How RevenueCat tore up the sales playbook, with Rik Haandrikman
Rik Haandrikman on why RevenueCat sales reps aren't paid on signed contracts, the year they briefly paid on contract count and watched self-serve revenue quietly evaporate, and the human claw machine full of cat plushies that's part of RevenueCat's conference playbook.
Rik Haandrikman is VP of Growth at RevenueCat, which handles mobile subscription infrastructure for a huge share of the app economy — by his count, close to half of new subscription apps launch with it, and about 20% of all app-store subscription revenue worldwide flows through it.
We get into RevenueCat's unusual approach to sales — a team whose job is to help you evaluate the product however you want, not to close contracts — why waiting for a genuine "compelling event" beats pushing a deal, and why RevenueCat sends people from every department, not just DevRel, to conferences around the world.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
You wrote an article that was really a recruiting post in disguise. What's actually unusual about how RevenueCat does sales?
I called it a Trojan horse — dress it up as an article about how we do a thing, but secretly I'm sneaking in a bunch of job openings. In the article I put "sales" in quotation marks, because our sales team isn't measured on doing sales. Their mission is to help people evaluate RevenueCat wherever they are — RevenueCat is developer tooling, but also a platform used by marketers, product people, even support reps, so evaluating it could mean a developer poking around or a CEO wanting a business case. We don't care how you want to do that, and if you decide to buy, we don't care how you pay either — swipe a credit card, sign a contract, sign a contract and pay monthly, whatever works for you. Our job is to meet you where you are rather than force you into a box.
If reps aren't paid on signed contracts, what are they actually measured on?
They still have targets, the targets just aren't tied to getting a contract signed, because that's exactly the incentive misalignment we want to avoid. In almost every sales org, your quota is how much account value you close in a year — so when a developer just wants to evaluate the product themselves and would be best off swiping a credit card, a rep incentivized that way is going to try to swoop in and get them onto a contract they don't need. We're very much about getting incentives aligned, and it's the same logic behind our pricing: we charge based on the revenue you make, so if we help you make more money, we make more money too — a nice little synergy. Reps are instead measured on getting people to evaluate the product successfully and then use it however makes sense for them. If someone I helped evaluate goes and swipes their own credit card, that's still credited to me.
Have you ever tried compensating reps a different way and had it backfire?
Yes, at a previous company — we made the mistake of comping reps on the number of new contracts, not even the contract value. What happened is that people successfully swiping a credit card on self-serve slowly went down, while contracts slowly went up, and the total amount of money we were making barely moved. It didn't take long to figure out what was happening — reps were nudging people who would've happily self-served toward signing a contract instead, because that's what got comped.
You've talked about waiting for a genuine 'compelling event' rather than pushing a deal. What does that actually look like?
If what you're selling replaces something a developer already built themselves, and it's working, it's very hard to get them to rip it out and switch — if it isn't broken, they won't try to fix it. What you're looking for is a compelling event: a reason they have to touch it now even though they didn't want to. Something breaking is always a good one, or the person who built it leaving. We don't control when someone's in-app monetization infrastructure breaks, but we can make sure that when it does, they already know us, trust us, and reach out — which means thinking long term, because these are black-swan events that might only happen once every three or four years. You end up talking to big prospective customers year after year on very small things, being genuinely consultative, because if a rep is overly focused on closing the deal now, they won't maintain the relationship long enough for it to actually pay off later.
Can you give a concrete example of how you actually act on a compelling event?
Google releases a new Play Billing Library every year and deprecates an old one, so at minimum every couple of years, anyone selling on Android has to go in and change things. A few years back they jumped from version four to five and completely changed the taxonomy of what a subscription is — a panic moment for a lot of apps, especially the ones who realized a year later that what they were using was about to be deprecated. We wrote about the migration in detail — if you Google Play Billing Library version numbers, after Google's own content, we're the first hit — and for the version five transition specifically, it was such a huge change that we got on calls with engineering teams at apps that weren't even our customers, and helped them migrate from four to five, not to RevenueCat. We knew a bunch of them were too far along to realistically move to RevenueCat in time, so it was purely in service of the relationship — making sure they knew who we were and trusted us. A number of those companies came to us later when their next compelling event happened.
How big has RevenueCat actually gotten in the market?
We're closing in on 50% of new subscription apps worldwide launching with RevenueCat, and about 20% of all the money made by subscription apps in the app stores flows through us. We actually skew a little under the average in revenue share relative to app share — not because bigger apps avoid us, but because it takes a long time for a new app to become a big app, and we're disproportionately the choice for new apps. We track mentions of RevenueCat on Reddit, LinkedIn, and Twitter, and it's telling that over the years, those conversations have shifted from people asking whether to use RevenueCat to people explaining why they're not using RevenueCat — that's a pretty good position to be in. For net-new apps, the decision is almost always made by the developer directly, and the product mostly sells itself — we have top 100 grossing apps in the world that just swiped a credit card to get started.
If someone's early in their journey and thinking about marketing, what would you tell them?
Go to your customers. When I joined RevenueCat about three and a half years ago, I asked the sales team what their biggest problem was, and they said they'd get into conversations with big apps where the product team wanted RevenueCat, but there was a developer in the corner shaking their head saying they'd just build it themselves. So we went on a deliberate hearts-and-minds campaign — we went from doing one or two mobile dev conferences a year to about thirty. Conferences aren't just a good place to pitch, they're a very good place to learn who you're actually building for, which makes you better at your job regardless of what your job is. We also started talking on stage not about what RevenueCat does as a product, but about how we build it — because if a developer is deciding whether to build something themselves or trust someone else, seeing how you actually operate builds real confidence in your capability.
What do you say to people who think conferences aren't worth the time and expense?
It depends how you do them. Our booths are deliberately quirky — we've had a human claw machine where someone gets into a harness and gets lowered into a kiddie pool to grab a RevenueCat plushie, and someone dressed as a cat running a fortune-teller booth with cat-themed cards. But that works because these aren't hundred-thousand-person conferences like Dreamforce — doing a great booth at a mobile dev conference doesn't cost a million dollars. We only do two kinds of things at events: things that help developers make more money, because that's our actual mission, and things we think are funny. The booth is more about being funny than moving pipeline. The real value is in conversations — picking the most relevant talks, sitting in the front row, asking questions, and talking to people afterward. That's where the actual value is.
Who from the company actually goes to these conferences?
Everybody. There's a Notion page listing every conference we're doing that year with a column to sign up, and anyone in the company can put their name down — support, product, engineering, even people team. At a previous company I brought our 60-year-old head of legal to a booth and had him demo the product live after asking a visitor what they used for mobile CI/CD — the joke was that if our head of legal could set it up, anyone could, but the real value was that he understood what we did and who we did it for, which helped every time he had to sign off on something later. Because we're fully remote, sending people from all over the company to conferences together also just helps them meet in person and build relationships with teams they'd otherwise only see over Zoom.
Links & references
This episode is brought to you by WorkOS.