nika

it basically doesn’t matter if you’re at 10k mrr, 100k mrr or 1m mrr you’ll probably still feel behind because the goalpost keeps moving 10k becomes 50k 50k becomes 100k 100k becomes 1m it’s always another round number in the future you want to achieve

been a while in the last 2 months of being inactive here: - i became a dad - we crossed $8M ARR - realized I have even less free time than I thought pretty crazy how much can change in just 2 months anyway, gonna try to be more active here again, kinda using this account as a personal diary too $10M next

nice i like this @RevenueCat one thing i’d like to see is how much $$ was “saved” from these declines in one go, now you have to go inside the refund request chart, segment to product and calculate it yourself

tried the $0.99 first month + 7-day free trial combo on the new app last month fully ads driven seems to be working just fine for now

7M ARR ✅ almost a year in still lots to improve lots to learn from lots of shit to test lots of systems to build lots of hard decisions to make enjoying the ride 10M next

we’ve spent over $3M on ads & paid ads becomes way easier once you stop treating it like gambling after a few months of testing you should roughly know: your CAC your LTV your retention your payback period then you can work backwards example: $35 expected LTV $20 CAC if you want to acquire a cohort with ~$10k in expected lifetime revenue: $10,000 / $35 = ~286 paying users 286 x $20 CAC = ~$5,720 ad spend now you have a benchmark if you consistently can’t get close to that CAC, investigate what’s limiting it creative offer paywall onboarding store page tracking audience/geo optimize for purchase/subscription events when you have enough volume target broad where possible and let the algo find buyers once you find winners, make at least 20 variations different hooks formats angles voiceovers backgrounds throw the strongest ones in a cbo and let the algo fight one thing though: CAC < LTV doesn’t automatically mean you can scale you also need a payback period your cash flow can handle and a CAC that doesn’t fly up when you increase spend if those stay in check, then you can actually start pushing budget and get to 100k 200k 300k whatever you can handle ads = math once you have enough data

0-10k/mo revenue = test everything until something works 10k-100k/mo = find the winners and make 30+ versions of them 100k-1M+/mo = build a machine that produces new winners every week (CAC going up while scaling is normal) as long as CAC stays below LTV and your payback period works, it mostly comes down to how much profit you’re willing to reinvest into growth

the math on this: as it stands, 112K annual subs hit their renewal date between november and next august 38K of them already cancelled, so those won't renew unless we do something. the other 74K are still set to renew, but that number drops ~5pp every month as people get closer to their date realistically we land around a 35% renewal rate. so of the $3.33M on the table: $1.17M lands, $1.14M is already gone, and $1.03M drifts off before their date (net proceeds) an example strategy: a win back offer inside the app at -30% off the yearly plan, only shown to people who already cancelled, triggered weeks before their renewal date instead of after right now it's a pool of 38K annual cancellations. if we win back 15% back it's +$122K in proceeds we save but as the drift plays out that pool grows to ~73K by august then we should be able to save $232K of proceeds timing is everything here

we're grinding towards $7M ARR and ofc that comes with new roadblocks (which we were expecting) we pushed yearly extra hard ($12.99/mo vs $34.99/yr no brainer) money upfront went straight back into distribution, that's why we're at 7M ARR rn but we're almost a year live so the first renewal cycle is coming 33% of our active subs already have auto-renew off so $1.2M ARR sitting there waiting to expire for now it seems rest of 2026 is fine, but in Q1 ‘27 = ~$371K gone, Q2 ‘27 = ~$626K gone, and of course cancels keep drifting up 4-6pp a month per cohort if we do nothing (meanwhile revenue keeps running at 600-900K/month, which makes it easy to not see this coming) only ‘fix’ is winning them back BEFORE they churn; before expiry you can save 10-34% and after around 5-12% goal next 6 months: reach $10M ARR and win back as much as we can before it expires

no hard paywall btw people on X act like hard paywalls are the only meta now and yes, if your onboarding is cracked and the app actually delivers, they can work well but don’t treat it like the only way to monetize a/b test it and include refunds + billing issues in the result no point increasing conversion if you end up with a 10-20% refund rate imo give people value first, they’ll convert eventually

5 months ago when we hit 1M ARR I tweeted that our ARR prediction at the end of this year would be like 3-5M ARR already surpassed that big time and climbing steadily to 10M ARR where new challenges are waiting always double down on your predictions 😅

saturated app niches are not dead usually the existing apps are just boring make it fresher, more fun to use and actually worth downloading Pingo AI launched like 2 years ago they cleared 7M in revenue and are doing $600K months atm just a few dudes who understand social media, marketing and how to build something people want

if you're on revenuecat, hook the mcp into claude and just ask where exactly your business is leaking it digs through your churn & cancellations, runs you against benchmarks and hands you a plan fix things on time instead of firefighting later hour of work, used to be days

+7.4% more revenue from one ‘tiny’ paywall change swapped the positions of the yearly & monthly blocks waiting for 95% confidence but looking good so far psa: test everything

our first $1k mrr took 60 days, the next $15k took 18: $0 > $1k: 60 days $1k > $2k: 6 days $2k > $4k: 2 days $4k > $8k: 4 days $8k > $16k: 6 days $16k > $32k: 13 days $32k > $64k: 24 days $64k > $128k: 58 days $128k > $256k: 37 days $256k > $512k: 106 days 0 to $512k mrr in 313 days NGL those first 2 months were rough, grinding every day after months of building 60 days of nothing is the price of entry, most people don't pay it they ship, see no traction, and jump to the next app. or worse, sell right when it starts working we picked one and stayed

Your socials are part of the app A lot of people will search you on Google, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, everywhere They want to see if it’s legit and what other people think >App >Reviews >Content >Online presence It’s all one flywheel Also very important if you ever want to exit the app one day

“Don’t waste time building on Android, they won’t convert” ok sir

One of the most annoying thing about app distribution is attribution & measuring You would think these big companies would make things easy to implement, measure & check But instead it takes days of fucking around, ffs

Momentum is picking back up again with ads +$12K MRR in 3 days Influencer marketing phase will come next to amplify the momentum Biggest months are still ahead, need to reach 10M ARR this year

Every time I think AI UGC is slowing down, another app pops up and makes 500k in less than 6 months with organic AI videos only If they can do it, you can do it 🤷🏻‍♂️