Tolan · B2C · AI alien friend app
Run small paid ads from day one to test retention and conversion
Low install costs gave room to experiment; organic later beat it
Workedpaid-socialexperimentation
What they did
Alongside organic creator content, ran small-scale paid ads from the start just to bring people through the funnel and judge retention and conversion. Kept this setup for a few months; paid creative has its own separate process.
What happened
Relatively low CPI from the start gave leeway to experiment; once organic TikTok took off, organic installs became far cheaper than paid.
- Stage
- launch
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Fueling Growth with AI and Viral Product Features — Ajay Mehta, Portola“and then let's also run some small-scale paid ads basically just to get people through the funnel, like kick the tires, see how they enjoy things, and judge things like retention and conversion, and so on.”
Related topics
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More from Tolan
All 13 Tolan tactics- Quiz new users, match them to an AI friend, then start a voice chatAdvisor credits it as a big part of their success; no numbers
- Show a shareable card of how the AI character's personality maps to yoursAdvisor calls it a viral artifact people share; no numbers
- Start with a 7-day free trial, then tune trial length to limit AI costs
More from this episode
- Tolan: Onboard with a fun voice quiz, then have the app bring answers up laterUsers call it a wow moment; part of what lifted early retention
- Tolan: Soft-launch the app for free to see how people really use itSome users talked 30-40 minutes a day right away
- Tolan: Put up a paywall 2-3 weeks after launch to cover AI costsGrowth self-funded; renewals give a clearer product signal than free usage
- Tolan: Hire a group of college-age creators to post lots of TikToks on their own accountsAbout 1 in 20 videos takes off; viral days brought 10-15K installs and #1 in category
- Tolan: Make videos of people using the app while studying, cooking or getting readyStudying ('up at 3am') took off first; a cooking video got ~10M views
- Tolan: Pay creators with about a million followers to post a video on their accountNewer effort; these do better on average than the small creators
- Tolan: Hire artists to make a bright, cute character that looks great in videosLow install costs even on paid; users show it to friends and post it unprompted
- Tolan: Make the AI companion a friendly, non-romantic alien instead of a human80-90% of users are women aged 15-25 with normal social lives
- Tolan: Improve conversations and add a shared planet until D7-D15 retention risesD5, D7 and D15 retention went up; growth then started paying off
- Portola: Raise a small pre-seed first, then more from the same investor after launch$10M seed in total