Mobile App King: 2 Lines of Code Make Him $3.6 Million Per Year
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Jake Moore started coding at 14. By 24, he'd sold his first company for 4x net income. Today, his 12-person team at Superwall powers over 100 million paywall views every single month. 3,000 customers. $3.6 million in revenue. Processing $50 million in customer revenue monthly. Here's the kicker. Customers start self-serve at $200 a month, then graduate to more than $1,500 per month.

Oh, and it all starts with just two lines of code. But here's what blew my mind: Jake's team has built over 4,000 custom paywalls and converts 5 million new customers every month across their platform. From hacking HQ Trivia's API to raising $7.5 million, Jake reveals the exact playbook that's turning mobile apps into money machines. This is how you build a $3.6 million revenue business with 12 people.

Hey, folks, I'm here today with Jake Moore. He is the founder of Superwall. And I said, you know what? I've got to have this guy on because a couple episodes back to back, these folks that are building mobile apps, I'm asking them, how are you testing your paywalls? And they're all saying, well, you just do called Superwall. This is like Zach at Kali. I when he says he's running 100 experiments with Superwall and they did two point nine million of revenue in April. We had another founder before that. Come on. So, Jake, thanks for making time for me. It sounds like you're growing fast. Appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Yeah, it's always great to hear that our customers love what we're building. Did I do you justice or what did I miss? Tell us what Superwall does. You did me good. So Superwall is the easiest way for mobile apps to add subscriptions so that they can start making money. So if you're just starting out, you can add Superwall in two lines of code. So two lines of code, you get a paywall, start accepting payments.

But then as you scale, we build the most advanced tool set to actually test different paywalls, target specific customers with offers. And yeah, you know, this goes hand in hand with growing your business because I always like to say that there's like a pendulum swinging for all these mobile app founders between a growth mindset and a product mindset. And when the pendulum swings to the growth mindset,

you're really helpless because when you're talking about the actual product, you want to build features. You don't want to work on like paywall experiments and stuff like that. And when you're thinking about growth, you want to think about top of funnel. You don't want to think about this like middle of funnel sort of portion.

So when the pendulum swings, you can up your ad spend. Usually what's wrong is your paywall or your pricing because your audience changes as you scale up your ad spend. And just a little bit of efficiency could bring you from a 0.8 ROAS to a 1.2 ROAS, which lets you reinvest and possibly double your ad spend.

Oftentimes only a 10-20% lift can completely change your growth curve because all that gets reinvested into scaling. And then you hit a plateau and the pendulum swings back to product. And when you're working on the product, you also don't want to think about paywall. So we're really just here to support our customers' growth efforts from the beginning to the end. And can I ask you sort of on average, what's the average customer paying you per month to use your technology?

Average or median? So the average is like... Let's do... Well, that's exactly what I'm going to get to because I'm going to guess you have a massive range of our monthly ARPUs. But give me just the average, just the pure average for a second. Yeah, the average customer pays us around $1,000 to $1,500 per month. Okay. But our median is more like $200 to $300. So we skew heavily upward. I would say almost no one is paying us

Once 2000 a month, which is funny because that's what the average is. So like, yeah, there's a sold revenue, which for our biggest customers like, you know, Zach from Cal AI, we bring them onto the growth plan. Okay.

We're people, we like to cut deals that are good for our customers. We just kind of size you up and we agree on pricing and that's how it works. It's the same price every month. That's super cool. So it's really a negotiation. I mean, you're negotiating. It's not like, okay, number of paywall experiments or number of downloads your app is getting or are there any usage-based pricing axes you automatically sort of upgrade people against?

Yeah, I mean, if it's self-serve, you can just come in on the startup plan. It's usage based to pay for what you use. Usually huge customers, it doesn't scale well with them. And so they want a deal. And on top of that, we have so much industry knowledge. We run, you know, thousands of experiments per year. We've built

we've built for our customers north of 3,000 to 4,000 paywalls. I don't even know. I've never heard of such a thing. I don't know why anyone would even have done such a thing prior to this. But for people on the growth plan, we really like to take over their success in the first four weeks. So we jump in there, figure out everything that's going wrong, and we add in everything that we know has a chance at being right. We always say we're not experts in success, but we've seen a lot of failed experiments

And, you know, what we can do is tell you which experiments probably won't work, but we don't know which ones will work. So all we do is come in for the first four weeks, run all these experiments,

for you and then hopefully you see the power of the tool in that and stick around long term. - You've cracked a really cool sort of code here because there's a lot of founders I talked to that say, "Nathan, I'm stuck in an enterprise motion. "I've got a massive sales team, "they carry quotas, they're calling." Then I have other people that say, "Nathan, I can't get people to upgrade above 10 bucks a month. "I'm stuck in a freemium PLG motion."

What I just heard you basically say here is, look, we actually really are able to cater nicely to both because we know this is going to be the PLG bottoms up, no touch motion. And we know if they have success, they're going to run more than 250. They're going to hit more than 250 conversions per month. Like Zach told me on an interview last week that in April, they got between 20 and 30,000 downloads and converted between 10 and 20 percent of them into paid downloads.

Right. So, you know, you can do the math on that, right? That's thousands of conversions. So to your point, you know, they're going to hit that, that sort of usage limit. And then they get on a phone with you and you say, Zach, let's work out a deal. Yeah, absolutely. I'm really interesting. Big, big believer. Also, you know, your bigger customers require more support and no matter how big you are,

Excellent customer support is really hard to compete with because people just like you and it's a relationship and you build it. And yeah, we believe that software is a service.

So for our startup plan, it's software as a service. But for our growth plan, software is the service. Yeah, I love that. That's a great quote. Walk me through how you've set up the team because you also told me, I imagine you probably have SaaS gross margins on your P&L, 70%, 80%. But you said you, quote, built three to four K paywalls. And you probably build, I imagine you build these custom in-house. And then if they work, you add them to your template library. Walk me through the team and how you get all this done.

For sure. So people on self-serve, they just use it like any other PLG-led motion. We don't really do any marketing. People just hear about it through the ether. For the sold motion, two ways that people come into that. One is people graduating from the startup self-serve plan. The other one is we just have like an SDR sort of approach to try to get people to book meetings.

So once people come into that growth plan, again, the first four weeks, we basically say, we want you to give us the keys. We're going to show you how to drive. After the four weeks are done, we give them the keys. But what they don't know is we're learning how to drive their car. And the next time we see, you know, a 911 Turbo, we're going to know how to, you know, really, really push it to its limits. And so we then, we have this in-house team that

basically come in for those first four weeks and they try all these things, they build all these things into the person's app to run those experiments. We build as a product org for that internal team.

I'm going to your LinkedIn account here. How many people are building, like they're on that team, they build the custom stuff? We're just 12 people. Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. Super efficient. Yeah, yeah. So we, like this guy, Jonathan, you know, is our, you know, paywall designer. He's built thousands of these things. And he's our, he is our number one customer. Like we build the editor for him. Yeah. There's a huge benefit to dogfooding. Yeah.

Not only that, you know, we almost require, forget allow, we almost require every single person on the team to have a mobile app that they're trying to grow. I actually hope that they're making more money from their app and that they still want to work at Superwall because they know the equity is what's worth more. Yeah, that's super cool. How did you, I mean, you're very articulate. I mean, this is a super compelling vision and like high value product. Is this your first cut at a company or is this your second, third startup? Give me more of your background.

Yeah, sure. So I've been building apps since the app store was open. I was like 14 when it came out. What year? Maybe mid to late 20, early 2010s or like late 2009, 2010. I started out with Objective-C. It was really difficult. Then I got into game development. I built a lot of games. I just thought it was the coolest thing seeing

I would be working on a game literally in the middle of English class and someone next to me would be playing the game. And I thought that was the coolest thing. And so yeah, I've just been building software ever since. I've been completely hooked. Was that Houseparty? Houseparty I interned during college. Then I went through Techstars with a company called Shopturn. This was like reverse Postmates. We would return things for you instead of picking things up for you.

but that failed. At around the same time though, do you remember HQ trivia? - Yes, that was the hottest thing. - So HQ kind of took off and I hacked their API to basically get the questions in real time. This is pre-chat GPT. So I wrote an algorithm,

I took a lot of AI natural language processing classes in college. I took an algorithm to take the question and try to do a quick search on Google to parse the answer and predict what the answer would be. Oh, wow. Like super quick. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We called it H-Quack and it went mega viral. Hundreds of thousands of people would play. Once we got everything right and we had 100,000 people on and 100,000 people won.

So it was like, it was just ridiculous. And then they said, did they shut you down? They have to shut down. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They send a season assist, put up an email form. I collected 200,000 emails of people who played HQ. So I launched a competitor called majority rules. Wow. And majority rules was

was different because it's impossible to cheat because it's more like a survey says. So we ask, it's not a thing anymore. We would ask like, what's the best chocolate bar? And you have to predict what the popular answer is. So you can't possibly cheat. Oh, there is no Google search. There's no search. It's like family feud.

Yep. But that died. We just gave away all our money. We kind of had like a soft landing. We were actually hired somewhere, but I left within three months. And then I started Fitness AI, which is a fitness app that used AI to build a workout for you. And then based on how you performed

With that workout, it would update itself for next time. Oh, cool. And this was hugely successful. I bootstrapped it to a million in revenue. And then I raised some money, got into Y Combinator and sold it when I got to around four million in ARR. Cool. Can I ask how much you sold it for? It was like three to four million range. Okay. Interesting. So is that what those apps sort of trade for? That's like one X, basically one X revenue? Yeah.

It was four times EBITDA. I actually was so... Okay. I went... Before I sold it, I went to my investors and basically said... I started fitness... I was very honest. I started fitness... I had to make money not to start a huge brand. Yeah.

or a huge VC backed business. And I tried to turn it into a VC backed business. That's why I tried to apply to YC. That's why I got in. I pitched it as this big thing, but I just found myself obsessing over the paywall and the onboarding and our ad spend. And that had much more founder company fit for me. And so I just told my investors, this is the company I wish that I started. I had a friend that was willing to start it with me, Brian, who's my co-founder and

you know, just the best person in the world. So he, so we, yeah, we started it together. I told my investors, look, this is the company I wish I started. How about I give you, you know, the money back? I still had all of it. How much did you raise? I had raised one and a half. Okay.

for fitness AI. And I said, if you want in on the new venture, by all means, same terms, but that's what I want to do. And they all supported me and I'll never forget. I'll never forget that. That's amazing. So you haven't raised anything at Superwall except the rollover. Oh, you have raised at Superwall. Okay. How much have you raised? Yeah. We haven't announced anything. Ah, okay. Yeah. So we did, we did a $2 million seed. And then we did, yeah,

It was around 800K that rolled over. Okay. Of the 1.5? It raised a total of around 7.5 million. Okay. Can I do the math there? You have 2 million seed, 800K rollover, so you raised something like 3 or 4 million in a Series A that's unannounced? Yep. Okay. Interesting. Walk me through the tactics there. Do you see it as a weakness to announce it or just not important or it attracts the wrong kind of people?

We're just product focused. I don't know. Yeah, no, that's a good answer. That's not a bad answer. You want to know why? It was on our to-do list to announce it, and it just stayed in the to-do list. And I don't know if I know. Yeah, I mean, I guess what are the numbers? For whatever reason. When you're processing 700,000 conversions. Okay, what's it now? Can you give me the update? Monthly conversions? Yeah, across all your customers. How fast can you write the DB query? I think it's like, okay, monthly paywall views is well over 100 million. Wow, okay.

Yeah. So I think we're in the millions of conversions. What's a good... So if someone's watching this right now, you're the right person to ask this. What's a good conversion rate from free to paid for a mobile app? I mean, it's a loaded question. Well, is that doing good or bad? 30,000 downloads a month converting 10% to 20%? That's actually stellar. 20% install to trial start, 30%, whatever it is, is stellar. Okay. Anything below 10%, it depends. I mean, it depends how good your UA is or...

You know, it's more about how hard, how much effort are you putting into testing? If you're putting in good efforts testing and you're constantly beating yourself and you're doing well, but if you aren't putting anything into testing, then I guarantee your conversion rate's bad. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I imagine you have a lot of, there's probably a long tail of apps that like get no downloads, no one does anything. And there's a lot, like it's probably 80-20 rules. So when you say 100 million paywall views per month, I mean, are you doing over a million? You must be doing over a million. All of your customers together must be converting more than a million new customers per month.

Oh, yeah. Well, probably four or five million. Yeah. Interesting. Very five million average, let's say, twenty dollar annual. Let's say twenty dollars per conversion. Yeah. I would say that we're referring like.

maybe 25 to 50 million in revenue per month, like processing sort of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's, yeah, if you do 5 million and these folks in the mobile apps are selling, I mean, Zach's app did an incredible job at moving me from basically a free trial that would convert me in three days and bill my card to $399.

to then I hit the Superwall experience where then I spun a wheel, got a coupon called Super. I joked to him, I said, "You didn't even let me just enjoy the three-day free trial. You tried in the first session using Superwall to immediately move me to a discounted annual plan." And it worked, right? It worked. - I guess, yeah. I mean, I guess it did. - Yeah, that's wild. Okay, cool. So you're building the business. This data is really interesting. I guess, are you comfortable sharing how many customers you have today, total paid?

I think we're in like the 2,000 to 3,000 range. Okay. If I take like that medium and multiply times that average monthly thing you told me earlier, I think you said 1,700 a month was the average. I mean, can I multiply those to get your revenue? Yeah, that's actually a good proof. Yeah, our revenue is like 3.6 in ARR. Yeah, 3.6 in ARR. Okay, okay, cool. Oh, so 1,750 is not monthly. That's the average ACV, 1,700.

Well, let's say 3,000 customers times... $1,750 would be over $5 million. Maybe then. Oh, well, it's different. So the thing is, as you scale up, the pricing doesn't scale. So it's possible that the ACV is a little bit lower. Oh, I see. I see. Yeah, because you have a huge range. You have people on free plans. You got people paying you whatever, $10,000 a month. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, there's a lot of value here. What else...

Jake, what should I be asking you that just you're going, man, this guy Nathan, he doesn't know our business that well. He's missing this one obvious thing that I really should talk about. I mean, the entire landscape is changing right now because Apple is forced to open up its in-app purchase.

And for the first time, developers are going to be given the choice to choose how they build their customers, whether that's with Apple's in-app purchase that looks very much like an Apple Pay sheet. I'm sure you're familiar with that versus going through Stripe. And the reason that's so interesting is because

I think develop like the grass is always greener. So the developers are like Apple's taking 30% of my revenue. That's 10 times more than what Stripe takes. That's egregious. But then what they don't realize is that Apple is a merchant of record and Apple deals with, you know, you don't have to deal with chargebacks. You don't have to deal with disputes. You don't have to deal with taxes. You also don't have to deal with involuntary charges.

Because I have news for you. If your credit card expires, you're not going to resubscribe to Cal AI unless you love it. But if your credit card expires, you know, on your Apple accounts, your phone stops working. So that's a big one. Yeah. So by our math, it's worth around 15%. But I think that there are going to be tons of new merchant records that are introduced to the market if the ruling is here to stay. Yeah. And that's crazy because a huge, you know, it could mint a...

completely new market overnight. That's like a venture scale. Are you seeing, like you see what I pulled up here on my screen, people are complaining this warning is getting added to folks that... No, that's not true. It's not true? No, this is only in Europe because of the military. I was doing the bare minimum to comply, which is why the judge got so upset and basically...

I see. So this is not Apple trying to hurt and penalize founders that are getting paid on Stripe versus the Apple ecosystem. It is. So in Europe, they got away with putting this on the App Store as a warning sign.

But it's really, it's kind of playing dirty. I think it's a shot in the belt. But in the US, they tried to pull some shit like this and the judge basically said like, you are not getting this. Like it is open. Like starting tomorrow. And they made it open. Like, so we have, we now have customers that are using Superwall to build with Stripe.

And they're just getting through AppReview like it's fine. That is wild. Yeah, man, we live in a new world. Okay, before we wrap up here, anything that you can share in terms of how you guys are thinking about the next product release? Is AI impacting you at all? AI is, yeah, impacting us a ton. Basically, the number of developers has just quintupled over the last few months. So that means more customers for us.

Also means more competition. I think we're probably going to enter a golden age for apps. I think what happened is similar to Netflix, where you had a very limited number of shows that could be running at a time to unlimited shelf space. And so tons of shows started coming out, and that means more competition. And the best shows in the world came out. So I think that's the case today, too. Like so many new developers are going to come build apps, compete with one another, and the consumer is just going to get the most incredible apps that they've ever seen.

that they've ever had. So I think it's a bright future for consumer software. Are you really wanting to stay hyper-focused on that mobile conversion experience? Do we ever see a super wall for B2B dashboards, websites, software company conversions? Yeah, for sure. Is that going to come this year, you think, or that's a longer-term thing?

I mean, I think it's longer term. What we're really focusing on now are two things. So one is leveraging the insane amount of data that we have to help our customers run better experiments. One of that is in beta now, public beta. It's called the Art of Demand score. The Art of Demand? No, no, no. It's called-- we assign each unique user a demand score. And that's us using proprietary signals to determine, is this someone who subscribes to apps or not? Interesting.

And so we're enabling people to give massive discounts to people who can't afford software and also basically telling you which customers you can charge more. Really dynamic pricing, basically. We call it personalized pricing. You built like a RAC DB. What's the data? What sample cohort or what data set are you feeding this and training this thing on? The hundreds of millions of paywall views per month that we're showing. So from those paywall views, you will know from the users that hit them if they've bought other apps?

We don't know for sure if they've purchased other apps. It's just in essence what we're training it to do. But we're looking at things like, I mean, it's ridiculous. You can figure out, first of all, like forget what storefronts they're in, but what city are they in? What state are they in? What iPhone model are they on? What, you know, are they on wifi or cellular? That's a good proxy for if they're home or not. What's the time of day? And you could, you know, how many paywalls have they seen? If somebody has seen two paywalls, their demand is pretty low.

And we basically, it just takes the guesswork out of all of this testing and

It's really win-win, even for the consumer, because what ends up happening is there are tons of people who just can't afford your software. And we're now enabling you to give a discount to those people without underselling yourself to everybody else. So it's maximizing both revenue and subscribers at the same time for our customers. And it's just been massive for the companies that have tried it. We're talking about like companies in the...

you know, five to 10 in MRR range, just seeing 20, 30% lifts in revenue overnight. Insane, insane. Well, hey, Jake, I want to be respectful of your time. You got, you got, you got paywalls to build. So as we wrap up here, where can people find you online if they want to follow up?

At Jake Moore on Twitter. Or X. At X on Jake Moore. Guys, well, there you have it. He started off, get this, with Objective-C in 2010, 14 years old. He's been through the ringer a couple times, eventually now building Superwall. He's got over $3 million of revenue serving 3,000 customers that all build mobile apps, and they use him to run over 100 million or power 100 million paywall views per month. He helps them convert, you know, call it 3, 4, 5 million new customers to

every single month, you know, that's an average rate conversion rate. There are 5%. Watch them closely. Very interesting stuff happening in the mobile app space. His prediction is it's the wild west. A lot more apps, a lot more selection for everyone. That means a lot more paywalls for Jake to power. Jake, thanks for taking us to the top. For sure. Thank you, Nathan.