On the podcast I talk with Ryan about the TikTokification of video ads, how partnerships help increase the value of premium subscription tiers, and why you should be thinking about retention, not just downloads, when working with influencers.
Top Takeaways
🗣️ User acquisition can be more challenging for apps with niche audiences, which is why you should focus on channels where you can target by interest and search.
🎯 SEO feeds the retargeting funnel more than it drives direct conversions — but keyword data is valuable for product positioning.
🤗 Influencer marketing is extremely effective across the whole marketing funnel — from acquisition to retention — helping to build trust and authenticity.
🦾 Marketing automation is essential for educating users how the product will improve their life once they've gotten into it — especially for more complex products.
🖥️ Apps make more money from web subscriptions, so retarget users to drive them to sign up on the web rather than mobile.
About Ryan Watson
👨💻 Director of Growth Marketing at onX
💡 “Our motto is: ‘We want to awaken the adventurer in everyone.’ It’s very focused on the experience that they're having, and not just how the tool operates.”
👋 LinkedIn | Twitter
Links & Resources
‣ Work at onX
‣ onX on LinkedIn
‣ onX on Twitter
‣ onX on YouTube
Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club
Episode Highlights
[1:47] Hunting origins: Ryan takes listeners through the background of onXmaps, Inc., the market-dominating subscription app you might not have heard of if you’re not a hunter.
[7:03] Find the product fit: If you’re looking to build a business, look at underserved niches.
[13:34] Easy and hard: Narrow niches come with their own challenges.
[18:00] Channel selection: Targeting via interest is crucial to marketing to a niche audience.
[19:34] SEOperation: SEO does convert, but more importantly feeds the retargeting funnel.
[21:18] Secret channels: Ryan shares some of the more successful channels that might not be considered at first.
[22:41] TikTokification: Short form video is on the rise — how do you leverage that “escape-style content”? There’s still a market for long form podcasting too.
[27:08] Influencer culture: Working with a large number of the right influencers is important for authenticity, but sometimes in-house video works better. What’s crucial is a constant flow of video.
[29:17] Retention: People don’t think about retention as much as they should, Ryan says. Ads can actually be a retention strategy.
[31:39] Howdy, partner: Elite members get special deals. For onX, it’s about “provid[ing] true value of what matters to your audience,” Ryan explains.
[36:23] End-to-end: It’s all about figuring out your creative door-opener for getting people interested in your product.
[40:03] Personnel balance: Having a strong in-house creative team versus hiring from outside is a personal preference, and depends on the product.
[40:44] MMP: Ryan talks all things experimentation on ATT, SKAdNetwork, organic lift, and directing traffic between the web and the app stores.
[45:13] Bundling: onX believes in specific concept-based apps for specific users. Sometimes there’s cross-conversion.
David Barnard (00:01.118)
Welcome to the SubClub 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. SubClub is brought to you by Revenue Cat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust Revenue Cat 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. My guest today is Ryan Watson, Director of Growth Marketing at Onyx. Ryan has been working on marketing at Onyx for over seven years, helping to grow the original Hunt app and also launching innovative new apps in the outdoor navigation space. On the podcast, I talk with Ryan about the tick-tockification of video ads, how partnerships help increase the value of premium subscription tiers.
and why you should be thinking about retention, not just downloads when working with influencers. Hey Ryan, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today. Awesome, thanks for having me. So I wanted to kick things off. OnX is one of those subscription apps that's huge, but so many people in this space haven't heard about it. If they're not into hunting, if they're not into kind of outdoor ATVs, snowmobiling, and all the cool stuff that OnX works with.
So why don't you just kick off by telling us a little bit about the company and how it was founded and how much it's grown over the last decade plus. It's a pretty incredible story. Sure. Yeah, it's a really cool story. So the story goes the founder, Eric Siegfried, is a local born and raised Montanan, lived out in Eastern Montana. And if you use one of our maps, go ahead and zoom over to Montana, Wyoming.
David Barnard (02:03.594)
out in the middle of it and look at the map and you'll see it looks like a checkerboard. So there's a checkerboard of yellow, which is BLM land, and then you'll see privately owned parcels and it literally looks like a checkerboard. And Eric was a hunting guide, grew up hunting out there. And the main thing to know about the American hunting legal side of things is you need to be...
it's very, very important that you're legally accessing land. Otherwise you can run into some pretty serious like trespassing tickets and it's pretty severe penalties for not being on the right side of the law. And that's really hard if you don't have your understanding of the geospatial area you're in. So in those areas that's all checkerboarded or you're in an area that might have no fences,
that delineate public that is accessible without permission or private land that you need permission to hunt. And if you take an animal in that private land, and then you're caught, it can be very serious. So being out there, a lot of the Western hunting states are very similar like this. Eric was sitting on the front of his truck with a paper map of the private land parcel he got from the county office.
and a forest service map and a BLM map. And he's trying to make sense of all of these maps, these paper maps. I'm like, well, if I'm right here, can I go over this hill? It's very difficult to navigate. And what if the land's out of date? What if your map's out of date? So there's all these stresses in figuring that out. And so Eric, being an engineer, he was like, well, I'm pretty sure I can gather this data.
that exists for Montana. There's a private land parcel database that has all the geospatial data. There's a forest service downloadable map that I can use. Why can't we just combine all these and also add like topography maps and satellite imagery maps? Like, why not? And so he basically took all of that data, put it into a format that could be uploaded onto a GPS SD card and be uploaded into a Garmin GPS unit.
David Barnard (04:26.126)
And so then you had these maps that you could be literally standing on the ground. And this was revolutionary at the time. You'd be standing on the ground looking at your exact position relative to the property lines, which is a game changer for hunting and also helping you to find access points you might not have known existed. Right. You can look at those maps much differently. So anyway, the product was initially just selling these little tiny micro SD cards.
And, you know, they had the big campaign, get the chip, right? And so he brought this chip as a product to, you know, sporting, sporting goods stores and sold out like immediately in Montana and people were immediately starting asking from other States. This is literally a story of like the tightest product market that you could ask for, for a, for a very obsessive group of people, hunters are very objective oriented. You're trying to, you know, you're trying to harvest an animal.
You know, it's very, and hunters are a crazy breed. Let me give you a little bit of background and just an example of like how a hunter thinks. If a hunter is going to buy a new truck, he is oftentimes thinking about how he can use that truck for hunting. It's not, I need a new vehicle. It's I need a vehicle that can get me into the back country or can get me where I need to go because I wanna go hunting this fall, right? And so like everything hunters usually think about is in advance towards hunting season. It's always in the back of our mind.
And so if you get a tool that gives you an advantage or allows you to pursue your game in a more effective way, we're all about it. And so this was a super awesome tool. So the chip basically funded the production of the mobile app, because Eric knew that eventually these cell phones would become much better from a GPS unit technology. And fast forward to today when now Apple has
satellite communication abilities on their new iPhones. The technologies just really made the need for a GPS unit almost obsolete. And so now we've built out a very robust hunting app and dominate the market from a subscription perspective and a market share perspective from the hunting side. We're building out more apps that also use similar data sets that empower other activities
David Barnard (06:50.558)
off-roading, ATV, dirt biking, all of these other things. We're using this like really powerful mapping technology to service these super fanatic and really fun lifestyle groups of customers. It's pretty awesome. Yeah, that's a fantastic story. I actually wasn't even aware of how far back that went. And you know, it's one of those things that's a great reminder for folks in the subscription app space. If you're looking to build a new business, if you're looking to build a new app.
some of these niches are just are still to this day, so underserved and it's amazing how starting with such product market fit by finding a niche can build a really big business. Before we dive into, more into marketing and stuff, I did want to talk about hunting. So I think a lot of our audience probably has, doesn't know a hunter has ever been hunting themselves, kind of more tech focused. A lot of people don't know, I actually grew up hunting and fishing and you know, it kind of instilled in me.
better understanding of that culture and then the respect for the animal, the respect for the outdoors. It's funny too, because like you think of hunters as like polar opposite of kind of a Silicon Valley, like Uber left, you know, liberal, whatever. But a lot of the hunters I know are the most into conservation and land and like renewable resources and those kinds of things. And so I think a lot of people don't really understand the culture of it and the respect for the animals and stuff. So
How do you talk about your business and your, your life as a, as a avid hunter to the average kind of, you know, techie who hasn't ever experienced that before? For sure. Typically, and I get this question a lot, working with people in the technology space. So like, why would you kill something to eat it? And the first question I asked them was like, did you have a sandwich this morning with any lunch meat in it? You know, there's, there's a, like a lot of this kind of misconception about where you're
comes from. And I think that in a way, having the responsibility of having your hands be the one that end up taking the animal's life and then feeding yourself adds a level of like respecting responsibility that is lost to our culture today, that is basically fed by factory farming and factory agriculture. And so it's different. And so people don't...
David Barnard (09:11.874)
And that's really hard to describe. And so I'll go into that a little bit, but what I like to do is actually shift away from kind of like the primal, like historical heritage side of things. I actually go straight into like biology. So nowadays the human population is too big for us to have a purely natural world. If you want animals to have the best lives that they can possible and, and honestly have the best life that they, that they can.
We have to manage their populations because there is not an infinite amount of resources for them. If elk herds become too big, and this has happened in Colorado, you can Google elk starvation, like disasters that have happened in the past. The population gets too big, they overfeed on the resources of the land and they end up mass starving to death or ends up being diseased that wipes out many more of their population. And so...
hunters play a very important role and we're very in tune. Most people don't even know this is that state agencies that are in charge of managing these populations of animals, whether that's black bears to white tail deer to elk, to moose, certain types of birds are all very plugged into how those populations are doing. And they use the hunters who pay for a tag, which is essentially a tax to go hunt those animals and.
decrease the population and keep that population at a sustainable level so that those animals can continue to live. And it's all trying to manage and balance that ecosystem that those state biologists work towards. And the hunters are a big part of that. And those tags that we buy go back, right back to the conservation of those animals. Every, there's a law that's escaping right now. Pittman, I can't remember, I have to find it. But there's a law that's a federal law in Congress that if you buy a bow.
You buy ammunition, you buy a rifle. A small percentage of that also, of all of those sales of like camo, even camo or hunting clothes, hunting boots, a small percentage of every purchase also goes back into conservation for these animals. So from a biological perspective, North America in particular has had the best track record of keeping their populations alive and healthy. And that's in part due to the hand that hunters play in it.
David Barnard (11:33.214)
Now back to kind of like the emotional heritage that it brings, you know, I think it's very, like I said, it's very special and important to know where your food comes from. And if you're fortunate enough to hunt, not everybody can hunt, it's not sustainable for every human to hunt in America. And I realize that. If you're fortunate enough to hunt, you end up having the best organic food that you can bring to your family's table. It's extremely healthy. The animal that you're taking is oftentimes taken.
in a much more ethical way, if you look at the pain that the animal could have, if it dies from old age, or being eaten by a predator, an arrow or a well-placed gunshot is a very honorable way to go. And so if you kind of think about all of those things and culminate, there's actually like way more depth to the hunter. And I think Hollywood has done a huge disservice to, you know, painting hunters as these bloodthirsty trophy hunters.
The reason why you want to hunt a big bull elk, a big trophy elk, is so that he exits the gene pool and so that younger bulls, bull elk, can actually spread their genetics. Because if you don't kill the larger bulls, their genetic pool becomes less diverse. So there's even a reason for trophy hunting to be actually good. Right. There's a lot to it and hopefully people listening can take a little bit away before we get into the marketing side of things.
So on the marketing side, one of the more interesting things to me about OnX is how clearly defined your audience is. And so I'm just wondering how, how you think about that as far as kind of your broader marketing, you know, if you, if you've got a fitness app, like kind of everybody could be into fitness or a weight loss app. It's like, you know, you have people from all different walks of life who need to lose weight, but with OnX,
onyx hunt specifically, and then you have the onyx off road and a couple of other products, but it's just such a narrow niche with a clearly defined audience. How, how, how does that make things easier, but also harder? Yeah, I think, you know, I think broad, broader audiences like, like marketing Clorox, um, you know, or, you know, things that everybody needs is far more difficult in my opinion, from a like persona perspective with hunting.
David Barnard (13:49.654)
You know, there's estimates between 15 and 17 million people in the US. Canada is equivalent to one of our bigger states of a hunting population. So in the North American sphere, it's small comparatively to many other markets. Hunters, like I said before, are very fanatical. And so what you can really do is you can get deep into their psychology of like the objective that they're trying to do. If you've ever read the jobs to be done framework,
Harvard Business Review article, Google it, it's fantastic. It gives a great story about how a company was trying to market to homeowners to sell a certain product and it really goes into how the company missed actually the deep emotional aspect of what their product could do for people and how they were thinking and how they were perceiving and then how they changed their marketing in order to meet that.
And it was incredibly effective. Definitely recommend reading that. We apply a very similar thought process to, to that is a lot of hunters. Or are very family oriented. They want to pass this thing down to their children or there's, there's someone who's never hunted before, but it's super motivated because they listen to, you know, a Joe Rogan podcast about bow hunting and they got super interested in that and they have to learn this lifestyle. And so there's a lot of jobs to be done in the way that our product can help them.
achieve their goals. And so we really dive deep into who the person is, what their why is for why they get out into the woods and do the things that they do. And it's different. Some people travel into the Rocky Mountains from the eastern United States to hunt big game. And some people, and a majority of hunters, actually hunt in tree stands with like an ambush style of hunting in the Midwest and the South United States. And they all have
thing in common, but their tactics are very different. Their outcomes are sometimes drastically different. Maybe somebody just wants to have a good time with their kid. Maybe somebody legitimately wants to just feed their family because there's hardship going on and they can't, meat prices are going through the roof. Like inflation is a thing. And a lot of people feed their families with meat. A lot of hunters also donate a lot of the meat they hunt to...
David Barnard (16:10.902)
like causes to help feed homeless people, you know? So there is all of these really emotional, emotionally connected things that we really try to be at the forefront of with our product. Same thing with off-roading, which is our second newest or new, or sorry, our, we launched off-road after After Onyx Hunt. And that product is also a very fanatical group where we're targeting, you know, one of the subgroups of an off-roader is a...
a Jeep enthusiast and they are obsessive over wrenching, working on their Jeep. And that's also a heritage type thing. Working on your car with your children, a lot of fathers and mothers, now we've seen it, we've seen a lot of mothers even take on this role, is working, just working in the garage with your kid. And then taking that vehicle out and going on an amazing camp adventure that was really hard to get to up into a mountain lake, or you're down in Moab and you're going on the Slick Rock.
And so again, it comes back to, we're trying to empower people's adventures and really help them experience the outdoor world in a more profound and better way with more confidence. You know, we, our motto is we want to awaken the adventure in everyone. So it's kind of, it is very focused on the experience that they're having and not just what the tool operate, how the tool operates. Right. So, and I mean, I think learning and thinking through all of this.
aspects of it are very unique to on X, but other parts of it aren't right. It's like you're really understanding your audience first and you kind of are serving this core niche first. But then how, how does understanding that help with channel selection, you know, and, and even, um, I'm curious to know what channels are more performant based on, you know, understanding that audience understanding. You know, this is, so here's the challenge of the, of the
smaller, more niche audience, they're harder to find. The channels that work best are ones where you can target via interest. You can target via lookalike audiences. You can target via hashtags. So that lends itself to, you know, for demand generation and not search, looking at like TikTok, Facebook, Google YouTube, all of those ones that have high affinity data work really well for products like that. Obviously search, if people have a direct need, search is very powerful.
David Barnard (18:34.77)
for more niche products and niche audiences, because typically they're looking for something that's in adjacency or is directly what you're selling, which is really helpful. But yeah, so that's the challenge is, you'll test out and we have tested many, third party display video networks, many didn't work, but we found a few that their algorithms were good enough to find our customer. So I think what's helped us is to be really nimble and have a really solid creative team that's able to.
run a lot of tests and experiment and iterate quickly and try out a lot of networks. You mentioned SEO and I actually didn't have that in the notes, but I'm curious to know how that strategy has worked for y'all in the outdoor space and Altrail is kind of being one of the more famous examples. Everybody talks about how effective their SEO strategy has been for ONNX. Are people searching hunting maps or do you build out content specifically? Do you have like an SEO team that researches?
keywords and matching the content and that sort of thing? Yeah. So I directly oversee an SEO team. And they are always working on finding ways to build content. It's really valuable that will qualify the audience that comes in. So we have a robust retargeting structure and SEO does bring in direct conversions, but almost more so it feeds the retargeting funnel. And so
Like I said, it's hard to find hunters, but if somebody searches for, uh, what's an example, like deer shot placement where, you know, what's the, what's the best, you know, uh, you know, what's the best hunting boots, right? You know, that qualifies them as a, as a target, um, person, and that helps, helps with our funnels. And the funny thing back to the story of Onyx is, you know, the first, you know, the founder knew that Google would be, you know, a primary for
primary acquisition channel for this. So he actually ended it before it was Onyx Maps. It was actually Hunting GPS Maps was the name of the company, which was the keyword. And so hunting GPS maps.com, we own that URL. And it actually was the original URL for the hunting product, which is hilarious. It worked really well. It helped, it helped fuel his growth. It was a very smart move. I personally think that SEO, especially in these niche mark bits is somewhat undervalued, not just from like building content, because that is hard.
David Barnard (20:54.046)
But using keyword data to understand how your audience is thinking about certain things in order to position products, position features. If product teams are not tapping into search data to help inform them, I think that that's a, that's a mess. Are there any channels that you've seen be very successful that maybe you're a little out of the box that the average marketer, you know, might not have tapped into or tried? I mean, years ago, I've got almost like, really, you want to try Snapchat ads?
Hey, we got customers from it and it was a really good channel. We still spend on Snapchat. So I think that the big lesson there is that don't have any misconceptions about channel. Initially, especially with TikTok, and TikTok has been a great channel for us, people kind of like, well, yeah, but our customers aren't there. It's not on brand. It's just a bunch of kids on there. And it was not true.
David Barnard (21:53.226)
missed out on opportunities because they had assumptions about or, you know, maybe even biases against it. So I think as a marketer, you have to detach yourself, you know, from that and really, really have the open mindset to test things and never, you know, never let you know, you always have opinions, but always, you know, because have the humility to test your assumptions. Yeah, that's fantastic advice. And speaking of which, in prepping for the podcast, you actually brought up the word tick tockification.
that everything from Instagram and Facebook and elsewhere, video ads generally have been TikTokified. So tell me more about how you've seen that play out and then how effective it's been to kind of take some of those tools cross channel. We've definitely started noticing a trend. There were some talks at a lot of conferences about short form video being on the rise.
of even before TikTok really hit its growth curve, but it really materialized like way faster than everybody had sort of thought. So I think there's a balance, right? I think that there's a huge hunger for long form podcasts and long form YouTube video, YouTuber video content. And then there's a huge appetite for just distraction, short attention span, kind of almost like escape style content. I've noticed that like TikTok is definitely...
It kind of keeps people really engaged and people always say, I look up and I have 30 minutes has just passed. I think that might just be people like, honestly, like taking a mental break, whether that's good or bad for the human psyche, I don't know. But there's definitely a market for both and a very strong market for the short form video. I think of it as a need for marketers, especially as very technical marketers. I wouldn't classify myself as a creative. But
I think that the need to be more creative and be able to think about your advertising in new ways is starting to blend a little bit. I think the best marketers are going to be very data-driven, but also very creative in the way that they can work with video folks to produce things or work with influencers to produce and test things, but maybe even shoot them ourselves. I think sometimes the folks on my team, they've just done their own TikTok ads, and some of those have been our best ones.
David Barnard (24:15.182)
you're tapped into it, you're researching, you're studying it, and these short form videos are actually fairly lo-fi, right? They don't need a large production crew. I think that there is indeed still a time and a place for those higher production, higher fidelity. We have found that both low fidelity works and then some high fidelity, motion graphics, a lot of expensive B-roll, that does work. So it just depends on what your team is able to do.
And if your team is very small and you have very low creative resources, I think that right now is the time where you aim at UA managers can actually do a lot more than they think, uh, just because of the low fidelity of tick talk. Yeah. Have you seen that the kind of tick tock style infiltrate YouTube and, and Facebook and otherwise, like, are you, are you still like, when you think about the, the tick tock style,
kind of lo-fi video. Are you running those as ads on Reels, on the Facebook blue app, on YouTube, places like that? Are you like, you build the content and then just see what works like try them on all different channels. Yep. And it, and you know, typically it does really well. Now we have found there are slight differences in what works better for each channels. But in general, the theme of that short form, short form, low fidelity video works really well.
I think Facebook still has a lot of place for higher fidelity, more beautiful, kind of more experiential things, but that platform has many more ad placements. TikTok is very much feed focused, right? So we always say the concept can always be iterated upon inside the channel. So we find something that works. We will typically spread it around everywhere and then try to learn from it.
The other thing that's crazy is having three products is not everything translates the same from one to the other, right? You know, certain video styles or even like just like psychological concepts, like from a hunter to an off-roader are different. You know, so it's such a fun puzzle now. Your creative truly is your targeting is another thing that we've learned, you know, especially with ATT and all of the privacy stuff.
David Barnard (26:30.95)
that we had to go through as creative became far more important to be relevant to the audience, which, which was natural for us. But, you know, I think that that's a challenge that folks will have to do is use, try to use your video to qualify your audience. Yeah, that's great advice. How do you blend, um, influencer marketing with your video strategy? So like, what's, what's the ratio or maybe you don't have a specific ratio and maybe it varies by product and channel and stuff, but
How much do you use influencers in those videos versus, you know, either hiring out or having in-house people make these videos? Mm hmm. I mean, you can just look at our Instagram channel and you'll, you'll just see it right from the blue. We work with a lot of influencers. We think it's really important. One for authenticity, which I kind of, I don't really love the word authenticity because it's almost disingenuous when you say it. If you just are living the lifestyle, you're working with the right people.
authentic, but if you come into the world and say, we're so authentic, everybody just immediately is like, ah, cringe, you know. So I take that with a grain of salt. I think it's worth working with the right people and the people that represent your brand really well. And Onyx is very focused on doing that at scale. And so from macro level influencers, where we're sponsoring, you know, title sponsoring podcasts all the way down to micro influencers.
before anything, it is like the people that you work with will make or break you. And so, you know, we're really focused on that. And we use influencer video heavily. It has worked better in certain instances and other instances, and our in-house video works better in some instances and influencers. You know, it's just, it happens in flows. So it's a really powerful tool to have variety. And I think just with the monster that is these platforms, you need a constant flow of video content and influencers definitely help us with that.
And it's good for them to, you know, if they're a part of our marketing, they get exposure from our media dollars. And so it's a very beneficial relationship for these folks that want to make their, at least make some money or make their, make all of their money from social media influencers. And then how do you think about the kind of paying an influencer to reach their audience?
David Barnard (28:45.606)
in combination with also getting assets that you're going to use for ad placements, that you actually put money behind. One of the things I've seen a lot of people get super excited like, oh man, an influencer mentioned me and they've got a million followers or something. But it does seem like those, you kind of max out that audience pretty quickly. So how do you think about that blend between kind of reaching their audience and, but also kind of...
creating creatives that you can then use and spread more broadly? Well, it's, it's kind of an interesting question because people often don't think about retention as, as much as they should. And when we're working with a lot of these influencers, that social proof, even if it is paid, if they are genuine with how they're using the product, which ours is very easy to be genuine with because it's a, it's a tool. And if you're using the tool and they're teaching people how to use it, that extra
usage of it, even though we might have already tapped their audience and having them as literally ambassadors to your product is just great for retention because people are, they start to really associate the top tier with your app. And we are a performance-based organization, so dollars still have to be coming through, but some influencers give us value from just pure content that they give us and we don't actually grade them on how much money they're bringing through the door from a firm.
promo code or some sort of affiliate deal that we have with them. Because content is so valuable. We need photo content for our website. We have an SEO team that's building a, and writing team that's building blogs. We need photo assets, we need video assets, you know, so it's for other programs that are going across the organ. So those influencers also provide a vast amount of value to us in that way too. So it's not, it's not always, you know, an acquisition channel. It can be kind of a, kind of a whole, whole funnel, whole funnel channel when you think about it.
Yeah, that is a fantastic way to think about it. I never thought of ads as a retention strategy and especially partnering with really, I mean, and again, working in such a clearly defined niche, if you're, if, if you're working with some of the most influential kind of top-notch people in the hunting and off-road space, people continually seeing that's going to remind them, Oh yeah, next time I'm out, I need to open the app. Next time I'm going to go on an off-roading trip or
David Barnard (31:06.762)
those kinds of things. So that's a really great way to think about it. And maybe even influence kind of some of the creatives that you make as it realizing not all of our creatives are about getting people into the app. Some of them is reminding them to use the app. So that's, that's great. I saw a couple of ads where you, you do seem to have a lot of partnerships and I was curious how, how you manage those partnerships. Like there was one mentioning $200 off a dog training course.
How big is that kind of partnership program? And then do you also do affiliate marketing on top of that as well? Good question. So those programs are actually a pure benefit of being in our highest tier product. So if you're if you're an onyx elite member, you get access to these special deals from, you know, everything from a camo company, you know, to.
draw odds and hunting research company, even down to dog training like you saw for bird hunters. And that is in two ways. Obviously, it's to increase wallet share. We need to increase our revenue, but we want to do that by trading value to the customer. So we're not just raising our prices, we're actually giving you more value and hopefully maybe saving you money or giving you
David Barnard (32:28.17)
Other thing is also retention. If you have all of these benefits from this one tool that we have, but in addition, you get all these other perks, your lifetime value is going to increase because you wanna keep getting those benefits. And so from a, you know, that each deal with all of those organizations is obviously, you know, slightly different, they're negotiated. And so, you know, the way that those work is just different, but in all at the end of the day, it's all to provide the customer.
value so they feel good about upgrading or staying in the higher price tier. The higher price tier for Onyx is getting better and better and better. They're adding more features. There's going to be features that are specific just to that. And there already are features that are specific just to that tier. But truly, it comes down to a business principle of provide true value of what matters to your audience. And then as we go through this program, we'll figure out what's most important to the masses
hopefully continue to provide the best for all of our market segments. Can you share, I know you said each of them are negotiated and differently, but like what's a general kind of generic kind of affiliate and or this kind of partnership program look like? Like are you actually offsetting some of that discount? Are they looking at that discount as purely promotional?
What is that just in broad strokes look like to form these partnerships? What I think this is such a cool underexplored thing and it's really cool how y'all have these different tiers. And I think a lot of subscription apps over time are going to need to figure these kinds of things out to continue growing. Where you have the base here that's whatever like $30 a year and then you have the platinum tier that's like 60, 80, a hundred dollars a year. Yeah. So then what does that look like on a practical terms of how you think about
those deals and the exchange of attention and value and whatnot? A lot of times it just depends, right? Like certain companies, we will do something that's mutual. If we do, a while back, you might have seen it, we did a deal with First Light where there was a percent off. So if they're an elite member, they get a special promotional code and then they end up selling more products because of the...
David Barnard (34:50.514)
our audience is basically like awareness for their product and they, oh, I get a deal with this, this is great. They get more sales. We get more people interested in our product from their audience. It's like, you know, so sometimes they're very just, it's as simple as just doing a special deal for them through us. Sometimes it's a deal where we say, hey, we'll pay you a certain amount of money to give our users free access to your tool, right? Services are really important to people.
And that just makes it really simple for folks to be able to log in and have free access. And they feel, oh, gosh, this is great. I'm an Onyx member and I am afforded this free service, which is our customers really, really enjoy those. So it's everything in between. And we're actively trying to be more and more creative with these programs. We think that this will continue to grow and be a big part of what we do for our customers.
And how does having the tiered plan actually influence? I mean, I mean, it must influence so much from creatives all the way through onboarding to the paywall to everything else. Are there any kind of specific takeaways you have from, I mean, do you, do you like advertise, you know, the elite features versus advertising just the base plan features? Do you
onboard toward kind of maximizing ROAS by kind of onboarding toward the elite plan versus the base plan. How do you think about that kind of end to end? Yeah, it's, it's definitely an end to end, uh, you know, effort from the, from kind of the whole marketing, marketing team from user acquisition influencers to marketing automation, you know, and even into product. And so, you know, the, the higher tier is the goal of, uh, to get more people onto the higher tier and obviously more members in general.
And so a lot of what I tell people with a subscription app is figure out your door opener creative for getting people interested in your product. And that doesn't have to be that it may or may not be in the higher tier for us. One of our biggest draws is our land ownership, right? I mean, that's everybody talks about that for on X. Um, it's very easy door opener for people to check out the product from there. You have to figure out one is that if it's not enough to sell them on the spot, then how are you educating them?
David Barnard (37:12.49)
our influencers, a lot of what you look at on the internet is educational content, because our product is not super simple. And I've had conversations with folks in FinTech and sleeping apps where it's like education's kind of like the key once you get the person in the app is like, how should I be using this to make my life better? How should I be using your product? And oftentimes they're not that simple of a product. And so from an educational standpoint, you have to be thinking.
How are we educating from an omnichannel perspective or that's retargeting ambassadors or marketing automation? Because if you're just flashing sales and deals in front of people, that oftentimes doesn't actually get you the best users who become power users of your product. And so the elite tier is marketed very heavily, but we also very much focus on getting people to understand our product. And you'll...
you know, watch Andy Carville and features education around driving, you know, notifications and in-app messages to drive feature usage and feature understanding. They really preach that. And I think that there, you know, we adopted that early on and worked to basically, you know, playbook kind of the way that they did their things. We worked with them and it was great. So can't speak enough to like how
important marketing automation is. It is literally like, I'm more specialized in user acquisition, but I also built the foundation for our marketing automation system at OnX. And that's a huge part of our marketing. If you're a subscription app, you need to be thinking about, how do I get integrated with Braze or something like Braze and start engaging my people once they get into the product. Cause you can, I think you can just.
You can lean so far into acquisition and then your mid funnel just isn't strong enough. And then you're reacquiring users to reeducate them instead of like fostering a really good onboarding flow. This can also happen from product too. Really good product teams have the best onboarding experiences to get users to use their product in the best way that they can. So I think...
David Barnard (39:23.406)
I think you have to think of it. Your whole organization needs to be thinking about that whole experience. It really is like an experience from end to end. Yeah, and one of the things I wanted to dive into, we don't have a ton of time left, but on the kind of experimentation and measurement side, you've kind of alluded to this a lot, but I wanted to dig into the details a little bit around how you have all this set up. So let's just kick it off with, maybe we can do a little more rapid fire on this one, but...
What's your blend between in-house creative team and hiring out agencies and influencers and other stuff? Do you have a pretty big internal team that runs most of this? Yeah, Onyx has a strong in-house creative team. I think that if you can do that, that is usually my preference. I think that some agencies do really, really well. There's some fantastic ones out there, but depending on your product, the creative team being super close to your product is powerful.
it's definitely a differentiator. And then MMP, how do you, I mean, in 2023 with ATT and SK Ad Network and like all the other things going on, how do you manage the experimentation and really understanding the performance of your ads and it has incrementality testing and things like that work their way into your mix lately? Yeah, so MMP, we use Coachava and we work with them pretty closely on
utilizing kind of their whole suite of products now, because attribution is murky, but we're using their smart links on our, you'll see them all over our website to try and figure out like what's working there, trying to track people through different things. The big thing about once you get to a certain scale is incrementality becomes very, very murky and hard to really believe in, unless you have like massive amounts of money to spend on those big booms.
We typically are very, very focused on our rates. So install to trial, trial to purchase, and really being a tight communication with our market automation partners, I think that's really critical to, if you launch a new network and your rates don't change, but purchases grow, you can assume some incrementality there.
David Barnard (41:51.458)
But man, some of the incrementality tests that we have done with certain partners seem to come up a little short. But again, our audience is fairly niche. And so those larger incrementality tests are hard. Yeah. And how do you think about organic lift from Pay-D-U-A? When you do a big spend and really make a big push, do you see what appears to be people's...
increasing search results and just finding organic lift from those paid ads? Yeah, there's definitely, we call it the halo effect. We know it to be true. You can still see it, even though like ATT has happened, there's still like a little bit of data here and there to point to things. And in the web, we're lucky that we have a web funnel, which is much less affected by ATT. And so we can use search demand and our search prowess to
you know, kind of watch, watch the ebbs and flows of, of that organic flywheel. Yeah, that's great. And do you, do you notice, I mean, do you point specific traffic at the web and notice that performs better? And then you point some traffic to the app store because it performs better on the app store. What's, what's the kind of thinking between who you send to the web and who you send to the app stores? There are many instances where we try to get people to buy on the web. Obviously we get 30% more money when that happens. That's kind of,
critical, you know, we want we want more of that. We've we've been experimenting with a lot of a lot of things to get that up, you know, it's well known now that on X has made a switch to, you know, opt out trials, we have we've been testing those, you know, and so, you know, we're in the middle of this and I think that web and especially watching like Twitter making a different tier on web is kind of paving the way for people to start thinking.
even that drastic to have a higher price on Apple and a lower price on your website to try to draw that revenue in. But yeah, we do try our best to get those web sales. I think it's gonna be hard to beat install ads from just a top of funnel perspective, which inherently drives people to naturally go through your mobile flow. So there's always, that was always the challenge there is like, what is the most efficient for growth? And so we're still pretty,
David Barnard (44:15.01)
pretty heavy on the mobile for acquisition. But retargeting it's like, if you're gonna retarget somebody, why not send them to an area where they can purchase through a Stripe flow or something like that. I think that marketers need to be thinking about that. Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One last thing to wrap up, and this is a topic we could spend another 15 minutes on, but give me just an overview. As Onyx has grown, you now have Onyx Offroad. How do you think about...
the bundle and you know, we see a lot of apps kind of exploring, you know, even cross bundle where you get either two or three apps for an even higher price or, or for the same price, you get access to more apps. So there's kind of more value added. So how do you think about that bundling? And then even kind of a ROAS blend where if you're acquiring a customer in hunt, are they bleeding over and you're cross promoting to, uh, to the off road
where you're kind of double dipping on every ad doll you spend on either of the apps. Yeah. This is like a, I feel like a pretty common, probably a fairly common debate amongst app companies is do you build one app to rule them all? Or do you build multiple solutions? We really believe that Onyx in built for by kind of a concept. So, you know, an app specifically for if your passion is off-roading, if you're us, if you're a hunter, we build a specific app for you. The bundle, you know,
We'll see. I think this is always a business question that we need to ask is like, would it make sense to bundle? Would it provide value? Would more people upgrade for the, you know, for the foreseeable future? You know, I think Onyx is going to continue to focus on, on specific lanes for specific users. And then the last question there was, um, how do you view the ad spend? Do you view it kind of blended? Like, do you, do you see some kind of cross conversion from app one app to the other?
Yeah, we do see some of that. Sometimes we'll see an off-road ad pulling a hunt purchase. It's not massive that we can see, but it does happen. And it definitely could be something that we look at in the future. As the company gets bigger and more well-known, I think that there's going to be more of that maybe coming in from the top-level brand, people searching, what is this Onyx company? Or we saw the New York Times article about Onyx. What is this? And then they kind of choose their own adventure.
David Barnard (46:36.942)
whichever one they want. And then it's like, well, where do you attribute those dollars? So you know, we're thinking about that. I think that that's just kind of a natural progression of when you have multiple products that are somewhat similar in the way that they function from, you know, they're all three a GPS and mapping technologies there. Each one has different value for their specific person, but maybe one person maybe in the future, there'll be enough people to build some sort of bundle, but we haven't really, we haven't really gotten there yet.
as a company. Maybe we will in the future. We'll see. Well, I think that's a great place to wrap up a lot of, a lot of opportunity in, in multiple apps and overlaps and bundles and things like that. And, uh, you know, I think we're still so early in the, in the subscription app space. I mean, the, you know, the web is, uh, the playbooks have been written long ago for, for SAS and other stuff. Um, for this kind of consumer SAS and subscription apps, I feel like the playbooks are still being written. So there's,
There's just so much opportunity. I think what y'all are doing with the elite tier is really groundbreaking. And I can't wait to see, you know, what onyx does with bundles and other stuff. I think, you know, there's a lot of opportunity there. So, uh, thanks so much for joining me. I think there was so many great, uh, lessons people can learn, even if they're not in the hunting space, um, just from how you guys operate. So, so thanks again for taking the time. Absolutely. Yeah. It was a pleasure talking to you with David. This was really fun.
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