Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
10 tactics from Ron Schneidermann
Growing Your App to 1M Paid Subscribers — Ron Schneidermann, AllTrails
Watch the full episode“What really got me across the line was their product channel fit and i feel like that's often overlooked... it's not just like is this a product people are willing to pay money for but just straight up how are you going to get this out to market.”
Evaluate Product-Channel Fit Before Joining — Organic Traffic Is The Moat, Not Just The Product
Ron's reason for joining AllTrails in 2015 was a Google Analytics screen showing millions of free organic trail-search visitors — before the company even had polished apps. He calls this 'product channel fit': a separate question from PMF that asks whether sustainable, scalable distribution already exists. Without it, even great products stall. This lens applies to any acquisition decision or founding choice.
“Essentially what we ended up doing was triaging sort of a different funnel metric each quarter right so one quarter is like we gotta tackle bounce rate all right now we gotta tackle sign up rate now we've gotta tackle pro conversion rate now we gotta tackle retention.”
One Funnel Metric Per Quarter — Serial Focus Turned A Crappy App Into A Profitable One
From 2015 to 2017, AllTrails worked through bounce rate, sign-up rate, pro conversion, and retention — one per quarter — on minimal capital. By end of 2017 they hit profitability. This serial focus is the anti-pattern to roadmaps that spread effort across everything simultaneously. Constraint created clarity: what is the single weakest metric, and can it be meaningfully moved in 90 days?
“Our legacy seo... we have this amazing legacy seo and that was that product channel fit that brought me here... we're able to parlay all of that mobile first seo traffic into incremental organic app installs and that's a huge driver of our business we get millions and millions of incremental app installs that we don't pay a dime for every month.”
Legacy SEO Converts To Free App Installs — Millions Per Month, Zero Paid Acquisition
AllTrails' decade-old trail-page SEO doesn't just drive web traffic — as mobile behavior shifted, those same search visitors convert into free app installs at massive scale. Content produced years ago now compounds into distribution. For any app in a category with high-intent search demand (health, fitness, local), investing early in content SEO creates a distribution moat that paid UA can never match unit-economics-wise.
“The challenge with with that segment is that there's always these you know really esoteric and extreme product requirements... a lot of them are kind of living the van life... they don't want to really pay you any money either it's like this isn't a good growth segment.”
Your Loudest Users Are Not Your Largest Market — Target The Hesitant Majority Instead
AllTrails' 2015 rebrand moved away from hardcore through-hikers (who demanded extreme features and rarely paid) toward the 'my wife' persona — someone who enjoys outdoor time with family but lacks confidence to go alone. That mainstream-hesitant segment is hundreds of millions of people vs. hundreds of thousands of van-lifers. Vocal power users can misdirect your roadmap toward a segment that will never drive revenue.
“We tested it at 30 bucks a year and we tested at 15 bucks a year too... they were about a wash which is really interesting from a net revenue perspective 15 bucks a year versus 30 bucks year was was basically flat but we went with 30 because it gave us more maneuverability.”
Price Elasticity Can Be Flat Across A 2X Range — Choose The Price That Gives You Optionality
AllTrails cut price from $50 to test $30 and $15 — net revenue was flat between them, meaning conversion volume offset the per-unit difference. Ron picked $30 not for revenue maximization but for optionality: room to discount, offer introductory pricing, and run promo campaigns. At $15 there was nowhere to go. If your test shows flat revenue across two prices, always take the higher one for tactical flexibility.
“Our business is driven by ugc right we have this classic ugc flywheel and so obviously we know our pro users are more engaged but a ton of engagement comes from our free users as well and so you can't kind of turn the screws on them too hard without like really fundamentally damaging the business.”
UGC Flywheel Means You Cannot Over-Monetize Free Users — They Power The Core Product
AllTrails' trail data — ratings, photos, condition reports, closures — is entirely user-generated. Free users produce the content that makes the product valuable to paying subscribers. This creates a constraint on aggressive monetization: squeeze free users too hard and you destroy the input supply for the whole flywheel. Any app where free users generate value for paid users must treat free-user experience as a product asset.
“We hardly took any primary capital in 2018 i didn't i didn't want it... i didn't want to get stuck in a a growth model that's dependent on unsustainable paid acquisition right so um almost the entire deal was secondary capital.”
Take Almost No Primary Capital — Secondary Liquidity Lets You Stay Organic
When AllTrails raised $75M from Spectrum Equity, Ron structured it so almost all was secondary (buying out the founder and early investors) with minimal primary hitting the balance sheet. His reason: primary capital creates pressure to spend aggressively on paid acquisition, which conflicts with an organic-SEO-driven model. Taking secondary-only let the company maintain its growth DNA while giving the original stakeholders their exit.
“If you can bootstrap it if you can control your own destiny like do it... don't fall victim to that like just that story that you think is like the classic silicon valley startup story which is you go you raise a big round and you have an it never works it never works that way.”
Don't Fetishize VC Fundraising — Bootstrap If You Can Control Your Own Destiny
AllTrails reached 1M paid subscribers and 25M registered users having raised just $3M in primary capital over its whole history before the Spectrum deal — essentially bootstrapped. Ron's advice to founders: resist the Silicon Valley narrative that equates a big fundraise with success. Over-raising early breeds bad habits, unsustainable channels, and misaligned incentives. The subscription annuity model is especially forgiving of slow, organic growth.
“The folks who subscribed are retaining at higher rates than normal too and i think it's kind of more of a testament to like how the zeitgeist has changed a little bit post-pandemic and again people are like being outside just makes people feel good.”
Pandemic Subscribers Retained At Higher-Than-Normal Rates — Habit Formation Outlasted The Crisis
AllTrails entered 2021 with two unknowns: would pandemic registrants ever convert to paid, and would pandemic subscribers churn when life reopened? Both resolved favorably — conversion and retention actually exceeded pre-COVID norms. The explanation isn't luck: the outdoor habit formed during lockdowns became a permanent lifestyle shift. For subscription apps, a behavior-change moment (pandemic, life event, resolution) can set retention floors permanently above baseline.
“An annual subscription uh the auto renews it's like an annuity like it just builds up every single year... if you're able to kind of you know do a pretty good job on on the retention side and just see this thing build up and just raise the tide every single year.”
Annual Subscriptions Are Annuities — Every Year Of Good Retention Raises The Revenue Floor
Ron describes the compounding mechanics of annual subscription revenue as his single biggest business insight. Each year's cohort becomes the floor for the next year — unlike e-commerce where you re-compete for every transaction. AllTrails went from 20K paying subscribers when Ron joined in 2015 to 1M+ by 2021 because each renewal class added permanently to the base. Annual billing, not monthly, is what makes this compounding effect maximum.