REPLUG - App Marketing Experts

What's the biggest growth challenge your subscription app is facing right now? On November 11, REPLUG and RevenueCat are bringing together 30–35 subscription app growth professionals in Berlin for Mobile Growth Circle. No presentations. No sales pitches. Instead, we're trying something different: Growth Swap. Bring one real challenge, discuss it with peers who understand your business, and leave with a practical experiment worth testing. 📍 Berlin | November 11 | 18:00–20:30 Free to attend. Limited places, with registrations reviewed to keep the group relevant.

On November 11 in Berlin, we're teaming up with RevenueCat to host Mobile Growth Circle: Subscription Apps Edition. 30-35 people. Subscription growth challenges + zero presentations. Here's the idea: 🔴 Bring one growth problem you're currently trying to solve. 🔵 Join a small group of people who understand the challenges. 🔴 Exchange experiences, assumptions, and leave with your next experiment. From acquisition and paywall conversion to retention, monetization, and LTV - the people in the room will shape the conversations. 📍 Berlin 📅 November 11, 2026 | 18:00–20:30 🤝 Co-hosted by REPLUG × RevenueCat 🥂 Followed by networking, food, and drinks. Participation is free, but we're keeping the group deliberately small. Registrations are subject to approval. 👉 Save your spot: https://lnkd.in/du2vNze6 #MobileGrowth #SubscriptionApps #MobileGrowthCircle

"Have you tracked your KPIs today?!" This was the first tote bag we ever made at REPLUG. Years later, it's still the one people ask for the most. Apparently, asking marketers uncomfortable questions never goes out of fashion. But there's something I would add to that bag today: Have you tracked the RIGHT KPIs? Because after years of working with apps at different stages of growth and different business model, I've seen how easy it is to build beautiful dashboards full of numbers that tell you very little about how the business is actually doing. Installs are growing. CAC is decreasing. Conversion rates are improving. Campaigns are hitting their targets. Even ROAS can be positive. Great. But are you acquiring customers who stay, spend money and generate enough value to make that growth sustainable? There are a few principles I always come back to when looking at performance. 1. Start with the business model. A subscription app, an e-commerce app and an ad-supported app have very different economics. Their most important KPIs should reflect how they create and capture value. 2. Connect acquisition to what happens afterwards. A cheaper install can become a very expensive customer. Understanding activation, retention and monetization is essential before deciding whether acquisition is actually efficient. 3. Measure things you can act on. If a KPI improves or deteriorates, you should know what decision it might influence. Otherwise, you're collecting numbers for the sake of collecting numbers. 4. Look at how metrics influence each other. A better conversion rate at one stage can hide worse performance elsewhere. We recently saw this in a web-to-app funnel where several downstream metrics improved while the overall acquisition economics got worse. And finally, review your KPIs as the business evolves. The metrics that matter when you're finding product-market fit won't necessarily be the same ones you should prioritize when you're investing millions in growth. I love data. I love dashboards. And yes, I still love this ridiculous tote bag. But the most useful question you can ask when reviewing your numbers is: What are these KPIs telling us to do next? Thanks Izabela Wlodarczyk for the perfect reaction. I think the photo speaks for itself :)

How much money have you wasted waiting for more data that never changed your decision? I've been in so many growth meetings where we look at an underperforming campaign, a channel that isn't delivering, or conversion rates going in the wrong direction. We discuss the numbers, possible explanations, and what might be happening. Then we agree to monitor the situation. Another week goes by, the next report arrives, and we're having a very similar conversation. And yes, I've been guilty of this myself. Of course, there are situations where waiting is absolutely the right decision. Some experiments need more data, and subscription businesses often need time for cohorts to mature before the economics become clear. But waiting should be a conscious decision, with a clear purpose. When evaluating an underperforming growth initiative, there are 3 questions worth asking: 𝟭. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗻𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗮𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗶𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗴? If we're waiting for more data, we should know exactly what we need and how it will help us make a better decision. 𝟮. 𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝗹𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁? Every test needs a reasonable evaluation window. Otherwise, it's surprisingly easy to keep spending money on something simply because we're hoping it will eventually work. In paid marketing, hope could be very expensive. 𝟯. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝘀 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘄𝗲 𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵 𝘁𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗽𝗼𝗶𝗻𝘁? Scale, optimize, change direction, or stop. We should have an idea of what results would justify each decision before the next report arrives. And this applies to successful initiatives too. Sometimes we spend so much time discussing what isn't working that we delay investing more in opportunities that are already showing potential. After years of working in performance marketing, I've learned how expensive indecision can become. So next time someone says, "Let's keep an eye on it," ask one more question: 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗹𝘆 𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘄𝗲 𝘄𝗮𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗳𝗼𝗿?

You can improve several parts of a funnel and still end up with worse overall economics. We recently tested a web-to-app funnel for a subscription app with a pretty simple journey: welcome screen, quiz, sign-up, paywall, checkout. A previous iteration had worked extremely well. Session-to-trial conversion almost tripled, while the cost of acquiring a trial dropped by roughly two thirds. So we moved to the biggest remaining leak: the welcome screen, where around 2 out of 3 users were dropping. We changed the message from a very concrete promise around building a daily plan in 2 minutes to something more emotional. Result? The welcome screen got worse. Conversion there dropped from 35.5% to 31%. And despite downstream conversion rates got much stronger, the overall cost per trial increased significantly. That’s where looking at the whole journey becomes important. If fewer people are getting through the first screen, it might be an issue. Even if those who continue are probably more interested in the product and therefore more likely to complete the next steps. That can partly explain why the lower funnel looked healthier, even while the overall result got worse. This is why funnel analysis can get misleading very quickly: a few green numbers don’t automatically mean the test worked. You need to understand what happened before, what happened after, and whether the business outcome actually improved. In this case, the conclusion was simple: the welcome screen needed more work, and the stronger downstream conversion didn’t change that. When you evaluate a funnel test, what is the one metric you refuse to compromise on?

Some of the best insights for your next Paid UA creative might already be sitting in your ASO data. We saw this recently at REPLUG - App Marketing Experts while working with a dating app. The screenshots were polished, but also quite generic, and didn't really reflect what someone downloading a dating app is ultimately looking for: connecting with real people. Our ASO team tested a different creative direction, using more realistic profiles and showing much more clearly what interacting with someone inside the app actually looks like. We ran the test for a few weeks with an even traffic split, and the new version generated 3.5% more retained installers. Store optimization isn't only about keywords, rankings, or changing screenshots every few months. Search behavior gives us a pretty direct view into what people are looking for in a category, and the storefront gives us a place to test how well we're answering that demand. Take a weather app as an example. If "hurricane tracker" is showing significantly more demand than other use cases, that's information I can use to decide what deserves more visibility in my screenshots. And I'd probably want my Paid UA team to know that too. In the case of the dating app, the signal was different. People were looking for human connection, while the existing creative felt too polished and generic for that expectation. Changing the storefront helped us convert more of the traffic already reaching it. That's why I keep saying that we shouldn't be treating ASO as an activity on the side of paid acquisition. The data you get from it can tell you a lot about what people are searching for, what they're responding to, and which part of your product you should probably be putting in front of them. That's useful information before the click as much as it is after it.