On the podcast we talk with Darrell and Jake about optimizing your app’s paywall, how to increase revenue by giving users a better experience, tips for pricing your app, and how to reduce subscriber churn.
We’re with Darrell Stone and Jake Mor in front of a live audience at the App Promotion Summit in New York City. The App Promotion Summit is America’s leading app marketing conference. Darrell is the Head of Product & Design at Citizen, the number one public safety app in the U.S. Jake is the Founder & CEO of Superwall, the best way to build in test paywalls without having to update your app.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Where to put your app’s paywall
- Which features should you paywall?
- When to paywall all of your app’s features
- A clever way to win back users who cancel their subscription
Links & Resources
- RevenueCat
- Previous webinar with Jake on YouTube
Jake Mor’s Links
Darrell Stone’s Links
Follow us on Twitter:
[00:00:00] **David:**
Welcome, everybody. This is the first ever live taping of the podcast. Jake’s been on webinars and podcasts with me. He’s usually a little floating head. So this is the first ever live taping.
We do release episodes a couple of times a month on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere you listen to your podcasts. We do deep dives on subscription app monetization, subscription app growth, and everything related to that.
For those of you listening on the podcast, because we do have kind of two audiences today, we’re live on stage at App Promotion Summit, and it is really nice to have a live audience and real faces here today.
Thank you to App Promotion Summit. It’s been a fantastic event. If you’re looking for conferences in the fall and whatnot, there’s some great events coming up with App Promotion Summit.
Our guests today are Jake Mor. He is the Founder and CEO of Superwall, the best way to build in test paywalls without having to update your app.
Thanks Jake, for joining me today.
[00:01:20] **Jake:**
For sure. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:22] **David:**
And we also have Darrell Stone. He is the Head of Product and Design at Citizen, the number one public safety app in the U.S.
Thanks for joining us, Darrell.
[00:01:30] **Darrell:**
Super happy to be here, Dave.
[00:01:32] **David:**
And, as Andrew said, I’m David Barnard, Developer Advocate at RevenueCat. At RevenueCat we are a subscription app data platform. We provide in-app SDKs to make it easy to deploy in app subscriptions. We also have a server backend that becomes your single source of truth for subscription data. We now support over 12,000 apps on the app stores, including Citizen.
We have over 20 integrations, such as Superwall. They use our real-time subscription lifecycle data to power their products to help our developers make more money.
So with that I wanted to jump into the topic at hand: paywalls. Jake and I actually did a webinar earlier this year. For those of you that are listening on the podcast, there’ll be show notes. For those of you in the audience, search RevenueCat on YouTube, and Jake Mor. That’s going to be kind of a deep dive. We’re going to try and do the shotgun version today, and go as quickly as possible and hit the highlights. But if you like what you hear there’s an extended version with Q & A, available.
With that I wanted to kick it off talking about the five most important things to optimize with your paywall. The first one, Jake, that you love to talk about is placement. I also run my own apps, and have for the last 12 years. I’ve launched 20 apps. Sold a few of them, and this is something I’ve always struggled with. I feel like I don’t want to bug my users with a paywall. Should I do it in the onboarding? Should I not? Where do I put it? It’s honestly led to me not being great at monetizing my products.
So tell me what are the most important things to be thinking about when thinking about where to put your paywall in the app?
[00:03:26] **Jake:**
For sure. when you’re thinking about placement, there are two, there are two real placements you should be thinking about. The first is when do new users see the paywall? And the second is when do existing users who already use my app.
When do they see the. paywall for users who are just signing up, there are two main places it’s either before onboarding or after onboarding. then if you’re already a user, there are also two main places it’s either on app open or right as you’re trying to use. the key feature so usually there are two, two possibilities that you want to test for each, for each one.
Usually the winning combination is on every app open before using any locked feature both before and after onboarding. So usually more shots on goal are always better.
[00:04:12] **David:**
Yeah. That’s really interesting. And, you, you brought up the concept of percentage of users who actually see the paywall this, is something I never thought about.
It’s such a huge key to actually understanding your app monetization. So tell me about that.
[00:04:27] **Jake:**
Yeah, the, number one most neglected metric, in all of the apps we’ve worked with is what are the percentage of installs that are actually seeing the paywall? if this isn’t a metric you’re tracking already, you should, usually we don’t see.apps That are coming in, have over 80%, which is insane because we see directional movement between percent, installed to paywall view, between, between that and percent installed to paid. So it, your gains pass through the trial, survival as well.
[00:04:57] **David:**
Yeah. This is something I have not tracked in my own apps, but I would bet.
And I think you’ve worked with apps like this. I bet. Probably only 20%, 20 to 30% of the people who ever open my apps actually see the paywall, which is just ridiculous. if you’re building an app to sell and monetize via subscriptions, you need to actually show them something I think about a lot as well, is that showing people that the app may cost them money is actually oftentimes a better user experience.
I’ve failed in my own. apps Where, people get into the app, they never see a paywall. They get onboarded, they do all this work. And then all of a sudden I slap a paywall it’s a terrible experience as a user. you come in and not expecting to pay anything, everything seems free. And then you lock the feature that they’re about to use.
It’s a terrible experience. And so, you know, as, as we’ve been talking about. More and more about paywalls. I’m realizing it really is a better experience to get that paywall out there and let people know, Hey, this is something of value and I maybe charge for it at some point. So Darrell I know you’ve been doing a lot of paywall testing and placement testing, one of the other challenges with paywall testing is getting the team aligned and, and.
Getting the team excited about these little iterations and, and, and getting focused around these really important topics. But that don’t seem that important. So how how do you align your team?
[00:06:18] **Darrell:**
Yeah, I think that, it’s really important. You have a sharp viewpoint on the structure. You put in place to do this kind of testing and how you operationalize it.
And you know, what’s really important to, to my team. when we’re kind of thinking about how to market our product we have a subscription product it’s called Citizen protect 24/7 access to a trained safety agent. you all should check it out. when we’re trying to get them excited about it, we really want to tell the whole story.
Through the flows that present the paywalls, it’s not necessarily just about what does this paywall look like and where do we put it? It’s what is the user’s mindset when they’re opening the app? And what is the story? We reveal to them through our onboarding, so that when they see the paywall, it’s contextualized to their experience.
And like we think about it as an end-to-end user flow. and you know, our flow right now has two different paywall moments where we give you a story about the app and how it’s it exists for your personal safety and your community safety. We have you sign up we present paywall a Lot of people convert there.
If you don’t, you fill out a safety profile, which just exists to make sure we can better protect you. And then you see another paywall after that. If you haven’t yet subscribed, if you have already, you get, you know, a demo of the product you just signed up for. when you frame it that way, kind of at the narrative level, then you can create these, like that moments where people can kind of understand, okay.
How their work fits in and kind of, this is not just about, you know, one space for one user it’s actually a narrative flow. then you can start to run really rapid tests on the key moments of leverage in that surface. And, I know Jake has a bunch of thoughts on this as well, but you know, for us, it’s really always be testing.
The more. you can Generate idea-wise the better concepts, the better theories you have, the better results. You’ll see. then as you get wins and sort of, inflect your curves up and onboarding is a great place for this, because for us, there’s a new flow of users every day. And it inflects your curves forever.
It becomes very motivating to, to. a team not sort of how we think about the structure and, if I could have one more thing, it would be the less engineering you need to test and iterate, the better off you’ll be and the faster you can create a feedback loop for success, which is why we’re really excited about what Superwall offers, because it is, you know, relatively speaking, a lot less code for a lot more iteration which has re-galvanized our team.
[00:08:28] **David:**
Yeah, that’s really cool. And then, in Jake’s I’m borrowing from Jake’s list to, run the conversation today, of the five top things to focus on for optimizing your paywall. The first one is placement and the second one is features, and I know Jake, I mean, sorry, Darrell, just before we got on stage, we were talking about, Citizen has been thinking a lot about.
How to balance your freemium offering. So yeah. What, what’s your thinking, about, landing people on the paywall and then what the freemium experience should be, because obviously you want to put some features behind the paywall, but then you want to give people a good experience it’s to me it’s one of the big, biggest challenges in the subscription app space is to really.
Dial in your freemium strategy and then Jay, I’m going to follow up. Cause I love some of your ideas on here, but what, yeah. How are you thinking about that at Citizen?
[00:09:22] **Darrell:**
We take the responsibility of our free app to provide community safety for free, very seriously It’s part of our mission. we don’t want to jeopardize that with flows that lock, you know, essential safety information in real time behind, you know, paying experiences.
That’s just kind of like, a line we’ve drawn. I think to be super honest, we’re still in the process of figuring out how to orient our existing kind of core product. More, more wholly around this concept of the, of the protect agent. I think, I would guess if we polled the room or definitely. If we polled our user base, a lot of people because we’ve kept the free app.
So relatively unencumbered by paywalls don’t even realize that this product. Deeply exists.
[00:10:00] **David:**
Yeah. I was telling you before we came on, I downloaded Citizen last night. Perfect place to test it here in New York city. I saw the paywall closed, the paywall got a different experience and it was a fantastic experience.
Like there was, I heard police sirens. I got on the app. I got to see what was going on. So it really does provide a lot of value even for free.
[00:10:20] **Darrell:**
That’s going to remain, you know, free and available for safety. we’re in the process now of reorienting our entire app around this idea of the protect agent.
They exist to power your community safety. That’s going to become a way more obvious to users. Even those notifications you get, there’s a protect agent. Who’s powering that. With realtime editorial judgment to keep your community safe. as that becomes more clear to our user base and the agent becomes more powerfully reachable in these moments of, you know, a community crisis or community safety, we think it will become pretty obvious why you want to subscribe them.
We’re taking that type of approach versus you know, aggressively paywalling every app open or something like that, though. We certainly might try some of those things as we’re just driving awareness for our premium safety offering, but the core app. will remain You know, largely free with the safety enhancement.
[00:11:07] **David:**
Yeah. And a lot of apps go that route, but Jake, you give the exact opposite advice to a lot of paths. So your advice often is to paywall everything at first. So why Why would you give the advice to paywall everything?
[00:11:21] **Jake:**
Usually when you’re starting an app, you’re, how, how well you iterate has to do with the quality of your users.
And the quality of their feedback your app is only going to get better over time as you push updates. So if you’re really striking a nerve by solving a really, really important problem, what you’re doing by charging upfront for the worst version of your app is it’s a forced function for finding people whose problem this is truest, you know, in their lives.
For example, if you have a fitness app, the first version of your fitness apps is going to be pretty bad, but if someone’s willing to pay for it, those people are probably really, really open to using a fitness app to get healthier or stronger or whatever it is. those are people that you can build for and, whose problems you can solve.
[00:12:05] **David:**
Then would the idea then be to over time, figure out if there are specific features that should be part of a free experience.
[00:12:13] **Jake:**
Yeah. I mean,
[00:12:14] **David:**
Th there,
[00:12:14] **Jake:**
There are different kinds of apps. There are mass market apps like Citizen that,
[00:12:18] **David:**
Sort of
[00:12:19] **Jake:**
Relies on millions of people.
[00:12:21] **David:**
You know,
[00:12:21] **Jake:**
Depositing information into it.
So it’s tough to just paygate the whole app.
[00:12:26] **David:**
If, if,
[00:12:26] **Jake:**
If
[00:12:27] **David:**
You’re
[00:12:28] **Jake:**
The whole success of your app, depends on some viral coefficient.
[00:12:31] **David:**
But if you’re,
[00:12:32] Jeff: if you’re just looking to make money with a subscription,
[00:12:35] **David:**
There
[00:12:36] Jeff: you have to test, you have to test both, but what you’re either going to do is paywall the entire app or paywall half your app.
And when you’re paywalling half of your app, you have to keep in mind that. the price of those features, you’re paywalling They just doubled, Because
[00:12:52] **David:**
Half the product have to
[00:12:53] Jeff: half of the app is free. So there’s no value associated with that. The other half there’s tons of value associated with it, Because you’re only charging for those.
[00:13:00] **David:**
And,
[00:13:01] Jeff: The majority of your users don’t get to use the software as you created it. because half of it is not available to them
[00:13:09] **David:**
Yeah,
The other, the other thing I think about a ton too, is, you know, the, the features that you paywall, need to have like some self-evident value.
And that’s what I’ve really struggled with. you see a lot of apps. they want to put their best features behind the paywall, but sometimes your best feature is actually maybe an innovative feature. that Isn’t like self-evidently valuable. you think, oh, I’m going to build this amazing feature.
We’re going to spend all this engineering time. It’s going to be amazing. And you put it back in your paywall and people are like, what? Like, what is that even? you need them to experience it. so by. Either doing a fully free, a fully paywalled they actually get to experience those great features during that free trial.
Or you do, you do that free trial where they, they get that, even if it’s not a hard paywall. So. yeah, a lot of things to play with a lot of things to experiment with. then the cool thing is like, none of this is set in stone and that’s the whole point is that, you know, you need to optimize this over time.
You need to try things in and out of your paywall. You need to experiment with, with pricing and everything else. and that’s actually the next thing I wanted to bring up. The third thing to, optimize in your paywall is pricing I know we can talk for hours about optimizing the main price, but one of the things I think you talk about a lot, that’s especially interesting that not everyone thinks about is intent-based pricing, and showing different offers to different, people in different stages of their user journey, but then also in different countries.
And. Understanding intent. So w how do you, how do you do that and what do you think about that?
[00:14:47] **Jake:**
Sure. Well, the, the a not so nice way to say it is price discrimination. The nice, the nice way to say it is, personalized pricing. what you’re doing is you’re maximizing for both revenue and users at the same time.
You’re, you’re making your product more available in places who otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford. which I think is inherently a good thing. I think it’s things can be said about increasing the price dramatically for very wealthy people. Right. But I think that making your product more accessible for people who might not otherwise be able to afford it, I think that outweighs it as a, as a good thing.
But yeah. And
[00:15:26] **David:**
Dating apps got in trouble, for example, for like charging men more and women less. And that’s not the kind of price discrimination you’re talking. That’s not illegal. I don’t think. Yeah. But what we’re talking about here is more, you know, if somebody comes into your app, doesn’t engage with like your core features and you send them an email.
It’s like, Hey, 50% off, like continuing to capture that. And now with, promotional, subscription promotional offers on apps and Android, you can do things like a month free. You can do a year discount and then it kicks back up. Like there’s a lot of ways to kind of, do this kind of these offers and discounts that, that don’t even necessarily last all time, either.
How, how are y’all thinking about pricing? I know. Currently, you actually only have a monthly plan, which is really different than most subscription apps. How are you thinking about annual and then evolving pricing and testing pricing over time? Yeah, I
[00:16:19] **Darrell:**
Mean, it’s something you should know about us off the jump is, you know, we kind of subscription business.
You know, we, so we, we had a free app and then we sort of realized along our journey, oh, we can actually monetize via the subscription. So it wasn’t as though we built this really elegant system from the very beginning and just it all interconnected and scale. And that’s a different, I think, inherently product challenge when you step into something like that.
So. The reason we have a monthly isn’t because we’ve figured out that’s perfect. It’s because like our tooling and our testing and all the things haven’t yet fully caught up to, you know, all of the permutations or even web acquisition or these things that will allow us to go layers deeper. And, it doesn’t mean we’re going to be stuck there, but that’s kind of where we started.
And if there’s a lesson from that, I would say, you know, be as simple as you need to be to sort of get your thing off the ground and then layer on the complexity. I don’t think you’re going to win by being. Prematurely complex. And a lot of cases, though, you might find like a local Maxima. And so we’re in the process now of scaling out and we will have different pricing offerings and something we’re talking a lot about is, you know, we offer this like a kid, you not very important kind of product.
That’s rescuing people who need help when they press a button and reach an agent. How do we get that to more people? And that will inherently require different price tiers or different models. We’re even considering affiliate programs whereby you know, maybe if you invite a certain amount of people, you get free access or something like that.
So, we think a lot about pricing as almost like a tool for access. I think Jake put it really well. And, that will inherently necessitate, you know, a family plan with a different level of access and a monthly plan, and for sure, annual plans and, you know, there’s other things we’re thinking about sort of off of that.
And it doesn’t mean we haven’t tested pricing, but when we did test it, it, wasn’t obviously this like, oh, we got to sprint to do this now kind of lever relative to like adding more value or doubling down and refining kind of the core product offering in the context of a single
[00:18:05] **David:**
Price. Yeah. Yeah. I think that’s what a lot of apps.
Kind of fail to, to think about like pricing can evolve over time. Like you don’t have to get it perfect. The first time, I was looking at the Tinder app recently because, you know, they’re, they’re a lot further along than a lot of subscription apps and they now have, let’s see if I get this right. A gold offer.
Platinum offering and then a platinum plus offering. Those are three separate subscriptions. Then they have two separate, in our consumables for super boost and super likes or profile boost, and super likes. Those are enough consumables, and then you can actually get a subscription for the booths.
And so it is a crazy product matrix. and I’m happily married, man. Use Tinder. So I’m not sure exactly how they present it, but, but it’s one of those things like, you know, you can over time develop a much more mature monetization, as you test and see what works. And then I would imagine, and even what I saw just in, in minimal testing of the, of the Tinder app is that they do.
Progressively show these things. So you’re not seeing like a paywall with like 30 options. You’re seeing the paywall that’s relevant to what you’re trying to do, and then they can upgrade you over time or pull you deeper into the app. so I think, and this is why we need to test, right. This is why we need Superwall to actually.
See, what’s performing well to test things out, to constantly be iterating.
[00:19:35] **Jake:**
Th the, the whole point is to, you wanna, you want to show every individual user the price that matches their demand. So their demand is, could be different from the onset. So right when this. Download the app. You know, if they’re in a different country, their demand might be lower because people don’t make as much money there, but also based on time from when they download it.
So if a month has passed since they first downloaded and they haven’t converted yet, their demand is also lower. And so in all these scenarios, you need to set up rules so that you can offer the right discount at the re at the right. Yeah. and just like an econ 1 0 1, you’re just maximizing the area under the curve, which is like your revenue.
[00:20:14] **David:**
So placement features pricing. The next one on your list is visuals. And, I have two things in mind and we’ll see if you get it right. What are the top two things to think about on visuals for your paywall, the top to get, to move the needle things, on design of your paywall?
[00:20:34] **Jake:**
Video always does great.
We haven’t seen. Actually with you with you actually video is flat. Oh, interesting. Yeah, it was just
[00:20:42] **Darrell:**
One video we haven’t asked to do more of it.
[00:20:45] **Jake:**
So one of the, one of the best placements to put a paywall is right before onboarding. The thing is before onboarding it’s, it’s kinda tough. You’re asking someone to pay for your app without ever trying it.
And people have a nerd. People have an urge to feel things, you know, like if you go, if you want, if you were to go to a. That’s a store. And you ever get that urge when you’re, when you’re looking at a product on the shelf to want to like, take it out of the packaging to sort of see what it’s like before you buy it.
By adding a video of just here’s how the app works in the paywall, you sort of get that same feeling as a user of, okay. I understand what I’m buying. I understand exactly what I’m getting. And interestingly enough, across all categories, the videos that we see do well are not. Live action commercials.
They’re just like high production value screen recordings of the app with like overlays people just want to see what the hell they’re getting. So like literally show it to them inside of a phone.
[00:21:38] **David:**
You’ve made a good point before, too, that I just never would’ve thought of is that. When you drop a free user into your app and you, you know, they’re not going to read the onboarding screens.
They’re not going to necessarily know how to engage with like your highest value features. And so by building the video, you’re actually showing them the best way to use the tab. Like you’re showing them the value of the app and you get to. Control the messaging there versus kind of dropping them into the app and hoping they land on these high value, high engagement features.
Instead you just show it to him right from the outset. All right. So what’s number two. What’s the second like pro tip.
[00:22:15] **Jake:**
Okay. So I’m trying to, I’m trying to pattern to see what you have in your mind, in your head. Okay.
[00:22:20] **David:**
Coloring
[00:22:21] **Jake:**
The CTA.
Oh yeah. Okay. That’s a big one. So, I think Amazon wants to study. Someone wants to, to study. They want it to figure out what, what color made the best seat for a CTA button. And the interesting thing is it actually doesn’t matter. What matters is it that it’s the only thing that’s. Any color on the page. So really stick to bland paywalls, but not that much color you want really high contrast between the only button you want them to press, which is the purchase button and the background don’t use graphics with crazy, that the same CTA color that, that sort of seals, visual weight from people’s attention.
[00:22:58] **David:**
Yeah, I think this is a fantastic tip. so placement features pricing. the last one on your list is copy. And this sent that I’m really curious Darrell. you have a fairly large team there as Citizen. How do you think about copy? And this is kind of a, we can talk specifically on paywalls. Such an important thing across marketing across, app features.
I mean, writing well inside an app is, is such a huge topic in and of itself, but how do you it Citizen think about, copywriting, paywalls, marketing and things along those lines. So
[00:23:35] **Darrell:**
I think we’ve kind of approached this in stages and we still sort of, they all sort of seem to come back around like early stage kind of getting your future off the ground.
We were just crowdsourcing a lot, you know, we literally get into a room and be like, Hey, like here’s some, you know, inspirational images that we might throw in this paywall. Like what kind of copy would you write for them? And we get, you know, five, six people writing, sort of creative copy, and then we’d run a test of all of those and kind of see what resonated and kind of like get real time feedback on the kinds of value props or.
Phrases never be alone was a phrase that really resonated for our product. and then you could kind of build more build momentum off of that. So we did a lot of just like creative brainstorming, jump into a fig jam, get the team rallied. And it’s crazy where the best ideas can come from when you’re like testing on a specific surface.
Beyond that, you know, we do have a team of. creative content writers, they power all of our apps, content, who we can pull in strategically to help us write product copy. and we do that on as a, on an as needed basis. We don’t have like an in-house kind of content writer. we’re just a little smaller and a little scrappier than that, but I think if there’s anything I could kind of reinforce its best ideas can come from anywhere and do what you can just sort of create the conditions where the best ideas can emerge for your highest value.
[00:24:45] **David:**
Yeah, as you think about, copy Jake, what are, what are some of the top things that come to mind as far as what you, the kind of state of mind or frame of, of thinking that you should get into when writing paywall copy?
[00:24:59] **Jake:**
Well, in, in general, writing, writing copy that leads to user action, is, is a skill.
People are really good at. goes back to like the direct marketing days with like selling, sending letters to people’s homes, to try to get them to do things like people do really, really good work. Usually, there, there are two things to remember one, you always want to tell the user exactly what you want them to do like exactly.
So you say like if you could be as blunt as press the purple button below to start your free trial, like that’s great. or if you can say unlock today to continue, usually on paywalls, we don’t even see in the copy that you’re telling the user to subscribe. It’s just sort of like, you know, by now or whatever.
And the second is that most people lack. They lack the IQ to really put themselves in their customer’s shoes. And even if. You can’t put it in all your customers and all of their different segments and usually the best place to figure out how to talk about your product is by asking your users why they love your product.
So, in the past, I’ve looked through, like, questionnaires and surveys. There’s a question. Why do you love, you know, whatever your app is. and that usually users do a really good job of just succinctly, succinctly saying why they love your app. And sometimes you’re too close to the problem to put it in a way.
That’s.
[00:26:20] **David:**
Yeah. And I was looking at my notes because there were, there were two things that you’ve said before that I really resonated with as well. And that’s selling outcomes and engaging emotion in your copywriting. So yeah. Tell me a little bit more about, about how you. So outcomes versus selling features.
[00:26:37] **Jake:**
So the example with selling outcomes is when there’s a toothpaste brand advertising on TV, they advertise the smile. Then they go into the fluoride and the chemical, a differentiation between their products. But usually you want to sell the outcome and you want to sell it as something that rings an emotional bell in the customer.
So, instead of saying, you know, fitness, AI is a. is, is an accurate, is an AI weightlifting coach. You want to say, feel your strongest and your most confident, because like in knowing that you have the best weightlifting routine, on the planet, right. So that’s like more of an emotional invitation to try or try your
[00:27:16] **David:**
App out.
Yeah, that’s great. All right. So we’ve covered placement. We’ve covered features, we’ve covered pricing, we’ve covered visuals and we’ve covered. Copy. Those are the top five things that you should be. Thinking about when optimizing your paywalls. but we’ve got a couple minutes left and so I want to leave everybody with, your experience.
So we didn’t talk about it. But Jake, built Superwall because he was, in the app industry, himself building, an app called fitness AI. he was a founder of that app actually went through Y Combinator. And was going to blow that app up. And then you did this one experiment. They just completely blew your mind.
So tell us about that experiment and then how it led you to then build Superwall.
[00:28:01] **Jake:**
We added a video to the paywall and we moved it before onboarding and revenue, like one of 80% or conversion rates went up 80% and we didn’t even change anything about the. and yeah, throughout, throughout fitness I’s existence, most of my investor updates would speaking about, you know, paywall stuff and conversion rates.
And so when I shared with them that I think I may have started the wrong business, they were, they were pretty encouraging to go try it out.
[00:28:28] **David:**
So yeah, so, so, and w we’ve talked about this example before, so trial start rates went through the roof because you actually like, Took a swing. Yeah.
You actually gave people the opportunity to
[00:28:41] **Jake:**
Start a free trial. Absolutely.
Like peep installs to paywall. The percentage of installs to paywall went up from like 40% to 85%.
[00:28:50] **David:**
And then, and then w the thing that I was most amazed at is it, Subscription app. life cycle is like a funnel and sometimes you can choose a trial starts by being really aggressive with the paywall, but then you see a commensurate drop in trial conversions, or you see really bad retention or, you know, it’s really, you can’t refund rates go really high.
So you can’t look at any individual benchmarks in isolation, especially when you’re running these tests. You really want. To watch these cohorts perform over time. And so what happened with this specific cohort? Did they,
[00:29:26] **Jake:**
This one that most of them converted down down-funnel so it was worth it. the truth is onboarding probably wasn’t that good and people who were really motivated and who would have bought.
Just weren’t finishing on-boarding to say, Hey, well, so with the video, you, they, they understood exactly what they were getting and you get, you just give them the option to purchase if they want it. Also, you can always tap the X button. Right. You can
[00:29:48] **David:**
Just skip it. Yeah. And then one more hot tip. another one from Jake.
Tell me about adding discounted subscription plans to your subscription group. Ah,
[00:29:59] **Jake:**
As it going.
So, When When someone goes to cancel your subscription, they go to the app store and they’re forced to look at all of the subscriptions in your subscription group before you cancel. And so, a trick that that we do is offer a discounted plan in that subscription group, and it acts as a built-in win-back campaign, because if you’re going to go cancel, you’re forced to see that there’s a cheaper plan as you’re canceling.
And I think 10-15 of subscribers are on a plan that you can’t even subscribe to in the app. The only way you could subscribe to it is by trying to cancel in the app store.
[00:30:35] **David:**
What I love about this particular win-back campaign is there’s a cancel button right there. It’s a cheaper price right above the cancel button.
You’re not tricking people. You’re not making it hard to cancel. You’re not putting 10 steps in between them and canceling. You’re just giving them a cheaper plan. What’s super cool is they’re probably going to cancel anyways. They were in the cancel screen. So, you’re winning back revenue that you would have lost. Then they tell all their friends, “Hey, go subscribe to FitnessAI for 99 cents, go to cancel, and then you’re going to get this cheaper plan!” That’s incredible word-of-mouth marketing. And then those people who run that cheaper plan probably have higher retention over time because they feel like they’re getting this great deal and they don’t want to lose that great deal.
So anyways, I thought that was just another fantastic quick tip.
[00:31:28] **Darrell:**
That’s a great tip. I haven’t heard that. Noted.
[00:31:33] **David:**
We’re a couple of minutes over time already, but Jake and Darrell, thank you so much for joining us. This will be aired as a podcast on the Sub Club Podcast in June. It will be released, and then also YouTube videos, and video clips, and everything.
If you enjoy it and want to share it with folks it will be on the Sub Club Podcast soon.
Andrew, thank you so much for having us. you’re going to come and walk us out? Are we done?
[00:31:57] **Jake:**
Thank you everybody.
[00:32:00] **Andrew:**
Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yeah.