Lessons from a Lackluster Launch — David Barnard, Weather Up

0:00hello I'm your guest host Charlie Chapman a developer Advocate at revat and with me today is revat CEO Jacob iding Our Guest today is David Barnard you know him as the host of this very fine podcast but he's also a longtime Indie developer with his company contrast and a growth Advocate and my co-worker at Revenue cap on the podcast we talk with David about the many failures of his recent app launch the surprising results of his first ever AB test and the many reasons why you shouldn't plan a big app launch all right hello David welcome to your show longtime host first time caller that's great so I'm Charlie this

0:40is David the longtime host of this podcast First Time guest and with us as well is Jacob iding my boss and CEO of Revenue cat yeah I like the way you did it in the pre-show which was and Jacob's here too way to Su yeah the reason I am in the host seat and David's in the guest seat is because David just released a really big update to one of his apps and he has some learnings to use a corpor phrase here I guess to kind of share some things that he learned as part of this launch process and we thought it would be interesting to sort of walk through that

1:12and so I'm here to try and fill David's shoes to walk us through that update so and I think we're liberated Here Charlie to be a little more direct than we typically are with a guest that we've invited and you know on good terms with to bring on here but in this case David's kind of a if he wants his show back I think he's going to have is this a hostile takeover well I don't know you are sitting in the host chair so I think I think you have squatter's rights I'm an open book looking forward to sharing whatever you want to ask dangerous way to start this out before

1:44we get into weather up 3.0 which is the update that we want to talk about I want to give everybody a primer of your background as app developer not as growth advocate of ricat so what is your story as an IOS app developer leading up to this weather up 3.0 launch I was a struggling independent recording engineer in 2008 and not seeing my wife because I was working like 2: p.m. to 2: am. and she was working 9:00 to5 and when rumors of the iPhone SDK started circulating which I saw because I was a uber Mac nerd working in a recording studio I started thinking hey this could

2:21be a really good opportunity So within days of Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone SDK it wasn't even called iOS back then and I started a company and I initially intended to code all the apps and started learning how to code and got like three weeks into that and thought to ship something in the summer I should probably find a professional so I hired a contractor and started building apps and I've launched 20 something apps on the App Store seen close to 10 million downloads and millions of dollars in Revenue so I've been at it a long long time 16 years now starting from the beginning you've gone through many

3:01different business model iterations of the App Store and I assume your apps have as well yeah it's funny to me talking to developers these days who don't know the full history of the App Store and the fact that Ina purchase didn't even exist so early on we did all sorts of crazy stuff like a popular pattern for a long time was a free quote unquote light version of the app kind of what freemium exists today and it's almost like your free trial and then you push people to the paid version of the app which was always HD right or was that when the came along that was iPad

3:33that was iPad all right yeah I guess a little context for me too just so you understand my weird references I came into the iOS game a little later I became an iOS Developer and started building stuff in 2019 and I was actually Android until like 2016 so I learned most of my history through podcasts like this before I was an employee here so yeah most of that is like me getting that secondhand as well yeah then I did the whole like free version with the ton of in app purchases to like try and increase the average revenue per user the craziest experiment there I launched a timer app and it was

4:07like 99 and it was doing fine and then I relaunched it as a free app with a ton of inapp purchases like oh you want this theme it's 99 Cents you want that theme and in the app was a quote unquote ultimate bundle which I think was 10 bucks which at the time it seemed totally ridiculous 10 bucks for a timer out but people bought the freaking ultimate bundle because they just wanted everything and so I was making was a better deal David you'd be stupid enough to take the better deal you know it was great and that was 2010 2011 or something just experimenting with

4:38business models and then I started switching my apps to subscription in 2017 after Apple opened things up and then I mean that's how I ended up at Revenue cat and sub Club podcast and everything else was trying to switch my apps to subscription and it being such a huge pain in the ass where we were spending way more time on the subscription app code and infrastructure than we were building the products so yeah so when did the first weather app version like of those 20 apps you remember like when you first were like I'm going to do a weather app was it your first weather app technically my

5:08third weather app so perfect weather was the first weather app I did but it was like 2010 2011 so I've been building weather apps for over a decade now and then launched a whole brand new skew new app as weather Atlas in 20 17ish and then weather Atlas got rebranded as weather up was weather L basically a Rebrand then you said it was a new SK no no no it was a new skew everything it was just we wanted to switch to subscription it was just such a brand new take it's like file new project take everything I learned from perfect weather it was a new partner that's

5:44another thing since I don't code I've had this weird mix of working with contractors that I pay and then some combination of pay and do a REV share I started doing the partnership thing back in 2010 2011 after two projects went sideways so each of those projects I lost 50 Grand so I I was working with developers they made all the promises in the world but I was paying them hourly and the projects just drug on and on and on and I realized like these aren't going to ship stopped throwing good money after bad and I just wrote off $100,000 that i' paid out that's when I

6:16started thinking okay I need to work with somebody who's got a little more skin in the game yeah yeah yeah developers without downside risk there's nothing worse in the world but then that has its own challenges when somebody's working on as a side project they can gets with their jobs and so it's been a struggle too working with that model so I don't want to spend too much time on the history but I think one other thing that is probably related to the 3.0 launch for weather up is what was your marketing strategy for all these apps then you presumably didn't have a huge advertising budget or something at least

6:49initially how has that sort of evolved over time with all your apps yeah depends on the app I've relied very heavily on organic channels I've done very little paid advertising early in the App Store actually did spend thousands of dollars trying to make it work and like with paid apps it's just was Total Money losing proposition but mostly I've relied on getting attention Apple's attention press attention and then ASO has been really big for my apps generally like launch Center Pro was the top result for a bunch of like launcher and other kind of terms so it got a lot of browse traffic that's actually one of

7:22the things that we'll get to with a weather app trying to get any kind of organic traffic those keywords are just so C routed which makes it really hard but one of my most successful apps was a mirror app and go figure at its peak something like 10 or 20,000 people searched the app store for mirror every day and I was capturing 68,000 of those every single day ignorant person what does a mirror app provide that like the camera does not so it's genuinely a good app and I made it embarrassing I didn't imply it wasn't David you did one of the main things is that front

7:59facing camera if you just launch the camera app it's in a little window with all the Chrome around it so this launches to like a full screen mirror you can zoom in we did some really cool stuff like you tap a little flashlight button and it puts white around the edges of the screen and turns the brightness up to 100% so that in dark or lowlight situations it's actually really helpful like one of those lighted mirrors and stuff and then we had a really cool way where you tap the screen to like freeze the frame and then you can save that as a photo so it's a kind

8:29of cool way to preview your selfie before you save it little things like that but people love that app I guess it becomes a thing you know to search for right it's interesting the different sort of niches will inform your strategy like how you can acquire users I think it's almost the opposite I think it's like somebody's like I need to check to see if my lipstick looks right and they don't even think I can open the camera app they're just like is there like a mirror thing and then you know you just search for it you're trying to solve a problem and you go to the App Store if

8:56the App Store is your default search engine uh it can grab am creating that Loop you know what I mean like convincing people with normal human people problems to look for software let's just think about how magical that is for a moment yeah I'm always surprised when I look at my app figures ASO Tab and see that I'm ranking well and getting downloads from full sentences like I want a green noise I make a White Noise app a green noise for free or something like that and it's like people are just typing full-blown search queries but yeah I asked that because in the earlier era getting

9:33attention if that's kind of your big marketing strategy I don't necessar want to say it's easier but it's definitely different because like apple features in the early it's way easier how many apps are there now David like no Millions there's millions and millions there were like when I launched my first app there were 270 apps on the App Store you didn't need attention there were 270 apps on the App Store yeah yeah I guess there's always people talk about literally scrolling the list of apps yeah you can look at and by 2011 or 12 I mean it was different but it still we were talking probably in order of magnitude fewer

10:06apps than there are today and it's still to some degree like getting attention especially in the early teens you know 2010 2011 12 13 was like the most predictable thing you could do right and to some degree it is and I think it's probably one of the better more predictable ways to like try to break through the noise if you know how to do it but yeah we should talk about it yeah yeah especially if you have no marketing budget so yeah let's talk about weather up then and and like you mentioned earlier weather up was a Rebrand of weather Atlas you said and there's been

10:35multiple versions of it over time so when it came time to this weatherup 3.0 launch what was the state of weather up at that time well I mean weather up 3.0 has been a long time in the making as I mentioned you know working with a partner my cousin he was busy with other stuff and had a lot going on and so this has been a very long slow started in 2019 actually like the designs for the widget that's started doing apps yeah actually yeah when I first opened xcode for real what kind of kept happening was we would get deep enough into one specific feature and then just kind of

11:10realized oh well to get attention we really should be doing X and we finished Y and I mean at this point I actually regret not just shipping so like we were pretty far along watch app yeah just ship like we should have shipped the Apple Watch app in 2020 probably when that was ready but that was when widgets got really big and so like now we got to build a widget so at wwc 2020 we're like okay we got to build a widget we can't just launch the Apple Watch app then we're so close to launching the widget and then Apple announced interactive widgets and it's

11:47like we can't just launch a widget when everybody else is launching interactive widgets and so we should have just launched but we held off the tough thing about getting attention is that you do have to do something unique well widgets were really cool and unique in 2020 when they first were home screen widgets but 2021 that's not enough to get attention Apple watch apps complications like all these things and that's a trade-off the calculus for me was well let's wait and try and make a big splash with all these things but really like at this point we could have already had launched the widget and just adding interaction at

12:22the level we did would have gotten attention you'd be on weather up 7.0 yeah exactly so presumably then that long an amount of time without major new features was impacting the business then or were downloads pretty much just swimming along yeah I mean that's one of the big regrets I was actually just looking at app figures recently and downloads were pretty consistently good and we had some nice spikes from getting attention or being part of big launches with new iOS features and stuff like that all the way up until about 2019 when things went on Hiatus and we were working towards this bigger update and things really dropped off the map like

13:01apple stopped featuring the app because it hadn't been updated in a while we stopped getting any kind of bumps from these new updates and things like that so coming into the weather up 3.0 I mean it's almost like launching a whole new app because downloads were at low double digits a day like 15 downloads a day I mean I guess for some IND the apps that's a lot but it's hard to build a business and make any money on that so the revenue was down I've actually been losing money on the app for like 18 months I've been funding it out of my in the future DAV investing in the future

13:31yes and again I think that was one of the mistakes and that's the beauty of subscription apps too is that except for the getting attention there's no incentive to hold back features like launching a big 3.0 where you're doing a paid update where everybody's paying you for the features well nobody was going to pay me any more because I launched those features so I should have just launched them and kept moving yeah because even a really massive big splashy launch amortized over the time between big launches that time in between big launches is arguably a lot more important than how splashy the launch itself is unless you're just

14:06starting out that's where it can make a really big difference to start from a big stepping stone I think the big launch philosophy has been one of like the great mistakes of my career there's so many incentives to be like oh yeah we're just going to roll this together into a big thing or like we're going to put this all together in the fall you're honestly justifying not shipping right you're being like I'm not lazy or I'm not scared a strategy right and it's like yeah for me it's definitely fear right is like oh I don't want to like I'm not going to show this to the world

14:36because I need this one little extra thing otherwise people are going to ignore me I do think it's a legacy of box software really though the mindset and it did work prior to subscriptions when especially paid upfront apps it works really well like launching a pro would get massive spikes in Revenue where it'd make like 60k in a week they we'd go along making you know hundreds of dollars a day hundreds of dollars a day and then we'd have another big launch and then we'd go up but I mean why is it even called weather up 3.0 3.0 it's like yeah and prior to that mindset

15:11so I think a bit too it was like all about building and packaging these big updates and then talking about leveraging that into love from Apple and the Press right so there were like a bunch of these compounding things but I think you're right that if you reamortize that over the time value delivered right those features that you withheld for months are not compounding or four years or whatever are not compounding over that period And I think it's really easy for that to overcome and then of course there's always I think just the psychosocial aspect of it is that if you're not shipping you're not shipping and if you're not shipping

15:42every day you're not shipping your probability of never shipping goes up yeah right yeah I think we're especially in the sort of Apple sphere I think a lot of us have a tendency to think of our marketing like Apple's marketing and it's like Tim Cook can sneeze and that can be like news story we are not that and so do you have a Phil Shiller you should get one then you could be apple but you don't have a Phil Shiller right like Apple's marketing is world class and they're professional right and it's not just buil decades and decades and Decades of yeah they know the cadences

16:15they know how to control the narrative they know how you know what I mean and and they are doing paid updates though that's the thing it's like a lot of their launches are convincing you to get a new iPhone and so it is like save it up save it up save it up and then do a big Hardware to do it yeah and when it was box software that was part of the deal you had to hold back those features and early in the App Store you would release a new skew as a paid update because there was no way to monetize that user base over time I think a lot

16:43of what y'all were just saying I keep thinking yes because subscription business model allows you to acrw that value over time and make it compound versus the old model of paid apps and paid updates didn't allow you to do that point taken like nobody cares about those things anymore and so don't hold off on shipping and that was a mistake I made was for the last four years kind of getting dropped in that old mindset that did work in the past for me but no longer works in the same way because that's not how I run my business I think each small update is an opportunity to

17:19reach for attention and maybe not like send an email to your press contact or whatever because that you can oversaturate but if you're constantly making small updates and each time you can make a little video or something of that update every single one of those is a chance to catch somebody news attention and oftentimes what they're going to see is an old feature that just happens to be part of your demo you're like cashing in on an old feature or something each one of those times like most people aren't getting tired of you Tweeting too often because most people don't see it in the first place and then

17:50like you said earlier one of you two is if you're constantly tweeting to the point of almost being annoying it also kind of signals I get this with Revenue cat stuff you guys are pushing so much stuff out I can barely keep up which kind of shows that like I'm on top of things we're constantly coming out with new stuff even if you don't use it that signal adds value perceive value anyway to your product and for a weather app like this I mean I'm sure a lot of it's the mass Market but for getting a start for getting anything written about it or whatever you have to at least like

18:18appeal to The Connoisseur of apps right and somebody's going to check how many updates there were and like so yeah let's get to the actual launch itself then so what was your I guess strategy going into that launch we already talked about the actual update it was interactive widgets and a watch app right but what was your plan for getting attention press and you know hoping to get featured by Apple we'll get into mistakes but I kind of did the same Playbook I have for years was I know if I do something Innovative I can get some attention for that Innovation and then typically when you do something

18:52really Innovative with a feature like interactive widgets that Apple has been really pushing heavily and was a big new kind of part of the OS update you can get attention so my goal for the launch was to get as much attention as I could from press from Apple from others make some money and then take that and start experimenting with apple search ads and then if that went well start expanding marketing beyond that but that's not how things went which we'll get to yeah how are you trying to get that attention I know you most people listening know you you have a lot of contacts what was your

19:24general strategy to try and get those press articles and apple features people say oh well you know people and that's how you get featured but I don't think that's totally true it helps they will at least scan my email or at least see that I DM them and maybe I have like a tiny bit of faked in credibility because they know me or have know me for a while or whatever but at the end of the day and I think about this all the time is that I'm not actually going to capture their attention unless I do something that they care about and so for me

19:56thinking about reaching out to all my press contacts I would be embarrassed to send them weather up 3.0.1 update with like one tiny little feature that's not even interesting I still feel a ton of pressure to do something that's actually interesting in the market that they're going to be willing to write about because I'm not going to push somebody to write about something that's not actually interesting and that's where for this particular update I worked on a video that demonstrated the features funny enough Jake Moore who we've had on the podcast a ton and done a ton stuff with the CEO of super wall has been

20:31talking about for years how impactful videos are for pay walls and with this interactive widget it felt like it just something so visual that it needed a video so I was working on the video for the pay wall primarily and it turned out so good that ended up being my press pitch so instead of hundreds of words I mean you just have so little time to capture somebody's attention so the main way I pitched it was like a DM on Twitter and like hey I'm working on some really cool interactivity for widget some weather I think this is really interesting and I got quite a few people

21:02who are like yeah I don't really cover apps anymore or you know I wouldn't Ty cover an app but they saw the video we're like wow that looks really cool so I think whether or not you have a relationship with somebody because a lot of people I pitched I didn't know and they didn't know me but it's all about communicating that value and it being something that's actually worth them writing about and that video like really helped yeah cuz it's not just value to the user it's also interest for a story which are slightly different things you got to help them get their story written for

21:37the week right like they have a job they have a quota they have a number thing you have to produce and if you want them help them do their job and find something mutually beneficial for all three parties right the reader the journalist and you if I was to say any sort of distillation of how to do PR it's that like build something that's mut like win to all parties and it's hard you have to find something they interest in right you read about what they do you learn about you know whatever well I mean this is February of 2024 which like every Tech and other

22:06wise online outlet in journalism is disappearing right now like on the daily so maybe like the last one to get this in before writing about apps just doesn't exist anymore if you needed any more signs that this model of launching is no longer like that might be it to that same point it's not just is it interesting but is it interesting currently you had a little bit of an uphill battle well you had a huge uphill battle which we'll get into a second but even ignoring what happened on your launch day you weren't launching this when iOS 17 was coming out with these interactive widgets where huge regret

22:39people in the Press were literally begging please send me your interactive wig need some I need something ship about and I don't want to just copy Apple's press release right you had to pitch them on it in was this January when you were starting to kind of reach out yeah yeah so like not only did you need it to be compelling in its own write as a story that they already want to write but you had to make them want to write it well after the readers are demanding this anyway let's move to the actual launch because this is where things get pretty interesting so I guess

23:09I'll just let you take it away but how was your launch day itself terrible really really bad at least you didn't at least you didn't wait four years for it so that's good yeah I know after four years a hard work of all the things to happen I had scheduled the launch put it on my press page so if you go to press. contrast. we'll link it in the show notes but I create a press page for every release that I'm trying to get a little press for and on there I put the launch date and time so it's kind of the Embargo time so I did talk to a few

23:43journalists and I had set this time and it turned out that at the exact same moment Apple was planning on announcing their dma compliance and so somebody from the Press reached out and said hey there's big news coming an hour from now can I just publish now and I was like oh shoot not good it's like all right just go for it then I reached out to other folks that I thought might be writing about it and told them like go ahead and and write about it and then even like 9o5 mac was like hey I think we should just wait till tomorrow they didn't even

24:15publish till the next day and then several of the people I was talking to got so distracted with the dma news that they didn't even write about it so there was like layers there of one it didn't get written about by as many outlets as would have likely written about it had it not then two there wasn't any kind of like social Halo because the eror got sucked out of the room so people who may have seen it and may have otherwise tweeted about it or said hey this is cool or other journalists see Tech crunch write about it and they write their own story instead everybody was

24:48like super busy I didn't even know you watch that day David to be honest like I was so busy like I think on a normal day I was going to say even including you David like people on that day you are one of the people that people go to Twitter or whatever to find so it's like they go to your Twitter and they might see like hey I launched this new thing and they're just scrolling to find your take on this new thing because this is why I don't discourage side apps explicitly because the world just discourages side hustles all like your main gig will always destroy anything

25:20you try to do yeah so like an hour into my app launch and I didn't know what the news would be but an hour into the launch before I even had a chance to like tweet it from the company account before even some of my own launch Day plans were finished Apple announced that and then I was like all hands on deck with you and Jacob and everybody else at Revenue cat trying to figure it out and then scheduling a webinar for the very next day and like reading through all the documents and chatting about it internally and so what would have maybe otherwise been a lighter Revenue cat day

25:53where I take a little personal time to celebrate my app launch was just completely so it said I was up till like 2: a.m. reading the fine print of European regulation to host a webinar the very next day it was just about as big of a disaster as you could possibly have when your plan is to get attention Apple still hasn't featured and I'm not totally sure why but I have a feeling it's that well two things and this is a regret that I have now looking back is I was trying to squeeze it in ahead of Vision Pro and I thought so much air was

26:27going to get sucked out out of the room from Vision Pro what I didn't know was Apple was distracted with the dma but the whole editorial team was I'm sure so busy with the launch of the Vision Pro I never could have known that the dma would be such a big deal and would be launched on that day but I should have known that the App Store editorial team would be super busy with the Vision Pro and the reason I was trying to get it out was to launch was to like actually ship versus like oh now we need to build a Vision Pro app before we can ship and

26:58so I was trying to get out before the Vision Pro so that people weren't asking where's your Vision Pro app or whatever Well turns out a month later I don't think anybody would ask for a Vision Pro up anyway so hindsight 2020 I should have just waited a month and let the Vision Pro stuff blow over before launching but that's a top tip sub Club listeners if you're going to launch your app don't do it on the day that Apple announces the dma so take that one write that one down in your notbook this is really actionable this applies to all businesses you do better if Pi a

27:28different day than the day that the App Store melts down in Europe but it's another side effect of the big launch if you put all your eggs into one big launch basket you're sometimes you're just going to catch a stray some big news article is going to come out it happens with fundraisings too like companies put big like efforts behind their fundraising announcement and then that morning whatever Company files for bankruptcy and the entire like startup news Escape is like covered with that right nobody cares or some other company raises more or whatever that's just a risk and there's sometimes a little bit you can do to like drisk that maybe you

28:00have a friendly contact in the press that tells you hey there's already an embargo news drop that day but like you're not usually that lucky but if you're launching more often you have a more even you know you're drisking your launch Plans by having many small launches you could always try to do both right why can't you just have many small launches and big launch too right I think you can kind of no and that that's what I should have done I could have done that we could have launched the Apple Watch app and it would have been just launch it Qui and then be like this is weather of

28:24three they've never seen it these journalists have never seen it like you can that's what I was going to say you're saying the big launch and I think big launch maybe has two meanings there's like the big launch in the sense of you're holding a bunch of stuff for this one big launch but there's also the meaning of like making your launch big like going for just being loud and everything and you can be loud once a month I mean this is the YC advice if you have a launch that goes poorly Just Launch again the definition of a bad launch is nobody sees it so nobody's

28:52going to see you do it again right Revenue cat do that I think you said that stage somewhere so I think we posted on Reddit and it kind of got some steam and then we launched a beta like every time we fundraise we're like Revenue cats launching out of we make some stuff up and it's a little bit of a wink and a not like we're always doing stuff right yeah I guess it's a little bit of Showmanship just to like put a narrative to the building you've been doing and you can kind of do I mean look at Tesla like every Big company juices up stuff they've been working you know

29:21they dress it up they push it that's what marketing I me every Apple keynote starts with a bunch of things that sound like launches is that only all the super nerds are like we've heard this before right but most people watching it are like this is new like this is okay who are watching which is probably who it's for but yeah I mean it's the power of narrative control right like you can really kind of Drive The Narrative and I always telling you guys before to start the podcast this is all made up everybody has all it's made up you can just contrast is made up but yeah

29:48nothing you can do to control for like just dumb luck and it feels like in this particular case kind of the mistake if you were to say that would be you made a lot ride on this single event and then things that are outside of your control can go wrong and you gave up on all of the smaller events that could have happened over the last three years or whatever and put it all into kind of all your Quivers behind or I don't know the phrase something with a bow and arrow and putting everything behind the one bow or Arrow all my eggs in one basket

30:20and so that maybe is like the mistake that happened here but I guess maybe the more interesting thing then is what now what are you going to do are you going to do like Jacob said are you going to try and relaunch short answer yes I wanted to actually go through more of the failures of launch and to give the audience a little bit of context Jacob and I were chatting Friday and I was like we were talking about the podcast broadly and we've had some really great guests on but one of the things I want to do more is talk to people who have failed and talk about even the ones who

30:49have succeeded about all the failures leading up to the success and I was like yeah I failed so bad with weather app and jaob was like well let's talk about it if we're going to get other people on the podcast to talk about failures why don't you lead by example and so this is Monday like three days later and that's exactly what we're doing so I actually want to talk through more of the things I think really failed at the launch before we get to like how I hope to potentially recover from this failed launch because I think it's really instructive and then for me doing all

31:21this stuff it informs the questions I ask on the podcast you I'm using Revenue cat experiments in the app it informs how I talked to my colleagues about our product internally I give tons of advice on sub Club I get tons of advice on sub club didn't take all the advice I think one of the other big failures I wanted to discuss was pricing and specifically because we talked so much about pricing and I kind of just failed at every level of the like typical advice that we give so one of them is pricing is not as important as you might think and it's probably better

31:55to launch with a lower price and just get more people using the app and get more subscribers and I launched with what is probably the highest ticket weather app subscription at $4 a month was fine but the $40 a year but interestingly my biggest regret is not the $40 a year is that I didn't do a sale on launch so this is the advice I would have if you are going to do a big attention grabbing thing do it with some kind of a discount 25% off 50% off whatever because all that attention I did get most of the people who wrote about it listed the price a lot of

32:33people who maybe even read the tech crunch article read it on 9 to5 Mac Reddit on Mac Rumors or whatever boy Genius report they all saw $40 and were like no way but if they had seen $40 but H 50% off I think we would have better it creates like that urgency like take action now don't just wait part of the reason I wanted to push the envelope is I talked to so many folks here on this podcast and we talked to so many people inside Revenue cat where they have what seem like unreasonably high prices in my theory now is that well one this is a

33:09weather app it's a commodity good I should have really better understood like willingness to pay I should have looked at what other apps are charging and everything but the other thing is like the source of attention matters a lot so the apps that are charging a higher rate they're either creating a lot of demand through paid advertising where there's not a lot of expectation going into it versus getting pressed like the attention you get I think makes a difference to that willingness to pay and the type of people you attract and then especially apps that are really big with search if somebody's searching for a weather app and is like looking for a

33:45solution that's a really different audience than people just seeing it in the press and wanting to check it out so there's like a different kind of intent a different kind of user all those things and so I think it was a move pricing it at 40 bucks I think we probably should have done 30 and then done a discount to1 1999 for the launch yeah it's interesting almost definitely this thought is coming from me listening to this podcast but like the idea that the journey that the users taken at the point when they see the pay wall being super important which oftentimes is when you're talking about the onboarding

34:20experience but it's also the attribution as well it's interesting to think that yeah like whether that person came through a splashy launch or press versus the high intent they were searching for it or they saw an ad on Facebook or whatever that should also Drive what offering you're sort of showing them on that pay wall I don't know if I've ever seen this before but it would be interesting to oh I guess I have on a launch itself all the Press people that you're trying to get to write an article include a link that has the attributions so that that discount only applies if they get it through their article if

34:54you're launching an otherwise Unknown app with a press you can pretty much guarantee anybody who buys it on that day is coming from the Press right do a Time limited sale even if 100% of users that's the case from the person writing the article story them being able to say N9 to five readers are the only well yeah that's true you could just say that um am I coming off unscrupulous nobody's nobody's gonna mind it's literally true if they click they'll get the discount maybe everybody else gets a discount too but I think that's something that could live on though right like one of the things

35:28for me that I do see in the data and also it's in my head that this is a thing is like a lot of these journalists for some of the bigger press junkets they spend a lot of time on SEO they make these big listicles because they know that one they'll get a lot of attention on that day but then they'll get attention for the next six months when somebody buys their new iPhone and they're like all right what are these new widgets because that's probably when they actually update their phone at the same time that's a driver of traffic overtime for your app as well each one

35:56of these articles that they write that deal kind of can live there as well that's also part of that narrative that's user Journey all the way to your pay wall so like theoretically those could even live on there and show a different offering to somebody that came from an article versus somebody who came from searching I need to know the weather or whatever in the App Store one other thing I do want to mention on pricing is that I priced based on things that I knew and based on my thinking of the value of weather up and my costs in servicing weather up not on the customer

36:32perceived value of weather up and I think that's a huge thing that Founders can get themselves tied up in kns about and I succumb to it myself is that one of the features that we were leading with that I don't think many people are even using people didn't even talk about it much but I was personally so excited about it because this is how I use it is that with weather up 3.0 you can set a different weather Source per widget and so I have a whole home screen dedicated on my iPhone with three widgets and it's Apple weather as a source airs weather as a source and ACU weather as a source

37:06so at a glance I can see whether any of the forecasts are showing rain coming I can see the differences in the forecast and everything like that super uber nerdy feature well it's also very expensive to do that because every 15 minutes or whatever it's hitting the server not one time to one weather data provider and the weather data is why had been losing money on the app leading up to this launch was that it's just really expensive to provide weather data and then widgets and complications are especially expensive because they're constantly updating in the background so I got myself all twisted in knots thinking okay we need to make sure

37:43there's a level of profitability here and if a bunch of people start putting five widgets on their home screen with different locations at different sources and everything else it's going to get really expensive for us to service these customers it's really hard to educate customers on how expensive weather data is and then the fact that it's even more expensive because it's WEA man like I don't don't tell me about your business model I don't want to know and so I was pricing based on my knowledge of that and my own like thinking the feature was going to get super hyped and you only have the one tier right it's not like

38:17you have a more expensive plan M exct so you had to model it in like some percentage of users are going to be doing all of this yeah exactly I'll call back I don't think we talked about you didn't put any product analytics two causes of death there but one you didn't have product analytics to tell you how many users are doing this which you can probably look at the API calls to see like the relative now you know the percentag is which then I'm going to bust you for that's another symptom of not launching if you had launched this as it Standalone thing you could have

38:44like not touched anything just measured how many people are doing what and then you would have some idea of like okay actually as long as we charge X we're going to be able to cover cost because not that many people actually use this feature there's some risk there but yeah and this is why we talk talk about all this stuff like I should have surveyed some users I should have value based pricing value based pricing is typically helpful I think actually in this case David value based pricing is hurtful for your bottom line potentially actually not because I think if you're closer to the perceived value of the product

39:12you'll get a better Optimum in value based pricing you want to set your pricing to the perceived value for some aggregative users as opposed to cost based pricing where you're saying it cost me X dollar to deliver I'm going to charge X Plus 5% profit or whatever in SASS and stuff it's really important because the cost to Del is often very very low if you cost price just to your cost you're giving away too much and often especially in SAS where you're like as a developer having to ask for $100,000 a year right you really have to be like gosh that's so much money for software but then you go like well if

39:42I'm replacing a developer or if I'm replacing some amount of headcount or some amount of whatever now I see the value right the value is there and therefore you know you can feel it but you could be on either side of that price curve in the sense that like you're pricing way above the perceived value the demand's going to drop off again so value based pricing doesn't necessarily mean charge more it just means like charge the perceived value because the costs are only something really the provider of the service cares about well they're highly variable based on the number of users which is weird too yeah and and also like at the stage

40:13like there's some fundamental costs that you can never get below potentially but like you should really I mean when Revenue cat launched like our cost structures were really brutal in the early days right but it was like it's okay because eventually we're going to have a team that's going to focus on making everything offici efficient and driving down costs and whatever but the early days it was just like turn up the database dial right like just keep mning money um but obviously a different thing where you apis you have more fixed cost but I think the worst way to do this is to be like how much did it cost me to

40:41build this yeah and then they divide into that it's like no don't do that don't do that that's not going to end well for you and then the bigger problem for me too was on the value based pricing front is that people have expectations coming in to a weather app like understanding my market as weather nerds like who's going to put this widget on their home screen weather nerds weather nerds already have five other weather apps they're probably subscribed to two other weather apps so they have a sense of like what a weather app should cost and one of the ones I got compared to which I know Brian the

41:12developer of carrot weather and that's one I got called out against was like well carrot weather has more features and is only $30 a year on their like most premium tier and it's true if I would have thought more about who I would marketing too I would have realized that they already have that price comparison in mind and yeah it's a real thing to assume the market is already somewhat in equilibrium especially for something where you have a lot of products I don't think looking at your competitors you know if you're building something truly new it's harder but if you're building something that's like I want to say a commodity but think

41:45of car companies like car companies are super precise in their pricing right because most cars are Commodities right there's like slightly differentiated and so they have to be laser tight with where the market is and they know they won't sell them if there cost more than this and stuff like that yeah and you got to price in that differentiation too right I think that was a little bit of where I was hoping that this would differentiated enough and valuable enough we got thousands of subscribers at this launch it wasn't a complete failure so I mean it did kind of prove that a certain number of people were

42:15willing to pay a premium for what they perceived to be a premium feature and a premium experience now I have the opportunity experiment you had asked earlier about you know where do I go from here and we kind of already covered it is like I'm going to launch again am I going to get as much press this time probably no but like you said I'm going to create one or two features nothing massive but one or two features that I think are interesting enough to get some more attention and bundle those up and do a little relaunch and some people will be seeing it for the first time and

42:47I'm going to put it on sale exactly exactly and then from there then I can like experiment more with pricing and win back offers and things like that so you I want to shill here for a minute cuz you you used a bunch of Revenue cat stuff right you ran into some experiments things how did that stuff go cuz like that's probably more than most folks do on a launch but I'm what did you set up what did you use and like how did that go yeah I mean I guess as a guest I get to shill rubby I want an honest customer testimonial pay walls went way better

43:15than I expected so we used the revenue cat footer viw where we built a custom Swift UI pay wall behind where we're able to do the video do a lot of like custom fancy stuff which probably wouldn't have made that much more money we' have just used one of the revenue cat templates but I wanted to do the video on the playall and everything else but it was really nice being able to let Revan cat just do all the logic behind purchases and everything else so it saved us a ton of time I think Brock who did the development I think he said the super fancy Swift UI pay wall took like

43:46less than a day and then all the like logic and everything else for context if people don't know like we have a pay walls feature at Revenue cat where we can render everything for you and it's all driven by the back end you can change things but there's a version of it where the only UI we render is the actual hard part which is the prices and the CTA at the bottom and that stuff and then you can build your own Super customized fancy animated marketing view behind it and so that's what you it's a great solution for the developer that wants to like still own the pay wall but

44:17you also want to save a bunch of time well in selfishly from our perspective it also means that we do support any bespoke feature that we haven't built yet ourselves into our so like at the beginning we didn't have like videos or if you have certain types of slideshows even if it's not super complicated if we haven't built it yet it is possible I don't think he had to do anything Brock codewise because once we were using Pay walls to power it I was able to kick off an experiment so at launch I scheduled it which that's a new feature scheduling experiments but I scheduled the

44:53experiment to start like midnight the day of launch or or 12:01 a.m. the day of launch and the experiment I launched with and it was so fascinating because Revenue cat shipped experiments 18 months two years ago and I've talked to people who've launched experiments Charlie you wrote a blog post about using experiments like a lot of people have talked about experiments but launching an experiment that I conceived of implementing it myself it was just such a different experience of like dog fooding Revenue C and then also again podcast and the advice I give and what experiments to run and all those kind of things it was so fascinating to set up

45:29an experiment myself run it look at the results analyze the results real skin in the game too right it's easy to talk about somebody else's decisions and tests and be like oh you should do blah blah that's all I do all day but yeah when it's your money and you're like I'm actually testing this it's different yep so it just work though that's pretty cool like which it should I say unless you're putting something embedded in the behind the footer view in the like custom view like the footer will just automatically adapt to the offering even just customizing a pay wall for having two different offerings pre without

45:56using stuff which just it's not insurmountable but it's days of drudge you know so this is the first AB test I've ever run in 16 years of building apps because it was always such a hassle I didn't want to pay for SAS to run AB test I didn't want the developer to spend months building out some bespoke system so the only way I've tested in the past which we talk about this on the podcast I think it's a valid way to test is you launch and you look at the numbers and then a week later you you update the app with something very different and then you look at the

46:29numbers that week and that's a valid way to do it but this is the first time I've ever done a real AB test because it was so easy to do and so the test I did was defaulting to annual being the pre-selected option on the pay wall versus monthly being the pre-selected option on the subtle so it wasn't even like different price you were just like subtle ux difference which you can test with Revenue C pay W so just what's the default and part of the reason I did that is that I was considering just making the monthly the default always because we've talked to folks here on the podcast about how

47:03monthly shortens that feedback loop of like people who are staying engaged with the app and turning quickly and everything like that and then I also wanted to get some monthly recurring Revenue built up because we have monthly recurring costs and so do we do a big launch where we get a bunch of annual and then we need to budget that over time to make sure that we can keep the weather API bill paid or do we try and get more month Revenue where it's like more consistent over time so the results were fascinating and I'm looking at the results right now but the headline is that realized LTV less than a month in

47:38so I don't have renewals yet on the first renewal month but realized LTV is 60% lower on the people who saw monthly that makes sense because a lot of the people who saw monthly just stuck with monthly but I was running some numbers with my colleague Dan and this is something it would be really fun for us to model at some point but you know assuming a normal level of churn I'm unlikely for the realized LTB to cross before the year mark and then at the year mark those annual renewals will kick in and the realized LTV will shoot back up again and so basically I just

48:15made less money by launching with this well no you learn you learned about something that definitely doesn't work right like you mapped out the probably does I think the I think the interesting thing here is when you stop this experiment you'll still be able to track these cohorts for the next I think 400 days or something I would go back and look at these results after that year mark when your annuals have actually started renewing and then look at your actual lifetime value not over 30 days but over that full period yeah 366 day of lifetime value instead of just yeah the first because that's something that

48:52like you can make a lot of inferences based on other people you know what their annual turn rate looks like versus monthly but at the end of the day you don't really know until you see what yours looks like yeah the monthly renewals will start coming in this Thursday actually and so I'll be able to see pretty quickly but in Revenue cat.com you can go into the subscriber retention and see the number or percentage of people who have turned off auto renew already and so I already know that my turn in this first month is already going to be above 30% so I'm going to retain somewhere around 70% of

49:25users like not higher because 30% have already turned off auto renew and so by looking at that I already kind of know I'm going to retain probably less than 70% and so then you run some quick math on like even as that turn declines over time because month two it'll hopefully be less and month three it'll be less and less like fewer and fewer users return and more people stick around but like the Math's not looking good for those two lines to cross I David so just pre-selecting drove that much difference in Behavior like how many people on the a still ended up buying monthly like did

49:58it make a significant difference yeah okay so here are the numbers I'll round them up to just make it easy for listeners since we're not going to like have a screen share or anything of the people who saw the annual as a default around 800 of them went with annual but almost 400 selected monthly so a lot of people who saw annual did switch to monthly so like 33% of people chose monthly even though they saw annual as a default on the opposite end the people who saw monthly there were almost 1100 people and this was an even split so 1100 people selected monthly so there was

50:37actually a 4.5% increase in people converting to the monthly so when they saw the $4 more people did start that free trial than people who saw $40 in side note I am using Apple's new pricing where it is actually just $40 and that's a whole another experiment I'm actually running current Curr is the $40 versus 39 we actually running the side by sides I'm that's my second experiment cont we're have great content in 2024 because David I I don't have enough traffic right now somebody help me out let's get some traffic start driving some ads or something I don't know yeah but anyway so was $40 or $4 a month and that's

51:16another thing is I was kind of experimenting with making the price differential not quite as attractive but that's another experiment I'd like to run is like making the monthly a little more expensive to drive annual but in this case I was kind of like I want some monthly revenue and so I wanted it to balance out a little bit and so I did the 40 and four which is not a crazy deal for annual where typically people who are pushing annual would make it like 50% off 60% off to do the annual because they're trying to get that money up front so people who saw the monthly

51:46as a default it was 1,00 stuck with the monthly and only a hundred switch to annual so way more people who saw annual switched to monthly and almost no that's really yeah I mean that's probably going to wipe out your results just there because it sounds like the total number of conversions is similar it's like 11 1200 something like this yes yeah yeah yeah yeah oh that's fascinating so like just priming people on annual is gonna make a huge difference that's interesting especially I mean I wonder I mean relatively 40 is not the lowest for weather apps but it's also like some apps are for a year it's

52:19100 so it's already kind of on the low end but that's really interesting so 10% more people convert converted on the monthly Oh you mean on the annual primed more people converted on monthly no people who saw the monthly as a default more of them converted by 10% 10% more people became subscribers when they saw $4 versus seeing 40 but and again we can revisit these numbers actually little shout out to the community here I'm actually been sharing charts and the actual results from this in the subclub community and there's been a great discussion on that so if you're not already on the subclub community go to chat. sub club.com and then

52:59there's a join link there to join the community I shared it in the private area of the community but yeah 10% more people converted to become subscribers who saw the $4 instead of the 40 but still when you start doing the math on the churn on the monthly and everything else like I'll probably still end up making quite a bit less money on the people who saw monthly and stuck with monthly because get money up front versus like giving them 12 opportunities to tr also also to consider the time cost of money right that money now is literally worth more value perspective right than it is like one question to

53:33both of you guys I guess related to this is when running an experiment like this right around a launch is that data not that it's invalid but isn't that a very different cohort than the people who for the vast majority of the time are going to be finding your app through you're certainly learning more about the preferences of an interesting user base than you are and I would super valuable especially if you're going for big launches as your strategy uh because it's good to know how to optimize those cohorts but that's going to be different than a month from now all the people who are finding your app through just search

54:08and definitely just the volume you already alluded to it David it's like as you're running subsequent test your test that's a very subtle test split I mean I'm interested that there's any sort of like perceivable result there and actually I would love to run it for longer to see if that disappeared because you're talking five six percent like could be noise it was statistically significant though yeah it would be interested to run those tests on like yeah Charlie was saying like run rate like sort of downloads but you'll have to take bigger swings because the volume of people going through that funnel is gonna be a lot lower so to get

54:38statistical significance you don't want to be testing like green button Blue Button you want to be testing like $1,000 and $3 you know like testing complet versus this completely different you're trying to do gradient descent like a machine learning algorithm trains right like where you want to just create tests that are big enough part if you're trying to determine if it's too cheap or too high or whatever like the bigger differences you take they'll be notionally correct right so like the bigger swings you take if it's like oh actually there's a little more value in the higher side so like maybe don't make that a or that b your actual number then

55:09like find a new number that's closer and then test that again as well it's really awesome DAV that you now have a for a limited time only no for a limited amount of effort you got a pay wall set up that you can remotely configure especially for a developer like in your position where like you know you have to Loop somebody else in and youve got other bugs and features and things to be working on like now as the business oriented partner you can pretty much on your own be running these experiments analyzing the data and all of that stuff and I think it's something that yeah I

55:37didn't even have to talk to Brock to launch that second experiment I changed the price on App Store connect I already had two SKS and so I changed the other annual skew to $39.99 I left the existing skew at 40 and I set it all up in Revenue cat to run this subsequent experiment without touching code without updating the app without even talking to Brock actually did you test it at all like in a sandbox context or anything like this like no no just go for it yolo it's good I mean you should be able to like should be fine especially if the products were already

56:08approved and everything it's really cool I think this is one thing on Revenue cat side that we've just kind of started to Cobble all these tools together but like we haven't yet and talk about Revenue cat thinking about what's a launch for us right like we've been shipping these little features for the last year and a half and when you see them all start to interplay and play together now like we have a thing and now it's like having people go through the whole flow we need to like spread the word on like how to run these tests like all inside Revenue cat how to design plans how to do it all

56:38in one place because I think like you said David like you never 20 years in or what however many years the apps were in you've never done this before and that's crazy because it works right so I'm excited to see more and more developers do this and even developers that were already doing it doing it easier focusing on other things things like this so anyway Revenue cat.com before we land This Plane is there anything else with this launch either things that you're going to try going forward or were there other failures I miss that you wanted to cover another huge failure was just me getting my

57:06expectations up we talk about it on this podcast about product Channel fit and all the different things you know it got mentioned in Tech crunch which is a big deal and I was in N9 to-5 Mac and Mac rumors and boy Junior report you know it got a lot of attention again if the dma hadn't happened maybe there would have been a little more momentum going but anytime you're launching an app you got to think like okay where am I getting attention and then what's the overlap of the attention I'm getting and my ideal customer profile and then the reality is no matter how much you want to convince

57:39yourself otherwise is that of those maybe 30,000 people across all the different press mentions I got let's say 30,000 people's 100,000 people probably all the headline oh another weather app I don't care even if they are potentially even my like ideal customer profile they already have three weather app subscriptions and they don't even get past the headline because they just don't even care and then they see the app and they see the video they see whatever and it just whittles it down further and further and further and so like the real overlap of people who are actually care enough to go click a link and go buy my stupid little app is so

58:15small that even when you can get a lot of attention again if that attention isn't a huge overlap of your ideal customer profile it's just not going to be as impactful as you think and so back to maybe the this whole strategy is played out unless you're apple and are launching these massive consumer friendly apps that genuinely everybody is part of your potential customer base then it's not going to be as impactful as you would hope and assume it would be so another big lesson I think maybe the thing there is it's unreliable not necessarily unimpactful cuz sometimes you can have like I limped along an

58:50update for iOS 17 to get interactive widgets for my app and it just so happened that for whatever reason editorial picked it to be in one of their lists and it was the first one in the list and that was just massively impactful right and I've had other ones where I've even gotten on lists but it was lower down or it wasn't one that they pushed as hard or whatever reason and it didn't have those numbers if you keep swinging on those some of them will be hits and some of them won't you just got to launch over and over right you got to launch over and over launch

59:19launch somebody should make a podcast with that name yeah some should have a podcast about launching a great idea yeah for those who don't know Charlie runs a podcast called launched where he talked mostly to Indie developers about launching and running their app businesses but yeah I have it in the notes like where do I go from here it's launch get feedback iterate update get feedback launch from here it's ship ship ship and then keep doing these experiments and keep trying new things keep taking swings and there's the episode title we don't do that for this one do we but it should be ship ship ship all right well David it

59:51was a pleasure having you on your own podcast thank you for joining yourself where can people find you and your work I think we should plug Charlie's work I think like where can people find you Charlie Revenue cat.com I write articles on the blog no I I'm on all the different social media things most places it's Charlie M Chapman on Twitter which is what I will still call it it isore Chuck eec I think is my handle there and then I have an app called Dark noise which is a White Noise app which provides lots of fodder for good Reven cat content as well as a we'll have you

1:00:26on after a failed launch yeah perfect perfect to make it and I guess David you don't really plug contrast so it's contrast. co right is where you can find all your apps yep and the links of course will all be in the show notes and I'm actually not the one who has to put them there so I'm excited about that it's nice but yeah anybody else willing to share stories of failed launches and failed product updates and screw-ups and everything else get in touch David rat.com I want to hear more stories like this hopefully I broke the ice a little being really open and honest about some of my failures with

1:01:00this launch and the thing is like the story is not written right like we talked about this launch was a disappointment but there's still a huge opportunity and hey I got close to 2,000 people to pay 40 bucks a year for my stupid little weather I don't know where the failed came your head David at all I think that's an unqualified dub in my mind so all right well super fun talking to you guys thanks for uh having me on thank you 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

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