My App Flatlined at $530 MRR in May. I Almost Quit. These Are My Goals for the Next 12 Months.

Quick build-in-public update, longer than usual because this one is a plan for the next twelve months.

In mid-May I turned off every paid channel I was running. TikTok, Apple Search Ads, Reddit — $5,674 over about three months, and the math was hopeless: roughly $114 to acquire a paying user against about $18 of lifetime value. I wrote up the full postmortem in I Spent $5,674 on App Ads.

When the ads stopped, every metric I watched fell off a cliff. Installs, trials, all of it. MRR flatlined at $530. I figured that was probably the end of the app. I took a few days off and started flirting with a different idea.

Then I took a breath and went back to chipping away.

The Six Weeks That Changed My Mind

Four things, roughly in order:

Fixed my conversion tracking. My RevenueCat → PostHog integration had been silently broken for months. About 80% of trial conversions never made it into analytics, so every funnel number I'd been staring at was wrong. I couldn't diagnose anything else until this landed.

Attacked trial-to-paid conversion. Once the data was real, it showed 20.7% of trials converting, against a 39.9% industry median for Health & Fitness apps. Closing that gap became the whole focus for a few weeks. Full write-up in My Trial Conversion Was 21%. Five Weeks Later It's 44%.

Fed the SEO flywheel instead of restarting ads. Kept writing posts and comparison pages. The mechanics are in How I Grew My App's Organic Traffic 15x in 90 Days.

Started listening to marketing podcasts constantly. I'm an engineer. The marketing stuff I thought I knew, I mostly didn't.

Where That Left Me

As of July 15: $1,061 MRR, 223 active subscribers, and the growth since May is close to 100% organic (RevenueCat verified). Trial conversion for the three complete June cohorts came in between 43% and 58%, above that 39.9% median.

And search did something I've never seen on this project:

Flat around 15 clicks a day for months, then a bend in late June, then 244 clicks on July 16. Last three months total: 4,433 clicks from 209,000 impressions at an average position of 9.2.

I want to be careful here. This could be a step change or it could be a spike Google takes back. I'll know by September. But it's the first time a channel I own has grown like this.

The Goals

I wrote these down last week. Sharing them because public goals are harder to quietly abandon.

$2,500/mo: the app pays for childcare. That's the first milestone that changes something in my actual life. It beats any abstract MRR band as a target because I know exactly what it buys. Between here and there, the intermediate version is "covers a vacation and part of daycare."

$15,000/mo: the quit-my-job number. I'll say the awkward part out loud: my own organic-only projections top out around $8,500/mo at the 12-month stretch case. Reaching $15K means something beyond the current plan has to work — a paid layer that's profitable once LTV supports it, a partnership, or the SEO flywheel compounding harder than I've modeled. I don't know which yet.

The ladder I hold myself to, written July 15:

Get monthly churn under 18%. It ran 22–28% from April through June. 19 of my last 21 paid cancellations turned off auto-renew within 7 days of their first payment. First-renewal retention is about 50%. Churned MRR ate 30% of my gross new MRR. If none of that improves and installs plateau, the math asymptotes around $3,800/mo no matter what I do upstream. Of everything on this list, this is the one I'm worried I can't figure out. I've written about how three of every four people who install are gone within a week.

Hedge the SEO dependence. My other fear is that the chart above reverses. Two hedges. First, ASO: App Store search drives very few of my downloads today, which after three months of obsessing over Google search feels like a channel I've barely touched. Second, X, where I have 34 followers as I write this. Goal is 1,000 in a year. Most of my build-in-public reach is Reddit right now; I want X to become the home for it.

Ship insights that long-term users want to share. I now have users with months of photos and fitness data in the app. There are insights in that data people would screenshot and send to a friend without me asking them to. That's deliberately vague because I haven't built it yet.

One partnership moment with a bigger app. Top target is Hevy. GainFrame already integrates with them and we've had a brief conversation. A co-announcement or a shoutout would be validation that this thing is real to someone other than me.

Be useful to other builders. I want to be known as someone who helps people build and market B2C SaaS. Concretely: share something I learned every week, on X and Reddit, whether the week went well or badly.

The Constraint Behind All of It

I have an 8-month-old and a full-time job. GainFrame gets 8 to 10 focused hours a week, mornings only. Evenings are family time, full stop. The commitment I've made out loud: never trade a family evening for a launch.

That constraint shapes the whole list. Everything above has to keep working while I'm at my day job or asleep, because I don't have hours for things that stop the moment I stop pushing. It's the same reason ads lost to SEO here in the first place.

The Lesson I'm Keeping

I'm sure another May is coming eventually. A channel will die, or churn will win a few months in a row, or a competitor will land something I can't answer quickly. The thing I want to remember from this one: don't make the quit decision during the crash. Breathe, then chip away.

$1,061 a month is small. But it doubled in two months, on channels I own, in the mornings. And now the plan for making it bigger is written down where everyone can see it.

Building something similar, or stuck at your own $530? Ask me anything wherever you found this post — I answer everything.