Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
14 tactics from Fares Ksebati
Building a Content Marketing Flywheel
Watch the full episode“I basically bought a domain... I created a mockup of what I thought the app would look like and I had four value propositions on the screen so I had the mockup of the app and then an email capture and I used Twitter to drive traffic to this website. After just a couple of weeks I had 200 people who inputted their email to download this app that didn't even exist yet.”
Mockup landing page + Twitter DMs → 200 emails for an app that didn't exist
Before writing any code, Fares bought myswimpal.com and put up a four-value-prop mockup with email capture. He DMed strangers tweeting about swimming, favorited their posts, and sent them to the URL. 200 cold emails in two weeks gave him the signal to build v1 — the same playbook works today, swap Twitter for Instagram DMs.
“The first version of MySwimPro was simply to give someone a workout, as simple as that. You couldn't log it, there's no profile, there's no analytics, none of this stuff... we just iterated on it over and over and over.”
Ship the dumbest possible v1 — single feature, no profile, free for a year
V1 was a single feature: deliver a workout. No logging, no profile, no analytics, no Apple Watch. They charged nothing for the first year, just listened to the small group using it, and only added a $10/month tier in 2016. The MVP was small enough to ship, the free year was long enough to learn.
“We would get the same questions via email every single day... one day I was like you know what, I'm just going to make a video that explains this because I've had to copy and paste the macro basically, I'm telling the same people over and over the same thing. So I got up a whiteboard and I just explained swimming terminology.”
Whiteboard Wednesday started as support-email leverage, not a YouTube strategy
Whiteboard Wednesday started as pure leverage: instead of copy-pasting the same answer to seven users, film once and link it. The whole loop — concept, film, edit, blog, email — was a single-day Wednesday project for years before they ever hired help. Even at 7 views, the time math beat writing 7 emails. Compounded into millions of views.
“In 2015 to 2018 we're talking thousands of social media posts and hundreds of articles that I had written. So it's not like we wrote five articles and then now we're SEO relevant.”
Compounding content takes thousands of posts and years — not five articles
The honest bar for content-driven trust and search visibility is enormous — three years of one-article-per-week plus daily social before compounding kicked in. Their Instagram has ~7,000 posts; no single one made the account. Founders who quit at 75 views or five articles are quitting before the curve hits its inflection.
“I basically created an account for every channel and some have come and gone over the years. So for example, Snapchat was something that I was more engaged with and now we don't do anything with Snapchat.”
Be everywhere from day one — claim every channel, then prune what dies
At launch Fares claimed handles on every platform and posted to all of them, starting with Twitter because it was event-driven for swim competitions. Channels rose and fell — Snapchat dropped off, TikTok joined in 2019, YouTube became the deepest-trust focus only in the last few years. The land-grab is cheap; the pruning is on data.
“Every single video I have the app on screen showing the workouts that I'm actually doing. I'm not selling the app, I'm just using the app as my tool to achieve the results that I'm trying to show... the app is on the screen for 30% of the time.”
Don't sell the app — show it on screen ~30% of the video as your tool
Fares films himself training for the Masters World Championships using MySwimPro on-screen. The app is never pitched — it's the visible tool behind the result viewers are watching. Roughly 30% of videos carry a strong integration (60+ seconds with app on screen); 70% are pure value with at most a one-line CTA. Showcase beats sell.
“If someone's listening or watching and they take away anything from this content marketing, you have to do one of three things: you either have to educate people, you have to entertain them, or you inspire them... if you're amazing you can do multiple at the same time.”
Educate, entertain, or inspire — combine two to break through
Fares frames every social post against three viewer motivations: education, entertainment, or inspiration. Single-purpose content works, but the creators and brands that break through stack two. MySwimPro's own mix skews educational with light entertainment; the company channel runs inspirational 'gold medal moments' stories.
“We don't have that many app subscribers... a lot of people who are engaging with the content that are maybe not interested in the app because the app has a very specific use case... whereas YouTube — oh, you want to go swimming? Like anyone who wants to improve.”
Wide-funnel YouTube > narrow app persona — and that mismatch is fine
The app targets a narrow persona; the YouTube audience is anyone who swims. Fares is fine with the mismatch — the wider audience funds the content engine (AdSense + brand deals) and feeds future product expansion. Don't constrain top-of-funnel content to your exact ICP; let the channel be bigger than the product.
“This is really the only method of marketing that I know where you can actually do marketing to get more customers and you get paid to get more customers to do the marketing.”
Content marketing where the channel pays you to acquire customers
Past a viewership threshold, the funnel inverts: AdSense and brand-deal revenue from the YouTube channel fully funds two in-house video editors plus a five-person content team — independent of the app. Even if zero app subscribers came from a video, the content arm is ROI-positive on its own. The dual-economy unlocks scale most teams never reach.
“We use the App Store custom product URLs and we actually measure how many leads we get from YouTube versus... a different URL for Instagram, for YouTube, for Facebook, for our website, and then we can see and attribute revenue directly to that.”
Custom App Store product URLs finally unlocked per-channel revenue attribution
After eight years of mostly-unattributed content, the recent unlock was App Store Custom Product Pages with channel-specific URLs — finally producing per-channel revenue attribution. Most subscription apps doing content marketing are still flying blind here; this is a low-effort instrumentation win that retroactively justifies (or kills) channels.
“We didn't really see much of a change in conversion rate so we kept on increasing the price and we kept on making the app better and better.”
Eight price points $10/mo → $180/yr with no conversion drop
MySwimPro walked pricing through roughly eight different price points over the years, starting at $10/month, then $100/year, $120, and eventually $180. Each bump coincided with shipping more product value, and conversion stayed stable — proof that perceived value, not the headline number, is what gates upgrades. Most apps underprice by default.
“There are people who are willing to spend $200, $300 per year. We don't have a product offering right now and a packaging that is able to access that kind of a price sensitivity.”
Van Westendorp surfaced a hidden segment willing to pay 2-3x more
Fares ran the four-question Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey on free and paid members. The average landed near the current $120/year, but a real cohort signaled willingness to spend $200-$300 — revealing that a single price point leaves money on the table without tiered packaging. The fix is multiple packages, not one optimal price.
“The biggest mistake you can make is not having the right analytics in place. So if you don't know okay, you spend $1,500, what happened... you really can't put any significant budget besides just 'oh we'll boost this post and see if we get more app downloads.'”
Paid acquisition fails fast without analytics infrastructure to learn from the burn
MySwimPro tried paid acquisition three separate times. The first two failed not because of creative, but because they couldn't measure outcomes fast enough to kill losers and double down on winners. Install attribution before you spend a dollar — algorithms favor big budgets, so bootstrapped teams especially need tight measurement before scaling spend.
“Brand is the only thing that transcends technology, so technologies will come and go, products will come and go — the Apple Watch didn't exist when we started the company... if you have a brand and you build trust and you have that community, whatever the thing is, if you can innovate in it you'll have an audience.”
Brand is the only thing that transcends technology
Fares's reason for grinding content for years with low view counts: technologies and product surfaces shift (Apple Watch, Vision Pro), but a trusted brand and audience carries forward. The investment isn't really in views, it's in earning permission to ship into a new format later. This is what kept him going through 75-view videos.