Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
14 tactics from Brett Bauman & Zack Hargett
$6.7M ARR, No Paid Ads, and an Exit to Quizlet in 2 Years
Watch the full episode“There's a great quote by I think Sam Altman which is momentum is like oxygen for a startup. You just feed off of that momentum and it lets you put more and more energy and more and more cash if you need to into the company to keep it growing. Within 45 days we crossed 100K ARR, within 4 months we crossed a million.”
Momentum is oxygen — $100K ARR in 45 days, $1M in 4 months
Brett and Zack deliberately traded polish for speed at launch because they treat momentum itself as fuel. Crossing $100K ARR in 45 days, $1M in 4 months, and $2M in 5 months gave them the cash and confidence to keep reinvesting in creators and product velocity.
“I have a lot of smart friends that if I would have gone to with the idea for Coconote they would have said 'Zack no one's gonna buy this, you're targeting college students.' In the early days of an idea you can almost imagine it like a seed and you want to shelter it from a lot of harm so it can at least sprout. A much better framework is what happens if it does work.”
Shelter the seed — ignore smart friends who tell you the idea won't work
Zack credits part of Coconote's success to never pressure-testing the idea against smart skeptics in the early days. Smart people instinctively pattern-match to reasons something won't work; flip the frame to 'what happens if it does work' to make better early bets.
“I'd been building a lot for Emma which is this archetype that I had in my head who's my little sister. She was entering college as a first year civil engineering major and we were thinking a lot about how can we summarize things help people learn.”
Build for one real person — Zack's sister Emma, civil engineering major
Zack grounded every product decision in a single concrete person: his sister Emma starting civil engineering. Building for one real human instead of a fuzzy demographic sharpens every trade-off, especially when you can text her after a release and ask what she thinks.
“We really wanted to scope it down and launch something quickly and basic and I would say we achieved that and it like sort of worked when we launched — there was plenty of audio recordings getting lost and things like that.”
Ship the MVP with bugs — basic and broken beats polished and late
The April 2024 launch shipped with known reliability bugs — audio recordings actually getting lost — but Brett prioritized launching basic over launching polished. Much of what's in the product today looks like that scrappy v1; the alternative was missing the AI note-taking window entirely.
“We had a free trial from day one but we were in effect charging from day one. There's nothing quite like the dopamine high of realizing you're creating something valuable to the world and people are returning. You captured some of it right — it's hard to debate something is being done.”
Charge from day one — paid conversions are the only unambiguous signal
Zack insisted on real revenue from launch instead of free-tier vanity metrics. Mixpanel events can be gamed or noisy, but paid conversions are unambiguous proof of value — and the dopamine loop kept both founders building hard.
“If you reach out to a content creator and their email is at sunsetagency.com or something — any agency sounding, you're too late. Those agencies exist to eliminate the alpha that you are trying to create. If they have a Gmail in their bio and they have 5-10K followers, good engagement, that's a really nice sweet spot.”
Hire content creators, not influencers — Gmail in the bio beats agency.com
Zack's tactical screen for creators: look at the bio email. Agency emails mean the creator's pricing and earnings are already optimized against you. Gmail addresses on 5-10K-follower accounts with strong engagement are undermonetized, high-output, and willing to actually create — the real growth alpha.
“If you frame your product as a novel toy people are going to treat it like a toy. They do not want to pay for that thing. But if you frame it as a solution to a problem then people are much more willing to pay — it attracts a higher willingness-to-pay customer. One of our videos got 41 million views, 4.5 million likes — but didn't convert.”
Frame the product as a problem-solution — a 41M-view "toy" video flopped on conversion
Their PDF-to-brain-rot experiment (PDF audio over Minecraft parkour) hit 41M views and 4.5M likes but converted terribly because viewers treated it as entertainment. Viral views are vanity when the framing positions the product as a toy; frame as a solution to a real pain (e.g. 'never miss a key detail') for conversion.
“One of the best things that we did, we just asked our customers how would you describe Coconote, and a great majority of them — it was shocking how consistent this was — they use Coconote to never miss a key detail. And that is exactly what we put in the first App Store preview screen.”
Mirror customer language — "never miss a key detail" became the App Store hook
Zack stopped writing positioning copy from inside the building and asked users to describe Coconote in their own words. The phrase 'never miss a key detail' came back so consistently it became the first App Store screenshot headline — letting the market write the marketing.
“Imagine you're on campus at student orientation and you see a daughter and her mom. I would like you to go offer a notetaker that's going to help improve your grades and it's $130 to do it. Who are you going to ask? The obvious answer is you're going to ask the mom. So early on we were very keen on marketing to moms.”
Market to the buyer (mom), not the user (student)
Coconote's early viral 'my mom just changed my life' videos weren't aimed at students — they were aimed at other moms scrolling Instagram. Identifying the actual decision-maker (the parent with the wallet, not the kid with the problem) unlocked willingness-to-pay other launch campaigns missed.
“We launched at $99.99 but one of our early tests was raising it to 129 and we saw the magical like more users and more revenues at the same time. And so that's where we've been for most of it. But I do think we are one of the more expensive options on the market.”
Raised price from $99 to $129 — got more users AND more revenue at once
Brett bumped the annual price from $99 to $129 early on and hit the rare 'both go up' outcome — more signups AND more revenue. The premium price signaled reliability (critical when users are trusting you with their lecture recordings) and attracted higher-intent customers willing to pay for a serious tool.
“As an engineer whenever you start a new product you kind of build the login screen first. One of the nice things about being in Apple and Google's walls is you actually don't really need to create an account to make a purchase because you're already signed into your Apple or Google account. The biggest win that we had was moving login to after the paywall. We were seeing 10% drop off by having login being the very first screen.”
Move login AFTER the paywall — recovered 10% of the funnel
Engineers reflexively build the login screen first because they need it for dev, and then it stays in onboarding forever. Brett moved auth to AFTER the paywall (relying on Apple/Google identity to take the payment first), recovering the ~10% who otherwise bounced at a forced account-creation wall.
“We tried three things. Standard discount offers — 30% off if you stay. Pausing for 3 months because students don't want to pay over the summer. And trial extensions — if you're on a free trial and you go to cancel, we say 'do you just need more time?' and offer seven more days. That was the most successful by far. It really keeps people on autorenew.”
Trial extensions beat discounts for save-cancellations — 25% of cancellers retained
On the web cancellation flow Brett A/B tested a 30% discount, a 3-month pause for summer break, and a 7-day trial extension. The trial extension dominated the others and overall retained ~25% of would-be cancellers — preserving autorenew, which is much harder to recover once broken.
“I look at ones like Ladder or AllTrails or Strava and they all associate with a person's identity and then it's something they repeat frequently. To us we felt like we were capturing a student's identity — going to class and recording as something you do daily or a few times a week.”
Build for identity + daily frequency — like Strava, AllTrails, Ladder
Brett's product filter for consumer apps: does it tie to identity ('I am a student / runner / lifter') AND get used at high frequency? Coconote pinned itself to going to class — daily ritual + identity behavior — which builds a personal corpus (physics 1, 2, 3) that creates compounding switching costs.
“It was around 10,000 maybe each that we had to invest up front to get things off the ground but pretty much every month from inception to the acquisition we were around 50% EBITDA margins. And so we really tried to be lean.”
$10K each in, ~50% EBITDA from inception to exit
Brett and Zack each chipped in ~$10K to start, then ran ~50% EBITDA margins every month from launch through the Quizlet acquisition. That financial discipline kept them cash-flow positive throughout — which gave them real optionality on the deal rather than negotiating from desperation.