Built to scale, Engineered to convert
How Truebill Got Acquired by Rocket for $1.4B
Truebill Case Study
Truebill had recently secured a Series B fundraising round of $50M and the team had hopes of scaling to become a Unicorn (i.e. a startup valued at $1B.) However, unlike other tech startups, Truebill wanted to achieve this $1B status with user-fueled revenue growth rather than through additional founds of VC fundraising.
In order to achieve this, we needed to scale Truebill’s Annual Run Rate (ARR) from $33M to $100M, the classic mark of a Unicorn. This constitutes a greater than 3x scaling of the current Marketing efforts. On top of that, we had to get the right users to drive that revenue growth, not just any kind of net-new user.
Product Overview
Take full control of your finances with Rocket Money, the money app that works for you.
Managing money is hard, but you don’t have to do it alone. Rocket Money empowers you to save more, spend less, see everything, and take back control of your financial life.
The Rocket Money app identifies your subscriptions to help you stop paying for things you no longer need. Your concierge is there when you need them to cancel unwanted subscriptions so you don’t have to.
Key Value Propositions
- Budget Planner
- Net Worth Organizer
- Credit Score Tracker
- Subscriptions Cancelation
Pricing Structure: Freemium, Monthly Paid Subscription
Goals
- Scale the creative production team & processes to churn out fresh creatives at a weekly cadence based on data learnings
- Shift away from a CAC focus to a ROAS (LTV) focus based on enhanced metrics added to Singular attribution data
- Implement campaign structures that focus on rapid creative A/B testing and scaling
Target Actions
Primary Event: Linked Bank Account (via Plaid)
Secondary Event: Account Registration
Tertiary Event: App Install
Target Audience
Primary Audience: Finance-minded following specific influencers, newsletters, etc. Finance-minded
Secondary Audience: Broad w/ General Interest in Finance
Results
- Truebill was acquired by Rocket Mortgage for $1.3B
- Truebill’s ARR grew from $33M to $110M in 10 months
- Truebill’s market share of the Personal Finance Manager space has eclipsed 80%
- Truebill commands ownership for the top keywords in the Budgeting, Subscription Management & Personal Finance Manager categories in both app stores
- Growth Marketing team grew from 6 to 22 in one year
Growth Philosophy & Implementation
We believe in a holistic approach to Growth, which we helped implement at Truebill. Every good idea needs to be produced into an ad. Winning ads need to be launched and the appropriate budgets need to be allocated each week. Partnerships with brands and influencers need to be done in parallel. And lastly, data analytics needs to be pristine so that media buyers and designers can understand what’s working and what’s not.
Read our blog on how to approach App Store Optimization in 2023.
Media Buying & Campaign Management
At Apollo, we believe in a Campaign setup that helps spur rapid creative testing. We achieve this through a unique approach where we separate new creatives into Testing Campaigns and winning creatives in a Legacy Creating.
We couple this approach with a concentrated effort to produce 3-5 fresh creatives to test per week. Additionally, we run weekly programming meetings where we reviewed creative winners and determined which creatives to launch next. This allowed the whole team to be in-sync and communication flowed well.
Budget re-allocations happened at a weekly, sometimes 2x per week level, keeping the campaigns nimble and kept bad creatives spending at a minimum.
Creative Production
We worked with the existing team of designers and producers and created an organized workflow to manage the entire process. In general, all creatives went through a process that looked something like:
- Ideation
- Storyboarding
- Production
- Review
- Release
- Launch
We built this Creative Production flow out in AirTable and tied it together with a Creative Launchpad view which helped lay out all the different creative ideas along with its versions to launch across all paid social channels. This organization was key to improving workflows and making sure the right types of new ideas and iterations were making it into the creative production queue.
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