Practitioner pattern · Eric Crowley (Investment banker who earns fees selling consumer subscription companies; was sell-side advisor to Runna in the Strava deal.)
Build a web checkout to win back 15-20% margin from app store fees
Every one of the banker's clients is building or evaluating one; big wins at $100M+ revenue
Mixedpayments-checkoutweb-to-app
What they did
Over the last two years every GP Bullhound CSS client has built or is actively evaluating web funnels, now that court rulings stop Apple jamming app review over external payment links. Use payment providers such as Paddle, Solidgate or Stripe to handle subscription billing and tax. Worth most at scale ($100-200M revenue means multiple millions of profit); Eiting says roughly past $1M/month revenue. Caveats from hosts: mature subs already pay 15% so the gain is not the full 30%, porting an existing subscriber base takes time, and some apps convert better in-app.
What happened
15-20% of profit margin back for apps at scale; hosts note it is working for many but is not a slam dunk for every business.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Why AI Probably Won’t Kill Your App (But Ignoring It Will) — Eric Crowley, GP Bullhound“But then I'd say the last two years, everyone of my clients, and I do mean everyone, is building web funnels.”
“It's a big deal, especially when you're $100, $200 million in revenue. We're talking about multiple million dollars in profit. It's crazy not to build for that.”
“I think we've seen a lot of payment providers come up there, like Paddle, Solidgate, Stripe even that are helping people manage subscription payments, manage the tax withholding”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Strava: Buy a beginner-friendly app and sell it to your users as a bundleDeal closed; adviser calls it '1+1=6'; no post-deal numbers shared
- Runna: Give each runner AI coaching feedback on every run, built by an ex-coachGrew fast and was bought by Strava; no growth numbers given
- Bending Spoons: Buy mature apps, let go of almost all staff, and run them on one central teamEvernote kept ~2 of hundreds of staff and still rates 4.4 stars; company valued at $11B
- Tractive: Ping owners when their dog hasn't been walked in a dayGuest, a user, calls it phenomenal; no business numbers