The Mobile User Acquisition Show

Ravi Mehta built a working product in about four or five hours. Then he spent six weeks making it good enough to ship. That gap between a one-shot build and something with craft is the whole conversation. When AI can build almost anything, what is left for a product team to be good at? Ravi is a former CPO at Tinder and co-created Reforge's AI Strategy course with Brian Balfour. He now spends...

Gabe Kwakyi has 16 apps live, all built with AI. The gap between building an app and getting results is the whole conversation. When anyone can ship an app in a day, what is actually hard? Gabe co-founded and ran the ASO and ad agency Incipia, co-authored a book on advanced app store optimization, and later led Lingvano, a sign language learning app. Today he and his partner run Rhythmic Apps, a s...

Should a high-value user see a high price? When I asked Jacob Rushfinn, he answered, "Sometimes, but I wouldn't get caught up in the price. Price is just one variable." For some of the highest-intent segments his team has seen, a lower price doubled conversion. What the user sees around the price matters as much as the price itself. Jacob is the CEO and co-founder of Botsi, which tr...

When I interviewed Steve P. Young in 2019 the topic was getting featured by Apple. Today he runs App Masters, an agency that started in app store optimization, and his focus is paywalls, onboarding and monetization, both for clients and for a growing portfolio of apps he buys and operates himself. This conversation covers what changed, and the numbers behind it. Video Chapters: 00:00 Introduction...

Most creative strategists treat audience research as a box to check before the real work starts. Karina Tukanova, freelance creative strategy consultant, treats it as the actual work. Karina is a freelance creative strategy consultant working with health, wellness, fitness, and lifestyle apps. She made the jump from performance marketing manager to creative strategist right around the iOS 14 shift...

Most telehealth founders think AI's job is to write the ad copy faster. Vivek Girotra doesn't. He used it to figure out what his company actually stands for before he wrote a single line. Vivek is the co-founder of SurpassMD, a metabolic health telehealth company that launched with GLP-1 medications and plans to expand into HRT, TRT, longevity treatments, and peptides. Before founding Su...

Noom's onboarding funnel runs 120 to 140 screens. Some 3-screen funnels convert above 10%. "The length does not matter. Bigger is not always better," as Jacob Rushfinn put it. Part 2 of the FunnelFox panel gets tactical on how web-to-app funnels actually get built. Part 2 of the FunnelFox webinar panel, with Rocketship HQ as partner. Shamanth Rao moderates Jacob Rushfinn (CEO, Botsi...

82% of top-grossing apps now take payment outside the app store. Patrick Stuart-Constant's team at Sociaaal ships 4,000 video ads a month, scaling to 10,000. The shift to web-to-app monetization isn't coming. It already happened. Part 1 of a two-part panel from a FunnelFox webinar, with Rocketship HQ as partner. Shamanth Rao moderated the conversation with Jacob Rushfinn (CEO, Botsi), An...

Most mobile UA teams think the algorithm is something you set and surrender to. Itai Kafri doesn't. He engineers the signal. Itai leads product growth at Voyantis, a predictive LTV and signal engineering platform for mobile apps. He has been in mobile user acquisition since before Meta introduced oCPM, back when advertisers controlled every bid manually. Since then, he has spent years figurin...

82% of top-grossing apps now take payment outside the app store. Patrick Stuart-Constant's team at Sociaaal ships 4,000 video ads a month, scaling to 10,000. The shift to web-to-app monetization isn't coming. It already happened. Part 1 of a two-part panel from a Funnelfox webinar, with Rocketship HQ as partner. Shamanth Rao moderated the conversation with Jacob Rushfinn (CEO, Botsi), An...

How Ankit Nayal scaled organic TikTok to 50 million views with an AI content factory, and why half of them were wasted until conversion came first. Most founders who burn through their paid ad budget pivot to organic with one or two accounts and hope something works. Ankit Nayal pivoted to organic and went to 150 to 200 TikToks a day. He runs this for his app Flamme. He has crossed 50 million view...

How does an ASO specialist with 10+ years of experience think about AI visibility in 2026? In this episode of Intelligent Artifice, Simon Thillay from AppTweak shares what the data actually shows about how AI tools like ChatGPT are discovering and recommending apps today. ChatGPT owns the platform. Grammarly is outranking it inside its own answers. Simon knows exactly why. This conversation covers...

How does a growth operator who built and managed large teams at Twitch and Discord work today as a solo fractional CMO? In this episode of Intelligent Artifice, Shamanth Rao sits down with Justin Gerrard, fractional CMO and former growth lead at Twitch and Discord, to talk about how he uses Claude day to day to plan his week, build GTM plans, and deliver work for multiple startups at once. Justin...

Web funnels are like teenage hex. Everyone claims they are crushing it. Almost nobody really has a clue. Elise Zareie spent last year actually building them. She has been in UA since 2019. Last year she became a part-time product manager just to ship funnels herself. That meant learning Figma, coordinating designers, front-end developers, back-end developers, and analytics teams. Running QA. Shipp...

In this episode, I'm joined by David Barnard — indie app developer, RevenueCat Developer Advocate, and host of the Sub Club podcast — to talk about what happens when someone with 18 years of App Store experience picks up vibe coding for the first time. David has launched 30+ apps, sold four, and seen every major shift in the App Store since day one. Now he's building a new app entirely o...

🚀 In this episode, I’m joined by Patrick Stuart-Constant, who has been building AI-driven creative systems long before it became mainstream. Patrick breaks down how his team scaled from producing hundreds to thousands of ads per month using generative AI — and why more AI actually required more humans, not fewer. He explains why “AI slop” isn’t an AI problem but a creativity problem, how to balan...

Headway is one of the leading subscription apps in the world: and they run a LOT of ads. I pulled 730 of their display ads and broke them down by angle, format, and messaging to find the patterns behind their scale. Three things stood out: format fatigue, non-human copy, and a massive untapped content goldmine. In this video, I break down how they could 2x their creative velocity without sacrifici...

Ladder was a finalist for Apple's App of the Year in 2025: and they run a LOT of ads. I pulled 60+ of their video ads and ran them through our AI analysis tool, BruteForce, to find the patterns that actually drive conversions. Three things stood out: and none of them are limited to fitness apps. In this video, I break down their calendar date anchoring strategy, their identity-level promise f...

🎙 In this episode: We sit down with Romain Torres , co-founder of Arcads , to explore how they scaled a hypergrowth startup using AI agents, automated workflows, and a data-driven creative engine that produces winning ads at scale. From customer support automation to creative testing with Meta’s ad library, this episode is a masterclass in AI-driven growth. 💡 You’ll learn: How to scale customer s...

In this episode, we break down the ad strategy behind Duolingo, the world’s most downloaded language-learning app with over 500 million downloads . Using BruteForce AI , our proprietary ad intelligence system, we analyzed 70 top-performing Duolingo ads to uncover how the brand combines humor , habit-building , and aspiration-driven storytelling to create ads that feel effortless, yet convert at ma...

🚀 In this episode, I’m joined by Lomit Patel , a growth executive and the bestselling author of Lean AI . Lomit was pioneering AI automation strategies for user acquisition years before ChatGPT made headlines. In this conversation, he breaks down how his approach has evolved from the era of predictive machine learning to the generative AI landscape of today. Lomit shares his specific, high-level...

🚀 In this episode, I’m joined by Evelin Herrera, the founder of Reflect Place and an expert who has seen hundreds of mobile app acquisitions up close. Evelin breaks down the exploding AI app market — what’s working, what’s failing, and why valuations have shifted dramatically in just months. She explains why many AI apps feel like simple “info products with a paywall,” why retention is collapsing...

This language-learning app is quietly dominating the education category, and its ads reveal exactly why. With massive global adoption and some of the highest trust signals in the space, Babbel’s creative strategy is a masterclass in credibility, specificity, and real-world motivation. In this video, we break down the 5 key ad strategies behind their success, based on an in-depth analysis of 50+ to...

🚀 In this episode, I’m joined by Karen Levy Atias , the Director of Creative at Supersonic from Unity . Managing creative strategy at a massive scale for global hit games, Karen has navigated one of the biggest shifts in the industry: the transition from hyper-casual to hybrid-casual. She’s not just talking about AI efficiency; she’s actively using it to produce hundreds of high-performing ads a...

🚀 In this episode, I’m joined by Phil Carter, the Founder and CEO of Elemental Growth. A former growth leader at Quizlet and Faire and a Stanford GSB grad, Phil has actually done the work: scaling world-class subscription apps from the inside and building frameworks that last. 🎙️ What we cover in this conversation: ✅ The "Subscription Value Loop": Phil's framework for building an...