I have two indie apps. Smart Keys (smart keyboard for ESL writers) and Bird Rise (an alarm that wakes you up with birdsong). I ran the same marketing experiments on both, same budget, same channels, same broke operator. The results split wide enough to be useful.
Experiment 1: paid acquisition
Smart Keys: LTV/CAC barely 2, download-to-paid around 3%
Bird Rise: LTV/CAC topping 3, download-to-paid north of 6%
Experiment 2:
hard paywall A/B (read a RevenueCat report claiming small apps can pull this off, didn't believe it, tested anyway)
- Smart Keys: flat no
- Bird Rise: early read says it actually works
What I took from it
A metric on its own is just a number begging to be optimized. The same metric next to a wildly different app stops being a dial and becomes a verdict on the concept. You don't learn the shape of something by staring at it, you learn it by holding it up next to whatever it isn't.
There's no transferable playbook. Only the version you test on your own thing.
If you want the long version with charts, the Ritual × Tribe framework I built to explain the gap, and an uncomfortable chart asking whether the money would've done better in an index fund, full post
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