Revenue Cat

Jacob Eiting and his co-founder Miguel were engineering leads at Elevate, a subscription-based brain training app on the App Store. In 2015, they suddenly won Apple's App of the Year award—a dream come true that saved the company financially. But with sudden scale came chaos: they'd rushed their subscription infrastructure into production and had no way to answer basic questions like conversion rates, churn, or user segmentation. Every sprint, they were forced to spend engineering time building custom backend systems just to extract data for marketers and stakeholders. "This is really dumb," Jacob remembers thinking. "Why are we spending more time on this system every sprint? Somebody should build something for this." They talked about it and did nothing for two years.

In 2017, Jacob left Elevate to start a company. He didn't have a burning passion for subscription management—he deliberately chose something he knew well, with proven market demand, and tools he'd mastered. "I wanted to stack the deck in my favor as much as I could," he explains. He coded a bare-bones SDK, Miguel built a simple API, and Jacob posted on Reddit asking if anyone wanted to try it. He got torn apart. Commenters called him an "unnecessary middleman" and worse. But a few developers understood the pain. By December 2017, he'd gathered 30 beta signups, though only 5 ever created an account. The first real customer—someone he didn't know—integrated the SDK after finding their Reddit post while reading Apple's subscription docs and thinking, "This is way too much work."

Jacob was stuck. He had almost no revenue and couldn't iterate on the product without customer feedback. So he pivoted to content marketing—something he'd never done before and frankly hated. He spent 6-12 hours per week writing detailed technical blog posts about subscription implementation challenges, error messages, gotchas, and engineering best practices. He'd spend 8 hours researching and writing, walk away, rewrite the next day, iterate several times, and have his wife copyedit. "Writing is pulling teeth," he admits. But he did it consistently for two months, posting to Reddit, Hacker News, and his blog. None went viral. But something compounded: SEO. By the end of those 10 weeks, the blog posts had started ranking for technical keywords. A trickle became a stream. By August 2018, he had around $400 MRR just from organic traffic discovering Revenue Cat through these posts. "That was probably one of the highest leverage activities I did in the early days," he reflects. He also joined Y Combinator after initially applying somewhat naively for the credential—but the real value was forcing him to take the business seriously. "When I got into YC, my mindset totally changed... It's real now."

Jacob made a critical pricing mistake early on: charging 3.5% of app revenue as a take rate. He sent out two invoices totaling $300, then stopped. After YC, he learned that take rates felt too aggressive and that developers wouldn't commit to paid plans without seeing value first. He pivoted to a generous free tier (any app making under $10K/month could use Revenue Cat free) and bundled pricing for higher-volume apps. This was a turning point: removing friction meant more developers tried the product.

Another smart early move: when customers asked for integrations with marketing and analytics platforms, Jacob didn't build them first. He created landing pages for 15 integration ideas, added a "contact us" button, and told customers Miguel could build any integration in two days. Several customers came aboard despite the integrations not existing yet. "It ended up being really smart," Jacob says. "A lot of times you won't even need to do the work."

He also made hiring mistakes in the first year—brought on five people and had to let two go—but iterated quickly on the interview process and culture.

By November 2018, Revenue Cat hit $6.9K MRR. By July 2020, that had exploded to $161K MRR—a 23x increase in less than two years. The secret wasn't just more customers; it was structurally aligning with customer growth. Because Revenue Cat charges based on app revenue (not users), the company benefits automatically when its customers' apps grow. With hundreds of apps in the portfolio, even if new customer acquisition slowed, expansion revenue would compound at 4-5% monthly just from existing apps growing. Jacob stopped surfing and started hustling. Content kept working—developer word-of-mouth compounded—and the product got better every month. "Suddenly your product is way better than it was a year ago," he explains. His advice to founders: build as many compounding effects as possible. "Eventually the ball just starts rolling without you pushing it. Now you're just trying to keep up."