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Chapter 11: Your app is live: what to monitor first

You shipped it. Your app is now live on the App Store, and real people can download it and pay for it.

You don’t need to become a growth analyst overnight. For now, focus on a few signals that tell you whether people are finding your app, using it, and subscribing.

Metric

Where to find it

What it tells you

New customers

RevenueCat → Analytics → Charts → New Customers

How many new users RevenueCat is seeing in your app

Active subscriptions

RevenueCat → Analytics → Charts → Active Subscriptions

How many paid subscriptions are currently active

Revenue

RevenueCat → Analytics → Charts → Revenue

How much revenue RevenueCat is tracking from purchases

Conversion to paid

RevenueCat → Analytics → Charts → Conversion to paying

What share of new customers go on to make a purchase

Don’t judge your app from the first few downloads

Early numbers can move dramatically when you only have a handful of users.

If three people download your app and one subscribes, your conversion rate looks incredible. If the next 10 don’t subscribe, it suddenly looks very different.

So in the first days after launch, focus less on whether a metric is “good” and more on whether the funnel is working:

  • Are people downloading the app?
  • Are new users appearing in RevenueCat?
  • Are purchases showing up as transactions?
  • Do successful purchases unlock the right features?
  • Are subscriptions and revenue being recorded correctly?
  • Are users running into obvious problems?

Fix broken experiences immediately. Give performance metrics more time and data before making major decisions about pricing, onboarding, or your paywall.

Get your metrics delivered automatically

You don’t need to keep refreshing the RevenueCat dashboard.

RevenueCat can send you a weekly Performance Summary with metrics including revenue, monthly recurring revenue (MRR), new trials, active subscriptions, and conversion rates.

To turn it on:

  1. Open Account in the RevenueCat dashboard
  2. Select Notifications
  3. Find Performance Summaries
  4. Select your project and save your changes

The summary arrives each Monday and compares your latest results with the previous week.

What to do next

For your first week, your priorities are simple:

Check that everything works. Watch for crashes, broken purchase flows, incorrect entitlements, and anything users tell you is confusing.

Get your first users. Share the app with people who might genuinely find it useful. Ask them to use it, not just download it, and pay attention to where they get stuck.

Listen before you optimize. One conversation with a real user can be more useful at this stage than watching a conversion rate move from 2% to 3% after a handful of downloads.

You’ve already done the difficult part: you turned an idea into an app that someone can download and pay for.

Now you get to find out what happens when people actually use it.