What Reading.com Learned Testing Prices and Funnels — Tim Dikun, Teaching.com

David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat, thousands of the world's best apps. Trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.
Hello. I'm your host, David Barnard. And my guest today is Tim Dikun, chief operating officer of Teaching.com. On the podcast, I talk with Tim about the importance of trust in web-to-app funnels, replacing free trials with money-back guarantees, and how they found success with contractors after struggling with in-house marketing hires.
Hey, Tim. Thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, absolutely. Pleasure to be here.

David Barnard:
We're going to talk about Teaching.com, Reading.com, Nitro Type Typing.com. You got a lot of great brands. And interestingly, and I didn't know this until you and I started making notes for the podcast, that the company started in 1997. So the success you see today is, what is that? Twenty-eight years in the making. Which it's crazy how many storied brands are now finally doing well. I think you all were maybe earlier than some of those older brands to mobile and to consumer success, but it's really cool to be talking to someone at a company that's been around 28 years and is doing really well in this new age of mobile.
Tell us a little bit about the story of Teaching.com and Reading.com.

Tim Dikun:
Like you said, things started in the late '90s. The founder, Austin Butler, was working at a community college at the computer lab, because back in the day, there were computer labs. And someone approached him and asked if the computers had typing software on them, and he's like, "No." But he was aware of what the capabilities of the internet were, and he's like, "I'm sure you can find something on the internet." And the kid went and looked, and then came back a few minutes later and said, "I couldn't find anything on the internet." And so Austin went and taught himself how to program, bought a DHTML and JavaScript book, and built the web's first typing tutor. It was typingweb.net back in the day.
And so, he ran that as a side hustle for a while and did other kind of software engineering things. And then in the early 2000s, it had generated enough organic interest that he decided to try and make that a thing, and went full-on into trying to build the typing tutor. And then we started launching additional products. In 2011, we launched Nitro Type, which was a real-time, competitive typing game played by middle schoolers across the country. And that was really, really successful as well. And then in 2022, I believe January of '22, is when we launched Reading.com, which both Typing and Nitro are primarily B2B products. We sell the software directly to K-12 institutions. With Reading.com., we wanted to sell directly to the consumer. So, it's our first foray into B2C apps and it was our first mobile app as well.
Well, not technically our first mobile app. Part of this success story early on when the first App Store came out, had this idea for an app called TextPix where you could copy and paste ASCII art and send it back and forth because all iPhones had the same font. And so even though it wasn't a monospace font, it would show up the same way on both the sender and the receiver. And so he built this little 99 cent app, put it on the App Store, and it just blew up. It was featured by Apple a bunch of times back when that really mattered, and generated quite a bit of revenue that was then able to turn around and invest back into the actual educational app side of things. And that had its heyday, it came and went, and then we got back into the app space with Reading.com.

David Barnard:
Such an awesome story. As a company, you have found product market fit across 3 or 4 different products and in 2 different distinct industries. I mean, B2B... I mean, it's not technically B2B the way we typically think of B2B SaaS, but like EdTech. I guess, it may be a better category to put it in. EdTech and selling to schools is such a different skillset, such a different product requirements. You're building a product to satisfy the RFP for... I don't even know what they call it now at schools, but to satisfy the school requirements and to sell to administrators. And then to now, be running a consumer company where your primary target is a consumer. It's just honestly fascinating and incredible to me that you've found success across that many different products across such disparate industries.
So I wanted to talk a little bit about how Teaching.com thinks about the company, about building products, because I think that really is key to having found that kind of success. So, how do you think about building products?

Tim Dikun:
A lot of different directions to go with that. The mission statement that we have here at Teaching.com is just to build cool stuff that helps a ton of kids. And we think about ourselves not as an education company but as a product company, because at the end of the day, we're builders. What really matters to us, what's really fun for us is to build cool products. And so we're always thinking about the user and the use case, and not necessarily chasing features that would close a deal but really trying to think through what the users actually want. We hear what they're asking for, but what do they really need?
I think there's some pretty distinct things about the way we run the company. For instance, we're async, first. So, we don't use Slack here. We consider it a productivity killer. It encourages this always-on behavior in the kind of conveyor belt of text where if you're not on right now, if you miss a conversation, it's gone. Right? And so, what we do is we use different tools that really help slow down the pace of conversation and facilitate people thinking through things more deeply before they post them. And that has been really fantastic in improving the quality and the thought process behind everything that we do.

David Barnard:
So, how do you get out of that? What tools do you use?

Tim Dikun:
We use Basecamp for everything, mostly. We actually do use Slack, but we intentionally have the free version where past 90 days of history, everything's deleted. What we do when we're onboarding new folks, we say, "We want you to use Basecamp and we want you to disable all notifications. So, you shouldn't be getting any desktop notifications or email notifications or phone..." Like, nothing. And so when you log in to Basecamp, it's more of a push. You're intentionally going to it because right now is the time that you have structured your day. We want folks to have large blocks of uninterrupted time to do deep work. And then when you come up for air, you might log in to Basecamp and see what's been going on there. And then we use Slack and we say, "Okay, you do need to turn your notifications on in case I do need to get ahold of you right now."
If I'm blocked on something or someone else is blocked on something and I can't unblock them, I want them to reach out to me immediately in real time. But we police that pretty heavily so that if you're reaching out to me on Slack, it better be because you either need to tell me something right now or you need the answer from me right now. Any other reason should be in Basecamp, and I'll get to it when I get to it. When it's convenient for me. And that really opens up space for people to do really great work, and then only they're not constantly context switching because of notifications and whatnot.

David Barnard:
Yeah, I really like that. At our scale and the habits that have been formed over the eight years as a company, I've been there six years now, it sounds very hard to change gears at this point, but definitely sounds like a very nice way to work. And for those who can maybe make the transition, the proof is in the pudding. The results speak for themselves. It sounds like you guys have built fantastic products operating that way, and it seems like a really great way to build fantastic products.
Bute let's get back to the way Teaching.com thinks about building products. I know on your website, you have a whole manifesto, and we don't need to go point by point through that. But maybe give us a summary of the manifesto and then how that plays out in product decisions, in messaging, in the way the company runs and thinks about product.

Tim Dikun:
Yeah. Gosh, you're right. I think that document is probably four pages or something, so there's a lot of content in there. We originally put it out there just because we're very opinionated about the way we work and the way we think about things, and we wanted to make sure that people who wanted to work here shared those same values. And so, we wrote them up and we put them out there. Basically, it's on all of our job applications. If you haven't read this, please read it because there are some people that will not like the way that we work, and you will not be happy here because you're not going to be able to change us. We want to weed those people out early.
But one of the things that comes to mind right now is when we think about hiring engineers, we talk a lot about the difference between a product developer and a software engineer. A software engineer is someone who enjoys writing code for the sake of it. And a product developer is someone who really wants to deliver value to the world, and they view software as a mechanism that allows them to do that. And so, we really want to find the people who are driven not by writing the perfect abstract function, but someone who really wants to solve user problems and is also capable of writing the code. One of the other things that we do is we don't follow any Agile Scrum methodologies or anything like that. We actually tried when we were first starting out, first starting to scale our engineering org, we sent our people to product owner training and hired a Scrum master and all of that stuff.
And what we found was that it took our highly creative software engineers... Which because writing software is fundamentally creative, you're taking something from nothing. People think of it as something that's just for nerds. It's really not that. It is just as creative as product design. And what it did was it took these creative people and it turned them into ticket-taking task monkeys. "Here's the requirements, you build this and only this." And it eliminated the back and forth that we had where someone might ideate on a feature, a designer can then put pixels to it. And then when a developer actually starts building it and starts playing with it, interacting with it, realizing like, "Eh. This actually doesn't really seem like it's having the intent that we want." And we're not afraid at that point. We encourage 11th-hour changes. Just because something has been decided upon in an earlier stage doesn't mean that that's what we have to ship to the user.
And we tell people all the time. It's like, "Hey, if we get to the end stage of something, we've spent months working on this and it's not the right fit, we're not going to ship it." We're not afraid to go back to the drawing board and change it. That can be really frustrating for some folks. It's something that is really baked in into our process.

David Barnard:
One thing you told me in preparation for the podcast is that Teaching.com thinks about kids' products differently, and you think about the difference between parent-involved learning versus kind of babysitting edutainment. Not to be too derogatory on that, on the babysitting edutainment side of things because there is value in... My kids use educational apps. Actually, I bought them subscriptions to ChatGPT, and I've seen them more and more talking to ChatGPT, creating their own images.
Like, there's room for kids to explore on their own, but I love this idea of parent-involved learning. So, tell me about that philosophy and then how that plays out in the product.

Tim Dikun:
So with Reading.com specifically, we were doing the research, trying to figure out what this product was going to be. One thing became really clear to us, and there's no area of child education that's more well-researched than reading education. So the literature out there, there's just tons of it. And there are some very clear, "This is the right way to do things," when it comes to that research. And one of the things that we learned was that children will not learn to read on their own, and they won't learn passively. And so because of where we're at from a...
It's two things, right? It's a technical limitation. When we talk about a child learning to sound out the word mat, for instance. You ever heard a three-year-old... I've got four kids myself. So you got three-year-old trying to sound that out going, "Mat," the AI isn't good enough at this point to know whether or not the child did that correctly and to give it feedback. And so when we sat down to build this, we're like, there's no technical-only solution here. What we really need is somebody sitting next to the child, being able to give the child that feedback. And then because that's what the research showed was that children need to be directly instructed on how to read, we just decided that that was going to be an actual value for us.
And so now, even if not... If but when the AI becomes good enough to interpret the children sounding things out, we're not going to add that to the app because there are plenty of apps out there that... Like I said, I got four kids. You need some peace and quiet, you don't want to feel bad about it, you give them an iPad with some educational games on it and you're able to get some stuff done. There's nothing wrong with that. Done that plenty of times myself. But the trap that we fall into as parents is thinking that they are actually going to learn to read just from doing that, and the research is very clear that the vast majority of kids will not learn to read that way. And we wanted to build something that was truly effective.
And so, I think having a parent and a child sit down together has all these different benefits. It facilitates the child's better healthy understanding of screen time, allows for some snuggle time on the couch, the kid really is engaged [inaudible 00:15:04]. Because of course, every kid wants to look at a screen. And so you say, "Hey, want to come sit next to me and do Reading.com lessons?"
And they're like, "Yeah, absolutely." You're bonding with them. They're learning healthy boundaries because then again, at the end, you are able to turn it off and say, "Okay. Now, it's time to do something else." It just increases the effectiveness so much more. And even if it's not with an app that's specifically designed like ours is for a parent and a child to do it together, as a parent, you sit down and use that app with your child. Let's say, it's a math app or something. And you doing it with the child and watching them and interacting with them over it, one study said that children will learn 19 times more effectively when a parent is involved in the educational app than just a child doing it on their own.

David Barnard:
It's one of those things. As technology progresses and as AI does get better, I think there's still going to be a place for these kind of human connection via technology. And so it's cool that in a landscape, as you said, of apps that are perfectly valid and do teach kids things on their own, that there is a place for apps more focused around direct human connection. But really, really cool that you think that way and really cool to have built the product in that direction.
I want to shift gears and talk through some of the experiments you all have run. This is something you and I talked about in person at an event about a year ago. You've done so many interesting experiments that I think people will find fascinating. So, let's dive into some numbers. One experiment you talked about was a 6.99 versus 12.49 a month experiment, which is pretty dramatic. Almost double the price. Why did you test it and what happened?

Tim Dikun:
So when we launched this app, we started with a $6.99 a month price. The reason for that was because it seemed like a good number. We'd done some research but not a ton on what the pricing should be. I think this was right back in the day right when RevenueCat released the experiments feature. The first thing we did was we want to test the price. And so, we experimented with a ton of different numbers. We first tested a lower price, 4.99, and we tested a bunch of different prices all the way up to 19.99 a month. And what we found was that 12.49, interestingly, had the highest LTV lift. I think 14.99 had a slightly higher LTV, but it was really early on in our journey, and so we really were conscious of balancing the reach.
Especially in the kid app space, parents recommending things to other parents is huge. And so, we weren't necessarily trying to eke every penny out of it. We can clearly get some more value out of our users here, but we also want there to be a very broad audience that can continue to use the app and then recommend it to their friends. And so ended up at 12.49, and that's been the base subscription price since then for the last, probably, two years or so.

David Barnard:
Have you all continued to do lookbacks on that to make sure that the higher price isn't churning at a higher rate that it ends up being a net negative in the long run?

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, we have. And so we've definitely seen that some of the higher prices have an initial boost in LTV, but long-term, they don't pan out. 12.49 is still winning after multiple years of looking back.

David Barnard:
Very cool. All right, next experiment is monthly with trial versus monthly without trial. Tell me about it.

Tim Dikun:
We wanted to see if we could push more users to annual pricing, and so we ran a test where we have monthly and then annuals at a 50% discount. And so, one cohort where they were getting monthly with a trial, annual with a trial, and then we were also monthly without a trial trying to push people to more annual. And it did. We did see more people use the annual option, but ultimately, long-term, it didn't work out. It ended up with a 17% drop in realized LTV. And so, that's something that we decided not to roll out to everyone.

David Barnard:
Do you have any hypothesis around why that failed?

Tim Dikun:
That's a great question. Users who are more likely to go the annual route are, generally speaking, higher-quality users. They're already more convinced when they download the app that this is something that they're going to use. And the monthly users, I think, are the ones who are more hesitant. They don't know if this is going to work out long-term.
And so, I think what happened was we got a bunch of people who were not willing to even do a free trial on an annual plan and they certainly weren't willing to pay for the monthly upfront. And so, the reduction in users that we saw from folks trying, not willing to do anything over the long term was a net negative.

David Barnard:
That's fascinating. And I'm glad I asked that follow-up question because this is something that I feel like has become a little bit of an industry standard, to not give a free trial on your monthly to push people to the annual. But this is an interesting counter example that if you're doing that because that's the industry standard now, you might want to run the test.

Tim Dikun:
Right.

David Barnard:
And then maybe, again being a higher price, more premium product, maybe that's the differentiating factor. Where if your monthly is only 2.99 or something super low, or 4.99, maybe your results would be different. But really fascinating to think about it in that way.
And then another experiment you did around trial was to offer a 30-day money-back guarantee instead of a trial. How did that go?

Tim Dikun:
Really well. That's one that we haven't run that in the app. We've been running that on all of our web funnels. And so instead of offering a trial, we have a big 30-day money-back guarantee and we just ask them to pay upfront. And that has done really well. Obviously, it comes with much lower conversion rates, but because we're running paid ads to it, what it does is it gives better signal back to the ad networks. Specifically, most of our campaigns are with Meta. And so when you're running a start trial campaign, the signal is all the people who are willing to start a trial but not necessarily all the people who are willing to pay. And so you're getting a mix of high-and-low-quality, high-and-low-intent users. But when you have a purchase-only funnel, every user that gets sent back to the ad network is one that's high-intent, high-quality.
And so, the algorithms are able to better find users just like that. And therefore, the reduction in conversion rate is made up for based on the higher-quality users, and they end up sticking around longer. And really, not many folks actually reach out for a refund. The friction of doing that is probably a little too high.

David Barnard:
And you have a really good product. If you're struggling with trial conversion and thinking of doing this money-back guarantee, you may have a lot more people asking for that money back if your product isn't actually delivering. It seems like you all already had very good trial conversion because you do have such a great product, and that's maybe a part of why this works so well is because people don't regret making that purchase.
How do you think about managing the different campaigns? So it sounds like you have a somewhat isolated campaign that pushes people to this versus ones that push people to the app. Do you multithread campaigns in order to keep those goals separate and the destination separate?

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, we do. We have different ad set. Each ad set is pointing at a different funnel. Our web campaigns, we have our scan campaigns. We have campaigns we call pre-lander. And so the different, I would say, attribution methods are what separate our campaigns. But then within the web funnel campaigns, for instance, each ad set is pointing at a different funnel that may or may not have a trial running different experiments on those web funnels at different times. So, each one of those is a distinct ad set.

David Barnard:
Got you. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And then, what works in one ad set probably isn't going to work in the other. And by having this multithreaded approach, you are getting the best of the best for each different funnel that you've created.
The next experiment I wanted to talk about was web-to-app. And it sounds like contrary to what a lot of folks are seeing in the industry, web-to-app is working quite well. So I wanted to hear what experiments you've done on web-to-app, and why you think it's working.

Tim Dikun:
I was skeptical at first as well. I just assumed that the friction of... It's just so easy to open an app and do an IAP that doing a purchase on the web would just not work out that well. So what we wanted to do is just see, "Is this viable at all?" So, we took our existing in-app onboarding and just replicated it one-to-one in a web funnel and started sending some traffic to that. And I think it was 50% better conversion to trial and then a 30% better conversion to paid than the same exact onboarding in the app, which was just astounding to me that it worked so well.

David Barnard:
As we're recording this podcast, RevenueCat had just released this week stats on our app-to-web experiment with our app Dipsea, and we actually saw the opposite. Now, it's different because we're sending in from a paywall inside the app to the web, but we saw a pretty big drop in conversion on the web to even starting a free trial. And we have not gotten the full data in yet for trial conversions. That's going to be really fascinating.
I wonder if there is something to being a brand. Because I have heard of folks making it work, but I've also heard of so many people struggling to make web-to-app work. And there's probably multiple factors, but I can't help but think Reading.com, when you land there, it feels like there's an authority there. There's a brand there. There's trust that it's not some fly-by-night like childreadingapp.io or something like that. Do you think that plays into it at all?

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, I think absolutely. And I think to the... And I guess, brandability, it's really easy to remember. And so we definitely see, based on the data, that folks are seeing ads and then actually just going directly to the website, not clicking on the ad. And so when you have an easy to remember domain like that that has this domain authority, I absolutely think that that helps. And that was a intentional strategy on our part. That's why we also have Typing.com, and one of the future products that we're building is Flashcards.com.
And so we've invested in these domains because first was SEO value, and then second was just this brand authority that comes with it. And there's just an instant trust that's generated when you have a really solid domain.

David Barnard:
I'd love to get, maybe a little more insight on your onboarding and how you think about that, but I imagine this whole parent-centered learning versus just kind of a digital nanny resonates with folks as well. Is that something you mentioned in the onboarding? Or are there specific aspects of the onboarding that you've tested and feel like do you really help people resonate and help lead to that conversion? That higher conversion, especially on the web.

Tim Dikun:
That's one of the challenges that we have with the app because there are lots of parents who really aren't willing to invest the time to sit down with their kid to do that, or they just don't really feel like they need to. They don't understand why it's important to do so. And so, we spend a lot of effort trying to educate parents. Like, "I know it's inconvenient, but this is really the best thing for your child." So, we have different slides in our onboarding setup that kind of hinted that. When you get into the app, we have parent-focused specific content that's explaining how the program works and why it's important for you to be involved. But we still get lots of cancellation messages saying, "I shouldn't have to do this with my kid. Why can't the app just teach me or just teach my child on its own?" And stuff like that.
So, it is definitely a more niche audience. When you do find someone who's willing to do the work and really willing to engage, they're willing to pay more and they stick around longer.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's fascinating. Is there a specific aha moment? Some kind of goal that the onboarding is centered around?

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, that's a great question. It's something we internally argue about a lot. The structure of the app is there's 99 lessons that a parent and a child sit down together. In the context of those 99 lessons, there's 60 interactive storybooks. And what we found is that users who read a book are far more likely to stick around. The problem is we can't have a child read a book in their first lesson because they don't have the skills to do so. So, you don't get to that first book until lesson 10. And so it's like, of course, someone who's willing to do 10 lessons is very likely to stick around and do many more. We can't just throw people at a book that their kid doesn't know how to read and expect, "All right, that's our aha moment. We got it. We nailed it." There goes the activation rates.
And so we're trying to figure out how do we create, maybe, a book-like experience early on. And so they can catch like, "Oh, this is what my kid will be doing, capable of doing. And how do we bump that up to the first lesson or so?" But certainly, parents who actually make it, to do sit down and do even just one lesson with their child, tend to get it and tend to say like, "Oh, I see what's happening here and I love it."

David Barnard:
So maybe, that aha moment is the parent-child connection. I did want to talk about something you're starting to experiment with, and this is something I think more and more apps should experiment with, and that's that you're offering in-app purchase upsells. So charging 9.99 for content that's already available via the subscription, but I'm assuming this is for folks who maybe are hesitant? Subscription-hesitant maybe is the way to put it. And how is that working out?

Tim Dikun:
It's working out quite well. Within the app, what we have is we call them printables. And these are offline activities that parents can print and actually do. There's coloring sheets. There's little board games that you can play with your kid. And they all focus on different reading skills. And so, this content is available in the app with a subscription. After they've made a purchase or started a trial, we give them an offer for 9.99 to purchase access to the PDFs all at once, because otherwise, the PDFs are kind of like drip-fed. As you progress through the curriculum, you unlock the PDFs that your kid is ready for based on their lesson progression.
So we say, "Hey, you can pay 9.99 and we'll just send you a link to..." And honestly, right now it's just a Google Drive folder that we send people a link to, and they're able to download the PDFs directly. And we found that about 20% of the users who are starting a trial or completing a purchase on the web are also opting in to purchase this PDF upsell.

David Barnard:
Got you. Do you see a higher cancellation rate of the trial from people who spend that? So, folks that you may not have been able to monetize anyway end up pay the $10? Or does it, maybe, even end up leading to higher retention because they see how great the PDFs are and believe more in the product.

Tim Dikun:
Yeah. Right now, we only offer it to people who've actually completed their purchase or started a trial. I don't have the trial cancellation data right in front of me, but I would imagine that if that's what we were seeing, we wouldn't still be doing it. And so yeah, I've just seen that users continue to engage with the product. And yeah, I think the printables are very high quality and they're fantastic, and also extends that experience. Actually, some of my friends that use Reading.com with their kids, it's always fun for me when I go over for dinner and I see the coloring sheets from Reading.com are on the wall there. And so, it gives that brand presence also in the home. It's just you've got this coloring sheet that's just always on your wall, and so you see it and you think of it offered a lot of value, I think.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's really cool. And then speaking of printables, another experiment. And I know this is just getting off the ground, and we'll have to revisit it maybe in a couple of years to see how it goes. But you're expanding into physical products on Amazon. Why?

Tim Dikun:
Because it's time to become a new company again. We went from our B2B products to our B2C product, and now we'll start doing physical goods. Why not? We found that a lot of our users were requesting them, to be honest. One of the things we encourage parents to do in between lessons is to reread the books, and so give their children additional practice reading these words. And they're like, "Man, I wish there was a physical version of this book so I wouldn't necessarily have to have more screen time with my kid."
And so after enough user interest, we decided to start looking into it. And hopefully, within the next 6 to 8 weeks, we'll be selling sets of our books on Amazon. And I think that at first, it will be a really great LTV boost for the users who are already subscribed and want that additional content in the home. But I actually think, based on some of the research that I've been doing, that it will also work the other way where we have folks that are looking for books online, and there's a number of these different sets of early childhood readers that you can buy. And if we're able to generate enough on Amazon, that it will actually become a lead gen for the subscription app as well. And so, we're really excited to test that out and see how that goes.

David Barnard:
I think that's such a fascinating strategy in that this is where a lot of consumer subscription is heading, is that to expand LTV, something that kids apps do struggle with a lot is the kind of natural churn, which is another reason to maximize LTV while you have a family's attention. But how do you think about that natural churn cycle? And then how do you try and both increase the LTV, which we've already talked about, but then also expand the length of time that you're able to be a part of these families lives?

Tim Dikun:
That's certainly a unique challenge. The beauty and the problem of Reading.com is that once your child knows how to read, they no longer need the app. So, we succeed and we work ourselves out of a job. That is challenging. The app works really well for kids who are age 3 to 8. For families with multiple children, we can certainly have a long lifespan there. But really, the curriculum, if you start with your kid at age three, it will probably be really challenging. And you might be around a longer period of time because you're going to reach these natural developmental breaks where there's a skill that the child just isn't quite ready for. And we've seen that people will just not open the app for six months, keep paying for it, and then start using it again six months down the road. And so the younger the child is, typically, the longer they stick around. For those older kids, it's harder because we have a placement assessment that will... You can answer a couple of questions and it will skip some of the more basic parts of the lessons.
And obviously at that point, there's even less content for them to go through. And so, one of the things that we're focused on in addition to just general improvements to retain more users and improve engagement of the folks that are still in the target window, we're going to be expanding our curriculum. Because right now, the app can take a child from not knowing their alphabet to reading at about an early second grade level. There's no reason why we can't expand that to an early third grade level because in third grade, the way that children relate to reading fundamentally changes. They shift from learning to read to reading to learn. And so, it becomes a lot less about the core skills of decoding words and more about comprehension, which is really, that's kind of the holy grail of reading apps because that continues for a really long time. Right now, Reading.com is one app, but there's no reason why it can't be a suite of apps that are specifically targeted at different stages of reading development, all the way up to even...
We've talked about speed reading for adults. So, there's all sorts of different things that we could do with that under the umbrella of Reading.com.

David Barnard:
There are a few challenges I know you face as a kids app and I did want to dig into those. We actually get quite a few requests to have more kids apps on the podcast. For those in that niche, it's really hard. What are some of the things that you found especially challenging working in kids apps? All the laws in privacy and app store rules, and everything else that you have to work around that some folks not in the industry don't even realize.

Tim Dikun:
Certainly, the first challenge as a kids app in this space was the prevention of using third party analytics. So, we were unable to use Amplitude or Google Analytics even early on. We had to build our own first-party analytics tool in order to really understand what was going on in the app. And then we're able to clean the data, anonymize it, and then send it into Amplitude from there. But using just the out of the box SDK that a lot of these analytics tools have, you're not going to get through Apple Review. And that's the same with a lot of advertising attribution products. There's a lot of tooling that's out there for mobile apps that we just can't use because Apple won't let us because it's for kids app. And I get it. It makes sense. It just means we have to get a little creative and find some ways to get the information that we're looking for.
Like you mentioned earlier, the app-to-web thing that's going on right now, that would be something that we haven't even seriously discussed testing it because as a for-kids app, when you redirect someone to the browser, if they click on a link... Like, even our support link in the app, for instance. You are taking them to the web browser. You have to do what we call a grownup gate, which is just a challenge that a child couldn't realistically complete. And so, what we do is we print out letter or numbers. So it'll be 76, 44, 32 and there's a keypad. And they have to hit those numbers. Obviously, these kids can't read, so they can't complete this challenge. But even as an adult, it's super frustrating. There's a lot of extra friction there. And so if we wanted to redirect adults to the web in order to complete a purchase, I have to imagine we would just have such astronomical drop off because they just wouldn't be willing to do that grownup gate.

David Barnard:
Makes sense. This is where I'm constantly torn, and I think folks who listen to the podcast regularly hear the tension. As frustrated as we as an industry are at Apple at different times, as a parent, it's great to hear you say those things because I don't want my kids' data just hoovered up. And I actually really appreciate Apple Arcade. It's kind of a sleeper hit, in my opinion, in that I don't want my kids using those free-to-play manipulative games that are pushing them to buy more coins and to pester me on coins. And so, I don't let them download any game unless it's Apple Arcade. And I know that they're not going to be seeing ads. I know that they're not going to be pressured into buying gems or whatever and those kind of things. So, the tension between consumer-friendly and developer-friendly is hard.
There are a few other interesting takes you had that I wanted to touch on before we wrap up. One of them I thought was super interesting is that you don't have any in-house marketing employees. That you very intentionally worked with contractors. Why is that?

Tim Dikun:
Yeah. As a really small company who can't afford a large marketing team, we've tried in the past to build an in-house marketing team, but your first few marketing hires generally need to be generalists because you can't afford to just have a channel expert on the full-time payroll. And the saying about jack of all trades, master of none is we haven't had great success with marketing generalists. And so, what we found to be super successful instead is just contracting with channel experts. They can do it in half of the time an internal person can, and your cost is lower. And so we have someone running Meta ads. We have someone running Google Ads. We had someone running Apple ads. We have a lifecycle marketing campaign expert. We just have created this model where we just have a suite of experts that really know their stuff, and can do it quickly and well. We just lean on them to do what they do best, and it's been beautiful.

David Barnard:
Do you manage that team? Or who internally supervises and works across all those different channels? Because I imagine there does have to be a cohesive top-down strategy to make all of that work.

Tim Dikun:
There's not a lot of management that we do because one of the other benefits of working with experts and kind of top of their field is that they don't require a lot of management. And so, we have them just integrated into our Basecamp and they basically file a weekly report saying like, "Hey, here's what happened over the last week. Here's some of the numbers and the metrics." And then every week, I sit down with the founder and we go through those numbers. We go through those posts and we say, "Okay, how is this working? How is that working? What do we need to be paying attention to? What do we need to change? What do we need more information on?"
We're able to really manage it that way. So, it's been pretty straightforward and everyone is... They're professionals. They're great at what they do and they don't need a lot of handholding.

David Barnard:
I think that's a really fascinating way to work, and it's something that I have actually talked about on the podcast quite a few times. I've had Marcus Burke on, and Thomas Petit, and Sylvain, and Daphne Tideman. And there's a bunch of folks in the industry who are individual consultants who really are at the top of their game. And one of the things I love too, is that they work across so many different apps. And any one marketer, any one company might try something and form a hypothesis around why it worked, but if you don't get to try that same thing on five other apps, you might not realize why it actually worked.
And I think that is a fascinating way to work. And maybe not everybody could pull it off, but it sounds like it's working really well for you. And really unique, I think, in the industry to operate that way. So, it sounds like it's a great thing.

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, it was actually... You set us down this path when we first decided to use RevenueCat as our payment provider. I think you and I had a chat, like office hours or anything. You actually introduced me to Sylvain from Growth Gems fame. We had some conversations and we brought him on as a consultant early on, and he's still with us today. He brought a lot of the other experts. And exactly like you said, just his expertise across all these different... Just paying attention to the subscription app space and being able to talk with a lot of different folks about what's working and what's not. Even working with other clients has really been a tremendous value to us, for sure.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Unfortunately, it is hard to replicate these days because all of those folks I mentioned, and Sylvain are super busy and have a two-year-long waitlist that multiple people would have to fire them in order for you to get to work with them today. But anything else you wanted to share as we wrapped up?

Tim Dikun:
I think that's it, yeah. I'm just grateful for the opportunity and it's been a fun ride. I've listened to the podcast for years. We've met at a number of events, and just excited that we finally made it happen.

David Barnard:
And thank you for coming on. We don't often get to talk so specifically about experiments, the results of those experiments, and the pricing decisions and things like that. So, thanks for being willing to share so much data on the podcast as well.

Tim Dikun:
Yeah, for sure.

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.