How it all started: traffic, not product
We came into subscription apps not from the product side but from the money side: from media buying. We bought traffic for big brands, among them the #1 ride-hailing aggregator and one of the largest marketplaces in the CIS. Not necessarily subscription ones: just big budgets and hard discipline on the numbers.
One day we decided to try subscriptions ourselves. We ran traffic to a subscription app, and it turned a profit. That's when it clicked: we can not only bring in traffic but also build an app like this with our own hands. That's how we got into product: from zero, self-taught.
Subscriptions from zero: first the failures, then the principle that changed everything
We came into the subscription app with no product experience, self-taught. We started modestly: sketched a weak first interface ourselves, built it out with a developer, launched traffic, put together a content and media-buying team. The first one didn't fly. The second didn't fly. The third got some traction, but ROI held around 80, and we needed 100+ for it to be a real business rather than a subsidy. We tried a whole lot of things.
And the same thing won every time: we looked around, at those already earning in the niche, and assembled our onboarding and paywall from their already-proven solutions, and finished off the rest with A/B tests. This wasn't 'we got lucky, found a strong competitor and won'. It's a working principle:
'Copy' is too crude a word. The value isn't in taking someone else's work, it's in knowing: whom to take from, what exactly, how to port it onto your own mechanics and how to test it. We understand where to take something ready-made, what the market has already paid for and what's trending now, and where we'll have to invent it ourselves. Copy Netflix's paywall and it won't get better: they have different economics and a different user than you do. But that doesn't mean strong players have no ideas worth taking. The market sets the base, then come our hypotheses and A/B tests. We don't trust a guess until the data confirms it.
What came next: scale, a market break, and a team
From there a real business began, and with it real pitfalls that media-buying experience doesn't prepare you for: what Apple rejects an app for, how attribution works, which tools show what and where they lie. How to work with designers and developers. How we built internal analytics that then misled us, because we'd cut corners on a proper tool. That cost money too.
We went through all of it by hand. The project grew to $500 000 in monthly revenue. We answered for growth and at some point were already running several teams: this isn't a solo story or a 'genius in a garage'.
Then the market broke: IDFA was killed, and the old attribution model stopped working for everyone. We didn't stall, we found new optimizations: moved part of monetization into web funnels, rebuilt the setups, figured out what payment providers ban you for and how to live with it. The team grew, the focus shifted to new directions. So this is a path through a market shift, not the story of a single peak.
// If you're curious: the app (Nandy) can be found and tracked on Sensor Tower. Just note: after IDFA was killed, the revenue visible there almost disappears, not because the project declined but because monetization moved to the web, which Sensor Tower doesn't see. We deliberately don't build the story on a chart and dates: what matters is the method that paid off on real money, not a curve in a tracker.
Why this matters for your app
We sat in the same chair you're sitting in now: took a subscription project from zero with our own hands, dug into onboarding, paywall and traffic ourselves, hit the ROI ceiling and couldn't get our heads around all the growing complexity (the store, experiment timing, which metric matters most right now).
That's why almost any niche fits us: we don't fix the app's topic, we fix the funnel mechanics, and those work similarly everywhere. When we take on someone else's app, we don't guess. We step into the monetization funnel, find exactly where revenue is leaking, and fix those parts with the very method that paid for itself on our own money: with a documented experiment process tied to financial metrics.
Our job is simple: introduce the user to the product and turn them into a paying one. And we know this not from articles but because we walked this path ourselves.