Sub Club Podcast: Building a Community that Demands an App — Mark Kennedy & Jeff Bailey

0:00[Music] [Applause] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show hello i'm your host david barnard and my guests today are mark kennedy and jeff bailey co-creators of the none to run app mark is an rca certified distance running coach and created none to run as a blog and personal outlet to stay in touch with his passion for exercise science and healthy living jeff has been developing ios apps since 2009 and teamed up with mark to build an

0:41app as a none to run community started to take off and requests for an app could no longer be ignored on the podcast we talked with mark and jeff about community-led growth how they improved trial start rates by 25 percent and why running ads for a blog post might actually perform better than sending people directly to the app store hey jeff mark so great to have you on the podcast today thanks for having us david it's uh really enjoy the sub called podcast and it's uh nice to be on the other side of it now yeah ditto good to be here awesome well i wanted to kick things off

1:17with the story of none to run so you know we've talked in my office hours quick little plug i do do weekly office hours that anybody can sign up for uh hit me up at david revenuecat.com if you haven't taken advantage of that before but you know we've we've met in those office hours so we've talked through through some of this but i think it's really fascinating as kind of an origin story for an app so uh mark why don't you tell us uh about none to run and how you got started with it sure so yeah i mean i'll take it back further back then even then around a little bit

1:50to give you some context so i studied exercise physiology and kinesiology and university it's always had a passion for health and fitness and then life happened and anyways my career sort of pivoted into the investment world so that's where i worked for 20 years in fact i actually just finished my job or quit my job two months ago so i'm doing none to run full time um nice which is exciting and scary at the same time but um anyways yeah i started a blog

2:18it was around 2009. um i was living in england at the time my wife and my brother was he was kind of always been a hacker coder guy so he he was the one he said and my wife he's like you guys you should start a blog because you love health and fitness and a lot of people are writing about stuff and so it sounded interesting to me so my brother coded an html a blog for me and i think i crashed the site every time i tried to update it so i was calling him but i was writing about health and fitness in general just very general topics and

2:51i found myself over time writing more and more about running which is a passion i was training for the marathon in dublin ireland so over time i just sort of kept on talking about running i was doing a podcast and interviewing other running experts and medical experts who did stuff in the running industry and then i figured well maybe i should have changed the name to reflect more i'm talking about running so i wanted to come up with a plan uh for runners and i decided on beginners because um there's just a lot of information out there for more seasoned runners you know there's runner's world and there's a

3:28whole world out there if you're really deep into the running scene so i wanted to focus on beginners so i actually was digging around reddit and i was you know discovered that couch to 5k was the plan everyone was talking about costa 5k but the more and more i read within these um subreddits uh people struggled with couchsurfing a lot not everyone but right there was a big subset of people struggling and they um they found it ramped up too quick they're getting injured and frustrated losing motivation and momentum so i came up with the name none to run because i wanted my plan to be about

4:03running not about attaining a certain distance um so i came with the term you know starting from zero instead of a couch and the goal is running doesn't matter how fast you are so that's how the name came to be um and i came up with a running plan that did those things i just said where it sort of got started off gradually people could repeat weeks if they wanted to and it was more about just getting out there and running building momentum getting tiny wins yeah and that's interesting because a lot of people feel like they need to really hit this really broad market it's

4:36like oh running like i need to i need to like you know do advanced running and intermediate and and i should be writing articles on all of them but but it's really interesting that that you decided to focus on beginners was that very very conscious i mean you were talking about like there's just not a lot of content um but like did you think i'll focus on beginners and then eventually get to advanced running or was it just a really conscious effort to like really boil it down and focus on a very like small niche within a niche i wasn't sure i knew like starting sort of with a

5:11smaller subset of people and really getting to know it was probably better than trying to be um having a broader appeal or no one you know and i can't compete with runner's world and there's lots of running coaches i'm just i wasn't out there nor trying to compete with those people so i'm like why don't they really go niche and really help beginners and and i really like the sports psychology aspect of getting people started and gaining momentum um so i really i really like that yeah so i started with that and i still you know we do have other plans in the app that go

5:44beyond just running um so we'll see where it ends up but i really like this beginner space i feel like we you know get a really big impact on these people and it's changing people's lives and um i really like that so um we'll see we'll see where it goes yeah and so then when you did kind of pare down into this more niche audience um is that part of what you helped you actually build i mean imagine kind of like you're saying like there's so much out there for um advanced runners and there's magazines and blogs and performance coaches and like there's so much out

6:18there um yeah how did so how did you start to like grow the audience and did it kind of naturally start growing because you went so super niche um basically there was one blog post i wrote that really struck a chord with people and it continues to do so and i think it's called the three flaws and couch to 5k in a better safer plan for beginner runners and over time it just organically seemed to show up quite high when you search for couch to 5k and it continues to do so i do these weekly community calls with um none to run community members and i

6:58asked them how they found out about another one and the most common theme i'm hearing is literally a search like couch to 5k too hard or couch to five create something easier um our alternative to couch to 5k um so it was one blog post which was kind of the cornerstone of like huh i think there there's more to what i originally anticipated with um these they're not flaws coach 25g is a great plan works for many but just deficiencies that kind of other beginners might resonate with um and then there's a couple other articles that got a bit of traffic but that was the main one and it continues

7:34to to be the main post today yeah that's great and then and then how did you start parlaying that into what is now a community and a huge email list and how did you get from this this blog post and niching down to to then building a bigger business around it right so there was um it created a running plan which went along with the site um so it's a 12-week beginner running plan so basically said the the plan was on the website but it wasn't a weird-looking graph and i'm like if you want a pretty pdf of this or and the audio files to go along with it

8:09um you know sign up to email you will send you a beginner email series for runners and i'll send you a pdf and that just started to slowly grow um you know before i eventually approached jeff i think there was about 20 000 people on the email list and um yeah there was you know obviously a common request that people had which you'll probably ask me about at some point but um that's sort of how it started to grow and then there was a facebook group as well we um which was my wife's idea but i really resonate with people as well and that's grown over time to um

8:42it's about 12 500 people or so now today so um just community people telling each other yeah that that's fascinating part of part of why i wanted to have you and jeff on today it's just that you know so many so many apps are like oh i have this app idea and then you know you just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks and it's really cool to hear from from a founder like you who came at it from the exact opposite direction like you built an email list you built a community you built demand for a product that didn't yet exist to the point where people you

9:16know we've talked about this to people were like begging you to build an app um and i think that's it's such a different mindset i think that that a lot of developers kind of uh start with the the app as the end all versus kind of like meeting people where they're at with content with community with um you know and it's so smart you know i to this day i do not have an email list i never built it up within my apps i never built it up on a website that's a huge regret so many of the kind of indie success stories are built around this

9:50foundation of of community of a bigger email list of kind of these inbuilt marketing so anyhow i'd love to transition then to jeff so mark emails you saying i've got this community i've got these this demand uh can we build an app what was that like having uh uh mark email you and then what was your thought process of this crazy guy and am i actually gonna build an app and how do i uh how do i manage that with everything else i have going on yes so you you probably know this david you get you get these probably random emails right from people from time to

10:26time you know build me an app i want to buy your app you know i want you to you know add support for for my stuff and and your app that sort of thing but um but yeah this this one i you know i went out to number one site took a look at it and decided to you know it's just chat and talk about it and you know mark and i hit it off he's you know seemed pretty legit so you know we we started off actually pretty slow so at the time i had well i still do have a pretty popular interval training app um

10:56that was really an app that i launched back in 2015 and it really started out as just kind of a scratch my own itch type app you know and because i i was consulting for a big part of my career i did consulting and i had just left a company that had really good fitness facilities and at lunch time they had classes and i would do like this core body class you know three four times a week and i really you know really enjoyed it and then i went to this other company and i kind of missed that and i wanted to keep doing that core body

11:31workout so i you know i started um looking at different apps and you know you know how it is it's like ah you know i don't like any of these i can build you know and i also kind of wanted to i was really just kind of transitioning from like being an enterprise java consultant to ios consulting at the time i'd been doing ios development full-time but not as a full-time consulting gig so decided to build this app had had it out there for a while mark contacted me you know we started out slow i basically just integrated uh his none to run plan um so you could basically just kind of

12:04quickly create all the runs within intervals pro but you know it wasn't a great integration you didn't it didn't really keep track of your workouts you know it's just kind of a starting point we we kind of went like that for for a while and until you know we decided to build build the app yeah and i'm curious i i didn't ask before so feel free to punt on this question um but i'm curious if you're open to share or or share in generalities how you structured the initial engagement or partnership you know was it a contracting gig for a little while and eventually became partners and we're

12:40getting ahead of the story a little bit you know as as you did partner on it but uh you know for for as much as you're willing to share i'm curious kind of what the arrangement was in the early days and then how that uh transitioned over time yeah you know originally when i when i did the initial integration of an underrun into intervals pro you know it's basically just cross-promotional you know i got some benefit out of it because you know he could point people to my app right and he got benefit out of it because people were begging him for an app so it basically started out as a

13:12handshake agreement no no financial uh you know implications at all just just cross-promotional and um you know when we decided to build the app it's actually still pretty much a handshake agreement you know i i built the app sweat equity mark you know had the email list you know he has this nice community and all that so we share the profits um and you know we we actually need to formalize things a little bit better as time goes on here but yeah that's that's great to hear i mean that that's that's how i got started that's how i did a lot of my early apps was handshake agreement more recently i

13:53have you know uh kind of a basic template you know after because things do go south when when you do these kind of partnerships so eventually having some kind of written rules around it is is smart and having some form of uh you know prenup around well what happens if you know one person wants to go a different direction or the other person's not investing anymore you know there's there's a lot of intricacies to be solved but when you're just getting started and you don't know if it's gonna take off you know sometimes it is easier to just shake the hand and know you trust the other person and um you know

14:26i've had i've had some very good outcomes that way myself um so after you um agreed to to actually build an app what was the launch like so you you already had this following you already had this email list um was it just like you know blasted out of the gate and made a ton of money on day one or what was that launch process like yeah so we built up some anticipation with people saying okay it's finally coming and then you know jeff and i had to prepare for the onslaught when we didn't launch an android version that's a whole another maybe podcast but um you know i'm in constant

15:04communication with my community members um you know whether it's to the facebook group or by email so just sort of saying hey it's being worked on it's coming jeff i can remember if we invited a few beta people in the test or not but um yeah just prepared people and then we we actually launched on my birthday of 2020 march 3rd that's that's why i remember the launch date so you know literally like two weeks before the whole world started to shut down so i think that was good timing but um anyways so we had a nice audience of people to initially launch it to on day one

15:40because you know i don't think people would have probably downloaded it just from the app store based on seeing it you know i had no reviews but we had this nice little audience so we definitely had a pretty good month you know bit of a spike and then it kind of started to you know it definitely went down the next couple months and then pretty much consistently since then we've been just growing nice and steadily month by month um it's been you know just uh just over two years now so yeah having an audience to launch to was definitely uh really helpful yeah um it's interesting i talked to a

16:15lot of folks who have this idea that if they just got an influencer if they just got you know somebody who had an audience um that it's just you know would would be this huge unlock for their business and then you know some businesses i've seen you know there's a lot of fitness apps where it's uh you know a specific celebrity and they're it's like their fitness app but the interesting thing that that happens and it sounds like you kind of saw this as well is it you kind of saturate your initial audience pretty quickly it's like you know if you if you have 20 000

16:49people in your email list well 20 000 people aren't going to download the app and 20 000 people aren't going to um then subscribe what did the numbers look like at that launch so you had a very passionate following so your numbers are probably going to be a lot higher than you know the average kind of you know less passionate community but but what do those early numbers look like as far as conversion so the numbers you know we didn't know what to expect right so in intervals to this day is actually um just a free download in a single in-app purchase i i plan to transition over to

17:25subscription probably sometime this year but so you know i've never done a subscription app before and you know we really didn't have a good sense for you know what sort of conversion rate are we going to get how many what percent of people are going to start the free trials uh what percent of people are actually going to convert to paying users and um you know originally when we launched the app in in march of 2020 that initial um cohort of of people that signed up we had a like 89 almost 90 percent people that signed up for the trial actually converted to be paying users so that was pretty crazy

18:00yeah that's it that's like industry leading that's pretty amazing and you know actually to this day of people that actually sign up for the trials we have a conversion rate of about 80 so that from from what you've told us david that's good right yeah i know that's absolutely great and maybe even a sign that you need to be a little more uh a little less lenient with your freemium strategy or a little more you know aggressive with the paywall or something uh you know every everything ends up being kind of a a trade-off so you know you can kind of push harder to get a higher trial start rate and then

18:34sometimes that'll kind of um lessen your trial conversion rate and you know every little tweak you make to one part of the funnel can affect things up and down the funnel um but yeah i mean shoot eighty percent uh trial conversion is is very high uh compared to a lot of the folks we talked to and i am uh working with our data scientists to put out some benchmarks later this year that'll hopefully shed a little bit more light on the variance in that but yeah 80 is fantastic and then so again of that 20 000 you know person audience what were the initial downloads like did you get

19:10you know five thousand downloads you get a few thousand downloads like what and what were the subscription numbers like early in those days i think within about a month or so mark correct me if i'm wrong we had about a thousand paying subscribers so yeah we were we were very very pleased with that number and um and you know we we had a we did definitely have a spike of downloads at the very beginning because of all the you know anticipation that mark built up in in the in the community you know the community was the key there to to have a good launch and honestly to

19:45this day you know we have pretty we have pretty steady downloads but we we don't have huge download numbers you know our downloads are in the in the low hundreds a day you know it intervals pro it gets like double double those numbers you know it's probably about you know four or five six hundred downloads a day but but you know we get steady we get steady downloads and we have um good trial start rates about 20 um to this day even even higher at launch so because of the trial start rates and the conversion rates you know we've been able to grow that subscription base over time

20:18yeah i think that's one thing a lot of people don't don't think about in the in the like kind of funnel dynamics is that sending a smaller number of very high intent users um can be ultimately better for business than just you know flooding that top of funnel which you know over time y'all are in a great position to start experimenting because your numbers are so great so like are those numbers great because most of those that are coming have you know read a blog post they're on the email list they're you know they have a a deeper connection than just you know seeing an ad on facebook or

20:52something um but you know as you as you shared in in the notes for this you initially had a trial start rate of 26 which is just crazy i mean to have 26 percent of everyone who downloads the app um and of course in that that trickle down over time and now you're closer to 20 percent um but when you have 20 of downloads starting your free trial and you have 80 percent of those folks you don't need to feed the top of funnel as much to create a great business and i think that's you know a dynamic that that a lot of developers aren't as aware

21:27of and aren't thinking clearly about those kind of funnel dynamics of of where to optimize and how to think about those things so it's it's great to see uh y'all succeeding and building a great business on hundreds of downloads a day when like you would think like oh i need thousands or tens of thousands a day to like build a real business but you don't if you are hitting the right audience with the right intent and then have your the rest of the funnel really dialed in but i am curious so you're at hundreds of downloads a day you've got yeah i think you said now like 30 000 people on

21:59your email list like what what are the next steps y'all are taking to start kind of growing the app from there yeah as i said i'm now doing this full time so i've got more time to dive into all the things i didn't know i need to do and other things i wanted to do so which is a good problem to have some things we're working on now or we're looking at is some sort of a in-app referral program we've been digging around about that we we do and speaking to the community members that a lot of people um tell their friends and family about it we've even been

22:34fortunate some of the people heard about the program from their doctor which has been really interesting and something that i wouldn't have anticipated so we're looking at that um i'm doing some sort of live in-person um group meetups wherever my travels take me to my family and i were going to england this summer so i'm doing a meet up in hyde park on july 3rd and there's about 35 people like signed up to come meet me and we're going to do a group run and have a coffee afterwards so i'm diving a bit more into the community also um looking at empowering ambassadors with some of the super fans of none to run

23:11really passionate users so and they're happy to share and and show that they're you know new running expertise to other people so looking to sort of develop some sort of ambassador program so i think the community aspect is like he says it's so powerful and when people come to none around the actual app they're already been warmed up and they've felt a connection and underwriting before they download the app so i think that's um really important for you know current and future success um jeff anything else that we're looking to work on yeah you know one of the other things you started recently was uh having uh you hired out

23:46blog posts right to get some more content so that you know i think that that's been a boost as well yep we've got a a woman uh who who writes who means lisa zhang she's a really talented writer and she writes for other publications outside magazine and runner's world and so forth so she does an article for us um once a month and i'm looking to hopefully start writing again which i haven't done in quite some time um so a little bit more of that and then just speaking to more you know other founders and stuff and just sort of getting ideas and seeing you know what's working for other people

24:21yeah we're really just in a discovery phase now that we that i have some more time to figure out you know what levers we want to pull and what levers have the biggest impact for our community and for the app success yeah that's awesome i mean to get to your stage with this like very community-led growth and then you know it's kind of interesting you know just the variety of people we have on the podcast and talk to um in webinars and other places it's kind of fascinating to me that you haven't even brought up like paying for marketing yet because you've just been so focused from the start on on this

24:56organic and community-led growth and then leaning into that with your first kind of marketing spend being to hire an outside writer to actually write more content which is what has been a successful year in the past but i'm curious are y'all running apple search ads are you do have you done any other form of paid marketing or has it all just been community email list and things like that we've done a little bit on the just google search um marketing um my wife works for google so that that's helpful um she sort of helped that but it's literally um driving traffic to that one article i spoke to um right i spoke

25:38about before um because i think that would have a higher impact again we should probably measure this at some point but then just driving them towards the app because they'll read this article and it's either going to highly resonate with them or not and if it does resonate with them they're going to dig deeper and check out the community other articles and then go to the app with the super high intent and then jeff's done a little bit experimenting on the app store yeah you know through the years when apple search ads came out i i started doing some apple search ad stuff with intervals pro

26:10dipped our toes a little bit into it with none to run but you know especially nowadays with app transparency tracking the the cpms are just so high i don't know we just have not seen really great success with with that um so yeah it's we would we would like to drive more downloads that way but um you know i was talking to somebody recently that has one of those companies that's you know they're kind of an app holding company you know and uh he used to do a ton of money pump a ton of money into facebook and instagram and stuff but he's kind of really backed that off and

26:47nowadays he's he's actually kind of shifted and he's doing like a lot of tick-tock videos and stuff but right you know it's it's hard to know we are not growth hackers it's it's a whole it's a it's a whole different world we we could use it but your accidental growth hackers i mean i think it's brilliant like you know you found a post that resonated and it was you know maybe just happenstance but something you were really passionate about and so you wrote an impassioned article about why couch to 5k isn't serving people well and then you built an alternative and in the the strategy of sending google

27:25search traffic to the website versus the app that's that's brilliant because you would think like you know typical app marketing like i want to get them in the app that's the best experience but i think you were exactly right mark is that by sending him to the blog post first that's what you're helping to to build that intent and that's probably part of why you know it sounds like you know you're getting users from that blog post specifically whether ad driven or seo you're getting word of mouth from other people who have been successful you know so much of the traffic that you're getting has been pre-primed to to

28:01care and believe in the product and then that's where you end up with a 20 draw start rate and a 80 trial conversion rate is because what you're you're going after the the high intent so you know can you scale that to a you know 10 million a year business i don't know we'll see um but like you're you're starting in a in a very smart sustainable cost effective way to get capture that high intent and so you know i mean slopes is a great example is we had the curtis herbert on the podcast a few episodes back and you know early on it was just trickle trickle trickle

28:37trick or trick and now he hit a million dollars in arr and you guys are right along that path to you know you just keep doing what you're doing and you're going to hit that and i think you know a lot of folks it's like you start to hit this wall and and you're looking for opportunity and you guys kind of stumbled upon an incredibly effective strategy to drive these super high intent users that's really hard to do if you're you know doing it on facebook or doing it like you said app store search ads you have high intent users but it's got really expensive and then in fitness categories

29:10like my weather app you know categories like that they're really saturated um and the cpms are so high that it's just it's just super hard to compete so yeah you may not be growth hackers but you but i i think you've you've uh you're headed the right direction and built a really great strategy around that yeah i actually one of the other things that that mark even did before the app was challenges right mark yeah that's right um yeah every pretty much every quarter or so we run a challenge which basically people come in and run the uh do the whole program uh or they start wherever

29:46they are and any other program that they're doing and that's been really nice people rally around that and usually recruit other friends or family you know of course they can't use the app if they're on an android but that's okay they can use uh they can use another app or they can use um just programming rules themselves but um that's been really nice so yeah we've actually for the challenges we actually used another community software mighty networks which maybe some sub club listeners are familiar with but we're actually in the process of transitioning the facebook group over to that just for you know probably the reasons everyone's

30:23familiar with but the privacy um and also just you know i can post something about an app update or a blog post and it's you know a couple hundred people see it out of twelve thousand five hundred so right you know while the numbers are there they're not really there because they're not seeing the they can't communicate with them so anyways we're slowly transitioning people to this new community yeah it's unfortunate the way things have gone down with some of these bigger community platforms where you build up this audience and then then facebook charges you to get access to your own audience and they just see fewer and

30:57fewer of the posts so it's smart to be moving to kind of i mean you know it's a similar dynamic with with apple right it's like we have to go through this platform and apple maintains a lot of control over that relationship um and you know now with being able to do web billing and other stuff developers are clawing back a little bit of that direct relationship with customers and but yeah it's great to see kind of taking this community off of the the owned platform and bringing it to you your own space where they're going to see more of the posts they're going to be more active yeah i do want to

31:31switch gears and talk um you know you guys shared with me some really great experiments you've been doing that i think um our listeners would be really interested to kind of hear some of your thinking and even some of the results have you gotten um so i wanted to start with the this blinkist style paywall so it's it you know made a lot of noise on on twitter of um i was going to give a summary but i'll just let you uh jeff if you want to take it away like tell us what the deal is with this blinkist style paywall and then what impact it had when you

32:01uh added it to none to run yeah you know i i think it was what beginning of last year that they wrote about the blankets wrote about they redesigned their paywall and you know they they did they did some research first to try to figure out what they want to do and i i think the conclusion they came with came to is a couple different things one is that uh you know a lot of users still today are not completely comfortable with um with subscription apps and in trials and the number one fear that they had and complaint that blinkist would get was that you know they would they

32:37they were afraid they were going to forget to cancel their free trial you know if they didn't really want to subscribe they were afraid they're gonna forget to cancel so they would either one not subscribe or two they would subscribe and then they would just day one cancel you know and that's that's my move you know that's what i do you know i don't want to forget either so i tend to do that and then what what they did to address that was you know your your typical paywall is all about the value prop right it's like hey subscribe to this app you're going to get this feature that that feature blah

33:11blah blah this is you know and they they kind of turn that on their on its head and instead of that it's it's all about the free trial it's like hey you got this free trial that's available to you how does the free trial work what's the timeline and they also came up with the concept of notifying the user you know with two days left before the free trial is over to remind them hey you got your free trial going you know if you wanna you know hope things are going well if if not you know don't forget to cancel or you're going to get charged so they redesigned their

33:42paywall around that concept so like you said you know they got a lot of a lot of buzz on twitter and stuff a lot of people implemented something similar we we did the same and we actually ended up we we did pretty good a b testing on that we ended up with um very similar results to what they what they had which i think they had an uptick of about 23 i think of free trial starts and ours was right around there was like you know 23 25 increase in starts you know so it's good from that perspective and you know they they also found out it's just good from

34:16like a transparency and openness perspective you know just kind of building that trust and and you know the reminder in the whole thing put people at ease and you know and that ultimately helped increase conversion did it have any impact on your um on your trial conversions so did you see a commensurate drop in conversion rate when you reminded people to cancel yeah you know i was i was actually i was actually afraid of that that was that was my biggest fear going into this it's like hey you know we're basically telling people hey cancel if you want to cancel but it really did not seem to

34:49have a significant impact on you know it seemed overall it was it was definitely a net gain wow yeah that's impressive and it but it just goes to show i mean you know there's a lot of apps out there and and for a while you know apple wasn't policing subscription paywalls very much and so there were some like really shady tactics and you know continue button with no mention of price and um and things like that but it's like those only work so far right it's like you know maybe you capture that one year and you know you increase your short-term revenue but you're not you're not building true fans

35:25you're not like you know growing a sustainable business you're just like setting yourself up for a high churn and so it is really cool that that strategies like this end up not impacting the conversion rate because you're you're just like being up front you're being honest you're being like you're filtering for the users who are really gonna care and then i you know hopefully um and ideally you know you're going to see that in your retention numbers long term by being upfront like that versus like tricking people into subscribing and then just having them churn out i don't i don't think we um you put any any

35:58retention numbers in in the kind of notes that we were going to talk about today but uh off the top of your head uh putting you on the spot again uh off the top of your head like has retention gone uh pretty well for y'all yeah we've we've been we've been really happy with our with our retention numbers i think that's one of the things that's allowed us to grow our subscriptions you know from that initial kind of 1000 bump to what pushing pushing what nine thousand over nine thousand today something like that i don't actually have the the percent retention number off the top of my head though gotcha

36:32something you should you should be thinking about but it's actually i mean a good sign that it's not something you're as focused on i mean a lot of developers i talk to are you know have very high retention and that's a that's a huge focus for them because i mean very low retention very high churn um and and it's it's more top of mind you know when when you are kind of bleeding out users um so the fact that it's not top of mind for you is probably a good sign there are a couple other experiments you did that i thought that were especially interesting and and it's great that you're actually

37:05like you know trying to measure the lift and like doing this more systematically i've never been good at that over the years but one of the other ones was changing out your app store screenshots so tell me about the impetus behind doing that and then how you actually created new screenshots and tested that yeah go go ahead mark you want to talk about working with the designer the screenshot yeah so it started off the screenshots when the app launched were just created by jeff and jeff's got a lot of talent but i don't he's not a not a designer but they served their purpose they were

37:40totally fine but over time you know you're just looking at little little hits you can improve on and um we decided to make them you know a bit more pretty um and in line with our audience so yeah i engaged a designer lives over in the uk and he was great to work with and um it's a much larger project or took longer than we had anticipated just for screenshots but it took a while for us to come up with the right language and uh imagery and so forth but um they turned out really well and i think it just gives the app a bit more of a

38:15polished look when people do land on the va app store and take a look at the screenshots a bit more professional and polished and then jeff i believe has some numbers he ran a little bit of some a b test based on the old screenshots which you can share yeah so um it was actually great timing because right about the time that we were coming out with the new screenshots i think apple launched their uh a b testing within app store connect to so so we decided you know let's go ahead and actually do a formal a b test and and see you know what kind of lift we

38:49got from these new screenshots compared to the old ones and the way they do it you know you can you can go out there and you can you've got the old screenshots put the new screenshots you say you know hey show the old screenshots to 50 show the new screenshots 50 it runs over a period of time until it gives you like a high confidence rate and it and it tells you like what percent better you know are the new screenshots compared to the old ones as far as impressions to app downloads and we got we got a 10 lift um from the new screenshots i

39:24actually kind of thought it might be a little bit more than that but um i know a lot some different people have had mixed things to say i think about the uh the screenshot stuff in app store connect but um you know it it seemed to work pretty well for us that's awesome did you just do like one new set of screenshots and a b tested that or have you have you now since like dramatically changed the messaging or tried like a whole different design or a different color scheme or you know have you done some other kind of dramatic tests to kind of validate those being

39:53the the best ones possible um yeah we actually did this whole screenshot um redesign just a few months ago so yeah we would definitely like to do some some more things some color testing you know you can even you know an app store connect you can change the your icons right have different color icons have different icons we do we definitely like to do some of that in the future for sure gotcha um another thing you talked about is um improving the share card and i don't think you put any hard numbers on it but social sharing is one of those really tricky things i've tried it in so

40:26many of my apps and and not seen much success but i also haven't it hasn't been as good of a natural fit compared to a fitness app where you're you're sharing a run and there's like you know strava has done really well with it and other fitness apps have done really well with it um so yeah tell me about kind of the thought behind improving that experience and then um you know did were you able to measure the results on that or just kind of get a gut feel that that it was improving word of mouth by uh having more people share their runs out of none to run

41:03yeah you know i think it's um i'm not sure i could give you hard numbers i think it's more of a gut feel but you know for us the biggest impact i think with the share cards was was within the community itself because the facebook group the mighty networks group you know are pretty active groups and people you know people post on there on a regular basis and what we wanted to do is we wanted to provide them like an easy way to post either you know their workout stats maybe just by themselves maybe along with a with a photo a lot of people take like a selfie while they're

41:37running or after the run or whatever um i added something in there where you could it shows the workout stats and you can type it and just type a little caption you know so they could just type whatever they want to say and it you know just shows up in there or you know that sort of thing so when we are on the facebook and mighty networks groups it's there you know people are doing that all the time you know it's it's really popular within that so i think all it can do is is really kind of help build build the community on you know on the other hand um i actually

42:08started share cards in intervals pro and and i think i've kind of seen which what you said there you know people don't people use it but they don't use it a ton you know right you know once in a while i'll get a app mention on instagram or something from somebody sharing something but it hasn't been a huge driver yeah yeah there's got to be like a really natural fit and that is really cool that even though it's somewhat like preaching to the choir maybe it is kind of a self-reinforcing thing is that you know not everyone in the community is a subscriber um and so seeing these

42:41the sharing within the community itself is like a constant reminder of like the value of the app and the importance of it and uh and how helpful it is i imagine you know to to be fit and and grow and everything like that so uh and you know that's something i've been thinking a lot about from like a freemium strategy perspective and another question i i didn't think to ask before is the balance of free features to what you put behind the paywall because this is a great example of like you know you've got you know whatever it is now 30 000 people on the email list and you've got a big

43:15community around it and for some apps it can work really well to build up this free usage and then kind of market to those users so if you know if there's enough um free stuff where people can really get some value and and and become habituated to the app and and become users but then there's enough value that you put behind the paywall that there is incentive to actually pay then you can you just have this like built-in marketing to just pick people off over time i think you know all trails is a good example of that where there's enough free stuff that you don't have to subscribe

43:56but and they have a massive you know free pool uh and but then over time they just pick those people off and so you know when you have for them you know tens of millions maybe hundreds of millions now of these free users they're just such a fantastic marketing channel because they've already experienced some of the value and then asking them to pay for a little more value just makes so much sense so i've kind of uh spoiled it if you are using a different strategy but i'm curious like where you where y'all draw the line and how you think about that part of the strategy oh i can start yet

44:27but right now we just offer one free workout on any of the of the three plans so they don't get much right but where like you said all trails provides that experience all within the app we provide all the free stuff outside the app so you know maybe you should experiment more that it's inside the app but it's all provided outside the app so if they want if they want the plan for free it's available if they want audio files like a podcast version of the plan with me speaking in their earbuds saying run now walk now that's that's free that's available we've got strength and

45:02mobility workouts that's all free and available outside the app so a lot of that material is inside the app so i think where people go into the community more and more and i think some of them just eventually to be honest get sick and tired of seeing the share cards and not being involved in the app and they're like i might as well use the app because i'm not i'm not in the club i'm not in the cool club so that's crazy yeah so we kind of do that but it's just not in the app yeah know that and i mean back to the the marketing piece and the blog

45:31post resonating everything you all are doing like it's such a fantastic strategy that you're building a lot of value outside of the app but then there's so much value in the app that it it's it's a great funnel so um yeah so it sounds like you are giving away a ton of value so that by the time people come into the app they they recognize that value and are more willing to pay more willing to start to trial yeah i do the odd time we get a snarky rating review about the price and i do try to jump in and remind them like listen like here's all the free stuff

46:04that's available to you go ahead and use it but you know yeah you have to charge for it yeah what is your price that's that's something i actually didn't look up all right uh our price currently is uh 35.99 usd annually or 5.99 usd on a monthly basis cool yeah not not terribly expensive for compared to a lot of other fitness apps and compared to the value you bring is that something you all have experimented with as well uh we've done a little bit we've we've sprayed them slightly from when we launched yeah jeffrey you can comment probably we did do a little bit yeah it's a it's a

46:41little higher than when we launched but we did we did have a period of time when we tested a higher price point and it it seemed to be right now that that price point that we're we're at right now it kind of seemed to be the sweet spot yeah that's great well we're gonna wrap up here in a little bit but the the last kind of experiment um that i wanted to talk through is this uh quick straw start button so you on twitter shared that you borrowed it from curtis herbert of slopes but i think it's it's a really cool thing i wish um i don't think he had

47:15implemented that before we talked on the podcast i wish i would have getting to talk to him about it so i don't know that most of our listeners will be familiar with what we're talking about so why don't you tell me jeff like what the what this quick trial start button means and then what impact you saw from it um yeah so this has been an interesting experiment that's ongoing right now um because we just i just kicked it off here at the beginning of the month so it's it's definitely a work in progress but you know it was inspired by a couple different things the biggest thing was

47:44uh you know curtis is great he's got slips diaries i think his latest one was called something like building ramps not walls and um the other thing that i kind of mixed in there at the same time was you know as we mentioned we've got a monthly and a yearly subscription and you know another growth hacking technique is to is to maybe you know guide people toward the yearly subscription so we kind of combine those two things in in this experiment so you know to kind of set things up uh you know we've got a just a simple one onboarding screen and then the next screen is is an onboarding paywall and

48:23actually most trial starts happen during onboarding so of that 20 that that we talked about about 18 actually um subscribe during the onboarding process but you know that still leaves a good amount of people that have not you know subscribed to the app and curtis had a couple of key ideas you know i think the one was you know ask for the sale so you know kind of kind of obvious but you know a lot of a lot of devs are hesitant to actually you know ask you to subscribe right so you know the other thing was the whole idea of building ramps not walls you know a

49:00paywall is is a wall make it make it easy for users to take advantage of this free week uh whatever kind of free trial that that you have so you know what he did was in kind of what a couple places main tabs in his app he has a little quick subscribe card you know with basically just the bare bones kind of a call to action redeem your free week you know what the price is and the genius part of that was when you tap that it just directly starts the apple in-app purchase flow where traditionally in fact that's that's the thing i'm not even sure would

49:39have occurred to me because i'm still kind of have my old school you know apple subscription rules from a couple years ago but things have kind of changed over the years right you know so i would have just thrown them right into our big paywall but what does that do that gives them a whole nother screen to process and you know just make it it's it's a free trial make it easy for them to go ahead and start the free trial so you know it removes the step of the process and you know it's been successful for us we definitely have had uh you know over the

50:11i don't we kind of mix a couple of different ideas together but probably right you know i do i do have stats on you know we've probably got close to 100 subscriptions from that over the past couple of weeks um from from the quick uh subscribe the other thing about the quick subscribe is that it just subscribes you directly to the yearly now there is a link in there to learn more that does bring up the free paywall and you could you could see both but at the same time i also changed that blinkist style seven-day trial paywall to just show by default the yearly subscription and then there's a link

50:49under that to see more pl you know see all the plans and then that that animates in the monthly and the yearly that's actually been the biggest change because before our mix of yearly and monthly subscriptions was 56 yearly and after you know making those two changes so changing that blanket style paywall and adding this quick subscribe over the past couple of weeks our yearly subscriptions are now 76 versus 56 now one of the things we're interested in is making is seeing how this affects conversion of pain right um so the the jurors kind of still out on that but the early indications are is that things look good there as well so

51:30you know i think it's it's definitely a net win for us and you know the the yearly plan we've we definitely see you know using revenue cap we could see since you guys recently added the long-term value which is great you know it's like first thing we did is like what's our long-term value of our yearly subscribers versus the long-term value of our monthly subscribers and even though our yearly subscription is half the price of the monthly you know we have a better long-term value for those for those yearly subscriptions so um so we have better ltv and if they're doing a yearly subscription they're saving 50 percent so it's yeah it went

52:10all the way around yeah that's great i think part of it too i like the framing of that quick start button um is that instead of like start your free trial it's redeem your free week um and i like that kind of reframing that that curtis did and y'all using and i'm keen to use it in my app as well for an app that delivers value you really it's not just a free trial you really are like giving them value you know like with my uh weather app for example like it costs us every time somebody opens the app and then you know we're introducing widgets and apple

52:46watch complications soon and like those are really expensive and so you know we're we're giving them value for free so it's not just a free trial it really is a value exchange where we're giving them something and so i really like that reframing of redeem your free week versus start a free trial so i i think that's really cool as well well any any uh final thoughts as we wrap up um usually you know guests are hiring or you know have something to pitch or something like that um but anything you all want to share as we wrap up i really appreciate y'all being so open you know

53:23kind of like curtis i appreciate y'all uh kind of opening opening the the kimono as it were and uh and being so uh specific about the the exact you know things that you you've seen and percentages and revenue and that kind of stuff so i appreciate all that uh but yeah anything else you want to share as we wrap up nothing really for me i guess you know if anyone's interested in running check out the website nunderrun.com uh if there have any questions they can email me marketingrun.com um also just quickly give a shout out we've talked about curtis a few times but i wanted to thank him because he ray

53:57when i started working with jeff i actually evolved him a few times about like a survey that he said to his customers and a few other little tidbits and he was been happily shared his time and expertise with me so thanks to him i'm sure he'll probably be listening to this podcast yeah jeff anything from your end um yeah definitely ditto as far as curtis goes and you know another one too is uh ariel from app figures i you know everything i've learned about asl i've i've learned from ariel he's got great content videos and blog posts and stuff like that so yeah that's that's about it you know if there's anybody

54:33from apple listening out there i could we could use some apple love and that in the promotional space apple does listen to the podcast we've got a little bit of that from from intervals but uh we we haven't seen any of that for none to run yet yeah i i did see uh your icon was on uh apple watch icon was shown at wwdc that's pretty cool yeah that was that was definitely a bucket list thing that was one of those uh where they have thousands of that watch icons flying past the screen you know so i had my sub second of fame there for the app

55:07yeah that's fantastic um well again thank you all so much for sharing i think it's just such a unique business and a unique approach to app growth a unique approach to marketing and um you know i think even some of the biggest apps out there have something to learn from from some of these strategies that y'all have been working on uh so again thank you all so much for sharing and that's it thanks david thanks to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time [Music]