Getting paid traffic off the ground is difficult. There are so many things you need to dial in with your funnel so that the unit economics make sense. From your ads, to the app store/landing page, to your onboarding, ultimately to your offer.
If you are just starting off and considering paid traffic, know that you are paying for learnings in the beginning.
So what is your goal?
Let’s start with some simple back of the napkin math:
Let’s say your annual price is $100 and your monthly price is $15. On average, 30% of people go with the monthly plan. Each subscription gets you ($100 * 70%) + ($15 * 30%) = $74.50.
If 40% of people who start a trial go on to subscribe, your breakeven cost per trial is ($74.50 * 40%) = $29.80.
That means on Meta, for example, your campaigns need to be getting around $29.80 for each trial start.
After a month of testing paid traffic, are you trending in the right direction?
If you have no baseline metrics with organic you have to start with some assumptions. Here are some for a generic subscription app:
install to trial: 10%
trial to subscribe: 40%
share of monthlies to annuals: 30%
Additional considerations:
What’s your share of people who choose the monthly over annual?
What’s your monthly retention rate?
What’s your annual retention rate?
What’s your refund rate?
What do you want your payback period to be?
What do you want your margins to be?
Do you have enough trial event volume for Meta to use as a signal?
Do you go with SKAN or AEM?
Are your assumptions holding?
etc
There are many other considerations further down the road.
You need patience and an ‘invest in learnings’ mindset when just starting off with paid campaigns.
Sovran updates:
Experiences so far building sovran.ai:
Things break and you need to look for a missing bracket, comma, or semi-colon
Build it and they will come is not the right paradigm
Spend as much time marketing as you do building
Updates to the tool this week:
improved visual hook model so the first few seconds have a higher hook rate
you can now ask to include visuals of whatever you want (pills, man reading in nature, woman wearing a scarf having tea sitting by a fireplace, etc)
30-Day Rejection Challenge
I am doing a 30-day rejection challenge. The idea is to try and get someone to say ‘no’ to your request each day. You’d be surprised how many people would agree or at least ask you why. Fear of rejection is very common and I notice that fear in myself. This challenge will help alleviate that. I’ll keep you posted on my journey as always.
Some of the questions I’ve asked to try to get a ‘no’:
Can I get a free taco re-fill?
Can you spot me on this? (I was doing a tricep pull-down)
Can you tell me your secret recipe?
Can I get a senior discount?
Here’s the link to the Ted Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/jia_jiang_what_i_learned_from_100_days_of_rejection
Wanna join?
I like the rejection challenge you gotta tell me how that goes. Surprised missing colons aren’t picked up by the bubble UI I guess they don’t have a linter.