Andrey Shakhtin

CEO & Co-founder at FunnelFox
Talking app market and web2app:
Web onboarding, web payments, market research

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

The Apple fee is usually why teams start looking at web2app, but not why they stay.

What keeps them is owning the whole path from the ad to the checkout.

You can change onboarding, pricing and the paywall the same day without waiting on an app update.

The fee savings end up being a small part of it.

[Jake Castillo @jakecastilloooo]

This guy speedran his app to $10k/mo with this simple and effective app growth setup he gave away in one tweet

But one thing I think people get caught up on, especially for beginners is when and how to diversify funnels and avenues of scaling

Majority of the people in my DMs asking for advice are just happy to have their app launched when they actually need to be thinking 5-10 steps ahead RIGHT NOW

For example, if you’re tired of paying the 30% cut to Apple when you’re a small app, imagine how much that bill is going to hurt when you hit 100k/mo or more…

Bro that’s 30k/mo+ gone right off the top

You 100% can and should start incorporating web2app funnels setups like FunnelFox to:

- Control the onboarding
- Test basically unlimited funnels
- Customize the checkout experience
- Track CTR, the user journey, and how much time they spent on your page

P.S. if you want more help with building and scaling consumer apps, start by reading the article pinned in my bio

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

The line most people will skip here is the last one in the brief.

Send viewers to a page that continues the same promise.

A creator can nail the hook and you still lose the user if the next screen talks about something else.

The ad makes a promise to one specific person.

The funnel has to keep it.

That's why the best web2app teams build a separate funnel for every angle they run.

[Vadim @VadimStrizheus]

our UGC campaign just crossed 11.2M views in 30 days

if you're hiring creators for your app, please give them something better than “go viral.”

we research formats, test them with creators and double down on what performs.

for paid ads, i went into FunnelFox Market Radar to look at how other apps pitch themselves. one example:

Headway had an ad aimed at parents whose kids dont listen. the copy offered parenting books condensed into 15-minute reads.

thats a useful reference to put in a brief.

you can point to the exact person the ad is talking to and the problem it opens with.

Radar puts the creative, ad copy and destination together, so you can check what happens after the pitch too.

if i were briefing a creator on that Headway angle, id say:

talk to a parent who wants practical advice but doesnt have time for another long book.

open with the unread book. show what a 15-minute read gives them. send viewers to a page that continues the same promise.

now the creator has something they can actually shoot.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

One surprise: a short eligibility quiz and a longer flow with an earnings calculator performed about the same.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Web2app isn't just for subscription apps.

A global ride-hailing platform swapped app-install ads for driver-only web funnels:

→ 2–8x lower driver acquisition cost
→ 21 countries in 3 months
→ 100% of funnels under target cost

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

The takeaway: web2app controls who enters your app and what signal ads get.

That matters for marketplaces, gig platforms, fintech, and any app where one install can mean very different users.

Full case: https://t.co/6xz2KSD5Fg

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

The fix: a better signal, not a better creative.

Driver-only web quizzes. The optimization event became "completed the driver quiz," not "installed the app."

Quiz volume went from 96K to 1.6M per month in six months.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

The problem: drivers and passengers use the same app.

So every app-install campaign got flooded with passengers, and ad algorithms optimized toward the bigger, cheaper audience. Drivers stayed expensive.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

I think the App Store is in a deep crisis.

Four things happened in the last three weeks that point the same way.

US consumer spending on the App Store fell 6% year over year in Q2.

First decline in the ten years Sensor Tower has tracked it.

A year earlier that number was +9%.

Globally it still grew, but only 3%, down from 13%.

Apple's US commission revenue is down 18% so far this year, per Appfigures.

Same story in Brazil and Japan, where regulators forced the store open.

Tim Cook handed the CEO job to John Ternus on September 1.

Ternus is a hardware engineer. He's run hardware at Apple since 2013.

Cook stays on as executive chairman, mostly handling governments.

Then Phil Schiller stepped down from running the App Store.

He was the one senior person inside Apple who consistently argued against squeezing developers harder.

The App Store moved out of marketing and into Eddy Cue's services division.

That last move is the whole story.

For years the App Store sat with the marketing organisation.

Now it sits with the people whose job is recurring revenue.

Gurman reports Ternus and Cue want to raise margins and pull more recurring revenue out of the platform.

He also reports that's part of why Schiller wanted out.

So revenue is falling and the plan is to charge more for it.

That's not a marketplace helping developers grow.

That's a landlord raising rent on a building people are already leaving.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

@jakecastilloooo Absolutely. There's a tendency for hard-working people to get lucky, haha

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

@wbnns For sure. That list was deliberately web-only. The web funnel handles acquisition and the first payment, the app handles delivery.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Someone asked me what I'd use to build a web2app funnel today.

The whole list:

Spy - FunnelFox Radar, AdSpyLab, Meta and TikTok ad libraries
Build - Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, FunnelFox Funnels
Code - GitHub, GitLab
Host - Vercel, Cloudflare
Database - Supabase, Firebase, Neon
Payments - Stripe, Adyen, Solidgate, or FastSpring and Paddle for merchant of record
Billing - FunnelFox Billing, Yuno, Payrails
Email - Resend, Postmark, SendGrid
Analytics - PostHog, Amplitude, Mixpanel

Nine layers. Two years ago most of this was a roadmap item.

Save it for your next funnel.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Good point, but the chargeback is not what kills you, the merchant account block is.

Cheapest fix is a unique statement descriptor, since a lot of disputes are just "I don't recognize this charge".

After that, plug into Ethoca and Verifi so you catch the dispute at the issuer and auto-refund before the network records a chargeback.

Losing one $40 order beats losing the account.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Six things take a cut of your web2app revenue before you see it.

Processing fees: 5-10% blended, not the 2.9% on the PSP's landing page.

Refunds: aim for 5-7% of charged revenue.

Failed renewals: up to 40% of your churn.

Chargebacks: ~$20 per dispute alert, plus penalties, plus account risk.

Tax: 20%+ VAT in the EU, around 7.5% average in the US.

Declined checkouts: good cards a second provider would have approved.

Model all six before you scale UA.

Every one of them is measurable and most are recoverable.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Very excited about this upcoming live webinar! If you have any legal concerns or questions, this is a great opportunity to get some counsel and learn from others:

[FunnelFox @Funnelfoxhq]

Join us live on September 9 to hear the legal war stories from Cal AI's former General Counsel, Debi Yadegari.

A data exposure affecting 600,000 users, App Store clones, FTC-bait UGC campaigns, 5 questions that decide if your app survives diligence, and more.

[FunnelFox @Funnelfoxhq]

Join us live on September 9 to hear the legal war stories from Cal AI's former General Counsel, Debi Yadegari.

A data exposure affecting 600,000 users, App Store clones, FTC-bait UGC campaigns, 5 questions that decide if your app survives diligence, and more.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

All you have to do is paste the url of an app you want to copy (or your own app) and FunnelFox AI agent creates the web onboarding for it. It takes the best performring onboarding in your niche and applies the winning practices.
Edit if needed > ship it > iterate > profit

[Jacob Rodri @jacobrodri_]

App Store sales could be declining because more and more apps are using web funnels

Helping them avoid Apple’s 30% cut

Here’s how you can implement it:

1. Go to FunnelFox
2. ⁠Use Agentic AI
3. ⁠Provide context about your app and let it generate your web funnel
4. ⁠Integrate any payment processor

Funnel created in minutes and ready to implement✅

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

Same ad spend but up to 20% more revenue.

Almost half of failed subscription payments fail for one boring reason.

The card was short that day.

47.5% of all declines are insufficient funds.

17.7% are "do not honor".

9% are "refer to card issuer".

None of that is churn.

Nobody in that group decided to leave.

First retry recovers 19.3% of failed payments.

Second adds 12.5%.

Third adds 9.3%.

Three attempts and you've got back over 40% of them.

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

@adriamatz That's awesome to see. There's a special place in heaven for people who go out of their way to write encouraging feedback like this

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

@HakDimoz Congrats, keep it going!

[Andrey Shakhtin @a_shakh]

@VadimStrizheus thanks for FunnelFox the shoutout, Vadim! Yeah the 30% app store tax avoidance is nice if you're doing web payments, but you touched on a great point - the user data. That's where you actually learn how to build your product and marketing