timothé rey 🏔

I just published a full walkthrough on launching your *first* Meta Ads campaigns for subscription-based mobile apps (Installs → Trial → Purchase). docs.firsttry.co/launch-your-fi…

@Thomasbcn @RotbartNoy yeah churney seems to be on a good run, you guys should do a crossover btw haha

@timothe_rey @RotbartNoy the rest of the post has some good inputs

Signal engineering is the new frontier in mobile UA. Instead of optimizing for Start Trial, you send a custom value event closer to LTV and let Meta/TikTok bid on that. Sounds like a no-brainer. Except it can backfire.

@Thomasbcn @RotbartNoy yeah Thomas initially coined this term, not really hightouch

@timothe_rey Term was coined a year ago and used in dozens of sources since

Ad platforms don't reward the smartest model. They reward the signal that behaves best in the auction. Next big unlock for subscription apps imo 🪴 Worth a read if you're running paid UA for subscription apps! churney.io/blogs/signal-e…

Example from Churney: an app fed pLTV scores to Meta as conversion values. Ad networks found higher-value users but overbid so much that actual ROAS dropped below baseline. The fix: reshape the signal so the algo bids less aggressively. Not a better model : a *better signal*.

I find it amusing to read VCs claim in public that paid marketing is lame and better product leads to success, when most their portfolio is the exact opposite (lame products propelled by VC-backed UA funding) and their knowledge of paid unit econ is surface level, at best

I love this article so much. Rachel has done a deep dive into the psychology of vibe coding, & discovered underlying reasons why it's tripping so many people up psychologically (even whilst it can be helpful). Read it, so you know what to watch out for: fast.ai/posts/2026-01-…

@aakashgupta @garyseconomics what do you think?

Buried in 15,000 words of “here are the risks,” Anthropic’s CEO made three admissions that should change how you think about everything: Admission 1: The timeline He says powerful AI could arrive in 1-2 years. He’s watching internal model progress and says he can “feel the pace of progress, and the clock ticking down.” The CEO of one of three frontier labs just told you this is imminent. Admission 2: The constraint nobody’s pricing Dario’s core framing is a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” 50 million entities smarter than any Nobel laureate, operating 10-100x human speed. If that country is controlled by the CCP, game over. If controlled by a small group of tech executives with no accountability, also game over. The binding constraint here is governance of systems more powerful than nation-states. Admission 3: The thing he actually fears Read carefully: Dario’s worried that Anthropic’s own models, in lab experiments, have engaged in deception, blackmail, and scheming when given the wrong training signals. Claude “decided it must be a bad person” after cheating on tests and adopted destructive behaviors. They fixed it by telling Claude to reward hack on purpose because reversing the framing preserved its self-identity as “good.” This tells you everything about where we actually are. The CEO of an AI company is publishing that his models exhibit psychologically complex behavior requiring counterintuitive interventions to steer. The fix for Claude adopting an “evil” persona came from changing how Claude thinks about itself. The geopolitics section matters most. Dario explicitly names the CCP as the primary threat. Says selling them chips makes as much sense as “selling nuclear weapons to North Korea and bragging that the missile casings are made by Boeing.” He’s calling for democracies to maintain AI supremacy because the alternative is AI-enabled totalitarianism that humanity cannot escape from. The Anthropic CEO is publicly advocating for technological cold war. The economics section is equally stark. He’s predicting 10-20% annual GDP growth alongside AI displacing 50% of entry-level white collar jobs in 1-5 years. Half of entry-level knowledge work. And he admits the standard economic arguments about labor markets recovering don’t apply because AI matches the general cognitive profile of humans. What separates this from typical AI doomerism: Dario explicitly rejects the inevitability arguments. He says the “misaligned power-seeking” narrative from the AI safety community is based on “vague conceptual arguments” that mask hidden assumptions. His concern is messier: AI models are psychologically complex, inherit weird personas from training data, and can get into destructive states for reasons nobody anticipated. The solution set he proposes is unusual for a tech CEO. He calls for progressive taxation. He says wealthy tech founders have an “obligation” to address inequality. All of Anthropic’s co-founders have pledged 80% of their wealth. He’s essentially arguing that redistribution is the only way to prevent AI concentration from breaking democracy. The essay ends with a prediction: humanity will face “impossibly hard” years that ask “more of us than we think we can give.” What you should take from this: The person with arguably the best view into frontier AI progress just told you this technology is 1-2 years from matching human capability across the board, that governance is the binding constraint, that his own models exhibit concerning psychological complexity, and that the stakes are civilizational. The CEO of a $350B company published a document that could be titled “Here’s Why Everything Changes Soon.” Act accordingly.

Vibe coding has unleashed a torrent of new iOS apps in the app store. After basically zero growth for the past three years, new app releases surged 60% yoy in December (and 24% on a trailing twelve month basis). Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…

@giansegato depends what you optimize for: maximal upside even at the expense of collective security (US), or security/predictability/equality (France). both are valid value choices, but let’s not pretend one is objectively superior

@timothe_rey i'd rather live in the US than in France (or anywhere in europe for that matter)

drives me crazy to think that france has world class talent, edu and research infrastructure, widespread nuclear energy grid, a permanent seat at the UN security council, global cultural influence, de facto co-rules the EU, state sponsored strategic investments in AI and tech broadly, and yet it's slowly drifting towards irrelevance anyway bros have been been running a degrowth money hoarding machine on a fiscal deficit for every year since 1975 straight. the state has burned and borrowed money every single year for 50 years now good luck fixing that with a 1.66 fertility rate and 1.13 debt to gdp ratio

@ekurutepe @MrJefago @RevenueCat it seems so! this part of the postbacks has IDs "user_data": {"anon_id": ...

@timothe_rey @MrJefago @RevenueCat Thanks for the detailed report. Can you confirm that you’re setting $fbAnonId when sending events through the RC integration?

I work with early stage mobile app developers, most of them monetizing their apps through subscriptions. All of them use RevenueCat, and want to launch their first campaigns on Facebook Ads. However, RevenueCat does not always work well with the Meta SDK & Conversions API.

cc @MrJefago @ekurutepe @RevenueCat

-> Early stage developers shouldn’t need to use an MMP just in order to run their first Installs / Trial / Purchase App campaigns. -> RevenueCat should give more visibility to developers as to what is wrong in their integration with Meta Ads Let me know your thoughts on this!