Building a Community that Demands an App — Mark Kennedy & Jeff Bailey, None to Run

[00:00:00] **David:** Hello, I’m your host, David Barnard, and my guests today are Mark Kennedy and Jeff Bailey, co-creators of the None To Run app. Mark is an RRCA Certified Distance Running Coach and created None To Run as a blog and personal outlet to stay in touch with his passion for exercise science and healthy living. Jeff has been developing iOS apps since 2009 and teamed up with Mark to build an app as the None To Run community started to take off and requests for an app could no longer be ignored. On the podcast we talk with Mark and Jeff about community-led growth, how they improved trial starts by 25%, and why running ads for a blog post might actually perform better than sending people directly to the App Store. Hey, Jeff, Mark, it’s great to have you on the podcast today. [00:01:07] **Mark:** Thanks for having us, David. I really enjoy the Sub Club podcast. It’s a nice to be on the other side of it now. [00:01:14] **Jeff:** Yeah, ditto, it’s good to be here. [00:01:16] **David:** Awesome. I want to kick things off with the story of None To Run. We’ve talked in my office hours—quick little plug; I do two weekly office hours that anybody can sign up for. Hit me up at David@RevenueCat.com if you haven’t taken advantage of that before—but we’ve met in those office hours, so we’ve talked through some of this, but I think it’s really fascinating as an origin story for an app. So Mark, why don’t you tell us a about how you got started with it? [00:01:45] **Mark:** Sure. I’ll take it further back than you to give it a little bit of context. I studied exercise physiology and kinesiology in university. I’ve always had a passion for health and fitness. Then life happened, and my career sort of pivoted into the investment world. That’s where I worked for 20 years. I actually just quit my job two months ago. So I’m doing None To Run full time, which is exciting and scary at the same time. But anyway, I started a blog around 2009. I was living in England at the time, my wife and I. My brother, who has always been a hacker/coder guy, and my wife were like, “You guys should start a blog, because you love health and fitness, and lot of people are writing about stuff.” It sounded interesting to me. So my brother coded an HTML a blog for me, and I think I crashed the site every time I tried to update it. So I was calling him, but I was running what health and fitness, in general, just very general topics. And I found myself over time writing more and more about. which is a passion. I was training for the marathon in Dublin Ireland. so over time I just sort of kept on talking about running. I was doing the podcast and interviewing, other running experts and medical experts who did stuff in the running industry. And then I figured, well, maybe I should just change the name to reflect more. I’m talking about running. So I wanted to come up with a plan, for runners and I decided on beginners because. And there’s just a lot of information out there for more seasoned runners, you know, there’s runners role and, there’s a whole world out there if you’re really deep into the running, scene. So I want to focus on beginners. So actually I was digging around Reddit and I was not, discovered that couch to 5k. The plan, everyone’s talking with close to five K. but the more and more I read within these Reddit, subreddits, people struggled with a lot, not everyone, but there was a big subset of people struggling in the, they found it ramped up too quick. They’re getting injured and frustrated, losing motivation and momentum. So. I came up with the name, none, the Ron, because I wanted my plan to be about running, not about the, a certain distance. So it came with the term, you know, starting from zero instead of a coach and the goal is running. doesn’t matter how fast you are. So that’s sort how the name came to be. and I came up with a running plan that did those things, I just said. Got started off gradually people could repeat weeks if they wanted to. And it was more about just getting out there and running, building momentum, getting tiny wins. [00:04:29] **David:** Yeah. And that’s interesting because a lot of people feel like they need to really hit this really broad Market. It’s like, oh, running. Like I need to, I need to like, you know, do advanced running and intermediate and, and I should be writing articles on all of them, but, but it’s really interesting that you decided to focus on beginners. Very very conscious. I mean, you’re talking about like, there’s just not a lot of content. but like, did you think I’ll focus on beginners and then eventually get to, advanced running? Or was it just a really conscious effort to like really boil it down and focus on a very like small niche within a niche? [00:05:07] **Mark:** I wasn’t sure. I knew like starting sort of with a smaller subset of people and really getting to know it was probably better than trying to get. having a broader appeal or no one, you know, I can’t compete with runner’s world and there’s lots of great running coaches. I’m just, I wasn’t out there nor trying to compete with those people. So I’m like, why don’t they really go niche and really help beginners? And I really liked the sports psychology aspect of, getting people started and gaining momentum. so I really, I really liked that. Yeah. So I started with that. I still, you know, we do have other plans in the app to go beyond just running. So we’ll see where it ends up, but I really liked this beginner space. I feel like we can have a really big impact on these people and it’s changing people’s lives. And, I really liked that. So, we’ll see, we’ll see where it goes. [00:05:58] **David:** Yeah. And so then when you did kind of pare down into this more niche audience, is that part of what helped you actually build? I mean, imagine kind of like you’re saying, like there’s so much out there for. advanced runners and there’s magazines and blogs and performance coaches, and like there’s so much out there. Yeah. How so, how did you start to like grow the audience and did it kind of naturally start growing because you went super, super niche. [00:06:28] **Mark:** Basically there was one blog post I wrote that really struck a chord with people and it continues to do so. And I think it’s called, the three flaws and couch to 5k and a better, safer plan for beginner runners. And over time, it just, organically seemed to show up quite high. When you search for couch to 5k. And it continues to do so. I do these weekly community calls with, none neuron community members and asked them how they found out I go neuron. And the most common theme I’m hearing is literally a search like couch to 5k, to hard or toast to five, something easier. our alternative to Kosta 5k. so it was one blog posts, which was kind of the cornerstone of like, huh. There there’s more to what I originally anticipated with. these do not fly as close to five years. A great plan works for many, but, just deficiencies that can have other beginners might resonate with. and then there’s a couple other articles that got a bit of chocolate, but that was the main one. And it continues to be the main post today. [00:07:37] **David:** Yeah, that’s great. And then, and then how did you start parlaying that into what is now a community and a huge email list? And how did, how did you go from this, this blog post and niching down to, to then building a bigger business around it? [00:07:51] **Mark:** Right. So there was, created a running plan, which went along with the site. so it’s a 12 week pre-kinder running plan. So basically said that the plan was on the website, but it wasn’t a weird looking graph. And I’m like, if you want a pretty PDF of this or the audio files to go along with. you know, sign up email, we’ll send you a beginner email series for runners and I’ll send you a PDF and that just starting to slowly grow. You know, before I eventually approached Jeff, I think there’s about 20,000 people on email list and. Yeah, there was obviously a common request that people had, which you’ll probably ask me about it at some point, but, that’s sort of how it started to grow. And then there was a Facebook group as well. We, which was my wife’s idea. but that really resonated with people as well. And that’s grown over time too. it’s about 12,500 people or so now today, so, just community people telling you. [00:08:49] **David:** Yeah, that’s fascinating. Part of, part of why I wanted to have you and Jeff on today’s just that. You know, so many, so many apps are like, oh, I have this app idea. And then, you know, you just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks. And it’s really cool to hear from, from a founder like you, who came at it from the exact opposite direction, like you built an email list, you built a community, you built demand for a product that didn’t yet exist to the point where people, you know, we’ve talked about this to people were like begging you to build an app. And I think that. It’s such a different mindset. I think that that a lot of developers kind of, start with the, the app as the end, all versus kind of like meeting people where they’re at with content, with community, with, you know, and it’s so smart, you know, to this day, I do not have an email list. I never built it up within my apps. I never built it up on a website and that’s a huge regret. So many of the kind of Indians. It’s success stories are built around this foundation of, of community, of, of a bigger email list of, of kind of these inbuilt Marketing. so anyhow, I’d love to transition them to, to Jeff. So Mark emails, you saying I’ve got this community, I’ve got. Just demand. can we build an app? What, what was that like having a, Market, email you, and then what was your thought process? If this crazy guy in am I actually gonna build an app and how do I, how do I manage that with everything else I have going on? [00:10:20] **Jeff:** Yes. So you, you probably know this, David, you get, you get these probably random emails, right? From people from time to time, you know, build me an app. I want to buy your app. You know, I want you to, you know, add support for, for my stuff in your app, that sort of thing. But, but yeah, this one, I, you know, I went out to none or onsite, took a look at it and decided to. Chat and talk about it and, you know, Mark and I hit it off he’s, you know, seem pretty legit. So, you know, we, we started off actually pretty slow. So at the time I had, well, I still do have a pretty popular interval training app. that was really an app. Launched back in 2015. And it really started out as just kind of a scratch my own itch type app, you know, and because I was consulting for big part of my career, I did consulting and I had just left a company that had really. Good fitness facilities. And at lunchtime, they had classes and I would do like this core body class, you know, three, four times a week. And I really, really enjoyed it. And then I went to this other company and I kinda missed that and I wanted to keep doing that core body workout. So I, you know, I started. Looking at different apps and, you know, you know how it is. It’s like, ah, you know, I don’t like any of these. I can build them, you know, and I also kind of wanted to, I was really just kind of transitioning from like being an enterprise Java consultant to iOS consulting at the time I’d been doing iOS development for a time, but not as a full-time consulting gig. Decided to build this app at added out there for awhile. Mark contacted me, you know, we started out slow. I basically just integrated, his None To Run plan. so you could basically just kind of quickly create. all the runs within Intervals pro, but you know, it, wasn’t a great integration. You didn’t really, it didn’t really keep track of your workouts. You know, it’s just kind of a starting point. And we, we kind of went like that for, for a while. And until, you know, we decided to build the, build the app. [00:12:21] **David:** Yeah. And I’m curious, I didn’t ask before, so feel free to punt on this question. but I’m curious if you’re open to share or share in generalities. how you, structured the initial engagement or partnership, you know, was it a contracting gig for a little while and eventually became partners? And we’re getting ahead of the story a little bit, you know, as, as you did partner on it, but, you know, for, for as much as you’re willing to share, I’m curious kind of what the arrangement was in the early days and then how that transitioned over time. [00:12:51] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, originally when I, when I did the initial integration of None To Run into Intervals pro you know, it was basically just cross promotional. You know, I got some benefit out of it because, you know, he could point people to my app. Right. And he got benefit out of it because people were begging him for an app. So it basically started out as a handshake agreement. No, no financial, you know, implications all just, just cross-promotional and, you know, when we decided to build the app, it’s actually still. It pretty much a handshake agreement. you know, I, I built the app, sweat equity, Mark, you know, had the email list, you know, he has this nice community, and all that. So, we share the profits, and you know, we’re, we actually need to formalize things a little bit better as time goes on here, but. [00:13:45] **David:** No, that’s, that’s great to hear. I mean, that, that’s, that’s how I got started. That’s how I did a lot of my early ops was handshake agreement. And more recently I have, you know, kind of a big. Template, you know, after, because things do go south when, when you do these kinds of partnerships. So eventually having some kind of written rules around it is, is smart. And having some form of, you know, prenup around, well, what happens if one person wants to go a different direction or the other person’s not investing anymore? You know, there’s, there’s a lot of intricacies to be solved, but when you’re just getting started and you don’t know if it’s going to take off, you know, sometimes it is easier. Shake the hand and know you trust the other person. And, you know, I’ve had, I’ve had some very good outcomes that way myself. so after you, agreed to actually build an app, what was the launch like? So you, you already had this following, you already had this email list. was it just like, you know, blast it out of the gate and made a ton of money on day one? Or what was that launch process? [00:14:49] **Mark:** Yeah, so we’ve built up some anticipation with people saying, okay, it’s finally coming. And then, you know, Jeff and I had to prepare for the onslaught when we didn’t launch an Android version, but that’s a whole another maybe podcast, but, you know, I’m in constant communication with my community members. You know, whether it’s through the Facebook group or by email. So just sort of saying, Hey, it’s being worked on it’s coming. Jeff, I can even remember if we invited a few beta people in the test or not. But, yeah, just prepared people. And then we, we actually launched on my birthday of 20, 20 March 3rd. That’s why I remember the launch date. So, you know, literally like two weeks before the whole world started to shutdown. So, I think that was good timing, but, anyway, So we had a nice audience of people to initially launch it to on day one, because I don’t think people would probably download it to some of the App Store based on seeing it, you know, I have no reviews, but we had this nice little audience, so we definitely had a pretty good month, you know, a bit of a spike. And then it kind of started to, you know, definitely went down the next couple months and then. Pretty much consistently since then, we’ve been just growing nice and steadily month by month. And it’s been, you know, just, just over two years now. So, yeah, having an audience to launch to is definitely a really helpful. [00:16:13] **David:** Yeah. it’s interesting. I talked to a lot of folks who, have this idea that if they just got an influencer, if they just got, you know, somebody who had an audience, that it’s just, you know, would, would be this huge unlock for their business. And then, you know, some businesses I’ve seen, you know, there’s a lot of fitness apps where. It’s a, you know, a specific celebrity and there it’s like their fitness app, but the interesting thing that that happens, and it sounds like you kind of saw this as well. Is it, you kind of saturate your initial audience pretty quickly? It’s like, you know, if you, if you have 20,000 people in your email list, well, 20,000 people, aren’t going to download the app and 20,000 people, aren’t going to. Then subscribe, w w what did the numbers look like at that launch? So you had a very passionate following, so your numbers are probably going to be a lot higher than, you know, the average kind of, you know, less passionate community, but, but what did those early numbers look like? As far as conversion? [00:17:13] **Jeff:** So the numbers, you know, we didn’t know what to expect, right? So in Intervals to this day is actually, just a free download in a single in-app purchase. I plan to transition over to subscription probably sometime this year, but so, you know, I’d never done a subscription app before and, you know, we really didn’t have a good sense for, you know, what sort of. Conversion rate, are we going to get how many, what percent of people are going to start the free trials? what percent of people are actually going to convert to paying users? And, you know, originally when we launched the app and in March of 2020, that initial, cohort. people that signed up, we had a, like 89, almost 90%. people that sign up for the trial actually converted to be paying users. So that [00:17:59] **David:** Wow. Yeah, that’s it. That’s like industry-leading, [00:18:03] **Jeff:** Yeah. And you know, actually to this day, of people that actually sign up for the trials, we have a conversion rate of about 80%. So that from, from what you’ve told us, David that’s good. Right? [00:18:14] **David:** Yeah, no, that’s absolutely great. And maybe, maybe you an assign that you need to be a little more, a little less lenient with your freemium strategy or a little more aggressive with the paywall or something. you know, every, everything ends up being kind of a trade off. So, you know, you can get. Push harder to get a higher trial start rate. And then sometimes that’ll kind of, lessen your trunk conversion rate and you know, every little tweak you make to one part of the funnel can affect things up and down the funnel. but yeah, I mean, shoot, 80%, trial conversion is, is very high. compared to a lot of the folks we talked to and I, I am, working with our data scientists to put out some benchMarks later this year. That’ll hopefully shed a little bit more light on the variance in that, but yeah, 80% is fantastic. And then, so, again of that 20,000 person audience, what, what were the initial downloads like? Did you get. 5,000 downloads, you get a few thousand downloads. And what were the subscription numbers like early in those days? [00:19:16] **Jeff:** I think within about a month or so Mark, correct me if I’m wrong, we had about a thousand paying subscribers. So yeah, we were, we were very, very pleased with that. And, and you know, we, we had, we did definitely have a spike of downloads at the very beginning because of all the, you know, anticipation that Mark built up in, in the, in the community, you know, the community was the key there to have a good launch. And, Honestly to this day, you know, we have pretty, we have pretty steady downloads, but we don’t have huge download numbers. You know, our downloads are in the, in the low hundreds a day, you know, it Intervals pro pro it gets like double, double those numbers. You know, it was probably about four or five, $600 a day. But, but you know, we get steady, we get steady downloads and we have, good. Trial start rates about 20%, to this day, even even higher at, at launch. so because of the trial start rates and the conversion rates, you know, we’ve been able to, grow that subscription base over time. [00:20:18] **David:** Yeah, I think that’s one thing that a lot of people don’t, don’t think about in the, in the like kind of funnel dynamics is that. sending a smaller number of very high intent users, can be ultimately better for business than just, you know, flooding that top of funnel, which, you know, over time y’all are in a great position to start experimenting because your numbers are so great. So like, are those numbers great Because most of those that are coming have, you know, read a blog post they’re on the email list, they’re, you know, they have a deeper connection than just, you know, seeing an ad on Facebook or something. but you know, as you, as you shared in, in the notes for this, you initially out of trial start rate of 26%, which is just crazy. I mean, to have 26% of everyone who downloads the app, and of course then that, that trickled down over time and now you’re closer to 20%. but when you. 20% of downloads starting your free trial, and you have 80% of those folks. you don’t need to feed the top of funnel as much to, to create a great business. And I think that’s, you know, a dynamic that, that a lot of developers aren’t as aware of. And our aren’t thinking clearly about those kind of funnel dynamics of, of where to optimize and how to think about those things. So it’s, it’s great to see, y’all succeeding and building a great business on hundreds of downloads a day when like you would think like, oh, I need thousands or tens of thousands a day to like, build a real business. But you don’t. if you are hitting the right audience with the right intent and then have your, the rest of the funnel really dialed in. But I am curious. So you’re at hundreds of downloads a day. You’ve got, I think you said now, like 30,000 people on your email list. Like what’s, what are the next steps you all are taking to start kind of growing the app from there. [00:22:06] **Mark:** Yeah, as I said, I’m now doing this full time, so I’ve got more time to dive into all the things I didn’t know I need to do. And other things I wanted to do. So, which is a good problem to have, Some things we’re working on now, we’re looking at is some sort of a in our peripheral program, we’ve been digging around about that. We, we do in speaking to the community members that a lot of people, tell their friends and family about it we’ve even been fortunate enough to some of the people have heard about the program from their doctor, which has been really interesting and something I wouldn’t have anticipated. so we’re looking at that. I’m doing some sort of live in person, group meetups, wherever my travels take me to my family and I were going to England this summer. So I’m doing a meetup in Hyde park on July 3rd, and there’s about 35 people like signed up to come meet me and we’re going to do a group run and know have a coffee afterwards. So I’m diving a bit more into the community. Also, I’m looking at. Empowering ambassadors with some of the super fans of none neuron, really passionate users. So, and they’re happy to share and show that their new running expertise to other people. So looking to sort of develop some sort of ambassador program. So I think the community aspect is that he said it’s so powerful. And when people come in under, on the actual app, there are. Been warmed up and they’ve felt a connection and under running before they download the app. So I think that’s, really important for our turns and future success. Jeff, anything else that we’re looking to work on? [00:23:41] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, one of the other things you started recently was, having, you hired out, blogposts right. To get some more content, So that, you know, I think that that’s been a boost as well. [00:23:52] **Mark:** Yep. We’ve got, a woman who writes some is Lisa, John. She’s a really talented writer and she writes for other publications outside magazine and runner’s world and so forth. So she does an article for us, once a month. And I’m looking to hopefully start writing again, which I haven’t done quite some time. So a little bit more of that. And then just speaking to more, you know, other founders and stuff, and just sort of getting ideas and seeing, you know, what’s working for other people. yeah, we’re really just in a discovery phase now that we, that I have some more time to figure out what leavers we want to pull out. Leaders have the biggest impact for our community and for the apps. [00:24:32] **David:** Yeah, that’s awesome. I mean, to get to your stage with this, like very community led growth, and then, you know, it’s kind of interesting, you know, just the variety of people we have on the podcast and talk to, in webinars and other places. kind of fascinating to me that you haven’t even before. Like paying for Marketing yet, because you’ve just been so focused from the start on, on this organic and community led growth. and then leaning into that with your first kind of Marketing spend, being to hire an outside writer to actually write more content, which is what has been a successful year in the past. But I’m curious are y’all running Apple search ads. Are you doing, have you done any other form of paid Marketing or is it all just been community emails? And things like that. [00:25:21] **Mark:** We’ve done a little bit on the, just Google search, Marketing. my wife works for Google, so that that’s helpful. she sorta helped out, but it’s literally, driving traffic to that one article I spoke to, I spoke about before. cause I think that would have a higher impact. Again, we should probably measure this at some point, but then just driving them towards the app because they’ll read this article and it’s either going to highly resonate with them or not. And if it does resonate with them, they’re going to dig deeper and check out the community, other articles, and then go to the app with the super high end. and then Justin, a little bit experimenting on the App Store. [00:26:03] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, through the years when Apple search ads came out, I started doing some Apple search ads stuff with Intervals pro dipped our toes a little bit into it with Nundah run, but, you know, especially nowadays with app transparency tracking, but the CPMs are. So, hi, w I don’t know, we just have not seen really great success with that. So yeah, it’s we would, we would like to drive more downloads that way, but, you know, I was, I was talking to somebody recently that has one of those companies. you know, they’re kind of an app holding company, you know, and, he used to do a ton of money, pump a ton of money into Facebook and Instagram and stuff, but he’s kind of really backed that off. And nowadays he’s, he’s actually kind of shifted in and he’s doing a lot of TikTok videos. But, you know, it’s, it’s hard to know. we are not growth hackers. It’s, it’s, it’s a whole, it’s a whole, it’s a whole different world. We, we could do [00:27:01] **David:** But your accidental growth hackers. I mean, I think it’s brilliant. Like, you know, you found a post that resonated and it was, you know, maybe just happenstance, but it’s something you’re really passionate about. And so you wrote an impassioned article about why couch to 5k. Isn’t serving people well, and then you built an alternative and the, the strategy of sending Google search traffic to the website versus the app. That’s, that’s brilliant because you would think like, you know, to be typical app Marketing, like I want to get them in the app. That’s the best experience, but I think you’re exactly right. Mark, is that by sending him to the blog post first. That’s what you’re helping to, to build that intent. And that’s probably a part of why, you know, it sounds like, you know, you’re getting users from that blog place specifically, whether ad-driven or SEO, you’re getting word of mouth from other people that have been successful. You know, so much of the traffic that you’re getting has been pre-primed to, to care and believe in the product. And then that’s where you end up with a 20% TRASAR rate and a 80% trial conversion. Is because what you’re, you’re going after the high intent. So, you know, can you scale that to a $10 million a year business? I don’t know. We’ll see. but like you’re, you’re starting in a, in a very smart, sustainable cost-effective way to, to get capture that high intent. And so, you know, I mean, slopes is a great example is we had the Curtis Herbert on the podcast, a few episodes back. And, you know, early on, it was just trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, trickle, and now he hit a million dollars in ARR and you guys are right along that path to, you know, you just keep doing what you’re doing and you’re going to hit that. And I think, you know, a lot of folks, it’s like, you start to hit this wall and, and you’re looking for opportunity and you guys kind of stumbled upon an incredibly effective strategy to drive these super high intent users. That’s really hard to do if you’re. Doing it on Facebook or doing it, like you said, absolute search ads, you have high intent users, but it’s gotten really expensive. And then in fitness categories, like my weather app, you know, categories like that, they’re really saturated. and the CPMs are so high that it’s just, it’s just super hard to compete. so yeah, you may not be growth hackers, but, but I, I think you’ve, you’ve, you’ve, you’re headed the right direction and built a really great strategy around that. [00:29:28] **Jeff:** Yeah, I actually, one of the other things that, that Mark even did before the app was challenges, right? Mark. [00:29:34] **Mark:** Yeah, that’s right. yeah, every pretty much every quarter or so we run a, a challenge, which basically people come in and run the, do the whole program, or, or they start wherever they are and any other program that they’re doing. and that’s been really nice. people rally around that and, usually. Other friends or family. you know, of course the Chinese, the app, if they’re on an Android, but that’s okay. They can use, they can use another app or they can use, just programming unit rules themselves. But, that’s been really nice. So, Yeah, we’ve actually for the challenges, we actually used another community software mighty networks, which maybe some sub listeners are familiar with, but we’re actually in the process of transitioning the Facebook group over to that. Just for, you know, probably the reasons everyone’s familiar with, but the privacy. and also just, you know, I can post something about an app update or blog posts and it’s, you know, a couple hundred people see it out of 12,500. So. but you know, while the numbers are there, they’re not really there because if they’re not seeing the, they can’t communicate with them. So anyways, we’re slowly transitioning people to this new community. [00:30:46] **David:** Yeah, it’s unfortunate. The way things have gone down with some of these bigger community platforms where you build up this audience and then, then Facebook charges you to get access to your audience and they just see fewer and fewer of the posts. So it’s smart to be moving to kind of, I mean, you know, it’s a similar dynamic with, with Apple, right? It’s like we have to go through this platform and Apple maintains a lot of control over that relationship. and you know, now with being able to do web billing and other stuff, developers are clawing back a little bit of that direct relationship with customers and, but yeah, it’s great to see kind of taking this community off of the, the owned platform and, and bringing it to your, your own space where they’re going to see more of the posts. They’re going to be more active. Yeah, I do want to switch gears and talk. you know, you guys shared with me some really great experiments you’ve been doing that. I think, our listeners would be really interested to kind of hear some of your thinking and even some of the results you’ve you’ve gotten. So I wanted to start with this Blinkist style paywall. So it, it, you know, made a lot of noise on, on Twitter of, I was going to give the summary, but I I’ll just let you, Jeff, if you have taken away, like tell us, tell us what the deal is. This blink is style paywall. And then what impact it had when you added it to None To Run. [00:32:03] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, I think it was what beginning of last year that, they, wrote about the, Blinkus wrote about they redesign their paywall and, you know, they, they did, they did some research for. To try to figure out what they want to do. And I think the conclusion they came with came to as a couple of different things. One is that, you know, a lot of users still today are not completely comfortable with, with subscription apps and, and trials and, the number one fear that they had in complainant. Blinkist would get was that, you know, they would, they, they were afraid they were, they were going to forget to cancel their free trial. You know, if they didn’t really want to subscribe, they were afraid they’re going to forget to cancel. So they would either one not subscribe or two, they would subscribe and then they would just day one, cancel, you know, and that’s, that’s my move, you know, that’s what I do, you know, I don’t want to forget either. So I tend to do that. And then, what they did to. Address that was, you know, your, your typical paywall is all about the value prop, right? It’s like, Hey, subscribe to this app. You’re going to give this feature, that feature, blah, blah, blah. This is, you know, and they kind of turn that on there on its head. And instead of that, it’s, it’s all about the free trial. It’s like, Hey, you got this free trial. That’s available. how does the free trial work? What’s the timeline? And they also, came up with the concept of notifying the user, you know, with two days left before the free trial is over to remind them, Hey, you got your free trial going, you know, if you want to use. I hope things are going well, if not, you know, don’t forget to cancel or you’re going to get charged so they redesigned their, paywall around that concept. So, like you said, you know, it got a lot of, lot of buzz on Twitter and stuff of people implemented something similar. We, we did this. and we actually ended up, we, we did pretty good AB testing on that and we ended up with, very similar results to what they, what they had, which I think they had an uptick of about 23%. I think, of, of free trial starts and ours was right around there. It was like, you know, 23, 20 5% increase in starts, you know, so it was good from that perspective. And, you know, they, they also found that it was just good from like a transparency and openness perspective, you know? Kind of building that trust and, and, you know, the reminder and the whole thing put people at ease and, you know, and that ultimately helped increase conversion. [00:34:28] **David:** Did it have any impact on your, on your trial conversion? So did you see a commensurate drop in conversion rate when you reminded people to cancel? [00:34:38] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, I w I was actually, I was actually afraid of that. That was the, that was my biggest fear going into this. It’s like, Hey, you know, we’re basically telling people, Hey, cancel if you want to cancel, but it really did not seem to have a significant impact on, you know, it seemed overall it was a, it was definitely a negative. [00:34:54] **David:** Wow. Yeah, that’s impressive. And it just goes to show, I mean, you know, there’s a lot of apps out there and for a while, you know, Apple wasn’t policing subscription paywalls very much. And so there were some like really shady tactics and, you know, a continue button with no mention of price and, and things like that. But it’s like those. So far, right? It’s like, you know, maybe you capture that one year and you know, you. Increase your short-term revenue, but you’re not, you’re not building true fans. You’re not like, you know, growing a sustainable business. You’re, you’re just like setting yourself up for high churn. and so it is really cool that that strategies, like this ended up not impacting the conversion rate because you’re, you’re. Being upfront, you’re being honest. You’re being like, you’re, you’re filtering for the users who are really going to care. And then I, you know, hopefully, and ideally, you know, you’re going to see that in your retention numbers, longterm, by being upfront like that, versus like tricking people into subscribing and then just having him turn out. I don’t, I don’t think we, you put any, any retention numbers in. In the kind of notes that we were gonna talk about today, but, off the top of your head, putting you on the spot again, off the top of your head, like how has retention gone pretty well for you? [00:36:12] **Jeff:** Yeah, we’ve, we’ve been, we’ve been really happy with our, with our retention numbers. I think that’s one of the things that’s allowed us to grow our subscriptions, you know, from that initial kind of 1000 bump to what pushing, pushing what 9,000 or 9,000 today, something like that. I don’t actually have the percent retention number off the top of my head though. [00:36:31] **David:** It’s something you should be thinking about day in, day out, but it’s actually, I mean, it’s a good sign that it’s not something you’re as focused on. I mean, a lot of developers I talk to are, you know, have very high retention and that’s a, that’s a huge focus for them because I mean, very low retention, very high churn. And, and it’s, it’s more top of mind, you know, when, when you are kind of bleeding out users. so the fact that it’s not top of mind for you, it’s probably a good sign. There are a couple of other experiments he did that. I thought that were especially interesting. and it, and it’s great that you’re actually like, you know, trying to measure the lift and like doing this more systematically. I’ve never been good at that over the years. but one of the other ones was, changing out your App Store screenshots. So tell me about the impetus behind doing that and then how you actually, created new screenshots and tested that. [00:37:23] **Jeff:** Yeah, go, go ahead, Mark. You want to talk about working with the designer? [00:37:26] **Mark:** The screenshot. Yeah. So it started. The screenshots when the app launched for this created by Jeff and just got a lot of talents, but I don’t, he’s not a, not a designer. but they served their purpose. they’re totally fine. but over time, you know, you’re just looking at little, little hits you can improve on. And, we decided to make them, you know, a bit more pretty, and, and in line with our audience, so yeah, I engaged a designer who was over in the UK and he was great to work with. And, much larger project or took longer than we had anticipated just for screenshots, but it took a while for us to come up with the right language and, imagery and so forth. But, they turned out really well. It just gives the app a bit more of a policy. Look when people do land on the App Store and take a look at the screenshots a bit more professional and polished. and then Jeff, I believe has some numbers. He ran a little bit of some AB tests based on the old screenshots, which. [00:38:32] **Jeff:** Yeah. So, it was actually great timing because right about the time that we were coming out with the new screenshots, I think Apple launched their, AB testing within App Store connect to do so. So we decided, you know, let’s go ahead and actually do a formal AB test and answer. You know, what kind of lift are we got from these new screenshots compared to the old ones and the way they do it, you know, you can, you can go out there and you can you’ve got the old screenshots, put the new screenshots. You say, you know, Hey show the old screenshots to 50% show of the new screenshots, 50%. It runs over. Period of time until it gives you like a high confidence rate and it, and it tells you like, what percent better, you know, or the new screenshots compared to the old ones, as far as, impressions to app downloads. And we got, we got a 10% lift, from the new screenshots. I actually kind of thought it might be a little bit more than that, but, I know some different people have had mixed things to say. I think about the, the screenshot stuff in App Store connect, but, you know, it, it seemed to work pretty well for us. [00:39:36] **David:** That’s awesome. did you just do like one new set of screenshots and AB tested that? Or have you have you now since like dramatically changed the messaging or tried like a whole different design or a different color scheme or, you know, have you done some other kind of dramatic tests to kind of validate, those being the best ones? [00:39:55] **Jeff:** Yeah, we actually did this whole screenshot, redesign just a few months ago. So yeah, we would definitely like to do some, some more things, some color testing, you know, you can even, you know, an App Store connect, you can change the, your icons, right. Have different color icons, have different icons. We, we definitely like to do some of that in the future. [00:40:14] **David:** Gotcha. another thing you talked about is, improving the share card. and I don’t, I don’t think you put any hard numbers on it, but social sharing is one of those really tricky things. I’ve tried it in so many of my apps. And, and not seeing much success. but I also haven’t, it hasn’t been as good of a natural fit compared to a fitness app where you’re, you’re sharing a run and there’s like, you know, Strava has done really well within other fitness apps have done really well with it. So yeah. Tell me about kind of the thought behind. Improving that experience. And then, you know, were you able to measure the results on that or just kind of get a gut feel that it was improving word of mouth by, having more people share their runs out of nuns run. [00:41:03] **Jeff:** Yeah. You know, I think it’s. I’m not sure I could give you hard numbers. I think it’s more of a gut feel, but you know, for us, the biggest impact I think with the share cards was, was within the community itself because the Facebook group, the mighty networks group, you know, are, pretty active groups and people, you know, people post on there on a regular basis. And what we want to do is we want it to provide them like an easy way to, Post either, you know, their workout stats, maybe just by themselves, maybe along with a, with a photo, a lot of people will take like a selfie while they’re running or after the run or whatever. I added something in there where you could, shows the workout stats and you can type it and just type a little caption, you know, so they could just type whatever they want to say. And it just shows up in there or, you know, that sort of thing. So, When we, or on the Facebook and mighty networks groups, it’s there, you know, people are doing that all the time. You know, it’s, it’s really popular within that. So I think all it can do is, is really kind of help build, build a community on, you know, on the other hand, I actually started share cards in Intervals pro and I think I’ve kind of seen which what you’ve said there, you know, people don’t people use it, but they don’t use it. Tom, you know what, you know, once in a while, I’ll get a app mentioned on Instagram or something from somebody sharing something. But, It hasn’t been a huge driver. [00:42:25] **David:** Yeah, there’s gotta be like a really natural fit and that, and it is really cool that even though it’s somewhat like preaching to the choir, maybe it is kind of a self-reinforcing thing is that, you know, not everyone in the community is a subscriber. and so seeing. The sharing within the community itself is like a constant reminder of like the value of the app and the importance of it. And, and how helpful it is. I imagine, you know, to, to be fit and, and grow and everything like that. So, and you know, that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about from like a freemium strategy perspective. In, in another question I didn’t think to ask before is the balance of free features to what you put behind the paywall, because this is a great example of. You know, you’ve got, you know, whatever it is now, 30,000 people on the email list and you’ve got a big community around it. and for some apps, it can work really well to build up this free usage and then kind of Market to those users. So if, if you know, if there’s enough, free stuff where people can really get some value and, and, and become habituated to the app and, and become users. But then there’s enough value that you put behind the paywall that there is incentive to actually pay. Then you, can you just have this, like built-in Marketing to just pick people off over time. I think, you know, all trails is a good example of that. Where there’s enough free, stuff that you don’t have to subscribe, but, and they have a massive, you know, free pool. And, but then over time they just pick those people off. And so, you know, when you have, for them, you know, tens of millions, maybe hundreds of millions now of these three users, they, they’re just such a fantastic Marketing channel because they’ve already experienced some of the value and then asking them to pay for a little more value, just make so much. So I’ve kind of spoil it if you all are using a different strategy, but I’m curious like where, where y’all draw the line and how you think about that [00:44:25] **Mark:** Yeah, I can start Jeff Ray. Now we just offer one free workout, on any of the, of the three plans so that they don’t get much. but where, like you said, all trails provides that experience all within the app, we provide all the three stuff outside the app. so, you know, maybe we should experiment more that it’s inside the app, but it’s all provided outside of the app. So if they want, if they want the plan for free it’s available, if they want audio files like a podcast version of the plan with, me speaking in their earbud saying, run now walk now that’s, that’s free. That’s available. we’ve got strength and mobility workouts. That’s all free and available outside the app. So a lot of the materials inside the app. So. Where people go into the community more and more. And I think some of them just eventually to be honest, get sick and tired of seeing the share cards and not being involved in the app. And they’re like, I might as well use the app because I’m not, I’m not in a club. I’m not in the cool club. So [00:45:22] **David:** Crazy. Yeah. [00:45:24] **Mark:** Kind of do that, but it’s just not in the app. [00:45:26] **David:** Yeah, no, that, and I mean, back to the, the Marketing piece and the blog post resonated everything y’all doing, like, it’s such a fantastic strategy that you’re building a lot of value outside of the app, but then there’s so much value in the app that it’s, it’s a great funnel. So, yeah, so it sounds like you are, Giving away a ton of value so that by the time people come into the app, they recognize that value and are more willing to pay more willing to start to [00:45:54] **Mark:** Yeah, I do the autonomy. We get a snarky rating review about the price, and I do try to jump in and remind them like, listen, like here’s all the free stuff that’s available to you. Go ahead and use it. But you know, the app we need to charge for [00:46:10] **David:** Yeah. what is your price? This is that something I actually didn’t look. [00:46:13] **Mark:** Alright. our price currently is 35 99 USD annually, or 5 99, a USD on a monthly basis. [00:46:23] **David:** Cool. Yeah. Not, not terribly expensive compared to a lot of other fitness apps. And compared to the value you bring, is that something you all experimented with as well? [00:46:33] **Mark:** We’ve done a little bit. We’ve sprayed them slightly from when we launched. Yeah, Jeff, you can come. And probably we did do a little. [00:46:40] **Jeff:** Yeah, it’s, it’s a little higher than when we launched, but we did, we did have a period of time when we tested a higher price point and it, it seemed to be right now that, that price point that we’re we’re at right now, it kind of seemed to be the sweet spot, [00:46:52] **David:** Yeah, that’s great. well, we’re gonna wrap up here in a little bit, but the, the last kind of experiment, that I wanted to, talk through, is this a quick straw start button? So, you on Twitter share. that you borrowed it from, Chris Herbert of slopes. but I think it’s a, it’s a really cool thing. I wish, I don’t think he had implemented that before we talked on the podcast. I wish I would have gotten to talk to him about it. so I don’t know that most of our listeners will be familiar with what we’re talking about. So why don’t you tell me Jeff, like what the, what this quick trial start button means, and then what impact you saw from it? [00:47:30] **Jeff:** Yeah, so th this has been an interesting experiment that’s ongoing right now. cause we just, I just kicked it off here at the beginning of the month. So it’s, it’s definitely a work in progress, but you know, it was inspired by a couple of different things. The biggest thing was. You know, Curtis is great. He’s got slips diaries. I think his latest one was called something like building ramps, not walls. And, the other thing that I kind of mixed in there at the same time was You know, as we mentioned, we’ve got a monthly and a yearly subscription and, you know, another growth hacking technique as to, as to maybe, you know, guide people toward the yearly subscription. So we kind of combine those two things in, in this experiment. So, you know, to kind of set things up, you know, we’ve got a, just a simple. one onboarding screen and then the next screen is, is an onboarding paywall. it actually, most trial starts happen during onboarding. So. 20% that, that we talked about about 18% actually subscribe, during the onboarding process, but that still leaves a good amount of people that have not, you know, subscribed to the app. And Curtis had a couple of key ideas, you know, I think the one was, you know, ask for the sale. So, you know, it was kinda, kinda, kinda obvious, but you know, a lot of, a lot of devs are hasn’t, it’s actually. ask you to subscribe. Right? So, you know, the other thing was the whole idea of building ramps, not walls. You know what paywall is, is a wall, make it, make it easy for, users take advantage of this free week, whatever kind of free trial that, that you have. So, you know, what he did was in kind of what a couple places, Maine. Tabs in his app, he has a little quick subscribe card, you know, with basically just the bare bones, kind of a call to action, redeem your free week, you know, what the price is. And the genius part of that was when you tap that, it just directly starts the Apple in that purchase. Flow where traditionally, in fact, that’s, that’s the thing I don’t, I’m not even sure would have occurred to me because I’m still kind of have my old school, you know, Apple subscription rules from a couple of years ago, but things have kind of changed over the years. Right. you know, so I would have. Thrown them right into our big paywall, but what does that do that gives them a whole nother screen to process and, you know, just make it it’s, it’s a free trial, make it easy for them to, go ahead and start the free trial. so, you know, it removes a step of the process and. You know, it’s been successful for us. we definitely have had, you know, over the, I don’t, we kinda mix a couple of different ideas together, but probably, you know, I do, I do have stats on, you know, we’ve probably got close to what, a hundred subscriptions from that over the past couple of weeks, from, from the. Subscribed. The other thing about the quick subscribe is that it just subscribes you directly to the yearly. Now there is a link in there to learn more that does bring up the free paywall and you could, you could see both, but at the same time, I also changed that Blinkus style seven day. Trial paywall to just show by default the yearly subscription. And then there’s a link under that to see more, you know, see all the plans and then that, that animates in the monthly and the yearly. that’s actually been the biggest change because before our mix of yearly and monthly subscriptions was 56% year. And after, you know, making those two changes. So changing that blanket style paywall and adding this quick subscribe over the past couple of weeks, our yearly subscriptions are now 76%. Versus 56%. Now, one of the things we’re interested in is making is seeing how this affects, conversion pain. Right? so that, the jury is kind of still out on that, but the early indications are, is, is that things look good there as well. So, you know, I think it’s a, it’s definitely a net win for us and, you know, the yearly plan we’ve we definitely see, you know, using revenue category. We could see since you guys recently added the longterm value, which is great, you know, it’s like first thing we did is like, what’s our longterm value of our yearly subscribers versus the long-term value of our monthly subscribers. And even though our yearly subscription is half the price of the monthly, you know, we have a better long-term value for those, for those yearly subscription. So, so we have better LTV and if they’re doing a yearly subscription, saving 50%. So it’s, [00:52:09] **David:** Yeah. Yeah, that’s great. I think part of it too. I like framing of that, quick start button, is that instead of like start your free trial, it’s redeem your free week. I like that kind of reframing that, that Curtis did and, and y’all using, and, and I I’m keen to use it in my app as well. For an app that delivers value. You really, it’s not just a free trial. You really are like giving them value. You know, like with my, a weather app, for example, I hate costs us every time somebody opens the app and then, you know, we’re introducing widgets and Apple watch complication soon and like, does it really expensive? And so, you know, we’re, we’re giving them value for free. So it’s not just a free trial. It really is a value exchange where we’re giving them. So I really liked that reframing of redeem your free week versus start a free trial. So I think that’s really cool as well. well, any, any, final thoughts as we wrap up, usually, you know, guests are hiring or, you know, have something to pitcher or something like that. But anything y’all want to share as we wrap up, I really appreciate y’all being so open, you know, kinda like Curtis. I appreciate y’all. kind of opening, opening the kimono as it were, and, and being so, specific about the, the exact, you know, things that you you’ve seen in percentages and revenue and that kind of stuff. So I appreciate all of that. but yeah. Any thing else you want to share as we wrap up? [00:53:41] **Mark:** Nothing really for me. If anyone’s interested in running, check out the website and nonetorun.com. If they have any questions they can email me Mark@NoneToRun.com. Also, just quickly give a shout out, we’ve talked about Curtis a few times, but I wanted to thank him because right when I started working with Jeff I actually emailed him a few times about a survey that he sends his customers and a few other little tidbits, and he happily shared his time and expertise with me. So thanks to him. I’m sure he’ll probably be listening to this podcast. Jeff, anything from your end? [00:54:15] **Jeff:** Yeah, definitely ditto as far as Curtis goes. Another one is a Ariel from App Figures. Everything I’ve learned about ASO, I’ve learned from Ariel. He’s got great content videos, blog posts, and stuff like that. That’s about it. If there’s anybody from Apple listening out there, we could use some Apple love in the promotional space. [00:54:39] **David:** Apple does listen to the podcast. [00:54:41] **Jeff:** We’ve got a little bit of that for Intervals, but we haven’t seen any of that for None To Run. [00:54:46] **David:** Yeah, I did see your icon—your Apple watch icon—was shown at WWDC. That’s pretty cool. [00:54:54] **Jeff:** That was definitely a bucket list thing. That was one of those where they have thousands of watch icons flying past the screen, so I had my sub-second of fame there for the app. [00:55:07] **David:** Yeah, that’s fantastic. Well again, thank you all so much for sharing. It’s just such a unique business, a unique approach to app growth, and unique approach to marketing. I think even some of the biggest apps out there have something to learn from some of these strategies that y’all have been working on. So again, thank you all so much for sharing and, that’s it. [00:55:31] **Mark:** Thanks, David. [00:55:32] **Jeff:** Thanks.