Top 5 Considerations for Paywall Optimization — Live at App Promotion Summit NYC

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 so i wanted to welcome everybody this is the first ever life taping of the podcast i'm normally like jake's been on webinars and podcasts with me is usually a little floating head so this first ever live taping we do release episodes um a couple times a month on you know apple podcast spotify or anywhere you listen to your podcast we do deep dives on subscription app

0:38monetization um and all things subscription app growth and everything related to that for those of you listening on the podcast because we do have kind of two audiences today uh we're live on stage at promotion summit and uh it is really nice to have a live audience in real faces here today and thank you to app promotion summit it's been a fantastic event so if you're looking for conferences in the fall and whatnot there's some great events coming up without promotion summit so our guests today are jake moore he is the founder and ceo of superwall uh the best way to build and test paywalls without having to update

1:18your app thanks jake for joining me today for sure thanks for having me and we also have daryl stone he is the head of product and design at citizen the number one public safety app in the us thanks for joining us daryl super happy to be here dave and uh as andrew said i'm david bernard developer advocate at revenuecat at revenuecat we are a subscription app data platform we provide in-app sdks to make it easy to deploy in-app subscriptions we also have a server back-end that becomes your single source of truth for subscription data and we also now support over 12 000 apps on the app

1:56stores including citizen and we have over 20 000 i mean 20 20 integrations uh such as superwall they use our real-time subscription lifecycle data to power their products to help our developers make more money so with that i wanted to jump into the topic at hand paywalls and jake and i actually did a webinar earlier this year uh for those of you listening on the podcast there'll be show notes for those of you in the audience uh search revenue cad on youtube and jake moore and that's gonna be kind of a deep dive we're gonna try and do the uh the shotgun version today and go as quickly as possible and hit

2:36the highlights but if you if you like what you hear there's a an extended version with q a available so with that i wanted to kick it off talking about the five most important things to optimize with your paywall and the first one jake that you love to talk about is placement so i also run my own apps and have for the last 12 years i've launched like 20 plus apps sold a few of them and this is something i've always struggled with like i feel like uh i don't want to bug my users with a paywall like should i do it in onboarding should i not like where do i

3:12put it and it's honestly led to me not being great at monetizing my products so tell me what what are the most important things to be thinking about when thinking about where to put your paywall in the app for sure so when you're thinking about placement uh there are two there are two real placements you should be thinking about the first is when do new users see the paywall and the second is when do existing users who already use my app when do they see the paywall for users who are just signing up there are two main places it's either before onboarding or after onboarding and then

3:46if you're already a user there are also two main places it's either on app open or right as you're trying to use a key feature so usually there are two possibilities that you want to test for each for each one usually the winning combination is on every app open before using any locked feature both before and after onboarding so usually more shots on goal are always better yeah that's really interesting and um you brought up the concept of percentage of users yes who actually see the payload is something i never thought about and it's such a huge key to actually like understanding your app monetization so

4:27so tell me about yeah the number one most neglected metric uh in all of the apps we've worked with is what are the percentage of installs that are actually seeing the paywall and if this isn't a metric you're tracking already you should uh usually we don't see apps that are coming in have over 80 which is kind of insane because we see directional movement between percent uh install to paywall view uh between between that and percent install to paid uh so it your gains pass through the trial uh survival as well yeah and this is something i have not tracked in my own apps but i would bet and i think you've

5:02worked with apps like this i bet probably only 20 20 to 30 percent of the people who ever opened my apps actually see the paywall which is just ridiculous like if you're building an app to sell and monetize via subscriptions like you need to actually show them and something that i think about a lot as well is that showing people that the app may cost them money is actually oftentimes a better user experience like i've failed in my own apps where people get into the app they never see a paywall they get onboarded they do all this work and then all of a sudden i slap a paywall it's a terrible

5:37experience as a user like you come in not expecting to pay anything everything seems free and then you lock the feature that they're about to use it's a terrible experience and so you know as we as we've been talking more about more and more about pay walls i'm realizing it really is a better experience to to get that paywall out there and let people know hey this is something of value and i may be charged for it at some point so darryl i know you've been doing a lot of uh paywall testing and placement testing and one of the other challenges with paywall testing is getting the team aligned and and

6:07getting the team excited about these little iterations and and and getting focus around these really important topics but that don't seem that important so how do you align your team yeah i think that uh it's really important you have a sharp viewpoint on the structure you put in place to do this kind of testing and how you operationalize it and you know what's really important to to my team and we're kind of thinking about how to market our product we have a subscription product it's called citizen protect 24 7 access to a trained safety agent y'all should check it out um when we're trying to get them excited

6:41about it we really want to tell the whole story through these flows that present the pay walls it's not necessarily just about what does this paywall look like and where do we put it it's what is the user's mindset when they're opening the app and what is the story we sort of reveal to them through our onboarding um so that when they see the paywall it's contextualized to their experience and like we think about it as an end-to-end user flow and you know our flow right now has two different paywall moments where we give you a story about the app and how it's it exists for your personal safety and

7:08your community safety we have you sign up we present a paywall a lot of people convert there if you don't you fill out a safety profile which just exists to make sure we can better protect you and then you see another pay wall after that if you haven't yet subscribed if you have already you get you know a demo of the product you just signed up for and when you frame it that way kind of at the narrative level then you can create these like that moments where people can kind of understand kind of how their work fits in and kind of this is not just about you know one space for

7:36one user it's actually kind of a narrative flow and then you can start to run really rapid tests on the key moments of leverage in that surface and i know jake has a bunch of thoughts on this as well but you know for us it's really always be testing um the more you can kind of generate idea-wise the better concepts the better theories you have the better results you'll see and then as you sort of get wins and sort of you know inflect your curves up and onboarding is a great place for this because for us there's a new flow of users every day and it inflects your

8:03curves forever um it becomes very motivating to a team and that's sort of how we think about the structure and uh if i could add one more thing it would be the less engineering you need to test and iterate uh the better off you'll be in the half and the faster you can kind of create a feedback loop for success which is why we're really excited about what superwall offers because it is you know relatively speaking a lot less code for a lot more kind of iteration which has kind of re-galvanized our team yeah that's really cool and then uh in jake's i'm borrowing from jake's

8:32list to uh uh run the the conversation today uh of the five top things to focus on for optimizing your paywall the first one is placement and the second one is features and i know jake i mean sorry daryl just before we got on stage we were talking about uh citizen has been thinking a lot about how to balance your freemium offering so yeah what's your thinking about landing people on the paywall and then what the freemium experience should be because obviously you want to put some features behind the paywall but then you want to give people a good experience it's to me it's like one of the big

9:10biggest challenges in the subscription app space is to really dial in your freemium strategy and then jake i'm going to follow up because i love some of your ideas on here but what yeah how are you thinking about that at citizen so we take the responsibility of our free app to provide community safety for free very seriously as part of our mission and we don't want to jeopardize that with flows that lock you know essential safety information in real time behind you know paying experiences and that's just kind of like a a line we've drawn i think to be super honest we're still in the process of figuring

9:43out how to orient our existing kind of core product more more wholly around this concept of the protect agent i think i would guess if we pulled the room or definitely if we pulled our user base a lot of people because we've kept the free app so relatively unencumbered by paywalls don't even realize that this product like deeply exists yeah i was telling you before we came on i downloaded citizen last night perfect place to test it here in new york city and i saw the paywall close the paywall got the from the experience and it was a fantastic experience like there was i heard police sirens i got on the app i

10:14got to see like what was going on so it really does provide a lot of value in that free experience yeah and we don't want that's going to remain you know free and available for safety um we're in the process now of kind of reorienting our entire app around this idea of the protect agent they exist to power your community's safety right and that's going to become way more obvious to users even those notifications you get there's a protect agent who's powering that with kind of real-time editorial judgment to keep your community safe and as that becomes more clear to our user base and agent becomes

10:43more powerfully reachable in these moments of you know uh community crisis or community safety uh we think it'll become pretty obvious why you want to subscribe and we're sort of taking that type of approach versus just you know aggressively paywalling every app open or something like that though we certainly might try some of those things as we're just driving awareness for our premium safety offering but the core app will remain you know largely free with the safety enhancement yeah and a lot of apps go that route but jake you give the exact opposite advice to a lot of so your advice often is to paywall everything at first so why why would you

11:18give the advice to paywall everything well usually when you're starting an app your uh how how well you iterate has to do with the quality of your users and the quality of their feedback and your app is only going to get better over time as you push updates so if you're really striking a nerve by solving a really really important problem what you're doing by charging up front for the worst version of your app is it's a force function for finding the people whose problem this is truest uh you know in their lives so for example if you have a fitness app the first version of your fitness app is going to

11:52be pretty bad but if someone's willing to pay for it those people are probably really really open to using a fitness app to get you know healthier or stronger or whatever it is and so those are people that you can build for and whose problems you can solve and then would the idea then be to over time figure out if there are specific features that should be part of a free experience yeah i mean there are different kinds of apps there are mass market apps like citizen that sort of relies on millions of people you know depositing information into it and so it's kind of tough to

12:25just pay gate the whole app if if you're the whole success of your app depends on some viral coefficient uh but if you're if you're just looking to make money with a subscription uh there you have to test you have to test both but what you're either going to do is paywall the entire app or paywall half your app and when you're paywalling half your app you have to keep in mind that the price of those features you're paywalling they just doubled right because half the product have to half the app is free so there's no value associated with it the other half there's tons of value

12:57associated with it right because you're only charging for those and um majority of your users don't get to use the software as you created it um because half of it is not available to them and yeah that's right the other thing i think about a ton too is um you know the the features that you paywall um need to have like some self-evident value and that's what i've really struggled with like you see a lot of apps it's like they want to put their best features behind the paywall but sometimes your best feature is actually maybe an innovative feature that isn't like self-evidently valuable and so you

13:32think oh i'm going to build this amazing feature we're going to spend all this engineering time it's going to be amazing and you put it behind your paywall and people are like what like what is that even it's like you need them to experience it and so by either doing a fully free of fully paywalled they actually get to experience those great features during that free trial or you do you do that kind of uh free trial where they they get that even if it's not hard pay well so yeah a lot of things to play with a lot of things to experiment with and then

14:03the cool thing is like none of this is set in stone and that's the whole point is that you know you need to optimize this over time you need to try things in and out of your paywall you need to experiment with with pricing and everything else and that's actually the next thing i wanted to bring up the third thing to optimize on your paywall is pricing and we could talk for hours about optimizing the the main price but one of the things i think you talk about a lot that's especially interesting that not everyone thinks about is intent based pricing and showing different offers to

14:35different uh people in different stages of their user journey but then also in different countries and kind of understanding intent so how do you how do you do that and what do you think about that sure well the the uh not so nice way to say it is price discrimination the nice the nice way to say it is um personalized pricing what you're doing is you're maximizing for both revenue and users at the same time um you're you're making your product more available in places who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it um which i think is inherently a good thing i think it's it's things can be said about increasing

15:12the price dramatically for very wealthy people right but i think that making your product more accessible for people who might not otherwise be able to afford it i think that outweighs it as a as a good thing yeah um but yeah and dating apps got in trouble for example for like charging men more and women less and that's not the kind of price discrimination you're talking that's not illegal i don't think yeah but what we're talking about here is more you know if if somebody uh comes into your app doesn't engage with like your core features yeah and you send them an email it's like hey 50 off

15:43absolutely continuing to capture value and now with uh promotional uh subscription promotional offers on app store and um android you can't do things like a month free you can do a year discount and then it kicks back up like there's a lot of ways to kind of uh do this kind of these offers and discounts that that don't even necessarily last all the time either uh darryl how are you all thinking about pricing i know currently you actually only have a monthly plan which is really different than most subscription apps how are you thinking about uh annual and then evolving pricing and testing pricing over time

16:19yeah i mean something you should know about us off the jump is uh you know we kind of our subscription business kind of happened to us you know we so we we had a free app and then we sort of realized along our journey oh we can actually monetize via the subscription so it wasn't as though we built this like really elegant system from the very beginning it just it all interconnected and scaled and that's a different i think inherently product challenge when you step into something like that so the reason we have a monthly isn't because we figured out that's perfect it's because like our tooling and our testing

16:48and all things haven't yet fully caught up to you know all of the permutations or even web acquisition or these things that will allow us to go layers deeper and um it doesn't mean we're going to be stuck there but that's kind of where we started and if there's a lesson from that i would say you know be as simple as you need to be to sort of get your thing off the ground and then layer on the complexity i don't think you're going to win by being prematurely complex in a lot of cases though you might find like a local maxima and so we're in the process now

17:12of scaling out we will have different pricing offerings and something we're talking a lot about is you know we offer this like i kid you not very important kind of product that's rescuing people who need help when they press a button and reach an agent how do we get that to more people and that will inherently require different price tiers or different models we're even considering affiliate programs whereby you know maybe if you invite a certain amount of people you get free access or something like that so um we think a lot about pricing is almost like a tool for access i think jake put it really well and

17:42that will inherently necessitate you know a family plan with a different level of access and a monthly plan and for sure annual plans and you know there's other things we're thinking about sort of off of that um and this doesn't mean we haven't tested pricing but when we did test it it wasn't obviously this like oh we got a sprint to do this now kind of lever relative to like adding more value or doubling down on refining kind of the core product offering in the context of a single price yeah yeah i think that's what a lot of apps kind of fail to to think about like pricing can't evolve over

18:11time like you don't have to get it perfect the first time i was looking at the tinder app recently because you know they're they're a lot further along than a lot of subscription apps and they now have i let's see if i get this right a gold offering a platinum offering and then a platinum plus offering those are three separate subscriptions then they have two separate uh in-app consumables for super boosts and super likes or profile boosts and super likes those are in-app consumables and then you can actually get a subscription for the boost and so it is a a crazy product matrix um and i'm happily

18:49married man so i don't use tinder so i'm not sure exactly how they presented market research market research but uh but it's one of those things like you know you can over time develop a much more mature monetization uh as you test and see what works and then i would imagine and even what i saw just in in minimal testing of the of the tinder app is that they do progressively show these things so you're not seeing like a paywall with like 30 options you're seeing the paywall that's relevant to what you're trying to do and then they can upgrade you over time or you know pull you

19:23deeper into the app uh so i think and and this is why we need to test right this is why we need super wall to actually see what's performing well to test things out to constantly be iterating the whole point is to uh you want to you want to show every individual user the price that matches their demand so their demand is could be different from the onset so right when they download the app you know if they're in a different country their demand might be lower because people don't make as much money there but also based on time from when they downloaded so if a month

19:56has passed since they first downloaded and they you know haven't converted yet their demand is also lower and so in all these scenarios you need to set up rules so that you can offer the right discount at the right at the right time yeah um and just like an econ 101 you're just maximizing the area under under the curve which is like your revenue so placement features pricing the next one on your list is visuals and i have two things in mind and we'll see if you get it right what are the top two things to think about on visuals for your paywall the top two gonna move the needle things

20:31uh on design of your paywall a video always does great we we haven't seen actually with you with you actually a video is flat oh interesting yeah but it was just one video we'll have to do more videos um so one of one of the best placements to put a paywall is right before onboarding the thing is before onboarding it's it's kind of tough you're asking someone to pay for your app without ever trying it um and people have a nerd people have an urge to feel things you know like if you go if you if you were to go to a a store and you ever get that urge when

21:05you're when you're looking at a product on the shelf to want to like take it out of the packaging to sort of see what it's like before you buy it by adding a video of just here's how the app works in the paywall you sort of get that same feeling as a user of oh okay i understand what i'm buying i understand exactly what i'm getting in interestingly enough across all categories the videos that we see do well are not like live action commercials they're just like high production value screen recordings of the app with like overlays people just want to see what the hell they're getting

21:35so like literally show it to them inside of a phone and you've made a good point before too that i just never would have thought of is that when you drop a free user into your app and you you know they're not going to read the onboarding screens they're not going to necessarily know how to engage with like your highest value features and so by building the video you're actually showing them the best way to use the app like you're showing them the value of the app and you get to kind of control the messaging there totally versus kind of dropping them into the app and hoping

22:05they land on these high value high engagement features instead you just show it to them right from the outset all right so what's number two what's the second like pro tip okay i'm trying to i'm trying to pattern to see what you have in your mind okay uh coloring the cta oh yeah okay that's a big one so i think amazon once did a study someone once did a study they wanted to figure out what what color made the best see for a cta button and the interesting thing is it actually doesn't matter what matters is that it's the only thing that has any color on the page so really

22:39stick to bland paywalls but not that much color you want really high contrast between the only button you want them to press which is the purchase button and the background don't use graphics with crazy with the same cta color that that sort of steals uh visual weight from people's attention yeah yeah i think this is a fantastic tip uh so placement features pricing uh the last one on your list is copy and this is something i'm really curious darryl uh you have a fairly large team there a citizen how do you think about copy and this is kind of we can talk specifically on paywalls but this is such an important

23:18thing across marketing across app features i mean writing well inside an app is is such a huge topic in and of itself but but how do you as citizen think about copywriting paywalls marketing and things along those lines so i think we've kind of approached this in stages and we still sort of they all sort of some seem to come back around like early stage kind of getting your future off the ground we were just crowdsourcing a lot you know we literally get into a room and be like hey like here are some you know inspirational images that we might throw in this paywall like what kind of copy

23:51would you write for them and we'd get you know five six people writing sort of creative copy and then we'd run a test of all of those and kind of see what resonated and kind of like get real-time feedback on the kinds of value props or even like phrases never be alone was a phrase that really resonated for our product um and then you could kind of build more build momentum off of that so we did a lot of just like creative brainstorming jump into a fig jam get the team rallied and it's crazy where the best ideas can come from when you're like testing on a specific surface

24:19beyond that you know we do have a team of uh creative content writers they power all of our apps content who we can pull in strategically to help us write product copy um we do that on as on an as needed basis we don't have like an in-house kind of content writer we're just a little smaller and a little scrappier than that but i think if there's anything i could kind of reinforce its best ideas can come from anywhere and do what you can to sort of create the conditions where the best ideas can emerge for your highest value flows yeah as you think about um copy

24:47jake what are what are some of the top things that come to mind as far as what you the kind of state of mind or frame of of thinking that you should get into when writing paywall copy well in in general writing writing copy that leads to user action uh is a is a skill yeah people are really good at it goes back to like the direct marketing days with like selling sending letters to people's homes to try to get them to do things like people do really really good work there usually uh there are two things to remember one you always want to tell the

25:20user exactly what you want them to do like exactly so you say like if you could be as blunt as press the purple button below to start your free trial like that's great um or if you can say unlock today to continue usually on pay walls we don't even see in the copy that you're telling the user to subscribe it's just sort of like you know buy now or whatever um and the second is that most people lack they lack the eq to really put themselves in their customers shoes and even if you can you can't put it in all your customers and all of their different segments and usually the

25:55best place to figure out how to talk about your product is by asking your users why they love your product so um in the past i've looked through uh like questionnaires and surveys to see there's a question why do you love you know whatever your app is um and usually users do a really good job of just succinctly succinctly saying why they love your app and yeah sometimes you're too close to the problem to put it in a way that's yeah and i was looking at my notes because there were there were two things that you've said before that i really resonated with as well and that's selling outcomes and engaging

26:30emotion yeah in your copywriting so yeah tell me a little bit more about about how you sell outcomes versus selling features so the example with selling outcomes is when there's a toothpaste brand advertising on tv they advertise the smile then they go into the fluoride and the chemical differentiation between their products but usually you want to sell the outcome and you want to sell it as something that rings an emotional bell in the customer so um instead of saying uh you know fitness ai is a uh is an accurate is an ai weightlifting coach you want to say feel your strongest and your most confident because like in knowing that you have

27:09the best weightlifting routine um on the planet right so that's like more of an emotional yeah invitation to try to try your app out yeah that's great all right so we've covered placement we've covered features we've covered pricing we've covered visuals and we've covered copy those are the top five things that you should be thinking about when optimizing your paywalls but we've got a couple minutes left and so i want to leave everybody with your experience so we didn't talk about it but jake built superwall because he was in the app industry himself building an app called fitness ai he was a founder of that app actually

27:48went through y combinator and was going to blow that app up and then you did this one experiment that just completely blew your mind so tell us about that experiment and then how it led you to then build superwall um we added a video to the paywall and we moved it before onboarding and revenue like it went up 80 or conversion rates went up 80 and we didn't even change anything about the product wow and yeah throughout throughout fitness i's existence most of my investor updates were speaking about you know paywall stuff and conversion rates and so when i shared with them that i think i may have

28:22started the wrong business they were uh they were pretty encouraging to go try it out um so yeah so so and we've talked about this example before so trial start rates went like through the roof because you actually like took a swing yep you actually gave people the opportunity to start a free trial absolutely like people installs to paywall the the percentage of installs to paywall went up from like 40 to 85 wow and then and then the thing that i was most amazed at is that subscription app um lifecycle it is like a funnel and sometimes you can juice uh trial starts by being really

29:02aggressive with the paywall but then you see a commensurate drop in trial conversions or you see really bad retention or you know it's really you can't refund rates go really high so you can't look at any individual benchmarks in isolation especially when you're running these tests you really want to watch these cohorts perform over time and so what happened with this specific cohort did they this one most of them converted down down funnel so it was worth it um the truth is onboarding probably wasn't that good and people who were really motivated and who would have bought just weren't finishing onboarding to save paywall uh so with the video you

29:41they understood exactly what they were getting and you get you just gave them the option to purchase if they wanted also you could always tap the x button right you could just skip it yeah and then one more hot tip another one from jake um tell me about adding discounted subscription plans to your subscription group ah that's a good one so uh when someone goes to cancel uh your subscription they go to the app store and they're forced to look at all the subscriptions in your subscription group before you cancel and so um a trick that that we do is offer a discounted plan in that subscription group and it sort of

30:16acts as a built-in win back campaign because if you're gonna go cancel you're forced to see that there's a cheaper plan as you're canceling um and i think 10 15 of subscribers are on a plan that you can't even subscribe to in the app the only way you could subscribe to it is by trying to cancel yeah in the app store and what i love about this particular win back campaign it's not a dark pattern there's a cancel button right there yeah it's a it's a cheaper price right above the cancel button you're not tricking people you're not making it hard to cancel you're not you know putting 10

30:51steps in between them and canceling you're just giving them a cheaper plan and what's super cool is they're probably going to cancel anyways they were in the cancel screen and so you're winning back revenue that you would have lost and then okay they tell all their friends hey go subscribe to fitnessai for 99 go to cancel and then you're going to get this cheaper plan it's like great that's great that's incredible word of marketing and then those people who are on that cheaper plan probably have higher retention over time because they feel like they're getting this great deal and they don't want to lose that great deal uh so anyways i thought

31:25that was just another fantastic quick tip um that's a great tip i'm gonna say i haven't heard that noted well we are a couple minutes over time already but uh uh jake and daryl thank you so much for joining us um thank you this will be aired as a podcast on the sub club podcast in june will be released and then also youtube videos and video clips and everything so if you enjoyed and want to share it with folks it will be on the sub club podcast soon and andrew thank you so much for having us are you going to come walk us out are we

31:57done thank you everybody not with the bang but with a whimper yeah okay thank you thank you everyone [Applause] 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]