A true self-made success story - Luni

Luni's journey started about four years ago as developers of utility apps such as Scanner, extending to creativity and wellness apps including Fitness Coach, Omada, Meditation Nest, and Photo Studio. Luni boasts over a quarter million daily downloads, built on gratifying app content and continuous improvement through frequent testing and optimization. Luni is also a big advocate of influencer marketing, with about 60% of its users based in the United States.

User acquisition - what is it

User acquisition (UA) is gaining new users for a product or service. If an app's revenue depends on subscriptions or in-app purchases, attracting new users is the most basic precondition for success. Customer acquisition in the mobile world is a revenue battle, as individuals have limited money to spend while app stores keep growing.

Luni's acquisition strategy

Luni has benefited from paid and organic acquisition strategies for utility apps, investing in Apple Search Ads for keywords like "document," "scanner," and "weather" to attract users already searching with intent. For content applications like wellness and creativity apps, a combination of paid and organic campaigns on Snapchat, TikTok, and Facebook brought good results.

Organic acquisition over paid acquisition

Many new subscription apps consider betting 100% on organic acquisition. Adrien's verdict: it's not a scalable strategy. Keyword-focused organic marketing can reach a certain number of users with matching intent, but scaling further is extremely difficult because impressions are limited to search volume.

Advice for early startups

Adrien advises targeting both paid and organic traffic. A 100% organic strategy could work only in rare cases, such as an app offering absolutely gratifying content, or getting featured by Apple through immense luck. In real life, paid traffic plays an inevitable role in launching an app in a crowded store.

The secret recipe for starting from scratch to reach success

Have a well-made application with fresh, engaging content as the basics. Kick off with paid traffic to gain the first user base and generate data for testing. Once users start sticking around, run frequent A/B tests on paywalls and onboarding, using tools like Purchasely, Amplitude, and AppsFlyer. Build a branding strategy over time and gradually shift toward organic traffic, leveraging influencer marketing.

Influencer marketing

Influencer marketing lets brands leverage individuals who endorse products for money, offering a non-invasive, creative way to reach people. Because influencers often have huge, dedicated followings and longer-term collaborations, it's considered cost-effective for creating social proof. Adrien calls it "the most effective way to make people retain your brand."

From acquisition to making users pay - an example of Fitness Coach app

To convert users to paid subscribers, Luni displays paywalls early on, gets users to understand the app's value before showing them, works hard on onboarding (testing 2-3 onboardings per week), and avoids being pushy, letting users experience what they're paying for during the trial.

Numbers! What are reasonable conversion rates to target?

Download to trial: a general rule of thumb is 10% (apps with specific content targeting a specific audience generally convert higher). Trial to subscription: the ideal rate is higher for shorter plans, around 10% for monthly and 40-45% for weekly. Churn: for a yearly subscription, 40% churn would already be considered low, so aim as low as possible.

Episode 7 sneak peek

• On organic traffic: "It's not scalable because you have a number of users looking for one keyword. But once you reach the maximum impression you can't scale more because you are limited to the search volume. But if you build a strong brand, you can scale your organic traffic by the reputation."
• On paid traffic: "You need paid traffic to launch your application but counting only on paid traffic is hard because it's getting more expensive with a growing number of applications."
• On paywalls: "You need to sell the value of your app even before users discover your app. You see that in every application, you have paywalls very early on because it's what converts most."
• On onboarding: "We are testing maybe 2-3 onboardings per week with several steps because we don't want users to be disappointed once they start the trial. Don't be too pushy or aggressive."
• On influencer marketing: "We work a lot with influencers because it's the most efficient way to make people retain your brand. You need to work with big influencers who will talk about your application not only once but several times."

More about Adrien Miniatti

Adrien Miniatti started coding at 13, recruited engineers at 19, and today spends more than 2.2 million euros per month on marketing for the Luni empire, a mobile app publisher and developer of a wide variety of applications. Adrien founded gaming studios and launched Luni about four years ago, and is also an investor in several tech companies.