Making Web2App Work: From Basic Landing Pages to Complex Sales Funnels — Nathan Hudson, Perceptycs

David Barnard:

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

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me today, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Nathan Hudson, a two times former head of growth. This year's app marketer of the year and founder of Perceptycs, a full service growth agency for mobile apps focused on driving profitable user growth, retention and revenue. On the podcast we talk with Nathan about the strategic opportunity of web to app, how and when to use web to app and why one app found success using webinars in their web to app funnel. Hey Nathan, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Nathan Hudson:

Hey David, it's great to be here.

David Barnard:

Been meaning to have you on for a long time, so it's great to finally make it happen. We've talked about this for almost a year.

Nathan Hudson:

It's been a while. Long time coming. Yeah, just excited. One of my favorite podcasts. In fact, it is my favorite podcast.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, my God, come on. That's just pandering. I'll take it though.

David Barnard:

And Jacob, nice to have you on the pod today.

Jacob Eiting:

Thank you. It's nice to see Nathan again. We met in the YMCA weight room in San Francisco, but it's good to see you virtually and we didn't get a ton of time to talk when we were at RAGA in San Francisco, so I'm excited to dig in a little bit.

David Barnard:

Awesome. So the topic today is web to app. Been a huge topic of 2024 and I think going to continue to be one of the leading topics of 2025 for reasons we'll get into. But I think the first place to start out, because I think there is a lot of confusion around it, is what do we mean by web to app? How do you think about web to app and do you have an opinion on the spelling? Is it W-E-B, the number two APP or is it Web TO app.

Jacob Eiting:

You're asking the hard hitting questions, David.

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, that's tough. It's funny you say it because I was working on some content a couple of months ago and I wasn't sure whether to title it Web to App, T-O, Web2App, two. So I looked at how you guys named it at RAGA. I looked at loads of different posts and articles and I think that this web number two app is becoming the staple way of referring to web to app. I don't know if it's because Web T-O App is already taken.

Jacob Eiting:

No, it's just cool. It's like Boyz II Men, you know what I mean? It's like a hip thing to do, I guess.

David Barnard:

It is kind of funny that we're just making up words in this industry at this point.

Jacob Eiting:

I think all words are made up at some point, David, so it's like... But it has been a thing that kind of emerged organically. I've been aware of the concept for a long time, right? We even experimented with this kind of stuff at Elevate 10 years ago, but it's been in the last, I feel like 18 months when I finally heard so many people have been emailing me being like, you all have a web tap solution, what are you all doing for tap? And at first I was like, well yeah, you can use this and whatever, but I've come to learn it's actually kind of, it's a whole thing, right? And so yeah, what does it mean, Nathan, tell me finally so I know.

Nathan Hudson:

Well, good question. The reason I like to define web to app firstly is because I think there are a lot of people who just assume web to app means building one of those web onboarding quizzes.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, that's what I assumed. Yeah.

Nathan Hudson:

Most people I speak to, whenever I say web to app, they think, oh, so I need a quiz, I need onboarding journey. So I think just taking it a few steps back helps. And simply it's the process of converting traffic on the web or starting to convert traffic on the web before directing them to your app. So I like to think of it as wherever we are in the funnel, at some point in that journey we are going to leverage the web intentionally or unintentionally to help us convert users.

David Barnard:

So practical takeaways, you kind of mentioned a few there. A lot of people do do quizzes and it's super popular. We talked to Ladder on the podcast, they have a quiz, but practically do you have buckets of minimal web to app all the way to full web to app? Give me some examples of what you think of as web to app.

Nathan Hudson:

The quiz funnel is the most common. I think it's worth saying that it is the most common. But things like blog posts, directing Meta traffic or TikTok traffic to a specific blog post and then having people download the app from there, sending people from YouTube videos to long form webinars or videos, swept to app, at the end of the webinar you might sell the app or position, hey, we have a product, you can buy it on our site, all the way through to just basic landing page with a buy now button. So I think there are loads of different ways to slice and dice it and we can get into some of the rationale behind each of those and the use cases for those. But really I like to think that the basic setup is just we have a landing page and a sales page on the web and we're trying to sell, like an econ brand would, like a lot of SaaS products do. And then we kind of build around that based on what the user's looking for.

David Barnard:

So at the highest, highest level it's just having some function, some touch point on the web before people get to the app. And then you would even say the definition wouldn't necessarily even include that you're sending ad traffic to it. We talked to an app, None to Run, on the podcast, their main source of traffic was people searching alternative to couch to 5K and they had this one blog post that ranked really high for that. People went to the blog posts, then people go from the blog post to the app store to becoming a subscriber. So you would even lump organic traffic in that. It's just like creating a touch point on the web as people get to the app.

Nathan Hudson:

Exactly that. And I would say it gets, not vague, but it gets more complex in that I wouldn't even say that it has to be cold traffic or that it has to be people who haven't used your product. Oftentimes you can reactivate churned users via the web, whether that's an email campaign to churn subs, pushing them to the web to start a new trial or new subscription, still web to app. Maybe it's app to web to app, but it's web to app.

Jacob Eiting:

It's using the web as either some part of your acquisition funnel or retention funnel, right? And yeah, I think, I guess it's a good way to frame it because I think in my mind where we sit and how I've been thinking about this technology, from a technology perspective, it's like the purchasing and the quizzes and all of the things that have kind of become synonymous with this. But really you're talking about just using the web as this more open platform where you can own more of your distribution, which is always the problem with the app stores. The app stores, you have Apple search ads, you can do click to install ads I guess, but your ability to have control over your acquisition funnel is pretty limited and the web just gives you a ton of more tools that you can use. Like you were mentioning content and whatever, just good sales pages.

And then maybe it doesn't even include a purchase, right? It's just thinking about driving users to content and then content into the app, because people search stuff, right, on the internet, it's like a thing. And then of course we can talk, I guess we'll talk too about some of those more technical aspects of it actually converting and things like that.

David Barnard:

So all of that leads into why, which we kind of touched on that a little bit already, but why should apps be considering using the web more?

Nathan Hudson:

Again, we can do some more nuance, some more buckets. I like to break it down based on app size and app stage because I think there is a clear division between benefits for really massive apps or apps that have been around a long time doing multiple millions in monthly revenue versus smaller apps who are just looking to get their first acquisition channel going beyond organic ASO.

Now, for those smaller apps, I really think there are three benefits. The main one being cash flow, right, which is I don't have to wait so long to receive my money if I take the purchase on the web. Now, I've spoken to loads of people differing views, some people agree or disagree. There's a question of is it the fees, is it the attribution? Having worked with a lot of early stage apps who are just trying to get one paid channel working, they always have this issue of, well, even if I spend 3K this month, which is a really small amount and not advisable, but even if I spend 3K this month and make 50K, I'm not going to be able to spend that next month potentially, so I can't do anything, I'm stuck.

Jacob Eiting:

It interrupts your iteration cycles, right?

Nathan Hudson:

So I think that is by far the biggest advantage of testing on the web, when you're first launching a paid channel, you can just build that feedback loop and it's kind of what you want to do with a performance channel anyway.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. And even then then 3K can actually become enough money to learn something, right? Because you could even do $1,000 in acquisition, learn stuff literally in a day and then do an iteration. And then if you're using Stripe or whatever, I think they do almost same day payouts, right? So you can get that. I guess it's obvious in hindsight, but the combination of keeping 95% of your revenue net of fees and then on top of that getting it instantaneously is a huge windfall if you're cash strapped.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I've talked a lot about the fees and how small apps only pay 15% anyway on both Google and Apple. But that time value of money thing-

Jacob Eiting:

You talk about on the worst case scenario, the app store might be like 60 days net of spend or yeah, or-

David Barnard:

65 is the... Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you can imagine you're easily renting that money for that amount of time is 15%, right? A short-term loan is going to cost you probably nearly that. So the fee almost doesn't even matter at that point really, the 15% break. It's important but compounded together, I never really thought about that. That is huge.

David Barnard:

For small apps though, how do you think about conversion? This is something I've always been concerned about is for an app that has no brand, is there a reticence on the part of consumers to pay on the web for some random app they just heard about through a Google ad or whatever?

Nathan Hudson:

It depends. Typically, we don't see huge disparities on conversion between web and app. Oftentimes it's higher conversion on the web, especially if we're talking about low ticket subscription products and even more so for high ticket actually. But just for a second, if we talk about this low ticket products, yeah, it's not an issue. I think it can be the case that if you're directing traffic just to a landing page, as we spoke about before, and then trying to get people to purchase without a trial, without a quiz, without any context and your landing page really isn't that great, then yeah, you're going to struggle. But similarly, a lot of small apps have hardly any reviews and a hard paywall and are still able to convert organic traffic. So I think applying the same approach on web makes a lot of sense. And I think we talk about control, there are things you can do on web to make you seem more impressive than you are.

Jacob Eiting:

It's hard to stand out on the app store, right?

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's a really good point. When you have 10 reviews on the app store and maybe you had a bug in your 1.0 and so you're actually only rated 3.5 stars and you only have 10 ratings, it's like you can create an aura on the web that looks a lot more impressive than your 3.5 stars on the app store.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. And a good template for WordPress or whatever.

David Barnard:

So you mentioned there were several reasons. So we've gone through cashflow and fees. What are the next two things that you think about on why smaller apps should even consider a web to app?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, the next two are kind of linked. The first one is attribution. Now it's becoming less of a reason to switch to web to app. I'm specifically talking about mobile subscription apps that are pushing Meta as their first channel, oftentimes, at least from the founders and teams I've spoken to, beyond organic traffic, the first channel people think to try, it's an ASA maybe or Meta. And when it comes to Meta, when scan was the only way of attributing traffic, it was a real big issue. If you weren't spending 10K plus a month, you weren't going to hit your privacy thresholds, you weren't going to see your post backs and it was going to be a problem.

Now with Meta's AEM, aggregated event measurement, it's slightly different so it has leveled the playing field, but there is still an advantage of using web in that you can pretty much spend, as Jacob said, 1K and learn something, and that can be fine, and you can do that on web. I would not want to launch any kind of app promotion campaign with a 1K budget or a 2K budget just because I'd be pretty cautious about what we're going to get back in a given timeframe. So I think the fact that it's slightly easier to attribute on web, benefit three, means benefit four, I can spend less money as a smaller app to actually make some progress.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, actually you know exactly where those people were coming from, you know very well their conversion, you can really tell something about that. This is analogous, they're not the same, but back in my core mobile development days, it's like we used to soft launch apps on Android because we knew even just background noise on Android, we could get 500 downloads a day. And it didn't matter, we didn't need that many because we would launch a super busted version of the app and then we would get a trickle of downloads and we would just look at all, we'd literally watch the session replays for all 500 of those users and we would learn a ton. And it wasn't statistically significant, wasn't scalable, but it didn't matter because all we needed was to start that engine of information, that loop of iteration.

And that's kind of what you're talking about here. It's like you can spend small amounts of money, learn a little bit, and then you don't need to actually scale or actually make money. It's nice if you don't lose all of that money, but really the value there is the information because you'll make money when you scale it, right? That's the whole mission.

David Barnard:

On that front, how has Apple's changes to Safari impacted attribution for web to app? Because I know they're deprecating, cookies, all the privacy stuff that Apple has done in Safari, has that had an impact in that same timeframe that Apple introduced app tracking transparency?

Nathan Hudson:

A small impact, nowhere near as big an impact as ATT.

David Barnard:

Because you can still use UTM parameters, right? And Apple's not blocking those?

Nathan Hudson:

I think it'll be interesting to see. I always hear Google are onto something next or we don't know what's going to happen with all the rest of the browsers, but I think as long as we have UTM tracking, we can see what we need to see. We can go to mixed panel amplitude, we can see our users, we can, as Jacob said, dive in and watch those funnels. So I don't think it's been such a big issue yet, but it's definitely something that people I've spoken about are kind of wary of. But very few actually, David. I think you're probably only one of three people ever mentioned it.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's always Apple's kind of sometimes missing the mark. But anyway, UTMs are fairly inert, right? Because you encode them usually in the link you're putting into a campaign or whatever. So they're never all that targeted. They can't really convey personal information in them. You just get a bucket of people. And when I analyze attribution and inbound data for RevenueCat, we got ads and all kinds of other sources, it's just so much nicer to know where users came from. And I don't feel bad about it. It's not super creepy or anything like this. It's just like, oh, did they click on us in a search term? It's like, okay, that's nice to know.

And so I've always said this, I probably said it 20 times on this podcast, but this is with the app store conversion process specifically, but I feel like by Apple not allowing UTMs to flow through the app store download, they've actually made privacy way worse because basically all these adjusts of the world, don't want to talk ill of our trusted partners or anything like this, but basically the entire fingerprinting industry was created to circumvent the lack of UTM parameters on the app stores and if they had just allowed a little bit of privacy with the UTM stuff.

But I think it's worth highlighting, that's kind of one of the core advantages here is things attribution, you don't even need a partner for it, you don't need an MMP, you don't need anything. You just encode UTM params, make sure that's making it into your funnel or into your data side somewhere. It's really easy to break up your in-bounds and start to get qualitative, especially small numbers data on what's performing.

David Barnard:

This is a whole other podcast, but I would be interested for your take if you're willing to share. Facebook's AEM is essentially fingerprinting, and yet Apple lets it happen, which is the whole state of the industry is just bizarre to me because Apple made this big deal with app tracking transparency. Fingerprinting is against the rules. But Facebook, Adjust, AppsFlyer, individual app developers, other ad networks, everybody just moved to fingerprinting. Facebook's doing the best at it, but it's technically a violation of Apple's rules, but they're like turning the other cheek, it's just bizarre to me. Any thoughts?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, I was speaking about this with someone a couple of weeks ago. I love AEM, so let's start with that. I don't want it to go anywhere. I don't think Facebook are doing anything. No.

Jacob Eiting:

This is news to me by the way. I'm so bad at all this ad tech stuff.

Nathan Hudson:

It's crazy because there have been some big accounts that we fully migrated from Scan to AEM because it's that much more accurate. And it's like maybe four, five months ago, we would only really recommend it to smaller apps, smaller clients. Eight, 10 months ago it was really bad and shabby and wasn't really good. Now it's really strong. So yeah, whatever they've got going on, it works really well and I encourage anyone who's pushing app promotion campaigns to try that on Meta. But yeah, I don't understand why Apple haven't jumped on it, but I'm not complaining.

Jacob Eiting:

I'd have to look at the technology more deeply to understand exactly what it's doing. But again, it's like I don't think, we're getting probably off the beat here into industry news or industry prognostication, but I do think it's just sort of the understanding there's way too much economic value locked up if we don't allow developers to make some sort of understanding of the quality of the customers that they're paying to attract. You know what I mean? Everybody stands to benefit. If we can understand are the users I'm trying to bring into my product actually users interested in my product, there's just market efficiencies there that are generally, and when processes and growth of businesses are cheaper, generally that's good for the world in aggregate, right? So maybe Apple's silently wising up to this. It's good for them, it's good for developers, it's probably good for the people involved too as long as that data isn't being brokered a million ways to a bunch of do weird stuff. But I think that's maybe not the primary case.

David Barnard:

And that's what Apple broke with ATT. So I think it's like they maybe achieved their primary goal with ATT and maybe this kind of refutes previous conversations about how Apple specifically did it to break Facebook and to cash in and build their own ad network. And there was all these conspiracy theories early on that that's why Apple did it. But I've always maintained that it genuinely was a kind of privacy fundamentalism inside of Apple and they did achieve by deprecating the IDFA, it is way harder to build up a dossier on an individual user across multiple apps. And so Facebook using fingerprinting internally to Facebook is not giving them all this super private data and-

Jacob Eiting:

Well, it's not like Facebook doesn't have a dossier on all their users.

David Barnard:

Yeah, they already have it. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

You know what I mean? It's like, we already knew where you lived and who you dated, but now we actually know what running app you use. It's like what's the incremental damage at that point, right?

David Barnard:

And that's what's been so frustrating about Scan. It was built from that privacy fundamentalism standpoint of we can't let any personal data leak. And I think AEM is a good example of, hey, the economic value is there, we should let companies like Facebook do this to the benefit of our entire platform.

Jacob Eiting:

Also, the users have already engaged in private data sharing with this because anyway, we're probably getting way off the rails here. But yeah, maybe this is a second podcast we can do on just the state of the attribution industry. But I think we kind of hit all the major key points for smaller apps and you broke it up. And why is web to app so different or looked at differently when you get to scale? How does it change?

Nathan Hudson:

I think the reason it changes when you get to scale, it's not because those benefits don't apply. Everyone cares about cashflow. But typically the amount that these large apps are spending on ad spend is not the biggest concern. You know what I mean? It's like they're not going to not be able to do anything next month because they had a little bit of a bad week.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. You also have access to capital typically. You can get loans. Once you're established it's just not as big a deal.

Nathan Hudson:

Exactly. So I think cashflow, sure. The fees become a little bit more relevant. All of a sudden, 30% hits a lot harder than 15. So I think that's one thing. And even though people say, yeah, but it's not 30% forever, it's like, hey, this is a new user and I'm not getting 30%. This is significant.

Jacob Eiting:

It is essentially when you're running a little bit of ad arbitrage, right? You're like, I'm not really able to count on that next year revenue anyway, so thank you for that discount from... It's like here's a gift card for a discount next year. Thank you, Apple.

Nathan Hudson:

Exactly. So it's like yeah, the fees become more of an issue and web to app becomes more beneficial in that way. But I think the others that are more exciting, kind of what you touched on earlier, Jacob, around control, the ability to really control the user journey and the funnel as much as you possibly would like to. And when I speak about this, I mean kind of going back to the days of here's a specific ad creative which happens to tie with this landing page, which happens to tie with this onboarding funnel. And guess what? The paywall is exactly the same. And kind of really building out a granular journey based on the job to be done or problem statements that you're pushing top of funnel. You can kind of do a little bit more of this now with custom product pages and these kinds of advancements, but I don't think it's the same and I don't think it ever will be because really what we want to do is say, hey, this person saw this ad, so in onboarding I want to ask them this set of questions.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you can't have a fully integrated funnel as product where it's like the ad into the funnel, it's all integrated and reactive. You can't really do that without something like this.

Nathan Hudson:

It's the synergy of acquisition and product, that's what's missing. Sure, we can have a really great top of synergy ad creative app store screenshots, great, and then we can learn about them on onboarding and tailor the paywall, but we can't necessarily do the whole thing. But again, even that benefit that I touched on that example was just speaking around quizzes and kind of how you may use that in a quiz funnel. But things like how you anchor pricing, I'm sure everyone watching this has had an app rejected at some point because they had some sort of violation on their paywall, price related, whatever it may be. And I think that is frustrating.

And also there are sometimes things that you want to do which you may not think this isn't unethical, this is just I want to anchor pricing this way, I want to see how it performs. And you don't really get any refunds or any upset users from it, but Apple don't like you doing certain things. So I think it kind of opens the floodgates on that front. And similarly when we think about things like money back guarantees instead of trials, this is something that you just... Funny enough, I actually saw in the sub club community today, someone posted something about, hey, are people doing this in app and how are they doing this? I didn't read the post in its entirety, but on the web this is a big thing.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, Faye and the Dipsy team internally here are running on the web a money back guarantee alternative to a trial experiment.

Nathan Hudson:

So I think there are all kinds of things you can control that you can't control in app.

David Barnard:

And back to your point on custom product pages, it's like, that's been kind of the biggest innovation in 16 years of the app store. If you think about the fundamental user journey of the app store across these 16 years, you dump somebody into the app store, they see three screenshots, a description, a user icon. Yeah, there's discoverability stuff, search has changed a little bit, but the fundamental experience of the app store is pretty much the same 16 years on. It's like three screens, and yeah, you can scroll and get more screenshots, but what do people actually see?

Jacob Eiting:

But how do you stand out? You know what I mean? Sometimes I open the app store and I just, everything looks like the same app slop, no offense to all of my customers, but you just go... And especially if you search an AI keyword or something like this and it's just every variant of slightly modified AI wrapper and you almost lose your mind. You're like, I just want to be talked to. You know what I mean? I don't want to scroll through screenshots. I want to be sold. So having that control to actually create an experience that's somewhat differentiating too. Because the likelihood, I don't have the date on this, but if somebody clicks on an app ad, they probably click on more than yours. You know what I mean? Somebody who clicks on app ads, probably somebody who clicks on app ads and so you have to have something that's going to make them be the one, this is the one that they can convert on, right?

David Barnard:

And then again, speaking to control, you were talking earlier about getting rejected for pricing and paywall issues, I got rejected for creating a video of the widget in my weather app and I cropped it horizontally 16 by nine of the home screen so that I could really highlight a medium-sized widget. And Apple rejected me and said I had to create a new video that was vertical so that it could represent the entire home screen. And I was like, "Look, the widget is really small, if I crop it horizontally, it still looks like a homepage, but you can actually see what's going on." And they're like, "No, no, no. You need a vertical video to show off your horizontal widget." And it's like dumb stuff like that where they take control of stuff that doesn't matter and they lock everything. Anyway, I could rant for a long time about it, but to your point on control, they reject screenshots, they reject... And parts of it I get, they do prevent a lot of unscrupulous developers from-

Jacob Eiting:

Unscrupulous developers from cropped screenshots.

David Barnard:

Well, but there used to be stuff and you don't hear about it anymore because it doesn't happen because they don't allow developers to do this, but there used to be issues with people putting screenshots that were just totally fake. It's like these fake ads for games. There is consumer value in Apple having some level of being able to reject stuff.

Jacob Eiting:

This is always their problem though. It's not the intention, but it's always when they scale it. Same with app review. It's like how do you teach a thousand entry level employees to adjudicate app store pages? It's very, very hard.

Nathan Hudson:

When we speak about web to app, it's not that everyone's making the shift from in-app to web to app so that they can be unscrupulous and have all these unethical... They're doing it because they want a horizontal video.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.

David Barnard:

That video is a better sell for my app than anything I can do in a screenshot, but Apple won't let me.

Jacob Eiting:

It's just Apple's... They're Apple's view and I think they're somewhat right here, the app store, they're their users and they feel they have a duty to protect them and they've made certain promises about what you'll get on the app store and this is the deal we've made, right? We give you 30% and you get to insult us, but it's fine, right? But I don't want to jinx it because I think Apple, again, zooming out a little bit, but it's relevant to this part of the conversation, but they've more or less been okay with this kind of stuff.

I think this might go into the AEM conversation as well. Apple kind of turns an eye to a certain amount of things as long as you're playing ball in the things that they control. As long as you're not being a total rake and just doing unscrupulous stuff constantly. Apple, they won't say officially they're cool with this, but by their lack of action, they've never taken action in it, they've essentially implied that they're okay with this, which I think is great. I think there is some level of understanding there. They got to do what they got to do, they got to lock down what they have to for their own messaging, but then they do understand that these things are important and they really are helping the app economy and things like this.

David Barnard:

And I think ultimately this whole web to app movement is great for developers in the long run because as more and more developers find more and more success outside of the app store using web payments, apple has to do something-

Jacob Eiting:

Has to respond, yeah, at some point.

David Barnard:

Yeah. It's like they need to evolve their thinking on the app store or more and more and more and more and more traffic is just going to go to the web.

Jacob Eiting:

All right, we've hammered on control, but Nathan's got a bunch of really good points here and I want to make sure we give them adequate time. So what else for big apps is one of the benefits?

Nathan Hudson:

Reaching new audiences and expanding your reach I think is massive, massive. And I think takes, it takes so many forms. I think the obvious one, or not the obvious one, but the one that Thomas mentioned, David, when you spoke to him on the podcast around reaching different pockets of audiences on existing channels, I think it's a great one that a lot of people still aren't really aware of is that when I pick app promotion campaign, install campaign, I'm getting a different pocket of users to if I pick app promotion campaign trial star as my event. Which then becomes completely different again if I select a sales campaign and a conversion campaign on web, because to your point, Jacob, if I'm clicking on an app ad, I'm probably clicking on multiple. There are people out there who don't click on app ads but do click on web ads and therefore if I want to reach those users on a given channel, I need to use a different campaign type and campaign objective, which is one layer of expansion.

But I think it really goes even deeper than that. For example, I like to think of expansion to do with intent. When you are pushing traffic to the app, you are, if we take a subscription app, focused, so focused on can we get this person to start a trial to send back the trial event to Meta, can we use a hard paywall and get the purchase event to go back to Meta? And sure, you can optimize a funnel that way and you can reach profitability and have something that works, but there are a whole load of users that are dropping off. And we never think about those that didn't make it. The guy who downloaded the app but didn't start the trial, what happens to him? He's gone, right? We didn't get any data on him. Sign up was after the paywall, I don't know, he's gone, but we still paid for those impressions, right? Now, with web you can have a lot more lead magnets. You can capture lower intent traffic, blog articles and webinars like we spoke about.

Jacob Eiting:

You do retargeting, right, after, not even on the primary channel that you attracted them initially. You can have other networks you're running to do retargeting once somebody's at least gotten to your funnel.

Nathan Hudson:

Precisely. So when it comes to kind of building out a full stack, multi-channel approach, you can do a lot more on web. And I think that is really big for a lot of apps who are spending a lot already, right? They're already juicing the spend, they're looking for new things like what can I do now? Well maybe now you should invest in some long form content and some lead magnets and really start to nurture those that aren't going to purchase today or tomorrow or next week, but probably will in two months time.

Jacob Eiting:

That's more like a B2B motion, right? Where it's like start to think about, in consumer, you're always initially targeting just these fleeting moments of intent or trying to manufacture intent in a very narrow moment. And B2B, we're constantly just doing the latter or what you described, Nathan, which is where it's like, just be ever present because we don't know when that moment's going to happen necessarily, but we just need to cover the zone. Yeah, I guess at scale it probably makes sense.

You think about this too, Duolingo had a very broad example, but I just think they weren't doing brand marketing 10 years ago. You know what I mean? Now they just have weird videos with the owl that go viral and there's nothing about their app at all, right? It's just like you just need to be thinking about the owl constantly, right? And it works. But it doesn't work until you're at certain amount of scale, which to your point is kind of the evolving benefits in web to app as you grow.

David Barnard:

Can you give some specific examples that you've seen work well, whether it's web Google search or YouTube or maybe even go through multiple flows and channels that you think do a good job of capturing some of that intent that you're not going to capture directing people straight through the app store into the app?

Nathan Hudson:

Absolutely. So one example was a project I worked on where we ended up building out an entire webinar funnel to push a subscription app. Now, it wasn't like a $30 a year subscription, it was like 200 pounds a year, so it was a fairly high ticket for a subscription app. But the challenge was it was a pretty sensitive topic and people just weren't ready emotionally to invest in that kind of purchase at the time. So you're hitting home, the message resonates, absolutely, I hear you, but I'm not ready for this. I need some time. So we can't run app. We can, but then we have to go into freemium and that's a whole other thing. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to scale up top of funnel as fast as we could.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, you actually kind of created a freemium, right? It's like you created a free on-ramp that necessarily wasn't the app, but you were like, okay, here's some value before you purchased, right?

Nathan Hudson:

And that was pushed three ways, well, two ways really. Meta, Instagram, Facebook, but also YouTube. And I think this is where it becomes really interesting because we could just take portions of that video and edits of that video, upload them to YouTube, run them as YouTube ads, and then direct people to watch the full-length webinar.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, okay. So you would take clips from the webinar and then... Oh, so interesting. It wasn't live, it was a-

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, more like a VSL, like a masterclass.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. And so they would what, they would have to sign up or something or some gating to get to it?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, we experimented with a few different things. The gating works. Nowadays, you can make it seem as though it's live. So you can have people... A webinar that starts every five minutes, you're like, I just made it.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, that's tricky. I'm already having FOMO though. I guess at that point, webinar, but this is generally just a piece of free low commitment content that you're giving away a lot of value to the customer, right? Even in those lead-in ads, do you advertise the app at all or was it purely just like, hey, here's a webinar on this topic?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, no mention of the app. More like, this is the topic you're struggling with, this is the solution.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Which goes back to your expansion thing, right? It's like, okay, not everybody's somebody who thinks of an app. I think about my parents' generation, I'm constantly pitching apps to them and they're like, "App? What's an app going to do?" And it's like apps can solve a lot of problems, okay. And then I'm like, "Okay, just let me download the app." And then they're like two days later, "I subscribed to this app and now I got premium forever pro," or whatever. And it's like, of course you did, of course you did. You just had to be open to it, right? I think that's probably part of this expansion story is there is just a lot of people who they miss the boat. I see it in myself as new technologies are coming out as I approach 40 and new tech is coming out that the Gen Alpha, Gen Z set is using, and I'm like, no, I don't want that, I don't need that in my life.

And I have no reason to resist that other than it's like I didn't witness it coming up, right? So I've heard this from a couple of folks I've talked to web to app. It's just like you get access to a whole new audience of people who will watch a webinar but won't download an app, but will take a quiz but won't download an app, right? And you get an opportunity to pitch them. Obviously your conversions are going to be all wacky, it's going to be a totally different machine, but at scale, we're talking about at scale here is like you need to always be looking for that next card you can play like, okay, what's the next frontier? And so that's really cool.

I bet if people thought they could probably come up with a lot of really cool ideas for how do I build something that's a little bit less than just get into my app, get a free trial, or just get into my app and try the freemium. But it's like, what can I build on the internet? Look, this podcast is an example, right? There's like we've done this kind of intentionally unintentionally just giving away a lot of value, but thinking about how we do it at scale or how an app would do it at scale for that, that slightly lower ticket value is kind of very interesting.

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah. And I think the interesting thing about this example is we weren't even at scale when we tried this.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, so it was just from the start?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah. It was more to do with the audience needed more time to convert and we needed a fast trial start if we wanted to get our post back. So we were kind of at conflict. Also, the audience was slightly older. So we're talking about expanding audiences, you can also expand it to different age demographics. Desktop. A lot of people still use Facebook on their desktop and you can reach them via the web. So it's things like this. But you mentioned that your parents didn't want to download an app. Probably if they came through a web to app journey and they landed on a website, they may have felt differently. So there are different plays.

Jacob Eiting:

Especially if there were an influencer involved, somebody they respects or watch on TV, you know what I mean, or something like this. It just slow walk them from what they're comfortable with into something that maybe is uncomfortable for them, I think is really fascinating. And it plays back into control because it's like, once a developer has the control on this, the world is their oyster. They can try all kinds of stuff, right? Max Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, has this really wonderful book on growth. We'll put it in the show notes. I can't think of the name of it, but he contends that there's only seven different growth tricks. It's like PR, paid marketing, SEO, whatever. I always thought it was really painful because in the app world you can only do two of the seven. It's paid ads and [inaudible 00:38:34] SEO on the app store. It's about it. But this actually opens up basically every channel now that you can try and you can try programmatically, which is just really cool.

David Barnard:

Not only every channel, but a ton of creativity because it's not just sending people to the app store page and making that funnel work. It's like talking through this it's gotten me really excited. I had not thought about web to app quite so broadly as you're presenting it, and it's genuinely making me excited in that I talked to so many developers who are like, "How do we get those first 500 downloads?" And when you're trying to push people to the app store and there's low intent, and maybe, like I said earlier, maybe they got a 3.5 star on the app store currently because of whatever 1.0 issues.

And the world is your oyster as an app if you think about it in this way, any form of... And web marketing is 15 years ahead of app marketing in tooling, in so many different ways. And so it just opens up so many possibilities to shape that entire funnel. So yeah, it's super exciting to think about it more broadly like this. Any other top of mind examples of cool things that you would never think would work for an app that you're seeing work for an app?

Nathan Hudson:

I think it becomes interesting because now we get into how you're building out the web funnel or the web onboarding journey. There are some things you can do with web apps that you can't do with WordPress, let's put it this way, right? So I guess an example is I want to take a picture of the food in front of me and it's going to tell me with some clever AI how many calories in the food. You can build that demo into a web journey. Now, you can also build it into the app, but now I can bring it super early. So I can experiment with ads that just take people directly to some tool to take a picture of food and give me calories. Would I do that? Only at real scale when I don't care about conversion. But if I bake that functionality into some sort of cohesive journey, for example, I'm pushing calorie tracking and macronutrients and I have people sign up or not and I say, hey, are you eating now?

And people say yes. Or are you near food? Yeah. Let's play a game. Take a picture of the food and we'll demo the product. It's so much smoother on web because you're already asking for a lot of, there's already a lot of friction there. I'm asking someone to go to their fridge and open it up and take picture of food or something like this. But if it's no sign up, nothing's gated and it kind of feels like a fun thing to do, some users are going to do this. And there are apps doing stuff like this, which you can try. So I think those are kind of the more product demo experiences that you can build out on web. But they are, in my opinion, super fun because it then becomes what functionality does that app do and how can we rebuild part of this on the web to decrease time to value?

David Barnard:

So another interesting opportunity on the web is that you're not as constrained to what you sell even. So inside an app, it's typically just a digital purchase only and you can't have any add-ons. So tell me about the opportunities to diversify things you sell and to increase average revenue per user on the web.

Nathan Hudson:

The obvious example are things like upsells. But I think where it gets smart is when you have things like one-click upsells. I've already taken their payment details, I'm now going to show them something that's an add-on and they're going to click buy. Or you can bundle products with your subscription. So it's almost like a cross-sell pre-purchase, right? We're just bundling products. Whether that be you're a fitness app and you also have some fitness clothing that you want to bundle on or you want to sell a nutrition guide. One great example are apps where you take photos or family photos and we're going to send you physical albums and photo albums, stuff like this, that can work really well on web. These kind of upsells, I don't see too many people using them. Noom, Headway, they do have upsells, oftentimes a lot of people are still using digital upsells though. But there are some edge cases where you can actually bundle physical products and ship them. So yeah, the family album's one example.

David Barnard:

Isn't Headway shipping physical books now?

Nathan Hudson:

I think they might do. Yeah, they might be.

Jacob Eiting:

I think the idea of bundling digital content is really interesting because most of these businesses are already digital businesses, right? And so when you're thinking about increasing your revenue or your LTV, as David was pointing out, you could in theory. You know what? Honestly, it's the point of purchase friction, as you were saying, Nathan, if you want to, okay, get in through the payment details, you can craft that experience so that you collect payment details, you get authorization, and then you right before checkout you're like, hey, why don't you add this extra... If you're a fitness class, here's a exclusive VOD option for another piece of content. Or you got something with a problem. And all of this is like, it's just trying to find how painful this is for the person and also just what their price sensitivity is, what their value line is, right?

I actually think bundling is a really... One of the challenges in B2C always is just price discrimination or essentially finding out how much money somebody, finding a right price for somebody so that you can kind of have a good sort of value extraction with your value creation for them. In gaming, they do it by just letting you buy more coins purely with some consumption mechanic, but by adding some other skews that you can bundle on I think it's a really good idea. And then with anything doing it at the point of purchase, there's often just a lot of intent and a lot of, you're very up funnel still, so you get more eyeballs and things like that. But I can see that being complex and why you wouldn't want to try this until your very late stage.

Nathan Hudson:

But familiarity as well. This is not new. Amazon does this.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, they get me all the time. Customers also bought. I'm like, yeah, I need that too. I didn't know I needed tape. I do need tape. Thank you. Click.

Nathan Hudson:

It's always the most generic items.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it works on me. What was I buying the other day? I don't know. I was buying some electronic stuff and they were like, you probably need some more solder. And I was like, yeah, you know what? I'm actually out of solder. I'll just go ahead and add that. It's a little bit different here obviously but I still think the concept, there's a reason stores stuff the checkout aisle, you know what I mean, with sort of useful but maybe stuff you wouldn't necessarily go out of your way to buy. But yeah, the complexity of implementing that I think probably doesn't make it worth the squeeze until... Also, you have a brand, right? I've heard of Noom, I've heard my friends have used it and whatever, and I've decided to go all in or whatever. And then getting offered some sort of upsell at that point of purchase, it's probably different than random app I've never even heard of ever trying to sell me another thing that I... You know what I mean? So it's probably just a card you have to judiciously choose when you play.

David Barnard:

It can probably thwart user intent as much as it can expand the ARPU. So probably something to be careful of. And then that kind of thing can easily turn into a dark pattern too. My wife went through a web flow where it was just continue buttons, continue, continue, continue. And she got to the end not realizing that those continue buttons were actually adding stuff to the cart and there wasn't a final checkout that gave a full dollar amount.

Jacob Eiting:

You know who's really bad at this is the travel industry. They're really bad at it, right? It's like, oh, insurance and oh, the extra premium. Airlines are terrible because it works I guess, but yeah, they're all terrible at it.

Nathan, I want to ask sort of related to ARPU, but maybe more like LTV of install generally, but are there general characteristics about the way that people buy? It's credit cards [inaudible 00:46:17] the app store. Are LTVs generally lower, generally higher, churns? How do you think about the quality of these customers? Are there any sort of expectations people should have before they start this?

Nathan Hudson:

It's a great question and it's hard to answer directly because of the dark patterns.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. If you have a dark pattern, really high.

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah. It's like a lot of people are, as David said, doing these things on web where it's like, oh look, web's working really well. I guess an easy example, which maybe this isn't so dark, but whether it be a free trial or a paid trial with a really high annual price plan, just not notifying them at all, not sending any comms during the trial window and then just billing them at the end. It's like, oh, you've already got payment details, especially if it's a paid trial, it's really easy to do that, but questionable. So typically, LTV is higher on web. Aside from these things, is it higher? I'm not sure.

Jacob Eiting:

Probably depends. It's just what you're selling and what price point and all of that stuff. I've heard from some folks, some of the mechanics of the apps, working with credit cards, some of the, for example, you mentioned paid trials, which I think is much more common in web to app. The reason being I've heard is there's so many fake credit card. People have credit cards, they either bounce or they're not real or whatever. They use those to access a credit card locked free trial. And I know one developer I spoke to at least, they started with a free trial and then they converted to a $1 one month trial, right? So it's essentially a trial, but it's really an intro period. And that has the benefit of you've now validated this is a real credit card and it costs money, which then you're just saving yourself the pain of providing services to those users and then having a failed credit card. Probably net it maybe doesn't make a big difference, but it does help with some of those conversion rates.

I've also heard a lot, and I'm curious if you've heard the same, just about, it's kind of all this stuff that we grouse about. We complained about the app store fee a lot, but then once you're dealing with credit cards and direct payment, you realize, well, okay, this is kind of nice because, one, yeah, there's just Visa and all these, they have these different rules around, I think it's called 3D Secure. There's different things you can do that will increase the likelihood that payments go through, but then also reduce your exposure to fraud stuff. So if there's a lot of fraudulent credit cards being used on your site, you are liable for that. And people like Stripe will, they are also liable to provide some protection to Visa for that, and depending on what payment provider you're using. So you now have to think about that, which isn't necessarily something you have to think about on the app store.

You do, people do get kicked off the app store for a lot of fraudulent transactions. I think Visa and the App Store, one, they have to deal with the chargebacks. So when people are getting ripped off, Visa has to eat that. And if they have a vendor who seems like they're getting a lot of chargebacks, they're going to kick you off. But then also there's things like money laundering and stuff that can happen. People use these sort of flows for that, that people have to watch out for, which I think generally on the App Store you don't have to think about, but for web to app, it's now something that you're going to have to get good at. And the folks I've talked to that have gotten successful, at least some percentage of them had to go through this process of understanding what these sort of finer points are.

Nathan Hudson:

It becomes a lot messier, right? And I think that's why, you didn't touch on it, but I thought you were going there, like chargebacks, right? Refunds, handling these yourself as opposed to having the benefit of Apple.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Even just the mechanics of it, right? Where does a user go to get a refund? You have to have that figured out somewhere, right? In the App Store, it's taken care of for you.

David Barnard:

What tooling are you using and how do you approach that when you're setting this up with the clients that you work with?

Nathan Hudson:

I think the first thing comes into, are you using Stripe? Everyone defaults to Stripe because they're so big. But when I look at the different options, Paddle is really solid for a lot of things, right? They have a lot of great tools for sales tax compliance, which we haven't even touched on, but that's another thing to be-

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, so they buffer at least some of the risk for you.

Nathan Hudson:

Fraud, things like this. So that's really kind of where to start. Beyond this, I've been fortunate that some of the bigger clients that we've worked with have already been fully on top of this and aware of it. I don't think it's such a big issue for smaller apps either, right? No one really has to worry about that much fraud if you've only got 15 paying customers a week. It's like, probably it's legit. But I think it's an area where there's almost a gap. There's almost a gap for tooling or a gap for mobile apps.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, to have it all. Because it's a lot of... And it was probably no secret that we're keen on this space and trying to figure out and trying to build our way there, and these conversations, this one obviously, but then I've had conversations with a lot of founders this year that have been doing this stuff. And yeah, it's the payments complexity we were just talking about. All of the stuff we've been talking about is software, right? It's like you got websites and you got quizzes and you got landing pages and each of those individually is probably a simple thing, but then if you want it to work, we were talking about synergies between your acquisition and product and all that stuff, you want it to be all stitched together and the complexity can get quite hairy over time.

We've definitely seen there's a number of upstarts trying to work on this stuff and I expect that to probably continue into 2025. Hopefully RevenueCat can get a decent solution, but baby steps. Sometimes we take it slow so we can take it fast. But yeah, I think it's clear, at least from what I'm talking about, it's not necessarily slam dunk value for everybody, but it's definitely worth trying, right, at some stage for sure.

David Barnard:

So we've gone through a lot of the complexity, the benefits, some drawbacks, but at kind of a higher level, how should people be thinking about that? They listen to this podcast and they're thinking, okay, we should do web to app, what are the questions people should be asking themselves to get started?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, I think it's a great question. And the questions they should be asking are really why do we want to do web to app? I think this is what I always ask clients and potential clients first is, why is this appealing to you? Is it because of the fees? And oftentimes it's like, yeah, I heard that we will save money. And then it's a case of figuring out that there's more to it than just the fees because you need to actually be profitable on web. And you don't know whether the traffic is going to be more expensive or not. So we've got to try all this out. We've got to build landing pages and funnels that convert. So it's not as simple as just switching two buttons on an ads platform. But that's the first question. It's like, why do you want to do this?

The other question I'd like to ask is, what does your existing marketing funnel look like? How are you converting at the moment in app? Because the best place to start on web is that. For example, if you have a really long onboarding in app, build it on web. That's where you should start. If you're a utility app and you have a hard paywall, don't build a long quiz on web. I've had some utility app founders ask me, "I'm really struggling to come up with questions to ask on the web."

Jacob Eiting:

Oh my God, there's such a great Meta note about founder cargo culting there. And I think that's some message we try to tell in this podcast always, which is like, don't listen to anybody. Nathan's great, everybody we have on this podcast is great, but don't listen to anybody without thinking about your situation because, it's obvious, but I don't know. Everybody wants to make more money. They want to try stuff. So it's like, okay, how do you feel about multiply and divide for my calculator app? You know what I mean? What's your feelings? How are you hoping to improve your ability to find the area of a room? It's very funny.

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the place to start. And then I think specifically when it comes to then building out long onboarding funnels, it becomes questions like, what is it? Most people who are already running successful in-app onboarding journey duplicate that on web and see some sort of success. Very rarely have we ever worked with an app where they have a solid profitable in-app onboarding funnel, they mirror that on web and it just doesn't work. That's not the case. Oftentimes, there are certain questions that we want to remove or certain things we need to add in, certain problem statements we want to hit a little bit more and kind of change the funnel based on the traffic. But generally speaking, if it's working in-app, it's the same target market, it's the same.

Jacob Eiting:

They don't really care that much that it's web, right? It's just a screen with stuff they can read on it.

Nathan Hudson:

So I think that's one question. Another question would be, well, which is a big one, how much do we want to invest before we give up on this or not? I think a lot of teams are focused on building product and getting that existing funnel working. So the appeal of web to app sounds great, but the investment required to actually get it working, not so much, especially with the lack of tooling to make web to app fast, and obviously there are some products out there that help make it fast, but there's nothing that really does it end to end super quick, doesn't require any dev resource, we're great.

So I think any app team that's going to start investing in web to app is going to need to allocate, one, time, two, resources, and three, money. Probably, you should be very cautious about diluting your spend that's going to the app and try and bring new spend into the web depending on where you're at. If you're spending millions and millions in app, sure, you can just slash some of that and send it to web. But if you are only spending enough to reach learning phases and privacy thresholds in app, you're going to need to make a decision because that becomes a little bit complex. So yeah, those are some considerations I think most teams should ask before launching this.

David Barnard:

Yeah. And to your point earlier, I do think it's interesting that if you're an app that has a few hundred people coming in, you've got the product flywheel going, jumping to web, instead of really dialing in that product market fit and getting that first motion going seems like it can just be a distraction that's actually going to net you less in the long run, even if you save a little bit on fees, even if you get a little more kind of cost advantage. But I like what you were saying earlier and I hadn't thought about it from this standpoint. If you're struggling to start that product motion and you've got a product going, but you just don't have people getting into it, then maybe it is worth the investment just to get that zero to one motion going.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, there's almost like a middle there where it's probably if your app's kind of working and you kind of have something, you should probably just focus there until you hit headwinds. But if you're at the very, very beginning or if you're at the very late stage on the app core app, you can maybe think about it, is kind of an interesting reality. I don't know, it probably varies, but what kind of mixes of folks, folks that have done this successfully for some period, I guess as a percentage of net new subscribers, what percentages of people's traffic are coming, revenue wise, coming from web to app and a good setup?

Nathan Hudson:

It varies. 80 20, 20 80, 50 50.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, really? All over the map. It really just depends. Which is an argument for maybe it could work for you, right? But I think it could be any one of those, right? It could only be a minority. It's not that dissimilar to some of the pre, we wouldn't call it web to app, but adding a Stripe online conversion through email follow-up campaign, you know what I mean? These are not going to change your life, but they are incremental improvements on retention and conversion that you should do. But again, not before you have a core funnel that's kind of working.

Nathan Hudson:

I think it also comes down to as well, what people are able to get working first. For example, a lot of people will start with web and app, see that web's working and then scale web more so that it makes up a higher percentage of overall net new revenue. That's just because you've scaled that more. It's not to say that there's a bigger opportunity there.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Which is often the case too. Anytime you're evaluating businesses in sort of a snapshot, people want to draw too many conclusions about why numbers are a certain way. And often it's like, well, that's just because this is this moment in time.

David Barnard:

As we start to wrap up, I did want to kind of do a little bit of a quick fire and maybe hit on some of your top practical tips, like, if you're going to make this work, here are some of the things you should try. And I do actually want to start with verticals. Are there specific kinds of apps, specific kinds of intent that you think are going to have a higher likelihood of succeeding and others where you think... Like, we were joking about a calculator app. But that's maybe a good example of probably going to struggle. People are looking for that utility on their phone. They're probably willing to download an app. They're probably verticals that just really shouldn't try or maybe should delay web to app until they're way further along in their journey. So how do you think about those?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Utility apps don't need to invest in web to app. That doesn't mean it can't work. A lot of people think utility apps just can't make web to app work. They can't make quizzes work in a lot of cases because there's nothing you need to ask users, but they can most definitely have landing page, check out, here's the product. And that can work well. Just like they'll have screenshots, paywall, native prompt.

Jacob Eiting:

If it solves a problem, it's like I think of Flighty, that's kind of a utility app. You know what I mean? And I could imagine easily converting people from the web if you targeted it correctly. But yeah, I wouldn't ask a quiz about your travel, you know what I mean? Maybe I would, actually. How often do you travel? Because Flighty is one of these apps, it gets way better the more you travel, right? So kind of building... Okay, nevermind. Utilities, you should do a quiz for your calculator. I changed my mind. Don't listen to Nathan. Don't listen to me. Listen to me instead.

Nathan Hudson:

Well, yeah, don't do that.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. Official advice from Nathan, he's the smart one. Don't do that. Okay.

Nathan Hudson:

But yeah. And then in terms of intent, low intent, web, high intent, maybe not web. If there's low intent, you need longer time to convert, you need to put more effort in. You can do a lot more on web. It goes back into what we were speaking about about control. But I generally like to say that there aren't that many verticals that shouldn't try web to app. You should try it as long as you have the hypothesis around what you expect to happen or what you're hoping to get out of this. Again, touching on the intent piece. Blog posts, webinar funnels, gated lead magnets, you can't really do these things in app and they really lend themselves towards traffic that's low intent or lower intent than those that would want to purchase. So I think that's one case.

The other thing I would say is around pricing and price point. Typically, I've seen a lot of higher ticket products make web work before app, and I think it's for a range of reasons. Sometimes it can be to do with the audience like the audience age and how comfortable they are purchasing on web versus in-app. Sometimes it can be around just not being comfortable regardless of age to spend that much money on a subscription app, more comfortable making those larger purchases on web. But again, low ticket subscription apps work really well in app. You don't need to necessarily invest all of this money into building out web funnels just to push your 29.99 annual product.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Next up in our quickfire, what ad channels are you seeing find success? Any ad channel or are there specific ones you think work especially well?

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, I think a lot of channels work. I've seen Meta work, Google search and YouTube, TikTok. I would say outside of channels, affiliates and influencers, amazing with web. Again, it comes back to the attribution piece. If I'm working with influencers and creators and I want them to push my product, it's hard to attribute when it's mobile. On web, I can just take them to a dedicated landing page, UTM parameters, perfect. So I think it's not just kind of ad channels, but just channels more broadly, they're applicable for web to app.

But I've not come across a channel that just hasn't worked. I know Thomas was saying he hasn't had that much success with YouTube as a channel. I have, but that's because the videos we were pushing were more long form and it worked really well. So again, I think it depends. But what I would say is don't think, oh, I'm testing web, so now I need to find a new channel. It should be firstly, can we get existing channels working on web? Secondly, are there channels like this channel that we can expand into? Thirdly are the channels aren't like this channel that we should test?

David Barnard:

Awesome. So next up, what data do you feed back to the networks for improving that targeting? In app, we talked about how hard it is to get the right signals and get it fed back and cross the privacy thresholds. At least you don't have to cross the privacy thresholds, but what are you feeding back to the networks and how are you making that kind of targeting work on web?

Nathan Hudson:

It's not that dissimilar to mobile. The only difference is we want to send as many events as we can because we can map out more of a funnel. So we can send sign up events, trial start events, we can send multiple events and just kind of see the conversion from each step. So that's one thing. You can also experiment with optimizing for value as opposed to just events. So if you're pushing monthly plans, annual plans, lifetime plans, you can kind of maximize value and send that data back, which is something that some people are doing, but it's not been spoken about that much. I've tried it and it's interesting. I kind of don't have any impressive results to share as of yet, but I'm hopeful that we can get this working.

But yeah, really the same things I would say to anyone looking to launch on app promotion campaigns. Make sure you're optimizing for something that's actually valuable. So if the most valuable thing you can optimize for is a trial start, then do that. If it's the purchase, then do that. But pixel tracking, step one, with Meta, you can use your conversions API to send data from the backend server to server, definitely, definitely do that.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Awesome. And then you had a list. I didn't get to attend your workshop at Growth Annual, but I got to see your slides and so you had a list. I just want to quick fire these and just give me 90 seconds on each of these. And this is specific tactics for creating a winning web to app funnel. You've talked about quizzes, but what makes a good quiz work on the web or even an app?

Nathan Hudson:

So I think where quizzes are concerned, I find this quite funny because quizzes are all about asking questions, right? We're asking questions to the user. But an onboarding journey is about us conveying value to the user, and it's really about us answering their questions. So if you think about it, the user has in their mind, is this app going to work? Is it for people like me? Is it going to do this, this, and this? But what about this? They have all these questions and we approach it with, let me ask my 15 questions so I can track them nicely. The first thing I would say is don't focus on what questions you're asking, but focus on what questions you're answering. Sometimes you can answer a question with a question.

For example, if you land on calm and you're like, I don't know what this app does, and then they say, are you here to sleep, improve, focus, et cetera, you now understand what the app does, and they've done that by asking a question and giving you multiple choice answers. But beyond that, you can use, I like to call them interludes, which are kind of the screens that break up questions to communicate specific information. I think there are three types of content you could put on an interlude, like evidence, things that prove you do what you say you do, whether that be charts, graphs, social proof, testimonials, the sorts. Content that focuses on reassuring the user. There may be known anxieties that they have. I think there's a great example from Headway that's like, do you often worry? Or something like this. How often do you worry? And then you click a lot and then it tells you, hey, don't worry, loads of people worry. Stuff like this.

That's an example of reassuring the user, but the idea is you want to figure out prior to building what those are. And then on certain screens, call them out specifically. A great example is time to value. I don't know how long it's going to take for me to get my abs. Summer's next week. Can I do it? This app told me I can. Woohoo. So the charts we see. But that's one.

And the final one is I would say functionality. Don't not talk about your product. You want them to get to the end of onboarding and have a pretty good understanding of what you're going to do and how. So that's something. And doing those things ultimately adds value. So that's kind of my approach. I guess if I had to wrap it up in a nice way, I would say that a good web onboarding journey tells a story. A great web onboarding journey echoes their story back to them.

David Barnard:

Next up is social proof. How do you incorporate social proof effectively? And then how effective is it and should people be using social proof?

Nathan Hudson:

I often get asked, what type of social proof should we use? And I think it really comes down to what questions, back to the previous comment, the users have in their head. Are they thinking, do I believe this works? Are they thinking, is this safe? Are they thinking, if it's a very health oriented product, you're asking for medical information, is this a trusted product? Who's validated this? Who approves them? Whatever these kind of questions are. But the idea is what objections do people have?

Once you identify those, then you can narrow down what social proof you should be displaying on your paywall, not your paywall, your web onboarding journey or your paywall. I think a great example is, and you've probably seen it all the time, when people have 80 million, 20 million, 30 million users use this product. It's like, that's great, but probably if 20, 50, 80 million people use the product, I already know what the product is. So, smaller apps who are then like, join thousands of people using my app, it's like, it doesn't really have the same impact. You're better off saying, join others who have X, Y, Z like you. And then having a testimonial of someone just like you who solved that problem. It's less focused on kind of volume and quantity, more focused on qualitative efforts.

David Barnard:

And lastly, talk to me about personalization. How, when, why should you think about personalizing? And this does get to a point where it can get very complex to personalize a web journey where you've got this infinite branches of a tree, but I know it can be powerful, so tell me about how you think about personalization.

Nathan Hudson:

Yeah, I think personalization is super key. I think the reason it's so important is because it's how you echo their story back to them. If I just have a really nice flow and ask some great questions, I'm saying stuff and I'm doing stuff, but I don't know how relevant it is to you. What I want to do is make you believe that this product was designed for you. Like, someone sat down and thought about David and then built the app. And the way to do that is to ask questions, use the answers in the next questions, and kind of take them on that journey. What I would say though is that you don't need to invest in this at the beginning because oftentimes the diminishing returns are very real, and you think that adding way more personalization is going to dramatically increase your conversion rate and it doesn't because people don't care that much.

So I think the question is to figure out what do people actually care about? For example, if we take an example of an app that helps you get to sleep, right? If you're helping me get to sleep and you're asking me what time I sleep and all of this stuff, great, you're going to personalize it by reminding me when I can go to sleep, great, this is cool, but that's not really moving the needle for me emotionally, right? It's not doing much. It's very functional and I understand, but it's not probably the best example of personalization. Whereas if we take an app that is to do with improving your focus at work and you're asking me what my job is, and then you're telling me that CEOs, X, Y, Z, developers, X, Y, Z, train drivers, A, B, C, now this is like, ah, okay, this makes sense because it's specifically for me and my context. So I think focusing personalization on context as opposed to just focusing personalization on questions answers is a nice way to wrap it up.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's some fantastic advice. So many of these, and especially this last kind of quickfire round that we did the last few minutes, it applies to so many other aspects of your product as well. It's not just your onboarding journey, but how do you personalize the product? How do you find emotion and really show people that you're delivering value? In the product, how do you incorporate social proof? I was just using Strava last night and a friend of mine from 20 years ago was on Strava and showed me that he's now an athlete competing in triathlons. And that was a really interesting social proof moment for me of like, oh, that's really cool. He's using Strava. I can follow him on Strava. And so all of these apply throughout the entire product journey. And so really fantastic advice. As we wrap up, anything you wanted to share? And are you accepting clients at Perceptycs currently? I know a lot of growth advisors are booked up through 2025. Do you have any spots available? I know after listening to this podcast, some folks are going to want to get in touch.

Nathan Hudson:

We are pretty busy these days. I'm pretty busy these days, but the team is growing, so we do have capacity and we are taking on new clients. I'm also available to chat all things web to app. Sometimes the best way is to just message me on LinkedIn a question. Because for example, it may be the case that you don't really need my services or our services, and you really just need a little bit of advice and a kind of point in the right direction. So more than happy to do that as well.

Jacob Eiting:

That's good top of funnel marketing right there. Give away a little bit, reel them in.

David Barnard:

And definitely we're going to include links, but Nathan's been sharing a ton on LinkedIn. And then you started a YouTube channel as well, right? So you're sharing a lot more video and written content and slides on LinkedIn and stuff. So great follow on all those platforms. All right, Nathan, well, it was so much fun chatting today, and thanks for sharing all these great nuggets and learnings that you had over the years.

Jacob Eiting:

Thank you, Nathan.

Nathan Hudson:

David, Jacob, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

David Barnard:

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