Jacob Eiting - CEO of RevenueCat: Extreme dogfooding
RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting explains why deceptively simple problems make great DevTools, how thousands of red T-shirts built trust, and why acquiring a customer gave the company an unusually powerful way to dogfood at scale.
Jacob Eiting is the CEO of RevenueCat, the platform that helps mobile developers manage in-app subscriptions across Apple, Google and the rest of their stack.
He explains the unusual economics of subscription apps, the value of making developers look like heroes, RevenueCat’s content and personality, and the reasoning behind acquiring Dipsea—a longtime customer with more than 100,000 subscribers.
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.
What hard problem does RevenueCat remove for mobile developers?
Apple and Google make it possible to sell digital products across many countries and handle responsibilities such as tax and fraud, but their purchase APIs are clunky and the surrounding state is difficult to maintain. RevenueCat puts a layer over those systems so developers can spend their energy on pricing, packaging and experiments instead of reconciling subscription access across platforms.
Why do subscription apps need different tooling from SaaS?
A consumer subscription may be worth less than $100 per year, churn more frequently and still have very high gross margins. Successful apps can have hundreds of thousands of subscribers and enough new buyers to run programmatic pricing experiments. That combination changes pricing, support and optimization. It is a different business shape from high-contract-value SaaS, and it rewards software built specifically for that vertical.
What makes a deceptively simple problem a good DevTools opportunity?
A problem that looks as if it should be easy but repeatedly is not can create real embarrassment for a developer explaining the delay to nontechnical colleagues. Removing that hidden complexity produces a powerful moment: instead of looking stuck, the developer brings in a tool and looks like a hero. The most persuasive customers were often people who had already tried to build subscription infrastructure and understood the pain firsthand.
How did you know RevenueCat was possible to build?
We built subscriptions at Elevate soon after Apple opened them to more apps, then became App of the Year only weeks after shipping and quickly discovered everything our implementation got wrong. My cofounder Miguel and I spent years across engineering, growth and product, so we experienced the compound complexity ourselves. RevenueCat grew directly from that work and from the needs of a small app company wearing many hats.
Why give away so much technical knowledge in public?
In the beginning we had very few users, so I spent roughly half my week writing detailed posts about StoreKit and the technical problems behind subscriptions. The subject was underserved, and those posts began ranking beside or above Apple’s material. Explaining how to build the product ourselves established authority, made the value legible and created trust long before a sales conversation.
How did a T-shirt script become enduring marketing?
A small script sent a red RevenueCat shirt after a customer reached ten subscribers—enough evidence that a real person was building something. The note openly traded a free shirt for a human billboard. It cost around $15–$20 each and has now sent thousands; people still wear them at developer events. The program was inexpensive, automatic, funny and aligned with customers whose growth could repay the early generosity.
Should technical founders deliberately show more personality?
There are different kinds of charisma, but scaling a company means talking to employees, customers and many other stakeholders. A founder does not need to imitate my voice, yet a founding team benefits from someone comfortable with people and quick enough to communicate authentically. My version came from theater and years of making jokes online. The broader lesson is to include that capability rather than defaulting to a generic corporate voice.
Why acquire Dipsea, one of RevenueCat’s customers?
Dipsea had used RevenueCat from very early on, had more than 100,000 subscribers and operated at a scale employee side projects could not reproduce. Owning an app like that lets us test risky backend work, new Apple and Google features and cross-platform edge cases without asking a customer to accept changes that offer them no immediate benefit. It also brought founder Faye Keegan’s product experience onto the team.
Would you recommend this kind of extreme dogfooding?
Every DevTool needs a reason for its founders to keep using the product. Company building can pull a technical founder away for years, even though the product and the people consuming it remain the core of the business. Dipsea, RevenueCat’s own mobile app and monthly shipping reviews brought me back into the details. Small neglected problems compound, so founders need intentional mechanisms for noticing and fixing them.
What keeps a founder going for the long term?
Work out the deeper reason you are doing it. Eight years in, a severe incident can still get me out of bed at 1 a.m.; those moments are not immediately happy, but winning matters to me. Once a company survives the early danger, boredom, burnout or falling out of love with the product become serious risks. It is worth deliberately engineering the job so the founders can stay motivated and close to the work.