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Are You Ignoring These RevenueCat Features? (Stop Losing Money)

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App Masters11:22Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

RevenueCat's charts on revenue mix, trial conversion and LTV show whether a subscription app is healthy and ready to scale. Reading them tells you what to fix and whether paid ads can pay off.

Key takeaways

  • New revenue should grow faster than renewal revenue. 3:06
    • Segmenting by transaction type in one month showed about $56,000 in sales, with roughly $22,000 to $23,000 from renewals and $34,000 from new customers.
    • In July, new revenue fell and renewals rose after ad spend was cut. Profit was the best of the year, but renewals outpacing new sales can signal a dying app.
  • Trial start rate and trial-to-paid rate show how well the funnel converts. 4:02
    • A start rate of 5 to 10% is good, above 10% is great, and above 20% is rare and amazing.
    • Trial-to-paid averages 30 to 40%. This niche health app with a 7-day trial converts over 60%.
  • LTV per customer decides whether an app can run paid media. 5:21
    • His personal rule is that an app needs roughly $3 per install within 30 days.
    • Stretching the window to 12, 18 or 24 months barely moves it, to about $3.30. The levers are conversion rates and pricing.
  • Paywall experiments show which changes raise conversions and revenue. 7:53
    • A paywall variant with money-back guarantee wording is beating the control on initial conversions and trial activations.
    • The test is only 4 days old, so it needs more days. He checks conversions at the top of the report and LTV and revenue at the bottom.
  • Web funnels may reach buyers who won't purchase inside an app. 9:32
    • His Facebook ads to an older audience get strong hook rates, hold rates and cost per install, but the installs don't convert.
    • This is an untested hypothesis. He plans to test RevenueCat's web-to-app funnels in a later video.

I want the new to outpace the renewals because if I see something different, you might have a dying app.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Segmenting the revenue chart

Splitting revenue by country and by product shows where the money comes from and which offers carry the app.

  • Country segmentation shows where sales concentrate. 1:44
    • Most sales come from the US, with a few from Canada and the UK.
    • A new app is showing early traction in Kenya.
    • He is starting ASO and ASA campaigns in Kenya, though the app only just launched.
    • The app shown is established and about $37,000 MRR. He bought it.
  • Product segmentation shows which plan earns the most. 3:35
    • It compares monthly and yearly plans.
    • For this app, yearly earns the most.
    • He hides the product view on screen so it doesn't reveal too much about the app.
    • Transaction type can also be found by search, under products and offering.

3:57 Trial conversion and LTV

The trial chart in relative view and LTV per customer show whether the funnel is healthy enough to buy traffic.

  • Trial conversion should be read in relative view. 4:05
    • Switch the chart from absolute to relative to see rates, not counts.
    • Trial activation rate is the first question he asks new clients.
    • His own start rate is high, and he thinks he could still lift it toward 12%.
    • January inflates start rates in health and fitness. The more niche the app, the higher both rates go.
  • LTV per customer matters most when running paid ads. 5:15
    • It is a key sign of whether paid media can work.
    • The chart shows LTV across a 30-day span.
    • The roughly $3 threshold is his personal opinion, not an industry rule.
    • The chart here is the one he checks before spending on ads.

5:41 How long to wait for payback

A longer payback window barely changes LTV for this app, so the cash you can tie up matters more than the chart.

  • An advertiser's cash reserve sets how long they can wait for returns 5:56
    • Spending $10,000 now and waiting a year for $15,000 only works with money in the bank.
    • At 18 months the figure is $329, and at 24 months it barely moves.
    • The customer lifetime window is a variable you can change in the chart.
    • The higher the number, the better the position.
  • RevenueCat can serve as the attribution source for Apple Ads 6:50
    • Under acquisition, you can view results by campaign.
    • It isn't connecting properly for him, but other clients have it working.
    • Done right, it shows how each Apple Ads campaign performs inside RevenueCat.

7:23 Paywalls and experiments

A custom-built paywall can still be tested with RevenueCat's experiment tool.

  • A custom paywall beats RevenueCat's builder for now, and the A/B test still runs there 7:33
    • RevenueCat's own paywall is pretty basic in his opinion.
    • He builds the paywall himself and uses RevenueCat only to run the test.
    • You can build paywalls inside RevenueCat or do it custom.
    • The results summary sits lower on the page, and the full report holds the detail.

9:04 Web funnels and the API

RevenueCat's funnels and API extend its reach beyond the built-in charts.

  • Web-to-app funnels are the next thing to test 9:07
    • Many people have seen success with them, and he thinks they are the future.
    • The app works well for organic and Apple Ads traffic.
    • The idea is to get buyers to pay on the web, then move them into the app.
    • He hasn't tried the feature yet.
  • The API can feed an AI-built weekly report 10:24
    • Technical users can pull RevenueCat data into Claude and have it build its own analysis platform.
    • That platform would give a weekly report.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters, app marketing agency and app publisher. A walkthrough of the RevenueCat charts and features used to judge subscription app health and decide when an app is ready for paid acquisition. It shows a roughly $37,000 MRR app with a 7-day trial converting over 60% of trial starts to paid, and a paywall test where a money back guarantee is winning.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript291 lines
0:00

coming up. If you're building a subscription app, there's one platform you'll probably end up using eventually, Revenue Cap. But most developers only use a fraction of what the platform actually does. So, in this video, I'm going to show you what's exactly inside Revenue Cat, some of my favorite charts, and some of the tools that you might not be leveraging. All that and so much more. What is up app nation? It is Steve P.

0:36

Young, founder of appmasters.com, the YouTube channel, the app marketing agency, the app publishing company that's going to show you exactly what's working in apps today, what the most successful apps are doing, and how you can do the same for you. And in this video, I'm going to walk you through some of my favorite charts within RevenueCat, some of my favorite features, and how you can fully fully leverage it. Now, if I miss something, please reach out to me, steve appmasters.com, and I will do a part two of this video.

1:12

But for now, I'm going to show you my personal favorite charts and tools within RevenueCat. So, without further ado, let's get into it. All right, here is one of our apps and I have blocked out any type of indication for the app, but I wanted to show you the app's doing about 37,000 MR. And here's the revenue feature. Obviously, I'm skipping over the overview because then it'll reveal too much about the app, but I want to show you some of the things that you can do just within this revenue chart. So, I'm going to go to segment and I'm going to show you country. So, you can search for it right here as well. The obvious one is country. So, it's customer segmentation. That's where you find it.

1:53

And you can see most of our sales are coming in the US and we're getting a few in Canada and UK, but not a whole lot. So, that's a great indication for a new app of ours. We're actually seeing some traction in Kenya. And I was like, "Oh, interesting." So, I'm starting to work on some ASO and ASA campaigns within Kenya, but we just launched it and it's brand new. But this is a more established app and you can see the bulk of the revenues coming from the US. The other thing that I like is called transaction type. So you can search for that within this products and offering as well. Transaction type or you can just search for it. Transaction type.

2:29

It's in my most recent. Done. Now this will show you especially if you got an established app. It's been around for some time. This app has been around for some time. Actually purchased this app. But you can see like in January we had a great month. Total we did $56,000 in sales. renewals were about 22,000 or 23,000 and then you were about 34,000. So you can start to see the breakdown. Obviously, I want my new revenues to continue to grow. In July, we had a lower new revenue month and a higher renewal month. That's not a trend that I want to be seeing. I want to continue to grow the renewals and the new, but I want the new to outpace the renewals because if I see something different, you might have a dying app. I've seen certain clients whose renewal revenues outpace their new revenues, which means, you know, you just have old users and you're not trying to capture new users.

3:20

We did lower the ad spend in July a little bit. So, profitability wise, it was really high. It was our best month, but I want that new sales number to go up as well. So, these are the ones that I really pay attention to when it comes to the revenue chart. The other one that you can do is by product. Now, I'm not going to hit this because then it'll reveal too much about the app, but within product, you can see whether it's your monthly, it's your yearly, which plans have the highest revenues. For us, it's really yearly. So, product is also a good indication of how everything is lining up. All right, the next chart I'm going to show you is the one that you really, really have to pay attention to.

4:01

All right, it is called trial conversion. You go here. Here it is. What you want to do is change this absolute revenue cap. Just say relative. This is what you want to see, right? This is the number one question that I ask new founders, new clients that want to work with us. I'm like, okay, what is your trial activation rate, which is your start rate? So, for us, pretty high, right? And we could probably improve it to try to get to 12%. It's a health and fitness app, so January is always going to have a higher start trial rate. And then, what is your trial to paid? Because we have a 7-day trial, we are actually converting over 60% of our trial activations into paying customers. So, that's really high. On average, you're going to see about 5 to 10 being a good number to reach for this start rate. Anything above 10 is great.

4:49

And anything above 20, which I've seen very rarely, but have seen is amazing. And then the conversion rate from trial to paid on average it is about 30 to 40%. So, anything above that is awesome and we're doing very awesome for this. It's a niche health and fitness app and the more niche you can go, the higher these start rate and conversion rate numbers go. But these are things that you have to pay attention to. The next chart I'm about to share with you is something that you really have to pay attention to when you are running paid ads. So, realize LTV per customer is a very key indication of whether you can run paid media or not. So, for this app, and for me, this is just a personal opinion, an app has to be roughly around $3 realiz.

5:38

So, you can see here within a 30-day span, I am about roughly at a $3 per customer. So, I'm making roughly about $3 for every new install. Now, if I can wait a little bit longer, I can always change this. So, the customer lifetime is 30 days. But let's say I was like, hey, I can wait until a whole year. I have enough money in the bank that if I spend 10,000 now, I can wait a whole another year to make 15,000, right? And so you can change that variable.

6:07

Obviously, it doesn't change much for us. So it went from 30 something to 330. So it's not a huge significant change, but this is where you can start to play around with those numbers. Let's say if you can wait 18 months, does this change? 329, so not much. Let's say if you can make 24 months, like two years, doesn't change much either. So, we're roughly going to be around a $3 mark. Now, the higher the number, the better you're going to be. So, the levers I can tweak there are going to be the conversion rates and the pricing, and I can test around that to see if I can get an higher LTV. That's how I can get a higher LTV, just playing around with the conversion rates and obviously the pricing that I do within the app. All right, the other thing I want to show you guys, and I haven't been able to properly connect it, but I've seen other clients who have done this properly, is you can use revenue as a MMP or an

7:01

attribution source for Apple ads. So, I can go into acquisition and do by campaign. Unfortunately, it's not working properly for me, but I have seen other clients who've done it right. But I just wanted to show that off that if you can do it properly, you can kind of get a sense of how well your Apple ads campaigns are performing within Revenue Cat. All right. Now, some of the cool features beyond the charts that you can utilize within Revenue Cat. Okay. The first one is payw walls. You can see it payw walls right here. Again, I've locked out the app itself. We're not using the Revenue Cat payw wall. It's pretty basic in my opinion right now.

7:43

So, we've just built a custom one and so that's how we've done it. But you can build payw walls within RevenueCat or you can just do it custom. The other thing that I love too is the experiments. So, we're running an experiment right now where we have money back guarantee on our payw wall and it's winning. So, I'll show you that real quick. Now, here are the numbers. You can see the B which has the money back guarantee language on our payw wall is outperforming the results summary are down here. I'm not going to scroll too much for you guys because then it'll reveal some of the app details, but you really want to go into full report here.

8:20

And you can see that the initial conversions are up, the initial trial activations are up. The other thing I want to show you is if you scroll all the way down, you'll start to see the LTV and the revenue. And that's really what's most important, too. So I pay attention to the very top in terms of the initial conversions and then I pay attention to the very bottom which is the revenues. Now this experiment literally the day we're recording this has been only 4 days old but the initial numbers look really really good. So we're going to let this run for a few more days before so that we can get significant data behind this. But another cool feature and again this is all customuilt. So, customuilt payw walls, but we're using Revenue Cat to run the AB test. All right. Now, a cool thing that I'm about to test out using Revenue Cat is their funnels feature, and I'm going to show it off right here.

9:13

It's called funnels. You can do web funnels, web to app funnels. A lot of people have seen success with that. I do definitely think it's the future. I've been running Facebook ads on this particular app and not seeing really good results. And because we're targeting a older audience, my hunch, my hypothesis is that maybe web funnels will work better than app funnels. App is great for organic and Apple ads, but we're just not getting the conversions.

9:41

And our ads are performing pretty well. We're getting insane hook rates, insane hold rates, great cost per installs, just those installs are not converting. So, I have a gut feeling that maybe my older audience isn't so used to buying on the app. app itself that I might have to explore web campaigns to get them to buy on the web which they might feel more comfortable with and then getting them to use the app after they've purchased. So, really cool feature here.

10:10

Again, I haven't played around with it, but I am going to test this out in an upcoming video. All right, that is it. Now, obviously, everybody knows Revenue Cat. You probably are using it. I wanted to really highlight what you can do with it. The other thing that if you're really techy, you can take its API, take some of this data, put it into Claude, have Claude built its own platform so you can analyze it and it'll give you a weekly report. Lots of things you can get done there. And lastly, the feedback I want from you is if I miss something in this overview, please leave a comment below. Say, "Hey, Steve, I really love this feature." or send me an email and say like, "Hey, this is the feature I really love because of X, Y, and Z."

10:57

I'll create a part two of this video and highlight some of those features, but I want to show off my favorite features and charts first. All right, if you need help with your app marketing, reach out to us appasters.com. And if you enjoyed this, share it with a friend or like the video. All right, until then, I'll see you on the next video.