Full steam Ahead for emotional intelligence app with Pollen VC

Martin Macmillan
3 min readMay 16, 2024

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Ahead is a coaching app founded by Kai Koch and John Roggan based in Berlin, Germany — dubbed as the “Duolingo for emotional intelligence”. Ahead is a personal coach in your pocket, it helps users navigate their own emotions such as overcoming fears, anger, insecurities or procrastination. Built by a team of seasoned founders and behavior change experts it uses bite-sized, science-driven tools to boost emotional intelligence.

Launched in 2022, it has been in a cycle of continuous product iterations to evolve the product and subscription mechanics and, importantly, an ROI-positive scalable formula for user acquisition.

In November 2023 they felt ready to scale. The team hit upon a UA formula that consumers were super receptive to and designed ad creatives that resonated perfectly with their target audience. The most popular subscription plan involved a 7 day free trial converting into an annual subscription and conversion rates were best in class.

This meant that ahead app had achieved the formula they were looking for in terms of unit economics of UA but found the payment terms of the App Store (up to 67 days before proceeds would be received by the studio) to be prohibitive in terms of being able to aggressively reinvest back into their acquisition engine.

Drawing on their Pollen VC credit facility every few days allowed Ahead to reinvest faster into more paid ads and scale monthly revenues by 10x in just 4 weeks

In November 2023 they felt ready to scale. The team hit upon a UA formula that consumers were super receptive to and designed ad creatives that resonated perfectly with their target audience. The most popular subscription plan involved a 7 day free trial converting into an annual subscription and conversion rates were best in class.

This meant that Ahead had achieved the formula they were looking for in terms of unit economics of UA but found the payment terms of the App Store (up to 67 days before proceeds would be received by the studio) to be prohibitive in terms of being able to aggressively reinvest back into their acquisition engine.

Initially, Ahead increased ad spend on Meta using their credit line in place. However they quickly reached their credit limit and were unable to secure an increase from Meta within the timeframe required. Even with an increased credit limit and their cash position the invoicing terms would not necessarily mean that they would be able to take full advantage of their momentum.

Ahead drew on their revolving credit facility with Pollen VC to keep doubling down on their ROI positive paid campaigns. By working with Pollen VC, they were able to draw on an ever-increasing pool of accounts receivable (AR) — funds earned, but not yet paid out by the platforms — in order to keep spending more on the ads which were breaking even and delivering a financial return in a short period of time.

By being able to draw on their AR and rapidly reinvest back into more user acquisition (eliminating the platform payout cycle delay) the company was able to draw on the facility every few days in order to reinvest faster into more paid ads and scale its monthly revenues by 10x in just 4 weeks.

Ahead embraced the notion of the Capital Stack, which we wrote about back in 2022. This suggests studios step through their sources of capital from cheapest to most expensive, to keep scaling for as long as the demand economics of user acquisition continues to work for them.

By embracing the concept of capital efficiency, the Ahead team have been able to scale user acquisition using their credit facility from Pollen VC, enabling them to deploy their equity funding into making a great product even better.

You can try the product here.

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Martin Macmillan
Martin Macmillan

Written by Martin Macmillan

CEO & Founder at Pollen VC - London, we provide devs early access to revenues earned from the app stores so they can rapidly reinvest https://pollen.vc

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