Guides / Growth
How do you grow a subscription app?
Map your unit economics before you touch a channel. Your ARPU, free-to-paid conversion rate, and LTV set a hard ceiling on what you can pay per install — everything else follows from that number.
Most apps get this backwards. They pick a channel first — Meta because a friend used it, TikTok because it's the one everyone's talking about — spend for a month, and only then find out whether it was profitable. By then the budget is gone and there's no way to tell if the channel failed or the app did.
The right order is:
- Revenue audit. ARPU, ARPPU, LTV, free-to-paid rate — the ceiling for viable CPA, before any bidding starts.
- Diagnosis. Is this a marketing gap or a product gap? A channel can't fix a paywall that's quietly leaking money, and no amount of paywall tuning fixes a genuine keyword gap in search.
- Channel choice. Apple Search Ads where purchase intent is highest and there's a real keyword gap. Google UAC when organic has hit a structural ceiling and you need to reach people before they search. Meta once you have first-party data to build lookalike audiences from.
- Country segmentation. A single global CPI target hides unprofitable pockets. One of our longest-running Apple Search Ads accounts — a subscription health app live across 43 locales — sets a separate CPI ceiling per market against that market's own blended ARPU. Tier-1 English-speaking markets can support aggressive bidding at €1.50+ ARPU; markets below €0.50 get paused to protect the portfolio average. Achieved CPI landed at €0.46 against a €0.70 ceiling — a 1.52× blended LTV:CPI, managed profitably for five years running.
- Launch and iterate against revenue-tied reporting, not installs.
Two failure modes are worth naming directly, because they're the ones that actually sink accounts. The first is scaling spend before the paywall converts — I've watched an ad account get scaled aggressively while nobody was tracking whether the unit economics still held, and conversion collapsed under its own weight. The second is treating every market the same: a blended average across 43 countries tells you almost nothing about whether any single one of them is profitable.
This approach assumes there's a real budget question behind it. It fits apps already clearing roughly €10k+/month in profit, or funded launches with €25k+/quarter in marketing capital. Below that line, the better move is usually ASO and organic work done yourself — a consultant's fee only pays for itself once there's enough at stake for the judgment to matter.
Most engagements start with a foundation month if the basics — tracking, attribution, store presence — aren't in place yet, or go straight into a three-month growth roadmap if they already hold. The goal from there is a twelve-month partnership: a durable traffic engine, not a campaign.
If your numbers are close to that bar and you want a second pair of eyes on where the ceiling actually is, book a call.