Starting with your questions from last time

In my previous newsletter, I talked about the “secret” weapon I’ve been using to improve my life continuously: a weekly Mastermind session with three very good friends of mine, where we learn and advise each other on various topics.

I’ve got a few replies with general comments about it, alongside some interesting questions from you (thanks for not allowing this edition to flop completely).

1) How did your group start, and how can I find the right people to create my own?

It all started with an invitation for my friend and ex-business partner, Yuri Moreno. He shared this article about “The Elephants,” a modern Mastermind group (an idea introduced by Napoleon Hill, the author of one of the most-sold books ever).

What’s important to say here, though, is that I already knew everyone from the group: Caio Mattos and Denis Andrade. I already respected them and had a good idea about what it was like being around them. So when Yuri told me they were on board, I already knew it’d be foolish of me not to give it a try.

If I were to create a new Mastermind today, I’ll sit down with myself and think of people that:

• I could learn a lot from more than one area
• Have at least one area of their life where they’re “ahead” of me: fitness, relationships, finances, work, or mindset-wise.
• Someone I’d trust with my money and my wife
• Someone I’d enjoy being around

After I put that list on paper, I’d ask those people if they’d like to create a Mastermind with you. If they say yes, then use the answer to the following question as a map to decide what to talk about.

2) How do you decide what to talk about? Do the meetings always have the same format?

We have two types of sessions: fixed commitments and discussions.

The fixed ones currently are:

• Reset reviews: every month, we share updates on goals and progress around: health, relationships, work, finances, and hobbies
• Book/Documentary Club: every ±6 weeks, we sit down to discuss what we just read or watched. Then every ±3 months, we vote on what we want to read or watch. From documentaries on plant-based diets and e-sports to the most interesting authors I got to know – like Seneca, Victor Frankl, and Franz Kafka – we try to pick reads that will open our minds to something new.
• Game nights: we fill the gaps with simple multiplayer games to wind off and talk shit. We started with Poker, and last week we played Unrailed for the first time (this game is really fun, btw!).

Then we have sessions where it’s all about learning new stuff. It can be something that one of us knows more than the others (I talked about Freud and Phenomenology once, for example), or we bring a guest to teach us something cool and different (let me know if you want to be one of them), or if one of us needs to share a deeply personal problem, then we also have a safe space to talk it through and help. Those are the sessions we bond, I think.

3) What about the other things? Like, are there any downsides to having such a group?

Great question. There are also problems involved, of course, although I wouldn’t necessarily label them as bad.

The hardest thing is keeping accountability and having everybody aligned as much as possible. To keep it simple, we created a spreadsheet with all the dates and the theme of each day – and then we put it on paper if someone misses a meeting.

We also created the rule that if just one of us can’t attend, the others will go on without that person. That’s to avoid a situation where one person spoils the commitment of the rest.

Then the other thing is that it’s natural that everybody will not be 100% committed all the time. Only some people will think that the topic for discussion is super interesting. So I guess it’s also about being thoughtful and transparent to each other and enduring when things aren’t going well.

—

So, that was it. I hope that is enough information for those who are considering creating something similar and inspiring others who miss being part of a group with like-minded people. If you have more questions, hit reply 🙂

This meme from Anna R. made me spill my coffee:

A brutal “sad but true” moment.

Btw: I plan to bring AI to Easy App Reports later this year. The idea is to provide actionable insights and optimization suggestions based on the data we bring from the app stores and other sources. The thing is that most companies don’t have the fundamentals in place to leverage AI for data analysis. So I see this as a big, juicy, business opportunity if you ask me.

A dope growth hack from a Portuguese fintech

When my partner and I incorporated Easy App Reports as RC5 Lda in Portugal, we got this remarkable letter from Coverflex just a few weeks after we started operating.

I’ve been following these guys on LinkedIn for a while now, as they seem to have a pretty exciting way to run Growth there. I found this letter a perfect example of how startups need to think outside the box and go offline (why not?) to get their customers:

A few components that I found interesting about it:

• Using bold text to highlight business problems and tease the customer
• A calculation of how much value they can create (who on earth wouldn’t want to save 1k euros per year per employee?)
• Clear call to action via the QR code and other links
• Social proof at the bottom

Way to go, guys 😉

How to Google Ads your app

Thomas Petit has the best Twitter account for app marketers out there. This week he went beyond and wrote this guide on how to run Google Ads campaigns for apps. A must-read if you’re getting into the weeds of UA.

📕 Books I’m reading

Love: How to rethink Marketing for Digital Products: I got this book as a gift from Patrick Goldsteen and I have already recommended it to at least five people since I started reading it. This is an excellent book for anyone considering moving into Product Marketing or if you’re a Product Manager who wants to know how to market your product better.

🛠️ Tools I’ve been using

My prayers were listened to: finally, someone solved the problem of dealing with multiple calendars and project management tools. Let me introduce you to Akiflow.

As an independent consultant and entrepreneur who struggles with focusing, it’s easy to get lost in all the different commitments I’m making with multiple people. With Akiflow, that’s no longer a problem. I’ve been using them for about two weeks now, and it’s been a total game-changer. Now I finally have clarity on what should I prioritize my tasks during the day, even if they’re spread in Jira, Notion projects, Trello, and email.

Use my referral link to get $10 in credits (I’ll also get $10). Akiflow is not sponsoring this newsletter, by the way.

💡 Quote I’m pondering

Someone power-hungry makes a new rule at your workplace. It’s unnecessary. It’s counterproductive. It’s an irritant. It removes some of the pleasure and meaning from your work. But you tell yourself it’s all right. It’s not worth complaining about. 

Then it happens again.

You’ve already trained yourself to allow such things by failing to react the first time. You’re a little less courageous. Your opponent, unopposed, is a little bit stronger. The institution is a little bit more corrupt. The process of bureaucratic stagnation and oppression is underway, and you’ve contributed by pretending that it was OK. Why not complain? Why not take a stand? If you do, other people, equally afraid to speak up, may come to your defence. And if not—maybe it’s time for a revolution. Maybe you should find a job somewhere else, where your soul is less in danger from corruption.

12 Rules for Life, Jordan B. Peterson

It’s not taking cold plunges or waking up at 5 am daily.

It’s not drinking lots of water, exercising daily, or meditating.

It’s not spending more time with your family and friends.

It’s not therapy. Continue…

Yes, I’m still alive.

Saying that I’ve not been consistent with my content production might be a total understatement by now. But I’m less than 2 months away from buying back my time to continue pursuing my projects (including this newsletter) while I still dedicate a good chunk of my time to my clients.

Here’s how I’m rationalizing my total lack of consistency:

1) I moved to a new house a couple of months ago

It’s a lovely 3-floor detached home on the outskirts of Viseu. Still, only the last weekend, I had the time to organize my new home office properly.

The light of this space is incredible (the window on the left was closed; otherwise, it’d be super bright everywhere), which gives it such a great vibe!

I think that the reason why I get excited about it is that designing an office is where many of my interests in technology, design, and self-improvement come together.

Focus is something I struggle with, so having a place designed with intentionality is key for me to be able to do my best work. There’s a lot of inspiration from channels like Matthew Encina and Never Too Small, which I think is worth mentioning. This is also a project I get to do with my wife: check, check, check.

2) Interim Head of Marketing for Impala Studios

I’m once again doing Growth for apps full-time, which allowed me to learn new tricks and test my current skills. I’m also getting to work with many interesting folks, which is pretty cool.

Interestingly enough, I’m also leading a Marketing team again. I’m still processing it and comparing this experience with my previous one. This is something I definitely want to write about in the near future.

Now that things are progressing, I should gradually return to my consultant role, which will also give me headspace for my projects. There are still a few weeks in front of me, though, and things are far from perfect, so there’s a lot yet to be done.

It’s a pretty special moment when you start to see everything falling into place after months of going through the numbers, bouncing ideas off with people, putting a plan on paper, and then actually going for it.

3) Easy App Reports got to $5,000 Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)

We were stuck at $4.2-$4.4 for almost half a year now, so what changed? How did we break the ceiling?

Well, we started playing with ads again – but this time, it’s actually paying off. That means we’re operating on a slightly lower margin, sure, but also that we’re able to sustain a stronger pace of growth.

This project could be so much more though, so if you ask me about it I’d probably start naming all the one hundred things we should be doing in order to make a bigger impact on the market.

Still, there’s a psychological barrier I’m breaking here, which I think might be the most important outcome here. You know, I’ve helped clients go from 6 to 8-9 figures in revenue a year. But, the truth is, I never managed to do that for myself.

The funny thing is, because I could see this product growing as big (if not more) than other companies I worked for in this past decade, now I actually believe I could replicate this success again in the future. Not that I didn’t believe in it before, but now I can see what it takes and what it feels like, which certainly hits differently.

Am I the only one?

From “I can’t get enough of it” to “I can’t stand people hearing people talking about it”

From “this is great and works like magic” to “oh, this is just another gimmick”

From “this will save my job” to “this can replace my job”

From ”the future will be awesome” to “the future might be fucking terrifying”

How are YOU feeling about it, by the way? I always love to get replies to this email, so, you know, don’t be a stranger.

ps: am I doing this meme thing right? 😛

💬 Quote from the book Cashvertising

“When you get someone to think deeply about something, and you persuade them to arrive at a conclusion, they will adopt their decision as a result of their own thinking, protect it, and defend it (against competitors, for example)”

– Cashvertising, Drew Eric Whitman

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TikTok made me sign up – but I regret it

AdCreative.Ai: I tried using it for my Google Ads retargeting campaigns, and I must say I was deeply disappointed. While I understand that the issue might be that my expectations were too high, I still think they could do a much better job at not promising what it can’t deliver.
There are certainly many people out there who like AdCreative.ai a lot, by the way, I know. Still, I’m not sure I’m giving it another shot anytime soon.
What went wrong in my case:

The AI-generated texts are… Well, I was going to say not great, but in my case, it was just wrong. After spending a couple of minutes adding context about what Easy App Reports is about, our goal, and who the customers are, I got an unusable placeholder text as output Humm…

You still have to design your creatives yourself. From watching their ads, you instantly get the feeling that it has an AI-powered creative generator – but it just feels like a gimmick.

It’s not clear what size of the images you need to upload, and there’s not much you can do with the cropping.

You can only do one copy option and one image at a time. Not sure how I’d scale that.

Then it outputs 100 different banner options from which 90%+ is either awkward or wrong, so you have to pick what you want to use manually anyway.

As a SaaS entrepreneur myself, I don’t like sharing negative feedback about another tool in public.

As a marketer who writes to other marketers, I feel you’d appreciate the heads-up.

📊 Data viz tip

How to build (good) funnels on GA4: Simo Ahava is a well know figure in the web analytics world. I’m always learning something from him, and this time he goes beyond again by sharing a relatively simple trick on how to build a proper funnel report on GA4, which is pure awesomeness.

Taking contextual ads to the next level

I recently stayed at Novotel, and I noticed these ads from Calm at the front desk and elevators:

A few thoughts crossed my mind when I saw these:

“This is pretty cool! Looks like a win-win deal for everybody: the guests, Calm, and Novotel.”

“Is this an ad, or is this a partnership?”

“I wonder what the results are, though. Are they being able to measure this properly?”

Later at night, I found this article that explains the whole partnership.

In a world where everybody seems to be pushing for short-term results and cheap conversions, this felt like a breath of fresh air to me.

A Shortcut to Measuring Engagement

How to measure your product’s stickiness today without going hardcore on data crunching by using GA4 or Firebase:

Write down how often your customers need your product to do their thing: daily, weekly, monthly (quarterly or annually could also be an option, but it’s not covered on GA4). That’s your product’s “natural usage frequency”. There are fancy ways to calculate this. But, honestly? If you know your customer, you don’t need any of that (you can always ask your founder or customer support person – they’ll know for sure).

If it’s daily, then DAU (Daily Active Users) is your main metric. But, you can compare it to weekly to make it more insightful.

So, in this example, you should be looking at DAU/WAU.

The question it answers: from all the users we’ve had in the past week, how many interacted with our product in a single-day window? That’s it. That’s how you instantly know your product stickiness.

Here’s how to find that info: open your Google Analytics 4, click on Engagement, and scroll down. You’ll see your “User Stickiness” there. That’s what you’re looking for.

Now, look at the trend. You can instantly know if your engagement is flat, rising, or dropping. Cool, right? It could be better, but it’s better than just looking at daily visitors or MAU.

“I don’t get it. Looking at Monthly Active Users (MAU) is just as useful”

Not true. If your customers use your product daily or weekly, it’ll take 3-4 weeks to realize what’s going on, which can be quite dangerous for your business.

“What if my product has a quarterly/yearly usage?”

GA4/Firebase doesn’t offer this, primarily because the more inaccurate it gets as you stretch the time window. In this case, an in-house solution would be better, or you’d have to upgrade to a tool like amplitude.

“But on GA4, there’s a lot of visitors, not real customers. Their dashboard isn’t reliable.”

It’s a matter of configuring your GA properly. You can then filter for logged-in users only if that makes sense. There are better solutions. But, the reality is that most teams don’t have the BI support to extract this information, so it does come in handy.

Another option is always to learn a bit of SQL, but that’s a story for another day.

🛠 Tools I’m using
I’ve been playing around with Descript for a while now, and the more I use it, the more I want to use it. This shit is magic. It even works in Portuguese (it’s not as good, but it gets 85%+ of the words right).

At the moment, I’m using it to prepare a few shorts and interview drops for my YouTube channel:

📕 Books I’m reading

Anything you Want by Derek Sivers: If you want to hear a story of a guy who built a multi-million dollar business trying to make his business smaller, not bigger, and delivering value above everything else, this book is for you.

Derek is in my top 5 favorite non-fiction authors, and he once again crushed it with this book (I have no idea how I forgot to read it sooner). Just like the Calm ad, this book feels extremely refreshing, especially compared to all tales we’re bombarded with about trying to get rich fast and growing companies like crazy.

Here’s one of my favorite parts (Portuguese):

Quote of the week

Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you – The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, by Eric Jorgenson

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Extras

I usually don’t brag, but the content we’ve been putting out in the App Bakers newsletter is just lit. If you work with apps and you’re thirsty for high-quality content on how to grow an app, then I really recommend you subscribe now.

PT-BR: recentemente eu liberei as entrevistas todas do meu curso de App Store Optimization de graça no YouTube.

Estimating campaign results without conversion tracking

We’ve all been there.

You’re running a campaign with a decent budget, but there’s no conversion tracking in place.

Because of that, you can’t quite report more than cost, impressions, CTR, and clicks. As a marketer, that’s not really a spot you wanna be in. Well, unless you could find a way to get close enough to reality without relying on engineering 😉

Here are three ways to achieve that:

1. Use the overall conversion rate of your product: on apps, for example, you can know how many in-app purchases you sell daily in total, but not necessarily by traffic source. In this case, you could take your app’s overall conversion rate and assume your campaigns perform similarly.

2. Ask BI for the number of conversions registered in your products’ database during a given time: let’s say they tell you that you had 92 sales registered on your database last month. If you divide that by the number of visitors you had in the same period, now you got an assumed conversion rate that you could use.

3. You can get a benchmark from a market study: this is not ideal, and I wouldn’t recommend this approach to make any big decisions, but I’ve seen it being used for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Still, if your company doesn’t know how much it’s selling, then maybe that’s a strong signal you might have bigger problems to worry about.

By the way, using assumptions like this (in the right way) is a clear indication of seniority. The opposite is also true. So learning how to feel comfortable with using proxies is a great way to get to a next level in your career.

⭐ Extra tip: when reporting results using proxies and assumptions, it’s always a good idea to mention how you got that number somewhere in your presentation.

Easy App Reports and a new newsletter: App Bakers 🥐

If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I built a SaaS with a close friend a year and a half ago. Back then, I thought that If we got 20 subscribers in the first year, I’d consider it an ultimate success.

Fast forward to now, we reached 170 customers from all over the world. Pretty mindblowing, to be honest. It’s incredible what happens when you build something that solves a problem you deeply understand – and there’s enough demand for it.

One of our main initiatives is this newsletter on Analytics and Marketing for apps. We’re calling it App Bakers.

So if you’re here for all the app-specific content, you might want to check it out: click here.

I’m personally curating the content that is going there and I’ll also write/record original content whenever possible.

Takes on Apple Search Ads

In December, I spoke at the App Growth Week about Apple Search Ads and the impact of UA on organic rankings. Now they released the full interview on YouTube, so I thought maybe you’d like to watch it:

App Growth Week | Evolution of Apple Search Ads and effective UA strategies for 2023

Some of the questions I covered:

• What are the best strategies for Apple Search Ads in 2023?
• What to expect from new App Store ad placements?
• Do installations from Apple Search Ads contribute to higher keyword rankings?

🛠 Tools I’m using

HelloNext is a web-based platform that enables users to manage and prioritize product feedback from their customers. It offers a variety of features such as customizable feedback boards, voting systems, and integrations with popular tools like Slack and Trello. I use HelloNext on Easy App Reports because it’s simple to understand and manage all customer suggestions, with that in hand we can priotize every single sprint fast and easily.

📕 Books I’m reading

The Great CEO Within is a comprehensive guide to building and scaling a successful business, written by veteran CEO and executive coach, Matt Mochary. The book emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and continuous learning as key traits for successful leaders and provides practical insights and advice on topics such as creating a vision, building a strong team, setting goals and metrics, developing a company culture, and managing growth. With valuable insights from Mochary’s own experiences as a CEO and executive coach, “The Great CEO Within” is an essential read for entrepreneurs and CEOs who want to take their businesses to the next level.

Quote of the week

It’s a cliché question to ask, What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: Well, thank God I don’t have cancer – The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.

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Maybe you noticed I’ve been absent for the past couple of weeks. Sorry for that and thank you for sticking around. I’m a big advocate of consistency though so, naturally, I’m frustrated that stuff like this happens.

Anyway, I’m also thinking of solutions already because I know I’ll probably have more weeks like these. So soon you might notice I’ll change the format sometimes, making it more concise and powerful rather than long and detailed.

On a more positive note, it’s been a great couple of weeks with my speaking gig at App Growth Week, a work trip to the Netherlands, some traveling with the fam, and exciting plans for Easy App Reports.

But without further ado, let’s get into this week’s newsletter:

3 metrics to master your app’s subscriptions

If you’re used to looking at new subscriptions to measure your growth but can’t seem to understand the forces at play around it, this article is for you. Hell, I guess it’s probably even more helpful if you don’t have access to fancy dashboards or a data team to help you out every step of the way. All tips I’m giving here can be retrieved directly from Google Play or the App Store.

Anyway, I’ve worked with multiple app subscription businesses in the past eight years, and if there’s one thing I learned, it is how to take a holistic approach when diagnosing growth problems.

When understanding how to grow a product, you must look up and down the funnel to understand all variables to identify problems and opportunities. In the article below, I’ll go through some of the shortcuts to understand the levers involved – and maybe it’ll help you get a feeling of where your opportunities are.

Moving beyond Sales Conversions

The first thing you can do is have your cancelations alongside your new subscriptions: that’s the easiest way to level up your analytical game. By doing so, you can have a more holistic view of your subscription growth and understand if you should focus more on acquiring subscribers or on retaining them.

Extra tip: look at your install-to-subscription conversion rate to get a sense of how well your product can convert free customers into paying customers.

Ideally, we want it all, of course, but it’s crucial to have in mind where’s the biggest problem so we can put our eggs in the right basket.

Think about it: you’re building a recurring revenue business. Therefore, increasing the total amount of active subscribers is what you want – not only acquiring new paying customers.

The longer your customers stay subscribed, the more your revenue will grow. That revenue can then be reinvested in expanding your acquisition channels and improving your product.

So creating the habit of looking into cancelations as frequently as you look into acquisition is the easiest way to get used to looking at the whole picture.

If you’ve never seen this information before, here’s how to find it:

App Store: Apple makes it hard to extract this Information as it’s only available through their API. Luckily, Easy App Reports provides a connector so you can pull that information to Google Data Studio.

Google Play: Go to Monetize > Subscriptions > Overview – also available on Easy App Reports

Net Subscriptions

Building on cancelations, I see it’s helpful to look at “Net Subscriptions” too:

New Subscriptions – Canceled Subscriptions = Net Subscriptions

This will give you the ratio between your acquisition and churn, providing a shortcut to measure your Marketing and Product efficiency throughout your funnel. Cool, right? I look at this metric daily as it contains the most crucial information I need to know sales-wise.

One thing to watch out though: today’s subscriptions don’t drive the cancelations of today. It’s more likely that the cancelations you see today are actually caused by customers who subscribed weeks or months ago. So some people might say that it’d be unfair to run such a calculation. I admit they’re not entirely wrong.

If you’re an Excel pro, though, you can adjust that calculation based on the time lag between a subscription and a cancelation to get a better proxy.

For example: let’s say your users stay subscribed for nine weeks on average. What you could do to incorporate that into your formula is:

New Subscriptions (9 weeks ago) – Canceled Subscriptions (9 weeks ago) = Net Subscriptions

The disadvantage of this model is that it can take weeks or months to have this overview, making it a lagging metric. And we know what happens to lagging metrics: they’re ignored.

So I’d still advise you to run it the way I initially proposed and keep this shortcoming in mind.

Voluntary vs Involuntary Cancelations

I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to differentiate these two. Your reactivation tactics must be utterly different when approaching voluntary or involuntary churn.

Voluntary: your user made the decision to cancel and proactively did it.

Involuntary: the subscription was canceled automatically due to multiple failed payment attempts, or the payment method is now invalid.

80% of the results I get for my clients are driven by involuntary churn recovery. Here’s how to find that information:

App Store: Same problem: This information is only available through their API, which you can extract without coding using Easy App Reports.

Google Play: Go to Monetize > Subscriptions > Overview (also available on Easy App Reports)

How to approach it

Involuntary: follow up with your customers, offer help and provide simple instructions on how to reactivate their subscription. It’s a good idea to gently remind them of what they’re missing as well to increase the likelihood of getting that customer back.

Voluntary: These are people who made a conscious decision to walk away from your product. As a consequence, the chances of recovering such customers are tiny. Brian Balfour (ex VP of Growth from Hubspot and the founder of the world’s leading Growth program, Reforge) has a pretty solid case against trying to regain such customers – he even calls this a “Hail Mary resurrection.”, and it’s an opinion I share.

The best thing you can do here is to work backward from the reasons why your customer churned in the first place and improve your product to prevent it from happening again in the future. This leads us to our final metric:

Explore your “Cancelation Reasons” often.

I’m blown away by how many people don’t know this one. Marketers, Developers, Product Managers, and even Founders miss it. But not us. Right?

Google Play and the App Store provide high-level information on why your customers unsubscribe by running a survey. Yes, you heard me: you already know why your customers are churning. Now, you just have to take that information and act on it.

App Store: You know the drill: use Easy App Reports to extract your cancelation reasons.

Google Play: Go to Monetise > Subscriptions > Cancelations > Cancelations with written responses  – also available on Easy App Reports

Ok, now what?

Now that you have a better picture of what your app’s growth looks like, you can work backward to figure out what are the best initiatives you might want to do to grow your sales and revenue.

Is your churn growing? Maybe it’s time to invest in product development or tweak your traffic sources.

Is your acquisition going down? Time to do your best User Acquisition work out there.

Acquisition and Churn are the same? Pull one up and push down the other.

It’s a simple thing, and it’s underestimated at the same time. Often we get trapped in optimizing for something that we don’t understand why is behaving in that way. Hopefully, during this article, I was able to provide you with a few tools to crack the problem so you can be more successful with your app.

📕 What I’ve been reading

The S.W.I.P.E.S. Email: this newsletter is super fun to read and I always learn something new, even if I just scroll through it for half a minute. For me, it serves as a constant reminder that building visually appealing content is not always necessary.

The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life: I have a book club with a few friends and this is the one we’re currently reading. Lots of people make jokes that life doesn’t come with a manual, but maybe it’s because they didn’t read this book yet. I already read it a couple of times but I’m planning to read another one because there’s just so much powerful stuff in every line of this book.

How to write a one-pager: “Your colleagues are most likely building decks of 50-80 slides to present a strategic recommendation for executive approval. Decks of this size take the better part of a week to build, over an hour to present, and at least an hour for an executive to review before and after a presentation. Slides tend to be crammed with data and hard to understand without live voiceover. A one-page memo, on the other hand, is a simple, disciplined approach to getting alignment and buy-in for strategic initiatives that will move the needle for your business“. I rest my case.

If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I bought an app a couple of months ago.

Then I recorded myself creating its new text metadata (title, subtitle, keywords, promotional text, and description) in Brazilian Portuguese – obviously.

The video below was recorded at 5 am, and I wasn’t at home, so the quality isn’t great. Still, I think it’s a nice example of a non-scripted “quick and dirty” kind of optimization:

So on the 23rd of September, our first app release was approved by Apple.

The results were instant:

🔥 8.7x more impressions: 107 to 939 (per week)

🔥 8.2x more downloads: 5 to 41 (per week)

Not a lot, but, hey, we’re going places!

Then it was time to understand why exactly this happened.

I was able to track down a couple of keywords that are responsible for this result: “tela de carregamento” (charging screen), and “papel parede natureza” (nature wallpaper).

We’re not ranking well in the other search terms to make any difference, so I’m just ignoring those.

“Well, but it’s just 45 downloads a week”

Yes. And here’s how I see it:

• Brazil went from being our market #20 to being our market #2, right behind the US. That with just one round. Mind-blowing. What else can we do in other markets, then?
• We know we can rank in the top 25 for queries with a search score of 30 or lower now, a crucial piece of information for our next round;
• We got results right off the bat.

“What about keywords added to the Promotional Text field?”

Yeah, we’re not ranking for any of those. Apple is still not indexing it.

It’s on the roadmap

We plan to decrease our pricing now. $5,99/week for a charging animation app is borderline insane.

Once we do that, we’ll have another chance to tweak our keywords, as well as maybe launch a new in-app event.

If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do next, feel free to reach out.

📕 What I’ve been reading

New Ad Placement Options – Apple Search Ads: Apple continues to push its ad game aggressively. Now they added placements on the Today Tab and… The Product Page tab. That means developers can finally buy their space on a competitor’s page. Interesting.

Creating an email lifecycle “welcome/onboarding series” that actually drives results: I love every single part of this post by Elena Verna. Idk who said that onboarding emails always drive results. Most of the time it actually doesn’t. So she shares four pillars on how to create welcome series your users will actually want to click.

One-year challenge: Turn a $20k Investment into $500k: I’ve been following this challenge since day 1. He’s using Facebook to grow and it turns out it’s working pretty well. There are many mud-throwers at Meta right now and companies are pulling investments from there. My take? That might be a great reason to consider Meta if the traffic costs are going down there. Why not?

reading time: 2 minutes

We see this happening at our companies all the time. We pour money into acquisition when we have retention problems. We place all our bets on recovering users that are unhappy beyond repair when we should be improving our UX and customer support.

Deep down we know that the right thing would be to figure out the root causes of the problem first. Still, who would have the courage and expertise to debate with the CEO that our acquisition problem is actually an engagement problem?

And it’s more complicated than that because it doesn’t seem like too much of a problem at first. People know that if they hammer a wall hard enough a hole will be open anyway. So why not just do that?

So we open a big, messy, ugly, not-so-useful hole.

Still, the target was achieved. Everyone got their bonus. Shareholders were happy. Everything looks great – except we’ve all hooked on bad behavior now.

Then next year arrives and a new, ambitious target is set.

“Because we were so successful last year, we believe we can deliver twice as many holes this year.”

So the work starts. People start to see cracks here and there, then everywhere. They start wondering how long can they continue before our wall gets so damaged to the point where it becomes useless.

Doesn’t matter, it’s past half-year already. We don’t have the data or research budget to find a better pathway now. We can’t afford to stop. It’s literally hammer time now.

An infinite loop of stale growth has started. At some point, negative compounding effects will start to kick in.

But it can still be saved. If could only we admit we’re wrong. If only we could create the headspace to learn about the marvels of drilling machines, this could all be different.

Everybody’s new favorite SEO job board 🇧🇷

The dream came true for companies looking to hire SEO talent – as well as SEO people that are looking for exciting job opportunities. The platform launched by Mariana Pessoa and Yuri Moreno was recently launched and already contains over 30 listings from companies like Globo, Nestlé, i-Cherry, Mirium, and many others. Check it out.

📕 What I’ve been reading

This Won’t Scale: this book was recommended by a friend (Rafael Coda) and I’m really glad he did. It’s not a technical book by any means. It doesn’t provide a linear step-by-step guide. But, it can open your eyes to unconventional ways to market a product. I believe this book can be especially useful for people working on B2B SaaS, Product Marketers, or people who are working on companies who didn’t launch their product yet. It’s also a quick read, I was able to re-read a couple of parts of it on the same night I read the whole thing.

Como criar uma máquina de testar ofertas: beyond being fun people to be around, Jorge and João are also great marketers. In this 8,000-word-long essay, they describe how to create a machine to test your offers from awareness to conversion and retention. It’s so dense and filled with details that it could easily be a 2-day bootcamp. If you’re struggling with building your own conversion machine, then this is the article for you.

It’s not uncommon to hear this question from potential clients and aspiring consultants.

Even my parents, family, and close friends ask it sometimes, too – with an evident embarrassment on their faces (although they shouldn’t have to feel embarrassed at all). Maybe this article will help them understand what I’m getting paid for then. Or if you’re already working in the internet industry, then this article should provide you with a more detailed overview of how’s the work-life like for a Marketing Consultant.

I’ll break down my explanation into three parts:

1. Scope and Jobs to be done
2. What does success look like
3. Daily routines

Continue…