How to test different hooks on trial reels without getting shadow banned: If Instagram recognizes two or more videos as similar, they will shadow ban the latter videos (will get 0 views). Even if you change the first couple seconds to a completely different video. I’ve been getting around this by: 1) Make sure the first couple seconds are a genuinely different video not present in the original reel. 2) Give each post a unique visual fingerprint - I add a different visual filter over each reel. 3) Give each a post unique audio fingerprint - I edit in FCP and drop a compressor over the entire audio track set to different values. You could also add a very slight reverb, or similar.

Trial reels are one of the biggest hacks Whenever I create a video I try two different hooks (literally just the difference of a couple of seconds) and post both variations as a trial reel on ig. Sometimes one will far outperform the other in just 12 hours. Which makes sense: if you ever watch someone scroll, they decide if they want to watch a video in maybe 0.4s.

Maybe SaaS targeted specifically towards people who vibe code (founders, developers) is not that lucrative now as it was two years ago That said, if I create a calorie tracking app, it’s far more difficult to reverse engineer (1) the app deployment (normal people are not going to purchase an apple developer license and a $200 Claude code plan to avoid paying for your $39/yr subscription) and (2) the branding and distribution

I just posted to LinkedIn. Am I unc? lnkd.in/p/ebCx2Dq9

META ADS DON'T WORK FOR ALL APPS (why I turned off my meta ads) (Day 58 of building apps to $30k/mo) Ever since I started marketing my app, almost every app founder I talk to has recommended I try meta ads. Some have said to get organic videos to go viral first, others say their best ads perform terribly organic anyway so it doesn't matter... So I tried $50/day trial start campaign for 9 days. From the start I was getting 1-2 trial starts per day, then 3, then up to 4 earlier this week. I thought things were looking pretty good and optimizing further, but: 1) They capped at 4 trial starts on Sunday (day 6). The following days fell back down to 2-3 trial starts. So not great cost per trials to start. 2) These paid meta users are having a FAR higher billing issue rate than all other methods of acquisition (apple ads and organic). The majority of my meta users who didn't cancel resulted in billing errors (67%). I thought the first time it happened it was a fluke, but it kept happening all throughout the week. Comparatively, my billing error rate is 8% for Apple Search Ads and 0% for Organic. YES - it could very well have been my creatives. But I think the larger signal was that all of my top competitors, ranging from $50k/mo - $200k+/mo revenue, are also not running meta ads. In Meta Ads Library I can see that they've tried several times before (can see history if you look in the UK), and most times stopping within ~1 week. What these competing apps did to scale was mostly influencer partnerships + some UGC, although their UGC does not seem to be performing very well either recently. I'm sure there's some genius format of Meta ad which would be profitable here, but no one in my niche has been able to crack it - would take a truly cracked growth marketing genius or just a budget that is not suitable for indie devs. I think ultimately this was a really good lesson (which I needed to learn for myself) that marketing an app is a very individualized process; what works for one app will not necessarily work for another.

People ask me all the time why I don't publicly post my apps. It's because of stuff like this. It seems reasonably easy to get a dev banned from the app store if you really wanted to. And bro I'm not even hiding anything 😭

Bro I'm not hiding anything 😭

On of my users this morning ran into my app's accountability feature twice, then cancelled their trial. For my app over the past week I'm finding ~50% cancel their trial for no apparent reason, and ~50% cancel right after running into friction somewhere in the app. Yesterday, after checking posthog with chat, I found a large portion of my users are cancelling right after they experience a bug with one of my AI features. I fixed the bug, added additional graceful degradations in case it happens again, and submitted an expedited app review. Checking posthog again this morning, I found this user that just cancelled their trial right after running into visible friction (pressing a button multiple times) with an accountability feature. And they say you should talk to your users, which I should, however thanks to modern analytics + AI it's easy to find instances where users are cancelling due to friction in your app and what the friction is that should be resolved.

My users coming from Meta (~20% trial -> paid) have been converting far worse than users coming from Apple Search Ads and organic (~70% trial -> paid) At first I thought Meta was just giving me low quality users, but after digging into the posthog data it looks like there's a much more explainable (and fixable) reason... It turns out Meta users use one of my app's AI features about 3x more than users from Apple Search Ads or organic. This makes sense because my Meta creatives are built around this particular AI feature. It *also* turns out that there's a bug that shows up ~25% of the time with this AI feature... About half of my Meta users who cancelled their trials used this AI feature, encountered the bug (I can see via posthog), some of them repeatedly, then immediately cancelled their trial. I fixed the bug and submitted an expedited App Store review (still waiting). Also goes to the importance of verbosely littering analytics events throughout your app to understand why users are cancelling or even why they're converting.

I got the most trials today (7) I've ever gotten in a single day (Day 55 of building apps to $30k/mo) But just cause I'm getting trials doesn't mean they're converting... TL;DR: - About one week into a $50/day meta trial starts campaign - My first 2 meta conversions resulted in billing error - Unfortunately a really high trial cancel rate from meta (~80%) - much higher than with apple ads and organic (~30%) After filming this though I realized a large portion of trial cancels are happening right after a bug users are experiencing in one of my primary features. I submitted an expedited app submission and still waiting for review. Hopefully this fix can provide a good conversion lift

PSA: my apple search ads CRs (tap-to-install rate) increased ~50% across campaigns after adding an app store header image

When meta finally starts understanding who to target

smh i guess these serial trial starters are a thing huh

I never knew how drastically conversion rates can vary by acquisition channel. For example with my iOS app: - Apple ads - this is where I started and conversion rates were pretty good. 10% converting to free trial at paywall - Organic - barely any would even install. I got organic TikToks and Instagram videos to thousands of views, clearly shouting out the app, and would get like 2 installs which could have even just been organic ASO?? - Meta ads optimized for app installs - the cheapest app install I've gotten. Got it as low as ~$0.50 per install on one of my creatives. But these users converted like shit. Actually a 0% conversion rate after 2 days of this meta campaign - Meta ads optimized for trial starts - the highest CPI I've had yet - even up to 2x CPI of Apple ads, but starting trials at 2-4x the rate of Apple ads. It's crazy how an organic Instagram Reel can have horrendous install rates, like 5k impressions -> 1 install; and the same Reel in an ad campaign optimized for installs can have 300 impressions -> 5 installs.

Today is a record day of $170 active trials for my iOS app!! (Day 51 of building apps to $30k/mo) Current revenue: $383/mo TL;DR: - $170 of active trials atm - the most I've ever had in one day - looking like the meta campaign MIGHT be profitable!! (been 3 days so far of this campaign so need to let it mature; running trial start campaign at $50/day) - all with AI-generated videos btw - I think AI UGC is 10000% the future. Far cheaper, far more control, and even higher quality than most human UGC you will find

I know this is not that much money. But I have NEVER had $130 in active trials before. Gotta celebrate the small wins 🙏

This is the difference between optimizing for App Installs vs Trial Starts on a Meta campaign: October 12 I was optimizing for App Installs and did get far more installs, and even 16 IAP transaction starts, but no one started a trial. (the 1 user who did was one of the few installs not from the meta campaign) October 13 I created a new campaign optimizing for Trial Starts. I'm getting half as many installs, even half as many transaction starts, but far more Trial Starts. (Most of my traffic hits in the late evening-night, starting right about now, so hopefully Oct 15 metrics will bump up too)