Unnamed company
Fix the store page, onboarding and paywall alongside paid ads
What they did
In their words
Marcus Burke - How to Build a $2M/Month App (Copy Me)
… of it's hiring it's reporting it's um administration And I noticed that that's not for me. And that's when I decided to go freelance and start my consulting business in 2022. Now you do consulting. So you don't do like the, like, what does that entail in the ad stack? I really honed in on meta ads for subscription ads as kind of my primary channel and then going really deep on that, but kind of more of a vertical integration than where I'm for
the purpose of getting better, like running better meta ads. I do app store optimization. I do onboarding optimization, paywall activation period. So really kind of looking at that full upper funnel, first time user experience to ensure we're doing everything we can to like in the end convert that audience. And that has been getting more and more important over the last years. Just optimizing for like a purchase event and like having a very minimal funnel of, hey, here you are, welcome, like register and then show them a paywall.
That's just not enough anymore. Let's get into the ad creative. So like people want to know, like, how do you make good ads? Can you show us some of the ads you've made? I did another webinar where we kind of, we mapped out a bit like app ads versus web ads. So I thought that maybe it would be kind of a good starting point here as well. One thing I think that's very important when you're trying to make ads is like, I mean, everyone copies everyone. That's pretty normal. Like you're always going to take inspiration from other apps. You're going to take inspiration from other products. I think you want to be very clear about, well, what's the product that is using this ad and
have an hypothesis in mind of why they're using it and why it works for them because you might have to adapt something so it fits your product and i see a lot of like issues there where people like they copy something one-to-one because they think hey this looks cool let's do it for our app but it doesn't really make sense and that happens between industries so everyone was very inspired by the d2c e-com industry for the longest time for all the …
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More from this episode
- Say 'app' or show a demo so the App Store isn't a surpriseMost winning app ads do this; installs suffer otherwise
- Remake one winning ad ~400 times with new hooks and use casesWell over $1M spent on the concept
- Run short videos with a wall of text in the audience's own pain wordsOne of the main working formats; no numbers
- Feed 10-20 Reddit threads to Claude to write ads in your audience's wordsHis standard process; no numbers
- Make ad variants with AI: create an image first, then turn it into videoUsed for clients; not compared with creator videos
- Mix app demo clips into everyday videos, like a chore list for ADHD
- Run ads that look like normal posts; let a web page do the selling
- Send Meta ad clicks to your blog instead of the App StoreClaims to be one of the first to scale this way; no numbers
- Compare cost per trial with trial-to-paid rate for each age groupAges 25-34 cost the most; older users looked under-served
- Give ads that deliver differently, like mostly Facebook feed, their own ad set
- Split ads into groups by format and message, each with its own budget
- On a small budget, put all ads in one group and pick winners weekly
- Have every ad team member interview one user a weekTaught the team most of how to write ad copy; no numbers
- Post on LinkedIn 2-3 times a week
Tags: full-funnel, first-time-user-experience