How Superwall Reached $3.6M ARR With 12 People and Two Lines of Code

Jake Mor started coding at 14. By '20 four, he'd sold his first company for four x net income. Today, his 12 person team at Superwall powers over 100,000,000 paywall views every single month, 3,000 customers, $3,600,000 in revenue, processing $50,000,000 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 5,000,000 new customers every month across their platform. From hacking HQ Trivia's API to raising $7,500,000, Jake reveals the exact playbook that's turning mobile apps into money machines. This is how you build a $3,600,000 revenue business with 12 people. Hey, folks. I'm here today with Jake Mor. He is the founder of Superwall. And I said, you know what? I've gotta 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, we used to call it Superwall. This is like Zach at Calii when he says he's running a 100 experiments with Superwall, and they did 2,900,000 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.

Thank... 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 you did me good. Superwall... So Superwall is the easiest way for mobile apps to add subscriptions so that they can start making money. So, you know, if you're just starting out, you can add Superwall in two lines of code. So two lines of code, you gotta paywall, start accepting payments. But then as you scale, we build the most advanced toolset 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 you know the actual product, you want to build features. You don't want to work on like paywall experiments and stuff like that.

That's right.

When you're thinking about growth, 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 point eight ROAS to a 1.2 ROAS, which lets you reinvest

and possibly double your ad spend. So oftentimes only a 10, 20 lift can completely change your growth curve because all that gets reinvested into scaling. And then, you know, you hit a plateau and the pendulum swings back to product. And when you're working on the product, you also don't wanna think about paywall. So we're really just here to support our customers' growth efforts from the from the beginning to the end.

And 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 gonna get to because I'm gonna guess you have a massive range of our monthly ARPUs. But give me the... 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 2 to 300. So we skew heavily upward. I would say almost no one is paying us once 2,000 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, know, Zach from CalAI, we bring them on to the growth plan.

Okay.

We're people. We like to cut deals that are good for our customers. Mhmm. We just kinda 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 so you're... It... It's really a negotiate... I mean, you're 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, pay for what you 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, you know, north of three to 4,000 paywalls. Yep. I I don't

even know... I've never heard of that such a thing. 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 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. Yep. 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 you see the power of the tool in that and stick around long term.

Yep. You... 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, like, I can't get people to upgrade above $10 a month. I'm stuck in a freemium PLG motion. Right? What 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 gonna be PLG bottoms up, no touch motion. And we know if they have success, they're gonna run more than 250... They're gonna hit more than 250 conversions per month. Like Zach told me on the interview last week that in April, they got between twenty and thirty thousand downloads and converted between 1020% of them into paid. 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 gonna 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.

Yep. Absolutely. I'm That's 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... It it... You know, software as a service, but for our growth plan, like, is the service.

Yeah. That's... 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 and l, 70, 80%. But you said you quote built three to four k paywalls, and I... 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 user. 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 show you how to drive. After the four weeks are done, we give them the keys. What they don't know is we're learning how to drive their car. And the next time we see, you know, a nine eleven 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.

How many people are going... I'm going I'm going to your LinkedIn account here. How many people are are building? Like, they're on that team. They build the custom stuff.

We're we're just 12 people.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Yeah. Wow.

Super efficient. Yeah.

Yeah. We... Like this guy Jonathan, you know, is our, you know, paywall designer. He's built thousands of these things. And he's our number one customer. Like we build the editor for him. Yeah. There's a huge benefit to dogfooding. Not only that, 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 than

they still want to work at Superwall because they know the equity is worth more.

Yeah. That's super cool. How did you... I mean, you're you're you're very articulate. I mean, is a super compelling vision and like high value product. Is this your first cut at a at a company or is this your second, third start? Give me more of your background.

Yeah. Sure. So I've been building apps since the the app store was open. I was like 14 when it came out.

What year? Maybe

mid to late twenty... Early twenty ten, so like late, like 2009. Okay. 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... You know, I would be working on a game literally, like, in the middle of English class, and someone next to me would be playing the game. And I thought that was the coolest thing. That's a lot. And so, yeah, I've just been building software ever since. I've been completely hooked.

That's a lot. Was that House Party?

House Party, I interned Okay. During Yeah. Okay. 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. Yeah.

So HQ kind of took off, and I hacked their API to figure... To basically get the questions in real time. This is pre chat GPT. So I wrote an algorithm. I took a lot of, like, 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, wild. Called like, super quick. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. We called it h quack, and it went mega viral. Like, hundreds of thousands of people would play. Once we got everything right and we had a 100,000 people on, and a 100,000 people won. So it was like Wild. It was just ridiculous. And then they sent us Did they shut you down?

They have to shut you down.

Right? Yeah. Yep. Yeah. They sent us cease and desist, 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... And it's not a thing anymore.

Yeah.

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.

Yeah. There's no search.

Yeah. It's like Family Feud.

Yep. But that that died. We just gave away all our money. That... We kinda had, like, a soft landing. We were... We hired somewhere, but I left within three months. Wow. 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 I bootstrapped it to 1,000,000 in revenue, and then, I raised some money, got into Y Combinator, and sold it when I got to around 4,000,000 in ARR. Cool.

Can I ask how much you sold it for?

It was like like 3 to 4,000,000 range.

Okay. So... Okay. Interesting. So is that what is that what those Zaps sort of trade for? That's like one x, basically one x revenue?

It was four times EBITDA. I actually was sold... 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 Day to make money, not to start a huge brand 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, you know, 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 like that had much more founder, you know, company fit for me. And so I just told my investors, like, 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 1.5 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 wanna do. And they all supported me, and I'll never forget.

I'll never That's forget 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.

So we did we did a $2,000,000 seed, and then we did...

Oh, it was around 800 k that rolled over.

Okay. Of the 1,500,000.

A total of around 7,500,000.

Okay. Okay. So, I mean, can I do the math there? You you have 2,000,000 seed, 800 k rollover, so you raised something like 3 or 4,000,000 in a series a that's unannounced?

Yep. Yep.

Okay. Interesting. Walk me through the tactics there. Do you see it as a weakness to announce it or it's just not important or it attracts the wrong kind of people?

It's just product focused. I don't know.

Yeah. No. That's a good answer. That's not a bad answer.

You know, you wanna 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. I don't know.

Yeah. I mean, I guess what's...

What are the... Whatever reason.

When you're when you're processing 700,000 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 payroll views is well over a 100,000,000.

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 in in the... From free to paid in a for mobile app?

I mean, it's a loaded question.

Well, is Zach doing good or bad? $30,000 a month converting 10 to 20%? Zach stellar.

Stellar. 20% install to trial start, 30% whatever it is, is stellar. Okay. Anything below 10%, it depends. I mean, 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 effort to 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 so I 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 that, like, it's probably 80, 20 rules. So when you say a 100,000,000 paywall views per month, I mean, are you doing over a million... You must be doing over... Your... All of your customers together must be converting more than a million new customers per month.

Oh, yeah.

Well for that. Probably four or 5,000,000. Yeah. Interesting.

Yep. Four or five million average, let's say $20

annual... Let's say $20 per conversion. Yeah. I would say that we're referring like maybe 25 to 50,000,000 in revenue per month, like processing sort.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's... Yeah. If you do 5,000,000 and these 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 $3.99 to then I hit the Superwall experience where then I got spun a wheel, got a coupon called super. He didn't... I joked 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 Yeah. I guess it did.

Yeah. That's wild. Okay. Cool. So you're you're building the business. This 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 to 3,000 range.

Okay. If I take, like, that medium and multiply times that 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, three point... We're at, like, 3.6 in ARR.

Yeah. 3.6 in ARR. Okay. Okay. Cool. Oh, so $17.50 is not monthly. That's the average ACV.

1,007. Well, let's see. 3,000 customers times

Seventeen fifty would be over over a 5,000,000.

Maybe then. Oh, well, it's different. So the thing is like, as you scale up, the 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 have people paying you whatever $10 a month.

Mhmm.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I understand. Okay. There's a lot of value here. What else... Jake, what should I be asking you that just you're going, man, this 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, you know, 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. Yep. 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. Mhmm. 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

churn. Yeah. Because I have news for you. If your credit card expires, you're you're not gonna resubscribe to Cal AI unless you love it. Yeah. But if your credit card expires, you know, on your Apple accounts, your phone stops working.

You're gonna... That's a great one.

Yeah. So by our math, it's worth around 15%, but I think that there are gonna be tons of new merchant of records that are introduced to the market if if the ruling is here to stay. Yeah. And that's crazy because a huge... You know, it could meant a completely new market overnight. That's like a venture scale. Yeah.

Are you seeing... Like, you see what I pulled up here on my screen. People are complaining this warning's getting added to to folks that No.

That's not true.

It's not true?

No. This is only in Europe because of the latest hearing. Apple is 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, like, hurt and penalize founders that are getting paid on Stripe versus the Apple ecosystem.

It is. So in Europe in Europe, they got away with putting this on the App Store as a warning sign. Oh. But it's really... It's kind of playing dirty. I think it's Oh, a 100%. Felt. 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. Wild. And they're just getting through App Review. Like, it's fine.

That is wild. Yeah. Man, we live in we live in a new world. Okay. What's... Before we wrap up here, anything that you can share in terms of what you... How are guys thinking about the next product release? You know, is AI impacting you at all?

AI is, yeah, impacting us a ton. Basically, you know, 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 gonna 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. Mhmm. And so tons of shows started coming

out, 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 gonna come build apps, compete with one another, and the consumer is just gonna get the most incredible apps that they've ever that they've ever had. So I think it's a bright future for consumer software.

Mhmm. Are you are you really wanting to stay hyper focused on that mobile conversion experience? Do we ever see a super offer b to b, you know, dashboards, you know, websites, you know, software company conversions?

Yeah. For sure.

Yeah. Yeah. Is that gonna 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. Mhmm. One of that is in beta now, public beta. It's called the art 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? And dynamic pricing, basically.

Well, we call it personalized pricing.

You built like a RagDB. Like, what's the data? What what what sample cohort? What dataset are you feeding us and training this thing on?

The hundreds of millions of payroll views per month that we're showing.

So you... 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, 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, know, how many paywalls have they seen? If somebody has seen two paywalls, their demand is pretty low.

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, wanna be respectful of your time. You got you got you you got paywalls to build. As we wrap up here, where can people find you online if they wanna follow-up?

At Jake Mor on Twitter. I guess that's... Or x.

Guess... Head x on Jake Mor. Guys, well, there you have it. He started off, get this, and with objective c, ugh, in 2010. Fourteen fourteen years old. He's been through the ringer a couple times, eventually now building Superwall. He's got over $3,000,000 of revenue serving 3,000 customers that all build mobile apps, and they use him to run over a 100,000,000 or or or power a 100,000,000 paywall views per month. He helps them convert, you know,

call it three, four, 5,000,000 new customers every single month. You know, that's an average rate rate conversion rate. They're at 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.