Distribution Playbooks
Getting a product in front of the right people — the channels founders bet on, the partnerships that scaled, and the underrated distribution plays most people skip. Each one is quoted from the founder who ran it.
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“going in eyes wide open is like are you going to be the big fish or the little fish... when you have two companies that are kind of equal size all of a sudden it's like I want it on my stack and I want control of the building relationship and all those things you know we've run into issues before”
Know who is the big fish before signing a bundle partnership
External bundle partnerships create great press and real business results, but they break down when both parties have equal leverage and competing tech stacks. Michael's rule: before signing, decide which partner owns the billing relationship, the data, and the customer experience. If both sides think they are the primary, the deal will stall or blow up. Going in with clear eyes about power asymmetry is the prerequisite.
“we have two people which have the job title AI creative producers and their task is every day they're just obsessed they're using tools like motion they're obsessed with okay what's the data of what's working so far what are other companies in the space doing and then they're coming up with new creative ideas and then rapidly iterating and testing”
AI creative producers: motion design plus voiceover plus music for rapid variant testing
Rather than outsourcing creatives to agencies or relying purely on UGC, ElevenLabs hired two in-house 'AI creative producers' — motion designers who layer AI-generated voiceovers, music, and visuals to produce high-quality ad variants at scale. The combination keeps quality high while enabling rapid hook testing: swap the voiceover, change the opening 3 seconds, test a new music bed — all without new shoots.
“we actually view yes we have the top down view but we're mainly thinking bottoms up and so we treat each channel as its own growth engine and actually our biggest one still is Google and Google search and so what we're doing is like that we're obsessed of okay how do we make really great ad copy how do we localize it to all the geos how do we have really high converting landing pages”
Treat each paid channel as its own bottoms-up growth engine with a specific bottleneck
Rather than allocating a $100M budget top-down across channels, ElevenLabs treats each channel as a standalone business with its own optimization loop. Google gets obsessive attention on copy, geo localization, and landing page CVR; Meta gets high creative volume plus quality control. The question is never 'what percentage goes to channel X' but 'what is the next specific bottleneck limiting this channel's 20% week-over-week growth?'
“we started creating content with no new video but we got to 250,000 followers like 45 days later and we're like all right so like that worked and like we're generating million plus view outcomes and we're doing it on a weekly basis there's something there”
Grow a TikTok account to 250K followers in 45 days using only existing raw footage
Before committing budget, Ladder took a brand-new coach account, grabbed all the raw phone footage she had ever shot, and iterated on editing and format to reach 250K followers in 45 days without filming anything new. The exercise proved TikTok viability for the Ladder content style, built platform intuition about what hooks worked, and gave the team enough organic data to start putting paid dollars behind winners.
“it's as simple as growth versus profit and a lot of trade-offs we deal with come back to growth versus profit it's really hard to do both at the same time you could either grow grow grow by making it really easy to subscribe or you could juice your profit by making sure you're not paying a 30% tax”
Growth vs. profit: IAP tax is worth paying when conversion friction costs more
Michael frames the Apple IAP vs. web billing decision as a pure growth-vs-profit trade-off and concludes that for Skylight's growth stage the 30% tax is worth paying because Apple's native checkout converts better. The math only flips if you are optimizing for EBITDA to satisfy PE or M&A buyers. Know your objective before optimizing: maximizing subscribers and maximizing EBITDA require different decisions on the same question.
“The way I think about it is very much it's not just a cost-saving opportunity it's actually a growth opportunity there's a lot opportunity on the web in terms of deploying different billing models and deploying different types of pricing experimentation and AB testing in a way that that you're a little bit restricted with on the App Stores.”
Web Is a Growth Opportunity, Not Just a Cost-Saving Play
Many apps first explore web payments because the app-store fee is ~30%. Lucas Lovell argues the real prize is bigger: the web unlocks billing models, paywall A/B testing, and audience reach (users who never search the App Store) that are structurally impossible inside the stores. The cost saving is the hook; the growth upside is the reason to stay.
“They're coming for the fees and staying for the flexibility in a way right it's the catalyst is sort of better attribution and lower cost transaction fees but they get here and they go wow I have all of this flexibility around me I can do different things I can experiment in different ways.”
Apps Come to Web for Lower Fees — They Stay for Billing Flexibility
Lucas summarizes a pattern he sees repeatedly: apps approach web payments as a cost optimization (saving ~25 percentage points in store fees), then discover that the real unlock is the ability to run paywall experiments, offer varied billing models, and build cancellation flows that are impossible in the App Store. The fee savings fund exploration; the flexibility builds the moat.
“Apple search ads I mean this is kind of like the starter kit of what I and many people recommend like if you're not at least starting with search ads you're probably leaving money on the table. Typically search ads are still working pretty well any measurement partner is still getting reports of the keyword data.”
Apple Search Ads Is Still the Starter Kit — If You're Not There, You're Leaving Money on the Table
Unlike Meta and Google which lost signal after ATT, Apple Search Ads retained keyword-level attribution and LTV visibility throughout the privacy changes. Shane still calls it the default starting point for subscription app UA: keyword data is actionable, LTV by keyword is measurable, and the channel remains less competitive than broader social. Skipping it is almost always a mistake.
“With the advanced srns we are starting to get more signals by sending additional parameters over for attribution. TikTok was the first one that did it with us following suit Snapchat also did that with us and then meta as well. We're getting the signals better quicker because we're not relying on SKAdNetwork's 24-hour delay mechanism.”
Advanced SRN Integration Restored Attribution Signal for TikTok, Snap, and Meta on iOS
The iOS signal loss crisis that followed ATT has been significantly mitigated by advanced self-reporting network (SRN) integrations. TikTok pioneered this with AppsFlyer, followed by Snapchat and Meta: extra parameters are transmitted at install time without requiring a device ID, recovering attribution that would otherwise be lost. The payoff is faster, more accurate signals — and critically, full LTV measurement so subscription renewals at month 3 or 4 are traceable back to source.
“Probably the biggest thing that Google's done in the last year from a attribution perspective is that YouTube now serves an ATT prompt. Very exciting for us because historically Google did not do any prompting so we're not able to — any measurement partners not able to — make measurement with Google using traditional methods. Now that YouTube has it that's been a huge advantage.”
YouTube's ATT Prompt Is the Biggest Google Attribution Unlock in Years
For years, Google was a blind spot in iOS attribution: no ATT prompt meant no device ID, so measurement partners couldn't connect installs to YouTube ad views. In 2024 YouTube began serving the ATT prompt, unlocking full deterministic attribution for the first time. Apps running Google UAC or YouTube ads can now see LTV by campaign, just like they can for Meta. Shane calls this the most significant Google measurement development in recent years.
“We're just seeing overall more spend going into all three itself. The reason why is because now they're a little bit more confident in terms of hey is this actually driving performance. When iOS 14 first came out spend was held back right because even though you put money in they don't know is it driving results itself.”
Improved Attribution Is Driving More Ad Spend Across All Major Networks in 2025
AppsFlyer data shows UA spend rising simultaneously on Meta, Google, and TikTok in 2024-2025. The catalyst is measurement confidence: as advanced SRNs and new attribution methods close the signal gaps left by ATT, advertisers are willing to commit bigger budgets again. No single network is 'winning' the spend shift — all three are growing together because subscription app operators now have better evidence their money is working.
“Reddit has pretty much kickstarted their ad network this year so they spent a lot more time on it particularly app install campaigns so they've grown quite a bit they became srn in terms of doing attribution. They have a large user base so it's definitely one of those networks that are up and coming and something that should be considered for subscription apps.”
Reddit Is the Emerging Arbitrage Channel for Subscription App UA in 2025
Reddit became a proper self-reporting network for app installs in 2024-2025 and is actively building out its ad measurement capabilities. Because most subscription app UA budgets aren't there yet, the CPIs are attractively low relative to the intent level of users searching relevant subreddits. Shane flags it as the clearest under-exploited opportunity for apps willing to test beyond the Meta/Google/TikTok trifecta.
“Turkey banned Instagram for 11 days and we got 15 million downloads in 4 days... Once the spike is gone you hit a new normal at a higher level.”
Geopolitical Spikes Reset Your New Normal — Each Crisis Establishes a Higher Floor
Super Unlimited experienced multiple geopolitical surges — country-level social media bans, civil conflicts — that delivered tens of millions of downloads in days. The key insight Tanuj shares: after each spike recedes, the retention floor is higher than before. New users acquired in a crisis frequently stay. The strategy is to be ready (excellent product, low friction) so that when an external event drives a surge, it converts into a durable cohort, not just a vanity moment.
“We are mobile first and we have an advantage because desktop people pay more — but there's a trade-off. It's scale, loyalty, LTV.”
Build for Mobile First, Win on Scale — Desktop Competitors Have Higher ARPU but Lower Reach
Super Unlimited chose to own mobile first when desktop VPN players had higher-paying subscribers. Tanuj acknowledges the trade-off honestly: desktop users have higher ARPU and lower churn, while mobile delivers massive scale with lower individual LTV. His bet paid off: a billion downloads on mobile creates a funnel that desktop-first competitors can't replicate. As they now expand to Windows and eSIM, they can up-sell a premium desktop experience to an already-trusted mobile user base.
“I made a new account, made a video with zero followers and got 50,000 views on the first video... 95% plus of the videos you scroll through are from creators you've never seen before.”
TikTok's For-You Page Lets Zero-Follower Accounts Go Viral Overnight
TikTok's For You Page distributes watch time based on content quality, not account age or follower count. Joseph contrasts this with every other platform: SEO is saturated, Instagram requires a built following, Facebook ads cost money upfront. On TikTok a well-crafted video from a brand new account can immediately reach millions. For app founders testing new ideas, this makes TikTok the cheapest viable acquisition channel from zero.
“Find people that have less than 50,000 followers who've maybe hit one or two viral videos... they sort of know what it takes. And they're probably not making much from brand deals so you can pay them cash.”
Target Low-Follower Creators Who Have Gone Viral Once — They Know the Formula and Are Underpriced
Joseph's influencer playbook deliberately avoids big accounts (expensive, agented) in favor of creators under 50K followers who have already experienced virality. These creators understand the mechanics of a hit video but haven't been discovered by brands yet, so their rates are low and their motivation is high. For a $500-$3,000 monthly retainer they'll post 30 videos — one per day — giving you a volume of shots at the algorithm.
“A typical rate I've seen is $1,000 per million views or $500 per 500,000 views — $1 CPM which is very cheap. Plus a base rate for making the videos.”
Structure Creator Deals With a Base Rate Plus CPM Bonus — Aligns Incentives Without Capping Upside
Joseph recommends splitting creator payments into a predictable base (covering production effort) and a per-view bonus (aligning the creator's incentive with virality). At $1 CPM the economics are dramatically better than paid ads. The critical counterbalance: a detailed creative brief with non-negotiable CTA requirements, because a viral video that doesn't mention the app or direct people to download it delivers only vanity views.
“i still a big fan of the app store like... the the way of buying software this is the friction is so low the experience is so ingrained in everybody like you just know how to buy software on the app store”
App Store Distribution Beats Website Sales For Consumer Apps — The Buying Experience Is The Moat
Astropad originally charged on the Mac side — where users pay more — but revenue was weak. Moving to iOS App Store pricing caused revenue to jump. For consumer-facing apps the frictionless, trusted App Store buying experience outweighs higher price points available elsewhere. The distribution and trust infrastructure is worth the commission for products that solve a problem people search for on a phone.
“There's a lot of information in the Play Console i think people forget what you can find there we actually have a lot of benchmarking data in there so if you want to see how you are performing against a peer set or a different category outside yours you can look at some of your KPIs especially around play store conversion rates.”
Play Console Has Free Benchmarking Against Peers — Most Developers Ignore It
Google embeds competitive benchmarking data directly in Play Console — store conversion rates compared against peers in the same and adjacent categories. Most indie developers don't check it. It's a free, no-third-party-tool-required signal that shows whether underperformance on conversion is an industry-wide issue or a fixable outlier specific to a given app.
“I think that we're about to see another big shift with these new models Neither of those things are going to be a problem Creative volume not an issue Creative diversity not an issue The challenge is going to be that we have so many creatives and not enough ad spend to actually test them all.”
Next Problem: Too Many Creatives, Not Enough Budget to Test Them All
Nathan flags the next wave of growing pains in AI-powered paid UA: budget, not production, becomes the binding constraint. When a single agent can produce hundreds of credible creatives per day, even a well-funded growth budget can't test them all to statistical significance. Teams need smarter creative filtering and prioritisation frameworks upstream — to decide which hypotheses are even worth generating, let alone spending to test.
“We just added an integration with stripe for the exact same reason because we see more developers are trying now this.”
RevenueCat Built Stripe Integration Because Developers Are Routing Around Apple
RevenueCat's decision to build a Stripe SDK was a direct response to developer demand — a leading indicator that web billing was going mainstream before Apple officially allowed it. Infrastructure platforms follow developer momentum; when the billing provider starts building the workaround tooling, that is a signal the workaround is becoming legitimate practice.
“Don't go build an app and have this if-I-build-it-they-will-come kind of mentality — you need some level of built-in marketing.”
Distribution Built Into the Niche Beats Marketing Bolted On After Launch
Distribution is not a marketing problem to solve post-launch — it is an architectural decision made before building. The best solo app developers pick niches with inherent distribution: hobby communities that share app discoveries, professional networks with word-of-mouth, or content channels already producing the keywords users search. Niche selection and distribution planning are the same decision made simultaneously.
“Brazil is one of our biggest markets — a couple months ago when we launched the website in Portuguese we saw a huge lift in installs in Brazil. Really really makes a difference.”
Localizing the Website to Portuguese Drove a Huge Lift in Brazilian Installs
Captions serves customers in all 186 App Store regions and treats localization as a growth lever, not just a polish step. Translating the website into Portuguese produced a measurable spike in Brazilian installs. The same logic applies to the help center, App Store listing, and in-app copy — localized support is not just a customer service play, it is a top-of-funnel acquisition multiplier.
“Hitting copy and paste on your iOS strategy is probably not going to work on Google Play... you've got the $2,000 device and you've got a $200 device and the users who are on the more premium devices actually behave quite similarly to iOS... but that will not get you the full benefit.”
Don't Copy-Paste iOS Strategy to Android — Devices, Users, and Willingness to Pay Differ
Premium Android device users behave like iOS users — but they are a fraction of the 2.5 billion Android install base. The majority of Android users worldwide are on mid-range and entry-level devices with different price sensitivities, payment preferences, and usage patterns. Developers who narrow their strategy to iOS-parity targeting leave the majority of the platform's scale untouched.
“there was enough Canadian Mint users that were super frustrated... many of them were like hacking Monarch and changing their IP address... we finally just said okay we're going to turn this on.”
Demand-Led Expansion: Let Users Hack Around Geo-Restrictions Before You Build
Monarch had no Canada plans for the next 12 months. But when users actively spoofed their location to sign up, the team recognized an unambiguous demand signal and did a quick beta toggle. The experience was not perfect — Canadian institution data quality lagged the US — but Monarch offered refunds to dissatisfied users and built goodwill. Demand-led expansion with a clear quality caveat beats waiting for a perfect rollout.
“Strategy based comms and marketing is so much more interesting and so much more important long term — you really need to get that out of a PR strategist; you won't get that out of a PR firm.”
Hire a PR strategist, not a PR firm — you need a narrative, not a press-release factory
A traditional PR firm packages and blasts press releases to maximize surface area — useful for gaming companies seeding their name broadly. But what app founders actually need is someone who builds the narrative you'll tell consistently over years: the story your future users and investors will always recognize as true. That strategic layer isn't a volume game.
“Even if I spend 3K this month and make 50k I'm not going to be able to spend that next month potentially so I can't do anything like I'm stuck it interrupts your iteration Cycles I think that is by far the biggest advantage of testing on the web when you're first launching a paid Channel.”
Web2App Cash Flow Advantage: Stripe Pays Instantly vs. 60-Day App Store Delay
The App Store can delay payouts by up to 60 days — essentially a 15% short-term loan on your own revenue. Web payments via Stripe settle near-instantly, letting small apps reinvest the same week they acquire users. At $3K ad spend → $50K revenue, this cash-flow difference is the difference between scaling and stalling. Nathan calls it the biggest advantage of web2app for early-stage apps launching their first paid channel.
“It's actually pretty surprising I think most people would view offline channels as the more expensive channels to go after and when you buy a certain way you can actually achieve cpms that are probably much much cheaper than Facebook for example.”
Broad National Radio Buys Can Deliver CPMs Cheaper Than Facebook
The assumption that offline advertising is inherently expensive collapses when you buy broad. Babbel buys radio nationally at scale rather than paying a premium for host-specific reads. The resulting CPMs undercut Facebook. The trade-off is targeting precision, but for apps with broad audiences, this is a worthwhile swap — and one most app marketers never investigate because they assume the price is prohibitive.
“If someone sees a TV ad it's a 50/50 chance that they're going to visit you on your app or on the web we can't figure out how to change that it's hit or miss so yeah we've optimized both for the App Stores and the app experience as well for a web experience.”
TV Ads Drive 50/50 App vs. Web Visits — You Cannot Control It, So Optimize Both
Babbel's data shows that TV ad viewers split evenly between downloading the app and visiting the website — and there's no way to influence that split. Rather than fighting the behavior, Babbel built full funnels for both paths. The web path has a data advantage: no download barrier means earlier conversation and better attribution. Any app running offline ads needs both funnels operating at parity — ignoring web means throwing away half the traffic.
“On app store it's very Democratic App Store I like to think about it like YouTube is right like Paramount Pictures and a YouTube influencer they're pretty much competing for the same eyeball so we don't get a lot of advantage… a startup can start in Bangalore and start taking the spot on some keyword and start showing up above word.”
App Store Is Democratic — a Startup in Bangalore Can Outrank Microsoft on a Keyword
Ramit's bluntest insight: the App Store strips away brand moats. Microsoft has no guaranteed placement over a two-person shop. Every app — regardless of company size — has to earn discoverability through ASO, reviews, and relevance. For indie developers, this is the level playing field that makes the app store worth competing on.