Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
11 tactics from Gessica Bicego
Brand Marketing, Product-Market Fit, & App Growth
Watch the full episode“The first thing I did is I organized a brainstorming session with all the founders and the people that have been there from the beginning... I was using Miro and I looked for a template — brand, this sounds good, let me use this one... it was so good for me to just get the baseline.”
Run a Miro brand workshop with founders before hiring a brand lead
Before hiring a brand director at Paired, Gessica ran a single Miro-template brand workshop with the founders and earliest employees. That baseline clarified the brief for the future hire and identified the small group of stakeholders who'd actually shape brand decisions — keeping the future brand lead unblocked by committee.
“The section or like the topics that they like in the app, they're not the one that brought them in... it's like I'm driven to a certain product in an app because I think that I'm interested in this but then I end up using it for something else, but if I use that message in the ads it doesn't actually work.”
The feature that hooks the install isn't the feature that retains — split your messaging
Paired's user research showed the features users love most aren't what initially pulled them in. Testing the retention-driving messages in acquisition ads flopped. Treat acquisition copy and onboarding emphasis as separate problems — they answer to different audience moments. Don't naively port your top-retained feature into your ad hook.
“We received not from Bill Gates but from someone pretty close to him — you need to bring it down and stop running, and that was such a nightmare... as soon as we moved the ad the account went from spending 100 to spending 10. I make sure that you have at least four or five creatives that are working at the same time.”
One Bill Gates ad carried Blinkist's account — its C&D collapsed spend 10x
Blinkist had one Bill Gates ad creative carrying nearly all of their Facebook spend. A legal threat forced its removal and the account collapsed from 100 to 10 in spend because Facebook's algorithm lost its event volume. Always keep 4-5 winning creatives live concurrently so any one takedown leaves a backup — and avoid identifiable famous figures.
“When I was at Blinkist, one of the things that I was really proud of is establishing paid content as one of the main drivers — Outbrain and Taboola. That took me and my team I think nine months. It's a long time, it's like nine months of suffering and really bad performance and people saying are you sure you know what you're doing, but it eventually paid off.”
Budget any new paid channel for 9 months of bad numbers before judging it
Blinkist's now-flagship paid content channel took nine months of poor performance and internal skepticism before becoming a top driver. New channels need a multi-quarter runway and explicit air cover, not a 30-day kill switch. Protect long-horizon bets from short-term ROAS judgments.
“I tend to have like the pillars — the channels that are working where I continue investing massively in this channel — usually 30% will go to just testing new things, and in the meantime I will expand my budget like starting to explore new channels knowing that for some of them it's going to take longer.”
Reserve 30% of paid budget permanently for testing new channels
Concrete portfolio rule: keep pillar channels funded, but always carve out roughly 30% of paid spend for testing new ones. This guards against platform dependency and creative fatigue while compounding learning across the funnel — so when a pillar saturates you already have the next winner warming up.
“Outbrain and Taboola — that's a platform where I spent a lot of time on. It's a performance channel and everyone uses the performance channel, but especially in some markets where the competition is not so high, since you pay for CPC you have so many impressions that it actually becomes stronger than TV.”
Outbrain/Taboola are CPC performance — but in low-competition markets they're cheap TV
Most apps run Outbrain/Taboola as bottom-of-funnel performance, but in low-competition markets the cheap CPCs deliver TV-scale impressions. A startup can build mass recognition without a million-dollar TV budget — the same channel doubles as both performance and brand if you read the impression math.
“Suddenly, since it was like a really well-known platform, they lost so much organic discoverability — people were looking for that and they were not finding. And at the same time there was such a big drop in conversion because all these people that were looking for Adidas shoes on the app store... would say wait a moment, where's the shoes that I wanted to buy.”
Runtastic → Adidas Running rebrand vaporized ASO and tanked conversion
Adidas renamed Runtastic and destroyed branded-search demand while simultaneously poisoning store conversion — visitors searching 'adidas' expected shoes and bounced. Facebook event volume collapsed too, breaking the entire ad stack. Be very wary of renaming an app whose brand name is doing free acquisition work.
“With influencer marketing for example is easier because you know the audience, you know more or less how old they are what they're interested in. In other platform like Facebook where you go with broad targeting, you need to go with what sells.”
Influencer ads can sell to segments paid social's broad targeting can't reach
For broad audiences like Paired's (1-year couples to 10-year marriages), Facebook's broad targeting forces lowest-common-denominator messaging. Influencer marketing flips this — you inherit a known sub-audience and can sell the specific motivation that fits them, even if it would never win on Meta.
“I also want to see the overall my paid acquisition cost — instead of becoming higher and higher, they maybe stay at the same level or they even go down, because you know the more you spend, if you spend a million if you've spent four million you can expect your conversion rate to go down. What if by doing more awareness campaign I'm able to actually maintain that conversion rate?”
Brand spend success = flat CAC as you scale performance spend
Rather than measuring brand spend by impressions or recall, Bicego measures it by whether paid CAC stays flat or drops as performance spend scales up. Conversion rate normally decays with spend; if awareness work holds the rate constant at higher dollar volumes, the brand investment is provably working.
“How I want to set it up is that I want the brand person to have a specific budget, because I feel that without a budget a brand person, they're lost. What do they do?”
Give your brand hire a dedicated budget, or they have nothing to actually do
A common failure mode is hiring a brand director and then making them beg performance for budget. Bicego's structural fix: carve out a dedicated brand budget upfront and limit stakeholder approvals so the role can actually execute instead of negotiating. Otherwise you've hired a strategist with no runway.
“Something that they did right is that they invested a lot in having senior people at the beginning. Yes you spend a bit of money on hiring good people, but then everyone knows what they're doing, everyone is super independent.”
Hire senior early — independence beats handholding at 15 people
Paired deliberately over-indexed on senior hires in their first 15 employees rather than stretching budget across more junior staff. The payoff: every hire ships independently without management overhead, which is what actually makes a tiny team feel fast — junior-heavy early teams pay for themselves in coordination cost.