Lipstick

Lipstick is one of Social's four leading apps, at just over $300K a month. Lipstick earns just over $300K a month inside Social, a bootstrapped studio of 22 apps that reaches $16M a year with a small team and about 100 A/B tests a month.

Celebs is a little bigger than Lipstick. Font Maker earns about $200K a month, and Autopaste is closer to Font Maker. Social buys apps it thinks can scale profitably over the long term, often after a viral peak, then grows them through a loop of better ads and better monetization.

Superwall▶ 10:00

A test that wins on Celebs can be the wrong call for Lipstick. Social found that the same test decision can be right for Celebs and wrong for Lipstick, because each app's funnel is shaped differently. Removing the onboarding paywall won big on Celebs only after its roughly 10 later conversion points had been optimized.

Onboarding changes matter most because the funnel shrinks with each step. The team tags every test with its hypothesis so the lesson transfers as a principle, not a copy: the Celebs win was friction removal, and in another app the team looks for the equivalent move. Patrick's rule for a new app is to keep a paywall in onboarding unless a better moment to ask for payment exists later in the app.

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