BPM · B2C · dating app for sporty singles
Start Meta ads at €20/day after week one to keep new users flowing
Profitable; main growth driver to 140K MRR
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- week 1 after launch
In their words
$140K MRR Niche Dating App in Just 6 Months
or if it's gonna be worth it for them or not. So basically my take is this. I will split every consumer app there is into two categories, social apps and non-social apps. Non-social apps for me is really similar to a utility app, but if you do a non-social apps your product is the product that means that when you come on the app the user will be facing the product he won't be facing any other user all right so that's
why that's what i call a non-social app if you have those sort of those kind of apps paid ua isn't necessary especially in the beginning of uh of your adventure if you don't have a few hundred or a thousand dollars to put in page UA. There is so much you can do on organic on TikTok today that you don't really need to do page UA. Basically, if you acquire one user on Friday, 10 on Saturday, and zero on Sunday, it doesn't really matter for your app because the product is the product. For us and for any social app, it's quite different because I can't let the app
have one user on Friday, 10 on Saturday, and zero on Sunday. Otherwise, everyone is going to turn. So you have to have some sort of steady growth, of course, steady increasing growth, to be able to do a social app. And that's why, in my opinion, paid UA is necessary. It's not the only way to do it, all right? So I know another app of my friend that's called Albo. It's an app where you can pin stuff that you want to do and you can do it with friends.
He has like a social app, but he's only on organic. He's doing a big creators program, but his program is really huge and big and doing a lot of success. So there are other ways to do it, but to me, it's still necessary to do paid UA. And eventually at the end of the day, the only thing that's gonna scale, yeah, that's the app. The UI is amazing as well. You need to invite him to the podcast. I mean, he's- You need me the intro. Yeah, I'll …
… on the objective. Basically, if you want to do a 5K MRR app and it's a non-social app, you don't need paid UA because otherwise you're going to be stressed about how much you're putting in, how much you're gaining, etc. If you want to make a 100K MRR app, at some point you're going to need paid UA because you can't make it with organic, except Isaac. um but um but yeah so that's basically how i uh how my what my philosophy is around um around
paid ua and i don't know if i forgot something about this no i i like it and you're going to break down your paid ua strategy and i love it but before we do that gabe i want to ask you this you know at the start you used your run club but when did you okay i need to go outside my run club to attract more users? Yeah, after week one. So yeah, so first week. I'm exhausted. Yeah, Run Club got us until week one. And afterwards, I started doing paid ads.
You know, it was like 20 euros per day. I remember I had like one campaign on Meta running on 20 euros per day, but still it was something. But the very beginning was the Run Club and then it was paid ads because I knew I had to have like a steady growth all the way i couldn't allow myself to to make a few 100 views on on this tiktok have a 50k on another one etc etc so yeah i did it after week one in week one was were you just optimizing for and …
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More from this episode
- Run a singles-only run club to test a dating app ideaDemand confirmed; couples formed; runners became the launch audience
- Make your own Reels and boost a couple of posts to fill an eventGrew to ~500 followers; people signed up for runs
- Build a 3K waitlist before launch and have regulars make profiles early~500 installs on launch weekend
- Launch a dating app in one country only, so users are close together140K MRR in six months from France alone
- Download every competitor app and copy what works in each part
- Launch free, then turn on subscriptions about a month later1K MRR by the next Monday, 10K MRR 30 days later; no before/after comparison
- Set up Meta ad campaigns to get the most installsReached 20K MRR, but founder calls it the worst choice in hindsight
- Test ad tracking with $5, start at $50/day, add ad sets once costs holdStable costs; some ads ran profitably for months
- Make your first video ads from event footage, then test agency videos against themAn agency's videos worked well; no numbers
- Split co-founder equity unevenly so one person has the final say
- Ask everyone you know for a technical co-founder; work together a few weeks first
- Run the company with two founders who both use Claude daily
- Build a dating app only for people who play sport every weekPassed App Review; 140K MRR in six months
- Grow a social app only through a big creator program
- Get a brand deal with a sports event like Hyrox for a dating app
- Show the paywall before asking people to create an account+52% sales
Tags: meta, social-app, steady-growth, budget