A ninety-day creator trial with one gate: if the creator channel is not producing 250 subscriptions a month by day 90 — matching what Meta does for you today — it ends. No renewal conversation, no hard feelings. If it is, you decide what happens next.
Let me say the true thing first: six to eight dollars a subscriber on Meta, roughly 3.4x, growing well, reinvesting everything but the Apple tax. That is genuinely hard to beat, and nothing in this proposal asks you to pull a dollar out of it.
Here is what I would ask you to sit with instead. A 3.4x ROAS does not survive scaling spend without a constant flow of fresh creatives and new audiences — that is how the auction is built. The six-to-eight-dollar number is what today's spend buys at today's creative. Every account that scales past this point either builds a creative pipeline before it needs one, or scrambles for one after CAC has already climbed.
A creator program is not a competitor to that machine. It is the fuel line. It produces the three things Meta cannot produce for itself: a standing supply of fresh hooks and formats to keep the auction fed, whitelisting and spark ads that typically outperform brand-account creative on cold traffic, and reach among young men on socials who will never see your ads but need what you have. And it becomes a second channel you own while it does it.
The trial has one job: prove the creator channel can match your Meta output — 250 subscriptions a month — inside ninety days. Everything below is organized around clearing that number, and the winning content feeds your Meta account the whole way through.
Tracking live in week one. Roughly a hundred approaches a week from dozens of vetted creators I am already connected to, briefs and scripts written, first cohort posting on commission. We learn which creators, hooks and formats actually convert for a Catholic men's app, with almost nothing at risk, because creators are paid on results.
Every winning video is already rights-cleared. It goes into Meta as paid creative and, where the creator agrees, runs whitelisted from their own handle, which typically outperforms brand-account creative on cold traffic. Your working channel gets stronger while the second one is still being built.
Roster compounding, losers cut, winners doubled. Day 90 we sit down with the reconciled numbers. Under 250 a month and it ends — no renewal conversation. At or over it, you decide whether to continue, month to month, on the same terms.
Commission funds the testing. You keep the rights. The winners become paid creative. This is a volume-and-testing game — the exact system that has scaled brands to millions through creator marketing.
You asked for case studies. Here is the most recent one, with the client anonymised at their request: a direct-to-consumer brand in a crowded retail category, no faith angle, no built-in community. Harder starting conditions than yours.
Three months. A roster of micro-tier creators, all recruited cold and all paid on commission at ten to twenty percent, with no upfront fees and no flat posting rates. Every order attributed by unique discount code or tracked link and then reconciled line by line against the store of record before a single invoice was raised.
3.69x is after creator commissions, after the management fee, after payout and processing fees. It is not gross attributed revenue divided by media spend. It is revenue divided by the total invoice. The 5.29x is what the creator commission alone returned.
A small handful of creators produced roughly three quarters of the revenue, and there was no way to know in advance which ones. That concentration is the pattern in every program that works, and it is precisely why the first ninety days are a volume game and why the creators are paid on commission. You are buying the search, cheaply, and then you keep the ones who win.
This is the arithmetic underneath the guarantee. It runs on your funnel, not on industry averages, and every conversion assumption is set at or below what your own Meta traffic already does.
Your traffic converts at about one percent from impression to download, and about sixteen percent from download to paid. I model creator traffic at the same download rate and half the subscription rate, eight percent. If creator traffic converts at parity instead, which it often does because it arrives pre-trusted, every number below roughly doubles.
| Month | Consistent creators | Posts | Impressions | Downloads | New paid subs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 1tracking + first cohort | 13 | 26 | 130k | 1,300 | 104 |
| Month 2first winners visible, ads begin | 24 | 48 | 242k | 2,420 | 194 |
| Month 3day 90 — the gate | 34 | 68 | 338k | 3,380 | 270 |
Assumes ~5,000 views per post across the micro tier (10k–100k followers), two posts a month per consistent creator, ~100 outreach a week at a ~10% conversion to first post, 14% monthly roster churn. Month three lands at roughly 270 — clearing the 250 gate with margin to spare, on conversion assumptions set at half your own funnel's rate.
Creators compound. A creator recruited in month one is still posting in month three, so each month's reach is the sum of everyone who came before plus the new cohort. The curve is slow, then steep — which is exactly why the gate sits at day 90 and not day 30.
I will not leave this in your sprint queue. Every creator gets a unique code and a tracked link from day one, which works before your developers touch anything. We reconcile against daily conversion deltas the same way the reference program was verified, and I will spec the deeper attribution build for your team at no cost.
Every number on this page is computed live from the sliders. Nothing is hard-coded. Set the inputs wherever you actually believe them and see what comes out.
| Month | Creators | Posts | Impressions | Downloads | New subs | Gross | Total cost | Net |
|---|
The roster compounds: each month carries forward the prior roster less churn, plus the new cohort. The Vessels commission is 15% of attributed revenue and applies only after the month's attributed revenue has covered the retainer — the first $1,997 each month carries no Vessels commission at all. "Net" is what Saint Steps keeps after creator commission, the Vessels commission, processing and the retainer.
You played with the model and found configurations where this loses money. That was fair — under the old structure, it could. So the structure changed. The retainer dropped by a third, and my commission now earns nothing until the month's attributed revenue has covered the retainer. Here is what that does to the arithmetic.
Assumes your current six-month plan at $39.99 through web checkout — no price changes, no discount lever. Variable costs: 20% creator commission at the top of the range, 2.99% processing, and the Vessels 15% applied only to revenue above the $1,997 retainer. Every one of those is paid out of revenue that did not exist before.
| Monthly subs | Retainer per sub | Variable cost per sub | Total cost per sub | Return on total cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 69 — break-even | $28.94 | $10.85 | $39.79 | 1.00x |
| 100 | $19.97 | $12.20 | $32.17 | 1.24x |
| 150 | $13.31 | $13.20 | $26.51 | 1.51x |
| 250 — the gate | $7.99 | $13.99 | $21.98 | 1.82x |
| 400 | $4.99 | $14.44 | $19.44 | 2.06x |
| 600 | $3.33 | $14.69 | $18.02 | 2.22x |
The program now pays for itself at about 69 subscriptions a month — expected inside month one, and less than a third of the day-90 gate. If the channel cannot even find 69 subscriptions a month, the gate ends the program before a fourth retainer payment ever exists.
Two thousand dollars into Meta returns you six to seven thousand today, and nobody is touching that. This is not funded out of ad spend — it is a second engine running beside it. At the gate, $1,997 here returns roughly $5,000 a month net and feeds the creative pipeline that keeps the Meta number from decaying. One budget buys attention; the other builds the machine that keeps attention cheap.
And the honest part: at 250 a month, a blended $21.98 does not beat a $6–8 Meta CAC today. It is not supposed to. Three things close that gap: the retainer is fixed, so it halves every time volume doubles; Meta's number rises as you spend into it while a percentage of revenue does not; and every rights-cleared winner lowers the CAC of the Meta channel you already run. You are paying the difference for a second channel you own and the creative supply the first one runs on.
$1,997 monthly retainer. Sourcing, contracts, briefs, tracking, management.
10–20% commission on attributed revenue, paid net-30 on results.
15% of attributed revenue, and only after the retainer is covered each month.
The earlier proposal suggested a list-price change paired with a creator discount. David was hesitant to touch pricing, and he doesn't have to be talked out of that — the lever is shelved. That structure was a conversion tactic, never a requirement.
The program runs on your six-month plan at $39.99, exactly as it is priced today. Creators drive traffic to a web checkout, every creator carries a unique tracked link and code for attribution only, and nothing about your paywall, your price points, or your in-app offer changes. The one economic move worth making is not a pricing move at all — it is a checkout move.
| A gate month — 250 subscriptions | In-app | Web checkout |
|---|---|---|
| Collected at $39.99 | $9,998 | $9,998 |
| Apple's 15% platform cut | −$1,500 | $0 |
| Creator commission at 20% | −$2,000 | −$2,000 |
| Vessels 15%, after the retainer is covered | −$1,200 | −$1,200 |
| Processing at 2.99%, any checkout | −$299 | −$299 |
| Monthly retainer | −$1,997 | −$1,997 |
| Net to Saint Steps | $3,002 | $4,502 |
Program fees are identical either way; the difference is Apple. $1,500 a month at the gate — three quarters of the retainer recovered by moving a checkout, without touching a single price.
In-app subscription events are the hardest thing in this program to attribute honestly. A hosted web checkout at saintsteps.vssls.co answers attribution and Apple's cut in the same move: every conversion arrives with its creator attached. We run it against in-app from day one, measure both, and keep whichever converts. Where an in-app conversion can't be reliably attributed, no fee is owed on it — that risk sits with me, not you.
Nothing on your paywall. Price, plans, and in-app offer stay exactly as they are.
Web checkout at saintsteps.vssls.co, run against in-app from week one.
$6 per sub Apple would have taken, plus attribution you can audit line by line.
Sourcing through to reporting, plus the partnerships already on your books, brought into the same pipeline, measured the same way, and renegotiated where the numbers say they should be.
Multiple creator databases plus direct search across Catholic and Protestant audiences. A living pipeline, roughly 100 qualified approaches a week.
Every agreement carries paid usage and whitelisting rights up front. You never go back to renegotiate for a video that worked.
Testimony, story, teaching, day-in-the-life. Multiple hooks per format so we learn what converts instead of guessing.
Per-creator codes and links, reconciled monthly to installs and paid conversions. Dashboards and automation built in at no extra cost.
The creator retainer you run now comes into the pipeline, tracked properly, benchmarked against your $11 CAC, and restructured toward performance if it is not earning it.
Three to five long-term relationships with large Christian creators I already know personally, negotiated directly, at rates cold outreach does not get.
You have creators who posted well before and went quiet. They are the cheapest reach available to you, already warm on the product, already proven. That list gets worked in week two.
A large share of your users already identify Protestant. The creator pool there is many times the Catholic pool, and the message needs almost no change. It is the single largest unpriced opportunity you have.
Nothing past day 90 is a commitment — that is the point of the gate. But it is fair to show what you would be deciding about. Here is what months four through twelve look like if the trial clears and you elect to keep the machine running, month to month, on the same terms.
| Month | Active creators | Posts | Impressions | Installs | New paid |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month 4large-creator test | 42 | 84 | 421k | 4,210 | 337 |
| Month 6anchor partnerships land | 55 | 111 | 553k | 5,530 | 442 |
| Month 8Protestant cohort scales | 65 | 130 | 651k | 6,510 | 521 |
| Month 10rights library feeds paid | 72 | 145 | 723k | 7,230 | 578 |
| Month 12year-one run rate | 78 | 155 | 777k | 7,770 | 621 |
Same assumptions as Section IV: 5,000 views a post, 1% to install, 8% to paid, thirteen new creators a month, 14% churn. No new channel, only more of it — and the interactive model above runs this exact projection live if you want to stress it.
Three to five large Christian creators moved off one-off posts onto standing arrangements: recurring content, revenue share where it fits, real association with the app.
Many times the creator pool, almost no change to the message. Year one is where that stops being a test cohort and becomes a second full pipeline.
Lent, Advent and Easter run as coordinated pushes across the whole roster, with a standing ambassador cohort posting monthly on long-term terms.
Comparable programs run $5,000 to $15,000 a month, and my own standard structure is $2,999 on a six-month term. $1,997 on a ninety-day trial with a walk-away gate is a one-time structure built for where Saint Steps is right now — and it is held through Friday, September 11. After that I have to move back to the standard structure.
If the creator channel is not producing at least 250 subscriptions a month by day 90 — matching your Meta output — the agreement ends on its own. No renewal conversation, no hard feelings, no sixth-month invoice arriving anyway. If it is producing, we sit down with the reconciled numbers and you decide whether to continue, month to month.
Performance fees are billed net-30 on tracked revenue, net of refunds, and Vessels fronts creator payouts so no creator waits on your close of month. Onboarding, tracking spec, web checkout page, dashboards and automation are included in the retainer. My 15% earns nothing until the month's attributed revenue has covered the retainer — I only really get paid when this works.