Applause is a profitable, well-capitalized operator of consumer subscription apps across privacy, security, health, productivity, and accessibility. The model is simple: acquire high-retention, category-leading apps and scale them.
The apps already have top 1% retention, strong brands, and high organic traffic, so paid growth compounds on proven products instead of propping up weak ones. There is real budget behind growth that works.
The role. A top-of-funnel paid acquisition role that owns user acquisition across the whole portfolio end-to-end — running it, not supervising it. You start by personally running growth for at least three apps, then scale to five to seven as you build repeatable systems and, over time, a team beneath you. Paid and organic are treated as one connected acquisition system. This is a builder-operator role: you set up the growth function from scratch — campaign infrastructure, measurement, reporting, and playbooks.
Who we look for
Has personally deployed meaningful paid spend at a consumer subscription company (~$10M+/year, or smaller budgets run with real rigor) with direct ownership of the numbers.
Hands-on with the modern stack: an MMP (AppsFlyer, Adjust, or Singular), Superwall, Amplitude/Mixpanel, Customer.io
SKAN-fluent; builds and pressure-tests LTV and payback models
Has operated across 3–7 apps or product lines at once
Player-coach who executes today with a clear path to hire and lead a small team; ideally arrives with 2–3 trusted specialists (e.g. a UGC/creative producer and an analyst).
What you'd own
Plan, launch, and optimize paid UA hands-on across Apple Search Ads, Google (UAC + search), Meta, TikTok, and paid web — budgets, bids, audiences, and creative testing against payback and CAC per app.
Drive organic in parallel: ASO, store-listing conversion, web-to-app.
Build the measurement backbone — stand up the MMP, configure SKAN and postbacks, run incrementality tests, reconcile web-vs-app attribution.
Own the experiment roadmap independently: bring your own channel and creative ideas, size them by expected payback, run them without waiting for a task list.
Manage secondary paywall/funnel work and coordinate lifecycle (email/push) with the analytics and lifecycle hires.
Comp. up to $150K (+performance bonuses) tied to portfolio payback and growth, with equity options after the first year
