Hey there, it’s Jacob at Retention.Blog 👋
I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.
Nearly every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.
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RevenueCat’s App Growth Annual hit New York on October 21.
Daphne already shared her activation workshop here last week.
A few other speakers posted their slides, and they’re too good to leave buried in LinkedIn comments.
We’ve got 4 world-class growth leaders you can learn from:
Gessica Bicego, Fractional CMO
Natalia Drozd, App Growth Consultant
Sven Jürgens, Paid Growth and Creative Consulting
Marcus Burke, Meta Ads & App Growth Advisor
1. Meta UA in 2026: the spend ladder
Gessica Bicego, Fractional CMO
❓ This is for you if: you run Meta and want to know what changes as your budget grows.
Gessica split her workshop into tables by monthly spend: under $50K, $50K–$300K, and $300K+. What works at $30K a month looks nothing like what works at $1M.
Creative testing is math first. At a $40 CPA, you need about $480 a day to test one concept properly. Your budget sets how many concepts you can test, not your team’s idea list.
Your numbers won’t agree. In the accounts she manages, Meta and the MMP usually land 20–40% apart.
Around $5K a day, measurement needs a real system.
Optimizing for deeper events is for the big fish. Fun to talk about, hard to pull off on a small budget.
👉 Link to Gessica’s deck: https://www.figma.com/deck/BXVZadnxi8WDsizDnV06b5/Gessica-Bicego--Meta-UA-in-2026?node-id=5016-107
Gessica’s LI Post: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7524120569248837633
2. How your ad creative shapes your LTV
Natalia Drozd, App Growth Consultant
❓ This is for you if: you pick winning ads by cost per trial.
Natalia opens with a trick question. Two ads, same app, same price, same paywall. One has a $17 CPA, the other $44. Which do you scale?
Both. Ad 2 cost 2.6× more per conversion, and each conversion was worth 2.6× more. Same 166% return.
Creative is targeting. Since Meta’s Andromeda update, the algorithm decides who sees which ad. The person on screen, the slang, and the setting pick your audience.
Brief by persona, not demographic. Two 34-year-old renters earning $85K can want opposite things. One wants progress bars and streaks. The other wants one calm number and “set it up once.”
Cheap installs can wreck a cohort. A book summary app ran faith-inspired ads and hit its lowest CPI of the year… then saw 3× lower retention and 2× lower ARPU. The ads promised a different app.
Day 0 decides. 55% of 3-day trial cancellations and half of all paid conversions happen on the first day.
My favorite slide: break the pattern in the feed, but look trustworthy on the paywall. A surprise at the paywall costs you trials.
👉 Link to Natalia’s deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1M7Y_wOsAvhx9IlrgITvFpCBSH2kzlaCQFzE0rihIRIM/edit?slide=id.p1#slide=id.p1
👀 New Price Power Podcast:
This Flow Grew MasterClass Conversion 20%+ w/ Michael Berliner
Michael Berliner was a former growth lead at Masterclass and Calm, and an absolute rockstar on onboarding, paywalls, and activation for subscription apps.
Michael built one of the first quiz-style onboarding flows at Masterclass, which lifted conversion 20%, then revamped Calm’s self-serve flow for a 50% conversion lift and a 30% lift in return retention!
Listen or watch on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:
3. From competitor ad to finished creative
Sven Jürgens, Sven Jürgens Consulting
❓ This is for you if: you want an AI creative workflow that does more than “make a great ad.”
Sven had the room vote on a competitor ad (Cal AI won), then cloned it live with AI. Brave. While the video rendered, he walked through his creative strategy loop.
Let competitors pay for your testing. Sort the Meta Ad Library by impressions and start from what’s already working.
Mine the reviews. Read 1-star and 5-star reviews, yours and theirs. For Reddit, add
.jsonto any thread URL and feed it to a model.One reader, one idea, one action per ad. And get specific: “1,425 users trust us” beats “thousands of users.”
Math goes to code. Text goes to the LLM. Let the model write the report, and let Python calculate the ROAS. Nobody wants a hallucinated number in Monday’s CEO update.
👉 Link to Sven’s deck: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QB8BKucW40qFZLanxqE7F0GexQRLfJnvzARI9U6coWs/edit?slide=id.raga01#slide=id.raga01
4. 6+1 AI workflows to scale Meta from your phone
Marcus Burke, Meta Ads & App Growth Advisor
❓ This is for you if: checking your Meta account takes six tabs and a Google Sheet.
Marcus wired Ads Manager, his MMP, RevenueCat, and product analytics into Claude. Now a ranked brief lands on his phone twice a week.
Account reviews dropped from 2 hours to 10 minutes. He accepts 84% of the recommendations without changes.
Cost per trial lies. Ad A cost $37 per trial and $102 per payer. Ad B cost $54 per trial and $88 per payer. The “expensive” ad wins.
Bid up older users. People aged 55–64 converted trial-to-paid 1.7× better than under-25s but got only 9% of spend. A +15% value rule pushed their share to 13%, and conversion held.
Match onboarding to the ad. In one account, 53% of trials came from “ChatGPT for X” ads, yet no onboarding screen explained why the app beats just asking ChatGPT.
He’s also giving away a read-only Account X-Ray you can run on your own Meta account.
👉 Link to Marcus’s deck: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7524404015158251520
Yes, we all already follow on Marcus on LI, but if you don’t, go do it 😂
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