From One-Time Purchase to Recurring Revenue: How Acquisition and Engagement Made Home Design 3D Ready for Exit

When a mobile app is being prepared for sale, buyers don't just count downloads — they look at how much each user is worth and how reliably the app can reach and re-engage its audience. Over a focused twelve-month engagement, Scalebay partnered with Microids on Home Design 3D to build exactly that kind of asset, combining App Store Optimization (ASO), user acquisition (UA) and CRM into a single, compounding growth engine that helped the publisher realize a successful exit.

This is the story of how deeper engagement — not vanity metrics — became the value that carried the deal.

A twelve-month, cross-functional growth engagement

Home Design 3D is one of the most recognized interior-design apps in its category, and the goal was clear: increase the long-term value of the user base ahead of a strategic exit. Rather than treating acquisition, discovery and retention as separate silos, Scalebay ran them as one connected program.

ASO sharpened how the app was found and understood in the stores. UA brought the right users to the app efficiently. And a lifecycle CRM program turned those users into an engaged, returning audience. The result of this joint effort — aligned across creative, media, product and data at every level — was a base that kept getting healthier month after month.

Engaging more users through lifecycle CRM

The engagement layer is where much of the value was created. We designed and shipped a full lifecycle CRM program in Customer.io — onboarding journeys, a reactivation engine, a free-trial workflow and an in-app rating flow — and ran it as an always-on, owned channel that never depended on paid media to reach users.

The execution was both large-scale and clean:

• Over half a million push notifications delivered across lifecycle automations and broadcast campaigns.
• A almost 100% delivery rate across broadcast sends — a well-maintained, genuinely reachable audience with zero failed messages.
• A 20.1% open rate on the in-app rating flow — roughly four to five times typical push benchmarks — feeding App Store ratings and reinforcing ASO.
• A high-volume reactivation program that continually brought dormant users back into the app.

Every one of those touches had a job: bring users back, move them toward an account, and nudge the most engaged toward a trial. Consistency compounded, and engagement deepened.

The result: sessions per user grew 90%

The clearest signal of a healthier user base is how often people come back. Over the engagement, average sessions per user grew from 2.9 to 5.6 — a 90% increase. Users were not just arriving; they were returning, exploring and building inside the app far more often than before.

This is the metric that matters most to an acquirer. Rising sessions per user means the audience is sticky and the product is habit-forming — the foundation of durable revenue and the strongest possible answer to the question every buyer asks: will these users still be here after the deal?

Deeper engagement per user is what turns an installed base into a monetizable, durable asset — and that is precisely what buyers pay a premium for.

More intent, more trials

Deeper engagement translated directly into stronger commercial intent. As the CRM program matured, a larger share of users moved further down the funnel:

• The trial-start rate rose 45%, climbing from roughly 6.7% to 9.7% of users starting a free trial.
• The account-creation rate improved from 47% to 64%, meaning far more users completed the step that unlocks personalization and monetization.

These are quality gains, not volume tricks: each user became measurably more likely to register and to try the paid experience. For a subscription-driven app, that shift in per-user intent is exactly what lifts long-term value.

The exit: value built, then realized

Twelve months of combined ASO, UA and CRM work produced an audience that was engaged, reachable and re-activatable — an owned base that a buyer could count on rather than one propped up by ad spend. That profile is what makes an app attractive in diligence, and it is what helped Microids realize a successful exit for Home Design 3D.

The through-line is simple: we made each user worth more, and we made the base reliably reachable. Rising engagement and rising commercial intent, sustained over a full year, gave the app the kind of story that stands up to scrutiny and commands a stronger valuation.

Our expertise

This outcome came from running acquisition and retention as one discipline. Scalebay's team pairs performance UA and ASO with deep CRM and lifecycle expertise, so the users we bring in are the users we keep — and grow. We build owned channels that publishers control, we instrument everything so decisions are grounded in real behavior, and we align every level of the program toward a single commercial goal.

If you are preparing a mobile app for growth or for exit and want an engaged, high-value user base to show for it, that is the work we do.