Mobile subscription-management startup Adapty has raised $500,000 from 500Startups, AdFirst.VC, Genesis Investments, and other investors to help mobile apps developers adapt to the consequences of Apple’s killing IDFA in early 2021.
The identifier for advertisers or IDFA has been the only way for advertisers to target and track users within apps on iOS devices. It lets advertisers get a notification when a user takes an action, such as clicking on their ad in a browser and then installing, using, or interacting with ads in their app.
Apple’s decision to change the way IDFA works in iOS 14 effectively kills off this useful information, since users will now be asked whether they would like to opt-in to tracking. While that’s in line with Apple’s stance on privacy, asking users to opt-in will likely result in a mass drop off in data, and that’s going to hurt advertisers.
Adapty offers mobile app developers a tool to optimize subscribers’ retention and engage with paying users to upsell products with behavior-based promotion tools.
“The changes in IDFA will cause a lack of ads personalization,” Vitaly Davydov, Adapty’s CEO and cofounder, said. “With Adapty developers can personalize onboarding and paywalls inside the app to improve conversions to trials and payments. We believe it will help developers earn more from each user and stay alive.”
Adapty can also forward events to AppsFlyer, but that’s not the only integration on offer.
“Right now in addition to AppsFlyer we have intergation with Amplitude, Mixpanel, Adjust, Branch, Facebook Ads, AppMetrica,” Davydov said. “We also support Webhook events forwarding.”
Adapty’s origin comes from the need to solve a real pain point in advertising technology.
“Our startup was born out of our personal experience with mobile apps and product analytics. Over the years of helping projects with millions of users, we have seen that subscription churn constantly gets bigger and сompanies spend their resources on chaotic user management, using analytical services and self-made CRMs as a substitute for the tool they really need. At EasyTen, together with Kirill Potehin, Adapty’s CTO & Co-founder, we benchmarked subscriptions, evaluated, and predicted LTV for users’ cohorts. We used traditional tools like Excel and Python, but due to the lack of functionality and restricted data formats, we were constantly exposed to limitations, errors, and bugs. It was a real struggle. At Adapty we address these pain points, adopt an iterative approach to enhance the product according to the latest inquiries, and use the accumulated data to provide precise product metrics to mobile app developers,” Davydov said.
So far, Adapty has been used by 1,000+ users. It tracks $10+ million in apps’ revenue, and the company claims more than 100 apps already became more profitable because of Adapty’s solution. After the Seed round, Adapty plans to improve the precision of its tracking and forecasting features, simplify its A/B testing framework, and grow its sales team.
So what’s next for Adapty?
“After the round, we will continue developing our A/B testing engine specifically made for paywalls, in-app purchases, and subscriptions,” Davydov said.