Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
10 tactics from Tim Dikun
What Reading.com Learned Testing Prices and Funnels
Watch the full episode“We experimented with a ton of different numbers from $4.99 all the way up to $19.99 a month. $12.49 had the highest LTV lift. That's been the base subscription price since then for the last probably two years or so — and it's still winning after multiple years of looking back.”
Almost doubling the monthly price from $6.99 to $12.49 lifted LTV — and the higher price is still winning years later
Reading.com's first act after gaining access to RevenueCat's Experiments feature was to run a full price ladder from $4.99 to $19.99. The winning price was nearly double the launch price, and longitudinal cohort analysis confirmed it wasn't a short-term anomaly: two years later $12.49 still outperforms on realized LTV. The lesson is that initial pricing is almost always a guess — and systematic testing quickly uncovers significant unrealized value even for products with strong word-of-mouth dynamics.
“We ran a test where we had monthly without a trial trying to push people to annual. It did — we did see more people use the annual option. But ultimately long-term it didn't work out. It ended up with a 17% drop in realized LTV.”
Removing the free trial on monthly to push annual caused a 17% LTV drop — hesitant users need an on-ramp
The now-common tactic of hiding the free trial on monthly plans to coerce users into annual backfired for Reading.com. Users willing to try a monthly plan but not commit to annual are often moderate-confidence users who convert well over time — removing their on-ramp eliminated them from the funnel entirely. The experiment is a cautionary counter-example for apps with high-consideration purchases where trial friction matters more than annual adoption rate.
“When you're running a start trial campaign the signal is like all the people who are willing to start a trial but not necessarily all the people who are willing to pay. When you have a purchase-only funnel every user that gets sent back to the ad network is one that's high intent, high quality — the algorithms are able to better find users just like that.”
Money-back guarantee on web funnels sends better purchase signal to Meta than free trial — quality users find you faster
Reading.com replaced the free trial with a 30-day money-back guarantee on its web ad funnels. Conversion rates dropped, but every conversion event sent to Meta was a real purchaser — high-intent signal the algorithm could use to find more like-minded users. Over time the higher-quality audience the algorithm learned to target more than compensated for the lower raw conversion rate, and few users actually exercised the refund.
“We took our existing in-app onboarding and just replicated it one-to-one in a web funnel and started sending some traffic to that — and I think it was 50% better conversion to trial and then a 30% better conversion to paid than the same exact onboarding in the app.”
Replicating in-app onboarding one-to-one on the web converted 50% better to trial and 30% better to paid
When Reading.com's first web2app test replicated the exact in-app onboarding with no changes, it outperformed the native app on every metric — without any optimization. The gain is attributed in part to brand trust from the reading.com domain (an easily memorable, authoritative URL that users type directly after seeing an ad) and the web's ability to build context before any purchase request is made.
“We definitely see based on the data that folks are seeing ads and then actually just going directly to the website not clicking on the ad. When you have an easy-to-remember domain like that that has domain authority I absolutely think that helps — and that was an intentional strategy on our part.”
A trusted domain like reading.com drives direct traffic from ad viewers who type it in — brand is conversion infrastructure
Teaching.com deliberately invested in exact-match domains (typing.com, reading.com, flashcards.com) for their SEO value and, critically, the instant trust signal they emit. For web2app funnels, domain trust reduces the sales burden. The reading.com data shows a meaningful share of ad viewers bypass the click entirely and type the URL — a signal that brand familiarity built through ad exposure converts through a channel that no attribution tool can measure.
“We found that about 20% of the users who are starting a trial or completing a purchase on the web are also opting in to purchase this PDF upsell. Right now it's just a Google Drive folder that we send people a link to and they're able to download the PDFs directly.”
20% of users buy a $9.99 printable upsell immediately after starting a trial — one-time IAP adds revenue without subscription churn
Reading.com offers a $9.99 one-time purchase giving immediate access to the full curriculum's printable worksheets — content that is also available progressively inside the subscription. The offer appears immediately post-trial-start or post-purchase, and 1 in 5 users buys it. The materials create offline brand presence in the home, reinforce parent commitment to the curriculum, and generate incremental revenue from users who would have stayed subscribers regardless.
“Your first few marketing hires generally need to be generalists because you can't afford to have a channel expert. And the saying about jack of all trades master of none — we haven't had great success with marketing generalists. What we found to be super successful is just contracting with channel experts. They can do it in half the time an internal person can and your cost is lower.”
Channel-expert contractors outperform in-house marketing generalists — channel depth beats generalist breadth for small apps
Rather than building an in-house marketing team, Reading.com assembled a roster of specialist contractors: one for Meta ads, one for Google, one for Apple Search Ads, one for lifecycle email. Each files a weekly report and requires minimal management. The model gives access to expertise that would be unaffordable full-time, and contractors bring cross-client pattern recognition that any single-app team cannot develop internally.
“We were unable to use Amplitude or Google Analytics even early on. We had to build our own first-party analytics tool in order to really understand what was going on in the app. Using just the out-of-the-box SDK that a lot of these analytics tools have you're just not going to get through Apple review.”
Kids app privacy rules block most analytics and attribution SDKs — build first-party analytics from the start
COPPA and Apple's App Store rules prohibit most standard third-party analytics, advertising attribution, and data collection SDKs in apps designated for children. Reading.com had to build a first-party analytics pipeline that anonymizes data before routing it into Amplitude — adding significant engineering complexity. Any app targeting children must plan for this constraint from day one; retrofitting compliance-friendly analytics is far more costly than building it in.
“We don't use Slack here. We consider it a productivity killer. It encourages always-on behavior. What we do is use different tools that help slow down the pace of conversation and facilitate people thinking through things more deeply before they post them.”
Async-first with Basecamp and no notifications enables deep work — communication tools should serve the builder, not the other way
Teaching.com runs on Basecamp with notifications disabled by default; Slack is kept only in its free tier (90-day message history) for true emergencies. The intent is to protect large blocks of uninterrupted deep work time. New hires are onboarded into the system with explicit instructions to disable all notifications — a cultural forcing function the company attributes directly to the quality of its products and the longevity of its team.
“I think at first it will be a really great LTV boost for the users who are already subscribed. But based on some of the research I've been doing it will also work the other way — folks looking for books online could become a lead gen for the subscription app as well.”
Physical books on Amazon give a two-way flywheel: subscribers get an LTV boost and Amazon buyers become app leads
User demand for physical versions of the in-app storybooks prompted Reading.com to expand into Amazon publishing. The strategy creates a bidirectional acquisition loop: current subscribers buy physical books for off-screen reinforcement (extending subscription value and LTV), while Amazon shoppers discovering the books become a new top-of-funnel for the subscription app. Physical products also create lasting brand presence in the home that digital subscriptions cannot.