Growing to $1M MRR with Paywall and Pricing Experiments — Francescu Santoni, Mojo

0:00hello I'm your host David Bernard and with me today Revenue cat CEO Jacob iding Our Guest today is Franchesco santon the CEO and co-founder of Mojo an app that enables everyone to easily create top-notch videos for Instagram and Tik Tok on the podcast we talked with Franchesco about how Mojo grew to over 1 million in ARR the most impactful pricing and pay wall experiments and why it's important to choose complexity instead of just letting it happen hey Franchesco thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today hey super excited to be there and Jacob nice to have you on the podcast today I'm here David I'm

0:39ready to talk about subscriptions and with a person I've known for a very long time so nice it's exciting so speaking of long time I did want to kind of go back in history a little bit we don't always dig into the history of apps and founding stories and stuff but you've got an especially cool one so tell me about what you doing way back in 2013 and how that kind of brought you to founding Mojo yeah I think like the relationship that I have with apps and video is long I think a bit like jackob I started like as an iOS Developer and an entrepreneur but around mobile apps

1:12and in 2013 for the first time I was an employee as an iOS Developer I met my co-founder there but also my team was great because I was working with mat from photo room which I think is also a hug fan of cat yeah like me we did work on this cool video editing app together and with of course a small ninja startup team and we got acquired by GoPro so we continued to work on video that became the official GoPro app right for a while or yeah exactly we transformed like the replay app into the quick app yeah which is still is the base of the GoPro app

1:46every time I open yeah I think but it was also a lot of fun story both in term of engineering and product like the transformation of a product into another one was really at the time also fun story they also acquired splice another video at the exact same time so we had to mer that had to be yeah we could do a whole podcast on the social and emotional dynamics of that I'm sure also GoPro was already public at the time right yeah exactly and we got some shares but unfortunately that went down public markets are tough you know DJI funds but the brand is still like

2:21amazing I love yeah I mean they still make great cameras the software is really good like I use the old app whenever I live stream my race car races I use the quick app to set up live streaming straight from the GoPro to the hot spot and all that so it's pretty interesting even if the equity didn't ban out it's need to still have the impact right yeah sure and the bigger impact and you kind of brush over a little bit but it is you were working with Matthew from photo room who went on to found what's now one of the biggest apps in photo you went on

2:51to found Mojo which we're going to talk about with a co-founder who was there uh huge successful app and then the CTO at hucking face was also there at the time so you've got this like replay Mafia I think that's true of a lot of startups you know like the PayPal Mafia like when you get a lot of really smart people together have similar experiences and then you also get a built-in network but you guys probably can take some credit for like France's reputation in AI right like not all of it but like there is a reputation that Paris specifically in France has like after San Francisco it

3:23might be like the most known hub for AI right now and it's not in spite of this right yeah I think like Jun M were like the pioneers of actual applied AI in France and they really paved the way and we also got those new players like Mistral we also got the poolside team moved from I think the US to France so yeah I think like right now uh but don't start me about AI because we will never end uping about NE mobile or I mean it goes to show that like the folks that are winning in this category or like seem like way ahead in this category

3:53didn't start last year they started a decade ago right and we're building the expertise and then the right moment happens and then all of a sudden you have a thing but yeah these Talent density networks are really interesting and our thing I strive to one day create a revenue C Mafia That's My we're never gonna leave Jacob come on man right yeah that's what all you're stuck with me the fun story is like egging face actually not that I think about it and hello to Clon and Julia they started as a mobile app a chatbot like a tamagi like a virtual friend so I think like at some

4:24point the circle will close because I think they should do it again it also highlights how inter leave mobile and AI is like I think there's been some people being like mobile is over and apps are over and AI is starting and it's like they're the same thing like the the AI Revolution is another app Revolution and in some cases came very much from the talent and like learnings of those you know it's just a great form factor for it so I think for AI I think something that's never said enough I think like AI simplify so many things that you can make even more things in Mobile

4:55especially on the creation side so you know like consumption on mobile is normal but creation and like Photo room like Mojo I think like creation on mobile will get much much bigger thanks to Ai and we also have this kind of us or european point of view but if you think about even our top markets like Brazil or Asia they don't even have laptops on computer so if you bring like that power into Mobile meaning that you can do a lot more stuff with less and fewer like interface so I didn't even think about that that the leverage you get out of like a textual interface gets

5:28you much more different on a mobile device than it does on a laptop where like yeah maybe point and click is actually pretty good right that's interesting it highlights like the constraints of human computer interfaces right and that's actually probably where a lot of our constraints Li today anyway we're here to talk about apps so let's yeah well and we're here to talk about the story we already div down a pretty deep rabbit hole but I want to resurface and say you I think a lot of people listening to this podcast whether they're already working at an app company or like dreaming of a side project or whatever if you're working at

5:56a huge company and you think you want to start a little startup maybe go find a cool app startup to join and find one of those high density places and then go start your startup after that it's pretty cool how many people from that team went on to found very successful companies it's probably not a coincidence yeah I can double down on that just because just after uni I immediately started my first two companies in Mobile that I felt like miserably but I learn a lot and once I started to really join that really talented team at stup Flix I've learned so much that then starting a company

6:30again was much easier and I don't spoil also but I think like mobile and AI from the previous funer of stupid fix maybe they are also planning something Co so nice and then to finish to close that Loop a year after joining GoPro you and your co-founder left GoPro and started a new app and went through YC tell me a little bit about that yeah basically we're obsessed about going fast having impact and having a lot of fun and so we were always looking for like this Innovative ID in creativity and the fun part is also we did AI back then but it was the previous wave that didn't really

7:07took off deep learning and CNN and all of this so we decided basically to make like an animation app you could put 3D text in the real world so augmented reality we were a bit too early let's say but we had so much fun and we applied to YC but we were like at the time French to YC was not like a big thing so we were like not really thinking that we had a realistic chance but eventually we got in and we learned so much and then we were followed by Revenue cats I think the next batch and then F the room not so long after yeah

7:42around 2017 18 yeah and so you started the augmented reality app and raised money through YC and went through YC with that and then pivoted yeah it was odd because I think like and this is a good lesson actually for the sub Club basically what we've successfully done with the augmented re app that was we got like a wow effect so basically when you started the app you will show immediately like something that you wouldn't think were possible with technology so you will see your actual text in 3D in the real world and that was so cool we were also detecting emotion and putting emojis automatically

8:16so people were so hyped that they were downloading the Apple out Apple was also super hyped because the quality was there and air of course was very strategic for them but so we got like those hundred of thousand of doll in the few months and it's really really hard to at some point acknowledge that you have to shut down something like that so basically the reason we did that and the proxy metrics that we use and thanks to YC is like you really have to do something that people love first so no matter like if you have like one million users that just like your product and

8:50don't come back you need to find those 100 users that are really dying for your product and we couldn't crack any engagement metrics like retention or stickiness and we tried a lot of things in AR we tried to really pivot inside the app first so we did interactive stuff during the 2018 World Cup with life scores and a lot of things gaming dancing we tried brainstorm on a lot of things but at some point you have to realize that it was too early for augmented reality to take off and we really recentered on our core beliefs around video creation so good learnings but really hard hard time when you go

9:26back to zero and say okay now we have to find an idea retention metrics I just was talking to a very nent founder yesterday who's just launching an app and was like oh I think it's got legs or whatever and I was like what's your retention like that's what matters right I don't care how many downloads you have I don't care you've been featured it's like how many people are using the app how many people are coming back and then if you're paying like how many people are like renewing or paying is interesting but also like renewing and the thing is is you can't hide like you

9:53can't hide that right if people aren't loving your product they're not going to keep opening it and I've been in that world too where you're like you got something you kind of try to like wander around a local Maxima right which is good eventually you find like okay you try moving in as many orthogonal directions as you can understand and then if you don't see a big lift then at some point you have to go like well we need to jump somewhere else in the distribution right I think a really good way to think about that is do you have a gimmick or do you have a product and a

10:21gimmick can be fun and I start of something right yeah yeah yeah it can be the start of something but like it has to turn into a product and I think you can even and this is something to think about even as you're kind of adding features to an existing app that maybe have some level of product Market fit is that you know and I chased my tail a lot with my launch in a Pro app because I would get these big splashy launches because we do something super Innovative but then it wouldn't stick as like a real feature it wasn't a real product it was just something that got people hyped

10:50got a lot of downloads but it wasn't a real business it wasn't a real product people wouldn't engage with it over time people downloaded played with it for a minute and moved on with their lives so like you really got to build the features and the products that people are going to come back to to your point Franchesca that you didn't have a business people weren't engaging over time and it's great that you figured out that you needed to Pivot and like made those hard choices yeah and Apple's love can actually make this worse right yeah like they it kind of artificially inflate your Organics right that was the

11:19main reason that we actually added like subscription into Modo like from the get-go right away I remember talking to you about this yeah yeah as you said like you have this kind of funel yeah of course you need activation but we didn't even had like a nonbing pay wall for a few years because what we wanted to measure is the actual interest and so at some point of course you have to grow a bit more so you put this pay wall into General a dollar is a dollar right like if you can capture a dollar you've captured something measurable and real and you can't really lie to yourself

11:47right ex that the best proxy ever yeah and even if it's small dollars right it doesn't matter if you can move that up now you have something measurable that you know is like real and then like you said like when it's time to actually make money then you can start to think about how to actually optimize for that but there's some argument to like you have to build a lot of stuff to justify a subscription on day one but I mean not that much stuff right like take one really cool thing put it behind a pay wall and see what you get there's no harm in that you know I think some

12:13people are embarrassed to like charge for something not done but it's like whatever people don't have to buy it nobody's entitled to what you built right we were very very embarrassed you should be you should be it's good I mean starting anything is embarrassing that's the thing is like if you can't just manage embarrassment for a really long time we're probably not going to build something so as you pivoted into Mojo what did that early first launch of the Mojo app look like yeah I think like jaob said that like you have to be a bit ashamed so we are like just pivoting and we were funding story like should we

12:46give back the money to investors or so we took that call with our YC Partners so Michael and gustaff they were like almost laughing at us you know it's like what are you talking we invested in you not in your product that throw emojis everywhere you know and basically the first thing that they said and that I say also as a business Angel and Coach sometime is like it's never too early to release your product right so I think we took like still two full months a bit more to build the first version that what I called Alpha and we did a product HT and basically that day we decided to

13:20put subscription for the GetGo that's I think the first time that I talk to Jacob I remember we are just the two of us micer and I plus an intern which is now working on the n up and we were like if on Day Zero we get one trial and at that time the trial was 30 days because we didn't want anyone to pay by accident hav wanted to put like $1 a month a subscription but we eventually s it to 10 and we like if we get one trial period from one country that we don't know so except us and France because of friends maybe we will celebrate and we

13:53got I think on the day Zero like 30 trials so EV was the app that we thought was broken we we really thought that the app was broken you couldn't like half of the thing were glitchy but you can provide value to people and what we enabled people to do was actually like much much easy than we didn't realize that until the actual launch yeah I do really think with ideas people are like oh does this have legs like whatever whatever and if you're like asking yourself it's probably not even Revenue cat it took a longer for a B2B thing to get any sort of like positive feedback

14:24but I could tell in conversations with people and I could tell there was like and stuff but for Consumer it pops like if it's good enough it'll pop right now can you build something sustaining and differentiated that's a different question but yeah often like you have good signal on day Zero when something's really really useful yeah and then scoping ahead to today you shared with me that Mojo now does over $1 million in Mr has over 40 million downloads and does that with a team of 30 so incredibly Successful by most metrics and so I wanted to kind of go through some of the things that it took to get

15:03there some of the experiments some of what the team has done with such a small team to build such a great business around this kind of early app so I want to start with pricing and pay walls and like what are some of the bigger lessons you've learned growing to this size around pay walls yeah I think like pay walls is a good example of things that we did very late on because yeah we were like every focused on the product but yeah at some point you cannot take things for granted right so of course most of the value you capture is from your product itself and from the value

15:37that you provide to your users but at some point you have to show them that like I remember because the first signal that we got was from the up store team from Apple was like you're not pushing your payroll enough and the first payroll experiment that we did without even changing the payroll was pting it at the end of the onboarding which was everyone was doing that but we were like oh but they didn't try the app yet and whatever but like but they have a trial so the first actual like big experiment that we had was like the onboarding payroll and I think it accounts for most

16:06of the trial even today and then slowly like moving of course of the funnel of impact so the payall position on top then you want to iterate of course on the payall design the payall kind of layout and core Narrative of the payall right do you want to use the kind of how do you split that like how much do you think about like visual aspects and like the weights and things like that which matter like they subconscious and psychological things and then also how do you think about what it's actually saying what is the actual message yeah so I think like we were super lucky at

16:36some point to hire someone dedicated to monetization mik I think he wrote a great article on the r blog actually about our experiment and the grow so what we've done like as you said we are like a small team so every decision every focus is like you cannot spread too much your attention and you really have to be focused so what we've done is basically do one quarter after another focusing on those kind of prioritization parts so first is like position of the payall two is totally different pay walls just try different pays one with a video what we did is like mixing silver bullets you know at any given point you

17:14will hear from like oh you have to show a video a simple like no a lot of text and sometimes like scrolling sometimes like you have to do like a trial reminder putting the trial to go there's so many kind of best practice that change over time so just changing this kind of big different concepts was really helpful because you never know with this kind of audience what will work better then with done that a bit more localized also into different countries because I think it's also one specificity that we have also as a European company I think we all from the get-go you have like this very

17:46International worldwide view where like I think us is like a third of revenues only number one country yes but just a third so then you always have to think about all the countries so big layer CH when one payall is working you can do like smaller change within that and then you do price testing right and really changing the price and see what works but it's OD because what I say is like you should basically take two things into consideration one is of course the average revenue per user that you get arpu but the other is like what is the line with your product because some

18:21product are more naturally aligned with more like b2c distribution so you want that to be a bit cheaper even if you lose a bit of money starting maybe we get it on the longer run and other you want to focus on high quality user so you want to charge a bit more and you can look at different pricing on the industry like video editing photo editing and you will see basically where you are in our case it was like charging a bit more because also it was profitable a bit more for us but also targeting a bit more prummer users right like small businesses and so on because

18:52when you have a freemium app you get a lot of free users and it's hard to sometime they will pay but Canary and it's hard to get all of the signal and even now to be honest it's a problem that we're still focusing on is like how do you get your cor user base to pay the right price without losing the benefit of the other I mean that's just pricing and packaging right are you doing like any separation and teers or anything like this now that's something that we didn't try we didn't try basically what we have still left in the monetization side is trying the weekly we didn't try

19:23trying the as you said changing the limiting factor in any given price and doing like maybe yeah exactly what feature going what plan businesses actually they often like you do user interviews they say I don't understand why you charge like 60 70 a year and sometime like up store reviews like wow what this price is like yeah right makes sense well it's like the product generates massively different Surplus value depending on how it's being used right and so one of my gifts at Revenue cat is like I kind of can understand the value generated to some degree right and measure but like for Consumer apps it's very different

19:58right I think it's one of the core challenges of doing price discrimination Matthew talked about this a couple years ago and he's on the podcast but this has been a big part of their strategy too is like differentiating between these different use cases and like trying to like hit them with the right price points and I think as we see more we were talking about the power of mobile first tooling at the top of the call and I think like more and more apps are going to see this where the breakout apps if you're not like a du lingo if you're not like a massive consumer brand

20:25the other path is going to be this like bet to B2B prosumer path so I think there's a lot to be figured out there because it's complex right yeah anytime you're helping somebody make money you can charge more money yeah it's Surplus value right like you're capturing Surplus value and for somebody who's just like random person posting to Tik Tok or Instagram there's not a lot of value for them personally in their Grandma seeing at least not something they translate easily to cash right yeah exactly and those are the people who are like $60 a year to like post better videos to Instagram this is insane it's

21:01so funny how that affects so many people like how mad that makes I probably said this on poet times but if somebody isn't mad at you about your pricing your pricing is wrong right like like if you make everybody happy you're definitely under pricing right and so it's about strategically deciding how many people you want to make mad and who you want to make mad and it's actually a good signal if people are complaining about your price a little bit right because you can always take that information adjust it and things like this but the last thing you want to do is especially when you're on the outset is like set your price

21:30point super low because then like not only have you like left a lot of money on the table you've also set the perception that your product's not worth that much right and so like if the developer saying it's only worth a dollar why am I going to Value this thing right you want a offense story about that sure yeah we I think about it I got a user telling us that we should charge way more so like they end up with less users using Modo and the the pro like the top templates so they could stand up interesting like you should charge even 10 like because some people they create

22:05even agencies out of modu like they will hire like three Freelancers and they will charge the business we should give people sub Club challenges David bit but like your sub Club challenge is this create a $100 a month skew that's just full of exclusivity luxury templates right I would be really interested to see what that experiment yields right and tradeoff because again it's like there are people for whom whom that exclusivity has a lot of value right and you can capture some of that I think so it's the whole lvmh model right like just charge for exclusivity it' be very French right of course yeah exactly as

22:40French we love design we love Tech and science you know and maths and luxury and exclusivity so it's fine so it sounds like you did raise your prices significantly did that have a huge impact on the business yeah it did I think IP increased like in the range of plus 50% at some point so yeah it had like a huge impact with all the testing and and sometimes it's like just I think like the latest experiment that we had is like we didn't realize that our turkey inflation was eating them and the price point there and whatever so Mikel had a test like a few weeks ago that we

23:15roll out with like plus 100% there ipu because inflation and all of this so sometime it's just like you don't see how much this can impact your users and also positively and even now I think like we didn't the logic of it like the core as you said like how do you split because every time we increase the price we also make those part of the user that tried the product but then at some point they don't get enough value so they CH more so if we had like several price points I think would be the perfect thing but it's also we are humble enough to know that it's hard to manage like

23:47several price point and TI it's hard to manage because it's complex and if it's complex for you your customers are also going to be confused and that in itself will create downward pressure on conversions if it's like hard to buy and I think that's the chall and for the engineering team and you know everything that you do then you have to think about oh is it t one two and matrics and all of this there are like two kind of companies or product or developers like the one that's always say that it's easy and sometime I'm a bit like this and sometime you also humbled down by the W

24:18it looked easy but actually this simple stuff like it should take like two days but it took like a thousand little ropes right that like hold you down over time as you build like I think about us we've had one two three four five we're on like our SE we have like seven plans over three iterations and that's not a ton for Consumer especially if you're like doing it in different countries and stuff but even that of thinking about all the transition States between those different things and like why and like not only do you have to make that work commercially so that you're like oh what

24:46happens to people on this plan to compare to the new plan and all that stuff but you also have to make it work technically right like what happens Technically when this person wants to go to this plan and then thirdly operationally which is like how do we read that data how do we put it into our chart like all of that stuff it the complexity grows so like we push experimentation and trying stuff but like I do think there is a limit to the amount of complexity unless you have a really good process for like trying and shutting down things and and clearing it out but like I'm curious like what would

25:12you say like percentage of your R&D resources go into like monetization and building that stuff versus building new product do you have like a split in mind or is it like one quarter we focused on this one quarter we focused on this like how we just have one guy on M just one guy just going got super cat R yeah I got it no but it's true we're using Revenue cat a lot from the get-go I think like at the time it was like super controversial because people were think like it's easy and that but yeah we were talking about this before the call like you were a very early

25:41adopter yeah because I think like that's exactly the kind of thing that from the outside is like oh yeah it's super easy the SDK it's getting better maybe the startkit part but it's definitely different now than it was in 2018 for sure yeah yeah but it was still good enough you know for you to do things easily but you always have this kind of if you want to be really into excellent and have this great experience you always lack a bit nice touch make it to walk perfectly yeah and even today with storit 2 as easy it as is you said you launch the MVP of Mojo in two months

26:12you're not going to launch an MVP in two months build yeah if you're building out your own subscriptions and pay walls and everything else at least like in a future proof way we're transition to the ad segment but we were talking about how in the early days the early adopters really had to be Believers like they had to have as much conviction as you do that this is a good idea that you don't need to convince them and it's like going back to your first launch of Mojo it's like that's who you're looking for you're looking for those first couple users who get it and they can see

26:39through how bad it is and see through like all of it and still understand it and the other you know crossing the chm to Turkey and like all those other things like really can wait you really just want to find those like couple and you were definitely of that first couple I think you were in our first 100 apps right but like every single one of those people kind of had to have a real belief in Revenue cat and then over time we were talking before the call it's now become the opposite where it's often you see people being like Oh don't do anything else right it was very

27:06non-consensus at the beginning which is true to some degree for all tools right like I think we're seeing it now with like generally Ai and like when to use LMS and not and like all of this stuff right it's very you know and then at some point it'll switch to everybody being like why are you doing this the stupid way you know yeah but you were talking about pricing and having a dedicated person and like what kind of focus you have on monetization and the split between like product monetization we can't of Chase a rabbit hole but I wanted to get back to that I had an

27:35opportunity to sh my company David I cannot leave it I cannot pass he I started the sh it's my fault but uh I want to get back to that because I'd love to hear your thinking about like how much iteration you put into the monetization side of things versus like Jacob was asking versus product and how you balance that when there is so much low hanging fruit and constantly iterating on pricing and packaging but like you got to have a product to sell too it's like all these things are a tough balance yeah for us what worked well so far is really to put that like

28:02with no sponsorship intended and I can also quot super W to make that a bit Heaven because we use that for the pays but if you like get the right tooling and the right person that is obsessed about that then you can iterate like a lot and Mikel is doing like a lot of experiment is's really dedicated to that gross part and monetization pay wall pricing onboarding CRM we don't do yet we might do a bit more with m so yeah from time to time like International expansion it gets like a one developer when we need for experimentation but most of it actually can do it like by

28:37himself are they a technical background or engineer or like a growth marketer like what's not necessarily but he has really like this data mind is from a Czech Republic and with like this kind of structural approach with like everything is documented in the notion all experiment and this is working very well but for the product part too yeah you're right because I think and coming back to the fr and maybe an advice for the creative space I think like the sub Club listener can be divided between the people that have more maybe business side and want to try apps and make it and with AI today I think it's really a

29:10new El Dorado you know like kind of God but there are also a lot of more in developers that are this craft and I think like that's originally our developers and for those I think in Creative space never forget that we are lucky enough to kind of build product where people would create something that they would inherently share so either like with the watermark or better with Modo at the beginning I think until like several hundred, per month we spend zero do in ads why because we invented basically the animated posters in stories like it didn't exist when people saw like a random guy posting like this super great

29:47video like animated poster on Instagram they were like asking in the DMs like how did you do that and that's not you and people were just referring the app without any like referral mechanism so that's also kind of a just I wanted to give a bit of Hope to developer is like because it's hard often to know how to put eort like where do you put for like all in ASO UA versus like product but if you really are like into the right product angle you can make it by having something like inherently Superior as long as it's like interesting distribution Channel you want the output

30:20of your app to be visible and if you have that think about how you can leverage that to get like some well it's just much more efficient right than having to spend even so you have to spend to like get it right and then obviously acquisition is a very Dollar in dollar and 10 out or whatever like it's not a highly leveraged game versus having you used to call kfactor I don't know if people still call that but like how many downloads does a download beet but building that into your product from the beginning it will make a difference and like you don't have to do it I

30:48actually would suggest not doing it in a way that's like very clearly just like an afterthought right it's just like oh share your scorecard or like whatever like that's fine but what you want to do is like think about a way like your product is made for sharing right so it's kind of built in and that's the case with a lot of like photo editing stuff maybe some more than others or like creation stuff but you can think about it in other aspects right like invites are like a famous in Social like invites are the thing which I don't know if you saw they're shutting off free

31:16access to contact books so we'll never see another viral social app again I think but yeah like thinking about how does the like core Loop of the app and then there's really not a clear line there's maybe monetization but growth is actually bigger than that maybe it's a good chance to like ask about this so yeah you said initially you didn't have any growth spend and stuff like that which I would recommend we talk about things that like hide your lack of product Market fit dumping a bunch of money in acquisition is a good way to convince yourself you have something when you don't thank you right so get

31:46off the ground and make sure you have something but like you go from that like couple hundred thousand to like million what were the moves and plays that allowed you to get people driven into the app so from this organic push from the users and also Apple we got also a lot featured so again and I'm super grateful for the App Store and also the App Store itself for existing I'm a huge fan no because it's true because before if you remember about the other stores like even like publishing a game on any video game console was super OD like Distributing a software on PC like was

32:17super OD and the App Store is really intrinsically worldwide and all of this so This Is Why I'm talking that not just to thanks the the Apple team but also because we are like this worldwide approach we had this spikes in countries that organically we didn't spend any money but then at some point we got like our first user acquisition guy anony that's really changed the way that we leverage this kind of smart acquisition in the fact that you can have from Apple search ads also the kind of more broad meta and Tik Tok approach you can get AI approach of course Esa Network also changed the game a lot but user

32:54acquisition was our first let's say nonorganic Ross level with kind of an approach that was still mostly relying on this kind of organic Factor so what we did is like at the time it was still a thing to pay the influencers to publish in their own accounts rather than use their content to ads so we tried like in several countries to do like those campaign they were not like profitable but they enabled like in some count I remember like Brazil for example Brazil we did the campaign it was like a fail small Spike and this but a few weeks later we got the initial spar enough and it's still among of top five

33:30even top three countries nowadays So Paid acquisition like influencers and thing and then that turned paid into a bigger scale with all of the challenges right gross data of course because with escad network even with mmps how much effort do you put in trying to like match attribution these days the core thing first that we gave up in a way that we don't do like pltv and stuff we push a lot more the yearly plan to make that much easier so the idea being it's like you can get the payback on a cohort and then you want to get the pay back in 30 days kind of is how do you cohort do

34:04you like without finger printing or this you just go by country or you break it down to a demo or how so the first split and that's is the easiest part right you split by country you split by platform also of course IOS and Android that's sure now we went back to and depending on the day-to-day versus longer budget allocation you can do like on the day-to-day it's more like an let's say we attribute the subscription by the date of atand let's say trial start with the atand of that week but on the longer run we do that Court based so basically the user acquired by a certain amount of

34:39AD spand are Blended by country and also of course country you have some like shifting window cohorts where you're like okay we're just going to say that the ad money we spent in this period created these trials like whether or not that's accurate or not doesn't matter but it's maybe a good enough approach to make sure you're not bankrupting the company and yeah exactly and maybe I got some future requests for you oh yeah yeah hit me I think like what we're using we're actually using Revenue cat as one of the source of new users something that think I was talking with B of grow lately we're like thinking

35:11about the way to attribute actually new users or displaying should be maybe hybrid approach where you could basically say you count as a new user at least for attribution for that sliding window CS but you could have like let's say that a user is inactive for a certain amount of time let's say 30 days then you come back to the new period because what happen is like when you spend a lot of money you increase the passort because you of retargeting because of a lot of that and some of them maybe unin they already have the app installed but they still exactly they already have then sometime somehow

35:44with iCloud and nowadays I think like even without uninstalling because people I'm not sure they ever uninstall apps again with the automatic offloading and stuff like that so I think like something like ibrid is something that we want to try in the next yeah the world has shifted so much in attribution I think the thing is is that the new world the new like fingerprintless world has made it so there's so much less value in the technology there which is also why nobody's rushed into to solve it because like there's not a huge business to build there but for us thinking about it there's things we can doin I'll just say

36:15we're thinking about it one of the things that you mentioned to me when we were prepping for this conversation was don't fall into the product Le growth trap so a lot of what we talked about early on was product Le grow growth but then you did start venturing into paid user acquisition but what did you mean by that don't fall into the product Le growth trap what I mean is basically you have to really know your strength and know what are not your strength and what are your weaknesses and basically you can have like three buckets think that are are inherently bad at I can give

36:49some example for me I'm bad at Ops I'm B at things that are boring I'm B at a lot of things so I will not be like on like a regional Opex business like delivery app or whatever I will be super bad I will be the worst CEO ever what we are good at modro is like the product and the tech and this kind of angle you have this angle this leverage and this Market which is you create video you create the most beautiful video it's inant but then when you're kind of in the middle and you're like more like with a regular app or business Centric if you don't have

37:21this core product leg it's not by adding like a refer or whatever that you will think that you made it right right and I think Jacob said it like it's not something that you add later on that you fake it of course it's always good to do a bit but don't think that you will crack it after a while and if it's not in the core DNA either in the distribution of your app or your content that you create out of your app or the strength in your team so what I meant by don't fall in the product Le gross is product Le gross is always kind of shiny

37:48you mean just make the product better and they will come right yeah exactly but also if you're like a business person accept it and work on paid and make that the best LTV on K and beat people on user acquisition and pay worlds testing even more and don't fall too much into oh when we build like this six months feature of referal the app will grow up or when we need like the sharing those cards yeah sure but nobody shares even their dingo card or whatever you know there are a few counter examples of apps that don't focus on anything else and just can win through a

38:18good product but there's always something there's always either Apple love or it's something inherently viral or it's something inherently unique they do I think of Anki the like flash card app that's really popular it's not even a paid app I don't think but like they just built a really good product but like maybe not a really good business but like or maybe maybe Craigslist is a good example right of where it's Works some counter examples of where they haven't had to really think about growth but those are outliers you're not Craigslist like you're not one of these apps that just gets lucky probably being somebody who did that a lot for some

38:49years at Elevate we wandered the Wilderness on before we really dipped our toes into like leaning into a growth engine you know and realizing the products is good maybe as it's going to get within some parameters and it had some sort of product Market fit but like we weren't going to double our retention through new features right it was probably some sort of inherent level that it gets to and then you have to figure out where your leverage actually lies so yeah I was really surprised and you kind of touched on it earlier that even at a million plus in Mr you aren't doing CRM you're not doing some of the

39:21basics that blg but what you're talking about is focus right and so yeah maybe you're not doing CRM but you have a whole person dedicated to constantly doing monetization experiments and paywall experiments and kind of looking and it sounds like a lot of the success of Mojo is like looking at what's working and being introspective about why it's working and doubling down on those strengths versus looking at what you're weak in and overly focusing on those weaknesses it's true at some point you still have to accept you know and that's why we probably will do a bit of CRM at some point but it's exactly that you

40:00know CRM is we have like even the top five languages in modo is like does not account for more than two third of the user base so if you think about CRM and scaling that to different languages and having the impact Serum is probably single digit grow so that you can activate with a lot of effort yeah so we were a bit reluctant and we pushed that back of course at some point you need to as the company grow and is a bit more established you need to take those kind of okay that's serum card we need to activate it now to kind of have this bit

40:31of growth but yeah if you do that too early also my biggest fear and I think like I didn't overcome it yet because also video Market is changing fast and especially right now in Ai and moo to be honest I don't consider it as a success yet because I think that's the future of video editing is AI all the market is disrupt and I love it personally so but everything is yet to be built I'm always afraid to lean away from the signal of product Market Fe so it's kind of also coming back to my own fears I think and to overcome that a bit sometime because I need also to be a

41:05better I think business person and less sometime of a product guy don't listen to him I think Jacob's framing earlier I really liked I'm going to steal this from you Jacob but I forget exactly how you said it but it was like you're going to piss off some people with your price the important thing is to choose who you piss off with your price I think this applies to building a company is that you're going to have complexity choose your complexity and you want to choose that complexity based on Leverage and so right now you recognize that CRM is very complex and is relatively low leverage

41:41like it's going to be hard to squeeze double digigit growth out of CRM and it's really complex so instead you're choosing the complexity of building into the AI future of video editing that's a very complex thing to build you're choosing to do something very complex but you're doing something complex that's very high leverage that's going to be the foundation of the business moving forward and I think that's kind of a great it's differentiated too right like do complexity that other people can't for people that didn't read the piece of Po grah how to do great work I strongly encourage you to read that immediately because I think that the

42:17core thing also that focus on the problem that you really are passionate to solve and that's of course is makes up for a lot right yeah you know as we scale too and like debating with Miguel like sure if I spent time on every part of the business like there's something I could improve but like if we let every single part of the business that isn't working exactly how we'd like into our brains we'll be paralyzed and we won't move forward on the thing that got us here in the first place and so I think that's one of the learnings and I don't think that really happens until you're

42:46maybe at kind of your guys' scale and above where there's edges of the Empire that you can't see anymore as a founder and you have to just be okay with it being how it is right there's the thing is like oh just you can let fires burn but almost worse is you just don't even know if it's a fire or not you're like could be a fire could be fine I don't really know right don't like to ask Jacob I think that every other week you get like this kind of stress as like w this fire is burning but I think like I getting more and more like okay with

43:11those you know this St and this but I think like the biggest challenge as a App Maker fer or whatever I think is in there and to change yourself to kind of perceive things differently to really I want to put that on phasis like at some point for the same level of information you will look at everything is not the way I want and like the week after nothing drastically change and you think oh we're doing good yeah yeah yeah yeah the same inputs the same inputs you start to realize like how much of it is reception bias like how you're feeling that day I don't think that's ever

43:43stopped right it's like a constant oscillation between like we're so back it's so over right over and over and again and I think the only thing that can come with years is just realizing that the troughs are just as transient as the Peaks just ride them out try not to quit when you're in a trough and keep going I don't think I can stand behind that enough in terms of and for people at all stages of the journey if you're the beginning if you're at the end or like whatever like you're good at something and like you can probably build anything but the best thing you're

44:12going to build is the thing you're good at you maybe don't get to choose that like I didn't get to choose in at purchases is the thing I was good at it's just kind of what happened and maybe there's an argument for like oh I've had a different passion for something else but at the end of the day performing and being good at something that you created is probably more satisfying than something you have a passionate about but has no legs right doesn't go anywhere so anyway we went from user acquisition to philosophy real fast on this episode of sub Club you also have to choose which weaknesses to

44:42fill in I think is that you know Like You Jacob it's like you came to revenue cat and you coated a lot of it and you were very in the weeds and then at some point you did have to choose to go down the company building path and I've seen you build the skills of people management and Company management and like you do have to fill in some of the gaps that you don't like doing but again it's like find people who are good at the things that you're not good at but then also choose the things you're going to fill in and get better at versus like

45:13you can't be good at everything so recognize that and then don't try to be good at everything but pick the things you want to get better at and then find ways to work around the things you aren't High lever fre to get better at or aren't going to move the business forward whatever else yeah I would like to share advice but then I think that would imply I've figured something out which I haven't I do miss coding though I do I don't know if I was ever as that good of a programmer but like I do think I was probably a better programmer than I'm not gonna say it than I'll ever be

45:41as a CEO but there's a part of me that thinks that I'm sure you franisco too you think the same thing right like I'll never feel as skilled or as capable as I was when I was 24 years old and like ripping code out all day believe it or not during Christmas I took my phone and I use ret AI to call the API of replicate to batch AI to fine tune some parameters I was happy just to see those line of codes you know but it's like I don't know about you but not only have I stopped doing code I had to kind of realize like I'll never be as good as I

46:10was right like I'm taking too long of a break but we can pretend it's fine because we are the cosos like I get to live vicariously through everybody else who gets to ship I mean it's just it's fun to build things that do things right it's fun to build things that like do things and like if you can find joy in that then it almost doesn't matter matter right you can find joy in just winning and building and making customers happy and showing up and being useful right that's the AR SPS book be useful right just being useful is satisfying as a human being so anyway

46:38this has been the sub Club career advice and life philosophy hour but hopefully it's compelling this is super fun I I think it's a great place to wrap up anything else you wanted to share Franchesca as we wrap up first thank you a lot for this discussion not only interesting but also a great moment and I think that's something that we can celebrate and be grateful to I think it's very important and also maybe a piece of advice to the people creating apps also because it's my duty to do so on social media please try to create more content consistently so not just use Modo any other app but I

47:14think like one of the secrets is like the podcast is a good illustration of that those people building apps you have so many things to tell so many stories to tell and not every one of them of course can go into podcast and be lucky as me so more and more what we see on social media is like people sharing their stories by themselves and not just creators more and more like business owner like even like I don't know like restaurant owners butchers that would be my piece of advice for people creating project like find a way to share what you're passionate about and social media

47:42is a great way to get your first users sometimes so piece of sponsored moment awesome well thanks again for joining us this was such a fun chat thank you thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]