Founder Playbook · Starter Story
10 tactics from John Makavoy
How I Built a $30K/Month Mobile App
Watch the full episode“Over the course of maybe two or three months with maybe 10 experiments I was able to increase the conversion rate from 0.5% all the way up to 8% just by optimizing the onboarding and paywall. Suddenly growth skyrocketed, going from around $8K a month to over $30,000.”
AB-tested paywalls took conversion 0.5% → 8% and revenue $8K → $30K in 2-3 months
Roughly 10 paywall and onboarding A/B tests over 2-3 months lifted paid conversion 16x on the same traffic, pushing revenue from $8K/mo to $30K+/mo. The unlock was treating the paywall — not the product itself — as the highest-leverage experimentation surface and letting event-analytics data, not opinion, decide each variant.
“Use other localizations — for example if you were to add keywords to Mexican Spanish, those same keywords would be indexed for the US app store and have the same weight as the native US English localization.”
Add Mexican Spanish localization to inject more US App Store keywords for free
Apple indexes additional localizations (Mexican Spanish, UK English, Australian English) for the same store. Filling those extra 100-character keyword fields effectively multiplies your usable US keyword inventory at zero cost — a non-obvious ASO quirk that doubles keyword surface area without changing what users actually see.
“After a lot of experimentation, what I've found is a real unlock is for people who just tap on the close button — the app starts at a reverse trial. So if I close it just now it says 'enjoy a week of Pro on us' and now you have 7 days free trial of all the Pro features starts without you having to pay or without you having to make any kind of commitment.”
Reverse trial: tapping "close" on the paywall silently grants 7 days of Pro
Instead of dumping paywall-rejecters into the free tier, Mumigo auto-activates a 7-day Pro trial with no card required when users tap close. They experience the full premium product before being asked to pay, dramatically widening the top of the conversion funnel. John names this as the single biggest unlock from his paywall experimentation.
“For the first couple of years I was relying on vanity metrics — things like monthly active users. That wasn't really moving the needle. It was only when I moved to event-based analytics that growth really happened.”
Kill vanity metrics — only event analytics let you run the experiments that actually move revenue
MAU and download counts let John feel good while the app barely converted. The switch to Mixpanel event analytics is what enabled the paywall A/B tests that took conversion from 0.5% to 8%. Decision rule: if a metric can't be tied to a specific experiment you could run next week, it's a vanity metric — stop checking it.
“Uber had just come out. I wanted to have the same experience waiting for a bus. I wanted something that would allow me to finish having my coffee in the morning without having to stand at a bus stop for 10, 20 minutes in the rain.”
Import the magical feeling of a hot app into a boring daily ritual
The wedge wasn't 'better transit data' — it was importing Uber's delight pattern (watching a vehicle crawl toward you on a map) into a category that didn't have it. Pick a tired daily ritual (commuting, queueing, waiting) and clone the emotional payoff from a hot app in an adjacent category. The feeling sells the product before any feature does.
“Different cities use different terminology — so for example in New York you've got the MTA subway, in Chicago you have the CTA L train. Once I started adding these kind of keywords I found that downloads increased substantially.”
Use local insider vocabulary (MTA, CTA L-train) in per-city ASO
Generic terms like 'transit' lost to the way locals actually phrase it. Adding 'MTA', 'CTA L train', and local equivalents to title + subtitle + 100-char keyword field per locale drove the bulk of Mumigo's 5M downloads. Pair the keywords with per-city screenshots so each user sees their own network in the store listing.
“Search for terms, keywords and phrases around what your app does by typing in the first few characters into search — you'll see a list come up. By looking at those lists I was able to determine what are the most high impact keywords people are searching for.”
Mine App Store autocomplete for the long-tail keywords users actually type
Free ASO keyword discovery: type the first few characters of a query into App Store search and read the autocomplete dropdown. Most users tap entry 1 or 2, so those suggestions are the actual high-intent queries. Target the specific long-tail entries — lower volume but easy top-5 ranking, which then lifts you for broader terms.
“You need to solve a problem that you have, because when you're working nights and weekends you're hitting walls all the time. You need something to keep you going and solving your own problem is probably the best way to get past that block each time.”
Solve your own problem — it's the only fuel that survives nights and weekends
Framed not as a product axiom but as a stamina argument: solo founders quit when motivation runs out, and a problem you personally feel is the only thing that reliably refills the tank at 11pm on a Tuesday. Pick ideas by 'would I keep coding this when nothing is working' rather than TAM.
“You need to have golden moments where you can ask for a rating. In this case it could be when you tap on a stop and see a live tracking of a bus or train — you can actually see it moving on the map. That's a great moment to ask the customer for a rating where the customer is most likely to respond positively.”
Time rating prompts to the app's wow moment, not session start
Rating prompts fire at the exact moment the user experiences the product's core magic (watching their bus crawl across the map live), not on session start or random N-th-launch heuristics. The resulting 75K+ five-star ratings on 5.2M downloads is what feeds the ASO flywheel — once you're top-10 for a keyword, ratings velocity decides whether you reach #1.
“For the first couple of years I started to monetize using banner ads — it was making around $8,000 a month. But then the pandemic hit and suddenly my ad revenue just disappeared. I knew I needed to pivot quickly. I rebuilt the app with subscriptions in mind, with premium features that would entice people to pay on an annual basis.”
Pandemic forced an ads-to-subscriptions pivot — that is where the real money was
Ad revenue on a commuter app evaporated overnight in March 2020. The forced rebuild around annual subscriptions plus A/B-tested paywalls is what produced the $30K/mo business. Lesson for bootstrappers: ad-supported single-app revenue is fragile to one black-swan event; subscription pricing is what compounds. The crisis was the gift.