Profitable, but stuck
Minimalist Phone is a one-person company from Germany. When we started working together in January 2022, the ad spend was under €3,000, Google Ads was the only channel, and the Google Play ratings were good. The app had some traction but was struggling to grow.
The goal: increase revenue while staying profitable enough to cover the next month's ad spend. There was no VC money behind it, so growth had to pay for itself.
Our app specialist Markus Seppam led the account. He had done the same thing before with Synctuition, a meditation app, taking it from 10K installs to a million.
Portrait videos for YouTube Shorts
App campaigns have several levers, from bidding and the optimization event to ad texts and creatives. For Minimalist Phone, the one that mattered most was video.
With Minimalist Phone, we discovered how well the portrait format worked. Ads on YouTube Shorts had just been released, few advertisers were using them, and there was less competition. We made the videos look like native TikTok content: fast-paced, lots of cuts, lower production value, text overlays. Each one cost around $100 to $120 from a single creator.
We tested lots of creators and lots of hooks (getting people to engage in the first seconds is crucial) and found the winning creative that let us scale massively. Then we tried to replicate it, making educated guesses about why that ad worked and the others didn't. A creative lasts longer in Google Ads than on Facebook or TikTok, but you still have to keep iterating to find new pockets of audiences.
The winning creative, with 2.4 million views.
Being aggressive with monetization
There are many wins outside Google Ads too. We looked closely at the Google Play listing and the onboarding: which images worked best, which pricing was optimal, and how to get more users to start a trial.
At the start, Minimalist Phone had a very user-friendly freemium option. We advised being much more aggressive with the paywall. Martin ran A/B test after A/B test, and every time the paywall got stricter, the average rating suffered. In the end, dropping the free option completely had the best impact. The rating settled at 4, and review prompts brought it up to 4.2.
Martin is very open to experimentation and puts advice into action quickly. Conversion from install to trial to payment improved massively, and better conversion rates meant we could pay more for each install.
Judging campaigns by revenue, not installs
Installs from YouTube, Search and Display, and from different countries, are worth very different amounts. So we didn't judge campaigns by cost per install. We balanced optimizing for installs and for purchases, and evaluated return on ad spend and ROI per country, with taxes deducted. That is how we expanded from the US and Germany into 23 new countries.
1 million installs in 12 months
Installs and purchases grew month after month. Monthly downloads went from 3,600 to 65,500, and monthly revenue grew 18x at 230% ROAS. Alongside the US and Germany, the app expanded into 23 new countries. Among productivity apps in the UK, Minimalist Phone ranked 26th in sales, ahead of Wix, DocuSign, Google Drive, Trello and Evernote. Within a year it went from 10,000 to 1 million installs, profitably and without VC funding.