Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mGDwL4SmhQ Channel: Steven Cravotta (steven.builds)

if you’ve clicked on this video you’re probably interested in running paid ads for your mobile app or SAS business maybe you don’t know how to get started or maybe you think that spending money on paid ads is just burning cash well stay tuned because in this video I’m going to show you exactly how I’m able to spend 1onpaidadsandgetout3to4onthebackendrunningpaidadsallowedmetoscalemybusinessto1 on paid ads and get out3 to4 on the back end running paid ads allowed me to scale my business to30,000 per month in recurring revenue and I’m going to show you proof right now okay here we are in the App Store connect dashboard as you can see in the last 90 days we have done 81,000insalesinthelastsevenjustabove81,000 in sales in the last seven just above6,000 in sales so you can see we’re earning anywhere from 600 to 11,000everysingledayandamajorityofthisrevenueisdrivenbypaidadsinthelast12monthswe′vedone11,000 every single day and a majority of this revenue is driven by paid ads in the last 12 months we've done132,000 in sales and in that same period of time as you can see right here this is set the maximum we have spent 5,000 on Facebook and we’ve spent 42,000 on Tik Tok so we spent close to 50,000andwe′veearned132,000backandyoumightbethinkingokayyouspent50,000butyou′veonlymade132,000that′sonlyalittleover2xthethingyouhavetokeepinmindisthateachoneofthesesubscriberswillstaysubscribedoveraperiodoftimesoevenifIstopspendingmoneyrightnowtodaytheexistingsubscribersinmymobileappwillkeepgeneratingRevenuesothisnumberisonlygoingtogoupandthatishowoverthelifetimeagainoverthelifetimeofourusersstayingwithourproducttheygeneratemorerevenueandtheirLTViscloserto50,000 and we've earned 132,000 back and you might be thinking okay you spent 50,000 but you've only made 132,000 that's only a little over 2x the thing you have to keep in mind is that each one of these subscribers will stay subscribed over a period of time so even if I stop spending money right now today the existing subscribers in my mobile app will keep generating Revenue so this number is only going to go up and that is how over the lifetime again over the lifetime of our users staying with our product they generate more revenue and their LTV is closer to70 and something that I want to mention just like four five six months ago my app was only doing about 100insalesitwasonlydoingabout100 in sales it was only doing about3,000 in recurring Revenue I want to be the first to tell you that anyone can do this just 6 months ago I was barely making any money but with paid ads and with the strategy I’m going to show you in this video I guarantee that you will have the knowledge and the skills to drive numbers like mine anyone can do it and if you watch till the end of this video you will know exactly how to do what I am doing here so stay tun and watch throughout the the entire video mobile apps like this and SAS businesses in general are the best businesses to run because they can give you time Freedom Financial Freedom location freedom and I could say that because I’ve done it myself and the beautiful thing about SAS or mobile apps is once your product is live once the hard work is done once you’ve develop developed your software that’s it all you have to do is send uh customers to your products right this isn’t Drop Shipping you don’t have to be consistently shipping products you don’t have to be consistently doing work once you have this business set up and follow the steps I’m going to show you in this video to scale paid ads you really don’t have to work on this business at all like I barely put a lot of time and effort into this business so this is going to be a very valuable video make sure you stick around to the end before we jump into the exact strategy here I just need to break down exactly what good numbers look like I need to break down what customer acquisition cost and LTV you should be going for a 3:1 customer acquisition cost how much you spend to acquire a customer and how much you make lifetime value on that customer a 3:1 ratio in that is phenomenal and that is really the golden kind of ratio where you can build real Enterprise Value through your monthly recurring revenue and your annual recurring Revenue so I’ll kind of break that down here so this is our best performing Facebook campaign as you can see I’m spending about 21toacquireasubscriptionapayinguserformymobileappandasyoucanseerightheremycustomerlifetimevaluehowmuchthatcustomerearnsmeovertheirlifetimeisrightnowsittingataround21 to acquire a subscription a paying user for my mobile app and as you can see right here my customer lifetime value how much that customer earns me over their lifetime is right now sitting at around71 so again I’m spending 21togetacustomerandovertheirlifetimeI′mgetting21 to get a customer and over their lifetime I'm getting71 back so truly I am putting 1intopaidadsandI′mgettingthreeto4dolloutonthebackendoveruhaperiodoftimethatthecustomeriswithmeandusingmyproductsowiththatbeingsaidthisistrulyabusinessthatyoucanprintmoneywithonceit′ssetupandI′mgoingtogoexactlyindepthonhowIsetthisupverylastthingI′llsaybeforedivingintothestrategyherethankyouyousomuchtoeveryonewhohasbeensubscribingwearesittingat6.8th000subscribersrightnowitmeanstheworldtomethatyouareenjoyingthevideosandsubscribingsopleaseconsiderthrowingmeasubitkeepsmemotivatedtomakevideosliketheseandtocontinuedroppingvalueforfreeforyallIhaveabsolutelynothingtosellyouinthisvideoI′mjustgoingtoshowyouexactlyhowIcanusepaidadstoscalemySASbusinesstoover1 in to paid ads and I'm getting three to4 doll out on the back end over uh a period of time that the customer is with me and using my product so with that being said this is truly a business that you can print money with once it's set up and I'm going to go exactly in depth on how I set this up very last thing I'll say before diving into the strategy here thank you you so much to everyone who has been subscribing we are sitting at 6.8 th000 subscribers right now it means the world to me that you are enjoying the videos and subscribing so please consider throwing me a sub it keeps me motivated to make videos like these and to continue dropping value for free for y all I have absolutely nothing to sell you in this video I'm just going to show you exactly how I can use paid ads to scale my SAS business to over30,000 per month with that being said let’s jump into it all right so this is the exact four phase process that I use to get my SAS my mobile app business in a place where I could spend this money on ads and get a return on it right and in phase one we have the setup which is essentially setting up your product building your product phase two we have optimization AB testing absolutely everything and optimizing your user funnel to get the most money out of it phase three which is scaling your paid ads and then phase four where you analyze your paid ads and start to scale the winning campaigns please do not be intimidated by these four phases I’m going to break them down so simply for you so make sure to stick around throughout the Entre video and at the end this will all come together and make sense with that being said the setup building a marketable product when I built my product my product is a quit vaping app it is called Puff count and here’s the Tik Tok for it and what the app does it helps people quit vaping so I knew that this product is going to be very marketable I knew that it could go viral on social media and I broke down my entire process around building this app and picking the niche and doing Market Research in a previous video be sure to go check that out where I showed exactly how I built this app this video is going to be focused on scaling and paid ads but just know that having a marketable product is going to help your paid ads so much because your content is going to be engaging people are going to want to download it this is where you should start so again you know lock in your organic marketing I started posting on Tik Tok for my my product and as you can see we have tons of videos here most of them getting over 10,000 views so this is my creative Library I tested these on Tik Tok organic for absolutely zero dollars this costed me absolutely nothing and as I was able to test my creatives and see which ones perform the best and I literally simply take my best performing videos like this one or this one or this one I download them and I put them on paid ads so that is the exact strategy I highly recommend that you start with Organic marketing on Tik Tok or Instagram reels or YouTube shorts whatever it may be that is how you get your start for the cheapest amount possible last thing I’ll say is building a killer team I went over this in my other video again go check that out but I work with a phenomenal freelancer his name is Yori he helps me out in developing the app and fixing any bugs and optimizing you know all the tests that we do with our pay wall so you know you can’t do this on your own you need great people around you who are very talented and know the business just as well as you do so build a great team highly recommend hiring Freelancers on upwork all right moving on to phase two optimizing your product you already have the product built you think it’s marketable you’re sending traffic to your product people are using it now we need to optimize the user funnel meaning for every user I send into my product I need to at least have a chance at them generating Revenue right right if users are coming to your product and they’re using it and they’re not spending money that’s a bad thing and paid ads will never ever work for you for my app I know that for every 10 users I send into the app one of them is going to pay and that allows me to be profitable on paid ads so what we need to do to get there is we need to AB test everything we need to AB test the user onboarding we need to AB test different prices and the way that I do that on my mobile app is I use this app called super wall it’s a great software where I am able to test different pay walls um and different pricings to see which one is the most optimal for my product so you see you know I’m testing five different pay walls here and it looks like uh this one is the best because the conversion rate is the highest we’re still testing but you can see the earnings per user from my onboarding survey right whatever your product is whether it’s a mobile app or it’s an Enterprise SAS software it’s a web software you need to be testing your user funnel how do you optimize your funnel your onboarding your survey your support how do you optimize all of that to get them to pay you at the end of the day there are essentially two ways that you can optimize your product to get users to pay you and to keep them paying you for a long period of time and those two ways are product on my right side here and then onboarding on my left so the first thing you should focus on is definitely your product you want your product to be top-notch you want the user experience to be great you want enough features to keep people interested in your product for a long period of time you want the reviews to be strong you want their LTV to be strong right you want people to use your product over and over and over again for a long period of time you want to have great support few bugs and even fewer crashes in your products so you want to optimize your product as far as you can first and then what you can do is optimize your onboarding because once your product is great then it’s just a matter of getting as many users in as possible and getting them to pay you as fast as possible right so when optimizing your onboarding you can focus on your funnel for example here is my kind of onboarding funnel for puff count I have the welcome and sign in I have an onboarding where I explain a few features I asked them to to rate and then I have a survey I ask my users key questions so that I can customize their experience when they’re in the app and also adding the survey funnel allows them to spend a little bit more time on the app before they hit the the hard pay wall and they’re asked to pay for the mobile app so they’ve already committed a little bit more time into the app before I asked them to pay which increases the conversion rate right so adding a survey is always great for your onboarding funnel it’ll give you so much information about what features and what else you should be adding into your app and what you should be focusing on because users will tell you what they want what they need in the survey onboarding also includes your marketing how strong is your marketing right like we have a great Tik Tok presence and our messaging is very strong so that is a part of optimizing the onboarding funnel and ultimately affects what the product does right and it affects how many people are willing to pay if my marketing is great my messaging is strong and I have a strong Foundation of social media then people are going to trust my product more and they’re going to be more willing to pay the first experience this is crucial too it’s part of your product but I’ll put it in the onboarding because after the onboarding how is that user’s first initial experience do they have the aha moment in the first 10 30 seconds of using your product if they do they’re more likely to stay longer and if they don’t they’re just going to go uh and cancel their subscription right lead capture how are you collecting leads are you collecting their email you are you getting follows on social media are you getting their phone numbers this is super important for remarketing and reaching back out to those users who maybe didn’t pay you or maybe didn’t download your product again you know followers on social media is huge brand messaging is huge this all needs to be super strong and again optimize your product first make sure your product is phenomenal and people love it and then you can optimize your onboarding and then after that it’s just a matter of marketing and getting as many people into your product is possible because everything is optimized okay so now we’re at phase three which is scaling and spending on paid ads the hard stuff is out of the way our product is set up everything is optimized we know that sending users to our product there’s a chance that they will convert and make revenue for us and now we can start to scale the product with paid ads so we’re going to go over spending on paid ads tracking everything and testing out different campaigns with different objectives now we get into the fun stuff make sure to stick around I’m going to show you exactly how we run our ad campaign so with Tik Tok we’ve been spending here for quite some time and this is the cheapest source of traffic for us so that’s why we stopped on Facebook but I’m going to go through both and kind of explain exactly how we got to these numbers and how we became profitable so the way these paid ad platforms work is you need to feed them with data about your product so you have to spend a little money and maybe in the beginning of you spending paid ads it won’t be super super profitable because the ad platforms need time to learn about your products and your audience and see which audience segment is going to make you the most money so the easiest way to think about this is when someone looks at a video of ours are they engaging in the video are they watching the entire thing are they clicking on the video so that is step one of the user funnel are they looking at your ad are they clicking on your ad so first we have to optimize for that and then they go to your app are they using the app are they installing the app are they subscribing are they starting a trial are they using it for a couple days right these are all different things you can optimize for but at the beginning need to start with your creative you need to make sure that people are viewing your creative clicking on your creative and that will drive them to your product and then the next thing to optimize for is installs are people installing your product are they using your product are they trying it out and then the next thing you optimize for is start trial for us right start a subscription trial and then finally you optimize for a paying user but it’s very important that you start kind of at the very beginning phases and then work your way up how you optimize your campaigns so for example I’ll break this down again first we optimized for video views we optimized our creative and then we optimized for link clicks are they clicking on the Tik Tok link to send them to the app store and then we optimized for app installs we’re optimizing for users who are going to download the app and try it out and then we optimize for a purchase AKA a free trial are people opting in to our free trial on the mobile app and then finally we optimize for subscriptions so again you have to start at video views are people viewing your video and then you test everything you test a different campaign all the way up to a paying you user and why it’s important to do that is by running paid ads in this manner you’re giving the ad platform enough data to where it can run your ads profitably if you only send it 100 users it’s not going to know enough about each user to be able to expand it to a wider audience if that makes sense and we did the exact same thing on Facebook as you can see we optimized for link clicks and then we started optimizing for installs and then we started optimizing for start trials and now we are our best performing campaign right here is a campaign that is optimizing for paying users paying subscribers on the mobile app and once you’ve done all this you should have a winning campaign it’s important to track everything again as you can see right here we are spending 21topurchaseasubscriberthatperformedbetterthanallofourothercampaignssothisistheonethatwe′vebeenscalingthemostthisistheonewe′vebeenspendingthemostonsameforTikTokthisistheonewherewegetthecheapestsubscribersandagainI′llshowyoumyLTVtheLTVis21 to purchase a subscriber that performed better than all of our other campaigns so this is the one that we've been scaling the most this is the one we've been spending the most on same for Tik Tok this is the one where we get the cheapest subscribers and again I'll show you my LTV the LTV is70 so we are consistently making money running these campaigns to break this down further this is where you should be starting on your paid ads you need to start and follow each one of these steps and optimize Facebook or Tik Tok or whatever pixel you’re running you need to optimize it for each one of these things one after another so you start with views or engagement what is your winning creative which creative are people spending the most time watching on these paid ads this is what you optimize for first and then you optimize for clicks are people clicking on this paid ad which ad are they clicking on which audience is clicking on these ads right you you optimize for clicks and then you optimize for installs and then you optimize for trials and then finally you optimize for subscriptions and this will take time you need to feed Facebook or you need to feed the ad platform data on each one of these individually until you get to your paying user and then by the end of that Facebook will have enough data and they’ll have a big enough audience size to run your ads profitably or at least for the cheapest amount possible and again you know I’ll show our Facebook ads event manager here and kind of show you exactly what this looks like so as you can see here are our Events first we have activate app which is kind of like the lowest tier event and then we have app installs right here and then we have purchases which is start trials and then we have subscriptions and as you can see as we go down this sort of funnel again this is the same as it is right here as we go down these events you can see that the the total events or the data received gets lower and lower and lower and lower so for example like if I started right here at subscriptions and I told Facebook hey you have no data on my product but I want you to find me subscribers for the cheapest amount possible and just simply won’t be able to do it it’s going to be super expensive for you because it hasn’t run through these first and gathered all the necessary data to get to a subscription so this is exactly why you need to start from the bottom and work your way up right that’s why we have each one of those campaigns optimized for each one of these individual events phase four is super simple keep track of your ads keep track of all your metrics your LTV your customer acquisition costs make sure that you’re consistently making money and then just scale your winners and always be testing new campaigns originally we just started running traffic to United States users but then we were able to expand globally because it still remained profitable for us and that gives us a larger pool of users that we can possibly advertise to so I think our audience size is 300 million people which means we can run these ads for a very very long time and stay profitable for a very very long time always be testing everything always be testing new campaigns be testing new demographics be testing lookalike audiences whatever you can like always be testing ads and and keep looking for those campaigns that are going to drive you lower and lower customer acquisition cost this is the key to pay to ads and again don’t stop on the organic marketing either like continue to post organic content on social media because this is absolutely free for you if you watch until this point you probably enjoyed the video so I would really appreciate you throwing the video a like that would mean the world to me and if you have any questions at all or you want to talk to me directly you want to take a call with me I’ll do it all completely free for my viewers I love chatting with you guys so shoot me a message on Instagram if you have any questions at all or you just want to chop it up let me know and peace