Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
9 tactics from Shamanth Rao
How Apple's App Tracking Transparency Affects Developers — Shamanth Rao
Watch the full episode“Your overall marketing spent gave you a a 20 cost per trial across paid and organic and social and everything that you're spending on... would you want a model that's helpful in helping you grow or would you want a model that's accurate but is it helping you grow.”
Blended Cost Per Trial Is The Post-ATT North Star — Total Spend Divided By Total Trials
Post-ATT, channel-level ROAS calculations are unreliable — Facebook models conversions, Google says 'take our word for it,' and postbacks go to networks not advertisers. Shamanth's practical replacement: divide total marketing spend by total new trials across all sources. This blended metric is what offline advertisers always used. It's less precise but directionally accurate, and it doesn't let broken attribution lead to wrong decisions about scaling or cutting spend.
“Tracking is broken even if performance is not right... if you look at the itunes dashboards you're like you think all right you know you didn't just go crashing down which is what i was afraid would happen right right that has not happened.”
Tracking Is Broken — But Performance May Not Be. Check Blended Numbers Before Panicking
After ATT launched, reported CPAs from Facebook skyrocketed because the privacy threshold hid attribution — but many apps' iTunes dashboards showed stable or growing trial numbers. The lesson: platform-reported metrics became unreliable directional signals, not ground truth. Before cutting iOS spend, check blended acquisition cost (total spend / total trials) against the App Store revenue dashboard to see if real performance actually degraded.
“A subscription app is less impacted by that uh just because uh you know again your cost per trial which is the primary metric nearly every subscription app optimizes for is generally under fifty dollars which means for the same five hundred dollar budget you're getting uh you get uh you're getting ten purchases so you're less susceptible to that privacy threshold.”
Subscription Apps Have A Structural ATT Advantage Over Games — Cost Per Trial Clears The Privacy Threshold
Apple's SKAdNetwork privacy threshold hides purchase events when campaign volume is too low — a killer for high-CPA gaming apps spending $150+ per purchaser ($500/day = 3 events, suppressed). Subscription apps with $50 or lower cost-per-trial generate 10+ events per $500 campaign, consistently above threshold. This structural difference means subscription app advertisers get more signal and less blind spending than gaming advertisers under ATT.
“Nearly every subscription app i know has 90 plus of their free trials happen within the first 24 hours of install... the fact that all of the trials nearly all the trials happen within the first 24 hours make it relatively easier for subscription apps to have the signal be captured by skadnetwork.”
90% Of Subscription Trials Happen In 24 Hours — SKAdNetwork Captures Nearly All Your Signal
SKAdNetwork uses time-based timers: if no new event arrives within 24 hours of install, it sends back whatever conversion value it has. For subscription apps where 90%+ of trials occur within the first day, this means the algorithm captures the critical conversion signal almost completely. Compare this to gaming or e-commerce where meaningful purchases might happen on day 3, 7, or 30 — those signals are lost under ATT. The 24h trial window is a hidden structural advantage.
“The webpage can do a much much better job of selling than the app store can uh while we're still making it clear that this is an app uh and while the actual conversion happens within the app itself.”
Web Landing Pages Sell The Product Better Than The App Store Ever Could
The App Store forces every app into the same template: icon, title, screenshots, short description. A web landing page lets you control the exact value proposition, social proof, emotional framing, and CTA structure. Shamanth recommends a simple web-first flow — landing page → App Store link — as the first post-ATT experiment, well before building a full web checkout. Apps using this saw month-on-month growth through the ATT transition.
“Your most important uh page point and value proposition goes to the header then there's social proof then your most important emotional benefits then the teachers i think the most successful advertisers we work with are very very intentional about what that web page is looking like and they also test rigorously.”
Structure Your Landing Page Intentionally — Header, Social Proof, Emotional Benefits, Then Features
Shamanth's team found that generic 'homepage-style' landing pages underperform versus pages built with a deliberate hierarchy. The formula: lead with the single strongest value claim in the header, stack social proof next, then emotional benefits, then feature specifics. Many apps send paid traffic to their marketing homepage and wonder why web flows don't convert — the page wasn't designed for a cold acquisition audience.
“The post pack goes to the networks but not the advertiser with ios 15 if the post back goes to the advertiser you can at the very least verify they're telling the truth with bonkers considering i think david you imagine uh until all this time you you just have to take the platform's word for it even pre-att.”
With ATT, Advertisers Have To Trust Platforms — iOS 15 Postbacks Finally Let You Verify
Before iOS 15, SKAdNetwork postbacks went to ad networks (Facebook, Google, TikTok) but NOT to the advertiser — meaning advertisers had to take platform-reported numbers on faith. TikTok was caught silently changing null conversion values to zero (different semantics). iOS 15 postback delivery to advertisers (via their MMP) finally enables verification that platform-reported data matches reality — a fundamental accountability shift in mobile advertising.
“It just becomes imprecise at small volumes of data you need a critical mass of data for your analysis to be useful uh right... i think the fact that they're not an antidote to all of the havoc that att has uh brought us about they're applicable to a tiny flavor of the advertisers out there.”
Incrementality Testing Requires Enormous Budgets — Focus On Product Fundamentals First
Every post-ATT discussion surfaces incrementality testing and media mix modeling as solutions. Shamanth's reality check: these tools require multi-million monthly budgets and multiple channels to generate statistically meaningful signals. For most subscription app founders spending low-to-mid six figures monthly on a handful of channels, the answer is simpler — blended metrics, a good product, and solid monetization. Don't let measurement complexity distract from product fundamentals.
“With the custom product features you can have up to 35 versions of your app store uh which means you're like if you're a you know wellness app uh if let's just say you're like a meditation app that has uh meditations for sleep or anxiety and how to meditate you can have a separate landing page so to speak on the app store for sleep anxiety meditation right.”
iOS 15 Custom Product Pages Enable Audience-Specific App Store Experiences
iOS 15's custom product pages give apps up to 35 unique App Store URLs with distinct screenshots, preview videos, and promotional text. A meditation app can send sleep-ad traffic to a sleep-focused App Store page and anxiety-ad traffic to an anxiety-focused page — dramatically improving message-match between ad creative and the store experience. This partially recreates the targeting precision lost to ATT by matching the store presentation to the audience's intent.