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

0:00Hello, I'm your host David Bernard and with me today RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Nathan Hudson, a two-time former head of growth, this year's app marketer of the year, and founder of Perceptics, a full-service growth agency for mobile apps focused on driving profitable user growth, retention, and revenue. On the podcast, we talk with Nathan about the strategic opportunity of web-to-app. How and when to use web-to-app, and why one app found success using webinars in

0:30their web-to-app funnel. Hey Nathan, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Hey David, it's great to be here. Been meaning to have you on for a long time, so it's great to finally make it happen. We've talked about this for almost a year. It's been a while, long time coming. Yeah, just excited. One of my favorite podcasts, in

0:47fact, it is my favorite podcast. Come on, that's just pandering. I'll take it, though. And Jacob, nice to to have you on the pod today. Thank you. It's It's nice to see Nathan. And we met in the YMCA weight room in San Francisco, but it's good to see you virtually and we didn't get a ton of time to talk when we were at Raga in San Francisco, so I'm excited to dig in a little bit. Awesome. So, the topic today is web-to-app. It's been a huge topic of 2024 and I think going to continue to be one of the leading topics of 2025 for reasons we'll get into. But I think the

1:22first place to start out because I think there is a lot of confusion around it is what do we mean by web-to-app? How do you think about web-to-app? And do you have an opinion on the spelling? Is it w e b the number two a p p or is it web t o? Asking the hard-hitting questions,

1:40David. Yeah, that's tough. It's It's funny you say it because I was working on some content a couple of months ago and I wasn't sure whether to title it web-to-app t o web-to-app two. So, I looked at how you guys named it at Raga. I looked at loads of different, you know, posts and and articles and I think that this web number two app is becoming the staple way of referring to web-to-app. Um I don't know if it's because web-to-app is already taken. No, it's just cool. It's like Boys II Men, you know what I mean? It's just like

2:12It's like a hip thing to do, I guess. It is kind of funny that we're just like making up words in this industry at this point. I think all words are made up at some point, David, so it's like, you know. But it has been a thing that like kind of emerged organically. I I've been aware of the concept for a long time, right? We We even experimented with this

2:31kind of stuff at Elevate 10 years ago. But it's been in the last, I feel like 18 months when I finally heard so many people have been emailing me being like, "Do you Do you all have a web-to-app solution? Like what are you all doing for web-to-app?" And at first I was like, "Well, yeah, you can use this and whatever." But I've I've come to learn it's actually kind of a It's a whole thing, right? And so, yeah, what does it

2:52mean, Nathan? Tell me finally so I know. Well, good question. I like to think The reason I like to define web-to-app firstly is because I think there are a lot of people who just assume web-to-app means building one of those web onboarding quizzes. Yeah, that's what I assumed. Yeah. Most people I speak to, whenever I say web-to-app, they think, "Oh, so I need a quiz, I need onboarding journey." So, I think just taking it a few steps back helps. And yeah, simply it's the process of converting traffic on the web or starting to convert traffic on the web before directing them to your app. So, I like to think of it

3:23as wherever we are in the funnel, at some point in that journey, we are going to leverage the web intentionally or unintentionally to help us convert users. So, like practical takeaways. You You kind of mentioned a few there, like So, a lot of people do do quizzes and super popular. We talked to a lot of them on the podcast, like they have a quiz. But practically, like do you have like buckets of like, you know, minimal web-to-app all the way to like full web-to-app? Is there Give me some examples of like what you think of as web-to-app? I mean, the quiz funnel is the most common. I think it's It's

3:56worth, you know, saying that it is the most common. But things like blog posts, you know, directing meta traffic or TikTok traffic to a specific blog post and then having people download the app from there, sending people from YouTube videos to long-form webinars or videos. So, web-to-app. At the end of the webinar, you might sell the app or position, "Hey, we have a product. You can buy it on our site." All the way through to just basic landing page with a buy now button. So, I think there are loads of different ways to to slice and dice it and we can get into some of the

4:28rationale behind each of those and the the use cases for those. But really, I like to think that the basic setup is just we have a landing page and a sales page on the web and we're trying to sell like a e-com brand would like a lot of SaaS products do. And then we kind of build around that based on what the

4:46user's looking for. So, at the highest highest level, it's just having some function, some touchpoint on the web before people get to the app. And then you would even say that that's not The definition wouldn't necessarily even include that you're sending ad traffic to it. Like we talked to an app Nundo Run on the podcast. Their main source of traffic was people

5:07searching alternative to Couch to 5K. And they had this one blog post that ranked really high for that. People went to the blog post, then people go from the blog post to the App Store to becoming a subscriber. So, you would even like lump organic traffic in that. It's just like creating a touchpoint on

5:23the web as people get to the app. Exactly that. And I would say it gets not vague, but it gets more complex in that I wouldn't even say that it has to be cold traffic or that it has to be people who haven't used your product. Often times, you can reactivate churned users via the web. Uh you know, whether that's an email campaign to churn subs, pushing them to the web to start a new trial or new subscription, still web-to-app. Maybe it's app-to-web-to-app, but it's it's

5:49web-to-app. It's using the web as either some part part of your acquisition funnel or retention funnel, right? And like yeah, I think I guess it's It's a good way to frame it because, you know, I think in my mind where we sit and how I've been thinking about this technology It's from a technology perspective. It's like the purchasing and the the quizzes and like all of the things that have kind of become synonymous with this. But I mean, really you're talking about just using the web as this like more open platform where you can own more of your distribution, which is always the problem with the App Stores. I mean, the

6:18App Stores you have Apple Search Ads. You can do click-to-install ads, I guess. But like your ability to to control the, you know, to have control over your acquisition funnel is pretty limited. I mean, the web just gives you a ton of more tools that you can use. Um like you were mentioning content, like

6:35whatever, just like good sales pages. And then not even Maybe it doesn't even include a purchase, right? It's just thinking about driving users to content and then content into the app. Um because people search stuff, right? On the internet. It's like a thing. And then of course, we can talk I guess we'll talk too about like what the some of those more like uh technical aspects of it, like actually converting things like that. So, all of that leads into why, which we kind of touched on that a little bit already, but like why should

7:00apps be considering using the web more? Again, we can do some some more nuanced, some more buckets. I like to break it down based on app size and app stage because I think there is a clear division between benefits for really massive apps or apps that have been around a long time doing multiple millions in monthly revenue versus smaller apps who are just looking to get their first acquisition channel going

7:25beyond, you know, organic ASO. Now, for those smaller apps, I really think there are three benefits. The main one being cash flow. Right? Which is I don't have to wait so long to receive my money if I take the purchase on the web. Now, I've spoken to loads of people, differing views. Some people agree or disagree. It's a question of is it the fees? Is it the attribution? Having worked with a lot of early-stage apps who are just trying to get one paid channel working, they always have this issue of, "Well, I mean, even if I spend 3K this month, which is a really small amount and not

7:59advisable, but even if I spend 3K this month and make 50K, I'm not going to be able to spend that next month potentially, so I can't I can't do anything. Like I'm I'm stuck." It interrupts your iteration cycles, right? So, I think that is, you know, by far the biggest advantage of testing on the web. When you're first launching a paid channel, you can just build that feedback loop. And it's kind of what you want to do with the performance channel

8:21anyway. Yeah, and even then, then 3K can actually become enough money to learn something, right? Cuz you could even do like a thousand dollars of acquisition, learn stuff literally in a day, and then do an iteration. And you will And then, you know, if you're using Stripe or whatever, I think they do almost same-day payouts, right? So, you can get that. I guess it's obvious in hindsight, but like the combination of keeping 95% of your your revenue net of fees, and then on top of that getting it instantaneously is a huge windfall like if you're cash-strapped. Yeah, I've talked a lot about the fees and how

8:55small apps, you know, only pay 15% anyway on both Google and Apple. But that time value of money thing, like You talk about like on the worst-case scenario, like the App Store might be like 60 days net of spend or yeah, or could be like 65 is the Yeah. Yeah, you can imagine you're easily easily renting that money for that amount of time is 15%, right? A short-term loan is going to cost you probably nearly that. So, the fee almost doesn't even matter at that point, really. And the 15% break, it's important, but like compounded together,

9:24I I never really thought about that. That's That is huge. For small apps, though, how do you think about conversion? I mean, this is something I've always been concerned about is is you know, for an app that has like no brand, no Is there a reticence on the part of consumers to to pay on the web for some random app they just heard

9:42about through a Google ad or whatever? It depends. Typically, we we don't see, you know, huge disparities on conversion between web and app. Often times, it's higher conversion on the web. Um especially if we're talking about, you know, low ticket subscription products. And even more so for high ticket actually, but just for a second if we talk about these low ticket products, yeah, it's not an issue. I think it can be the case that if you're directing traffic just to a landing page, as we spoke about before, and then trying to get people to purchase without a trial, without a quiz, without any context, and your landing page really isn't that

10:17great, then yeah, you're going to struggle. But similarly, a lot of small apps have hardly any reviews and a hard paywall and are still able to convert organic traffic. So, I think, you know, applying the same approach on web makes a lot of sense. And I think we talk about control, there are things you can do on web to kind of make you seem more impressive than you are. It's hard to stand out on the App Store, right? Yeah, that's a really good point. Like when you have like 10 reviews on the App Store and maybe you had a bug in your 1.0 and so you're

10:45actually only rated like 3.5 stars and you only have 10 ratings. It's like you can create an aura on the web that looks a lot more impressive than your 3.5 stars on the App Store. Yeah, and a good template for WordPress or whatever. So, you mentioned there were several reasons. So, we've gone through cash flow and fees. What are the the next two things that you think about on why smaller apps should even consider a web to app? Yeah, the next two are kind of

11:10linked. The first one is attribution. Now, it's becoming less of a reason to switch to web to app. I'm specifically talking about, you know, mobile subscription apps that are pushing meta as their first channel. Often times, at least from the founders and teams I've spoken to, beyond organic traffic, the first channel people think to try is an ASA maybe or meta. And when it comes to meta, when scan was the only way of attributing traffic, it was a real big issue. Like if you weren't spending 10K plus a month, you weren't going to hit your privacy thresholds, you weren't going to see your your

11:44postbacks, it was going to be a problem. Now with meta's AM, aggregated event measurement, it's slightly different. So, it has leveled the playing field. But there is still a advantage of using web in that you can pretty much spend, as Jacob said, 1K and learn something. And that can be fine. And you can do that on web. I would not want to launch any kind of app promotion campaign with a 1K budget or a 2K budget just because I'd be pretty cautious about what we're

12:12going to get back in a given time frame. So, I think the fact that it's slightly easier to attribute on web, benefit three, means benefit four, I can spend less money as a smaller app to actually make some progress. Yeah, actually, you know, exactly where those people were coming from. You know very well their conversion. You can really tell something about that. I mean, we this is analogous though not the same, but back in my my core mobile development days, it's like we used to soft launch apps on Android because we knew even just background noise on Android we could get 500 downloads a day. And like it didn't

12:45matter. We didn't need that many cuz we would launch a super busted version of the app. And then we would get like a trickle of downloads and we would just look at all we'd watch we'd literally watch the session replays for like all 500 of those users. And we would learn a ton and it like wasn't statistically significant, wasn't scalable, but it didn't matter cuz like all we needed was to start that engine of information, that that loop of like iteration. And that's kind of what you're talking about here. It's like you can spend small amounts of money, learn a little bit, and then you don't need to actually

13:15scale or actually make money. I mean, it's nice if you don't lose all of that money, but really the value there is like the information because you'll make money when you scale it, right? Like that's that's the whole the whole mission. So. On that front, how has Apple's changes to Safari impacted attribution for web to app? Cuz I know like they're deprecating I mean, like cookies, all the privacy stuff that Apple has done in Safari. Has that had an impact in that same time frame that Apple introduced app tracking transparency? A small impact, nowhere near as big an impact as ATT. Cuz you can still use UTM parameters, right? And

13:53Apple's not blocking those. I think it would be interesting to see, you know, always hear will Google run into something next or, you know, we don't know what's going to happen with all the rest of the browsers, but I think as long as we have UTM tracking, we can see what we need to see. We can go to Mixpanel Amplitude, we can see our users, we can, as Jacob said, dive in and watch those funnels. So, I don't think it's been such a big issue yet, but it's definitely something that people have spoken about or kind of wary

14:18of. Um, but very few actually, David. I think you're probably only one of three people ever mentioned it, so. Yeah, it's always Apple's like kind of sometimes missing the mark, but like I mean, like UTMs are fairly inert, right? Because you encode them usually in the link you're putting into a campaign or whatever. So, they're never all that targeted. They can't really convey personal information in them. You just kind of get a bucket of people. And yeah, it's like when I analyze it attribution inbound data for RevenueCat, you know, we got ads and all kinds of other sources. It's just like so much nicer like to know like kind of

14:50where users came from. And like I don't feel bad about it. It's not super creepy or anything like this. It's just like, oh, did they click on us in a search term? It's like, okay, that's nice to know, right? Like And so, I've always said this I've probably said it 20 times on this podcast, but like this is with the App Store conversion process specifically, but I feel like by Apple like not allowing UTMs to flow through the App Store download, they've actually made privacy way worse because basically all these like Adjusts of the world. I mean, not to don't want to talk ill of our trusted partners or anything like

15:20this, but like basically the entire fingerprinting industry was created to circumvent the lack of UTM parameters on the App Stores. And if they just allowed a little bit of privacy like with that UTM stuff. But I think it is worth it's worth highlighting that's kind of the core one of the core advantages here is things attribution not only is it like it's you don't even need a partner for it. Like you don't need a MMP, you don't need anything. You just encode UTM params, make sure that's making it into your funnel somewhere or into your data side somewhere. It's really easy to break up your inbounds

15:52and start to get qualitative. It's just saying it's one of the numbers data on what's performing. This is like a whole 'nother podcast, but I I would be interested for your take if you're willing to share. Facebook's AEM is essentially fingerprinting and yet Apple lets it happen, which is the whole state of the industry is just bizarre to me because Apple made this big deal with app tracking transparency, they like fingerprinting is against the rules, but Facebook, Adjust, AppsFlyer, individual app developers, other ad networks, like

16:24everybody just moved to fingerprinting. Facebook's doing the best at it, but it's technically a violation of Apple's rules, but they're like turning the other cheek. It's just bizarre to me. Any thoughts? Yeah, I was speaking about this someone a couple of weeks ago. I love AEM, so let's say it start with that. I don't

16:44I don't want it to go anywhere. I don't think Facebook are doing anything. No. This is news to me, by the way. I'm so bad at all this ad tech stuff. Like uh It's crazy because I mean, there have been some big accounts that we fully migrated from scan to AEM because it's that much more accurate. And it's like maybe four, five months ago, we would only really recommend it to smaller apps, smaller clients. Eight, 10 months ago it was really bad and shabby and wasn't really good. Now it's really strong. So, yeah, whatever they've got going on, it works really well. And I encourage anyone who's pushing app

17:18promotion campaigns to try that on meta. But yeah, I don't I don't understand why Apple haven't jumped on it, but I'm not complaining. But I don't know. I'd have to look at the technology more deeply to understand exactly what it's doing, but you know, again, it's like I don't think I mean, we're getting we're getting probably off the off the beat here into like industry news, but like or industry prognostication, but like I do think it's just sort of the understanding there's way too much economic value locked up if we don't allow developers to make some sort of understanding of the quality of the customers that they're paying to

17:47attract. You know what I mean? Like everybody stands to benefit if we can understand are the users I'm trying to bring into my product actually users interested in my product, right? There's like just market efficiencies there that are generally in when when processes and growth of businesses are cheaper, generally that's good for the world in aggregate, right? So, maybe Apple's like silently wising up to this. It's good for them. It's good for developers. It's probably good for the people involved too. As long as that data isn't being brokered a million ways to like a bunch of, you know, do weird stuff, but I think that's maybe not not the uh

18:19not the primary case. And that's what Apple broke with ATT. So, so I think it's like they maybe achieved their primary goal with ATT. And maybe this kind of refutes previous conversations about how Apple specifically did it to break Facebook and to like cash in and like build their own ad network. And like there was all these like conspiracy theories early on that that's why Apple did it. But I've always maintained that it genuinely was like a kind of privacy fundamentalism inside of Apple. And they did achieve like by deprecating the IDFA, like it is way harder to like build up a dossier on an individual user

18:58across multiple apps. And so, Facebook using fingerprinting internally to Facebook is like not giving them all this like super private data. And Well, it's not like Facebook doesn't have a dossier on all their users. Yeah, they already have it. Yeah, exactly. what I mean? This is like we already knew where you lived and who you dated, but now we actually know what running app you use. It's like it's like what's the incremental damage at that point,

19:25right? And that's what's been so frustrating about scan. It was like it was like built from a like that privacy fundamentalism standpoint of like we can't let any any personal data leak. And I think AEM is a good example of like, hey, the economic value is there. We should let companies like Facebook do this to the benefit of our entire platform. Also, the users users have already engaged in like data private data sharing with us cuz anyway, we're very Yeah, yeah. We're We're probably getting way off the rails here. But, yeah, maybe this is a second podcast we can do on just like the state of the the

19:58state of the attribution industry. But, I think we've hit all the I think we kind of hit all the like major key points for smaller apps. And And you broke it up in And what Why is web to app so different like treat looked at differently when you get to scale? Like, how does it change? I think the reason it changes when you get to scale is not

20:13because those benefits don't apply. Everyone cares about cash flow. But, typically, the amount that these larger apps are spending on ad spend is not the biggest concern. Like, you know what I mean? It's like they're not going to not be able to do anything next month because they had a little bit of a bad week. Yeah, you also have access to capital, typically. Like, you can get loans even like it once you have some Once you're established, it's just not as big a deal. Exactly. So, I think cash flow Sure, the fees become, you know, a little bit more relevant. All of a

20:43sudden, 30% hits a lot harder than 15. Um so, I think, you know, that's that's one thing. And even though, you know, people say, "Yeah, but it's not It's not 30% forever." It's like, "Hey, this is a new user, and I'm I'm not getting 30% This is significant." It is, essentially, when you're like running a little bit of ad arbitrage, right? You're like, "I'm not really able to count on that next year's revenue, anyway. So, thank you for that discount from you know, it's like a Here's like Here's a gift card for a discount next year. Thank you, Apple." Exactly. So, it's like, yeah, the fees become more of

21:14a benefit Or, sorry, the fees become more of an issue, and web to app becomes more beneficial in that way. But, I think the others that are more exciting are kind of what you touched on earlier, Jacob, around control. The ability to really control the user journey and the funnel as much as you possibly would like to. And when I speak about this, I mean kind of going back to the days of here's a specific ad creative, which happens to tie with this landing page, which happens to tie with this onboarding funnel. And guess what? The paywall is exactly the same. And kind of really building out a granular journey

21:47based on the job to be done or problem statements that top of funnel. You can kind of still do a little bit more of this now with, you know, custom product pages and and these kind of advancements. But, I don't think it's the same, and I don't think it ever will be because really what we want to do is say, "Hey, this person saw this ad. So, in onboarding, I want to ask them this set of questions." Yeah, you can't have a fully integrated like funnel as product, right? Where it's like the ad into the funnel, like it's all integrated and reactive. You can't really do that without something like

22:16this. It's the synergy of acquisition and product. That's what's missing. Sure, we can have a really great top of funnel synergy, ad creative, App Store screenshots. Great. And then we can learn about them in onboarding and tailor the paywall. But, we can't necessarily do the whole thing. But, again, even that benefit that I touched on that example was just speaking around quizzes and kind of how you may use that in a quiz funnel. But, things like how you anchor pricing. I'm sure everyone watching this has had an app rejected at some point because they had some sort of violation on their

22:47paywall. Right, price related, whatever it may be. And And I think that is frustrating. And also, there are sometimes things that you want to do which you may not think this isn't unethical. This is just I want to anchor pricing this way. I want to see how it performs. And you don't really get any refunds or any upset users from it, but Apple don't like you doing certain things. So, I think it kind of opens the floodgates on

23:08that front. And similarly, when we think about things like money-back guarantees instead of trials, right? This is something what you just I Funny enough, I actually saw in the Sub Club community today someone posted something about, "Hey, are people doing this in app, and how are they doing this?" I didn't read the post in its entirety, but on the web, this is a big thing. Yeah, Fay and the Dipsy team internally here are try are are running on the web a money-back guarantee alternative to trial, which experiment, yeah. So, I think there are all kinds of things you can control that you can't control in app. And back to your your

23:43point on custom product pages, it's like that's been kind of the biggest innovation in like 16 years of the App Store. I mean, if you think about the fundamental user journey of the App Store across these 16 years, you dump somebody into the App Store, they see three screenshots, a description, a user icon. Like, yeah, there's like discoverability stuff, search has changed a little bit, but like the fundamental experience of the App Store is pretty much the same 16 years on. It's like three screen And yeah, you can scroll and get more screenshots, but what do people actually see? How do you stand out? You know what

24:19I mean? Like, I I I sometimes I open the App Store, and I just like everything looks like the same app slop. No offense to all of my customers, but like you just go And especially if you search search like an AI keyword or something like this, and it's just like every like variant of slightly modified AI wrapper, and you're just like you almost like lose your mind. You're like, "I just need I just want to be talked to, you know what I mean? I don't want to scroll through screenshots. I I want to like be sold." So, having that control to actually create an experience that's

24:45somewhat differentiating, too. Cuz like the likelihood I mean, I would This is I don't want the data on this, but if somebody clicks on an app ad, they probably click on more than yours. You know what I mean? Like, somebody who clicks on app ads probably somebody who clicks on app ads. And so, you have to have something that's going to make them be the one This is the one that they convert on, right? Yeah, and then again, speaking to control, like you were talking earlier about getting rejected

25:07for like pay pricing and paywall issues. I got rejected for creating a video of the widget in my weather app, and I cropped it horizontally 16 by 9 of like the home screen so that I could really highlight a medium-size widget. And Apple rejected me and said I had to create a new video that was like vertical so that it could represent the entire home screen. I was like, "Look, the widget is really small. If I crop it horizontally, it still looks like a home page, but you can actually see what's going on." And they're like, "No, no, no, you need a vertical video to show

25:47off your horizontal widget." And it's like dumb stuff like that where they take control of stuff that like doesn't matter, and they lock everything. Anyway, I could rant for a long time about it. But, to your point on control, I mean, they they reject screenshots every time. And parts of it I get, like, you know, they do prevent a lot of unscrupulous developers from Unscrupulous developers from cropped screenshots, you know? Well, but But, there used to be stuff, and you know, you don't hear about anymore because it doesn't happen because they stop you know, they don't allow developers to do this. But, there used to be issues with

26:19people putting screenshots that were just totally fake. I mean, it's like these fake ads for games. There is consumer value in Apple having some level of like being able to reject stuff. This is always their problem, though. It's like it's not the intention, but it's always when they scale it. Same with App Review. Like, it's like how do you How do you teach a thousand entry-level employees to like adjudicate App Store pages? It's very, very hard. When we speak about web to app, it's not that everyone's making the shift from in app to web to app so that they can be unscrupulous and have all these unethical thing They're doing it

26:52because they want a horizontal video. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Like, that video is a better sell for my app than anything I can do in a screenshot, but Apple won't let me It's just Apple's You know, I mean, they're to Apple's view, and I think they're somewhat right here. The App Store is their These are their users, and they feel they have a duty to protect them, and they've made certain promises about what you'll get on the App Store. And you know, it's This is the deal we've made, right? We give you 30%, and you get to insult us. But, but But, it's fine, right? But, but, but, I

27:24mean, I don't want to I don't want to jinx it because like I think Apple like This is again zooming out a little bit, but they it's relevant to this part of the conversation, but they've more or less been okay with this kind of stuff. I think this might go into the AM conversation as well. Like, Apple kind of turns an eye to like a certain amount of things. As long as you're playing ball in the things that they control, as long as you're not being a total like a total rake and just like doing unscrupulous stuff constantly. Like, Apple I mean, they won't say officially

27:53they're cool with this, but like by their in lack of action They've never taken action against it. They've essentially like implied that they're okay with this, which I think is great. You know, I think they I think there is some level of understanding there. They got to do what they got to do. They got to lock down what they have to for their own like sort of messaging. But, then they do understand that these things are important, and they really are helping

28:12the app economy and things like this. So, And I think ultimately, this whole web to app movement is great for developers in the long run because as more and more developers find more and more success outside of the App Store using web payments, Apple has to do something Has to respond, yeah, at some point. Yeah, it's like they need to like evolve their thinking on the App Store, or more and more and more and more and more traffic is just going to go to the web. All right, we've hammered on control. But, Nathan's got a bunch of really good points here, and I want to

28:41make sure we give them adequate time. So, what else What else for big apps is one of the the benefits? Reaching new audiences, right? Expanding your reach. I think is massive massive. And I think this takes It takes so many forms. I think the obvious one Or not the obvious one, but the one that Thomas mentioned, David, when you spoke to him on the podcast, around reaching different pockets of audiences on existing channels. I think it's a great one that a lot of people still aren't really aware of. Is that when I pick app promotion campaign, install campaign, I'm getting a different pocket of users than if I pick app promotion campaign,

29:13trial start as my event, which then becomes completely different again if I select a sales campaign and a conversion campaign on web. Because, to your point, Jacob, if I'm clicking on an app ad, I'm probably clicking on multiple. There are people out there who don't click on app ads, but do click on web ads. And therefore, if I want to reach those users on a given channel, I need to use a different campaign type and campaign objective, which is one layer of expansion. But, I think it really goes even deeper than that. For example, I like to think of expansion to do with intent. When you are pushing traffic to

29:49the app, you are if you take a subscription app, focused so focused on can we get this person to start a trial to send back the trial event to meta. Can we use a hard paywall and get the purchase event to go back to meta? And sure you can optimize a funnel that way and you can reach profitability and have something that works, but there are a whole load of users that are dropping off and we we never think about those that didn't make it. The guy who downloaded the app but didn't start the trial. What happens to him? Like he's gone, right? We didn't get any data on

30:19him. Sign up was after the paywall. I don't know, he's gone. But we still paid for those impressions, right? Now with web, you can have a lot more lead magnets, you can capture lower intent traffic, blog articles and webinars like we spoke about. You do retargeting, right? Like after Yeah. Not even on the primary channel that you attracted them initially, right? You can have other networks you're running to do retargeting once once somebody's at least gotten to your gotten to your funnel. Precisely. So when it comes to kind of building out a full stack multi-channel approach, you can do a lot more on web. And I think that is really

30:52big for a lot of apps who are spending a lot already, right? They're already juicing the spend. They're looking for new things. Like what can I do now? Well, maybe now you should invest in some long-form content and some lead magnets and really start to nurture those that aren't going to purchase today or tomorrow or next week, but

31:09probably will in 2 months time. That's more like a B2B motion, right? Where it's like, you know, start to think about a consumer you're always initially targeting just like these like fleeting moments of intent or trying to like manufacture intent in a in a very narrow moment. And B2B like we're constantly just doing the latter or what what you just described anything which is where it's like just be ever present because we don't know when that moment's going to happen necessarily, but we just need to like cover the zone. Yeah, I guess like at scale it probably makes sense. I mean, you think about this too

31:37like at least Duolingo at a a very broad example, but just think they weren't doing brand marketing 10 years ago, you know what I mean? Like now they had just have weird videos with the owl that go viral and like there's nothing about their app at all, right? It's just like you just need to be thinking about the owl constantly, right? And it works. But it doesn't work until you're at a certain amount of scale, right? Which yeah, to your to your point is kind of the the evolving benefits in web to app as you grow. Can you give some like specific examples that you've seen work

32:06well whether it's like web, Google search, or YouTube, or or maybe even go through multiple kind of flows and channels that you think do a good job of capturing some of that intent that you're not going to capture directing people straight through the app store into the app? Absolutely. So one example was a project I worked on where we ended up building out an entire webinar funnel to push a subscription app. Now it wasn't like a $30 a year subscription, it was like 200 pounds a year. So it was, you know, it was fairly high ticket for a subscription app. But the challenge was it was a pretty sensitive

32:41topic and people just weren't ready emotionally to invest in that kind of purchase at the time. So you're hitting home, the message resonates, absolutely I hear you, but I'm not ready for this. I need some time. So we can't we can't run app We can, but then we have to go into freemium and that's like a whole other thing. We didn't want to do that. We wanted to scale up top of funnel as fast as we

33:02could. Well, you actually kind of created a freemium, right? It's like you created an a free on-ramp that doesn't necessarily wasn't the app, but you're like, okay, here's some value before you purchase, right? And that was pushed three ways. You two ways really. Meta, Instagram, Facebook, but also YouTube. And I think this is where it becomes really interesting because we could just take portions of that video and edits of that video, upload them to YouTube, run them as YouTube ads, and then direct people to watch the full-length webinar. Oh, okay. So you would take clips from the webinar and

33:31then Oh, so interesting. It wasn't live. It was like a Yeah, more like a VSL, like a masterclass. Okay. And so they would what? They would have to like sign up or something or some gating to get to it? Yeah, we experimented with a few different things. The gating works. You can nowadays you can kind of make it seem as though it's live. So you can have people, you know, a webinar that starts every 5 minutes. You're like, I just I just made it. Oh, that's that's

33:54tricky. I'm already having FOMO though. I guess at that point, I mean, webinar but this is generally just like a piece of free low commitment content that you're giving away a lot of value to the customer, right? Do you even in the in those lead-in ads, do you advertise the app at all or was it purely just like,

34:13hey, here's a webinar on this topic? Yeah, no no mention of the app. More like this is the topic you're struggling with, this is the solution. Yeah, which goes back to your expansion thing, right? It's like, okay, there's not not everybody is somebody who thinks of an app. I think about like my my parents' generation, I'm constantly pitching apps to them and they're like, "App? What's an app going to do?" And it's like apps can solve a lot of problems, okay? And then I'm like, "Okay, just let me download the app." And then they're like, 2 days later, "I subscribed to this app. I know, I got premium forever pro or

34:39whatever." And it's like, "Of course you did. Of course you did. You just had to be open to it, right?" I mean, I think that's probably this part of this expansion story is there is just like a lot of people who they miss the the boat. I see it in myself as like new technologies are coming out as I approach 40 and like new tech is coming out that the Gen Alpha Gen Z said is using and I'm like, "Ugh, you know, I don't want that. I don't need that in my life." And I have no reason to resist that other than I'm other than it's like

35:03I didn't witness it coming up, right? So like I've heard this from a couple folks I've talked to web to app. It's just like you get access to a whole new audience of people who will watch a webinar but won't download an app download an app. Will take a quiz but won't download an app, right? And you

35:18get an opportunity to pitch them. Obviously your conversions are going to be all wacky. It's going to be a totally different machine. But at scale we're talking about at scale here is like you need to always be looking for that next card you can play. Like, okay, what's the next frontier? And so that's really cool. I bet if people put the thought they could probably come up with a lot of a lot of really cool ideas for like how do I build something that's a little bit less than just get into my app, get a free trial or just get into my app and try the freemium, but it's like what can

35:43I build on the internet? look I mean, this podcast is an example, right? There's like we've done this kind of intentionally unintentionally just giving away a lot of value, but like thinking about how we do it at scale or how an app would do it at scale for that, you know, that's slightly lower ticket value is kind of very interesting. Yeah, and I think the interesting thing about this example is we weren't even at scale when we tried this. Oh, so it was just like from the start? Yeah, it was it was more to do with the audience needed more time to convert and we needed a fast trial start if we

36:15wanted to get our post back. So we were kind of at conflict. Also, the audience was slightly older. So the other, you know, we're talking about expanding audiences, you can also expand it to different age demographics. Desktop. A lot of people still do use Facebook on their desktop and you can reach them via the web. So things like this, but you mentioned that your parents didn't want to download an app. Probably if they came through a web to app journey and they landed on a website, they may have

36:40felt differently. So there are different different plays. Especially if they were like an influencer involved, right? Somebody they like respects or like watch on TV, you know what I mean? Or something like this. They might just like slow walk them from what they're comfortable with into like something that maybe is uncomfortable for them. I think it's it's really fascinating. And it like plays back into control cuz it's like once a developer has the control on this, the world is their oyster. They can try all kinds of stuff, right? Max Weinberg, the founder of DuckDuckGo, has

37:04this really wonderful book on growth. We'll put it in the show notes. I can't think of the name of it, but he's like he he contends that there's only like seven different growth tricks, right? It's like PR, paid marketing, SEO, whatever. I always thought it was really painful because in the app world you can

37:20only do like two of the seven, you know? It's like paid ads and SEO on the app store. It's about it. But this actually opens up like basically every channel now, right? That you can try and you can try programmatically which is just it's just really cool. Not only every channel, but like a ton of creativity because it's it's not just sending people to the app store page and making that funnel work. It's like talking

37:43through this has got me really excited. I had not thought about web to app quite so broadly as you're presenting it and it's genuinely making me excited in that I talk to so many developers who are like, "How do we get those first 500 downloads?" And when you're trying to push people to the app store and there's low intent and maybe you like I said earlier, maybe they got a 3.5 star on the app store currently because of whatever 1.0 issues. And like this just the world is your oyster as an app if you think about it in this way any form of and it like the web marketing is like

38:1815 years ahead of app marketing in tooling and like so many different ways and so it just opens up so many possibilities to shape that entire funnel. So yeah, it's super exciting to think about it more broadly like this. Any other like top of mind examples of like cool things that you would never think would work for an app that you're seeing work for an app? I think it becomes interesting because now we get into how you're building out the web

38:45funnel or the web onboarding journey. There are some things you can do with web apps that you can't do with WordPress. Let's put it this way, right? So I guess an an example is I want to take a picture of the food in front of me and it's going to tell me with some

38:57clever AI how many calories in the food. You can build that demo into a web journey. Now you can also build it into the app, but now I can bring it super early. So I can experiment with ads that just take people directly to some tool to take a picture of food and give me calories. Would I do that? Only at real scale when I don't care about conversion, but if I bake that functionality into some sort of cohesive journey, for example, you know, I'm pushing calorie tracking and macronutrients and I have people sign up or not and then I say, "Hey, are you eating now?" And people say yes or are

39:33you near food? Yeah. Let's play a game. Take a picture of the food and we'll demo the product. It's so much smoother on web because you're already asking for a lot of There's already a lot of friction there, right? I'm asking someone to go to their fridge and open it up and take picture of food or or something like this. But if it's no sign up, nothing's gated, and it kind of feels like a fun thing to do, some users are going to do this. And you know, there are apps doing stuff like this, which you can you can like try. So, I think those are kind of the more product

40:01demo experiences that you can build out on web, but they are, in my opinion, super fun because it then becomes what functionality does that app do, and how can we rebuild part of this on the web to decrease time to value. So, another interesting opportunity on the web is that you're not as constrained to what you sell even. So, inside an app, it's typically just a digital purchase only, and you can't have any add-ons. So, tell me about the opportunities to diversify things you sell and to increase average

40:37revenue per user on the web. I mean, the obvious example are things like upsells. But I think where it gets smart is when you have things like one-click upsells. I've already taken their payment details. I'm now going to show them something that's an add-on, and they're going to click buy. Or you can bundle products with your subscription. So, it's almost like a a cross-sell pre-purchase, right? We're just We're just bundling products, whether that be, you know, you're a fitness app and you also have some fitness clothing that you want to bundle on, or you want to sell a nutrition guide. One great example are apps where

41:10you take photos or like, you know, family photos, and we're going to sell send you physical albums and photo albums, stuff like this. That can work really well on web. These kind of upsells, I don't see too many people using them. Like, you know, Noom, Headway, they do have upsells. Often times a lot of people are still using digital upsells, though. But there are some edge cases where you can actually

41:33bundle physical products and ship them. So, yeah, the family albums one example. Is it Headway shipping like physical books now? Like I think they might do. Yeah, they might be. I think the idea of bundling digital content is really interesting, right? Because like you're Most of these businesses are already digital businesses, right? And so like when you're thinking about increasing your revenue or your LTV, as David was pointing out, I mean, you could in theory You know what? Honestly, it's just the it's the point of purchase friction. Like as you were saying, Nathan, like, you know, if you want to like, okay, get into the payment

42:04details, like you can craft that experience such that you collect payment details, you get authorization, and then like you right before checkout, you're like, "Hey, why don't you add this extra, you know, if you're a fitness class, like here's a like exclusive like VOD option, right? For another another piece of content." Or like, you know, you got something with a problem, and all of this is like, you know, it's just like trying to find how painful this is for the person and like also just sort of what their price sensitivity is, like what their value line is, right? I actually think bundling is a really one

42:34of the challenges and one of the challenges in B2C always is just like price discrimination or essentially like finding out how much money like somebody, you know, like finding a right price for somebody so that you can kind of have a good like sort of value extraction with your value with your value creation for them. And that's sort of a clean In gaming, they do it by just letting you buy more coins or like make purely a consumption mechanic, but by adding some other like SKUs that you can like bundle on, I think it's a really good idea. And then, you know, with anything, doing it at the point of

43:04purchase, like there's often just like a lot of intent and a lot of, you know, you're very up funnel still. So, you get more eyeballs and things like that. But I can see like that being complex, right? And why you wouldn't want to try this until you're very late stage. But familiarity as well. Like, this is not new. Amazon does this. Oh, they get me all the time. Customers also bought. I'm like, "Yeah, I need that, too." I I didn't know I needed tape. I do need tape. Thank you. Click, you know. It's always the most generic items. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it works on me. Like, I

43:31What was I buying the other day? I don't know. I was buying some electronics stuff, and they were like, "Do you probably need some more solder?" And I was like, "Yeah, you know what? I'm actually out of solder. I'll just go ahead and add that." It's a little bit different here, right? Obviously, it's very But I still think the concept, you know, there's a reason stores stuff the

43:45checkout aisle. You know what I mean? With like sort of useful, but maybe like stuff you wouldn't necessarily go out of your way to buy. But yeah, the complexity of implementing that, I think, is, you know, probably probably doesn't make it worth the squeeze until Also, you have a brand, right? Like, you know, I've heard of Noom. I've heard my friends have used it and whatever, and

44:03I've decided to go all in or whatever. And then getting offered like some sort of upsell at that point of purchase is probably different than random app I've never even heard of ever trying to sell me another thing that I just, you know what I mean? So, it's probably just a card you have to judiciously like choose when you play. It can probably thwart user intent as much as it can expand the ARPU. So, probably something to be careful of. And then it I mean, that kind of thinking easily turn into a dark pattern, too. My wife went through a a web flow where there was just continue

44:33buttons, continue, continue, continue, and she got to the end not realizing that those continue buttons were actually adding stuff to the cart, and there wasn't like a final checkout that like gave a full dollar amount. You know who's really bad at this is the travel industry. They're really bad at it, right? It's like, "Oh, insurance." And no, the extra premium. Like airlines are terrible. I mean, they all cuz it works, I guess, but like, yeah, they're all terrible at it. Nathan, I want to I want to ask like sort of related to ARPU, but maybe more like LTV of a install generally. But are there like general

45:03like characteristics or sort of about the way that people buy? You know, it's credit card, it's not the App Store. Are LTVs like generally lower, generally higher? Like churns? Like how do you think about the quality of these customers? Are there any sort of expectations people should have before they start this? It's a great question, and it's hard to answer directly because

45:20of the dark patterns. Yeah, if you have a dark pattern, really high. Yeah, it's like a lot of people are, as you were saying, doing these things on web where it's like, "Oh, look, web's working really well." Like, I guess an easy example, which maybe this isn't so dark, but whether it be a free trial or paid trial with a really high annual price plan, just not notifying them at all, not sending any comms during the trial window, and then just billing them at the end. It's like, "Oh, you've already got payment details." If it's especially if it's a paid trial, it's really easy to do that,

45:48but questionable. So, typically, LTV is higher on web. Aside from these things, is it higher? I'm not sure. I mean, It probably depends. Just what you're selling and what price point and and and all of that stuff. I've heard from some folks uh some of the mechanics of like the apps like working with credit cards, some of the Like, for example, you mentioned paid trials, which I think is much more common web to app. The reason being I've heard is just there's so many fake credit cards. People like have credit cards that either bounce or they're not real or whatever. They use those to access a credit card locked

46:20free trial. And I know one developer I spoke to, at least like they started with a free trial, and then they converted to like a $1 one-month trial, right? So, it's essentially a trial, but it's a really an intro period. And that has the benefit of you've now validated this is a real credit card, and it costs money, which then you're just saving yourself the pain of like providing service to those users, and then like

46:40you know, having a failed credit card. Probably net it maybe doesn't make a big difference, but it does like kind of help with some of those conversion rates. I've also heard a lot, and I'm I'm curious if you've heard the same, just like about It's kind of all the stuff that we grouse about. We complain about the App Store fee a lot, but then once you're like dealing with credit cards and direct payment, you realize like, "Well, okay, this is kind of nice." Because one, yeah, there's just like, you know, Visa and all these have these different sort of like rules

47:03around I think it's called 3D Secure. There's like different things you can do that will like increase the likelihood that payments go through, but then also reduce your exposure to fraud stuff. So, like if there's a lot of fraudulent credit cards being used on your site, you're liable for that. And people like Stripe will They They are also liable to provide some protection to Visa for that. And depending on what payment provider you're using, so you now have to think about that, which isn't necessarily something you have to think

47:30about on the App Store. I mean, you do. Like people do get kicked off the App Store for like a lot of fraudulent transactions. I think Visa and the App Store, one, they have to deal with the chargebacks. So, like, you know, when people are getting ripped off, Visa has to eat that. And if they have a vendor who's, you know, seems like you're getting a lot of chargebacks, they're going to kick you off. But then also there's like things like money

47:47laundering and stuff that can happen. People use these sort sort of flows for that that people have to watch out for, which I think generally on the App Store, you don't have to think about. But for web to app, it's now something that you're going to have to get good at. And the folks I've talked to that have gotten successful, at least some percentage of them had to go through sort of this process of understanding what these like sort of finer points

48:06are. It becomes a lot messier, right? And I think that's why you know, even you didn't touch on it, but I thought you were going there, like chargebacks, right? Refunds, handling these yourself as opposed to having the benefit of Apple. Yeah, even just the mechanics of it, right? Like where does a user go to get a refund? You have to have that figured out somewhere, right? Right in the App Store, it's taken care of for

48:24you. What tooling are you using, and like how do you approach that when you're setting this up with the clients that you work with? I think the first thing comes into Are you using Stripe? Like, everyone defaults to Stripe because they're so big. But when I look at the different options, Paddle is really solid for a lot of things, right? They have a lot of great tools for sales tax compliance, which we haven't even touched on, but

48:45that's another thing to be considered. Yeah, so they they buffer at least some of the risk for you. You know, fraud, things like this. So, that's really kind of where to start. Beyond this, I've been fortunate that some of the bigger clients that we've worked with have already been fully on top of this and aware of it. I don't think it's such a big issue for smaller apps, either, right? Like, no one really has to worry about that much fraud if you've only got 15 paying customers a week. It's like probably it's legit, but I think it's an area where there's almost a gap. There's almost a gap for tooling or a gap for

49:18for mobile apps. Yeah, they have it all. Cuz it's it's a lot of And this is, you know, it was probably no secret that we're keen on this space and like trying to figure out and trying to build our way there. And these conversations this one, obviously, but then I've had conversations with a lot of founders this year that have been doing this stuff. And yeah, it's the payments

49:35complexity we were just talking about. All of the stuff we've been talking about is software, right? It's like you got websites, and you got quizzes, and you got landing pages. And each of those individually is kind of probably a simple thing, but then you have to If you want it to work, we're talking about synergies between your acquisition and product and all that stuff, you want it to be all stitched together, and the complexity can get quite hairy over time. We've definitely seen there's like a number of like upstarts trying to work on this stuff. And I expect that to probably continue into 2025. Hopefully we can revenue I can get a decent

50:06solution, but you know, baby steps. Sometimes we take it slow so we can take it fast. But yeah, I think like I think it's clear, at least from what I'm talking about, it's not necessarily like slam dunk value for everybody, but like it's definitely worth trying, right? At some stage, for sure. So we've gone through a lot of the complexity, the benefits, some drawbacks, but kind of a higher level, how should people be thinking about that? They're listening to this podcast, and they're thinking, "Okay, we should do web to app." What are the questions people should be asking themselves to get started? Yeah, I think it's a great question. And the

50:39questions they should be asking are really, "Why do we want to do web to app?" I think this is why I always I always ask clients and potential clients first is, "Why is this appealing to you?" Is it because of the fees? Like And often times it's like, "Yeah, I heard that like we'll save money." And then it's a case of figuring out that there's there's more to it than just the fees, because you need to actually be profitable on web. And you don't know whether the traffic is going to be more expensive or not. So we've got to try all this out. We've got to

51:05build landing pages and funnels that convert. So it's it's not as simple as just switching two buttons on an ads platform. But that's the first question. Is it, "Why do you want to do this?" The other question I'd like to ask is, "What does your existing marketing funnel look like? Like how are you converting at the moment in app?" Because the best place

51:24to start on web is that. For example, if you have a really long onboarding in app build it on web. That's where you should start. If you're a utility app and you have a hard paywall don't build a long quiz on web. Like I've had some like utility app founders I asked me, "I'm really struggling to come up with like questions to ask on the web." Oh my god, there's such a great meta note about founder cargo cult thing there. And I think that's like some message we try to tell in this podcast always, which is like don't listen to anybody Nathan's great. Everybody we have on this podcast

51:56great, but don't listen to anybody like without thinking about your situation because like I mean, it's obvious, but I don't know. Everybody wants to make more money, they want to try stuff, so it's like, "Okay, how do you feel about multiply and divide for my calculator app?" You know what I mean? Like what's your feelings? Like how are you hoping to improve your ability to find the area of a room? Very funny. Yeah, exactly. And I think, you know, that's the place to start. And then I think specifically when it comes to then building out long onboarding funnels it becomes questions like, "What is it?" Most people who are already

52:28running successful in app onboarding journey duplicate that on web and see some sort of success. Very rarely have we ever worked with an app where they have a solid profitable in app onboarding funnel, they mirror that on web, and it just doesn't work. Like that's not the case. Often times there are certain questions that we want to remove or certain things we need to add in, like certain problem statements we want to hit a little bit more and kind of change the funnel based on the traffic. But generally speaking, if it's working in app it's the same target market, it's the same. They don't really

53:01care that much that it's web, right? It's not It's just a screen with stuff they can read on it. So I think that's one question. Another question would be, well, which is a big one, "How much do we want to invest before we give up on this or not?" I think a lot of teams are focused on building product and getting that existing funnel working. So the appeal of web to app sounds great, but the investment required to actually get it working, not so much, especially with the lack of tooling to make web to app fast. And then obviously there are some products out there that help make it

53:33fast, but there's nothing that really does it end to end super quick, doesn't require any dev resource. We're great. So I think any app team that's going to start investing web to app is going to need to allocate one time, two resources, and three money. Probably you should be very cautious about diluting your spend that's going to the app and try and bring new spend into the web, depending on where you're at. If you're spending millions and millions in app, sure you can just slash some of that and send it to web. But if you're only spending enough to reach learning phases and privacy thresholds in app, you're

54:03going to need to make a decision because that becomes a little bit complex. So yeah, those are some considerations I think most teams should ask before launching this. Yeah, and to your point earlier, I do think it's interesting that if you're an app that has a few hundred people coming in, like you've got the product flywheel going, jumping to web instead of really dialing in that product market fit and getting that first motion going seems like it can just be a distraction that's actually going to net you less in the long run, even if you save a little bit on fees, even if you get a little more kind of

54:39cost advantage. But I like what you're saying earlier, and I hadn't thought about it from this like standpoint, if you're struggling to start that product motion and you've got a product going, but you just don't have people getting getting into it, like then maybe it is worth the investment just to get that zero to one motion going. Yeah, there's almost like a middle there where it's probably If your app's kind of working and you kind of have something, you should probably just focus there until you hit headwinds. But if you're very at the very very beginning or if you're at the very kind of like late stage on the app

55:08like core app, you can maybe think about it. It's kind of an interesting reality. I don't know, it's probably varies, but like what kind of mixes of folks Folks that have done this successfully for some period, I guess like I guess like as a percentage of like net new subscribers, like what percentages of people's traffic are coming revenue-wise like coming from web to app in a good setup? It varies, right? Like 80/20, 20/80, 50/50. Oh really, all over the map. It really just depends, which is an argument for maybe it should work It could work for you, right? But I think it could be any one of those, right? It

55:36could only be a minority. It's not that dissimilar to like some of the like pre We wouldn't call it web to app, but like adding a Stripe online conversion through email follow-up campaign. You know what I mean? These are not like going to change your life, but they are like incremental improvements on retention and conversion that you should do. But again, not before you have like a core funnel that's kind of working. I think it also comes down to as well what

56:00people are able to get working first. For example, a lot of people will start with web and app, see that web's working, and then scale web more so that it makes up a higher percentage of overall net new revenue. That's just because you've scaled that more. Like it's not to say that there's a big opportunity there. Yeah, yeah, which is often the case, too. And yeah, anytime you're evaluating businesses in sort of like a snapshot, people want to draw too many conclusions about like why numbers are a certain way, and like often it's like, "Well, that's just cuz this is how it This is this moment in time, you

56:27know." As we start to wrap up, I did want to kind of do a little bit of a quick fire and maybe hit on some of your like top practical tips. Like if you're going to make this work, here are some of the things you should try. And I do actually want to start with like verticals. Like are there like specific kinds of apps, specific kinds of intent that you think are going to have a higher likelihood of succeeding and others where you think, like we were joking about a calculator app, but like that's maybe a good example of like probably going to struggle. Like people

57:00are looking for that utility on their phone, they're probably willing to download an app. Like they're probably verticals that just really shouldn't try or maybe should delay web to app until they're way further along in their journey. So how do you think about those? Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. Utility apps don't need to invest in web to app. That doesn't mean it can't work. A lot of people think utility apps just can't make web to app work. They can't make quizzes work in a lot of cases because there's nothing you need to ask users. But they can most definitely have landing page checkout,

57:29here's the product. And that can work well. Just like they'll have screenshots, paywall, native front. If it solves a problem. And like is like I think a flighty, like that's kind of a utility app. You know what I mean? Like and I could imagine easily converting people from the web if you were targeting it correctly. But yeah, I

57:44wouldn't ask a quiz about your travel. You know what I mean? Maybe I would, actually. How often do you travel? Cuz flighty's one of these apps that gets way better the more you travel, right? So like kind of building I Okay, never mind. Utilities, you should do a quiz for your calculator. I changed my mind. Don't listen to me. Don't

57:57listen to me. Listen to me instead. Well, yeah, don't do that. Okay. Official advice from Nathan, he's a smart one. Don't don't do that. Okay. But yeah, and then in terms of intent, low intent web. High intent, maybe not web. In the If there's low intent, you need longer time to convert, you need to put more effort in. You can do a lot more in web. It goes back into what we

58:19were speaking about about control. But I generally like to say that there aren't that many verticals that shouldn't try web to app. You should try it as long as you have a hypothesis around what you expect to happen or what you're hoping to get out of this. Again, touching on the intent piece, blog posts, webinar funnels, gated lead magnets, you can't really do these things in app, and they really lend themselves towards, you know, traffic that's low intent or lower intent than those that would want to purchase. So I

58:45think that's that's one case. The other thing I would say is around pricing and price point. Typically I've seen a lot of higher ticket products make web work before app. Just And I think it's for a range of reasons. Sometimes it can be to do with the audience, like the audience age, and how comfortable they are purchasing on web versus in app. Sometimes, you know, it can be around just not being comfortable, regardless of age, to spend that much money on a subscription app, more comfortable making those larger

59:12purchases on web. But again, low ticket subscription apps work really well in app. You don't need to necessarily invest all of this money into building out web funnels just to push your $29.99 annual product. Yeah. Next up in our quick fire, what ad channels are you seeing find success? Any ad channel, or are there specific

59:32ones you think work especially well? Yeah, I think a lot of channels work. I've seen meta work, Google like search and YouTube, TikTok. I would say outside of channels, affiliates and influencers amazing with web. Again, it comes back to the attribution piece. If I'm working with influencers and creators and I want them to push my product, it's hard to attribute when it's mobile. On web, I can just send them to a dedicated

59:55landing page, UTM parameters, perfect. So, I think it's not just kind of ad channels but just channels more broadly applicable for web to app. But I've not come across a channel that just hasn't worked. I know Top Thomas was saying he hasn't like had that much success with YouTube as a channel. I have, but that's because the videos we were pushing were like more long-form and it worked really well. So again, I think it it depends, but what I would say is don't think oh, I'm I'm testing web, so now I need to find a new channel. It should be firstly, can we get existing channels

1:00:27working on web? Secondly, are there channels like this channel that we can expand into? Thirdly, are there channels unlike this channel that we should test? Awesome. So next up, what data do you feed back to the networks for improving that targeting? In app, we talked about how hard it is to get the right signals and get it fed back and cross the privacy thresholds. At least you don't have to cross the privacy thresholds, but what are you feeding back to the networks and how are you making that kind of targeting work on web? It's not that dissimilar to mobile. The only difference is we want to send as many

1:01:01events as we can because we can map out more of a funnel. So, we can send sign up events, trial start events. We can send multiple events and just kind of see the conversion through each step. So, that's one thing. You can also experiment with optimizing for value as opposed to just events. So, if you're pushing, you know, monthly plans, annual plans, lifetime plans, you can kind of maximize value and send that data back, which is something that some people are doing, but it's not been talked spoken about that much. I've tried it and it's interesting. I I kind of don't have any impressive results to share as of yet,

1:01:34but I'm hopeful that we can get this working. But yeah, really the same things I would say to anyone looking to launch on, you know, app promotion campaigns. Make sure you're optimizing for something that's actually valuable. So, if the most valuable thing you can optimize for is a trial start, then do that. If it's the purchase, then do that. But pixel tracking, step one. With meta, you can use your conversions API to send data from the back end, server to server. Definitely, definitely do that. Yeah, awesome. And then you had a list. I didn't get to attend your workshop at Growth Annual, but I got to

1:02:06to see your slides. And so you had a a list. I just want to quick-fire these and just give me, you know, 90 seconds on each of these. And this is like specific tactics for creating a winning web to app funnel. You've talked about quizzes, but like what makes a good quiz work on the web? Or even in app? So, I think where quizzes are concerned, I find this quite funny because quizzes are all about ask asking questions, right? We're asking questions to the user. But an onboarding journey is about us conveying value to the user. And it's really about us answering their questions. So, if you think about it,

1:02:40the user has in their mind, is this app going to work? Is it for people like me? Is it going to do this, this, and this? But what about this? They have all these questions and we approach it with let me ask my 15 questions so I can track them nicely. The first thing I would say is don't focus on what questions you're asking, but focus on what questions you're answering. Sometimes you can answer a question with a question. For example, if you land on Calm and you're

1:03:04like, I don't know what this app does. And then they say, are you here to sleep, improve focus, etc. You now understand what the app does. And they've done that by asking a question and giving you multiple choice answers. But beyond that, you can use I like to call them interludes, which are kind of the screens that break up questions to communicate specific information. I think there are three types of content you could put on an interlude, like evidence, things that prove you do what you say you do, whether that be charts, graphs, social proof, testimonials, the

1:03:32sorts. Content that focuses on reassuring the user. There may be known anxieties that they have. I think there's a great example from Headway that's like, do you often worry? Or something like this, like how often do you worry? And then you click a lot and then it tells you, hey, don't worry, loads of people worry, stuff like this. That's an example of reassuring the user. But the idea is you want to figure out prior to building what those are and then on certain screens, call them out specifically. A great example is time to value. I don't know how long it's going to take for me to get my abs. Summer's next week. Can I

1:04:05do it? This app told me I can. Woohoo. So the the charts we see. But that's one and the final one is I would say functionality. I don't not talk about your product. You want them to get to the end of onboarding and have a pretty good understanding of what you're going to do and how. So that's that's something. And doing those things ultimately adds value. Um so that's kind

1:04:26of my my approach. I guess if I had to wrap it up in a nice way, I would say that a good web onboarding journey tells a story. A great web onboarding journey echoes their story back to them. Next up is social proof. How do you incorporate social proof effectively and then how effective is it and should people be using social proof? I often get asked

1:04:46what type of social proof should we use? And I think it really comes down to what questions, back to the previous comment, the users have in their head. Like are they thinking, do I believe this works? Are they thinking, is this safe? Are they think if it's like a a very health-oriented product, you're asking for medical information, is this a

1:05:05trusted product? Who's validated this? Who approves them? You know, whatever these kind of questions are. But the idea is what objections do people have? Once you identify those, then you can narrow down what social proof you should be displaying on your paywall, not your paywall, your web onboarding journey or your paywall. I think a great example is, and you've probably seen it all the time, when people have like 80 million, 20 million, 30 million users use this product. It's like, that's great, but probably if 20, 50, 80 million people use the product, I already know what the product is. So, smaller apps who are then like, join thousands of people

1:05:43using my app. It's like, doesn't really have the same the same impact. You're better off saying, join others who have XYZ like you and then having a testimonial of someone just like you who solved that problem. It's less focused on kind of volume and and quantity, more focused on kind of qualitative efforts. And lastly, talk to me about personalization. How, when, why

1:06:07should you think about personalizing? And then this does get to a point where it can get very complex to personalize a web journey where you've got this like infinite branches of a of a tree, but I know it can be powerful. So tell me about how you think about personalization. Yeah, I think personalization is super key. I think the reason it's so important is because it's how you echo their story back to them. If I just have a really nice flow and ask some great questions, I'm saying stuff and I'm doing stuff, but I don't

1:06:37know how relevant it is to you. What I want to do is make you believe that this product was designed for you. Like someone sat down and thought about David and then built the app. And the way to do that is to ask questions, use the answers in the next questions, and kind of take them on that journey. What I would say though is that you don't need to over-invest in this at the beginning because often times the diminishing returns are very real and you think that adding way more personalization is going to dramatically increase your conversion rate and it doesn't because people don't care that

1:07:10much. So, I think the question is to figure out what do people actually care about? For example, if we take an example of an app that helps you get to sleep, right? If if you're helping me get to sleep and you're asking me what time I sleep and all of this stuff, great, you're going to personalize it by

1:07:26reminding me when I can go to sleep. Great, this is cool. But that's not really moving the needle for me emotionally, right? It's not doing much. It's it's very functional and I understand, but it's not probably the best example of personalization. Whereas if we take an app that is to do with improving your focus at work and you're asking me what my job is and then you're you're telling me that, you know, CEOs, XYZ, developers, XYZ, you know, train drivers, ABC. Now this is like, ah, okay, this makes sense because it's specifically for me in my context. So, I think focusing personalization on context as opposed to just focusing

1:08:05personalization on questions, answers is is a nice way to to wrap it up. Yeah, that's some fantastic advice. I mean, so many of these and and especially this last kind of quick-fire round that we did the last few minutes, it applies to so many other aspects of your product as well. It's like not just your onboarding journey, but how do you personalize the product? How do you find emotion and like really show people that you're delivering value in the product? How do you incorporate social proof? Like I was just using Strava last night and a friend of mine from like 20 years ago was on Strava and showed me that he's

1:08:41like now an athlete competing in triathlons and that was like a really interesting social proof, you know, moment for me of like, oh, that's really cool. Like he's using Strava. I can follow him on Strava. It's all of these like apply throughout the entire product journey. And so really fantastic advice. As we wrap up, anything you want to share and are you accepting clients at at Perceptics currently? I know a lot of growth growth advisors are like booked up through 2025. Do you have any spots available? I know after listening to this podcast, some folks are going to want to get in

1:09:11touch. We are pretty busy these days. I'm pretty busy these days, but the team is growing. So, we do we do have capacity and we are taking on new clients. And I'm also available to chat all things web to app. Sometimes like the best way is to just message me on LinkedIn a question. Like because for example, it may be the case that you don't really need my services or our services and you really just need a little bit of advice and a kind of point in the right direction. So more than happy to do that as well. That's good top of funnel marketing right there, you

1:09:38know, give away a little bit, reel them in. And definitely we're going to include links but Nathan's been sharing a ton on LinkedIn and then you you started a YouTube channel as well, right? So you're sharing a lot more like video and and written content and slides on LinkedIn and stuff. So great follow on all those platforms. All right, Nathan. Well, it's so much fun chatting today and thanks for sharing all these great nuggets and learnings that you had

1:10:00over the years. Thank you, Nathan. David, Jacob, thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.