Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
10 tactics from Lisa Kennelly
Growth, Revenue, and Marketing Strategies for Your App
Watch the full episode“every single man of a certain age that i've spoken to from the united states in the last six months who is even remotely interested in like this industry has heard that ad 50 times”
Offline channels reach audiences that digital ads never touch
Fishbrain's target market — older male anglers in rural US — skews heavily toward radio, ESPN, and out-of-home. Running ESPN radio and satellite radio ads reached saturated frequency with the right demographic at a fraction of the cost of competing for them on Facebook. When the audience doesn't self-identify on digital platforms, offline channels aren't nostalgia — they're the primary reach vehicle.
“it's more or less like 10 of the sort of performance acquisition budget we think about is going towards awareness activities... this money is an investment because if we get that awareness and branding stuff out now it's going to make the customer acquisition cost for the performance cheaper later”
Allocate ~10% of acquisition budget to brand awareness before it is needed
Fishbrain rings-fenced approximately 10% of its acquisition budget for brand and awareness activities, treated as investment rather than performance spend. The thesis: brand-warmed audiences convert cheaper on performance channels later. This requires internal education for finance and investors who default to measuring dollar-in-user-out.
“there's no webmd for female health we have the space to take this market share we can command all this seo value right so we started building out this amazing content team... and it was all for free and it was like wait a minute this is driving seo traffic but are we converting it”
Build free SEO content, then paywall it once you have the audience
Clue hired a former New Yorker editor to build scientifically rigorous female health content — effectively becoming the WebMD for female health. That content drove massive SEO traffic for free for years. Eventually the team paywalled the premium content, converting an organic moat into a subscription driver. Establish authority and traffic first, then monetize the asset.
“thinking of it as like a membership versus like a subscription because there's this whole thing around like female health and sort of supporting community and using your data for good”
Frame a subscription as a membership when your mission supports it
When introducing monetization at Clue, Lisa tested framing the subscription as a membership — you are funding research that doesn't exist anywhere else, supporting a community, and contributing data to science. This shifted the conversion story from 'pay for features' to 'join a mission.' For apps where users share a strong identity or cause, membership framing can lower resistance to payment.
“hiring people who are into fishing makes a huge difference right like hiring people who are a target customer you shouldn't just hire your target customer when it comes to marketing and business it's actually pretty helpful”
Hire target-customer employees to close the empathy gap
Fishbrain is headquartered in Stockholm but its core market is American fishermen. Lisa deliberately hired US-based team members who actually fish — for business development, social media, and marketing. When a product team is culturally or geographically removed from its users, hiring inside the customer base gives permanent, cheap market research that no agency can replicate.
“we'll get like one of our amazing customers... a guy from rural mississippi who loves fishbrain and he will... call in and just take questions from the team for 20 minutes and that in itself is like a really great”
Invite a real customer to your all-hands to create company-wide empathy
Fishbrain periodically invites a real user to take live questions from the entire company for 20 minutes at their all-hands meeting. A product manager's customer interview notes reach a few people; a fisherman from rural Mississippi talking directly to engineers, designers, and finance changes everyone's mental model. One unfiltered customer voice compounds across every future decision.
“utility is really what how you grow and that's like top of the funnel what people think about they don't think oh i want a fishing social network they think i want a tool to know where to go fishing”
Utility beats social as the top-of-funnel hook — even for social apps
Fishbrain started as a vertical social network but learned that 'join a fishing social network' doesn't drive app downloads — 'find out where the fish are biting' does. People search for tools, not communities. The community emerges once they're inside the utility. Positioning a social product around its utility value in acquisition, then revealing the community inside, consistently outperforms leading with the social angle.
“all of those 13 million registered users they don't all of a sudden just start buying just because you put a shop in their face which in retrospect makes sense but like it's been much more of a challenge”
Commerce layered on social did not convert — even when it made logical sense
Fishbrain added a marketplace three years before this episode with a logical thesis: users see what gear someone used to catch a fish, one click to buy it. In practice, 13 million registered users didn't convert to shoppers at any meaningful rate. Most commerce revenue came from the web, not the app. The mental mode of using a utility or social app doesn't automatically include buying — that purchase habit has to be built separately.
“we use some positioning rod it's like having a fish finder but on your smartphone because a fish finder costs like 300 right some of these are super expensive and so we've tried to sort of justify like the cost”
Anchor subscription price against what users already spend in the hobby
Fishbrain tested positioning its subscription as 'a fish finder in your pocket' — a reference category where users routinely spend $300+. Anchoring against existing hobby spending reframes a subscription fee from an abstract monthly cost into a concrete comparison where the app is obviously cheap. When an audience spends heavily on physical gear, the software should price against the gear category, not against Netflix.
“very quickly we were like we need designers we need our own design team... that was kind of a really key hire which was quite hard to find... i immediately poached from the agency and they've been full-time for the last three years”
Dedicated marketing design team is a prerequisite for performance at scale
One of Lisa's earliest hires at Fishbrain was a dedicated marketing design team — not product designers moonlighting, but people whose entire job was producing marketing assets. She poached two people from an agency and kept them full-time. A solo social media manager burning out producing all creative output is a bottleneck; a channel-specific junior designer unlocks scale without burnout.