We bought a spicy audiobook app

I have an interesting announcement. We bought an app! We just acquired Dipsea, purveyor of fine “spicy audiobooks.” Bet you weren’t expecting that one?

Why we bought Dipsea

This acquisition is about making RevenueCat better. It’s been seven years since Miguel and I worked directly on a subscription app that had any kind of scale. And while we learn a ton through interacting with our amazing customers, there is a limit to what one can understand about real problems if they aren’t yours.

Dipsea is our opportunity to get back in the game. It’s a living lab where we can put new features, tools, and tactics to the test. We’ll be able to fine-tune and optimize our platform using data and insights from Dipsea, so that when we roll out updates, we know they’ll work for you.

I believe it is a competitive edge for a SaaS company to have direct access to a test environment with this kind of scale. Dipsea gives us that edge.

Building in public

One of the things I’m most excited about is how we’re going to use this acquisition to share more with the community. I believe transparency has many benefits, and Dipsea will allow us to take transparency to a new level.

We plan to share Dipsea’s performance as a way to showcase best practices for scaling a subscription business — and because it’s secondary to our core business, we can be very open. You get to ride along with RevenueCat as we help Dipsea grow, and you’ll be able to apply those lessons to your own apps.

Why Dipsea specifically?

Beyond the strategic benefits, Dipsea was an obvious choice for us for a couple of reasons. First, the app has been with RevenueCat since day one — its co-founder and CEO, Faye Keegan, was one of the earliest developers to integrate our SDK. Over the years, we’ve watched Dipsea grow into a unique product their subscribers are obsessed with, while also being profitable and scalable. That combination — a unique product, profitability, scale, and a strong relationship with RevenueCat — made Dipsea the perfect fit for what we wanted to achieve.

Faye will be joining our leadership team as part of the acquisition, bringing her expertise in the trenches as a technical founder and operator of a subscription app company. Before starting Dipsea, Faye was a technical product manager at fintech startup, Neighborly, and prior to that, she worked at Bridgewater Associates and CEO/CIO’s dedicated research team. I’ve known Faye for years, and I’m thrilled to finally have the chance to work together more closely.

What’s next?

Dipsea and its seven person team will continue to operate independently as a subsidiary of RevenueCat, but we’ll be involved in helping it grow, testing strategies, and learning what we can as we go. This is a long-term play for us. We didn’t buy Dipsea for a quick flip or to make money — we bought it to help us help you make money.

Stay tuned for more updates, and expect to hear a lot more about Dipsea x RC in the coming months.