# Andy Carvell, Phiture - Proven Growth and Retention Strategies for App Developers

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vjmp0gFhwHg
Duration: 45 min
Language: English
Words: 8770
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/Vjmp0gFhwHg

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[0:00] so the impact that you can drive with notifications uh is reach times relevance times frequency what we learned from the time at soundcloud was not all notifications are equal and the really killer ones that are going to really supercharge your business have high reach high relevance and high frequency and then you're in that that golden quadrant [Music] 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 welcome to the sub club podcast i'm your host david bernard and with me

[0:39] as always jacob biden hello jacob hi david it's uh thundering in your neck of the woods i hear uh it's you know it's clearing up now i think we're gonna make it good i've got a plumber our guest might have some construction workers there's gonna be a fun one today david you're preaching the magic of podcasting and it's gonna get all edited out so [Laughter] all right speaking of our guest our guest today is andy carville partner and co-founder of feature a mobile growth agency at feature andy has worked with some of the biggest apps on the app store including headspace spotify triller and visco prior to

[1:17] finding founding feature andy worked on the marketing and grow teams at soundcloud welcome to the podcast andy thanks david real pleasure thanks for inviting me on uh excited to be here yeah so um so you and i were chatting a little bit about your background um as i was kind of prepping your bio and you shared a really fun anecdote so i think i'm like old man in the mobile space you know or jacob and i both like we both had apps on the app store in 2008 you know we were early but you started in mobile a little just just a few years before that

[1:51] so um just a little bit more tell us about that you're at nokia making games in like 1999. yeah right out of uh um university i graduated computer science in 99 um and i you know i always wanted to be making games uh and i was applying for roles in in the games industry and then the agent that was kind of helping me find those um said hey there's this company nokia they make mobile phones i didn't own a mobile phone at that point none of my friends did but it was just kind of reaching the tipping point and uh it's like yeah they want to put games

[2:25] on these things and i'm like okay that sounds interesting um and yeah it was actually like i went along for the interview i really got along was very kind of amazed at the you know the r d center there it was like like pretty space age you know they were working on some real next level and um i was actually pretty excited by the idea of like cramming of you know decent games into like 16 kilobytes which is what i had to play with again games on uh you know on a black and white 84 by 48 pixel display so that's that's what's going to ask are

[2:57] we talking like snake are we talking like java level stuff it was pre-java it was uh embedded games i was coding in c in assembly um and i basically had to like build the whole game from start to finish we had a shared designer uh who did the pixel art um and i had to you know cram it into 16k and make it fun yeah i really wrote a game called space impact there which was released on the 3310 phone which i think wasn't available in america but rest of world um a lot of people played that game it was like the first uh side-scrolling arcade shoot-em-up on

[3:29] a mobile phone that is amazing wow it's pretty it's pretty it's pretty incredible just to even think like the iphone wasn't that far behind that right like you were doing 16k assembly and c and like eight years later we were gonna have like opengl driven yeah games which is pretty wild yeah yeah it's moved on a lot so after um nokia you spent some time at soundcloud and there's a couple things you did at soundcloud that i wanted to dig into because i it seems like you've kind of continued that work at feature um and it's really relevant to our audience in subscriptions um so so so one of those is the mobile

[4:13] lifecycle program and this is something i think so much about it's just there there is such a huge story that's that that's hard to tell and hard to really understand it's something like you know i i think we can help with that revenue cat that i'm constantly thinking of from a product perspective um and i think developers often it's like you just you get an install you get them to start a free trial and they convert and like but there's so many other journeys and so many parts of the life cycle that um that need to be studied so tell me about this mobile life cycle program kind of

[4:51] the origins and then you know how you see it today yeah um so yeah i was at soundcloud for about four and a half years in the end um i was working on you know various teams but ended up actually building out a cross-functional uh team focused on user retention uh which is where i got really into the life cycle topic um and yeah it's you're absolutely right it's it's a pretty complex topic it's one that we've continued to you know develop processes and and um you know best practice around a feature where we're helping companies like this go and uh yeah blinkist actually is another

[5:28] one that we're working with recently but yeah everybody seems to struggle with this because it is such a a giant topic as you say david um there's a lot to it there's a lot of different touch points you can have with the user and it all comes starts with understanding the user journey right and understanding understanding users probably better than you currently do and that for me always starts with asking them questions rather than diving straight into the analytics and looking at funnels uh i think it's something that's really overlooked in in tech companies you know we have all this data available and so the the instinct is just to dive in and

[6:06] look at the numbers now i think quant tells a very interesting story and for sure you need to be tracking what what users are doing to to understand those user journeys quantitatively but you also want to understand the psychology of the user at these these different points right what what are they thinking what are they hoping for what are they expecting um and you know i think uh great life cycle program from you know actually use user life cycle starts outside of the store right you outside of the app brother so it starts in the stores such as the need right or a one yes it

[6:41] starts with a need or a one um and then you know that hopefully the somehow the user discovers the app it's either through an advert or maybe a friend has mentioned it or you know there could be many ways that they come to the app stores but then you know they're all going to go through that app store which is why the feature we also put a lot of work into app store optimization with our clients you know you start the user journey there you're setting the expectation uh in your ad creative and in your app store page it's a great opportunity to to sell the benefits of the app and and

[7:13] qualify your users you know well because you're you're really then you know setting setting that expectation which you then need to deliver on in the very first session in the app so then you get into onboarding and activation and uh you know that can be both within the product but also augmented by a multi-channel messaging approach which is we did a lot of work with that at soundcloud um because this is like for me this is the kind of the hack right the magic bullet is that not that not that crm is the most effective lever for for engaging users actually that's product but crm is a great way to

[7:53] circumvent a six-month product backlog um an engineering backlog and and rapidly iterate on ideas and and also it's got built-in measurement and and segmentation so you can do some really interesting stuff sorry you had interest in that yeah so when you say crm i mean like i know crm is like in my world salesforce or maybe intercom or something is but when i've heard i've heard this used in the marketing world but what is what is the more seems like there's a more broad context uh or a broad definition of that term yeah and there's so many different terminology and definitions around it's it's uh it's very confusing

[8:30] as with everything in tech but um yeah so when i say crm you know which is customer relationship management and that goes back you know to the 60s and 70s you know classic business um you know theory actually it's nothing new that we've invented just with tech but uh when i'm talking about crm in a mobile app scenario i'm talking about leveraging a customer engagement platform like braze or lean plum or iterable maybe and uh you know the it's typically what you've got available in that kind of stack would be some sort of rudimentary analytics enough to do sort of targeting and triggering of messages as well as some

[9:12] basic measurement around like what the effects of those messages are although typically you'd want to pair that with your your product analytics to get a deeper view on how it's affecting retention or you know or monetization for that matter um but yeah you're able to sort of you know carve out segments of users and then craft uh interactions so so the tools you mentioned there salesforce and intercom definitely still in that mix we don't we don't see them so much specifically salesforce we see it more in enterprise um mostly around mostly around email as a channel um but you know the sort of more modern or mobile-first platforms

[9:49] you know such as braze for example um you know really kind of built to leverage um mobile specific channels like uh push and rich push um in mobile in-app messaging which is a killer channel for engaging users who are in the app and it's where it kind of bridges the gap between classic product and classic marketing because you can really kind of overlay and augment new experiences on top of what's what's built in the product um which sometimes causes some tension with uh with the designers but actually you can make them look you can make them look super native um and and yeah you can test and iterate on

[10:27] them quickly which is the the real benefit i think of using a platform like that is you can if you're testing on onboarding for example you're looking at day zero users you've got a fresh cohort every day you can run you know if you've got enough bigger code you can you can iterate every day if you want or at least every couple of days and as long as you're getting a few thousand downloads right or you know or even like even hundreds right if you're getting hundreds of downloads like those are significant enough cohorts especially if you're running you know tasks very towards that very beginning of the

[10:57] experience right so you get like lots of exposure but yeah and then it's typically very high leverage too right because we found this at elevate a lot um just in the nature of funnels is that there were all these like tests and kind of experiments we wanted to do further down the funnel like oh how was like the last step look and all this stuff and it turns out nine times out of ten it was not really that important because what really mattered was the first step or the second step because that's just where the most people were right it didn't matter we could get half the lift there but it

[11:26] mattered more because they hadn't decayed all the way through the funnel right which is there's a lot of these like unintuitive aspects of yeah i guess we think about a crm is like the pre-experience finding you getting into the app re-engaging right that are in some ways like there's an overlapping piece with products right but it's broader right it exists like sort of outside of the the specific software itself um and and yeah thinking about it holistically is yes david was saying earlier it's difficult right it's difficult because of the time based aspect system because it's multi-platform it's difficult because you know i think the tooling still

[12:03] leaves something to be desired um but but uh yeah i think it's really interesting to to talk about using your user interviews in that process because um you traditionally think about doing that in a product process right when you're like trying to talk to users about what to build but you actually need to be talking to them about how how do they what do they want like why do they why are they here like why did you to inform like you know how you're contacting them communicating with them etc very much so yeah and then so so part of that um life cycle management is this

[12:38] multi-channel notification systems and you've kind of already mentioned that a little bit but um so in mobile apps you know and the clients that you're working with that fisher feature and then some of the work you've done you did previously at soundcloud um how do you kind of manage the the breadth of available channels now you've got email you've got in-app you've got push um you know and have you seen kind of patterns in in certain channels performing better with these kind of mobile audiences yes absolutely i mean i think to some extent it it depends on the the the app itself and the audience for

[13:18] that app um you know we still see sms for example being a really impactful channel in in some specific categories like um you know soundcloud wouldn't send sms i think it would be a bad idea possibly in some markets you know maybe that are slightly less developed they have older phones but i'd say it's probably not a great channel for soundcloud for example but um you know we uh we did some work with uh with goodrx which is a uh like a prescription uh discount service in america is huge i think they uh yeah i think they might have ipo'd recently but uh yeah in any case

[13:54] sms is still a huge channel for them um because they're you know a lot of their customers are older people people with um you know with who are not necessarily engaging with with emails or or necessarily in-app messages i mean i think in-app is generally a pretty great channel for anyone who's in the app but actually with some some apps it's not a very valuable channel at all because the user's barely in the app if you're thinking about sort of very functional experiences like uh i'd say uber uber is a is a good example like there's definitely some room there to even with mobility startups to

[14:27] interact with users while they're in the app but you don't want to get in their way because they're there to book a ride and get in it so you have like limited surface area so yeah really uh you know when we go in as feature you know our retention team goes into to build out a an engagement strategy with a customer we very much like to to understand not just their users but also you know figure out what is the right channel mix that makes sense we actually put out i i think a while back a a matrix which kind of highlights the pros and cons of each

[14:57] channel and how they can be used in combination maybe i can i can dig out the link and and we can include it in the podcast yeah and you know it's funny i i feel like i see all these like threads on twitter about like especially from like the kind of indie developer scene about like you know don't you know do a newsletter like email is evil and like and then i'm always the one that's like i kind of like newsletters like as long as it's not like overly aggressive um and then same with sms i found myself lately just ended up with a couple of apps like

[15:31] a thrive market it's like a shopping it's kind of like amazon grocery-ish kind of stuff and they're texting me and i kind of like it and i never would have thought you know because like their push notifications they just get lost but like i care about when my order ships and i carry and so it's interesting how i think you know sometimes we in tech underestimate that when somebody really cares about something they don't mind getting notified about it but that's where you have to like be really careful of where you draw these lines and how you do your messaging and what the user really cares enough about

[16:07] but when they do you know you you know it's always felt to me as a developer like oh sms is like it's just off the table like i wouldn't touch that but then like now i'm like wait a minute like if it's something a user really cares about like it's a viable platform stuff right like your ship shipped and things like that and then you know it's become something you can piggyback marketing messaging or expansion or product marketing on to right um but i i always i was that that point is super valid david across to you as your twitter's not real life right and it's totally true that like

[16:43] the developers and the communities and the styles that we have often as people who make software and our insiders is very different from the the median consumer which is not even a thing there is no median consumer right you're dealing with this huge distribution of users and different they have different tastes and they have different um appetites for for for marketing and all this stuff and yeah i always believe give them control like obviously don't do anything on tour don't message people if they say not to right and give people like an opt-in opt-out like you know as clear a choice in the onboarding funnel but yeah you'd be surprised like people

[17:16] don't have as much stuff going on sometimes or as much noise in their in their feed and they might really want to engage and those are the users that you really should be reaching right because they are like they're not only installing your app but they're willing to show some intent to engage with you right because they they have a real purpose to be there right as opposed to like a drive-by or something like this right and so um yeah i don't know i think that that advice goes beyond just this one particular topic because like we yeah we hear developers all the time like being like

[17:46] oh i don't want to i mean i even remember me going back to elevate again being when we started to we hired a growth marketer and started to work some of these notification channels i was very against it like i thought this was like disrespectful to our users it was just growth hacking it was whatever then i saw the numbers right like i don't know the retention didn't go down all the other numbers went up i was like well i guess people won't care right or at least like the people that don't care aren't big enough to matter i mean they matter but like i don't know

[18:13] i'm building a business here at some point right so um it's counter-intuitive this goes to your earlier point though and i was just gonna bring up is 12 south i just bought this forte stand thing that's like one of my favorite products i've bought in a long time it's amazing it's like wireless charging for my phone i can drop my airpods pro on there and it charges a little ad for them real quick but i went to unsubscribe to their email because they were sending me like two a week i was like well i don't wanna i don't wanna unsubscribe because i actually like twelve south like they make good

[18:45] products i love this product i just bought from them i wanna know what they're up to so i go to unsubscribe because i just can't i can't do two emails a week from these people and then the the email thing was like hey do you want to just hear from us you know twice a week uh once a week or once a month i was like once a month cool like i'd love to hear from them once a month i wish more newsletters would do that and the opposite i i subscribe to kiwico boxes for my kids and they email me like four times a week

[19:14] and i've even talked to their twitter team and they're like we're gonna put you on the like slow thing and they don't and i keep getting four emails a week so i'm just going to unsubscribe so it's a lot to build that in right like it's a lot to like we're talking about i'm sure andy doing this whole time like just getting that first version of like a marketing product marketing campaigns going for sure it's hard to add in like well okay you'll have the the one month and the you know it takes time to build those things up so it doesn't surprise me but it is

[19:37] interesting that um yeah i mean it's interesting to to well it's a tough choice as product builders right we always have to decide like what are the corners we're gonna cut what are the like the boxes we're gonna shove everybody in right because we're not gonna be able to like perfectly meet everybody's like appetite for this stuff where they are right that's gonna be impossible um and so i mean i feel like that's where the measurement comes in right andy yeah so you've touched on so many interesting points that i know we don't have uh two hours to discuss them all but i would love to just quickly pick up

[20:08] on a couple um before we we get on to to measurement and and personalization i think it's all gonna flow so uh first point um you mentioned like you know developers being maybe not the target audience for the app that is so true and i mean unless unless you get github you know for sure but um you know for the vast majority of like consumer apps that are targeting essentially you know global audiences of more or less like you know broad audiences like you know i don't know 18 to 30 males and females or whatever who into a particular sport or something like this these people are not

[20:52] they're not engineers they don't hate notifications and you know the only way you can prove that as a growth marketer is by getting a little bit of surface area where you're allowed to learn experiments um or as as we as my team did in uh in soundcloud in the early days we would run them in places like pakistan we would just um soundcloud's going to kill me when they hear this but you know we were just like just just not send them and to berlin you know where all the engineers were based but uh we tested me the rest of world or if it was particularly something like a

[21:25] bit more daring a bit more bold and you need to run bolder experiments sometimes we would run them in pakistan we'd get a good feel for like you know what the uplift was and then we'd take it to the lawyers because sometimes there was you know there were also even legal issues about where we could tread the line with user-generated content and promotion um music licensing is a field but uh but yeah my point is it's only when you can kind of come back with data and show it to you know the exact team and say look we just moved retention five percentage points this is huge um

[21:54] then they kind of give you a bit more leeway to send a few more notifications um yeah like the the but you know we had so much resistance from from the tech team and the engineers were like convinced we were going to destroy the product and it comes from a very very good place you know they care about the product they care about the users they just they just are not representative of the users um and that comes to my second point which is uh i learned a lot from my time at soundcloud and from building out a uh real-time notification system that was um you know from was kicking out around 500

[22:31] million push notifications per month so you know we we got there in the end with the volume um but you know one of the things which i kind of distilled later when i was at feature i kind of thought back to that time and distilled it into a formula um so the impact that you can drive with notifications uh is reach times relevance times frequency and i'll just break that down very quickly so reach we're talking about you know your overall channel opt-in rate so how many people are actually opted in for push or in this case um and also like what if you're segmenting that

[23:05] that that whole audience then what stage of the funnel they're at which was to david's point earlier about how you have a you know greater surface area or greater reach as i would put it um earlier on in the funnel because more users are still around so that's um yeah so that's your reach and that's a it's a big lever on on how much impact you're going to drive with any particular notification is that is your size of your target audience that's addressable uh second one relevance which you've also touched on uh in your examples there if it's highly relevant users will tolerate not just tolerate

[23:38] but actually welcome a high volume of notifications which is the the third um parameter there in that formula the third variable which is frequency how frequently can you send this particular notification before people start to opt out and then it like brings your reach down so it's basically like uh it's not a seesaw because there's three elements to it right but it's some kind of 3d seesaw where if you get the right balance and you're able to tweak those things there's a tension between those three variables right but if you're able to increase relevance by by personalization um you know by providing in soundcloud's case more relevant recommendations for

[24:18] content or looking at what users have listened to before and and telling them more things about artists that they've been listening to and things like that that would increase the relevance which means you can proxy that by click-through rate uh they're much less likely to turn them off and you can send more of those notifications you can increase that frequency and so what i learned from that what we learned from the time at soundcloud was not all notifications are equal and the really killer ones that are going to really supercharge your business have high reach high relevance and high frequency and then you're in that that golden um quadrant i would imagine

[24:52] i don't know if you if you all have built things out internally to to feature but i imagine that kind of 3d seesaw is really hard to measure it's really hard to understand which which ones are driving relevance which ones and especially once you get into personalization where now you're not dealing with just massive a b tests you're actually like almost doing a user level uh understanding of what's relevant what's not so so it brings us to the to the next big topic and we can kind of dive into that aspect of it later but you got to build out a stack for this and so and this is something i

[25:32] you've done a great job of kind of boiling a lot of this down into the the mobile growth stack and i wanted to talk through a few kind of levels of the mobile growth stack so a lot of apps you know i taught as developer advocate i talked to a ton of revenue cat customers so a lot of apps all the way from like you know hey we just have an idea we're like thinking about subscriptions to indies to like huge companies and um but you have a lot of people super early who are kind of overbuilding and then you have people in the middle like what do i do next

[26:06] so let's talk through kind of a stack for for your mvp and then on to your kind of intermediate and then to your kind of growth stage like what's the like mvp i want to get this out but i want to have just enough you know measurement just enough analytics just enough data to to start growing this thing yeah great question and and um yeah it's a really good topic actually because you know this mobile growth stack framework which uh which which i published originally at soundcloud and we continued to develop a feature you know it's it's huge there's loads of stuff on there it's basically trying to

[26:44] encapsulate everything that you know could form part of your marketing strategy and your growth approach to growing growing a mobile app so sometimes people misinterpret that as oh i have to do all of these things i have to take all of these prices in order to be successful uh no absolutely not like you know you have to play to your strengths and also to your to your company stage and your your priorities right and and for sure if you try to overreach you try to do everything you're going to do it all really badly or at least most things um so much better to focus and yeah i think

[27:17] this could be another good uh blog post actually that i should write but um but yeah let's let's dive into it now and let's have a go so like early stage right pre-launch or well let's let's skip pre-launch for a second let's say you've just launched into the market uh with your you know with your new app i think what i see often is a of challenge with early stage customers and and frankly why we we don't work with super early stage customers in feature is they have unrealistic expectations they they think they're ready for hyper growth um but you know accepted except in absolutely like you know standout

[27:55] anomalous cases like maybe flappy bird would be a good example uh that that was ready for hyper growth pretty much from day one i think just just happened to catch the zeitgeist but you know you can't bank on that and most 99.9 of apps will not have that kind of success so actually what an early stage app team needs to work on is product market fit whether they whether they think they do or not they're probably two or three years away from market product market fit that means they need to iterate on the product and they need to iterate on the marketing and you know meet there

[28:27] somewhere in the middle with some level of um you know kind of a retention curve that flattens out at least somewhere along that curve i was thinking about this this this product market fit meaning and i don't know it's one of these words that it's it's it's it's constantly an enigma to founders and because nobody can tell you what it is right uh i think because it's different for every product it's even for every segment it's different for every market like what it actually looks like in our in this space the consumer subscription space it generally has to do with uh yeah the i think that's the

[28:58] best a very good definition of it the retention curves that do flatten out because like you don't get in this space you don't tend to get like ex like super stable user cohorts they always like drop off to some level but you want to see like some reasonable level out in some like shortest period of time which takes a while with subscription apps to really understand like two three four five six months or like for the annual renewals it takes a year to really understand it um but focusing on the product first yeah is really what you need to do at elevate we actually before we even

[29:28] launched and we weren't subscription when we launched but we we had uh uh and just or yeah we just released on um android so we had an android app we could it was great because we could release a new version every week um and do a beta list and we could we we curated a list or it was sorry it was android and ios and we used like test flight distributions but um and we measured each cohort right it's not talking about we weren't a b testing we weren't like driving in massive downloads or anything like this but we were just looking like each like subsequent cohort like what

[30:03] was their first like 10 you know what were these like how many signed up how many finish like activated and we just watched and like watched we iterated on the app until we felt like that number was pretty good and then we launched but we didn't do a b testing we didn't like massively like go over the top in tracking right it was just like a handful of like really things because the thing is you're going to screw it up right like av testing is really hard it's expensive not because of the tooling it's expensive because operationally it's really difficult to get right you got to put a lot of people

[30:32] on it so um that really starting simple mentality will save you a lot of headaches i think yeah we had a great episode with darius mora from reflectly on this about just just that minimally viable like shoot for product market fit and you know don't do sophisticated a b testing don't do all the stuff you think you need to do and then even some of the stuff that you they you know you could install braise or like try and do these big things early you can find ways around it like you can do simple email surveys you can do simple user testing you can you can

[31:07] you know use zapier for things to kind of like bridge the gap and don't go build a ton of internal tooling around it but like do the simple hacky things that don't scale early on and then move on so then let's talk about like okay you've reached some level of market product market fit you know your um you know your your marketing seems to be resonating you've got some decent retention and you're starting to really pour money into user acquisition what's kind of that next level up um that you think companies should start layering on new new services and new sophistication yeah so and i'm talking here like

[31:49] primarily about you know growth stuff rather than feature building i'm kind of assuming that there's there's always more features to build although you know i would actually say probably people generally keep building features when they should probably stop they always think like another feature is going to be the thing which really helps marginal right right exactly and it can actually be detrimental to a point you know like when when it becomes too crowded so um but yeah so talking about the you know the growth stack and the the growth activities that would be appropriate as as you've got that initial traction and you're looking to scale it

[32:26] which is where feature can get involved by the way like this typically we work with either kind of traction and growth stage companies or actually more mature kind of increasingly like enterprise folks who maybe have a very mature product in the market and they look they're kind of plateaued and they're looking to scale it but yeah in in in that growth phase um super exciting phase um there i think it's really about you know you want to be able to start to scale so that's you're going to need to upgrade your analytics probably and start tracking more stuff to get a better understanding of you know deeper understanding of your

[33:02] engagement your attention and for sure the performance of your acquisition channels whether they're whether they're organic paid or some mixture because you likely just want to start adding layering in more acquisition either scaling the channels that are working for you or when they max out or start getting expensive you know layering in other channels i would also recommend like you know i wouldn't build it right at the start but in this growth phase it's good to experiment with virality like you know i always say it's you can't really plan for virality but you can at least sow the seeds and see if they germinate right like if

[33:39] you don't cultivate the right conditions for virality to occur it never will um but if you you know if you have like you know the ability to share content if it's a content app if you put those share features in then at least you can kind of see what the kind of natural predilection of users is to to share to their users to share to their friends for example the networks and then you if you see some some traction there you can you can optimize it but even if it's just doing it a little bit it maybe it's helping to keep your paid acquisition costs down and you know your

[34:08] blended acquisition cost goes you know is a bit bit more sustainable uh and maybe you see that actually you go super viral you know i've seen it happen so i think like you know build building potentially referral systems or content shares depends on on your app but i'd say if you know do them in a fairly cheap way but just at least at least put those in and and see if that you know is going to be something that's going to help you grow because if you find that it is for soundcloud reality was huge you know so um but of course this it works better with with social

[34:40] apps and content apps um yeah apart from that uh you know i'd say like you know you're gonna be you're gonna be continuing to iterate on the product i'd say aso becomes more important at this point like so optimizing your app store page for um you know for organic discovery making sure that you're ranking for the right keywords uh in and also start to think about international um i think a lot of companies focus on their their core market and the one that they know best which is often you know us or you know whatever country that you know the team is based in they often

[35:13] start there and they know that market best but you know i think one of the things which for going back again to soundcloud one of the things they did very well was you know even though they were they were headquartered in berlin they didn't have this german outlook actually that the founders were not even from germany and they built it global from the start you know so they basically it was available everywhere uh you know when i came in to to help them level up on on mobile you know we made sure that we translated the app store page into all the languages when i came in it was

[35:44] just in english but even english is a good start compared to you know most other languages but you know pretty i'd say at this growth stage you want to see it's about exploring you don't necessarily know where those big levers are for scale yet but it's about discovering them so maybe maybe it's virality maybe maybe there's a market that you're not localized in yet which could be you just you just catch fire in that market you know so it's not about doing huge international launches and and doing a huge you know traditional kind of pr push in you know launching in us or whatever but you know at least make sure the app's

[36:20] available there or you know in in as many of your big markets as possible make sure that it's translated you know localizing the app localizing the app store presence and just seeing you know getting a feel for you know are you going to be a very local app or are you do you have a global potential you're really trying to tease out like what are the acquisition channels that are going to work for you and what are the what are the other levers for growth you know and probably you want to start doing a little bit more in terms of crm or customer engagement at this point

[36:53] and you know which which does also doesn't make sense when you when you're super small but you're sort of building the foundations for for for the next phase of growth and and then leading into the things that which are showing promise nice and then we we are coming up on time but um can you give us a like a 90-second two-minute uh quick drill um i think you know i i i i don't know that that many like massive apps are going to be listed in this podcast so maybe it's not even quite as relevant anyway david i think i like to think every apps can be a massive app every app

[37:26] yes right the massive apps of the future yeah yeah once you get to that stage of a headspace a calm a visco you know what what does the stack start to look like there so when you get to that kind of scale and we're working with folks like uh you know like uh like vsco like blinkist um headspace you know folks you mentioned uh and a whole bunch more uh some that i'm not allowed to talk about which i wish i could name drop but i'll get into trouble uh but some some really big enterprise brands and some household names um and when you're at that kind of scale

[37:59] you know when you're doing oh i can mention trillo trilla's a good one i'm going to give them a call out there they're a customer of ours uh awesome platform um anyway um when you're at that scale where you're just seeing like insane acquisition just on a you know that becomes the norm to get like more than a hundred thousand thousand downloads you know like a day um which which we see with some of the apps when you when you're at that kind of scale even incremental gains can be really really meaningful particularly on monetization right so i would say there you really want to then focus on subscription optimizations

[38:34] and revenue optimization way more than you would in the earlier stages because you're you've proven you've you've got all the elements in place you can really then start to scale and if you can you can increase your you know um average subscription lifetime by a month or you can increase your conversion rate even by like you know point one of a percent on your you know your subscription conversion at that scale it can be really meaningful right so i think activities which maybe you wouldn't have spent so much time on before maybe you've built out rudimentary stuff for or maybe you have rudimentary tech in place for

[39:09] it's time to start upgrading that stuff and and and going deep on these topics so things again like you know aso it's more or less you know something which you need to keep doing you're constantly kind of optimizing there to get as many organics in as possible you want to be of course continuing to optimize your your acquisition but i would i would assume at that point you've kind of got those things more or less nailed and it's almost like a hygiene factor uh it's more than a hygiene factor but sorry you said to keep this quick um yeah i'd say i i'd say like big focus on retention because you know

[39:41] again it's a slow moving metric but if you can move it even you know 25 percentage point that'll give such compound growth and also like you know knock-on gains for monetization work a lot you know diligently on conversion optimization and starting to sort of segment your user base further to provide more segmented experiences you know because you will have those cohorts in that scale where you can start to do really interesting stuff and and and lean into ai and personalization to to really get to that increased relevance in your recommendations and communications this is when it makes sense to really do a b testing right because you can hire

[40:17] a team right to focus on it you have multiple data people you've got engineers you've got you've got to have an entire growth engineering and experimentation team um and that's what you need you could bring in feature even yeah there you go or yeah or bring somebody in right if you need it in a pinch you know so um uh yeah it's it's a different game this is how all these things go though it's like you gotta every incremental compounding something like a business like this like every every the next 10x is always gonna just be different it's gonna take different tools different mindset there's going to

[40:52] be different um different returns on different actions right and i think uh you know when i talk to people at different stages a lot of times folks get this get this wrong right they they think they need you you were mentioning at the beginning andy like just thinking oh we're ready to scale when you're really not right and so it's there is a lot of value in just understanding what is like how what how different a hundred thousand downloads is from ten thousand from a hundred right those are very different numbers all of those like none of those tell me like you're dead right it's just

[41:24] a different stage and doing the right things at this stage is super important so i i really like how you break this down into like different phases because i think that's how uh app developers should be thinking about it and i think as a as a summary and and talking through this with you andy's really helped me kind of frame it finally is that when you're early you take big swings that don't need sophisticated measurement to see the results you don't need sophisticated a b testing you don't need sophisticated analytics you need to take big swings that give you big results the obvious results then as you grow

[42:00] you can start taking smaller swings that require a little bit more sophistication and then as you're like scaling huge that's when you get into minutia and too many small abs are getting into the minutia too early so big swings early you can take those smaller swings later uh but anyways as we wrap up um we're gonna put in the show notes um your twitter mobile growth stack great places to follow you're constantly sharing amazing uh content there um anything else you wanted to share with uh our our fine uh cadre of uh subscription app practitioners uh yeah actually i've got a really exciting announcement uh this

[42:40] is the perfect audience for it um it feature we're hiring right now for uh subscription optimization lead it's a super exciting role you get to really be in on the ground floor building out a team and essentially a new p l line that we're kind of breaking out from our existing services i'm really doubling down on subscriptions because it's like such a big topic uh and we we're really looking for a subscription expert to come in and lead that team um you know fantastic place to work etc etc uh you know you work with some like aaa clients uh some great names that i can't talk about

[43:14] today uh you work with a fantastic team of experts um you can come to berlin and and work with us here because it's obviously not in berlin today but berlin's an awesome place to move to we'd also consider remote i think uh don't quote me on that but uh yeah get in touch um you can find the job spec if you go to the feature site that's p h i t u r e dot com uh and go to the careers page you'll find it there under subscription optimization um yeah we'd love to get that out to your audience because i'm sure there's some people there that

[43:42] might be really interested in that role i'm looking at the requirements here proficiency and iap management you know it's right in my wheelhouse so maybe i'll throw my hat in the ring well andy it was on the podcast and um yeah we're gonna have to have you back on there's there was so much more uh and future feature does such great work um and we have we share some customers and so you know we see the the results of the work you do on our end and it's really great um so thanks for being on the podcast and we'll talk again soon thanks for having me on thanks david thanks jacob

[44:18] it's been a pleasure 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 you

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