Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
9 tactics from Jacob Eiting
The Future of Subscription Apps (Why We're So Excited For 2024)
Watch the full episode“most trial starts occur within the first 24 hours...70 plus% on average...most of your effort should be focused on that very first user experience...you have the maximum user intent they just downloaded your app this problem is acute to them at that moment”
70%+ of Trial Starts Happen in the First 24 Hours — First Session Is Everything
RevenueCat data across tens of millions of subscriptions confirms: most people decide whether to start a trial within the first 24 hours of downloading an app, and the majority never open it a second time. The moment of download is peak intent. Any strategy that delays the trial ask — waiting for a milestone, a day four alert, or a second session — sacrifices the overwhelming majority of potential conversions.
“I will beat you just by putting a buy button on the first screen by pure law of numbers right and that's sort of the like un-glamorous app design things that you sometimes need to do to actually optimize the business”
Just Put A Buy Button On Screen One — Pure Law Of Numbers Beats Elegant Delayed Paywalls
Jacob's brutal truth: no matter how elegant a delayed-paywall strategy sounds — show the product first, earn trust, then convert — the math kills it. Four out of five users never open the app a second time. Showing a trial CTA on screen one, even if it feels pushy, will out-convert a thoughtfully staged paywall simply because it reaches 5x more people.
“over 10% of churned monthly subscribers resubscribe within 12 months...reactivation is a huge part of their growth model...they've already primed they paid once they're very very likely to pay again if you just give them the right pitch”
Over 10% Of Churned Subscribers Resubscribe Within 12 Months — Reactivation Compounds
RevenueCat measured something that surprises most founders: more than 1 in 10 users who cancel come back within a year on their own or with a nudge. The churned user pool grows every month and never shrinks — so the ROI on reactivation compounds over time. Jacob notes Duolingo treats reactivation as a core growth lever. The caveat: don't build win-back infrastructure until you have enough churned users to make it worth the investment.
“download to paid in South Korea for Education apps is over 10%...find your Tailwinds find the places you can go where it will be easy for you to succeed and don't waste time...this can be as much as a negative guide of where not to focus”
Find Your Tailwinds: South Korea Education Apps Convert At 10%+ Download-To-Paid
RevenueCat benchmarks reveal enormous variance by geography and category: South Korea education apps convert downloads to paid at over 10%, versus a global median around 1.7%. The strategic implication is to find where your category already has favorable economics and lean in there first, rather than spreading localisation effort evenly across all markets. The same data is equally useful as a stop-list — some countries will never move the needle at your scale.
“subscription fatigue was just a convenient angle that was popular for clicks the economics of it never really shook out if anything apps and software have driven down the costs of the services they provide in the last decade”
Subscription Fatigue Is A Myth — Software Has Actually Driven Down The Real Cost Of Services
The subscription-fatigue narrative gets clicks but doesn't hold up in the data. Jacob points out that inflation-adjusted spend on streaming is lower than cable was — and consumers are getting more content than ever. The same logic applies broadly to mobile apps: developers keep creating more value and prices keep dropping in real terms. This is a narrative you can safely ignore when pricing your own product.
“the further you are away from the metrics you want you should proportionately increase the radicalness of the testing and experimentation you try...if you have total trash like you're not losing anything just try something nuts”
When Metrics Are Far Off Benchmark, Increase The Radicalism Of Your Experiments
Jacob's calibration rule for founders: the scale of your experimentation should be proportional to how far you are from your targets. If conversion is in the ballpark, run conservative A/B tests. If it's terrible, incremental tweaks are statistically equivalent to nothing — try a completely different paywall, a different business model, or a different app entirely. The time cost of trying something radical when things are broken is far lower than the time cost of grinding through marginal improvements.
“figure out how to get attention that should be your final dice roll before you give up on a project is like really try and figure out how can I get attention you're not going to get traction just from background noise on the App Store anymore”
Before You Kill A Project, Take One Last Dice Roll On Getting Attention
Jacob's framework for deciding when to abandon a project: before you quit, make a genuine attempt to generate attention — not passive SEO or a quiet launch, but a deliberate effort to get people talking. Most apps fail not because the product is bad but because nobody knows it exists. The App Store stopped being a discovery engine years ago. A single successful attention play can completely change the trajectory, making it worth one more focused attempt before moving on.
“the only bet is to like keep trying stuff until something really works and so that would be my takeaway from this is like don't get discouraged...the way subscription works you just double down and you compound into that as long as you can”
Keep Shipping Until Something Cracks, Then Compound It — That's The Whole Game
Even after years of building apps, Jacob observes that the probability of any single thing working remains stubbornly random. The only reliable lever is volume of attempts. Once something does start working, the mechanics of subscriptions — recurring revenue compounding over months and years — mean the returns scale non-linearly. The strategy isn't to predict what works; it's to stay solvent long enough to find it, then double down aggressively.
“The average realized LTV per download in North America 14 days in is four times the global average at 35 cents compared to 8 cents a multiple that exists both on the App Store as well as on Google Play”
North America LTV Is 4x The Global Average — Focus There First Before Chasing Global Scale
Hard benchmark from RevenueCat's dataset: a North American user is worth four times a global average user in the first 14 days. This shows up consistently across iOS and Android. For any subscription app in early growth, this argues strongly for North America-first before spreading to other markets — the economics are simply more favorable and the data is cleaner. Only after establishing unit economics in NA does geographic expansion typically make sense.