What the app could become — bought, earned and shared
These are not predictions. This is what could happen if things go well, particularly Zoopal’s sharing strategy built to be “semi-viral”.
Every figure here is the arithmetic of the settings on the left and nothing more. Zoopal has never measured a single download, so no number below is evidence of anything. The point of the sliders is to show which assumptions the case actually rests on — above all how a) often people share the app and b) how many of the people they share it with install it. Either could turn out far better than the default settings here, and either could turn out far worse. Reasoning for default settings is briefly described for several of the defaults.
Share of active users who send a Zoopal link in a month. No published benchmark exists for this.
A shared link opens on the web with no account needed. This is the share of the people who see a share who then install the app — everyone whose eyes pass it, not only the ones who tap it.
One share, and how many pairs of eyes land on it. A link texted to one friend is 1. A family group chat is 8. A post a few hundred people scroll past is a few hundred. This is the average across all of them — sharing is deliberately not broken out by channel. 8.75 is not measured, and it does not sit comfortably with a 20% install rate. Read the glossary before quoting anything that rests on it.
None of the three settings above has ever been measured, and this is the number the whole page rests on. Built from the outside evidence instead, the pair is nearer 3.75 people a share installing at 8%, which gives 0.53 rather than 3.15. See Glossary.
The same amount in each of the five years. Drag it to zero to see what the shelters and sharing do on their own. $145,000 is the advertising line in the $500,000 round.
The higher this is, the fewer users the advertising money above buys. The project’s working band is $3 to $8.
Earned by someone on the team, not bought. They add up and never go away — until the reachable core below is used up. Six a month is 360 shelters by year five, a fifth of the 1,805 that carry the system.
A signed shelter does not deliver all of its adopters. This is the share who actually install. Untested — and it decides the whole size of the channel.
The best upper quartile of any app category is 60%. Trupanion, pet insurance, holds 82%.
Duolingo: 12.5 million paying of 137.8 million monthly users, which is 9.1%.
Someone who joins in month eleven pays for one month, not twelve. Six is the average if arrivals are spread evenly.
A second market that adds users on its own money. Set to zero to switch it off. Half means every dollar spent in the US is matched by fifty cents abroad.
Nothing happens abroad before this year. Shelters never do — those relationships are American, so overseas runs on advertising and sharing alone.
| Metric | Year 1 | Year 2 | Year 3 | Year 4 | Year 5 |
|---|
Only 3 methods of customer acquisition are in this model so far: money spent advertising in the US, relationships built with American shelters, and money spent advertising abroad.
Critically: “viral” sharing — among friends, or via public media like Instagram — multiplies all three, and that amplification does not have its own chart line. The effects are instead built into the existing three “entry doors.” At the default settings here (which you can change), every person Zoopal brings in directly becomes 0 users by the end of Year 5.
Break-even. Running the company costs $0 a year by Year 5, exclusive of advertising. About 0 subscribers cover that. Above that is surplus to grow our user base.
This bar follows whichever view is selected above. Both charts credit every user to the door they first came through — an adopter handed Zoopal at a shelter, the friend they shared it with, and that friend’s friend. The table above separates sharing back out, for anyone checking the work.
For each one: what it is, what it does to the outcome, and how the model works it out.