How to Build a $2M/Month App (Copy Me)

I'm willing to bet that if you're running a subscription app, you need to run meta ads to grow at scale because being able to put a dollar in and have it print back more than the dollar that you put in is one of the highest leverage skills an app operator can have right now. But if you don't understand the ad creative format intricacies that

apply specifically to apps, you're probably leaving on the table six figures a year to operators who do. That's why today I'm sitting down with Marcus Burke, who has spent 14 years running meta ads for apps, scaled an app to $2 million a month, and whose single best performing ad has crossed a million

dollars in spend on its own. And the first thing that surprised me about his approach is that his ads barely look like the UGC and organic creatives people see on Instagram all day. Everyone was very inspired by the D2C ecom industry for the longest time for all the talking head content

they were doing, which I feel isn't the best format for apps. One thing on the app side of things is that you want to prepare people that they are going to land on the app store. Otherwise, your install rate tends to suffer. In this episode, Marcus breaks down his full

system to scale meta ad spend to six figures a month and beyond without burning through creative budget. The exact Reddit plus Claude research pipeline that writes copy so good people feel like you're reading their mind. And the framework he runs on every single ad account to figure out which audience and

placements these spend should go to. This is the Superwall podcast. I'm Joseph Choy, founder of Consumer Club, a Discord where top consumer app founders trade alpha and what's working now in growth. I've been talking to members doing a millionaire ARR, and they tell me they've been using these two tools. Superwall has this free AI

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you've been waiting for AI coding that does native iOS apps, well, this is it. I got you guys a discount. You can use the code superwall or use the link below. Marcus, welcome. Tell me about yourself and how you got started in ads. So, I've been doing this for

like 14 years now, I think. quite a while. before that, I did one job was which was becoming an air traffic controller. And I'm happy I switched to marketing afterwards. I started my career in gaming where I worked for a company called Inogames here in Germany. they're based in Hamburg. I got really lucky that I

started like in a hot time in that industry when things were moving from browser games to mobile games. So there was a lot happening and my company was well funded. They had a few games running that like were very profitable. I still remember like when I joined the company, I think

it was our head of marketing back then was like Facebook is dead. It's pretty crazy that your team thought that Meta was dead back in what was that 2012 to 2019. That's when some of the biggest companies scaled through Meta. It wasn't even clear it would become like a global

social network yet at the scale that is today. And back then performance was degrading a bit. So my head of marketing was like, well, we're not sure if this is going to stick around. What were the biggest apps at the time that you were getting inspired by from the ads back then? We locked a lot at

Clash of Clans and I think everyone did like they were one of the early advertisers then went like they just had a very strong product. Also any marketing tech partner we were working with to even figure out how to run mobile ads was always referencing

them as well look at what that team is up to. They're doing cool things. A lot of this was really trial and error like there weren't a ton of mobile advertisers doing well to look at and ultimately we were I think one of the advertisers people looked up to. So like we were invited to like all of the

big events over at the Meta headquarters because we were like up there with like a king a supercell spending like millions every month. It enabled a lot of like in the end also benefits because we would be the first ones letting

that they would be let that they would let into new beta products and a lot of was happening at that time like really the ad ecosystem as it works today has been largely really formed by meta like they introduced things like app event optimization value optimization later

I don't want to spend like too much time on this topic but I am curious like to bring it back to today like would you say that there's any industry right now that is like ahead of the curve and fully taking advantage of meta

ads compared to everyone else similar to how like gaming was doing that in 2012 2019 there's very strong UA talent in gaming and I think that's true to this date but subscription apps have really caught up in a lot of these newer tactics like for example web to app that's something that the

subscription app advertisers have been pushing so I feel like it's at least on par now between like gaming and subscriptions And you can see it in the revenues on the store how subscriptions have caught up there. Okay. Well, that's a good

transition. So like subscription apps versus gaming. So yeah, what happened from 2019 2022? Yeah. So I switched over to Blinkist in 2019 because a good friend of mine from Innoame started running the paid social team over at Blinkist. And that

was my introduction to the subscription app economy. It's a well-known subscription app. They knew what they were doing. We again had pretty good budgets. we're playing with a lot of novel tactics also in that web to app segment for example. We were I think one of the first scaling

ads while sending them to a website like our blog instead of directly to the app store. I tried a few other subscription apps after I stayed with Blinkist for I think like one and a half years. Stayed in ad tech working for like a company called study smarter a like a student at tech a bit like

Quizlet here in Germany and then Tandem a language learning social network. I don't do a lot of operative work anymore. It's just a lot of it's hiring, it's reporting, it's administration. And I noticed that's not for me. And that's when I decided to go yeah freelance and

start my consulting business in 2022. Now you do consulting. So you don't do like the like what does that entail in the ads stack? I really honed in on meta ads for subscription ads as my primary channel and then going really deep on that but more of

a vertical integration then where I for the purpose of getting better like running better meta ads I do app optimization I do onboarding optimization payw wall activation period so really looking at that full upper funnel first-time user experience to ensure we're doing everything we can

to like in the end convert that audience and that has been getting more and more important over the last years. Just optimizing for like a purchase event and like having a very minimal funnel of hey here you are welcome like register and then show them a payw wall

that's just not enough anymore. Let's get into the ad creative. So like people want to know like how do you make good ads? Can you show us some of the ads you've made? I did another webinar where we mapped out a bit like app ads versus web ads. So I thought that maybe would be a

good starting point here as well. One thing I think that's very important when you're trying to make ads is like everyone copies everyone. That's pretty normal. Like you're always going to take inspiration from other apps, you're going to take inspiration from other products. I think you want to be very

clear about well what's the product that is using this ad and have an hypothesis in mind of why they're using it and why it works for them because you might have to adapt something so it fits your product. And I see a lot of like issues there where people like they copy something one to one because they think

hey this looks cool let's do it for our app. it doesn't really make sense. And that happens between industries. So, everyone was very inspired by the D2C ecom industry for the longest time for all the talking head content they were doing. And it's always like people showing a product and my god

and like a like a strong hook and then just walking people through pain points and positioning the product as the solution, which I feel isn't the best format for apps and I don't see it working a lot. And the same applies to whether someone is sending people to the web or the app. Like that's those ads tend to look inherently different. One

thing on the app side of things is that you want to prepare people for that they are going to land on the app store otherwise your install rate tends to suffer. So don't try not to be an app. make it very clear so that the funnel holds up. So a lot of the very successful ads I see out there they

either mention app in the copy they show an app demo of some form just so to set the right context already. That's an interesting insight already. just like prepare people that they're going to land on the app store. I guess that's like just from my perspective

when I'm scrolling ads or Instagram or whatever and I see an ad, it seems interesting. I click the call to action and then the interstitial thing pops up or like pushes me to the app store. It's like super jarring . Like sometimes I don't want to install an app

unless I know like okay this is an ad. You push the fact that this is this is an app in your ads. But yeah, let's look at some of the examples. I'm I'm curious like how this is implemented. Okay, so it's like I showed my husband the Mogate app and he passed out instead of picking up the kids and

then the hook is just like she opens the door, the front door with a key and then opens the door and then you're like laying there on the couch and that was how long? That was like 5 seconds and then it just transitions to this like glowing green orb and then it like zooms

in slowly. Okay, this is green noise and then every couple seconds it's giving like a sentence. Are those sentences like intention? Like it seems like some of them are benefits, some of them are features. Like are is it very intentional like the structure of this

ad? It has been tested quite a bit. There were probably 100 versions of this. For this client, for example, we found that a lot of people use their noises to mask their tinus. So then we had like tinus specific ones like how can you use this for like relief there? So what's that language people use to

describe their pains and like their desires and how can you frame your product as a solution in their language that's usually very powerful. So of this concept there was probably in total 400 iterations that we

did where we of course a lot of different copy but then also different scenarios with different people sleeping outside inside in very absurd situations and less absurd ones. Do how much you spent on this specific ad creative? I would say over the course of that its

lifetime and all the iterations, it's probably well above like a million dollars or so., but a million dollars on this specific ad format. Yeah, I would I would think so. Wow, that's crazy. It's It's so unexpected, too. Especially a lot of

people from the UGC organic world, they see something like this and they're like, there's no way this is like high converting. Because in the organic world, you're just so used to it has to be like a super outrageous hook and then the demo has to like clearly show the

product because there's no CTA in organic. And this one like barely shows the actual app. It's really interesting. Do you have like a list of formats that are like the best in the past, I don't know, 6 months for app install ads? Generally, I'm skeptical when someone tells me, ", try this

ad for your product." It's always like, well, it highly depends on like what audience you have, where you're sending people. Is it the web? Is it the app? I rather think about certain styles that are usually originated in organic content. As you said, like this

could be to some extent an organic piece. It would need tweaks. Another one that would be inspired by that are these texts. Ultimately, it mirrors the content someone in their 30s, 40s would make. gentle reminder that if you're waiting on their text,

delaying your response, overanalyzing a non-existent future, we made this app to rewire toxic attachments and support your emotional regulation. 10 seconds long and then there's like it starts with the girl and with just like weird

camera angle like looking up at like her face. It's just like a threeclipip ad and then there's the text on screen the entire time and the text in the end is what drives conversion here. So you want to find these text blocks that in the

end people feel seen by like your audience feels like okay like they understood me they're using or all the language that someone would use and usually that's rooted in a lot of Reddit research and you can do that easily with LLM these days. So saying

things like my emotional regulation revive toxic attachments. Toxic attachments in the wellness space is a big thing people self diagnose with just like ADHD was before or overthinking there all these buzzwords that are pop up in

content quite a bit these days and people self diagnose with and selfidentify with. So if you manage to write like they would about this topic and you plug your product as a solution to that's usually a

pretty good strategy and then again they say here we made this app just to prime for you're going to land on the app store this is an app product and make sure that people also install. How much less effective do you think the ad would

be if you used language that was already a little bit more popularized and not quite like trendy or like rewire toxic attachments? Feels like that phrase was probably invented like in the past like 5 years, but like what if you used

like something that was a little bit older and like more well-known? Do you just feel like it's not as targeted and specific and like resonant with the audience? any of these ads is going to run on meta in a adset that is just

broadly targeted. You rarely define targeting these days. It's always the algorithm doing it. So ultimately the algorithm is going to pick your targeting based on the engagement and conversion signal coming in. If you're like highly specific about that audience

and you really give them that you really show that you understand them and how they speak, then that means those people are going to likely engage and that means the algorithm is going to figure out targeting. The more generic, the more broad you go, the harder that gets. Meaning you're going to end up

targeting bigger, broader, generic audience, which is harder to convert if your funnel is made for these people that are looking to rewire toxic attachments, for example. Overall, so far, my observation is that these ads are very emotional and they don't talk

about the app almost like at all. They talk about the pain points in the language of the target audience and they mention that the app exists, but they don't really say the benefits or the features of the app. Our app ads in

general just a lot more of a like soft CTA, more focused on the emotions in general because a lot of these subscription apps have like a long onboarding where the sale is done. You don't need to like sell the user on their purchase like inside the