Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
16 tactics from Alex Ross
Next-Level App Marketing Tips and Strategies
Watch the full episode“The two steps in making a successful app business are: make something worth using, and then put it in front of the people who would use it. It's remarkably hard to do either one of those.”
Two steps to a successful app business — and both are remarkably hard
Alex's whole marketing philosophy in one line. Most founders nail the product half and avoid the distribution half because it's outside their comfort zone — but both are non-negotiable. Naming the two steps clearly is the first step to actually executing on each.
“What is the industry that I want to be working in? Startups often don't go the way you expect, but you can learn so much, so I was thinking what do I want to become an expert at — if it doesn't work out, what would I like to have learned four, five, seven years worth of information about.”
Pick the industry, not the idea — assume the startup might not work
Alex's framework for picking what to work on: assume the startup may not work, then ask what domain you want to be an expert in after years of full immersion. He chose plants because the underlying science, climate-change tailwinds, and consumer adoption made the bet pay off regardless of whether Greg specifically succeeded.
“I ran to the nursery and I bought like 30 plants because I was like I need to have the problem in order to be deeply motivated to solve it — because if you actually have over 10 plants, keeping track of them kind of sucks.”
Buy 30 plants to make sure you actually have the problem you're solving
Alex deliberately bought 30 plants at the start of COVID to ensure he and the team felt the pain they were solving. Being your own user kept motivation real and grounded the prototype in actual need — founders without an authentic version of the user's pain ship for demos, not retention.
“Home Depot is a publicly traded company so you can look up their annual statements. They make more money on indoor garden than on any other product segment — more than lumber, paint, appliances. Roughly 11 billion dollars per year.”
Validate market with Home Depot's public filings — $11B indoor garden
Before committing to the plant space, Alex pulled Home Depot's 10-K to confirm indoor garden was their top revenue segment ($11B/yr) and sized the broader US plant retail market at ~$100B. Public filings are a cheap, hard-numbers validation step most founders skip in favor of TAM-on-vibes.
“We specifically for our app wanted to solve the retention piece first. We chose the behavior in the app that would be associated with retention. Our whole app is like a water reminder app right now — we built that specific functionality before anything else.”
Ship the one retention-driving behavior first — water reminders
Instead of broad feature scope, Greg shipped one core retention behavior first — push-notification water reminders — because that was the behavior most likely to bring users back over six months. The team needed six months of retention data to fundraise, so they front-loaded the single feature that would generate that signal.
“We reached out to a bunch of plant retailers — online, in person, brick-and-mortar — and basically said 'we will help your customers have a positive outcome with your product, can you put in our little QR code flyer.' Now when these retailers ship out a new plant every one has this little QR code in it. It led to our first 15,000 users.”
QR codes in retailer plant shipments drove first 15,000 users
Greg solved 'I just got a plant, now what?' so Alex partnered with plant retailers to slip a branded QR code into every shipped plant. Unboxing became the install moment — and the pitch was framed around the retailer's outcome (helping their customer succeed), not Greg's growth. The single channel produced their first 15K users with zero ad spend.
“You're referring users to us — we can refer users back to you, and our scale is large enough that it could actually be a meaningful number. It's a B2B strategy where I'm thinking of the strategic value I can provide to my partners in return for them providing value to us.”
Trade your app's audience back to your retail partners
The reason small retailers say yes isn't generosity — it's a two-way trade. As Greg's user base grows, they can route customers back to partner nurseries, giving small businesses something they desperately want: an audience. Mobile apps accumulate audiences over time; that audience is the currency you spend on offline partnerships.
“You have a place your users are going every day, which isn't always the case for all apps. There's no meditation store people are going to every day. I wonder if fitness apps have tried partnering with gyms. Find the adjacencies.”
Look for adjacent high-velocity venues your users already pass through
The retail QR play only works when your users already pass through a physical or digital venue with high frequency. Generalize: hunt for the high-frequency adjacent place your category already funnels through — gyms for fitness apps, headphones for music apps — and that's your partnership target.
“Users can create new species in Greg, we curate that, then we publish that page on the web, and it starts showing up in Google search traffic for other people. A user publishes a web page, more users find our app, then they publish more web pages — a very positive reinforcement loop.”
User-generated plant species pages become a compounding SEO loop
Greg crowdsources its species database from inside the app, then publishes curated public pages indexed by Google for long-tail plant searches. Each new user can spin up more pages, creating a UGC-to-SEO flywheel that grows acquisition without ad spend — and solves a data problem and a distribution problem at the same time.
“As long as you're not doing shady things, you don't have to worry that much. Make content that people click on and find useful — it will work. The ones I did that were intentionally SEO smart didn't do that well. The ones that were just really good posts and contained good content still generate traffic for us.”
Don't overthink SEO — make stuff worth clicking
Counter-intuitive lesson from RevenueCat's blog: posts engineered for keyword optimization underperformed posts written purely to be useful and shareable. Quality of read and dwell time still win the long game — stop fixating on keyword density and just write something worth clicking through to.
“We started thinking about what is the most optimal time for people to be introduced to Greg. We solve the problem of: if you have a plant and you don't know how to keep it alive. So the most natural moment would be when you get a new plant — that's the moment you're like 'oh crap, how do I keep this alive?'”
Onboard at the moment of pain — unboxing a new plant
Greg ships a QR-code card inside every plant a partner retailer mails out — onboarding the user at the exact unboxing moment they feel the problem. Acquisition channel and onboarding moment are the same design decision; map the highest-intent moment and place the install prompt there.
“If you do a trial, it's actually a much longer payback period — what finance people call float — than a lot of people expect. We have a 30-day trial which is a bit much for a mobile app, but we do it. 30 days, the user subscribes, Apple pays you a month later. You end up with up to a 90-day float.”
A 30-day trial is a 90-day cash float — Apple's payout delay starves you
Long trials look cheap on a paywall but starve cash flow. Greg's 30-day trial plus Apple's payout delay creates a ~90-day gap between ad spend and revenue — a critical input to whether paid acquisition is even viable while bootstrapped. Always compute the float before scaling spend.
“We've been running on Instagram and Facebook and it's been pretty productive to the point where it's almost net spend zero — we spend a dollar in advertising and then we make a dollar in revenue. With a 30-day trial you end up with up to a 90-day float — that's the key.”
Net-zero ad spend — $1 in, $1 out, every dollar buys a user
Alex's bar for paid acquisition isn't profit, it's break-even on first-cycle revenue. At net-zero ROAS, every dollar of capital eventually returns as a dollar plus a paying user who'll renew — exactly the math that justifies raising and deploying venture money on ads.
“You have a trigger — a person needs an external trigger to think about opening your app. For Tinder it's a feeling: I'm bored or lonely. For us we didn't have an emotion, but we did have the need for reminders, and so we leveraged push notifications very heavily.”
Apps without an emotional trigger have to manufacture one
Alex frames retention as trigger plus delivered value. Apps without an inherent emotional pull (Tinder = boredom/loneliness) have to engineer one. For Greg, push-notification water reminders became the external trigger — the app is the trigger, and the user comes back because the trigger arrives.
“We went on Craigslist and started saying 'hey, we're looking for people to weigh their plants every day twice per day for a couple months.' We had hundreds of responses. People thought it was cool to be doing citizen science — we ended up with people in Berlin and Sydney.”
Crowdsource training data on Craigslist — citizen-science weight-tracking
Greg needed global plant water-loss data to train its ML model. Rather than build a warehouse, Alex hit Craigslist and got hundreds of volunteers — including across hemispheres (which mattered for solar-radiation modeling). The product's ML core was trained on data they didn't pay for, contributed by people who liked the mission.
“We wanted to distribute as much of the financial ownership of the company across as many of the early teammates as we could. The first 20 people who joined the company, at least 10 or 15, all work pretty much as hard. We set up a mathematical curve where whenever I make an offer, I just look at this math equation of how much equity the next person gets.”
Distribute equity across the team via a deliberate math curve
Greg uses a formal equity curve starting from employee zero. The goal: at a billion-dollar exit, each teammate walks away with $10M+. Alex argues early employees take comparable risk and effort to founders but get less glory — he optimized for ending up with 100 teammates who feel as bought in as he is.