tim

It’s happening! I’m booking a venue for a WWDC26 watch party + breakfast in Melbourne Tuesday 9th June @ 10am We’ll watch the (delayed) WWDC26 keynote, have a yummy brekkie and chat everything indie app dev Let me know if you’re available/can make it in the comments below so I can work out numbers

I have been defeated by meta ads USD$3.63 is the lowest I could get this campaign The economics just don’t work The brutal postmortem: 1. I tried running different ad sets thinking I would be testing different creatives (more ad sets = quicker testing) But turns out that meant I was bidding against myself. Driving up costs and burning cash. It took days until I realised this. 2. The reason someone would want to download the app. It wasn’t as strong as I thought it was. Pivoted many times, rebuild many parts of the app, but the economics got worse. I got stuck in the trap of building more features. Thinking that was the problem. But it wasn’t. The issue is a value proposition that is too generic and vague. A hard to communicate feature (turn your photos into a video) and seemingly not as much demand for this as I anticipated. I actually found an interesting demographic: 65+ year olds. Grandparents are downloading the app more than my original target market. Theres something here! But is this the right product? 3. I thought offering lifetime would inject cash into the app sooner. Turns out a broken paywall with no lifetime working beat the paywall with lifetime. The issue: less people signed up for a free trial. 4. The biggest problem: only 5% of people actually see my paywall. It’s behind the product demo. In this case the demo fires off late in the onboarding process, and if the demo fails (they didn’t accept photo permissions or their library is too thin) no demo shows = no paywall. 5. And the biggest mistake of all: I wasn’t optimising for trial signups. Instead I was optimising for installs. Asking Claude what my issues were it pointed out: meta is training the audience on people who download free apps. Not training on people who pay for apps. So that means all that ad spend, all that experimentation, maybe wasted. Arg. Plan moving forward: I’m going to be less bipolar about marketing. I was looking for quick results and making changes daily. A data lead approach says: 1. Show the paywall earlier in the onboarding process 2. Run a new campaigned geared to trial startups with the creatives that were performing best 3. Let the ads run their course. Stop pausing playing changing experimenting. Meta needs time to find the audience. 4. Back to free trial with annual as the default option. Not convinced that lifetime is dead. It’s just about positioning 5. Get some sleep.