Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
12 tactics from Thomas Petit
What it Takes to Succeed with Paid User Acquisition
Watch the full episode“You have to dig in but why but why again and again because usually they just tell you I want to accelerate I want more Revenue I want to accelerate but why can't you do it otherwise or why do you think paid is the solution and most importantly what are your minimum bar of return.”
Know your return goal before a single dollar leaves your account
Petit's first filter before any paid UA engagement is forcing founders to name a specific return goal — not a vague aspiration. Most people say 'accelerate,' which is not a goal. Only when you have a minimum bar (2-week payback, 12-month ROI, critical mass of users) can you decide whether any channel or budget will ever get you there.
“do not go there with 20 a day it's money love like you're not going to learn anything but you can't really make the machine work at all not going to pass threshold there's a bunch of like criteria and that minimum bar of the amount you can put to actually start seeing something.”
Spending $20/day on algorithmic ad platforms is money wasted — the machine can't learn
Modern ad platforms (Meta, TikTok, Google UAC) require enough conversion events to feed their optimization algorithms. At $20/day you'll almost never generate the 10–20 daily events per campaign needed to exit the learning phase. The result: premium CPMs, garbage traffic quality, and nothing learned. Petit's floor is $10–20K/month before algorithmic channels make any sense.
“one advice maybe if you've got 5 or 10K to test probably would be to avoid algorithmic platform so search on this I mean the nature of the inventory is very different but influencer is also one where you might want to try because you can find influencer of the size that you are.”
Early stage, limited budget? Start with search ads and influencers, not Meta
Apple Search Ads and micro-influencers are the two channels that can work at small budgets because they don't rely on algorithmic optimization for conversions. Search ads win on intent; influencers win on trust and can be scoped to any budget. Petit recommends these as the entry point before a founder has the cash or data volume to make algorithmic platforms viable.
“if you're making 20 cents per install in the state there is no UA manager on Earth that can attract traffic that is going to be profitable like so running a bit of a very simplistic very basic what proximately is my Revenue per user.”
Revenue per install below $1 in the US means no UA manager on Earth can save you
Before touching paid UA at all, check your effective revenue per install from organic sources. If it is under $1 in tier-1 markets, unit economics make profitable buying impossible regardless of channel or creative quality. This reality check saves founders from burning budget on a fundamentally broken funnel rather than a fixable creative or audience problem.
“if you're looking at the unit economics where the app has really good ASO and it's like the top result for a very specific keyword the average revenue per user could be five dollars and it looks amazing but then the problem you run into there is that the intent on a paid install is nowhere near the intent on a search install.”
Your organic revenue-per-user may be deceptively high — paid traffic converts at a fraction of search intent
Apps with strong ASO have revenue-per-user numbers inflated by high-intent searchers. Using that figure to project paid UA profitability leads to expensive mistakes. Petit recommends always segmenting by acquisition source before extrapolating unit economics to paid channels, because paid and organic users behave like completely different cohorts.
“when you find a real winner it's game changing I mean but like really game changing I can remember a couple time in history where we find like a it's not a 10x winner it's a 100x winner it can change the course of the company to find one like it's vastly understated how you could completely change the course of a company just by finding this winner.”
A single 100x creative can change a company's trajectory — but only radical concept testing finds it
Petit has witnessed creatives that outperform baseline by 100x — not 10x. Finding them requires testing radically different concepts (person vs. animation, provocative vs. bland, long vs. short) rather than small variations of one idea. Testing 20 variants of the same concept is the most common mistake; breakthroughs come from concepts that seem completely different from anything expected to work.
“on Facebook you can but the most efficient strategy just go bro you just put the country and I want people to be at least 18 all of the US and have an iPhone and then the creative and the events that you're including are doing the targeting work.”
On Meta, the creative IS your targeting — broad audience beats narrow on algorithmic platforms
Counter-intuitively, Petit's best-performing Meta campaigns use the broadest possible targeting — whole country, minimum age, device type. The creative itself and downstream conversion events signal to the algorithm which users to find. Narrow interest-based targeting costs more, shrinks delivery, and fights the platform's optimization — a hangover from the pre-algorithmic era.
“content created by creators is what has been winning in the last one or two years that's why the younger generation wants to see and it's not the only way to do ads but if you're not doing any of it you're missing out on something huge.”
Creators produce winning ads because they understand platform context your designer does not
Petit argues that UGC/creator content consistently outperforms agency-produced ads because creators intuitively understand native context — the format, pace, and style that makes content feel organic on TikTok or Reels. Designers optimizing for brand guidelines produce ads that feel like ads. Creators produce content that gets watched. For apps targeting younger demographics, creator content is no longer optional.
“I'd say only gamble money you can afford to lose maybe it's going to come back but maybe not and even if it comes back it may not come back in a week so can you actually afford to finance this or maybe you need to change a bunch of things before you can actually get there.”
Cash availability is as important as the return goal — only spend money you can afford not to see for a year
Return on ad spend is not a cash-flow-neutral concept: you spend today and get revenue back over weeks, months, or years. Cash availability is its own separate check distinct from the return goal. A bootstrapped founder with $30K in the bank cannot afford 12-month payback cycles even if the math works in theory — the business starves waiting for money to return.
“more than what my Blended cost but paying subscriber up or whatever is what is the trend of this brand.”
Track blended subscriber acquisition cost trend — not just the paid ROAS dashboard
Paid UA creates secondary lifts in reviews, ASO rankings, and word-of-mouth that don't show up in the MMP. Petit advocates measuring blended subscriber acquisition cost — total marketing spend divided by all new subscribers regardless of source — as the North Star. This keeps teams honest about whether paid is genuinely additive or just cannibalizing organic numbers.
“The hook is like kind of the first second or three seconds of your ad it is extremely important because if people don't stop in the scrolling you're dead already you need them to stop on your ads this is fundamental and very often if you talk about what you're doing there's no way people are going to stop.”
Hooks matter more than value props — the first 3 seconds determine if anyone watches the rest
On TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Facebook, user attention is won or lost in the opening three seconds. An ad that opens with the value proposition will be skipped; one that opens with something surprising earns a pause. Petit's framework: optimize the hook as the primary creative variable, separate from the transition to the actual product message.
“I'd say for me like the area that I find really hard to nail is the 0 to 50K because 50k months is where you can start having two three channels running in parallel or even I can split the budget between campaigns and start making a bit more of experiments.”
The $0–50K/month budget zone is the hardest in paid UA — most agencies won't touch you until you're through it
Below $50K/month, you can barely run a single channel properly with almost no room for parallel experiments. At $50K you can split across two or three channels, test campaign variants, and start generating enough signal to optimize. This is also the threshold where serious freelancers and agencies start taking you on — making the 0–50K zone both the hardest technically and the loneliest operationally.