💎 Growth Gems #130 - Strategy, Monetization, and Creatives
Gems from Darius Mora, Matej Lancaric, Felix Braberg, and Jakub Remiar in Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science on the 2.5 Gamers Podcast
Hi, fellow growth practitioner!
This week, I’m bringing you insights on Strategy, Monetization, and Creatives.
I hope these insights will be valuable!
🥇 TOP GEM OF THE WEEK
Bending Spoons’ strategy is ruthless.
But it seems to work.
So while I’m not a fan, I was curious to learn more about it. I’ve also enjoyed insights by Darius Mora since I started Growth Gems, so I had extra incentive.
It starts with very Bending Spoon-specific stuff but then goes way beyond. I believe you’ll find these gems valuable!
(still, hi 👋 to the 5 “spooners” who are subscribed).
stage: early
💎 Bending Spoons 6 co-founders agreed that the one finding the highest-paying job will take that full-time job while the others work on the business. Luca Ferrari (CEO) ended up working at McKinsey for 16 months.
(06:50) by Felix
stage: early
💎 Building apps from scratch might not be the fastest path to high revenue. Bending Spoons first bought an app for $15k, rewrote it, changed the design, and improved revenue metrics. This laid the ground for their growth strategy.
(07:17) by Darius
Bending Spoons' annual revenue across apps has been estimated at $500M and they're eying an IPO.
Below is the evolution of downloads and revenue for their portfolio (source: Sensor Tower). It’s a little hard to read, sorry. You can see that Splice and Remini have grown a lot recently.
They did raise $340M in September 2022, which they used for acquisitions. StillFront and Embracer have had similar models, where they'd raise the value of their stocks via acquisitions and it apparently didn't go well but subscription apps is a different market.
stage: scaled
💎 Since they're very confident in their own team, the first move of Bending Spoons when they acquire a company is to fire 75% of people in that team and bring more talent in-house in Italy (where costs are cheaper).
(13:20) by Darius
stage: growth / scaled
💎 Bending Spoons expects job candidates to do 4-5 unpaid hours of "at-home" work before talking to them, mostly work unrelated to the core expertise and more geared toward problem-solving. They do pay very well for Italy and leverage that.
(14:30) by Darius
They also have a 3-6 month internship program for graduate hires where people choose their role after working a while for the company.
They supposedly have less than 1% "unwanted churn".
stage: early / growth
💎 The app acquisition market has drastically changed. 5 years ago, app founders would not get a lot of inbound messages for acquisition. It was also much easier to revamp onboarding and paywall to significantly improve revenue.
(20:34) by Darius
💎 Marketing trends typically flow from e-commerce to apps to games, with a 3-year lag. App marketers should look to e-commerce for emerging trends, while gaming can learn from both sectors.
(21:54) by Matej
I think this is particularly true for creatives. I feel like gaming leads in other areas like monetization, some ua channels, analytics.
Darius gave the precision that it often all starts with porn, actually...Later, when discussing the Remini app that's part of the Bending Spoons portfolio, Matej mentioned China was a pioneer in all fields.
💎 Implement dynamic Apple Search Ads keyword targeting that captures viral moments. Monitor trending topics and immediately add related keywords to your campaigns to capitalize on sudden spikes in search volume and user interest.
(29:22) by Darius
This is something Bending Spoon apparently does: anytime there is a viral thing happening, they're loading all the keywords around that.
Somewhat related, I believe it was Thomas Petit who shared a long time ago that a fitness app was bidding on some pizza search terms.
💎 Implement am "Enable free access" toggle on your paywall to increase conversion rates.
(33:23) by Jakub
If you're running paid UA (e.g., Meta, TikTok), make sure you're also adding an event that combines free trial and direct purchases so you can test optimizing for it (it's also interesting to optimize just for the direct purchases if you have enough volume).
💎 The weekly + annual subscription paywall with free trial toggle template has become the industry standard the last year, and is now available as a default template in tools like Superwall.
(37:53) by Darius
For the products in his portfolio, Darius is trying to push people to the weekly subscriptions because he's seeing the weekly subscription LTV being higher. Obviously this is something you need to test for your own product.
This is an interesting read by Daphne Tideman on the RevenueCat blog: Weekly subscriptions: when do seven-day plans make sense?
💎 Actively manage your app store reviews by reporting negative reviews that don't comply with guidelines (e.g., complaints about pricing rather than app functionality).
(44:32) by Darius
I know you can do this via your app store contact, but not sure you can do it any other way?
💎 Optimize review prompt timing by showing it immediately after subscription completion, before users experience the product. Users are most positive right after subscribing and will rate highly, while the negative-to-positive ratio remains constant but volume increases.
(45:04) by Darius
This is something that's been shared more and more lately, like here by Marcus.
stage: early
💎 Before asking for a review, show a review/ratings "pre-prompt" screen to users mentioning you're an indie team.
(46:15) by Darius
💎 Leverage app promotion sites like AppAdvice to make your app temporarily free in exchange for them featuring you. This sacrifices one day of revenue but generates thousands of installs and hundreds of five-star reviews which helps with discoverability.
(46:26) by Darius
Aaah the old AppGratis model (I'm showing my age)!
Before pulling the trigger on this, I would carefully look at (similar) apps that have recently used the service (3-6 months) to better understand what the impact might have been. There might be unintended consequences...
💎 Success in paid UA comes down to creative testing volume and speed-to-market. The first to identify and scale winning creative concepts wins.
(49:13) by Darius
💎 Launch 200+ creatives daily, kill under-performers by noon, then concentrate budget on the 5-10 winners. This is how you can identify creatives that perform well for months.
(50:20) by Darius
This is inline with the "eliminate poor performers" approach that I shared in Growth Gems #129 (with Thomas Petit and Eric Seufert):
Darius mentioned they would look everyday at the Facebook Ads library to find yesterday's best performers and immediately recreate the ads.
stage: early / growth
💎 Create and post on multiple TikTok accounts to leverage its unique algorithm and deliver millions of views to brand new accounts, making it the most powerful organic discovery platform for apps.
(53:08) by Darius
If you're looking for examples, my favorite newsletter is socialgrowthengineers.com.
As Matej mentioned, you can now automate a lot of this process (at least the content production part).
💎 One strategy to build an app portfolio is to monitor TikTok's trending keywords to spot a generic trend, build an app MVP around that keyword in a week and publish on the App Store. Run Apple Search Ads on top of that.
(54:13) by Darius
Easy!
💎 AI-generated content has saturated major app categories, making competition extremely difficult. This means you now need more sophisticated strategies to stand out in established categories.
(56:35) by Darius
💎 Use TikTok as a free creative testing platform by posting 100+ videos daily to identify winners before spending ad budget. This pre-qualification approach eliminates wasted ad spend by only scaling creatives that have already proven organic success.
(58:01) by Darius
This seems like a solid strategy, however it can be quite time-consuming (particularly if you use multiple TikTok accounts) so I feel like it’s a trade off between time and money: it is faster and more straightforward to just launch ads in creative testing.
See you next time.
Stay curious!
— Sylvain
Chief Insights Miner at Growth Gems ⛏️
(Fractional) Head of Growth at Reading.com
Growth Consultant/Advisor for high-potential subscription apps
🔗 Source:
Inside $500M/Year Bending Spoons: TikTok Trends, Viral videos, UA & Paywall Science on the 2.5 Gamers Podcast
Interesting to see Darius is seeing higher LTV with weekly, it really does feel like there is a trend that more apps are using weeklys as almost a trial option.
How do people do 100+ new creatives daily 🤯