Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
16 tactics from Aaron Webster Schaller & Paul Apollo
Achieving Mission & Profit with Freemium Apps
Watch the full episode“JJ Allaire was tracking his calories in an Excel sheet and thought 'well I could be doing this better on this new fancy handheld device called the iPhone' and he built the very first version of Lose It, put it up on the App Store. The email inbox started getting flooded with people saying 'this app is amazing it's helping me lose weight' — kind of realized like oh I have a product, I have a company here.”
Excel-tracking founder shipped v1 — inbox flooded with testimonials proved demand
Lose It! founder JJ Allaire scratched his own itch by replacing an Excel calorie tracker with an iPhone app at the dawn of the App Store. The contact email he was forced to provide for submission immediately filled with unsolicited 'I'm losing weight' testimonials — that's how he realized he had a product worth building a company around.
“For a number of years our bonuses that the company were paid out only if we met our revenue goals AND our weight-loss goals.”
Tied company bonuses to BOTH revenue AND weight-loss goals
Lose It! refused to let revenue be the only payout trigger for years. Company bonuses only paid if BOTH the revenue target AND the aggregate user weight-loss target were hit — hardcoding the mission into compensation so the team couldn't optimize monetization at the expense of outcomes.
“My job, my role has always been to not diminish the brand, not ruin the free product, and still produce sustainable growth and convince people that premium is where they should be — which I've got to tell you, it's a challenge because the free product is really good.”
Keep the free product exceptional — even when it cannibalizes paid
Paul frames the freemium constraint: the free product is intentionally excellent because mission fulfillment requires it. Premium has to earn its keep on its own merits, not via crippled-free tactics. That constraint forces better paywall positioning and messaging instead of feature gating.
“We think of the free product as being enough features to lose weight, primarily through calorie tracking. Macronutrient tracking, more advanced diets like keto or intermittent fasting, calorie cycling — all of that is in premium. Premium's got over 40 features.”
Free = enough to lose weight; premium = 40+ features to level up
Aaron's framework for what goes free vs premium: free covers the core job (calories in/out, which is genuinely sufficient to lose weight); premium is the 'level up' tier with 40+ features for advanced diets, macro tracking, and calorie cycling. They add to premium rather than taking from free.
“For users like that we'll offer steeper and steeper discounts. Okay, you don't want to give us $40 — will you give us $5? And there are some people who won't, but it allows us to take cohorts that otherwise we're just not monetizing and make something.”
Steep discount ladder ($40 → $5) monetizes long-term free users
For free users 30+ days in (whom data shows won't convert at full price), Lose It! cascades discounts down to as low as ~$5 — monetizing cohorts that would otherwise be $0 forever. They frame it as a loyalty reward to keep it philosophically aligned with the mission.
“As much as I would love to say that talking about our features is the better performer — it's not. Talking about a discount, our audience is very price sensitive, so that is a message we lean pretty heavily into.”
Discount messaging out-converts feature messaging — even when you wish it didn't
After extensive copy testing, Lose It! found discount/savings framing consistently beats feature-benefit framing for their price-sensitive audience. The honest founder lesson: your beautiful feature copy is probably losing to a price tag. Build the features, but don't expect users to convert because of them.
“Our paid marketing is a very, very small part of our overall marketing mix. We really are focusing on App Store optimization — that's a huge lever for us on both the App Store and the Play Store.”
ASO on both stores is the primary lever when paid UA doesn't pencil
Lose It! grew through word-of-mouth and organic acquisition for 15 years. When they tried scaling paid, ROAS came in as low as 10% of predicted LTV — economically setting money on fire. They returned to ASO on both stores as the dominant non-organic lever, supported by a deliberately strong free product as the entry point.
“We went big with a big budget on paid acquisition and it was basically impossible to make the economics work out. We were seeing ROAS as low as 10% — economically it was just setting money on fire.”
Paid UA push hit 10% ROAS — economically setting money on fire
In 2019 Lose It! tried to break free of organic-only growth with a serious paid push. Predicted 10-day ROAS curves came in at ~10% of LTV. The deeper lesson: competitors who make paid work (Noom, MyFitnessPal at 2x the price) priced around paid CAC from day one. Lose It! priced around an organic base — paid couldn't retrofit.
“In weight loss you don't want to talk about it until you've seen success. When you find successes you start losing 5, 10, 15, 50 pounds — now you're going to scream from the rooftops. We've got programmatic emails that go out at a few weight-loss milestones asking people to tell us their story.”
Trigger word-of-mouth at the 5-pound milestone, not at install
Lose It! waits for a 5-pound (or larger) milestone before triggering testimonial/story-collection emails — never at install. In stigmatized categories, asking users to evangelize at signup is wrong because they don't want to admit the problem. Wait for the early win, then make sharing a celebration rather than a confession.
“We were essentially paying ten dollars for a premium subscription and the economics worked for us but it just didn't scale as much as we were hoping. We killed it after like a year.”
Referral program paid $10/sub, broke even, killed after a year
Lose It!'s referral program paid $10 per converted premium signup. It broke even but never moved the needle. Worse, treated cohorts had lower LTV than untreated — meaning they were probably paying for shares that would have happened anyway. The funnel math is brutal: 5% of exposed users share, 5% of their friends convert. Killed after a year.
“What we started testing was alright what happens if we just ask people more questions? We don't necessarily care what the answers are; we just make onboarding longer. Our trial take rates went up double digits as onboarding got longer, and we basically just kept making it longer until we got diminishing returns.”
Just made onboarding longer — trial take rates jumped double digits
From 2018 onward Lose It! reversed the 'minimize friction' philosophy. Simply adding more questions — some not even used to set up the product — drove double-digit gains in trial start rates. They kept extending onboarding until diminishing returns. The mechanism is psychological investment, not personalization.
“We found that if we ask people 'hey, do you want more calories on the weekend' and they say yes, they convert more. It really introduces this idea of loss aversion, especially after you've spent like 10 minutes taking a survey, getting into a headspace where you're ready to invest in yourself.”
Set up premium features in onboarding to trigger loss aversion at the paywall
Users configure premium features (like calorie cycling — 'the Weekender') during onboarding. If they opt in, the paywall reframes the trial as 'don't lose what you just set up.' Concrete loss > abstract gain. The mechanism only works for features with day-one resonance — setting a carb goal upfront actively hurt conversion in their tests.
“Base users who have been using the app for 30 days and they haven't converted — the only way we have a prayer that they convert is if they leave and then come back and we hit them as a reactivated user.”
If a free user hasn't converted by day 30, only churn-and-return saves them
Lose It!'s data shatters the freemium-lottery promise that base users 'will convert eventually.' After 30 days without conversion, the only realistic path to paid is churning out and being reactivated under a heavy discount offer. The implication: stop hoping the base will convert in place — engineer churn-and-return loops instead.
“When we do exactly the same thing and change the format we're making 10 times more money. So that was how we migrated into being an in-app message first app.”
In-app messages make 10x more money than email at the same offer
Lose It! ran a clean A/B with the cohort as the denominator: half the eligible audience got an email blast, half got an in-app message with identical copy and offer. IAMs generated ~10x the revenue. Users in-product are higher-intent, the funnel is shorter (Apple/Google subscribe is one tap), and the surface is free to send.
“If we interrupt your logging flow — our app is a food tracker — if we deliver messages during that experience, that's obviously a pretty horrible user experience. We could see in the experiments that people uninstalled and they didn't upgrade. But if we hit you with that message after you're finished logging or after you've marked your day complete, those times are a lot more beneficial.”
Time in-app messages to user wins, never mid-task
Lose It! learned that delivering monetization messages mid-task (during food logging) raised uninstalls and depressed upgrades. Wait until task completion — the dopamine spike from a small win — and conversion jumps. They added a persistent countdown timer at the top of the log so users who dismiss the modal still see a path to the sale all day.
“We became cash flow positive in 2016 and profitable in 2017. In 2020 our CEO Patrick at the time started on a path to figure out how we could buy out our series A investors. When we were acquired in 2022 by Ziff Davis we were fully employee and founder owned.”
Cash-flow positive 2016, profitable 2017, bought back Series A in 2020, exited 2022 fully employee-owned
Lose It! launched in 2008, took a small Series A for walking-around money, added subscriptions in 2012, hit profitability in 2017, used cash flow to repurchase the Series A in 2020, and exited to Ziff Davis in 2022 as a fully employee-and-founder-owned company. A capital-efficient path most consumer apps never consider.