app-growth-designlisted

# App Growth & Design Playbook ## What this is A knowledge base distilled from the 30 most recent videos on **Tim Gabe's YouTube channel** (https://www.youtube.com/@TimGabe), covering app psychology, onboarding, paywalls and pricing, retention and gamification, growth and positioning, and design craft. The six thematic playbooks in `references/` hold the depth; the `[NN]` markers throughout resolve against the **Source index** at the bottom of this file, which links each number back to the original video. **This is one practitioner's opinionated view, not settled fact.** Almost every mechanic in the corpus is asserted from survivorship-selected case studies, not measured — there are essentially no before/after deltas attributable to a specific mechanic. Prefer cases that carry real numbers, and present the rest as hypotheses to test. Each reference file ends with **Anti-patterns**, **Contradictions** and **Caveats** sections: read them before advising, because the corpus contradicts itself in several load-bearing places (short vs. long onboarding, friction removal vs. friction as amplifier, design-as-moat vs. design-is-not-the-moat). **Agency promos are flagged.** Tim runs a design agency (Zipsa / Zipzap) and pitches "free design strategy calls" 2–4 times per video; several case studies (Freecash, Game Blazers, SolCard, Spark) are his own unaudited client work. The playbooks mark those segments as promotional. Use the mechanics, never the implied results. ## How to use