Alley

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.

Today we are launching ElevenMusic, a new platform to discover, remix, create, and earn from music, built on the ElevenLabs music model.

$100k MRR waiting someone here who is willing to put in the work > vibe code mobile app for palm reading > create some sort of viral component like sharing it with your bf/best friend > make it free to use, but $2.99 p/m to compare with someone else > half the palm reading is hidden behind pay wall > make TikTok slide shows promoting telling. Stories with images made with gpt image2 > stories are ways the palm reading changed persons life > link in bio > comment from other account as pinned comment saying palm reading app was the best one they found that does it for free > use sideshift to find UGC creators to make $10 UGC and take best ones put spend behind them Voila Everything is a wrapper - but that’s ok. Wrappers are actually wonderful packaging and friction removers. They give context and make things feel useful. Websites are HTML wrappers, venture capital is a wrapper on money, it’s all a wrapper This is one that could crush

BREAKING: Israeli PM Netanyahu announces he was diagnosed, treated for prostate cancer

Apparently I can afford to pay creators $20 per new subscriber and not loose money even after Apples cut. $20 is a pretty good offer right? But most creators want thousands upfront for a reel.