Flamme · B2C · couples app
Start charging in a free app when the money runs out
Barely survived; the early '15% conversion' counted renewals, so it was inflated
What they did
What happened
In their words
An Nayal - Full App Growth Guide 2026 - How to Make Viral Content to Get Users & Make Your App Retentive
An NayalI focused on the product too much. I didn't focus on the distribution enough. So what happened is, we were in the end of 2023, we had a product with insane retention, working really well, but we were almost out of money. We were almost out of money, we had raised a bit of money before, and we were running out of it. We had no other way to find out.
An NayalSo we then decided to monetize the product instead of going and raising more money. So this was a completely free product in that entire span of time, and we hadn't put monetization in the product, which is another one of the mistakes I made. As I mentioned, I made a lot of mistakes with Flamme as well, which I figured out along the way. We put in monetization in the product, we barely made it out of running out of money at that point, end of '23, and we brought the product back to life.
JosephSo the carrot-and-stick uh framework that you talk about for retention, you use that to bring your retention from 1 to 4 to 50% day-30 retention, and which was like higher than popular social media apps like TikTok and Instagram at the time. And how the heck do you do you make an app more retentive than TikTok? So the stick was like you send notification to warn the user that their streak is about to expire. So there's sort of like the fear of …
An NayalIt was a struggle. Uh so I started monetization, and initially, in the first month, we had a surplus of users built up, we monetized, and we had a 15% conversion rate. So I was like, "Wow, this is incredible, man. A 15% conversion to pay for every user who's coming onto the product. We have incredible product-market fit regarding monetization as well. Let's try to scale."
An NayalWhat I didn't realize is how to calculate that conversion to pay. I calculated that as anyone who is paying for the product, it could be new subscribers, it could be old renewals as well. So, let's say the the this sum in total was a thousand, and I would divide that by the total amount of users who are coming on right now.
An NayalNow the the tricky part with this is, if you're getting someone who has been on the app for a couple of months, who's renewing their membership, but you count them in this cohort, then it's not really conversion of the new users. It's just con- like who the total amount of users who are paying for your product.
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More from this episode
- Relaunch the date planner as an AI relationship coach right after ChatGPT came outDay-30 retention rose from 0.8% to 4.2%, still too low; press but no traction
- Make the daily question for couples the main thing on the home screenDay-30 retention went from 4.2% to ~30%, then 50%, with streak reminders
- Send a friendly morning reminder, then an evening 'your partner will be sad' nudgeDay-30 retention went from 4.2% to ~50% alongside the daily-question redesign
- Hide your partner's answer until you answer the question yourselfCreated a back-and-forth loop credited with lifting retention; no separate number
- Add a home-screen widget showing distance to your partner and days togetherWorked well, per the founder; copied from a competitor; no numbers
- Launch alongside a TechCrunch Startup Battlefield feature800% organic growth in one month; stopped by a trademark letter
- Pitch big investors on great retention before you have a way to get usersFailed; top firms asked about distribution and no term sheets came
- Scroll TikTok 4 hours a day for 2 months to learn what worksGot the first account getting views, then copied the approach across accounts
- Run 20-30 TikTok accounts on numbered iPhones, 3-4 accounts per phone~50M organic views; host cites ~150K users
- Use one Apple ID on every farm phone to skip repaying for the proxy appFailed: TikTok linked the accounts, one flag hit all; lost 120 work hours
- Under 300 views means a broken account; 300-1,000 means fix the contentTheir working rule for which accounts and formats to fix; no numbers on impact
- Judge app videos by likes and question slideshows by shares and savesLow-like videos rarely drove downloads, even at 1M+ views
- Post slideshows of '5 uncomfortable but healthy questions to ask your partner'Shared a lot, but only 0.05-0.2% of viewers downloaded
- Post videos that show the app in use, not memesApp demos convert 0.5-1% of views vs 0.05-0.2% for memes and slideshows
- Give AI a 10-page brief with product details, winning scripts and a master promptTeam posts ~200 pieces a day from it; winners are fed back in
- Log every post by hand in a spreadsheet and review it every morningForces the team to study why posts fail; no numbers given
- Copy only formats that went viral on small accounts and get 'what app?' commentsAdopted after 50M views brought few conversions; C part learned late
- Run real 'what do I text back?' Reddit screenshots through the app on videoJust started; guest expects 0.5-1% of viewers to download
- Design the app's screens and loading animation to look good on TikTok
Tags: late-monetization, survival, metric-mistake