App Store Ethics, Dark Patterns, and Rule-Breakers — Steve P. Young, App Masters

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and my guest today is Steve P. Young, founder and CEO of App Masters, the app marketing agency that helps grow apps faster, better and cheaper. On the podcast I talk with Steve about black hat app optimization, the benefits and drawbacks of hard paywalls, and why, despite Apple and Google's best efforts, so many apps still use dark patterns and even blatantly break the rules. Hey, Steve, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. It's been a while I've been meaning to have you on and finally getting to do it today.

Steve Young:

I feel excited, David. Finally got the invite. I've been waiting for the invite.

David Barnard:

Well, I've been thinking through, what would I really want to talk to Steve about? You cover so many things. We've had people on talking about ASO, you talk a lot about ASO, we'll probably talk some ASO today. You share all sorts of tips for optimization. But what I really want to talk about, what finally got me like, "Okay, I got to have Steve on." Is app store ethics. So you and I have been talking for years. We probably first met 12 years ago. Early on, one of the things we talked about very specifically was that I was super indie developer, I'm going to do everything, top most morality.

I'm not going to be aggressive with my paywall, which I've totally come full circle on that not even being a good way to describe it, we can get into that. But I had this super pure indie mindset of, build a product and they will come, and I'm going to follow every rule and be this upstanding citizen. And you were a little bit more like, "This is a business, morality is a spectrum, and I'm not going to break the law, I'm going to be careful not to break Apple's rules, but I'm going to run a business and do what it takes to succeed." And so that was the start of our conversation, I don't know, 10 years ago.

Steve Young:

I remember, man.

David Barnard:

And the reason we had that conversation is that I was getting to a point where I was fed up because I saw all these other developers bending the rules, breaking the rules, using dark patterns, and here I am struggling with my business, feeling like I need to not be aggressive with my paywall. And it's not that I wanted to do anything against the rules or anything like that, but I was just even realizing, "Hey, I need to think about this more as not this passion project. This is feeding my family." And so that's how it kicked off, I was like, "Hey, let's talk real stuff." But what I was seeing in the App Store was that so many apps were breaking the rules and so many apps were using dark pattern, so many apps... You're bringing a knife to a gunfight if you were trying to compete in any category. And then when you do market research, I was talking to people who...

It's like, "Hey, look, I see four wallpaper apps making millions of dollars. That must be a really great opportunity. I'm going to build a wallpaper app." And I'm like, "Look, go download those four wallpaper apps and figure out, why are they making a million dollars?" They're using all sorts of dark patterns, they're using $15 a week subscriptions and things like that, and it's just a whole different world. So let's start breaking it down. You and I have even talked recently that there are still tons of apps breaking the rules. So if you're an app developer in the App Store trying to succeed with your subscription app and you're looking at competitors, you're looking at the landscape, I think it's important to understand all the different ways that people are breaking the rules, and even using dark patterns, and even just being smart about their business that you may not have thought of.

So that's all a spectrum from clearly breaking the rules, clearly immoral, to like, "Hey, this is just smart business and not even questionable at all." I've been talking for a very long time, but I think it was important to kind of set up this conversation for actually calling out the dark patterns, the breaking of the rules, and then we're not going to philosophically dive into what's moral and what's not moral, and how you should run your own business. But we're just going to talk about what people are actually doing on the App Store. So let's kick it off. What is the worst, most immoral, most bad thing the apps are still doing to this day that people should understand that their competition might be doing?

Steve Young:

I think maybe we'll start off with reviews because that's the one thing that I do not do anymore, David. We used to in 2015. I remember our conversations and I would always live off in the gray. That's where I like to live. But don't buy reviews. 2015, I figured out that if you have keywords in your app store reviews, that would actually help your keyword rankings, and we would see apps go up in the keyword ranking just by one or two reviews with the right keywords in there. And I stopped doing that and stopped buying those reviews. And so the way I feel about these black hat strategies is you got to do what you got to do to get you to a certain point.

And then after you get that certain point, I don't believe these are long-term strategies, but I think the zero to one is just the hardest phase of any journey. And so it's like, "I'm going to do whatever it takes to get to that one. And then once it's there, yo, I'm good. Let me figure out everything else." And I hear a lot of big companies doing these reviews, they're just putting a ton of paid reviews, and Apple's gotten better at this. And Apple's friendly, Google will suspend you. But that's one thing, people say, "Hey, Steve, you have a good review source?" And I go, "Nope. I don't do that anymore. Don't do it. You're going to get in trouble. Do not touch that part."

David Barnard:

Yeah. But what you're saying there is that you don't do it anymore, but tons of apps still do it. I would assume it's just been a big cat and mouse game for the last decade, or more now, 15 years. For 15 years now, Apple's played a cat and mouse game of all these different dark patterns. But from what you've seen, people are still buying fake reviews and fake ratings, right? And they're just finding more sophisticated ways to avoid Apple's detection?

Steve Young:

Yeah. I can see it right now because I have a source and I'm on the website right now, and I can see multiple apps that are on this website asking for reviews, so yes.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And again, the whole point of having this conversation is when you're running your app, and you're doing market research, and you're trying to understand why is this other app being more successful? Why is this other app ranking highly for a keyword? It's something I meant to talk to Ariel Michaeli, we had a podcast with him talking about ASO and I didn't bring it up, but it was in the back of my mind. It's like when you're doing your keyword research, when you're doing your app store optimization, one thing you got to keep in mind is that people are probably breaking the rules, and this is one big way to do it, right?

Steve Young:

Yeah. Reviews, and then we can get into some of this other stuff too, David, is keyword campaigns, keyword install campaigns. Those I feel like I know a lot of big companies, I had a conversation one-on-one with a big company specifically talking about this and how to best leverage it and all that stuff. And I knew they were already running it. And so with the review side, I was talking to a big client of ours and I was like, "Hey, we can do this review stuff if you need help." Like, "We already got it taken care of." I'm like, "Oh." I didn't know these big companies were doing that, right? And that's why I was starting to talk about it more because I was like, "Yo, that's not fair. You guys got this massive budget and you're doing this stuff? That's not fair to us indies." So that's why I like to bring it up and talk about these issues and I don't try to shy away from them because I just feel like, yeah, they already have an advantage over us indies, so how do we gain that advantage?

David Barnard:

Let's step back. What is a keyword install campaign? Why would people do it? What is it? Buying ratings and reviews are pretty self-evident, but I think this one... And again, this goes to probably 80% of our listeners on this show will not know what this is, and yet their competitors probably do it. So what is a keyword boost campaign?

Steve Young:

So it's essentially, you get a bunch of people to search for a keyword and download your app, and hacking the algorithm to make the relevancy of this keyword closer to your app. So there's a bunch of different sources out there if you just Google it around, but it is that. You pick a keyword and then you boost that keyword by getting downloads from that keyword. So essentially like an ASA campaign, if you're really aggressive with an ASA campaign, put on exact match and just put a high cost per tap and you were just trying to get tap, tap, tap, tap, tap on there, I don't think that has the same benefit, but essentially that. You're getting people to search for a keyword to download your app and hacking the algorithm to get you higher in the keyword rankings.

David Barnard:

From what I understand, Apple has tamped that down a little bit, where it doesn't always work anymore, but it does still work apparently.

Steve Young:

It does still work. And so the key is to find a keyword that is pretty low competition from an ASO standpoint that has at least a search score of 30. And we did this for an app, and essentially we ran a keyword boost campaign within the initial launch phase, we got it to number one. It's still number one for this keyword. And there were two keywords, think with a space and without a space, one word versus two word. And then we both had decent traffic, we got it to be number one for both terms, and now it's getting downloads for free organically. So that's what I mean, David, we're not utilizing this strategy anymore.

We found this keyword, I don't think keyword optimization is enough anymore. You need to give it a little bit of boost, but if you find the right keyword that has low competition that no one's paying attention to then using these sort of black hat strategies, you can get it to number one. And once you're number one, you're golden. Don't worry about it anymore. You don't have to do anything. And that app is just getting it from zero to one and now it's making money, it's making $5,000 a month just organically pretty much. And so that's what I mean, we got it to a certain point and then we just stopped.

David Barnard:

Yeah. You're still doing this. Do you worry about Apple banning one of your accounts?

Steve Young:

I'm not worried, David, and here's why, because I can run this for any app. I can run it for your app, you won't know I did it. I can run it for my neighbor's app. I can run it for any app in the App Store. It does not matter. We've heard black hat strategies where people leave one star reviews for some of their competitors. Now, I don't do that type of stuff, I'm here to win my own game and I don't like to penalize. And so when I'm running the other stuff, sometimes I'm doing keyword research. Is this a valuable keyword? And so I can run this for any app, for anybody. I'm not hurting them, I'm only helping them, but it's my way of getting a sense of, is this keyword, can it move if I gave it a little bit of a juice? And then that way I can do some market research around that.

David Barnard:

And so then the problem is, and I remember this from decade ago, maybe more, was that there were some big apps that were accused of doing shady stuff and their defense was, "We didn't actually do it, a competitor did it to try and get us kicked out of the store." And there's almost no way, I can think of anyway, for Apple to figure out, aside from hiring private investigator. I don't know how crazy Apple gets in trying to figure this kind of stuff out, but how would you know if Steve did it for me without me knowing or a competitor did it to try and get me kicked out? And this gets to the crux of app review being a really hard thing. There's been a lot of press the last few years about, especially from Costa talking about all the scam apps on the store. And then just the reality of it is there's so many things that Apple just can't enforce well.

And as much as they have gotten better at detecting various things, it's this cat and mouse game where you just do it different and then they can't detect it. Again, personally, I think I draw my moral line maybe a lot differently than you do, and that's where I think our listeners are all going to be on a spectrum of how far you decide to go. I personally would not feel comfortable running a keyword boost campaign. This is why we're having this conversation though, is that to me that feels like cheating, but your point is valid that if so many other apps are cheating, if you're not cheating, you're not playing the same game that everyone else is playing.

How do you succeed in a marketplace where... I don't know what percentage it is, but it's probably a small percentage, but is a small percentage of the more successful apps are cheating, I'm doing quotey fingers if you're not watching the video. Again, I consider it cheating, but it's part of the game that's being played on this marketplace, and if you're not doing it, you are at a disadvantage. So if like me, you don't feel comfortable doing it, you at least still need to be aware that it's happening so that you can plan your strategies around understanding that the competitors might be doing these things.

Steve Young:

Absolutely. Yeah, David, I'm not here promoting to do these strategies. From a legal perspective, I'm not promoting any of this stuff, all right? You run your own risk. Don't listen to me and take my advice on any of this stuff. It's just that's my goal is, look, there are people doing it that are humongous companies and your goal, whether you want to do it or not, is up to you, but it does work. This is how you do it. It is entirely up to you. And I've talked to so many developers, David, that I think the app business, in its most simplistic form, and feel free to disagree on this, is just a funnel. How are you going to get downloads, whether it's...

Because I've talked to people who've done it on TikTok, on Twitter, on Reddit, on Facebook, organically, Facebook groups like ASO. It doesn't matter. You have to think, what is the top of the funnel? And then you have to think, okay, once I get the download, how am I get them to convert? And so all these strategies we're talking about, you don't have to do any of this stuff, it's just you have to think about the funnel. Because I'll talk to people and I don't even care about ASO. I've got Twitter ads running profitably, or I've got Facebook ads running profitably. So there's many ways to cut and win at this game, I just want to make sure people are aware of what's happening in the space.

David Barnard:

Yeah. What are some of your other top-

Steve Young:

Edgy?

David Barnard:

Edgy things? Yeah, yeah, that's a good way to put it.

Steve Young:

All right, so I'll rattle through a few. One of the things we used to do was, you know the top three reviews show up because they're the most helpful in the App Store?

David Barnard:

Yeah, yeah.

Steve Young:

You can 3D touch that and you can sort of hack which reviews show up first so you can get a lot of your friends to vote the five star that has the most famous. And I even tried having the right keywords in there to try to show up higher, the first three. So you just get a bunch of people to 3D touch that and then hit helpful and then that hacks the algorithm that way.

David Barnard:

Just to be clear... Well, and 3D touch isn't really a thing anymore.

Steve Young:

What do you call that?

David Barnard:

Long press. I think it's long press is Apple's terminology. So what Steve is saying is you go to the App Store, you find a review that you like that is promoting your app, mentioning the keywords that people care about, demonstrating the intent that what's going to get you a conversion in the app, and you long press on that review. And it's kind of a hidden feature, which this is one of those things, it's a hidden feature and so it's probably gamed as much as it's actually used by real people. Because who randomly on the App Store is long pressing a review, and then when you long press it brings up a little dialogue of like, "Did you find this helpful?" And then you mark it as helpful and that actually influences which ones show up at the top. But how many real people are actually doing this versus how many of your competitors are leveraging this to get the best possible reviews to show up first in the sorting. So that's what you're talking about. And then did you have anything else to add there?

Steve Young:

No. That front on the review side, I'll leave with that. The other edgy thing would be during the paywall view, waiting five seconds to show your X, so that's another edgy thing that people do where it's just like, yeah, you just have the little X just show up a little bit five seconds a little bit later. And then that way it does increase revenue. It does work. But it's up to you on whether you want to do it.

David Barnard:

Yeah, and so then the edgy part of that is that you're kind of forcing people to think that it's a hard paywall even though it's not. And so this is one of those where maybe five years ago I would've been like, "Oh, yeah, that's definitely something I would never do. That's so deceptive." The next phase maybe we should get onto is that there's a lot of these kind of hacks where, and this is a perfect example, where is it immoral to not show the close button so that people who otherwise wouldn't have started a free trial, now start a free trial because they think that's the only way forward? Yeah, for some people that's probably going to be a little edgy. But on the flip side, one of the things I've been thinking a ton about with freemium these days is that people understand that things cost money, and showing them a paywall is a reminder of that.

And if somebody is getting a ton of value out of your app, is it really that much of a detriment to show the paywall on launch? Again, five years ago I'd have been like, "Showing the paywall on every launch, that's a total dark pattern." And then I see MyFitnessPal doing it, and MyFitnessPal is a great example because I've used that app off and on. I subscribed for a year, tracked my calories really closely, lost some weight, then I stopped using it, then I subscribed for a couple of months. Just last week I was using it to check in on how I'm doing calorie wise, and I launch the app, I get a paywall, and for me I hit the little X button. And they don't delay the X, at least in the paywalls I saw, I wouldn't be surprised if they do at some point or do with other paywalls or something, but I hit the X and I kind of feel like, "Hey, I'm cheating the system. I'm getting value out of this app and I'm not having to pay."

The advanced features are super valuable, and so I have paid off and on to get those more valuable features, but I've been thinking about that, how the user psychology of seeing paywalls frequently is not even necessarily always a negative thing. So for some people, yeah, it's annoying like, "Ah, why are they showing the paywall? I'm just trying to log my calories." But then it's like, "Oh, yeah, I'm logging my calories and using this app completely for free, but there's actually a paid version." And personally, now when I'm seeing paywalls, that's my psychology, is like, "Hey, ha, ha, ha." Hit that X and I'm getting it for free. So any thoughts on that and any other thoughts kind of along those lines?

Steve Young:

I know we talked about personally hard paywalls, and I was sharing some data with our app. Now, David, I was against a hard paywall when we launched this, so I want you to understand the full story. We're talking, my co-founder, he's a developer, we purchased this app, he was like, "Hey, it's about to go. It has no X." And I didn't know what a hard paywall was at the time it was like no X. And I was like, "Why? That seems hella scammy, dude. Why are we doing that?"

And he's like, "Well, that's how we built it." And for me, I like to think of myself as just somebody that's a growth hacker, so I'm like, "Look, I'm not going to fix that. Let's let the data kind of figure out what's going to happen." And so we launched it as is, even though I was opposed to it, but then I looked at the data and I was like, "Whoa, that's crazy." We went from one to 2000 to 10,000 just like that with organic downloads, and I was like, "Wow, that's crazy." And so when we had to put the X in there, we dropped 5,000. Now, our app is super basic.

David Barnard:

Well, you say you had to put the X. Apple made you?

Steve Young:

Yes, Apple's coming around. And here's how I feel about this, and I'm happy to say this publicly, obviously, but it depends on your reviewer. Some things are against their T's and C's, some things are just who you get to actually physically review your app. And so while they might say that this is against our rules, unless I see it on paper, I see so many apps doing it that I'm like, "You can't say this is against your rules if I see these many apps doing it." Part of my job is looking at a ton of apps, and I see so many, and I get to distill a lot of this. But we had to put the X and our revenues dropped from 10,000 to 5,000. Now, the reason why I feel like a hard paywall works for us is because it's such a basic app, there's not that many features involved in it.

It's like a one feature type of app, that once you're in you're kind of like, that's it. Or maybe you wouldn't purchase and maybe we haven't done the math on LTV and all the retention since we're forcing it, but when I looked at the numbers, the numbers speak for itself. So I'm not going to be religious about the fact that this is immoral, I'm going to figure out, hey, the numbers are telling me this is a good app, people are staying on, people are not asking for refunds, so people are getting good use of it. That's the whole reason we bought the app. To your point earlier, David, and I'm glad you said it too because I feel like, hey, you spent so much time, so many resources, so much money on developing this app, if I can get away with using your app for free, guess what I'm going to do? Use it for free. But you spent so much time, if your goal is to just make the world better and have me use your app for free, good on you, mate. Congratulations.

But if your goal is to build a business, then you have to start thinking about, how can I be more "aggressive" with my marketing? Because if you feel like you built a great app, if you feel like you're actually helping people, then why aren't you charging? We're doing this stuff for free, but in the end, you're going to have to pay us. If you want to work with us, you're going to have to pay us. If you want to work with RevenueCat, eventually you're going to have to pay. And so we built a great service that we believe in, and if our service isn't good, it will fail. It will crash. And you can look at the numbers, it's not like we're not giving away a trial. We're doing a hard paywall. And if the trial percentage was very low, then you know we had a bad product. But our trial to paid on average, is 35%. Let the numbers tell me what to do.

David Barnard:

It's funny you brought up a hard paywall, I wanted to get to that because I'm actually doing a hard paywall in my weather app that's going to... Weather Up 3.0 is launching in the next, probably before this podcast airs. But the reason I'm doing a hard pall, and I really struggle with this for all the reasons you're talking about, everything from I don't want to be that app, I don't want to look scammy, I don't whatever. But here's the thing, is that with this update I'm releasing, so much of the value is in widgets and complications. So we built a really cool widget for the app, and we built a really cool Apple Watch complication. Well, guess what? That is really expensive for a weather app. And so I could not come up with a good way to give that away in any kind of freemium scenario.

You can't put an ad in a widget, that's a terrible experience. I think Apple even has rules against putting ads in widgets. You can't put an ad in a complication. So the actual value prop of the app cannot be given away for free, and the app itself is good. But we've been more focused on the widgets and complications lately, and so we don't want to give away the app for free as part of a freemium and show ads. And then the ads is a whole nother thing. I've been begging, and you and I were at a conference last September, and on stage I was saying, "We need..." For the subscription app industry, so this is my pitch again, the subscription app industry needs a good ad platform that does higher quality ads. Because I had Google AdSense in my app and I kept getting bad reviews, I kept getting support requests of, why are you showing gambling in your app?

They weren't actually gambling, but it was the slots games where it would be a really annoying animation, and so people are going into my app. I do genuinely care about the experience people have in my app, and the experience was crappy. No matter how many buttons I pressed in there, people were getting ads for guns, people were getting these casino looking ads, people were getting all these ads that they found offensive and that were annoying and a detraction from my product. And so even if I could, which with a weather app because every time you open the app it costs me money, even if I could only give away the app itself and not the complications and widgets, I don't have a way to monetize that. Actually, the app is losing money right now because we pulled the ads out in anticipation of this revamp and doing the hard paywall. And so I've been losing money for a year on that app because it's got no ads in it and it's got a lot of free users and it doesn't have many subscribers.

So anyways, I'm going on and on about my own personal strategy, but because I think there's valid reasons to do a hard paywall, and I wrestled with it, but we're doing a hard paywall. And this is a case where, and I think Apple does allow hard paywalls, but I think you might have to convince them and I think I have a pretty strong argument here of why I need to do a hard paywall on this app. So are hard paywalls a dark pattern? Well, honestly, I'm doing it because I want to create a better experience in my app. If you start the free trial, you're going to get everything. And I'm going to lose money on every free trial for people who don't convert because I'm probably going to lose 10 cents to 20 cents, maybe even up to 50 cents or a dollar on every single free trial I offer, depending on how heavy a usage the average free trialist uses.

So I'm actually giving value away for free in that seven day free trial. So doing a hard paywall, as much as I would've been against it three or four years ago, as much as some people might still think it's a dark pattern, I pretty much have to do it with this app to deliver the experience I want to deliver. So yeah, that's where I landed on it. And honestly, from a business standpoint and having talked to you, I'm probably going to make more money by doing a hard paywall than if I did do freemium for this app. And it's something I want to experiment with in the future, if I can figure out a way to do some kind of monetization with a better ad network or something to have some freemium experience, but it's tough. It's tough to make that premium work when you have those kinds of costs.

Steve Young:

Yeah, completely agree. Like I said, I was against it too. I was looking at other AI tools that help you create content and stuff. It is all a hard paywall. Don't get religious about this stuff. You go to any of your favorite web tools, it's literally a hard paywall. I'm looking at Jasper AI, I was like, "All right, what's a content tool that I love that's an AI tool?" Yeah, here, here's what we do, but it's a hard paywall in a sense.

David Barnard:

And AI is a great example. Some of the AI apps aren't offering free trials because it costs them a lot of money. I'm complaining about weather app costs, but these AI apps often have very high costs, and so even a free trial could lose them money. So yeah, that's a great example to bring up is that AI specifically. I think we may even see a bigger wave of hard paywalls, shorter free trials, and things like that. Is it a dark pattern? Well, when you're paying so much for these AI training, and AI inference, and running the AI models, it's not. It's like you're giving away value. If you can't give it away for free, you need to paywall it.

Steve Young:

Yep. Agreed.

David Barnard:

Any other dark patterns to wrap up this segment?

Steve Young:

Let me see.

David Barnard:

Well, here, I'll bring one up and see what you think and to see if you have experience with this. I was looking at a few apps recently where they're pushing folks to the web, and I think I actually got to it through a web ad, so it's not that they're necessarily pushing people to the web. But it's like a web ad, and so I'm in Safari, and the typical long onboarding thing. And then I get to the paywall and it's like, "Start your one-week free trial. It costs us $10 to give you a trial." Which probably BS. I'm going to calculate it and maybe I'll do something like this in my app where I'll tell people in the app that, "Hey, it costs me a dollar to give you this free trial." Because it is costing something. Now, $10 to give people a seven-day free trial. I don't know what app is actually... How they're doing the math on that.

But then it gives options. Do you want to pay the full $8 and 75 cents that it costs us to get... And it's really specific as if they really ran the numbers. Do you want to pay for the full cost of the trial or do you want to pay $2 or do you want to pay $1? I was like, "Okay, I'll pay a dollar." Seven days, a dollar, whatever. Apple Pay comes up, I confirm it. Now they have my credit card info on Stripe. So then I keep going through all the onboarding and at this point I'm just like, "It's so much tax, I'm just scanning. I'm not reading everything." At some point I hit a button that was like, "Start your actual subscription now." And actually, I'll take it back, I think it was fairly clear, but I was expecting to tap that button and then the Apple Pay sheet come up and then I cancel the Apple Pay sheet, but I tapped the button and then they just immediately charged the card like 70 bucks.

Because they got the credit card info with the $1 free trial, which again, I feel like that was a little bit of a dark pattern telling me it costs $8 and 75 cents for my free trial or whatever. But then they have the credit card on file, so then any continue button, any label that's not necessarily explaining it. Again, I think the app that I was using actually did have the price and it did say something, I don't want to totally throw any app doing this under the bus, but they could technically, because this is a web, Apple's not reviewing it, they could technically just have a continue button that doesn't say anywhere on there and they could charge directly to your credit card after that. So have you seen this and what do you think of this as a pattern?

Steve Young:

Not as much, but as much as I like to talk about this black hat stuff, I'm not a fan of all that stuff because sometimes I'll even see this on upsell pages, you add to cart, do you want to add this? I'm like, "Oh my God, you're really trying to sell, like buy stuff." But fine, I go, "No." As long as it makes it clear that I can say no, but I'm trying to look for the no. I know, because I come from the side of things, and so I know this stuff works. It's up to you. I'm not a big fan of those either. I want to bring value and not try to scam you, and I feel like once you're getting to the scammy... Again, I was against a hard paywall, and so once you get into the scammy phase, I feel like, "Oh, yeah, let's not go that." But one thing I would say for the hard paywall stuff, if you've got sort of a meditation app, if you've got really good content in the app, consider maybe...

A friend of mine tested a hard paywall versus just a lot of locked content. He has a crossword app and he just made one free puzzle. And he tested those two variations, because first I was like, "Dude, you're giving away too much. You're giving way too much away for free." Because in the end, humans, we're against friction. If you make it frictionless for us, cool, we'll just stay there. We're never going to pay you. But if you built a good app that people, highly engaged by the way, app. So he tested that and he saw a boost in revenues by doing a hard paywall, and then he tested hard paywall versus just more locked content. And so what I've been saying is like, "Look, if you don't want to do the hard paywall, just lock up a lot of your content." If you look at the big apps now like Calm, you can see that a lot of their meditations are all locked up. And so what that gives you is the user can see a variety of content that you have, but obviously, they'll have to pay to access any of the content.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's a great counterbalance because we were talking about the benefits of a hard paywall, but it's not going to work for every app. Eventually, I'd like to figure out a way to do freemium in my app because there is an aspect to, people have gotten more and more comfortable, I think, in apps starting a free trial and realizing like, "Hey, I can use this totally for free, get as much value as I can for seven days, and then it's so easy to cancel." And I'm a big fan of Apple and Google Payments because they make it so easy to cancel. This specific app, I had to do a chargeback to get my money back, the one that I was talking about where I accidentally clicked, which that's a whole nother topic. If you're doing web stuff, you don't have Apple enforcing rules on this kind of potentially more scammy stuff.

But what you do have is people who feel scammed are going to leave bad reviews and are going to do chargebacks with their credit card, which gets expensive and gets you booted from Stripe. If you go too scammy you'll find out pretty soon when Stripe boots you from their platform. Again, it's a similar thing, people complain about app review and there's legitimate complaints. I still have lots of complaints that I send to Apple about app review, but hey, this exists throughout the whole world. You running a restaurant, you're going to have the health inspector come check things out. You're running a scammy web app, you're going to have Stripe shut you down. It's like people talk about, "Oh, free market and Apple's..." Yeah, Apple's very restrictive and I've got my issues with that, but don't pretend you can just do whatever you want, anywhere you want.

Every business has rules that they have to follow and different countries they have to abide by the laws of those countries, and different platforms that they're working with have to abide by those rules, and so it is what it is. So that was a deep rabbit hole, but you were talking about hard paywalls and how that's not always the optimal strategy. So I think you're absolutely right, it's like there are times when having one or two things unlocked and then having everything else locked is a good experience because people actually get to see the value. It's essentially all these little mini paywalls, you see a little lock button and it's like, "Oh, I want that, but I know I have to pay for that." Don't let my hard paywall talk bias you to think that that's the way to do it. Freemium is a great strategy for most apps. And again, I think what I was talking about, I think the future of subscription apps is better freemium, is finding ways to monetize those users who aren't going to monetize via subscription.

Because in reality, socioeconomically and just mentality wise, there's just tons of people who are never going to pay for your app. And so the best thing we can do as an industry is be able to give more value to those who just aren't going to pay, and find ways to monetize. And then yeah, lock features, lock premium content, lock what makes sense, and every app needs to explore what actually makes sense to lock versus free. And hard paywall is kind of a cop out, just lock everything. But in some ways a good starting point, and then now potentially I get to work backwards of like, "Okay, now, how can I give away something for free?" But yeah, I think freemium is the right path forward for most apps, but it's just a struggle to make it work well. Any tips on getting that balance right other than locking content? Because content's an easier one, where you can give away a couple of meditations, you can give away a couple of this or a couple of that, but in more productivity apps, that gets a little tougher.

Steve Young:

I would say lock up as much as you can. I think a lot of times people... Here, we can go off this tangent. When people are developing a to-do list app, it's like, "Oh, I'll ask for a review after 10." I'm like, "How many of your users get to 10?" "Oh, maybe like 10%." Really a low percent. I'm like, "So maybe you should ask for a review right after the first one, and then get them, or during the onboarding process." Which we've seen work really well too, to balance off buying for reviews will show the review prompt during the onboarding process, or show it right after a paywall, even if they can X out, hit them with the review prompt. And so what I would say is, I think too many times I look at developers, I'm like, "You're just giving away too much for free. You spent all this time, you're so proud of this app, but yet you're so afraid of charging for it."

Look, I've been there. I feel the same way. I'm trying to increase our prices and I'm like, "I don't want to do that yet." I still want to be really affordable to the indies and be the most effective and affordable at marketing agency, so I feel the same struggle, as much as I'm saying here, increase your prices or be more aggressive paywall, I still feel it. When it's our baby, it still feels a little bit different to do it when it's our baby. So I still feel it, but that's why you need other people to talk to you, they be like, "Look, this is a great app." I'll talk to them and they're like, "Yo, this is a great app. How many downloads did you get? How much are you making?"

David, we worked on this Android because people are like, "Steve, this wouldn't work on Android." And I was like, "Challenge accepted." And so I was like, "All right." I threw an offer out to the audience like, "Look, I'm willing to work with anybody. I'll give you a discount on some of our packages, but here's what I want, the case study." And so one of our clients is like, "Steve, this is for an absolute prank type of app." He's like, "Look at the charts." And so a lot of the stuff that we're talking about and a lot of things I've been sharing from a monetization perspective, I feel, David, it's just more psychology based, more than actual like, "Hey, is this the right moral base stuff?" So when you have a paywall, show it during the onboarding. We talked about Anya, she said that was the biggest tip that I would've done. Once she did that, her revenues doubled.

And she has Rootd panic attack, so she's like, "I'm not going to do a hard paywall because if you have a panic attack, you want to feel relief and you don't want to have to pay." So I was like, "Cool." So she allows people to X out, but when she added it, it doubled her revenues. This is against it. And I was like, "What? There's no way." A friend of mine told me this tip in end of 2017, '18 range and I was like, "There's no way that works." She's like, "Nope, doubled my revenues." I'm like, "Whoa. Okay." So I just let the data, I think too many times we as experts, you and I as experts, we tend to just say what is our opinion, and so I always want to differentiate when I'm saying, "Hey, this is my opinion. Ask David too, or ask other people that might have the same opinion."

Or this is like data driven, and so I try to show data when I'm like, "Look, I feel confident that this works." And a lot of times people ask me, "Are you sure?" And I'm like, "Look, I wait. I don't just share everything. I wait, dude. I wait until two or three." And I'm like, "Okay, I feel pretty confident sharing this." Because the last thing I want to do is share something I feel like worked once and then I'm like, "Ah." You know what I mean? And it doesn't always work because then people are like, "Oh, that didn't work."

David Barnard:

And whatever you share and [inaudible] how much data you have, there are things that will and won't work for your specific app. So at the end of the day, and this is one thing I've struggled with over the years as an indie developer with limited resources, limited development time, is that I have not done a lot of testing in my apps. And it's been to my detriment, is that we launch something and it's clearly not working, but it's hard to unwind what you did wrong and then try something new, and try something new, and try something new. Somebody was asking me recently, what's the biggest mistake... Actually, it was in the Sub Club community. A little pitch for the community here. If you're listening to podcasts and haven't heard of the community yet, we have a private community. I think Steve's in there. If you're not, I need to get you in there. I think you're in there.

But anyways, there's an open question in the community, and it will be a little old by the time time this podcast airs, but it's like, what's the biggest mistake? And so people are sharing their mistakes. And so I was typing mine up, and I think the biggest mistake I've made is not learning from mistakes, is like you launch and you need to then try and find a way. And it doesn't have to be A/B testing, it doesn't have to be super sophisticated, it can just be, "Hey, this launch, trial starts went way down. Okay, let's try something new." And then I had a big release with my Launch Center Pro app a few years back to capitalize on the home screen customization. Made like 20K that month, but then we didn't iterate to maintain that lead. And so to this day there's tons of home screen customization and widget apps that are making tons of money.

And I totally missed the boat on that because we had this big launch and then we didn't learn from the launch of, what was working? What wasn't? And then keep building the features that were going to keep people around. And there were obvious things. But this is what's hard. If you're an indie out there, you don't have a ton of resources, but that's how you actually grow instead of running the app into the ground like I have with some of my apps, is that when Steve says, "Hey, do a hard paywall." You do a hard paywall, but then you look at the numbers, and if it's not working for your app-

Steve Young:

Don't do it.

David Barnard:

Do something different. And don't take any of the advice we share on this podcast or Steve shares as like, if he's sharing it, if I'm sharing it, it's probably that we've seen it work, but it's not going to work for every app.

Steve Young:

Hey, David, I'll say this. The biggest mistake I made, if I were starting in the app business today, I would say, "I don't care what I think. My opinion does not matter. We're going to let the data speak for itself." Whether it's ASO, whether it's hard paywall, whether it's trial conversion, whatever, long paywall, whatever it is, let the data play out. Because a lot of times how we're building new apps these days is we're letting the keywords, because I'm going to be more reliant, I don't want to pay for traffic, so I'm going to be reliant on more keyword organic downloads. But I'm letting the keywords tell me which app to build, and I want to stay in a field where I know people are willing to convert.

There's a painkiller versus vitamin, so I'm going to build an app that is more of a painkiller versus a vitamin. And from all the categories of apps that we worked with, the mental health space, the fitness, health and fitness space, tends to have the highest conversion rates. So how I'm building my apps moving forward is, looking at the categories where I know there's high conversion rates, and looking at the keywords and really figuring out, "All right, what are some keywords that a lot of people are not paying attention to?" So my opinion does not matter, everything is based on data.

David Barnard:

Yeah, Thomas Petty, I don't know if you listened to the last podcast, or it was two episodes ago now, but he was sharing on ad creatives, he's like, "Look, I've been doing this for 12, 15 years now." He said on the podcast, "I am no better than throwing a dart at pictures on the wall in deciding which ad is going to be the most performant." When you think about it, that really applies to your paywall design, your paywall call to action, whether or not you do a hard paywall or not. You and I have a ton of experience, have talked to so many developers, have worked on so many different apps, but even then, you don't know what the right strategy is until you try a few things. And again, bigger apps, yeah, you can do super sophisticated A/B testing, smaller apps, just try it.

The number should be big enough to see the difference. And this is where people get really hung up on statistical significance and everything like that. But at the end of the day, if you don't see a dramatic change, then pick what you think is a better experience. But you'll make some changes where it's just obviously better. Stick with those and then just keep trying. And yeah, if you can and have the resources, do more sophisticated testing. But even then, I think there's a lot of noise in the A/B testing community of when you're A/B testing everything, and every little thing, and how one thing affects the other is really hard to suss out. And the whole A/B test everything is tough to execute in a way that you're actually building a great product. You have to have a really good team to not just optimize your way into a crappy app that exploits every possible base psychology of humanity. So even if you don't have the resources, you can experiment. Just do it. And don't be like me launching an app, making some good money, and then just not following through.

Steve Young:

Yeah. And just start with the lowest hanging fruit. I've talked to many apps where I'm looking at their numbers and I'm like, "I think your screenshots are ugly. I think your icon is ugly. When I look at your numbers, you get great organic downloads, 25% trial activation, 60% trial to paid." There's nothing here. You know what I mean? Why would I tell you to change your screenshots? Maybe that might impact it, but you're doing pretty well. It's like six figures a month, over six figures a month. And so I'm like, "Maybe play around with the trial variation." So it's really about looking at the numbers and figuring out what the data is telling you where you should go and what you should optimize. And I think for indie developers, if you're not at least, I'm just going to throw out a number out of the air, but if you're not making at least a thousand dollars a month, try a hard paywall because it will force users and it will tell you if users actually want or need your app.

And if your hard paywall, your trial activation, is solid, but you're trial to paid, then you need to fix what's going on in the app. Maybe you need to get them to use it, or maybe they're telling you, "This isn't a painkiller, this is a nice to have, so I'd prefer to just be on the free plan." And that way you can really figure out what to do next. And that's why now I've become a proponent of the hard paywall, especially for the beginning developers, just get your users to tell you, "Do I really want your app or not? Because I invested it, downloaded it, and went through your onboarding, but now I'm here."

David Barnard:

And that's one of the things about a hard paywall that I think some people see as a dark pattern is that, "Oh, well, people are going to start the free trial and just forget." But these days people don't forget. Yeah, it's like a small percentage, but we shared numbers, revenue cap numbers, and I've seen this in our data that there are apps that have 5% free trial conversion rate, so 95% of people, and some of these are even apps with three day free trials. So yes, people will forget, but it's probably in the low single digit percentages. So if you think, "Oh, well, I'm just preying on people forgetting to cancel." Maybe, but you're not going to build a business around people forgetting. There are apps that still do that. If you dump a ton into paid acquisition, if the numbers are big enough, that single digit low percentage of people who forget to unsubscribe will drive significant revenue.

But for the average developer, it's a huge signal. Are people converting on the free trial or not? And like you said, that's a great way, you switch to a hard paywall and you will see, do people care or do they not care? If it's single digit percentage, you know you're not product market fit. That's people forgetting. If it's 10, 20%, then it's like, "Okay, people are finding value out of this." So yeah, I think that's a great hack to just, as an early stage, figure it out. Are people actually finding value? All right, well, I've talked way too much, but as we wrap up, any last minute low hanging fruits?

Steve Young:

Optimize your paywall, man. That's it. Optimize. That's the one thing I would do. Add it to the onboarding process, optimize your paywall, and then look at your main page, if you do have a freemium thing, look at your main page. I put a video up how a simple icon change that's a 57% increase in paywall views. And so there are two areas that I would just fully optimize, it's your onboarding experience and it's your paywall, whether it's the plans that you have, or whether it's a long paywall, short paywall, whatever it is, those are the two areas that I would play around with the most and then get to a stable part. For me, this is just my approach. Get to a stable part where I'm driving revenues, and then think about how I can drive more revenues off the top of the funnel. That's how I start operating. This has been fun, David. Thank you.

David Barnard:

Yeah, really great advice. So are you accepting new clients? Because yeah, you're just open for business, right? You work with anybody on optimizing their app?

Steve Young:

You're making me sound like a... Yeah, yeah, if you want to learn more about us just check out our YouTube channel. That's what I would suggest. I'd prefer you guys look at the freemium model, back to the freemium model, look at our free YouTube stuff, go through that YouTube channel, youtube.com/appmasters. And if you are interested in working with us, it is appmasters.com. We've got a team of 11 now.

David Barnard:

I have to give a little pitch because you give so much away for free, you exemplify the freemium model. But if you want to really get into the weeds with Steve, it's going to cost you money. Just like if you want to use my Weather app, it's going to cost you money. But the fun thing is, this was not just an ad for your services, I've listened to too many podcasts where it's like, it just ends up sounding like an ad. So I appreciate that you will share so freely of not just like, "Hey, come work with me and I'll share the real stuff." You share the real stuff all the time, today on the podcast, and then on your YouTube channel. So yeah, even if you don't want to work with Steve, he's got some really great content around all of this stuff. And I believe in 10 minutes you're going to go live on YouTube, so I think every Friday you do live shows? Oh, one minute. All right. Thanks, Steve. You're amazing.

Steve Young:

Thanks, David.

David Barnard:

Bye.

Steve Young:

See you man.

David Barnard:

Thanks So much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.