tracking calories on a spreadsheet when the App Store was born. Increasing satisfaction for happy users aligned perfectly with the app’s growth.

[6:18] No monetization: The app went from being totally free to freemium. The team didn’t even dabble with ads until very late in the game.

[7:28] Buying out Series A investors: Lose It! was so profitable it became fully founder- and employee-owned when it was acquired in 2022 by Ziff Davis.

[9:22] The feature adoption journey: The team doesn’t test locking features, but they do A/B test messaging and positioning. Apps and Devices is a big crowd-pleaser, Paul explains.

[14:02] Loss aversion onboarding: When Lose It! noticed inexplicably longer onboarding, they tested with more questions, which snowballed into significant success. Adding premium features to onboarding didn’t have the same effect.

[20:58] 135 million-pound loss: 50 million users came primarily from consistent word-of-mouth growth and organic acquisition. Experimenting with paid acquisition in 2019 didn’t work out.

[25:47] Pushing word of mouth: Erin explains how the company gets people to “spread the good word” to lose more, although experimentation showed that referrals aren’t a silver bullet.

[31:49] Lifecycle messaging: Paul jumps into the strategy of exposing freemium users to premium and keeping premium users engaged.

[38:07] In-app messaging: Lose It! experimented with in-app messaging versus email blasts.

On this episode: We talk with Guillem about how Hevy got traction early on, growing without paid marketing, and why you might not want to raise your price, even if customers would pay more.

Top Takeaways

🏛️ When shaping your MVP, establish a clear framework to guide your product development. Particularly for small teams or those bootstrapping, maintaining a lean approach is crucial. Identify your product's three core pillars, which will inform your decisions on which features to retain or eliminate.

🪞 Do you believe if you build it, they will come? That might be the case occasionally, but launching a new app can prove challenging. A practical initial strategy, covering roughly 80% of your bases, is to mirror successful competitors: target the same keywords, implement similar tactics. This isn't a long-term strategy, but it will position you ahead of those who do nothing and attract an initial user base.

🤝 When developing a social app, be cautious about how pricing changes might undermine user trust. If your app is predicated on social sharing, frequent or radical pricing experiments could incite negative discussions among your users. However, if you consistently offer good value, your users are likely to share this positive sentiment.

🪴 Cultivating organic growth early on primes your app for sustainable expansion, with paid acquisition serving as an effective boost. Growing primarily through organic strategies – such as social viral loops or App Store Optimization (ASO) – ensures your app's growth is not overly dependent on costly advertising, which can influence your pricing model.

🤹One of the perks of building a small team? It facilitates a concentrated focus on what's best for the product. While the allure of the indie route – keeping things super lean with minimal costs – can be tempting, it can hamper your growth scale. A team not only brings in diverse skills but also provides a buffer between product ideation and implementation.

About Guillem Ros Salvador

👨‍💻 CEO and co-founder of Hevy, a leading gym workout tracker and planner app for iOS and Android.

💪 Guillem and his co-founder took the basic idea of Strava to create a community-focused weightlifting app. Hevy has been downloaded more than two million times so far.

💡 “We try to take in as much feedback as possible. We ask for feedback all the time inside the app, and we're always in contact with users by email. That seems to be a great way to just gather feedback.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Hevy

‣ Work with Hevy

‣ How Hevy was built

‣ Read about Guillem’s journey

‣ Connect with Guillem on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Guillem on Twitter

Episode Highlights

[2:06] Building dreams: After five years of app building, Guillem learned from failures to move from mobile gaming into fitness (as both a hobby and a profession).

[5:28] Pain point analysis: Moving from triathlons to the gym, Guillem realized the missing ingredient was community.

[7:45] Rapid 1.0 ship: Ruthless cutting and asking the key question of what the real MVP is was the key to shipping quickly. Tracking, analytics and social were the foundations of their MVP.

[13:25] Burgeoning communities: Sometimes, single-digit downloads are the spark you need to get going — and that can give you insight, understanding and word-of-mouth growth. Then, one day, the communities pop up.

[19:00] Ramen profitable: Within a year and a half, Guillem was working on Hevy full-time. Germany’s unemployment benefits went some way in helping him get there.

[23:09] Two million downloads: Compounding word of mouth and a slew of New Year's resolutions vaulted Hevy to the next level — sustained with a good product.

[26:22] Pricing thoughts: Guillem and his partner quickly realized that because Hevy was higher-quality and more social than competitors, they could keep the price low and still turn a profit.

[29:53] Near-zero acquisition costs: Even the behemoths didn’t pay to acquire users in the early days.

[34:44] Hiring management: Hevy’s team of 10 keeps operations lean while broadening their vision more than Guillem and his partner could alone.

On this episode: The evolution of Headspace’s freemium model, balancing mission and monetization, and why referral programs sometimes work better without incentives.

Top Takeaways

💰 Don’t be afraid to experiment with gating 100% of your content. Not only can this result in a significant lift in paid users, in cases where an app requires some effort from the user (such as with meditation), getting them committed with a free trial early on can boost engagement levels versus free users.

⚠️ Promoting your strongest performing plan at the expense of your others doesn’t always have a positive effect. Let’s say your annual plan might display the best performance in terms of revenue or retention, giving it too much prominence can cause lower intent users to sign-up for it, leading to fewer trial-to-paid conversions. In these cases, giving users choice could produce the best results.

👪 Users on family plans can show the strongest retention rates. When users subscribe to your app as part of a family or group, there’s a degree of accountability involved: if one member is using it, then the others are less likely to want to cancel as a result.

🗣️ When designing onboarding experiences, think about the product and lifecycle messaging together. Having the option of communicating with users both in and out of the app means you can get more creative with your onboarding — for instance, offering a “prize” for completing the first month, and using email to remind users when they’re lagging behind.

💬 Some apps will benefit from referral schemes that are less transactional. Rather than receive some monetary reward, some apps’ users are more motivated by the intrinsic reward of being helpful. But you can experiment with more unique benefits for being a top referrer, such as exclusive content or in-person events****

About Shreya Oswal and Keya Patel

👨‍💻 Shreya is Senior Director of Product Management, Membership at Headspace, and Keya is the former Director of Product Management, Growth.

💡 Shreya: “Bringing that free trial online and letting users choose for themselves was a big win for the business and a big win for members in terms of picking the right product for them.”

💡 Keya: “Experimenting with the extreme of what happens if you condense onboarding as much as possible and ask for a conversion moment or an upsell [works] from a data perspective. So it wasn't necessarily a failure.”

👋 Shreya on LinkedIn | Twitter

👋 Keya on LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Headspace

‣ Headspace for Work

‣ Headspace-Ginger merger

‣ How Freemium Can Outperform Free Trials – Shaun Steingold, Momentum Labs

‣ Connect with Shreya on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Keya on LinkedIn

Episode Highlights

[1:53] 80/20 rule: Keya talks about Headspace’s evolving freemium strategy where 80% of their content was locked behind a paywall. They tested the effect of locking even more content — with a positive impact on conversion.

[6:26] Big shoes to fill: Shreya’s follow-up experimentation involved locking 100% of content, with a high double-digit lift. To attract long-term users to switch, they offered a 75% discount.

[8:22] Costco sample strategy: Headspace wants to continue to experiment by giving users a taste of what they can benefit from.

[10:58] Freemium do’s and don’ts: Building habits and engagement comes from commitment and early skin in the game.

[13:04] Price testing: Keya dives into the experiments and results of Headspace’s price testing efforts.

[16:18] Annual versus monthly: Where Keya left off with annual subscription efforts, Shreya picked it up from a net new, lower-intent monthly angle.

[20:55] Package experimentation: The ideal length of time for a free trial isn’t immediately clear when switching from free content with a paywall and no trial.

[24:24] Propensity model: Shreya breaks down what a propensity model is and how to build it.

[26:18] Student and family rollouts: Not everyone necessarily had the same access or ability to pay for Headspace — while revenue matters, so does company mission.

[30:47] Onboarding failures and wins: Additional questions in testing led to lower drop-off rates — from single-select to multiselect reasons. Both very short and very long onboarding failed.

[35:08] Product and lifecycle interactions: Keya explains how communication outside the app opened doors for incentivization within the app.

[37:44] Referral revamp: Headspace found intrinsic, less transactional referrals to be more effective in the long run.

On this episode: the one small tweak that increased revenue 5X, growing an app organically, and how hiring an ASO consultant actually tanked downloads.

Top Takeaways

💰 Not all problems can be solved with money, so see if you can fix your own problems internally — like team communication — before paying for external help.

💡 Highly relevant ASO keywords with lower search volumes are a better bet for engaging audiences earlier and seeing snowballing success.

🌅 Putting a paywall early enough in the onboarding process might just supercharge revenue and growth.

📰 When you don’t have an advertising budget, start with local journalists and tie press releases to key events in the year.

🌳 Organic referral mechanisms — ****like screen sharing success and milestones — can be very effective while enhancing user experience.

About Ania Wysocka

👨‍💻 Founder of Rootd.

💡 “I‘m so obsessed with the user experience, that it's important to work with others who also are obsessed with user experience.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Rootd

‣ B2B with Rootd

‣ Rootd on Instagram

‣ Connect with Ania on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Ania on Twitter

Episode Highlights

[1:31] Strong roots: Ania created Rootd not as a result of surveys or user research, but in response to her own personal need.

[8:31] Contract buzzkill: Working with contractors can be a challenge — alignment of values is the key.

[10:13] Fundraiser tales: If you haven’t hit a wall in development, it might not yet be time to seek investment. Fixing internal processes first can pay dividends later.

[12:53] Early ASnOwball: Sticking with keywords that might initially yield lower volumes can ultimately drive traffic that helps your app snowball. Ania found contracting ASO counterproductive.

[17:49] Dialing in the funnel: A paywall at the beginning of the onboarding process increased Rootd’s revenue by five times — with no negative feedback.

[20:55] Get their attention: Local journalists love to promote local business stories, and tying stories to specific world events can work wonders when there’s no advertising budget.

[25:03] Apple Editor’s Choice: Sometimes it pays to be as persistent as possible in submissions for getting featured.

[28:20] Paid marketing experimentation: Don’t pay for marketing until you’re ready to experiment.

On this episode: the trap of building for existing subscribers, incentivizing word of mouth, and why paid marketing should be an accelerant, not the foundation of your growth strategy.

Top Takeaways

📱 Growth comes from focusing on product retention: Build a product users really want, creating an engaged customer base and fueling the growth loop down the line.

🗣️ ‌Build a viral growth loop based on word-of-mouth. A product that exceeds user expectations is the ultimate way to drive word-of-mouth — even if your app isn’t naturally social.

👥 Paid advertising is an accelerant to user acquisition (UA) — not your sole UA channel. It should come after product focus and word-of-mouth virality.

😀 ‌Measure and improve retention by finding your minimum engagement milestone. Look to your ICP for clues.

🙅‍♂️ Talk to your users who aren't subscribers. There's a tendency to focus user research on super-users, but they won't tell you much about why others aren't subscribing.

About Jesse Venticinque

👨‍💻 Co-founder and chief product officer of Fitbod, a fitness app offering workouts that improve as you do.

💡 “There’s a trap of listen[ing] to super successful, engaged customers as a clue for what the unsuccessful customers are missing.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Fitbod

‣ Work with Fitbod (Currently hiring a Core Experience Lead PM!)

‣ Jesse’s product approach

‣ Connect with Jesse on LinkedIn

‣ Connect with Jesse on Twitter

Episode Highlights

[2:07] Solving a personal problem: The business has grown largely on revenue alone, thanks to what Jesse calls a “maniacal focus on product retention” and a goal of challenging the status quo.

[5:56] Catching a big break: The key to scaling was pioneering a subscription model based on AI and machine learning, as well as having the right product-market fit by tapping into a “secret hiding in plain sight.”

[8:26] Money in the bank: Although they found themselves in an underdog industry, the Fitbod team crucially found investors who aligned with their mission and values.

[12:06] Viral growth loop: Word of mouth is still a major growth driver for Fitbod today — especially given that Fitbod isn’t a naturally social product. They’re also considering content as another growth loop, both blog-based and user-generated.

[15:40] Hooking them in: The best consumer companies have discrete, repeatable actions to create a habit loop. Reward visibility and shareability are critical components of this.

[17:58] Referral science: Offering free referrals is a way to understand and measure the growth loop. This approach also offers hard data, whereas word of mouth is more challenging to measure.

[20:29] Everyday workout: Driving retention requires deep analysis of the metrics, like when users are canceling before the end of subscription periods and account dormancy.

[26:27] Leverage = focus: When retention is good, focusing on conversion and activation is a viable way to drive mass adoption.

[28:44] Contextualizing feature requests: Once you establish your ICP, scale and own the market for that audience. Then, build for the non-ICP.

[31:32] Digging into activation: Jesse explains that user research is critical to avoid focusing too much on the most engaged users at the expense of less engaged ones.

[35:09] The depth of need: Before building a feature, identify a participant pattern with (at least) medium confidence. Then you can develop a hypothesis.

On the podcast we talk with Shaun about the power of community, the importance of testing your freemium strategy, and why you might not want to offer a free trial.

Top Takeaways

🎆 Understanding unintuitive power laws is the ticket to explaining — and benefiting from — explosive app growth.

🪝 Deciding what goes behind the paywall is 90% of an app’s success — but developers typically only spend 10% of the time thinking about it.

🆓 Beware the free trial, which could create negative experiences and conversion rates — and might not outperform a freemium model.

🌍 Absorbing the cost of a freemium model comes down to creating an engaged, irreplaceable community, which is more likely to buy and lead to higher conversions.

🫶 Don’t focus on rates and formulae at the expense of what matters: Where users are in their emotional journey and how the app fits into their lives.

About Shaun Steingold

👨‍💻 Founder and managing director of Momentum Labs and CEO of Healthi.

💡 “I love opportunities where you have a business model that fundamentally disrupts an industry. Said another way: You and your business and products have a bigger margin than your competitors. That's been the thesis behind a lot of my career and what I've worked on.”

👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources

‣ Learn more about Momentum Labs

‣ Check out the Healthi app

‣ Look into iNavX, the “Google Maps for the Water”

‣ Connect with Shaun on LinkedIn

Episode Highlights

[1:45] From HP to SVB to apps: App developers have access to a free global scale and distribution network that only a privileged few corporations had in the past — harking back to when Eric Crowley said the App Store was the biggest marketplace in human history. Mobile apps that replace tangible products continually win out thanks to convenience for consumers.

[5:05] Proto-cyborgs: Apps have the power to augment physical activities — from fitness to physical hobbies — in a world where we still haven’t yet reached “peak app.”

[6:57] Gaining momentum: ****Shaun realized that the App Store ranking moat meant buying was better than building. Riding the first wave of app-buying firms, Momentum Labs chose top apps at rank three or lower where growth potential is exponential compared to those with the top spot.

[10:13] Buffett wisdom: “Great businesses for fair prices” seems like a good maxim. But right now, the market seems to be crazy prices for fair businesses because it’s not accounting for the unintuitive: that power laws still prevail, and people need to get wise to them.

[14:53] Featherlight ASO: Momentum has a very light hand on the tiller when it comes to ASO — they frontload most of the work and then (almost) don’t touch it. Performance consistency and longevity matter more.

[19:00] Never take our freemium: The initial backlash against subscription models needs to give way to understanding that software is a living, breathing thing. Freemium is about trying before you buy, and hooking with additional features — working out what these features are is 90% of an app’s strategy for success.

[23:51] Trialing the free trial: Shaun’s never used free trials with his apps, because he’s found that they can create negative engagement — reflected in lower conversion rates.

[28:34] Boundless, joyful experience: The key to not having a free trial is the freemium strategy. Freemium models done well entice without moments of pause or negative experiences — ultimately encouraging users to upgrade for more features and additional value.

[35:32] Community values: The best business asset — for app lifecycles and moats — is community. Building engagement improves conversion. The strategy for Healthi highlights how additional value generates revenue and helps grow apps to full potential.

[39:38] It’s a kind of magic: It’s easy to get caught up in rates and formulae at the expense of what really matters, which is how a product fits into someone’s life and emotional journey.

On the podcast, Ariel dives into the fundamentals of ASO and how to research and optimize keywords. He also explains why ratings matter much more than reviews, and why you should never, ever duplicate keywords.

Top Takeaways:

🔍 It’s not that it’s hard to get discovered with ASO — it’s that it’s hard to get discovered without doing enough ASO. Expect to spend more time exploring on the front-end, but this isn’t a “set it and forget it” strategy. 

⭐ Make sure that you're optimizing for ratings: they are more impactful for discoverability than download numbers alone. 

📛 When choosing an app name, make sure you put the most important keywords as early as possible. 

📊 Don’t rely on intuition for your ASO strategy — always look at the data.

🔑 Spend as much time using the keywords as you do on finding them — beyond just in your text meta.

About Ariel Michaeli

👨‍💻 Founder and CEO of Appfigures.

💡 “If you only trust intuition, you probably won't see results.”

👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Appfigures

‣ Appfigures’s Advanced ASO Secrets Guide

‣ Join Appfigures (they’re hiring!)

‣ Connect with Ariel on LinkedIn

‣ Which Keywords are Your Competitors Targeting?

Episode Highlights

[1:48] The A to Z of ASO: Should I care? they ask. Usually, it’s because they don’t know what ASO is. But it’s harder and harder to get found in the App Store, so you can’t deny the benefits.

[4:09] Black box optimization: ASO impacts both conversion and discovery, so how do you blend the two? Ariel suggests you forget about the algorithm, and focus on the people instead.

[5:52] ASO vs. SEO: So what is the difference? It’s hard to explain briefly. But you have much less control over ASO than SEO — it’s about limitations. 

[9:16] Great expectations: It’s not hard to get discovered with ASO — it’s hard to get discovered without enough ASO. Understanding your app and core competitors is the foundation of changing how much impact your app makes.

[12:46] Artificial boosting: Why should older apps get more traction? The good news for new apps is that Apple has now leveled the playing field.

[18:10] ASO key factors: App name, subtitle and keywords all affect ASO. Get relevant, important keywords in as early as possible because that’s where the value is, says Ariel. Plus: Some live keyword help.

[27:24] Capture their attention: People have to understand what they’re looking at before they download an app. With apps for everything now, how do you stand out? Screenshots and video previews are the answer.

[31:35] Rate beats review: Apps with more ratings beat those with more downloads. Ratings feel more organic to users, so Apple — and its algorithm — factors this in.

[35:35] The ultimate sin: Keyword duplication is the biggest no-no. But other common ASO mistakes include ignoring popularity scores, trusting your instincts, and failing to utilize app names for keywords. (Cleaner isn’t always better where it really matters: downloads.)

[39:12] Competitive focus: With some niches, like games, up to two keywords matter. Category rookies and those in highly competitive environments should be focused. Those with more ratings and downloads should angle for other keyword combos.

[43:59] Do your research: You need to look at the data to see what keywords really matter for your app. It helps to check competitor reviews.

[49:32] Paid marketing: Number of ratings, especially on Google Play, really matters. When people don’t download, it signals no one wants it. Expect Apple to follow suit. 

[51:08] Secondary ASO localizations: Apple uses English localization for keywords, but — in the U.S. — Spanish too. Use both, and you’ve got twice the keywords. Russia and other countries are on the way too, which means you can duplicate between sets (even if not within them).

On the podcast, we talk with Alice Muir about how best to onboard premium users, what lifecycle optimization looks like both tactically and strategically, and how to spot users before they churn. She shares insight into why focusing on CRMs for win-back strategies is only part of the story, and the best campaigns to entice users to stick with their subscriptions.

Top Takeaways:

📧 Email is good for two things: drip campaigns — offering a staggered, increasing discount to entice signups — and long-form content to keep premium users engaged.

📲 Consider using in-app messaging as proxy testing for paywalls if you don’t have access to A/B testing tools or are working with different regional pricing.

🎁 Using CRM for quick win-backs is a band-aid for churn — instead, you need to consistently add value to people’s lives.

🤔 Tap into human psychology and increase retention by reminding people of what they’re going to lose by unsubscribing.

💸 Balance discounts with the need to entice more high-intent users back into the app, because at some point discounts mean you’re losing money.

About Alice Muir

👨‍💻 She’s the Senior Growth Consultant at Phiture.

💡“In my experience, the low-hanging fruit is the strategy and strategic lifecycle targeting, because you would be surprised at how many apps … have absolutely nothing in place for people that have started a trial or are already subscribers.”

👋 LinkedIn

Links & Resources

‣ Check out Phiture

‣ Phiture’s Subscription Stack

‣ Connect with Alice on LinkedIn to guest write for Phiture

‣ The 4 Foundational Frameworks of Consumer SaaS — Robbie Kellman Baxter, Peninsula Strategies

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‣ Jacob Eiting
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Episode Highlights

[2:09] Top app learnings: Alice has worked with — and learned from — a number of subscription apps.

[3:17] Subscription onboarding strategy: Many top apps in the App Store don’t have a strategy focusing on those already subscribed or who’ve started a trial. Sometimes a simple message is all that’s needed.

[7:36] Feature highlight: Premium experience onboarding must emphasize additional features — not just what the free experience offers. Asking users what they like best in each experience never hurts.

[9:59] Channel blending: Email is great for drip campaigns — offering a staggered increased discount — as well as long-form content to keep premium users engaged. Push has limitations however, so it’s better to use for win-back scenarios.

[12:54] In-app messaging: Using full-screen in-app messages that look like native paywalls can be used as a proxy for testing the latter, Alice explains — with caveats.

[19:25] Next-step growth: For big apps with a lot of data, correlation analysis is a huge area of opportunity. The same can’t be said for startup apps, which lack this data. But what does it look like?

[24:50] From correlation to causation: Alice explains her strategy for driving value from correlation and funnel analysis for drop-offs.

[27:10] Churn prevention strategy: A holistic approach to long-term success harmonizes with Robbie Kellman Baxter’s view. A cost-of-living crisis is causing people to scrutinize their costs like never before, so apps need continual content for real added value.

[32:05] Spotting the churn: Alice suggests segmenting already-disengaged users, dissecting the reason, and re-onboarding them if necessary.

[37:19] Winning win-back campaigns: Reminding people of lost benefits, creating a sense of urgency, celebrating membership, and implementing screenshot capture functionality for premium features are all possible tactics for reinforcing the value proposition.

[39:32] Making discounts work: Discounts can seem attractive, but might encourage long-term loss — the key is to balance discounts with attracting high-intent app users. Reminding people what’s coming can be highly effective.

On the podcast we talk with Jason about some of Strava’s big growth wins, the importance of feature education, and whether or not all product teams should actually be growth teams.

Top Takeaways
🛠 The shift in mindset that comes with "growth engineering" — it's about a greater focus on the user and a willingness to go a little faster than usual...
🌀 While chaos in an app business may be unavoidable, the secret is learning to embrace "managed chaos"
🔬 How the key to growth is testing — and creating a safe space where it's possible to test every idea
👩‍🏫 Why having employees who use the app every day is both a blessing and a curse (hint: it's connected to the new user experience and feature education)

About Jason van der Merwe
👨‍💻 Director of Growth Engineering at Strava
💡 “Make it easy enough to test any and every idea.”
👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Check out Strava
‣ Work with Strava
‣ Check out Jason’s site and musings on growth and more

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[1:58] Growing as an engineer: Jason explains what the role of a growth engineer entails — most importantly, thinking like a product manager.
[4:10] If it’s not on Strava, it didn’t happen: Growth by word-of-mouth is the holy grail. How Strava grew before Jason joined looked different to how it grew once he joined.
[10:31] Flying blind: The board said that top companies have growth teams and to make it happen. Jason’s team had no idea what they were doing at first — it all started with tinkering and analyzing the metrics.
[16:26] From 0 to 100: Jason talks about how Strava’s growth team grew from nothing into five multidisciplinary teams with 70 people.
[20:37] Conflicts and scaling: Smaller meetings are more successful, but can be a challenge for creating a more overarching narrative.
[26:26] Core values: Strava has different teams focusing on different values, but all teams are platforms.
[28:13] Feature education: Developers can miss fundamentals — Jason explains how Strava factors this into development. Perfect observability remains a problem, but Jason says it’s important to move forward and make decisions in spite of that.
[31:31] Test churning: Because he was close to the problem, Jason could test nonstop. But now his role has changed, he needs to trust his teams and help them do their jobs well — illustrating the importance of engineers thinking like product managers.
[34:39] Stay focused: When debate about what to do becomes time-consuming and you’re not moving fast, you know it’s time to test more. Metrics like measured (not modeled) outcomes are key at Strava.
[40:09] Black box: No app developer has control of the App Store. App store optimization (ASO) might ease the pressure, but at the expense of the novelty effect. The best advice? Don’t depend on it.
[45:30] The power of copy: Visual design can be distracting for users, as well as powerful. But copy — no matter where it is — always has a huge impact.

On the podcast I talk with Ryan about the TikTokification of video ads, how partnerships help increase the value of premium subscription tiers, and why you should be thinking about retention, not just downloads, when working with influencers.

Top Takeaways
🗣️ User acquisition can be more challenging for apps with niche audiences, which is why you should focus on channels where you can target by interest and search.
🎯 SEO feeds the retargeting funnel more than it drives direct conversions — but keyword data is valuable for product positioning.
🤗 Influencer marketing is extremely effective across the whole marketing funnel — from acquisition to retention — helping to build trust and authenticity.
🦾 Marketing automation is essential for educating users how the product will improve their life once they've gotten into it — especially for more complex products.
🖥️ Apps make more money from web subscriptions, so retarget users to drive them to sign up on the web rather than mobile.

About Ryan Watson
👨‍💻 Director of Growth Marketing at onX
💡 “Our motto is: ‘We want to awaken the adventurer in everyone.’ It’s very focused on the experience that they're having, and not just how the tool operates.”
👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Work at onX
‣ onX on LinkedIn
‣ onX on Twitter
‣ onX on YouTube

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[1:47] Hunting origins: Ryan takes listeners through the background of onXmaps, Inc., the market-dominating subscription app you might not have heard of if you’re not a hunter.
[7:03] Find the product fit: If you’re looking to build a business, look at underserved niches.
[13:34] Easy and hard: Narrow niches come with their own challenges.
[18:00] Channel selection: Targeting via interest is crucial to marketing to a niche audience.
[19:34] SEOperation: SEO does convert, but more importantly feeds the retargeting funnel.
[21:18] Secret channels: Ryan shares some of the more successful channels that might not be considered at first.
[22:41] TikTokification: Short form video is on the rise — how do you leverage that “escape-style content”? There’s still a market for long form podcasting too.
[27:08] Influencer culture: Working with a large number of the right influencers is important for authenticity, but sometimes in-house video works better. What’s crucial is a constant flow of video.
[29:17] Retention: People don’t think about retention as much as they should, Ryan says. Ads can actually be a retention strategy.
[31:39] Howdy, partner: Elite members get special deals. For onX, it’s about “provid[ing] true value of what matters to your audience,” Ryan explains.
[36:23] End-to-end: It’s all about figuring out your creative door-opener for getting people interested in your product.
[40:03] Personnel balance: Having a strong in-house creative team versus hiring from outside is a personal preference, and depends on the product.
[40:44] MMP: Ryan talks all things experimentation on ATT, SKAdNetwork, organic lift, and directing traffic between the web and the app stores.
[45:13] Bundling: onX believes in specific concept-based apps for specific users. Sometimes there’s cross-conversion.

On the podcast I talk with Sylvain about the top subscription app insights you should be thinking about, how important cohorting is when looking at growth metrics, and why good advice can turn bad if you apply it at the wrong stage.

Top Takeaways
💎 In an early stage, engagement is more important than growth
💎 When looking at retention for your subscription apps, segment your users based on their subscription status
💎 Launching only a monthly plan first can help you improve the product
💎 Gifting is a great way to increase the spend ceiling
💎 You need to ask for the annual upgrade beyond sign up

About Sylvain Gauchet
👨‍💻 Director of Revenue Strategy at Babbel and founder of Growth Gems
💡 “Whether your onboarding is going to be short — because you get people to experience the background removal — or it's long because you need to sell them on the idea, it's still about convincing them. It’s for you to figure out what’s the best way to convince them.”
👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Learn a language at Babbel
‣ Sign up for the Growth Gems newsletter
‣ Gabor-Granger Pricing Model Explanation and Survey Template
‣ Check out Gabor-Granger on YouTube
‣ How To Price Your Product: A Guide To The Van Westendorp Pricing Model
‣ Check out Van Westendorp on YouTube

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:11] The curator: On top of working a full-time job, content consumer extraordinaire Sylvain “mines” the best growth insights to share in a biweekly newsletter.
[3:13] Top Gems: Strategy
[3:17] Get out and explore: Andy Carvell, co-founder at Phiture, preaches big swings for big results in place of sophisticated measuring and A/B testing. The stage you’re in shapes the tactics you use.
[7:05] Clash of priorities: On top of revenue, the CAC/LTV ratio considers health and growth instead of one or the other, says Michael Berliner, former principal product manager at MasterClass.
[13:02] Engage all systems: Without engagement, growth is meaningless, according to bestselling author Nir Eyal. Don’t scale until you’ve nailed engagement and know that people are willing to pay.
[15:29] Avoiding extremes: Eric Seufert, analyst and strategy consultant at Heracles Media, says that if you’re blowing up, you should spend on paid acquisition much earlier than you think — even before onboarding and perfecting the product. Just don’t focus too much on a specific channel — extremes aren’t good.
[20:22] Engineering success: Testing velocity is critical. Canva head of revenue and product growth David Burson knows you have to get comfortable with just enough engineering and moving fast. Growth and product engineering aren’t the same — you’re going to fail sometimes.
[23:32] Ease the tension: Monetization, engagement, and virality need balance, says independent mobile growth consultant Thomas Petit. Doubling the price for double the short-term revenue sometimes works, but at what cost for long-term retention?
[26:35] Top Gems: Retention
[26:40] Segment, re-engage: You can’t look at everything in aggregate, Sylvain says — if you do, you won’t understand the story behind user behavior. But as Thomas Petit also highlights, segmenting on a subscription basis helps you to target appropriately through re-engagement.
[29:27] Month by month: For cash flow, annual plans reign supreme. But monthly plans offer incremental improvement opportunities, says PhotoRoom co-founder and CEO Matthieu Rouif.
[33:30] Winning by proxy: It’s very difficult to impact the tail end of retention. Finding earlier patterns and indicators helps you to optimize for the proxy — and provides the only way to do so, says RBI head of digital marketing Anja Obermüller.
[36:41] Talking tactics: Strategy matters, but the technicalities of involuntary churn could be the key to increasing retention. Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell, advises looking at the Tactical Retention Zone as well as the Strategic Retention ends of the value spectrum.
[39:35] Top Gems: Onboarding & Activation
[39:40] Seeing is believing: Thomas recommends not A/B testing in the early stages — make the change directly instead. If it matters, you’ll know when you’ve made the desired impact. You don’t have to mimic mature, late-stage companies like DuoLingo that religiously A/B test everything.
[42:59] Onboarding is separate: Darius Mora, formerly the CMO of Reflectly, knows how important onboarding optimization is — to the point that you should view onboarding as a separate product.
[45:06] The art of persuasion: Don’t bother with a how-to tutorial, says Leon Sasson, co-founder and CTO of Rise Science. Instead, educate and convince: Demonstrate how the product affects users’ lives and why they should care.
[50:14] Collateral damage: Leon also emphasizes a classic mistake with funnel optimization: Making moves in one direction hurting elsewhere — say, increasing trials negatively affecting long-term retention. Use counter-metrics to avoid these pitfalls, which don’t have to be that sophisticated.
[52:06] Countdown to experimentation: Growth trainer and coach Ethan Garr is keen to stress that you don’t jump into tactics — you experiment instead. Just because something works for someone doesn’t mean it’ll work for you, so avoid copying tests.
[54:32] Realignment: What happens before is as important as what comes after, Sylvain says. Phitur senior designer Marissa Hsu clarifies the importance of setting the right expectations during onboarding for ensuring user acquisition continuity.
[59:26] Top Gems: Monetization
[59:31] Surveying the landscape: Giancarlo Musetti, growth product manager at Burner, strongly recommends surveying to understand the best ways to deploy paywalls. Especially if you’re in the early stages, talk to users.
[1:03:16] It’s all about the percentages: You can’t ignore the percentage of users who see the paywall. Monitor it, because many apps make it difficult for people to actually pay for them. Of the peopl...

On the podcast we talk with Lexi about data.ai’s State of Mobile report, the countries subscription apps should focus on for growth, and why things still look bright for apps despite a decline in overall spend.

Top Takeaways
🕹️ Mobile app spend is down, but that may not be a bad thing
🤳 Non-gaming apps see additional growth with resilient spend
✍️ The subscription model underpins growth for non-gaming apps
📈 Look to non-U.S. markets for new opportunities
💝 The most successful apps will offer frictionless, personalized experiences

About Lexi Sydow
👨‍💻 Head of Insights at data.ai, a unified data AI company that combines consumer and market data with artificial intelligence to offer insights into trends.
💡 “We’ve gotten to a place where it’s become very native behavior — not just in the app store sense, but even mobile commerce. … It’s those habitual things that we do that reinforce our habits.”
👋  LinkedIn | Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Get the State of Mobile 2023 report
‣ Work at data.ai (remote and hiring!)

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[2:16] History report: From starting as “The Retrospective” to including more forward-thinking pieces, publishing the Annual State of Mobile report has been a decade of fun for data.ai — and a valuable resource for app developers.
[4:54] More reports: Lexi outlines data.ai’s various other reports that help separate real trends from massaged data.
[7:48] An evolutionary thing: Most changes to data.ai’s reports have been organic, largely thanks to a maturation of the industry, analysis, and the team’s understanding.
[11:54] It’s data, it’s AI, it’s data.ai: data.ai’s sophisticated team collects data based on their own products, utilizing AI in the process. This helps them make their own accurate estimates, and they’re proud of that.
[18:39] M.E.T.H.O.D.: Lexi dives into the hows of data collection in the age of privacy, including data.ai’s growing categorization of apps.
[21:53] Marquee landmark year: For the first time ever, spend is down. Lexi details the data and what it tells us.
[28:03] Concentrate: The top three countries for app spend have their own chart in the report. But it’s not all dominated by China, the U.S., and Japan.
[30:21] GDP transformed: While China is three or four times the size of the U.S., China’s spend is only marginally greater than the latter. There’s still a lot of headroom for China to move.
[39:30] Top app categories: In many categories, subscription apps take the top spot. Usually in the top 10, storage subscription app Google One jumped straight to number one in consumer spending this year.
[42:36] What is a phone?: It’s becoming — if it hasn’t already become — native behavior to use phones to do everything. Meaningful personalized experiences convert to subscriptions and in-app purchases.

On the podcast we talk with Brennan about the challenge of building and growing kids apps in 2022, how to make effective decisions with minimal data, and why AppsFlyer had to build Sago Mini a custom SDK.

Top Takeaways
🧒 Building and growing kids apps is hard
🤔 Making effective decisions with minimal data is a challenge
💕 Find the right partner to invest in solving tough challenges together — especially if it’s a custom job

About Brennan Clark
👨‍💻 Director of Product at Sago Mini, which has received more than 100 million downloads. The company offers three subscription apps for preschoolers, a recently launched show on Apple TV+, and a physical subscription box.
💡 “We've staked our claim in this high-quality, interactive content — that's our competitive advantage. We invest a lot in creating the best content for kids as possible [and] making sure it's interactive. It's not passive YouTube Kids-style content.”
👋  LinkedIn

Links & Resources
‣ Check out Sago Mini
‣ Work at Sago Mini
‣ Connect with Brennan at LinkedIn

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:01] Building basics: When you build a kids app, you’re building both for the user (the kid) and the consumer (the parent) who pays. Building for preschoolers who can’t read yet is a challenge layered on top.
[8:11] Think of the parent: Sago Mini complements its kids-first experience with a parent app to demonstrate the value of the app to parents directly. But how does it balance the two and prevent churn from each group?
[12:35] The pitch: Providing the best digital tools and products for preschoolers means exploring different engaging avenues of kids learning — instead of letting them passively follow (scary) YouTube algorithms. The key is emphasizing what Brennan calls “high-quality screen time.”
[16:00] What data?: Kids data management is a huge topic. Getting creative with partners might be the best solution, and Sago Mini struck gold with AppsFlyer’s custom SDK job. But it’s just as important that you (or your partners) don’t collect more data than you need.
[23:11] Product testing: Product and UX design testing is a weekly thing at Sago Mini. It’s tough to put yourself in kids’ shoes, but it’s also crucial to get features right.
[26:54] Paid ads: Sago Mini can’t use the IDFA or ATT prompt, and is about to lose its Google Ad ID. With additional pressure on retention, how does it work with so many constraints? (Hint: they get creative with ToFu.)
[36:14] Mixing up the channels: Apple Arcade is a highly-curated safe space, perfectly aligned with Sago Mini’s value — it’s also not as crowded by preschooler content as other platforms are. But it’s the Apple TV+ show that’s really driving 80% of their revenue.
[42:03] The web experience: While some kids companies build their entire funnel on the web, Sago Mini views it more as a lead-generating, ToFu strategy to get kids on the apps ASAP.
[44:25] Innate ceilings: Brennan talks about one of the biggest “problems” kids app developers face, and how looking at the path holistically helps.

On the podcast we talk about RevenueCat’s State of Subscription Apps report, all the nuance that didn’t make it into the report, and why your app landing in the bottom quartile of some metrics might not be as bad as it seems.

Top Takeaways
🤔 Understand your own business model and unique leverage
📈 Consider the stage of your app when looking at benchmarks
🖐️ 5 key insights: conversions, renewals, retention and more

Links & Resources
‣ The report: State of Subscription Apps 2023
‣ Give us your feedback
‣ One year retention rate insights
‣ Join the RevenueCat team
‣ Follow RevenueCat on Linkedin
‣ Follow RevenueCat on Twitter

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:33] The why: RevenueCat is uniquely positioned to measure the data set released in the State of Subscription Apps 2023 report. (By the way, if you don’t want your data set featured in the report, just let us know.)
[7:18] The how: Anonymized data from $4 billion in tracked revenue across 22,000 apps is a lot to dig into. But it’s important to take it all in context for your own app’s situation.
[13:15] The what: Be sure to understand your own business model and the unique leverage you have. Price is a factor in retention.
[18:50] The flipside: Big acquisition costs and ad spend means you need to ideally be in the top quartile to get the right returns.
[23:12] Drawn and quartered: Why the report uses the upper, middle, median, and lower quartiles is important.
[32:43] Key results: David and Jacob go deep on each of the report’s top 5 takeaways.
[40:22] Calculating value: Understanding lifetime value (LTV) isn’t easy. You have to be careful not to fall into the naive developer trap. The good news is that predictive LTV is on RevenueCat’s roadmap.
[44:53] Retention: Weekly subscriptions have a 73% retention rate by week two, which drops to 3% by the end of the first year. But while monthly subscription starts lower at 64%, it comparatively only drops to 11%. Survival analysis: The longer you stay subscribed, the more likely you are to continue subscribing.
[49:16] Annual vs. monthly: Why is annual better than monthly? The answer might not be so obvious. (Hint: product quality.)
[55:14] The magic of subscriptions: If users are more likely to stick around the longer they stick around, minimal churn on annual subscriptions means more money (for free!) next year.
[1:00:21] Trials and tribulations: What percentage of apps have a trial strategy? Perhaps surprisingly, a lot don’t have one at all
[01:08:03] Trial duration: David dives into the trial-to-paid conversion rate. The results were counterintuitive.

On the podcast we talk with Osman about Duolingo’s culture of experimentation, data and testing as a moat, and why passive aggressive push notifications actually work in the right context.

Top Takeaways
🧪 Leverage a culture of experimentation to create a top user experience
📊 Data and testing are Duolingo’s best moat
👍 Passive-aggressive push notifications might work in the right context

About Osman Mansur
👨‍💻 Product Manager (PM) at Duolingo, the global language learning app with close to 60 million active users.
💪 As PM on the retention team, Osman plays a key role in maximizing user engagement and retention through specific mechanics, with a dedicated testing and experimentation regimen.
💡 “Just by the sheer amount of data that we collect, we're really able to drill down and optimize a lot of things on the app. And it keeps us busy as a product team, because there's so much stuff that we know we can improve.”
👋  LinkedIn | Medium

Links & Resources
‣ Duolingo’s findings on notifications (Twitter thread)
‣ Duolingo’s findings on streak rewards (Twitter thread)
‣ How does Duo decide what message to send? The secret is in the AI!
‣ The habit-building research behind your Duolingo streak
‣ Join the Duolingo team

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:08] Test everything: Osman explains how the data Duolingo collects and analyzes is one of the company’s best moats.
[5:26] Ideation generation: Sometimes the bottom-up approach works best for driving team roadmaps, but iteration and experimentation is at the heart of Duolingo’s testing process.
[11:02] Cooperation, working together: At Duolingo, teams share what they’ve learned with each other to create a better product, but they also cross over on analysis and experimentation.
[17:48] Looking back: To track long-term impact, Duolingo uses holdout experiments and looks at feature-level metrics via dashboards
[25:34] Notifications 101: Osman explains how a big driver of retention and company growth has been its notification strategy, learning a lot about what does and doesn’t work along the way.
[33:35] Let’s get creative: The secret to impactful retentive notifications is getting the tone right, and even conversing with users. Sterile voices don’t work — opinionated voices just might.
[37:30] Keep it simple: Messaging and theme matters for notifications, and so does copy length. Reduce cognitive load to increase willingness to engage. But once you’re in the app, you can get more complex for engaged users.
[40:10] Emoji titles: Osman’s team discovered that emojis are actually better in the title than in the body. Why it’s an attention grabber is still a mystery.
[41:53] Falling flat: Not every experiment works, but there are still great lessons to learn. The tone of an organic character works better than a brand talking to users like marketers.
[46:33] Keeping the streak going: The streak is one of the best Duolingo retention mechanics, Osman explains. He dives into how the company tinkered with it to prevent domino effect user drop offs, and how the streak widget works in iOS.

On the podcast we talk with John about the far reaching implications of the European Union’s Digital Markets Act, how app developers should be thinking about the opportunities created, and why Apple making so much money from the App Store might be bad for Apple long-term.

Top Takeaways
⚖️ The EC’s DMA is set to shake things up in a big way — but how isn’t completely clear
🪟 Don’t panic, app developers — the DMA creates opportunities, too
🤑 The profitability of the App Store might not be good for Apple in the long-term

About John Gruber
👨‍💻 John runs Daring Fireball, is host of The Talk Show podcast, and co-hosts the Dithering podcast.
💡 “One of the rules in the App Store is that you cannot explain the rules of the App Store in your app.”
👋  Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Mark Gurman’s article on how Apple is responding to the EU’s DMA
‣ If a Third-Party App Store Falls in the Forest and No One Uses It, Does It Make a Sound?
‣ Check out Daring Fireball
‣ The Dithering podcast
‣ The Talk Show

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:03] Get ready: The European Commission’s 100-page Digital Markets Act is going to seriously shake things up in a major bid to regulate big tech. But what is it, what does it mean, and who does it apply to?
[11:00] Keeping it cordial: Apple’s relationship with the Japan Fair Trade Commission during similar legislation was respectful. It’s not clear the same can be said of their dealings with the EU.
[13:24] The ABCs of USB: Whatever your feelings on legal mandates for USB ports, at least it’s clear. Not so with the DMA, John argues.
[18:14] We don’t care: John believes that the EC’s priorities aren’t aligned with developers or consumers. There are lessons from the Dutch case of dating apps with a huge 27% commission charged by Apple, as well as constraints on Netflix selling inside the app.
[24:26] Payment processing vs. licensing: 30% is a very expensive payment processing fee. But Apple views it as a licensing fee — a privilege to run your software on their system.
[38:07] The eye of the apple: Will Apple soften up or is it just money-grabbing? Apps have morphed as Apple didn’t realize how popular the iPhone could become, and App Store commission is a large part of its current growth.
[44:37] Multiplatform allure: If Apple is seen as an untrustworthy partner with poor App Store management, developers might want to develop across different platforms and avoid relying solely on Apple — even if its exclusive apps have typically been the most successful.
[51:21] What gives, Google?: Despite being allowed, there’s a mystery around why sideloading and third-party app stores never really took off with Android. (Hint: They can’t reach mass adoption.)
[58:26] The two big turning points: The DMA makes clear that within the app, apps can talk about outside payments, which means Apple now has to compete with web payments. Can Apple charge its commission on sideloaded apps and/or 3rd party app stores?
[1:01:08] Global continuity: Even a fully enforced DMA isn’t existential for Apple. The question of when they’re going to do right by the platform is up for debate.

On the podcast I talk with Dan about how to design experiments that answer the right questions, common A/B testing pitfalls to avoid, and how a simple checklist might just save your complex experiment.

Top Takeaways
🍞 Conclusions from tests sometimes go stale faster than you realize
👌 Minimizing the cost of running tests will improve decision making
🤪 Check your sanity — or don’t live and die by statistical significance

About Dan Pannasch
👨‍💻 Senior Product Manager at RevenueCat
💪 Dan saw what experimentation looked like across a portfolio of app businesses when his previous company TelTech’s success led to an acquisition by IAC. He joined RevenueCat in May 2022 and leads the Experiments project.
💡 “You could change the color [of the buy button in A/B testing and] release it in the new application. And if you can't tell which one won [with users], then you learned that it doesn't matter. You didn't learn which one won, but you did learn that it doesn't matter for you right now.”
👋 Twitter | LinkedIn

Links & Resources
‣ Join the RevenueCat team
‣ Sub Club interview with Blinkist’s Jaycee Day
‣ RevenueCat’s Experiments tool

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[2:18] Experimentation: What is app experimentation and why should you do it? The right decision making, considering impact on variables, and risk mitigation are everything when it comes to user experience.
[9:04] Taking a page from DuoLingo’s playbook: Product strategy and intuition naturally limits possibilities — and it’s not the place for A/B testing. Microdecisions within deliverables are testable, and then it’s just cost-benefit analyses.
[14:04] The early days: The cost-benefit analysis should pervade every stage of the process, from early growth and beyond. Trying to design the perfect A/B test isn’t always possible when customers are begging you for.
[19:20] Paywall plays: Where you put the paywall is a tough decision. But there are strategies for implementation and risk mitigation.
[24:35] Testing 101: Be sure to write down the hypothesis before testing so that you can measure impact. Unexpected results — where you learn the most about variables — depend on it.
[28:05] Follow it up: Dan shares his thoughts on user follow ups to boost quantitative data with qualitative data. Sometimes talking to users can be very powerful.
[31:13] Sanity check: How to do a testing plan, as done by Dan during his time as a PM at TelTech. Plus, an explanation of statistical significance.
[39:53] Impact and intuition: To understand user experience impact and product intuition, it’s critical to ensure the design aligns with the value proposition.
[42:22] Actual testing: There are pitfalls and screw-ups to watch out for when testing (and even before).
[46:33] Analyzing the results: Dan provides his overview for analyzing the results after running the experiment. Second and third order effects are important but not always immediately obvious.
[48:41] The Experiments product: RevenueCat’s new tool enables easy A/B testing for two offerings. The data helps you analyze the full subscription lifecycle to understand which variant is producing more value for your business.
[55:55] Bugs: No product will ever be perfect, but Experiments offers app developers the tools and confidence to make sure it’s at least most of the way there.

On the podcast I talk with Melissa and Félix about why more apps should be more than just apps, the benefits of a hard paywall, and why a lower price might actually make you more money even if the A/B test shows it didn’t.

Top Takeaways
📱 More apps should be more than just apps
💳 Hard paywalls can (and do) sometimes pay off
💵 How a price change can lead to big returns — if the quality is there

About Melissa Cash & Félix Boudreau
👨‍💻 Melissa is Co-Founder and CEO and Félix is Head of Growth at Pok Pok
💪 Their first app, Pok Pok Playroom, is an Apple Design Award-winning preschool app that sparks creativity and imagination through open-ended play
💡 “It's important to think about your updates from a content and subscription value point of view, but also from a marketing point of view, and really try to balance those narratives.” — Melissa
👋 Melissa on LinkedIn | Melissa on Twitter | Félix on LinkedIn

Links & Resources
‣ Pok Pok Playroom
‣ Watch the app trailer on YouTube
‣ A mother's entrepreneurial inspiration
‣ Melissa on The Mom Halo podcast
‣ The Apple Design Award Story
‣ Melissa on the Snippets of Genius podcast

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[1:40] Empowered play: What could it look like to equip and educate today’s children to think for themselves? Melissa shares the story of how her co-founders wanted to empower creative, independent play for their young son in a digital space.
[6:16] More than an app: There’s a much broader vision for Pok Pok in the works. Starting digital in a digital era gives the app a head start against business models that have been adapted to become digital.
[10:47] Investing in the future: The team at Pok Pok places a “hive mind” focus on the long-term strategy of the brand. They aim to earn the trust of parents (as well as their kids) for the best possible customer experience.
[13:15] You are the prototype: What did it take to build Pok Pok into an award-winning, successful app? Melissa shares about their robust testing and prototyping process.
[16:57] The data tracks: Félix talks about how to balance the protection of qualitative and quantitative data while getting the most out of what you can safely track and collect. They use intrinsic motivation to keep kids playing in healthy ways — a win-win-win for everyone.
[24:19] The monetization conversation: Creating an app that keeps evolving was the key to recurring revenue. Continual content with real value creation — for the parent as much as for the child — was the way forward.
[27:06] Easy lessons from a hard paywall: Testing the hard paywall took a lot of tinkering — resulting in some unintended (but welcome) consequences in user behavior. Now, there’s a video paywall in the pipeline.
[40:19] The price is right: Félix and Melissa discuss how to find the sweet spot with price testing that enables solid paid acquisition and LTV. Ultimately, doubling the price led to double the revenue.
[46:18] The power of storytelling: Subscription app entrepreneurs should learn how to tell good stories. Melissa and Félix share their wisdom about creating compelling stories in business and networking, as well as the importance of great in-app events.

On the podcast we talk with Jaycee about how Blinkist increased trial starts by 23%, how to balance user experience with business objectives, and why telling people how to cancel can actually lead to fewer cancellations.

Top Takeaways
⚖️ Balancing ethics and business means making tough decisions, but taking a smart approach lets you master both
🤝 Helping people unsubscribe isn’t the most intuitive thing for subscription app businesses, but ethical design patterns might be better for business in the long run
🔎 Transparency around the cancellation process can drive app success in multiple ways

About Jaycee Day
👨‍💻 Senior Product Designer at developer platform GitHub and previously at Blinkist
💪 Jaycee facilitated a sign-up increase of 23% following customer service complaints (which also dropped by 55%) at Blinkist. Even Apple took notice of her ethical design pattern
💡 “It's because of the transparency and the trust. … People have been burned so many times through other apps that it benefited us. … [Users thought,] Finally, an app that I can trust — they know how I feel, and they're listening. That was just super important: Letting people know that they can cancel [and that] they don't have to be scared of us.”
👋 Jaycee Day | LinkedIn | Twitter | Medium | GitHub

Links & Resources
‣ The story of Blinkist's 23% Conversion
‣ Ethical design pattern at Apple

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[1:47] Origin story: From founding to freelancing, Jaycee helped transform Blinkist in under three years.
[3:52] Internet fame: The ethical design pattern Jaycee helped evolve offers subscription apps the ability to understand the product discovery process in a different light. She talks about its inception at Blinkist.
[9:05] Zombie subscribers: The balance between business and ethics isn’t always easy to strike. Jaycee explains how customer empathy helped with product design.
[11:51] The first pitch: The early stages of ethical design and the goal of reducing customer complaints initially came from trial reminder testing. The reminders had the unintended positive consequence of increasing push notifications.
[16:29] The big rollout: With things on the up and up for Jaycee and her team, they built an A/B test prototype with “overwhelmingly positive” results.
[20:47] You can stop complaining now: A 55% drop in customer complaints wasn’t just theory. Why did it work so well?
[24:03] Mission unsubscription: It may not be the most intuitive thing for subscription apps to help people who don’t want to be subscribed to unsubscribe. But this effort brings indirect benefits like reducing cancellations and increasing trial sign-up rates.
[27:21] Retain and engage: Jaycee discusses how Blinkist was limited in its tracking capacities, but it used some unconventional markers to establish that the efforts were working.
[31:10] The biggest subscription app article of the year: Promoting principles via the user experience community brings more attention and business success.
[33:48] The aftermath: People care about the ethics of user experience as well as the business side. Jaycee discusses the major ripple effect of the ethical design she spearheaded: Case in point, Apple features it on their website.

On the podcast we talk with Eric about the largest consumer marketplace that’s ever existed, the growing exit opportunities for Consumer Subscription Software businesses, and why the CSS industry may be relatively recession-proof.

Top Takeaways
👀 Simply occupying eyeballs isn’t the game plan anymore
💰The CSS space could be recession-proof
👴 The data and tooling landscape has matured, making it easier to build and grow subscription businesses

About Eric Crowley
👔 Partner at GP Bullhound, a global technology investment and advisory firm for entrepreneurs and founders
👨‍💻 Coming from an executive software startup background, Eric primarily focuses on M&A, capital raises, and advisory transactions at the firm
💡  “If the entire focus of your team is adding value and not just making sure information flows from stack one to stack two, you're going to build a better business, because you're out there listening to your customer [and] watching them use your service”
👋  LinkedIn and Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Check out the Consumer Subscription Software (CSS) 2022 report
‣ GP Bullhound

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[1:58] Mind-blowing CSS report insights: Apps are instantly downloadable and purchases are immediate for 5 billion people around the world.
[5:10] What the internet was meant to be: Apple is the new cross-border cash clearing house, and apps are leveraging some of the most advanced technology we have today.
[7:39] The end of apps?: There’s a reason to be bullish on the subscription business model. David explains why.
[10:52] Record-breaking non-game app revenue: For the first time in 2022, people are spending more on apps other than gaming.
[13:27] Having fun with luxury goods: With a downturn on the horizon, will in-app purchases take a hit? Why spend money on Candy Crush when you can still have fun for free? GP Bullhound sees CSS businesses as “enhancements at an affordable price.”
[20:09] Where’s the value?: During a recession, the bar for added value increases. Where does that leave subscription services? If it makes you better at your job (like Grammarly does for Eric), it’s a winner.
[21:40] On bankers hating averages: Eric talks overvaluations, undervaluations, and the sturdy infrastructure of the industry. (Hint: DuoLingo, Dropbox, and Bumble will be here in five years.)
[28:22] Cashing in on subscriptions: The cash efficiency of the consumer subscription model is finally beginning to show. Eric highlights that CSS entrepreneurs are gold miners, with plenty of companies selling them shovels and pickaxes.
[35:13] Exit stage right: From PE firms to small investors, opportunities to exit apps are many. Eric explains what that looks like for brands, consumers, and founders.
[40:38] Philosophy of selling: Eric sets out the thought process founders go through and the questions they should answer before moving ahead with a sale.

On the podcast we talk with Andrew about the journey to cash flow positive for Elevate Labs, the importance of creative, and why spending less money can sometimes be the key to figuring out paid user acquisition.

Top Takeaways
📈 The journey to cash flow positive is a long one, demanding tough decisions along the way
💵 Spending less money can sometimes be the key to figuring out paid user acquisition
🎨 Control and collaboration are key elements of a creative culture

About Andrew Maguire
⚙️ Chief Operating Officer at Elevate Labs and Managing Partner at Volo Ventures
💪 Andrew saw Elevate move from rolling back on ad spend in order to survive, to becoming cash flow positive with record growth in 2022.
💡 “How do you have values that are not just the poster on the wall that no one cares about, but are actually lived in the organization?”
👋  LinkedIn and Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Join the Elevate Labs team
‣ Connect with Andrew on Linkedin
‣ Follow Andrew on Twitter
‣ Volo Ventures
‣ Elevate App
‣ Balance App

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[1:46] Inspirational investment: Making waves at Elevate, Volo Ventures invested in RevenueCat based on Jacob’s juice for building a big company and solving real problems.
[6:48] Early elevation: The duality of Volo Ventures and Elevate gives Andrew insight to create great apps while investing at the same time.
[10:25] Living organizational values: An ongoing commitment to incorporate company mission into every aspect of work — from hiring to recognition and performance — is what makes a company really stand out.
[13:25] Pay to play: You need to spend money to make money. Jacob and Andrew discuss getting a handle on LTV, plowing money into advertising, the subscription model, and trials.
[19:20] The slow degradation of ATT: It’s not an overnight thing, but Elevate still took a hammering.
[21:26] Circling the wagons: Andrew talks about the experiments they ran, what worked, and what failed, including pulling back ad spend.
[24:32] The importance of creative and the power of ads: Everyone taking responsibility for the quality of the product builds a culture of creativity with ideas coming from all angles.
[33:22] Blending acquisition costs: When you’re building a second app, you can leverage the customers you already have for the old one to build an even better product. And sometimes free giveaways can scale ad spend in asymmetric ways.
[40:25] Becoming a “real business”: Hitting cash flow positive feels really good. Andrew found that focusing on being lean and scrappy allowed them to scale the business without having to raise more capital.
[46:13] The Volo connection: Andrew, David, and Jacob discuss what’s happening at Volo Ventures.

On the podcast we talk with Adam about when and why to use an MMP, which subscription events to track in your analytics, and why A/B testing doesn’t always work the way you think it works.

Top Takeaways
📏 Understand what your users are doing to help define — and then achieve — your goal
📈 Spreadsheets are a great start, but growing sophistication requires something more long-term
🔧 Turning events into actions is difficult but necessary

About Adam Landis
👨‍💻 Founder and CEO at AdLibertas
💪 Adam has helped hundreds of apps — including Crossy Road, Temple Run and Audio Mac — influence user behavior through data collection and analysis.
💡 “How do you make sense of all this data that's coming out of the app? How do you understand what users are doing? What is the impact? And then what is the outcome of the changes you make?”
👋 LinkedIn | AdLibertas

Links & Resources
‣ Learn more about AdLibertas
‣ Read AdLibertas updates from Adam
‣ Follow AdLibertas on Linkedin

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[1:44] The OG of apps: At the genesis of the App Store, Google and Apple fought over ads — and that’s when Adam got started. AdLibertas was born just a few years later out of the need to understand the data coming from users.
[6:34] The progression of data sophistication: Brand new app developers are hungry for thousands of data points. But are those really necessary at the beginning? Adam dives into startups getting to 1.0, understanding product market fit and balancing product versus infrastructure.
[9:39] View from the data stack: Adam talks about minimum viability and the importance of understanding what your users are doing before anything else.
[15:27] Every app is unique, but data speaks uniformly: How do you do deep, complex analysis early? Adam offers a smart strategy on what metrics apps should track to garner the most valuable insights.
[24:16] Blending freemium and subscription is an art: Getting sophisticated and buying users means understanding their long-term value and the real sources of ROI.
[25:57] The essential MMP stack: Adam and David discuss the when, what and how of MMPs.
[31:56] SKANing: It’s the mess that no one wants to talk about. But don’t worry: It’s okay not to understand because no one knows what’s going on.
[34:36] All praise to A/B testing: When it comes to A/B tests, losing can be better than winning. Adam explains that the proper way to test is to set the boundary before the test and not look at the data during testing.
[40:05] CRM campaigning: Adam and David talk about getting the most out of CRMs in terms of retention and re-engagement.
[47:13] In with the old, in with the new: Do you focus more on product or marketing? It depends on how big you are.

On the podcast we talk with Emmanuel about the magic of affiliate marketing, how to best use Stripe payments, and why you should probably build a web app before you build a native one.

Top Takeaways
✉️ Don’t skip user registration — and do it early in onboarding
💰 The road to subscription revenue isn’t a straight one
📈 The little things add up over time

About Emmanuel Crouvisier
👨‍💻 Founder at CardPointers, an app that makes it easy to optimize credit card rewards and has saved users over $200M.
💪 Emmanuel used affiliate marketing and a revenue share model to increase user retention, simultaneously rewarding loyalty and content creator talent.
💡 “Keep your costs really low. […] The companies that have been in this space before never last more than two years because they need a team of [up to] 30 people to run everything. Whereas [with CardPointers], it's just me, and my costs are literally hundreds of dollars per month — so it makes it easy for me to make a good business out of it.”
👋  Twitter | LinkedIn

Links & Resources
‣ CardPointers on the App Store
‣ CardPointers on Twitter
‣ Special Offer for Sub Club listeners

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[1:42] Building inspiration: Emmanuel discusses what inspired him to found CardPointers, getting turned on to the world of credit card rewards and realizing just how much revenue subscription apps can bring.
[7:21] Exhausting side hustle: Early on, CardPointers was an evenings and weekends-based project, applying smart strategies combined with persistent tinkering.
[11:15] Decisions, decisions: Emmanuel explains the decision he made in the early building phase, as well as his lucky break with Apple iOS 13 and watchOS 6.
[17:30] Same system, same project: Emmanuel discusses the benefits of a backwards compatible API with proper user accounts created from the get-go, reducing sign-up friction.
[19:47] The affiliate backdoor: On launch, he didn’t have any partnership links set up and he wasn’t getting anywhere by going through official channels. He got better results by reaching out to people through LinkedIn.
[23:26] $1,000 a month sounds cool: Though he was making progress with affiliate revenue, it’s not all easy and there are a lot of rules around compliance. This made a subscription model more attractive, and led Emmanuel to devise the pro tier for paying users.
[27:22] Understanding employers: It can be nerve-wracking to quit your day job. Emmanuel talks about how he managed the transition. He lucked out because his employer was supportive, too.
[31:52] Blow-up business: Emmanuel talks about how his current roadmap really shifted the trajectory of the business, including imminent plans in the pipeline.
[35:23] Big-time consumer: Studying up before — and during — the startup phase is crucial for unlocking your app’s real potential. Emmanuel learned (and continues to learn) from an array of sources including webinars and Twitter communities.
[42:40] Influencing the market: So many apps need to find the kind of product-channel fit CardPointers has in terms of influencer and affiliate marketing. Emmanuel explains how it took off as a channel that worked for him.

On the podcast I talk with Darrell about going from zero to an 8-figure ARR in just 18 months, building a product improvement loop combining user research and A/B testing, and why expecting failure is one of the keys to success.

Top Takeaways
📈 Going from 0 to an 8-figure ARR in 18 months is doable
🙈 Sharing and selling data isn’t necessary to build and scale subscription apps
🎰 Structuring product development as a “bet” liberates you from needing to be right

About Darrell Stone
👨‍💻 Head of Product & Design at Citizen, the number one public safety app in the U.S.
💪 Darrell defined and scaled Citizen's consumer subscription product with a dual focus on acquisition and retentive, life-saving features.
💡 “Product [development] in consumer tech is very much a team sport. You have to approach it through the mindset that you're building a team that's going to win a thing.”
👋  LinkedIn and Twitter

Links & Resources
‣ Citizen App
‣ Citizen’s Career Page

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights
[2:03] Leaving Uber to scale a startup: Darrell discusses the reasons why he left Uber to start a subscription app.
[5:20] Making the world a safer place: Citizen is a “moderated safety app.” It has more than 100 people actively listening to police scanners to enable provide real-time information about what is happening in communities.
[10:57] Charging for a public safety app: Darrell discusses the tension between monetization and Citizen’s mission of keeping people safe. He outlines the difference between the freemium and paid products.
[19:15] Citizen on the world stage: Darrell talks about taking Citizen global and how the company “a safety marketplace” to the world.
[22:20] World pricing: Darrell offers potential strategies for global cost and price differences.
[24:52] Understanding users: Darrell gives insight into how user research shapes A/B testing, product development and the improvement loop.
[30:05] Antifragile product development: One of Darrell’s go-to recommendation for people in product is Annie Duke’s interview on The Knowledge Project. Bumps are inevitable during the product development process — it’s how you manage it that matters.
[33:14] Lessons learned for top unlocks: Darrell discusses tips for being more right than wrong to unlock a real value-add, and how this took the company from zero to eight figures in ARR.
[37:45] Buy versus build: David and Darrell talk about how bringing on third party tooling can help achieve long-term company goals.
[41:45] Aligning the team to the bigger vision: Darrell explains how clear goals, rapid feedback loops and celebrating incremental progress help keep teams motivated through the whole process.

On the podcast we talk with Phil about the thesis behind Tinder’s monetization strategy, the importance of product differentiation, and why some companies shouldn’t use subscriptions.

Our guest today is Phil Schwarz, Partner at Corazon Capital, a leading Chicago-based venture fund investing in early stage tech companies. Prior to joining Corazon, Phil served as the Chief Marketing Officer at Tinder during the rollout of subscriptions. He was also previously Head of Growth Initiatives at Match Group.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• 3 key innovations that propelled Tinder’s growth
• Tips for optimizing your paywall strategy
• How Tinder transitioned to a subscription-based model

Links & Resources

• Corazon’s website
• Follow Corazon on Twitter
• Corazon’s LinkedIn page
• Contact Corazon

Phil’s Links

• Phil’s LinkedIn page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Gessica about how to think about brand marketing for apps, finding product/channel/messaging fit, and why you shouldn’t even refer to Bill Gates in an ad campaign.

Our guest today is Gessica Bicego, Chief Marketing Officer at Paired, the #1 app for couples. Prior to joining Paired, Gessica spent 6 years leading performance marketing and growth at Blinkist.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to build a moat around your brand
• Paired’s growth stack & favorite data collection tools
• Tips for allocating ad spending & measuring advertising campaigns
• Why Bill Gates sent Gessica a cease and desist letter

Links & Resources

• Albert
• Taboola
• Runtastic
• Fivetran
• Amplitude
• RevenueCat
• Snowflake
• Looker
• Phiture’s Mobile Growth Nightmares podcast
• Sub Club Podcast episode 39: 8 Principles for Sustainable Growth — Sean Ellis & Ethan Garr, Breakout Growth

Gessica’s Links

• Get Paired
• Current job openings at Paired
• Follow Paired on Instagram
• Follow Gessica on Twitter
• Gessica is on Instagram
• Gessica’s LinkedIn page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Giancarlo about soft vs. hard paywalls, how to think about product experiments, and why removing friction from onboarding didn’t actually help.

Our guest today is Giancarlo Musetti, Growth Product Manager at Ad Hoc Labs. Ad Hoc Labs makes several apps including Firewall and Dialed, but is most well known for Burner, an app that allows you to create multiple phone numbers to protect your privacy and better manage communication.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to make a smooth transition to a subscription-based model
• Tips for optimizing your paywall
• How to boost your app’s growth and user base
• Giancarlo’s three-step process for testing new strategies and features

Giancarlo’s Links

• Ad Hoc Labs’ website
• Burner app
• Firewall app
• Dialed app
• Ad Hoc Labs’ hiring page
• Giancarlo’s LinkedIn page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Darrell and Jake about optimizing your app’s paywall, how to increase revenue by giving users a better experience, tips for pricing your app, and how to reduce subscriber churn.

We’re with Darrell Stone and Jake Mor in front of a live audience at the App Promotion Summit in New York City. The App Promotion Summit is America’s leading app marketing conference. Darrell is the Head of Product & Design at Citizen, the number one public safety app in the U.S. Jake is the Founder & CEO of Superwall, the best way to build in test paywalls without having to update your app.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Where to put your app’s paywall
• Which features should you paywall?
• When to paywall all of your app’s features
• A clever way to win back users who cancel their subscription

Links & Resources

• RevenueCat
• Previous webinar with Jake on YouTube

Jake Mor’s Links

• Follow Jake on Twitter
• Superwall’s website
• Follow Superwall on Twitter

Darrell Stone’s Links

• Follow Darrell on Twitter
• Citizen’s website
• Follow Citizen on Twitter

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Mark and Jeff about community led growth, how they improved trial starts by 25%, and why running ads for a blog post might actually perform better than sending people directly to the App Store.

Mark is an RRCA Certified Distance Running Coach and created None to Run as a blog and personal outlet to stay in touch with his passion for exercise science and healthy living. Jeff has been developing iOS apps since 2009 and teamed up with Mark to build an app as the None to Run community started to take off and requests for an app could no longer be ignored.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to build momentum for your app
• Don’t launch your app until you’ve done this
• Tips for growing your audience
• How None to Run reached an 80% conversion rate

Links & Resources

• Mighty Networks
• Sub Club podcast episode 35: From Indie Side Project to $1M in ARR — Curtis Herbert, Slopes
• Ariel from Appfigures
• Lisa Jhung

Jeff & Mark’s Links

• None to Run’s website
• Follow None to Run on Twitter
• Get the None to Run app
• Join None to Run’s community
• Check out Jeff's fitness app, Intervals
• Follow Jeff on Twitter
• Follow Mark on Twitter
• Contact Mark

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast I talk with Sean and Ethan about the importance of a north star metric, optimizing for speed to value, and why product/market fit needs to be dialed in over time.

Sean has worked on growth at some of the fastest growing companies in the world, like Dropbox, Lookout, and Eventbrite. He not only coined the term “growth hacking”, but literally wrote the book on it. Today, Sean helps companies around the globe accelerate customer and revenue growth through workshops, keynote presentations, and select advising roles.

Ethan got his start in subscription apps working on product at TelTech, which was acquired by IAC in 2018. He co-invented and led the company's flagship app, RoboKiller and helped to grow TelTech's other top communications apps including TrapCall and TapeACall. Ethan now helps companies improve their growth trajectories through workshops, coaching, and as a trusted advisor.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Sean & Ethan’s proven principles for achieving sustainable growth 
• Tips for dialing in your product/market fit
• What metrics you should track for your subscription app
• How to create a better onboarding experience for your users

Sean & Ethan’s Links

• Breakout Growth’s website
• Check out The Breakout Growth Podcast
• Download the Principles of Sustainable Growth PDF
• Sean Ellis: Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
• Follow Ethan on Twitter
• Ethan’s LinkedIn page
• Sean’s website
• Follow Sean on Twitter
• Sean’s LinkedIn page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Mike about building a principled, mission driven app, keeping product development focused on the right customers, and how ClassDojo scaled to tens of millions of downloads without a marketing budget.

Our guest today is Mike Overell, Revenue Lead at ClassDojo. Having founded his own company as well as working at McKinsey and Lyft, Mike is now using that experience to help every kid on earth get an education they love with ClassDojo. Mike also invests in and helps foreign founders crack the US as co-founder of investment collective Antipodes.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How ClassDojo reached 50M users with zero marketing spend
• Tips for setting up the right paywall for your app
• How to monetize your app without impeding growth
• ClassDojo’s user-led growth strategy

Mike Overell’s Links

• Follow Mike on Twitter
• ClassDojo’s website
• Follow ClassDojo on Twitter
• ClassDojo’s jobs page
• Mike’s LinkedIn page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Cliff about the benefits of building for a niche, the one ad that changed things for Speechify, and why Cliff is now hiring comedians.

Our guest today is Cliff Weitzman, the founder and CEO of Speechify. As someone with dyslexia, Cliff built Speechify to help himself learn by having text read aloud. Cliff went on to blitzscale Speechify with an irreverent approach to SaaS norms and a willingness to experiment.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Cliff found early traction for Speechify
• Unconventional ways to build a great team
• How Cliff got marketing tips from the top e-commerce CEOs
• The art of successful cold calls

Cliff Weitzman’s Links

• Speechify’s website
• Speechify for iOS
• Speechify Chrome extension
• Speechify on Google Play
• Follow Speechify on Twitter
• Follow Speechify on Instagram
• Speechify is on Medium
• Check out Speechify on YouTube
• Speechify’s LinkedIn page
• Cliff Weitzman: Read to You on Spotify
• Follow Cliff on Instagram
• Contact Cliff

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Eric about the importance of refining your pitch, how to build a moat in consumer SaaS, and why your month one churn might not be as bad as you think.

Our guest today is Eric Stromberg, the Founder & Managing Partner of Bedrock, a technology investment firm currently managing approximately one billion dollars. The firm has made investments in companies like Flock Safety, Plaid, Cameo, The Athletic, and more. Eric is also the Founder of Check, the payroll infrastructure API and Universe Software, the holding company for Vertical Fintech businesses.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why higher churn rates at launch are OK
• How to maintain a competitive advantage for your subscription app
• Why Eric is bullish about the future of Consumer SaaS

Links & Resources

• Barry McCarthy
• Sub Club podcast episode 031: Growth, Revenue, and Marketing Strategies for Your App — Lisa Kennelly, Fishbrain
• Equilab

Eric Stromberg’s Links

• Eric's website
• Follow Eric on Twitter
• Bedrock
• Check payroll optimization
• Universe Software
• Screenshot Essays

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Curtis about his 9 year journey to reach $1M in ARR, why he shares revenue numbers publicly, and how taking inspiration from web businesses instead of other apps kept him ahead of the curve.

Our guest today is Curtis Herbert, an independent iOS app developer/designer/wearer of many hats. Curtis is the founder of Slopes, the app for skiing and snowboarding, and he took it from an indie side project to a thriving business.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Marketing tips for consistent growth
• How Curtis transitioned Slopes to a subscription model
• Which tools and strategies had the biggest impact on Slopes’ success
• The tradeoffs of hiring employees as an indie developer

Links & Resources

• Tableau
• Vero
• Firebase

Curtis Herbert’s Links

• Slopes app
• Follow Curtis on Twitter
• Curtis’ website

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Michael about operating a portfolio of almost 40 apps, the importance of delivering value to customers, and why you should never use teal on your paywall.

Joining me today is Michael Ritter, CEO and Founder at Maple Media. Michael and his growing team acquire and operate category-leading consumer apps. Popular Maple Media apps include: Pic Stitch, Weather Hi-Def Radar, Dialog, We Heart It, Player FM, WeekCal, and many more.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Why customer support is crucial for subscription apps
• How to price your subscription based on the value it provides
• Tips for integrating ads into your subscription revenue model
• How to 10X your money on an app acquisition

Michael Ritter’s Links

• Michael’s LinkedIn page
• Maple Media

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On today’s podcast we’re hosting the Subscription Trends 2022 event. We talk with Thomas and Eric about navigating content fortresses as a developer. They share their thoughts on regulating Apple’s App Store, affiliate marketing, and breakout trends for 2022. We also talk about Web3 and Crypto, and answer questions from folks in the event’s chat room.

Our guests on the show are Thomas Petit and Eric Seufert. Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. Over the past year, Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.

Thomas Petit is a world-renowned mobile growth expert independent consultant. Thomas began his work in the subscription app space, eventually becoming a freelance consultant, and has worked with several large subscription apps.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to make a living as a solo app developer
• Are web apps the future of app development?
• Are you price-testing your app too soon?
• How to reduce churn for trial and paid users
• New regulatory burdens app developers are facing

Links & Resources

• The Sub Club Podcast: Growth, Revenue, and Marketing Strategies for Your App — Lisa Kennelly, Fishbrain
• The Sub Club Podcast website

Thomas Petit’s Links

• Follow Thomas on Twitter
• Thomas’ guest post on the RevenueCat blog: Mobile Subscription Predictions for 2022

Eric Seufert’s Links

• Follow Eric on Twitter
• Eric Seufert’s post: 2022 predictions for mobile marketing
• Mobile Dev Memo

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Colette about selling MileIQ to Microsoft then buying it back, experimenting with an unlimited marketing budget, and unlocking higher retention with a focus on prosumers.

Our guest today is Colette Nataf, Head of Growth at MileIQ and Co-Founder of Lightning AI. From founding multiple startups to spending more than $100M on marketing in growth roles at several great companies, Colette has spent her career using data science to grow businesses.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Colette’s take on Apple’s ATT and its effect on marketing
• Outsourcing to an outside agency vs. growing your team
• Analyzing lifetime value and customer acquisition cost for long-term subscribers
• How to balance your business and family life

Colette Nataf’s Links

• Colette Nataf’s LinkedIn page
• MileIQ
• Lightning AI
• Colette's maternity leave blog post

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Lisa about marketing an app with no revenue, the challenges of adding new revenue streams, and the importance of brand marketing in a post IDFA world.

Our guest today is Lisa Kennelly, Chief Marketing Officer at Fishbrain, the #1 app for people who love fishing. At Fishbrain, Lisa manages a team of 20 people, and is responsible for everything from brand positioning and product marketing to business development and e-commerce. Lisa also mentors startup founders on marketing and strategy.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to make the transition from growth to revenue
• Finding additional revenue opportunities beyond subscriptions
• Tips for balancing brand awareness marketing and performance marketing

Links & Resources

• VSCO
• Clue

Lisa Kennelly’s Links

• Lisa’s LinkedIn
• Follow Fishbrain on Twitter
• Fishbrain’s website
• Fishbrain Is on Instagram
• Fishbrain’s Facebook page

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Matt about how to not screw up switching your app to subscriptions, why offering lifetime subscriptions might not be a great option, and what it’s like when Apple ‘sherlocks’ your product.

Our guest today is Matt Ronge, co-founder and CEO of Astropad. Having worked at Apple, Garmin, and founded several companies of his own, Matt is an experienced engineer and entrepreneur with a passion for building creative tools.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to switch your app from paid to subscriptions
• Should you offer lifetime subscriptions?
• Why you should be charging more for your app’s subscription
• Tips for limiting subscriber churn

Links & Resources

• Garmin
• Giovanni Donelli

Matt Ronge’s Links

• Follow Matt Ronge on Twitter
• Matt's blog
• Matt’s blog post: How NOT to screw up switching your app to subscriptions
• Matt’s podcast
• Astropad
• Luna Display

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

On the podcast we talk with Robbie about finding your super users, the real reasons for subscription fatigue, and why pricing isn’t as important as you might think, especially early on.

Our guest today is Robbie Kellman Baxter, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. She’s advised many of the world’s leading subscription-based companies, including serving on the advisory board of Strava. Her most recent book, “The Forever Transaction” is a deep dive into everything consumer subscription, and a must read for anyone in the space.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Identifying and attracting lifetime value customers
• How to get and maintain customer loyalty
• Three causes of subscription fatigue
• Why customers cancel their subscriptions

Links & Resources

• Strava
• Intuit
• Survey Monkey
• Oracle
• The Subscription Economy
• Tien Tzuo: Subscribed
• Eric Crowley
• Seth Miller
• CrossFit
• Shopify
• Calm
• Matthieu Rouif
• PhotoRoom
• GoPro
• Elevate
• VSCO

Robbie Kellman Baxter’s Links

• Robbie Kellman Baxter’s website
• Follow Robbie on Twitter
• Robbie’s book: The Forever Transaction
• Robbie’s book: The Membership Economy
• Robbie’s LinkedIn

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello, I’m your host, David Barnard, and with me, as always, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting.

Our guest today is Robbie Kellman Baxter, consultant, keynote speaker, and author. She’s advised many of the world’s leading subscription-based companies, including serving on the advisory board of Strava. Her most recent book, “The Forever Transaction” is a deep dive into everything consumer subscription, and a must read for anyone in the space.

On the podcast we talk with Robbie about finding your super users, the real reasons for subscription fatigue, and why pricing isn’t as important as you might think, especially early on.

Hey Robbie, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:58 Robbie:

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to chat with you both. 

00:01:00 David:

I was introduced to your work by somebody recommending your book, The Membership Economy, and it really struck me. I was so excited that you agreed to be on the podcast, because here’s a book written in 2015, and we’ll talk about your other book that was written more recently, but written in 2015. I was looking through it, scanning the chapters, so I bought the book. I was like, this is everything we’re talking about now, thinking it’s all so novel with subscription apps, but really consumer subscriptions have been around for decades. You’ve been working in this space way longer than any of us.

So, I thought it would be really fun to have you on the podcast to talk more broadly about these principles of consumer subscriptions that apply equally to D to C subscriptions, as well as the app space that we work in. That’s where I wanted to kick things off.

So, how did you get your start in consumer subscriptions?

00:01:57 Robbie:

A couple of threads came together. I was in product-marketing for what is now called SaaS, for five years, right before I hung out my own shingle and started consulting. So, I had that background as a product manager working with software products that were being sold as subscriptions, and then as an independent consultant.

My fifth client was Netflix. I fell in love with their business model, and I was wondering why isn’t everybody else falling in love with their business model, too? This is amazing. Recurring revenue, predictable cashflow, the amount of data they were collecting on their customer. The fact that they’re offering was just a much better way of delivering on a promise that many of us wanted delivery for, which is a professionally created catalog of video content delivered in the most efficient way possible. It meant not having to put a raincoat over your jammies to go pick up a movie, with cost certainty and no late fees.

I was consulting with Netflix. I was already a customer, and a few people started calling and saying, “Hey, we heard you worked with Netflix. We want to be the Netflix of our space.” Whether that was news, or music, or bicycles, or dental pain management products, or clothes, there was a lot of interest in what it was that Netflix was doing.

So, I started trying to create frameworks, trying to say, what are they doing? Which parts are applicable to other businesses, and which parts are just unique to that group of people solving that particular problem?

That’s really where I got started, and it turns out to be big enough and deep enough that it’s kept me really busy for, it’s been 20 years, 20 years. 

00:03:55 David:

Fifth client to, to land as a consultant. That’s a. Really great. And so you were with them before they even introduced the, video on demand on the internet, right. You started with them when it was DVDs in the mail, 

00:04:09 Robbie:

Yeah. 

00:04:10 David:

Traditional D to C subscription service. 

00:04:13 Jacob:

But, but even then was satisfying a lot of those, almost all of those conditions. Right. I didn’t have to go outside just to my mailbox, not too bad price certainty. I didn’t have late fees. and then like, you know, insanely large catalog. Right. you know, it was, it was, it wasn’t. We tend to wait for the technology to get that right.

And then, then we had VOD being, 

00:04:33...

On the podcast I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.

My guest today is Eric Seufert. Eric has deep operating experience, having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, but he also founded and sold a marketing business intelligence company, Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories. Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. Over the past year Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Will Apple’s ATT be a net loss for Apple?
• Can SKAdNetwork be saved, and does Apple want to save it?
• Is focusing on organic traffic a flawed strategy?
• What does the future of app install ads look like?

Links & Resources

• Rovio
• Snapchat
• Apple’s Private Relay
• Tim Cook
• Outbrain
• Taboola
• AllTrails
• SubClub AllTrails podcast episode
• Stitcher

Eric Seufert’s Links

• Follow Eric on Twitter
• Mobile Dev Memo
• Heracles
• Freemium Economics: Leveraging Analytics and User Segmentation to Drive Revenue 
• Eric is on LinkedIn

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello. I’m your host, David Bernard, and for the first time ever, I’m flying solo today. RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting is busy CEO’ing.

My guest today, is Eric Seufert. Having worked in growth and strategy roles at consumer tech companies such as Wooga and Rovio, Eric has a depth and breadth of experience with mobile apps and games that few can match. He also founded and sold marketing business intelligence company Agamemnon, and is an active investor in the mobile gaming and ad tech categories.

Over the past year, Eric has written extensively about App Tracking Transparency and the future of mobile advertising on his trade blog, Mobile Dev Memo.

On the podcast, I talk with Eric about the value destruction of App Tracking Transparency, the limitations of SKAdNetwork, and how to thrive as an app developer in this new paradigm.

Hey Eric, thanks for being on the podcast.

00:01:09 Eric:

Thank you for having me on the podcast.

00:01:11 David:

So, we’re going to start off with a bit of a dead horse that’s been beaten over and over again. Apple’s motivation in enacting App Tracking Transparency, but I did want to take kind of a different perspective on it. The most interesting thing to me personally about Apple’s motivation with App Tracking Transparency is what it says about what they are going to do in the future.

Did they build SKAdNetwork purposely handicapped, or did they not really understand how handicapped it was? Were they really trying to kill Facebook, or was that a kind of a side benefit? I think that their motivations are important, because it forecasts what changes they may or not make moving forward as they start to see the impact.

So, I think the first thing I wanted to ask you is, how do you see Apple’s reaction and how they perceive ATT to be going, now that we’re seeing snap drop 25% after the quarterly earnings report, and see more of the disruption that you and others were predicting, but maybe Apple didn’t quite see coming? How do you think Apple sees this going currently? And what does that say about the future of privacy on iOS?

00:02:42 Eric:

I think Apple’s primary motivation was not to capture mobile advertising market share. I don’t think that was a primary motivation. I think that’s happened, and I think they expected that to happen, but I don’t think that was the primary driver of this decision.

What I think they wanted to do was, there’s kind of like a big picture idea here, and then an immediate consequence idea. I think what Apple did not like, was that they had kind of lost control over content discovery on the iPhone.

When the App Store was first launched, that was how you discovered apps. It was through going to the App Store, and some small part search, but then in large part just like the editorial curation that Apple exposes there. That changed over the years, and up until the announcement, or the enactment of of ATT, the way that people discovered apps was through advertising, and primarily Facebook advertising.

Apple totally lost control. The content that people interacted with on their phones was not the result of any deliberate decision on Apple’s part or some deliberate consideration. It just happened to be whatever could scale ads the best. Whatever companies could scale their ads the most efficiently, that’s what people interacted with. That’s what became dominant on the platform, and Apple really had no say in that.

Short term, narrow aperture view of this, they just wanted to regain control of that. They wanted to be the kingmakers. They wanted to be the tastemakers; the people that decided—the party that decided—what became popular on the iPhone and how the iPhone was used.

And I mean, that’s, it’s, if you’ve worked in, in gaming, especially, but if you’ve worked in mobile apps at all and you’ve ever had to go and, you know, go, go through the whole process of pitching your app to Apple, and pleading for featuring You know, that that’s what they want.

They, they like to having that control because that allowed them to percolate their new iOS features into the app community through almost horsetrading it’s like, you want featuring, We’d be happy to give you featuring, but you’ve got to integrate X, Y, Z thing into your app.

Once you do that, we’re happy to feature you. that, that was sort of the, that was the, the, the negotiating process. You know, that that process, even that process itself became less important and less prominent in the life of a developer over the last few years, In 2012 to 2015 that’s what you did every time you were launching a new app, or even if you’re doing a major update, you flew, you flew to San Francisco, you went to Cupertino, you went into a, conference room at Apple HQ and you pitch somebody.

That just stopped being something that people did. Like just people realized that, even if we get featuring, it’s not going to be that meaningful for our business, ...

On the podcast, we talk with Ron about the magic of consumer subscriptions, experimenting with freemium strategies, and how private equity isn’t always as bad as you’ve been led to believe.

Our guest today is Ron Schneidermann, CEO at AllTrails, the ultimate guide for outdoor adventures. AllTrails was early to the consumer subscription space, launching a $3/month premium tier way back in 2012. Ron joined as CMO and COO in 2015, and then took over as CEO in 2019, helping to grow AllTrails to over 1 million subscribers and tens of millions of active users worldwide.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How to refine and optimize your freemium strategy
• Two things you need to keep an eye on as a founder
• The pros & cons of outside funding vs. organic growth
• How Ron fast-tracked AllTrails’ profitability

Links & Resources

• Accenture
• Hotwire
• Yelp
• Liftopia
• Alex Honnold
• Spectrum Equity

Ron Schneidermann’s Links

• Ron Schneidermann’s LinkedIn page
• AllTrails Celebrates 1 Million Paid Subscribers! (January press release)
• AllTrails’ website
• AllTrails is hiring
• Follow AllTrails on Twitter

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Our guest today is Ron Schneidermann, CEO at AllTrails, the ultimate guide for outdoor adventures, AllTrails was early to the consumer subscription space, launching a $3 per month premium tier, way back in 2012. Ron joined as CMO and COO in 2015, and then took over as CEO in 2019, helping to grow AllTrails to over 1 million subscribers and tens of millions of active users world.

On the podcast, we talk with Ron about the magic of consumer subscriptions, experimenting with freemium strategies, and how private equity isn’t always as bad as you’ve been led to believe.

Hey, Ron! Welcome to the podcast. 

00:00:59 Ron:

Thanks for having me.

00:01:00 David:

Yeah. Really looking forward to the chat today. I wanted to kick it off, and most people know what AllTrails is, and it’s a fantastic brand. It kind of tells you what it is right there on the tin. What’s your pitch? We’re in 2021, post pandemic.

Give us the short version of what AllTrails is. What does it mean? 

00:01:21 Ron:

Yeah. So AllTrails is a free app and website that helps you find trails all over the globe, so you can spend more time enjoying the outdoors, and spending time in nature.

00:01:34 David:

That’s awesome.

00:01:35 Jacob:

That’s a very nice mission. That’s way more beautiful than helping developers make more money. Both are important, but I can smell that. It smells, “piney” and I like it.

00:01:46 David:

Yeah, it smells like the Colorado forest. I haven’t been hiking forever, and doing all the research to chat with you today was like, oh man, I need to go hiking more.

00:01:55 Ron:

I heard there’s a great app for that.

00:01:57 David:

I heard that.

So, I did want to also ask about your journey to AllTrails. You got there fairly early, and then grew in, and you’re now CEO. Tell me, off the bat, what led you to AllTrails way back in 2015 when it was just six people?

00:02:20 Ron:

Yeah. To answer that I’m going to go a little bit further back in time. My first job right after college was at Accenture, at a global management consulting firm. It was great. A good jumping off point, and I learned a ton. I didn’t know anything going into that job. You know, you get the rubber stamp and it opens doors.

By the end of my third year there, I kind of had a realization. Epifany is a little too strong a word, but I just kind kinda realized I can’t take a job just for money again. The amount of time and energy that I was putting into it, and the lack of work-life balance, it really made me rethink who I want to be. Who does working Ron want to be?

So, I was able to parlay that Accenture job into a biz dev role over at Hotwire, an online travel company. That was really where it opened my eyes. Like, I am so much happier, and I am honestly so much better when I’m working at something that I’m just personally passionate about.

That guiding principle has really held through throughout my career trajectory. From Hotwire, I want to do my own startup in the ski space. I love to ski. So, I did that for nine years. It was a ton of fun. Then I was over at Yelp, doing growth for a bit. I love finding non-chain restaurants, and supporting mom and pop businesses, and stuff. I live in Yelp, so that was great.

Then, when the opportunity for AllTrails presented itself, it was just kind of a no-brainer. Of course I’m going to take this.

I’ll say this to you, one little addendum, one of the things I learned along the way, too. I am not a zero to one guy. That is not when I am at my best. It just causes me stress and anxiety, and just, figuring out how to keep the lights on for another day.

So, again, knowing kind of that sense of self knowing. Like, alright, I’m best at B to C. I’m at my best when I’m using products I personally want to use and like talking about. I like hypergrowth, and I think that’s probably my sweet spot.

So, it starts to all align when AllTrials showed up.

00:04:34 David:

Yeah. And then how did that go from? You joined the company as COO, right? And then, what was the progression inside the company to eventually taking over as CEO?

00:04:45 Ron:

Yeah. So if you want to demo and COO, I dunno why I really wanted to have both, like, I didn’t want to just be CMO in a vacuum, but not have any ownership or agency over kind of team composition and strategy and stuff. So I thought that it was really. Really important. And when you’re a six person company, it’s pretty easy to grab titles.

It’s not like how to take it from anyone.

00:05:08 Jacob:

I was going to ask, like, I mean, it’s, it’s not like you see this a lot where it’s like a six person company and they had like five C-levels and you’re like, okay. Yeah, sure. Like, like my title, for example. But like, I’m kind of curious, like, you know, you like your background, you founded a company, like you were like a real CX whatever.

Right? Like it’s not like it was fake. So how did, how did that, how did you go as like an executive, like choo...

Our guest today is Eric Crowley, a tech investment banker with GP Bullhound. With investments in companies ranging from Spotify to Whoop, and clients such as AllTrails, Pinkbike, and Lingoda, GP Bullhound provides transaction advice and capital to many of the leaders in the Consumer Subscription Software space.

On the podcast we talk with Eric about his 2021 report on Consumer Subscription Software, the truth about LTV calculations, and the new era of organic user acquisition.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Was 2020 just a “COVID Bump,” or a shift in consumer behavior?
• Are the Bumble & Duolingo IPO multiples justified?
• How savvy developers are adapting to Apple’s App Tracking Transparency
• The truth about LTV
• The new era of customer acquisition

Links & Resources

• Spotify
• Whoop
• AllTrails
• Pinkbike
• Lingoda
• Bumble
• Duolingo
• Instacart
• Match Group
• Netflix
• Noom
• Weight Watchers
• Tinder
• The Dyrt
• Day One Journal
• Automattic
• Tech Crunch
• Scribd
• Pandora

Eric Crowley’s Links

• Follow Eric on Twitter
• GP Bullhound
• GP Bullhound insights
• Eric’s LinkedIn
• GP Bullhound 2021 CSS survey

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello, I’m your host. David Bernard. And with me, as always, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. 

Our guest today is Eric Crowley, a tech investment banker with GP Bullhound. With investments in companies ranging from Spotify to Whoop, and clients such as AllTrails Pinkbike, and Lingoda, GP Bullhound provides transaction advice and capital to many of the leaders in consumer subscription software.

On the podcast, we talk with Eric about his 2021 report on consumer subscription software, the truth about LTV calculations, and the new era of organic user acquisition.

Hey, Eric, welcome to the podcast.

00:00:56 Eric:

Hey, David, Jacob. Thanks for having me back. It’s always a pleasure. 

00:00:59 David:

Yeah. Every year you release this report, so we had to get you back. This is the third annual Consumer Subscription Software Report, and I wanted to kick off just asking you a little bit about the motivation, and where your headspace is in thinking about creating this. Who the target is, and what kind of questions you’re asking yourself as you prepare this report.

00:01:24 Eric:

Yeah. The report is the GP Bullhound Consumer Subscription Software Report. I call it CSS, which is kind of a playoff SaaS. This is the third year I’ve been writing it, and it started back in 2018. I worked with a company called AllTrails that was starting to monetize really well by selling subscriptions.

It was like a light bulb went off in my head. I was like, this is a phenomenal way to provide a consistently improving product to consumers, where the margins are pretty good. It’s easy to access a ton of different people globally through the app stores or through the web, and I just got really excited about it.

I started putting some notes down on my own, and then GP Bullhound really supported me in saying like, “Hey, this is actually a pretty big trend. There’s gonna be some amazing companies built around this space,” and companies like RevenueCat, that are supporting CSS companies, are just as exciting.

So, we’ve been slowly educating ourselves. The goal behind the report is really just to force me to do some thinking about the space. What it looks like. What it will be. As a banker, you can quickly focus on transaction, transaction, transaction, and not really do any long-term thinking about where the world’s going.

It’s putting myself in your guys’s shoes. You guys are building RevenueCat not for what the world looks like today, but for what the world looks like in three to five years. I try to take the same approach with CSS, and think about where’s the world going to go. So I talked to a lot of smart people as I put the report together. Entrepreneurs, investors, get their opinions.

You guys can see their interviews in the report, and then ultimately we publish it. The audience I like to think about is entrepreneurs, people that are thinking about starting a CSS company, or already launched one, and they’re looking to improve their metrics, or think about their target audience as entrepreneur-rich.

By partnering with them, investing in their businesses, it takes them to the next level. The other way I like to think about it, it’s my own personal scoreboard. I love to flip back two years ago and see, was I right about this company? You’re publishing in public, so people can always come back to you and say, “Man, you were way off.” So, I look forward to that.

00:03:26 Jacob:

I remember the F finding the first one, the 2018, I guess, reporter 2019, whenever the first one you put out,

00:03:33 Eric:

2019, I think that’s how we met actually.

00:03:36 Jacob:

Did you reach out to me or? I think I found it, or I don’t remember what it was, but

00:03:39 Eric:

We’ve had a mutual friend, Nico introduced us and said, Hey, you guys should talk about this. and then I think we just went off on a two hour tangent.

00:03:47 Jacob:

But yeah, I remember being, it’s still, there’s still not a ton of like really focused research or writing on this space. and I think that, that, you know, this will probably won’t be true for very long, right. As long as it continues to grow, but like going back to like who it’s for. I mean, I imagine it as some, you know, end of the day, if you’re employing.

Pushing into some kind of lead gen. Right. But it does provide a lot of value for, you know, even if you’re not interested in a transaction or whatever, just. Some like holistic data on a space. Cause like, I, the same, I mean, Eric, you said we’re, we’re thinki...

Our guest today is Seth Miller, Founder and CEO at Rapchat. Seth is on a mission to democratize music creation with Rapchat’s mobile app. Rapchat takes the friction out of making music, and has helped millions of artists unleash their creativity.

Seth earned his bachelor’s degree in business administration, with an emphasis on management information systems, from Ohio University. Before founding Rapchat, Seth worked as a consultant for Adidas, and an IT Systems Engineer.

On the podcast we talk with Seth about bootstrapping his way to signs of product market fit, raising money from strategic partners like Sony Music, and what it’s like to have Facebook completely rip off your app.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Finding the right niche for your app
• Bootstrapping and early funding
• Using the right marketing channels for your app
• Filtering out the wrong users for your app's paid features
• How to transition your app from free to paid

Links & Resources

• Sony
• Nico Wittenborn
• Twitter
• Adjacent
• Complex

Seth Miller’s Links

• Follow Seth on Twitter
• Rapchat

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 Seth:

We would be dead for sure if I didn’t learn how to code. It’s an invaluable skill that I’ll have in this organization and future organizations. It also just helps me think about things. It’s a really great way to look at the world sometimes.

00:00:31 David:

Hello, I’m your host, David Bernard. And with me as always, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. 

Our guest today is Seth Miller, founder and CEO at Rapchat. Seth is on a mission to democratize music creation with Rapchat’s mobile app. It takes the friction out of making music, and has helped millions of artists unleash their creativity on the podcast.

We talk with Seth about bootstrapping his way to signs of product market fit. Raising money from strategic partners like Sony, and what it’s like to have Facebook completely rip off your app.

Hey Seth, welcome to the podcast!

00:01:06 Seth:

How’s it going? Thanks for having me.

00:01:07 David:

It’s been a long time coming. You and I first chatted way back in 2019. You were the first office hour call I ever took at RevenueCat.

00:01:18 Seth:

Oh, wow. 

00:01:19 David:

Yeah, going way back in my RevenueCat days. 

00:01:22 Jacob:

It tells you how bad of a CEO I am that we’ve never actually spoken on the phone in those two years.

00:01:30 Seth:

Or how good David was!

00:01:31 Jacob:

Yeah.

00:01:32 Seth:

I was sold after one call. I’m like, all right, dude, where do I sign up? How do I get this going? 

00:01:37 Jacob:

We have a lot of cross connections, because you’re an Adjacent portfolio. Nico is a co-investor. We’re also both Ohio-based. So, yeah, lots of cover today.

00:01:54 Seth:

We got to hang out. 

00:01:55 Jacob:

We should. It’s beautiful in Ohio today, but I’m not going to make an Ohio podcast.

But, maybe kickoff and tell us, what is Rapchat?

00:02:07 Seth:

Yeah, absolutely. So, Rapchat is the easiest way to make music on your phone. We have an iOS and Android app. You really just like tap in, and open the app. We have hundreds and thousands of free beats on the app. So, you just pick a beat, you can record over it, and then you can share that anywhere.

We have people making full-length studio-quality songs from their phone and sharing it to Instagram and SoundCloud. And then also on the platform, we have a social layer as well. Which is really cool. Pretty much a recording studio in your pocket, with a community, with a social layer.

Similar to Visco, or Instagram for music. Our mission is really to democratize music by providing access and tools to the next billion music creators.

00:03:01 Jacob:

How did you get on this idea?

00:03:05 Seth:

Well, like just scratching my own itch in the early days. Almost eight years ago when I was in college, apps were really starting to become a thing, and same with social networks and you-do-see platforms that let you create content and share it. You know, the golden era of Vine, Snap, all of that. But there was nothing for music.

I also had a hobby of freestyling with my friends. So, we’d get together, throw on beats, and rap, and some people would sing and just create all sorts of stuff. It was something that I noticed that was like, yeah, this should exist on your phone. I should be able to do this with my high school buddies that are on a different campus that I used to do it with.

That was really it, just scratching my own itch. Then over time, I think we’ve really come to realize that there’s just this massive opportunity to do this at scale for those that really want to make music and take it seriously.

So, I’ve kind of outgrown my own use case a little bit, even though we have people that come and have fun, but really we’re focused on providing tools for the everyday artist that historically has been kind of gatekeeped out of participating in music. So, we try and give them everything we can in their pocket, and still feels like we’re only getting started. 

00:04:26 Jacob:

It’s not as easy to pirate logic these days I imagine, like it used to be.

00:04:31 Seth:

Yeah. Right.

00:04:32 David:

What did those early days look like? Did you learn to code? Did you have a coding background? What did those early days look like, and when did you get the app out? 

00:04:43 Seth:

Yeah, I mean, pure chaos and it’s not too much different today, you know, it’s just a little more organized. yeah, the first version of the iOS app was June, 2014. I think it was June 7th and that was really. I wouldn’t even pass as an alpha version think especially with how good some of the test flights are, but, you know, it was very basic.

It was, you could open the app record one track over like 10 predefined beats that had to come with the app store bundle, like would even have server side, like beats, and. Like, we just wanted to test that people would do it. And you know, of course the first couple of months, is just getting friends off Facebook and family to download it.

But then, I started to notice like, you know, a little bit of ...

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

Matthieu Rouif is the co-founder and CEO of PhotoRoom. PhotoRoom enables anyone to create studio-quality photos on their iPhone. Before founding PhotoRoom, Matthieu was the Senior Project Manager at GoPro. Matthieu is also the co-founder and CTO of HeyCrowd, and co-founder and CEO of As-App.

Matthieu earned his graduate degree in materials science and engineering from Stanford University, and his bachelor’s degrees in economics, and physics from École Polytechnique. While at École Polytechnique, Matthieu was a member of the skydiving team and debate team. Matthieu also served as a Parachutist Commando Officer in the French Air Force.

Matthieu started developing apps in 2009 as a student at Stanford, and subsequently started two iPhone app companies. He was part of the Replay app team when they won App of the Year in 2014. Matthieu started PhotoRoom after leaving GoPro in 2018.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Matthieu’s retention strategies for keeping app users subscribed
• Innovative and clever ways to get users to demo your app
• Balancing your app’s pricing and features
• How churn can be an asset

Links & Resources

• YC
• HeyCrowd
• GoPro
• Photoshop
• Zenlea
• Shopify
• Poshmark
• Depop
• Corel

Matthieu Rouif’s Links

• Matthieu on Twitter
• Matthieu on LinkendIn
• PhotoRoom is hiring!
• 10 Tools to Ship an iOS App in 2 Weeks
• PhotoRoom’s Website
• PhotoRoom API
• PhotoRoom on Twitter

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

00:00:00 David:

Hello, I’m your host, David Barnard. And with me as always, Jacob Eiting, RevenueCat CEO. Our guest today is Matt Rouif, co-founder and CEO at PhotoRoom, the app for removing backgrounds and creating studio quality photos right from your phone.

On the podcast, we talk with Matt about how his time at GoPro led to founding PhotoRoom, how churn can actually be an asset, and how being locked in Apple’s basement led to one of PhotoRoom’s biggest marketing wins.

Hey, Matt. Thanks for joining us on the podcast today. How are you doing?

00:00:48 Matthieu:

Great. Hey David, Hey Jacob.

00:00:51 Jacob:

Hi, it’s nice to finally meet internet/virtual face-to-face. We’ve known each other for a little while. I’ve become fortunate to know you kind of through RevenueCat, but not actually know-know you. So, it’s nice to finally put a face to the name.

I was looking back through my email and I think the first I ever heard of you was from our mutual friend, Cisco, if I say that correctly?

00:01:23 Matthieu:

Yeah, Francisco.

00:01:24 Jacob:

Francisco, who shared with me a blog post that I had seen that you wrote where you talked about RevenueCat as part of your stack. Since then, I think we talked as you were thinking about going into YC, and then after YC, I put in a little bit of money, so this is a good opportunity to check in on my investment.

I’m super excited to dive in, because there’s a lot of questions. I kind of have followed you guys and kind of seeing some of the stuff you’ve been doing, but I don’t know, like the behind the scenes decision making processes and like, and all that stuff. So yeah, I’m excited to hear the story firsthand.

00:02:04 David:

Yeah, but before we get into PhotoRoom, you’ve got quite a history in app development. So, I want to go back to the beginning and talk war stories. A lot of people were in the industry way back when. Jacob and I both started really early as well. So, you got your start during the Stanford class and you were actually a teaching assistant at Stanford at the time, right? I’m kind of stealing your story, but yeah. Tell me, tell me how you got into it.

00:02:34 Matthieu:

Yeah. Actually I wasn’t a teaching assistant in physics. I was doing a master’s in physics at Stanford, right at the moment of the first iPhone class. And, I actually went to Stanford because I was fascinated by the entrepreneurship. And I had this business idea of printing photos and sending them.

And that seemed a lot easier not to buy hardware, but just use the iPhone which just started at that point. So, I was at Stanford, there was the iPhone class. I wanted to do a photo app. So, see, 12 years later....

00:03:05 Jacob:

A 12 year overnight success.

00:03:07 Matthieu:

That’s what they say. Exactly. And, yeah, I got, I actually, I got started, programming.

I was doing physics before, and I didn’t know anything about programming. So I took a class with a friend that went through the basics, and I just wanted to push products on apps. And I found that the iPhone was the best at that point. And actually the photo app became something else.

The first company I started back in grad school and they became like a ski resorts app. I shipped, we had all of the major ski resorts. And, It was a great, I did that for two years and a major ski resorts and, yeah.

I started an apps company after that, one called HeyCrowd around a social network. So like we had surveys that you could answer to with polls, like, a bit like Instagram stories now, and that didn’t work so well compared to the ski resort, but, yeah, I got into iPhone apps right since the beginning.

00:04:18 Jacob:

I remember the Stanford course. It was on iTunes U that was mass disseminated or was it the later one?

00:04:25 Matthieu:

No, it was the one that it wasn’t Stanford U. There was a, the guy from Fitboard during the class. I don’t know if it was doing that.

00:04:42 Jacob:

Yeah. I remember. I remember it being like the moment when we were like, oh, this is going to go mainstream. Right? Like, because up to that point, you had to learn iOS by doing basically Mac OS. That was like the one point there was the big nerd book you learned Mac OS, and then the SDKs came and you like tried to learn quickly, like what worked and what didn’t.

But, if you were like me who came from no Mac programming, there was really no iPhone entry into it. I remember when the Stanford...

On the podcast, we talk with Ben about all things app stores. From Apple’s revolutionary launch of the App Store in 2008 to the monopoly-like powers both Google and Apple now wield today. With multiple lawsuits filed, government investigations ongoing, and developer sentiment at an all-time low, we take an honest look at the challenges and trade-offs in trying to bring two of the world’s largest companies to heel.

Ben Thompson's Links

• Stratechery
• Ben’s Twitter: @benthompson

Follow Us:

David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnard

Jacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeiting
RevenueCat: https://twitter.com/RevenueCat
Sub Club: https://twitter.com/SubClubHQ

Watch the video version of this show on YouTube »

Shamanth Rao is the founder and CEO at Rocketship HQ. Shamanth also hosts the Mobile User Acquisition Show podcast, and is the lead instructor for the Mobile Growth Lab workshop series.

RocketShip HQ is a boutique growth marketing firm with 8 figures in managed spend. Before founding RocketshipHQ, Shamanth led growth marketing resulting in 3 exits: Bash Gaming (sold for $170mm), Puzzle Social (acquired by Zynga), and FreshPlanet (acquired by Gameloft). Shamanth has also helped many other mobile apps grow and scale.

Shamanth is passionate about teaching and sharing everything he’s learned about mobile growth. Much of his time and energy goes into the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Shamanth strives to ensure that the wisdom he’s gained reaches as many people as possible.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The history of user acquisition and algorithmic targeting
• How Apple’s AppTrackingTransparency has shifted users to Android
• What Apple’s new tracking policy means for developers
• Are subscription apps impacted more than other apps by Apple’s tracking policy?

Links & Resources

• A Brief History of App Store Monetization episode – with David Barnard
• A Brief History of Device Identification episode – with David Philippson
• iOS 14 & IDFA Deprecation How App Marketers Must Adapt - YouTube

Shamanth Rao’s Links

• RocketShip HQ’s website
• The Mobile User Acquisition Show
• Mobile Growth Lab
• Follow Shamanth on Twitter
• Shamanth Rao’s website

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

Shamanth: 00:00:00

The more signal you give to the algorithm, the better the algorithm performs, right? You know, in the post AppTrackingTransparency world, if you gain more purchases, the better the algorithm performs, obviously that would take purchases from you and everybody in the world, and it would just do better. Now, obviously it’s just taking your trial and doing much, much better.

David: 00:00:38

Welcome to the sub club podcast. I’m your host, David Bernard, and with me as always Jacob Eiting.