2025 Growth Design Recap
Plus we're CLOSING this newsletter.
Less than 2 weeks left this year. I’ve been travelling lately. And I’m reflecting on how everything went for me in 2025. In this post, I’ll share what’s currently on my mind and also mention some updates on what’s coming next in 2026.
Why is this the end of “App Teardown”?
Over the years, we’ve helped countless mobile consumer apps upgrade their onboarding & paywalls. It was always us working on products owned by others. But this year, we joined the people we work with in the trenches, by shipping our very 1st mobile app in the Apple App Store on Sept 2025.
We’ve slightly pivoted from the idea we originally had. We burnt decent amount of cash on Apple ads, but in return we were able to uncover the right keywords to go after, and iterate our messaging & positioning afterwards.
All downloads so far are from ASO & Apple ads. We have a hard paywall right now. And new years right around the corner. Meaning, we’re seeing increase in subscription purchases more frequently than before.
We have pretty a decent onboarding completion rate [Hey we work with onboarding, remember? ;)] . But our core features need a lot of work. Retention’s pretty bad. Best case scenario, we ship 2 important features before the end of new year to improve our retention numbers.
Coming back to why I decided to end “App Teardown”?
I feel the publication’s name will become irrelevant in 2026. I don’t plan on strictly sticking to ‘teardown’-type format anymore.
I like to write. It feels therapeutic to me. All my posts here and on socials are written entirely by myself [not by AI]. I believe at some point, we’re gonna crave content that is not AI-generated slop, not 100% grammatically correct, and not eerily perfect.
My plan for this newsletter is to document my journey to exiting all my businesses that I’m currently working on. I’ll share things I’ve tried, mistakes I made, lessons learnt, and pass on some wisdoms from my unique journey in life. [Still deciding the right name for it.]
Of course, there’ll be adverts, and you may be sold to from time to time. [You’re reading this means, you’re already in my funnel.]
This is your chance to unsubscribe. No hard feelings. Here’s the button. Go ahead. [In case it didn’t work, find the unsubscribe button at the bottom of this email.]
The 2025 Growth Design Recap
Enough rant for now. Let’s get to the good part.
We’ve worked with some amazing mobile apps this year. And we saw this common pattern where most app teams struggle to make ASA/paid acquisition work due to terrible onboarding completion rate & low install-to-trial CR. This is “the big problem” we’re trying to solve at Roast My App.
We’re a Growth Design Studio at heart. Unlike traditional design businesses, we nerd out on customer research, data & analytics. We currently offer a 4+ week sprint where app teams receive high-fidelity UI & UX designs to run onboarding & paywall experiments with.
And as promised here’s a brief recap of our work this year. Enjoy!
Hi, I’m Muhammad Rahat. Thank you for making this far.
If you want to connect with me on socials, I’m mostly available on LinkedIn and X.
P.S: What’s your plan for 2026? Reply to this email. I read every single email and also get back to everyone.