BPM · B2C · dating app for sporty singles
Test ad tracking with $5, start at $50/day, add ad sets once costs hold
Stable costs; some ads ran profitably for months
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- post-launch scaling
In their words
$140K MRR Niche Dating App in Just 6 Months
… that installs campaign were literally the worst we could have done. but yeah it was fun to discover it hey but you did well with just an insult campaign i love that story yeah yeah definitely all right so yeah i don't remember what authority sorry about that uh yeah so that strategy um the strategy on page you wait so basically how i see it is the the the tech the technical setup is definitely a nightmare and it's still a nightmare today
sometimes we like three days ago we had a problem with an event and we had to change it etc etc so it's it's it's it is a nightmare and it's gonna stay a nightmare so you have to be sure that everything works correctly and you have to check like put five euros on a random five dollars on a random campaign and make sure that every event falls back to the right networks that installs work correctly, that your trials or your subscriptions work correctly.
Once that's done, you can start small. So if you want to run paid ads, I would advise you to start at like $50 a day if you can afford that because it's like already a lot of money at the end of the month. But if you can start at like $50, otherwise you can do $25 or less. Wait until the spend is clean. What do I mean by clean? That means like if you're running installs campaign, wait until it stabilizes, wait until you are happy with the results,
… cost per installs or down the line, cost per trials, cost per subscriptions, wait until it's clean. And then you can start stacking ad sets. So I don't know if everyone's familiar with the notion of ad sets, but it's basically a group of ads that you can create on any network. and one line equals $50 a day or the amounts that you set yourself to. And you start doing this. And the key, key really opinion, not opinion, advice on this is to only,
the key advice is stability. Change stuff on any network as little as you can. In my opinion, of course, I've got friends that are gonna disagree with me, but if you can change it once a week, the network is gonna like it he's going to have a change once a week, he's going to be able to adapt, he's going to be able to stabilize afterwards, and he's going to reward in a way this stability with having stable costs. And that's how we can run the same ads for like months and months. I know we don't have like a lot
of spend on paid UA compared to the big ones, but still we have some ads that have been running for like four months maybe five months because we are stable with our media buying with our ua strategy so that was uh the final advice i love it gabe hey what did what did you go what was clean for you like before you started stacking it's a good question honestly um i i didn't have something
something specific in mind in a clean when I started. But I knew some people from the industry and I was like, all right, here is my numbers. What do you think of them? And they were like, for a start and for your spend, these are good. And once I saw that I had those numbers for one week, then two weeks, then three weeks, I was like, all right, this is nice. I'm getting some revenue. I'm generating some revenue from those numbers.
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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
- Start Meta ads at €20/day after week one to keep new users flowingProfitable; main growth driver to 140K MRR
- Set up Meta ad campaigns to get the most installsReached 20K MRR, but founder calls it the worst choice in hindsight
- 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, budget, ad-set-stacking, stability, event-tracking