Starting a mobile-first subscription app business can be tough — there are a lot of decisions to make. Should you bootstrap or raise investor funding? How will you classify your business? When is the right time to monetize your app?

Fortunately, you don’t have to go it alone! One of the best ways to chart your course is to learn from the experiences of developers who’ve been through the process before. And one of the best ways to do that is to go through an accelerator like Y Combinator.

This week, David and Jacob caught up with Jake Mor to find out how he navigated the process of building a subscription app from the ground up. Jake is the founder of FitnessAI, an app that builds personalized weight lifting plans to help people achieve their goals without having to hire a personal trainer. The app was released in early 2019 and quickly grew to over $85k in MRR! Based in part on that growth, FitnessAI was accepted into the Y Combinator Winter 2020 batch and raised a seed round coming out of demo day.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

(4:38) Jake’s first accelerator experience; co-founding Shopturn and going through Techstars.

(8:44) The fitness app opportunity: market size, structured data, and machine learning.

(13:20) Pricing experiments; users are willing to pay more than you think.

(18:53) Scaling ad spend; what Jake learned from his first $20k.

(19:02) The importance of mentorship; Bryan Welfel; JSwipe; The Beard Club.

(22:15) Pro tip: Put your ad spend on a credit card to sync up with Apple’s payment schedule. (But be very careful to manage your debt!)

Follow Us:

David Barnard: https://twitter.com/drbarnard

Jacob Eiting: https://twitter.com/jeiting

Jake Mor: https://twitter.com/jakemor

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