User acquisition strategies for a consumer app come down to six routes. You can build your own short-form channels. You can collect a waitlist and launch to it. You can work with creators. You can win searches in the app stores. You can buy ads. Or you can get written about. Every plan you will be pitched is some mix of these.
This guide compares the six side by side: what each costs in money, what it costs in time, what you still have when you stop, and where each one fails. Then it gives an order to try them in, by stage. I run one of these routes for a living, so I will also say plainly which ones Underboss does not sell.
There are no cost benchmarks in this comparison. Install prices vary too much by category and country for a single figure to mean anything, so costs are described in plain terms: low, medium, high, and who has to put the hours in.
How to compare user acquisition strategies fairly
Most comparisons rank routes by how fast they produce installs. Speed matters, and by that test paid wins every time. But a founder choosing where to put a limited budget needs four answers about each route.
- Money: what you pay out, to platforms, people or agencies.
- Time: how many hours your own team spends, and how long before anything shows.
- What you keep: what is still working for you a month after you stop.
- What it teaches: whether the route tells you something about your users you can use elsewhere.
The ranking below is by the third answer, what you keep, because that is the one most plans leave out. The order to try the routes in is a separate question and comes later.
| Route, ranked by what you keep | Money, time, and what is left when you stop |
|---|---|
| 1. Owned short-form channels | Money: low. Time: high, for months. Left over: accounts, followers, formats, and people who search your name. |
| 2. Waitlist and launch | Money: low. Time: medium, before launch. Left over: a list of contacts that belongs to you. |
| 3. Creators and UGC | Money: medium. Time: medium, mostly briefing and checking. Left over: footage you can reuse, if the contract says so. The reach stays with the creator. |
| 4. Store search | Money: low. Time: low to medium. Left over: a listing that keeps converting, as long as people keep arriving. |
| 5. Paid ads | Money: high, and ongoing. Time: low to start. Left over: what you learned about creative and audiences. The installs stop with the spend. |
| 6. Press | Money: low to high. Time: uncertain. Left over: a link and a line of credibility. The traffic lasts days. |
Route 1: owned short-form channels
This means your app's own accounts on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, publishing short videos in formats you repeat. The feeds show videos to strangers based on how viewers respond, so an account with no followers can reach people from the start.
The money cost is low: a phone, an editor's time, perhaps a person on camera. The time cost is the highest of the six. Someone has to produce every week, and the first months often look like nothing is happening. This is organic user acquisition in its plainest form, and its price is paid in patience.
What you keep is the reason it ranks first. The accounts are yours. So are the followers, the formats that worked, and the growing number of people who type your app's name into a store. None of that is switched off when a budget ends.
It fails in two cases. The first is an app that cannot be shown. If nothing about the product is visible or interesting on a screen in a few seconds, short video is a hard road. The second is a team that publishes for three weeks and stops. An abandoned account is worth less than no account, because visitors can see the date of the last post.
Route 2: a waitlist and a launch
A waitlist is acquisition before there is anything to install. You collect email addresses or phone numbers from people who want the app, and on launch day you tell them first.
It costs little money. A page, a form and a way to message the list. The time cost sits before launch, and the route depends on route one or something like it, because a waitlist page does not fill itself. Something has to send people there.
What you keep is a list no platform controls. A feed can change what it shows tomorrow. An email address still works.
Two receipts from our record belong here. A game studio grew its waitlist from 2,000 to 80,000 at $0 ad spend. And on a dating app I built and own, the waitlist reached 10,000 people in five months of active collection, after three months of preparation, at $0 paid.
Both are waitlists. Neither receipt says how many of those people installed or stayed, and I will not fill that in. The limit of this route is exactly there: a signup is a promise, and some promises go stale. A list collected long before launch needs to hear from you along the way.
The launch itself is a one-time event. It can be a strong week. It is not a plan for the months after it. The step-by-step version of this route, from first video to launch week, is a separate guide.
Read the launch order, step by step →
Route 3: creators and UGC
Here other people make the content. Either a creator posts about your app to their own audience, or you pay for videos made in a user's style and publish them yourself or run them as ads.
The money cost is in the middle and varies widely with who you hire. The time cost is easy to underestimate: finding people, briefing them, checking the work, sorting out usage rights. What you keep depends on the paperwork. Reach on a creator's account belongs to the creator. Footage belongs to you only if the agreement says you may reuse it.
This route fails most often for one reason. The company pays for content before it knows what kind of content its users respond to. I have done this with my own money. On the dating app I built and own, roughly 4,000 euros of produced and paid UGC converted zero users. The organic build on the same app, on a budget of roughly 3,000 to 5,000 euros, produced the 10,000 person waitlist.
The lesson is about order. Creators work much better once you have a format that already earned attention on your own account. Then the brief is specific: make this kind of video, with this opening, about this subject. Without that, you are paying someone to guess. A polished guess is still a guess, and it arrives with an invoice.
Route 4: store search
People search the App Store and Google Play for two kinds of things: a category, such as a kind of tracker or game, and a name. Store search as a route means being found for both, and turning the people who land on your listing into installs.
Money cost is low unless you hire a specialist. Time cost is low for the basics: a clear icon, honest screenshots, a first line that says what the app does. Apple's product page tests let you compare versions of those once you have visitors to test on.
What you keep is a listing that goes on converting. The catch is that a listing converts demand and does not create it. Category searches are crowded with established apps. Name searches only happen if something outside the store made people learn the name. So this route pays off in proportion to the others.
Underboss does not sell store listing work. If your listing is the weak point, an ASO specialist is the right hire, and the teardown will say so.
Route 5: paid ads
Paid is the fastest route and the only one you can turn up on demand. For an app with good retention, a tested onboarding and a deadline, it is often the correct choice. Nothing in this guide argues against it.
The costs are the issue. The money cost is high and continues for as long as you want users. And the price moves against you over time. In its annual report to the SEC, Meta said its average price per ad rose 9% in 2025, after rising 10% the year before. Put the two years together and the same Meta budget buys about 17% less reach than it did two years earlier.
Apps feel a second pressure. Apple asks iPhone users whether each app may track them across other apps and sites. In February 2022, Meta's finance chief told investors that this one privacy change would cost the company about $10B in revenue that year. That is the scale of what the ad platforms could no longer see, and app advertisers buy against that reduced view.
What you keep from paid is knowledge: which messages and audiences worked. The installs themselves stop on the day the spend stops. That makes paid a poor first route for an app that has not yet learned what its users respond to, because every lesson is bought at full price.
It becomes a strong route later, once two things are true. The app keeps the users it gets. And you have videos that already held strangers' attention with no money behind them. Funding those is the least risky ad spend available. It is also the only paid work Underboss does. We do not manage paid user acquisition as a service of its own.
See how we approach user acquisition →
Route 6: press
Press means coverage in publications, newsletters or podcasts your users read. The money cost runs from nothing, if you pitch a story yourself, to high, if you hire a firm. The time cost is the least predictable of the six, because the decision belongs to an editor.
What you keep is small but real: a link, and a line you can quote on your site. The traffic arrives over a few days and then ends. Press works best as a boost on top of something else, such as a launch with active accounts behind it. On its own it gives you a good day.
Founders tend to overrate this route, because being written about feels like progress. Sometimes it is. Count the installs before you frame the article.
Underboss does not sell PR.
What about referrals and word of mouth?
They are missing from the six because they are not a route you can open on their own. A user who tells a friend is the result of a product worth mentioning and a moment inside it worth sharing. That is product work first. It multiplies whatever the six routes bring in, and it is covered in a separate piece on the organic plays an app has.
Read the four organic plays for an app →
The order to try them in, by stage
Ranking by what you keep is not the same as the order to start in. The order depends on where the app is.
Before launch. Start owned channels and open a waitlist together. The videos fill the list, and the list gives every video a job. Get the store listing basics ready. Leave paid and creators alone. You do not yet know what works, so anything you pay for is a guess.
Just launched. Keep the channels running and watch whether new users come back. This is the stage for user acquisition without paid ads, and the reason is practical. You are still learning which message brings the right people, and learning is cheaper when it is free. Pitch press yourself if you have a real story. Tidy the listing as visitors arrive.
Retention holds and a format works. Now bring in creators, briefed on the format that already won. Put the first paid budget behind the videos that did best organically. Run store listing tests, because there is finally traffic to test on.
Growing with a budget. Paid becomes a real line in the plan, and a specialist media buyer is worth their fee. Owned channels keep running underneath, for two reasons. They keep supplying creative that has already been tested. And they keep adding users who arrive without an auction, which holds the average cost of a user down.
The common mistake is to run this order backwards. A new app raises money, opens an ad account in the first week, hires creators in the second, and thinks about its own channels when the budget gets tight. By then it has paid full price for every lesson.
How to tell which routes are working
Each route reports its own success, and each report flatters the route. Ad dashboards claim installs. Creators send view counts. So keep a few numbers that belong to no single route.
- New users per week, in total, from your own records.
- The share of them still active after their first weeks.
- Searches for your app's name, from App Store Connect, the Play Console and Google Search Console.
- Everything spent on acquisition that month, divided by all new users. This is the blended cost, and it is the one figure that includes the users nobody paid for.
Then add one question to your signup flow: where did you hear about us? The answers are rough, and they are still more honest than any platform's account of its own work.
Across Underboss portfolio engagements, the average reduction in customer acquisition cost is 35%. That is an average across engagements, some above it and some below, and it is not a forecast for your app. It is here because it shows the direction: more users arriving through channels you own lowers what the average user costs.
Read how to reduce customer acquisition cost →
Where Underboss fits, and where it does not
We work on route one, and on the parts of routes two, three and five that connect to it. That means short-form formats on your app's own accounts. A waitlist fed by those formats if you have not launched. Creators briefed against formats that already worked. Paid budget behind proven pieces, on your own ad account. The method is written into a playbook, and your team learns to run it over twelve months.
Key takeaways
- A consumer app has six acquisition routes: owned short-form channels, a waitlist and launch, creators and UGC, store search, paid ads, and press.
- Compare them on money, time, what you keep and what they teach. Speed alone always points to paid.
- Ranked by what you keep, owned channels come first and press last.
- Start with the cheap routes that teach you something. Add creators and paid once retention holds and a format has already worked for free.
- Underboss builds the owned channels and funds proven pieces. It does not sell paid UA management, ASO or PR.
If you want to know which of these routes is open for your app, ask for the free teardown. Send a link to the app, or to the waitlist if it is not out yet, along with its channels. Within three days you get a written read on where your users come from today and what we would build first. No call, and the plan is yours whether or not we work together.