App Store Ethics, Dark Patterns, and Rule-Breakers — Steve P. Young, App Masters: Sub Club Podcast

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Steve p young founder and CEO of app Masters the app marketing agency that helps grow apps faster better and cheaper on the podcast I talk with Steve about black hat app optimization the benefits and drawbacks of hard paywalls and why despite apple and Google's best efforts so many apps still use dark patterns it even blatantly break the rules Steve thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today it's been a while I've been meaning to have you on and finally getting to do it today I feel excited David finally got the invite I've been

0:37waiting for the invite well I've been thinking through what would I really want to talk to Steve about I mean you cover so many things we've had people on talking about ASL you talk a lot about ASL we'll probably talk some ASO today you share all sorts of tips for optimization but what I really want to talk about what finally got me like okay I gotta have Steve on is App Store ethics so you and I have been talking for years and we probably first met 12 years ago early on one of the things we talked about very specifically was that I was super Indie developer I'm not going to be aggressive

1:14with my paywall which I've totally come first circle on that not even being a good way to describe it we can get into that but I had this super pure Indie mindset of build a product and they will come and I'm going to follow every Rule and be like this upstanding citizen and you're a little bit more like this is a business morality is a spectrum I'm not gonna break the law I'm going to be careful not to break Apple's rules but I'm gonna run a business and do what it takes to succeed and so that was the start of our conversations and years ago and the reason we had that conversation

1:45is that I was getting to a point where I was fed up because I saw all these other developers bending the rules breaking the rules using dark patterns and here I am struggling with my business feeling like I need to not be aggressive with my paywall and it's not that I wanted to do anything against the rules or anything like that but I was just even realizing hey I need to think about this more as not this passion project this is feeding my family and so that's how it kicked off was like I was like hey let's talk real stuff but what I was seeing in the

2:15App Store was that so many apps were breaking the rules and so many apps were using dark patterns so many apps you're bringing a knife to a gunfight if you were trying to compete in any category and then when you do market research I mean I was talking to people who it's like hey look I see see four wallpaper apps making millions of dollars that must be like a really great opportunity I'm going to build a wallpaper app and I'm like look go download those four wallpaper apps and figure out why are they making a million dollars they're using all sorts of dark patterns they're using 15 a week subscriptions and things

2:47like that so let's start breaking it down you know I've even talked recently that there are still tons of apps breaking the rules so like if you're an app developer in the App Store trying to succeed with your subscription app and you're looking at competitors you're looking at the landscape I think it's important to understand all the different ways that people are breaking the rules and even using dark patterns and even just being smart about their business that you may not have thought of so that's all a spectrum right from clearly breaking the rules clearly immoral to like hey this is just smart business and not even questionable at

3:22all I've been talking for a very long time but I think it was important to kind of set up this conversation for actually really calling out the dark patterns the breaking of the rules and then we're not gonna philosophically dive into what's moral and what's not moral and how you should run your own business but we're just gonna talk about what people are actually doing on the App Store so let's kick it off what is the worst thing that apps are still doing to this day that people should understand that their competition might be doing I think maybe we'll start off with reviews because that's the one

4:00thing I do not do anymore we used to in 2015 because we I remember our conversations and I'll be like I would always live off in the gray that's where I like to live but don't buy reviews 2015 I figured out that if you have keywords in your app store reviews that would actually help your keyword rankings and we would see apps go up in the keyword ranking just by one or two reviews with the right keywords in there and I stopped doing that and stop buying those reviews and so the way way I feel about these black hat strategies is you got to do what you got to do to get you

4:33to a certain point and then after you get that certain point I don't believe these are long-term strategies but I think the zero to one is just the hardest phase of any journey and so I'm gonna do whatever it takes to get to that one and then once it's there yo I'm good let me figure out everything else and I hear a lot of big companies doing these reviews they're just putting a ton of paid reviews and Apple's gotten better at this apple is friendly Google will suspend you but that's one thing that people say hey Steve you have a good review source and I go nope I don't

5:04do that anymore don't do it you're gonna get in trouble do not touch that part yeah but what you're saying there is you don't do it anymore but tons of apps still do it I would assume it's just been a big cat and mouse game for the last decade or more now in 15 years for 15 years now Apple's played a cat and mouse game of all these different dark patterns but from what you've seen seen people are still buying fake reviews and fake ratings right and they're just finding more sophisticated ways to avoid Apple's detection yeah I mean I can see it right now because I have a source and

5:40I'm on the website right now and I can see multiple apps that are on this website asking for reviews so yes yeah and again I mean the whole point of having this conversation is when you're running your app and you're doing market research and you're trying to understand why is this other app being more successful why is this other app ranking highly for a keyword when you're doing your app store optimization one thing you got to keep in mind is that people are probably breaking the rules and this is one big way to do it right yeah reviews and then we can get into some of this other stuff

6:12too David is keyword campaigns keyword install campaigns those I feel like I know a lot of big companies I had a conversation one-on-one with the big company specifically talking about this and how to best leverage it and all that stuff and I knew they were already running it and so with the review side I was talking to a big client of ours and I was like hey we can do this review stuff if you need help like we already got it taken care of oh I didn't know these big companies were doing that right and that's why I was starting to talk about it more because I was like yo

6:40that's not fair you guys got this massive budget and you're doing this stuff that's not fair to us Indies so that's why I like to bring it up and talk about these issues and I don't try to shy away from them because I just feel like yeah they already have an advantage Over Us in these so how do we gain that Advantage let's step back what is a keyword install campaign why would people do it what is it buying ratings and reviews are are pretty self-evident but I think this one and again this goes to probably 80 percent of our listeners on this show will not know what this is

7:11and yet their competitors probably do it so what is a keyword boost campaign so it's essentially you get a bunch of people to search for a keyword and download your app and hacking the algorithm to make the relevancy of this keyword closer to your app right so there's a bunch of different sources out there if you just Google it around but it is that you pick a keyword and then you boost that keyword by getting downloads from that keyword so essentially like an ASA campaign if you're really aggressive with an ASA campaign put on exact match and just put a high cost per tap and you're just

7:44trying to get tap tap tap tap tap on there I don't think that has the same benefit but essentially that you're getting people to search for a keyword to download your app and hacking the algorithm to get you higher in the keyword rankings from what I understand Apple has tamped that down a little bit where like it doesn't always work anymore but it does still work apparently it does still work and so the key is to find a keyword that is pretty low competition from an ASO standpoint that has a lease a search score of 30 and we did this for an app and essentially we ran a keyword boost

8:17campaign within the initial launch phase we got it to number one it's stuck it's still number one for this keyword and there were two keywords think with a space and without a space right one word versus two word and then we both had decent traffic we got it to be number one for both terms and now it's getting downloads for free organically so that's what I mean David Wright like we're not utilizing this strategy anymore we found this keyword I don't think keyword optimization is enough anymore you need to give it a little bit of boost but if you find the right keyword that has low

8:49competition then no one's paying attention to then using these sort of black hat Strat energies you can get it to number one and once you're number one like you're golden don't worry about it anymore you don't have to do anything and that app is just getting it from zero to one and now it's making money it's making five thousand dollars a month just organically pretty much and so we got it to a certain point and then we just stopped yeah you're still doing this do you worry about Apple Banning one of your accounts I'm not worried David and here's why because I can run this for any app I can run it for your

9:18app you want to know I did it I can run it for my neighbors app I can run it for any app in the app store it does not matter we've heard black hat strategies where people will leave once our reviews for some of their competitors now I don't do that type of stuff I'm here to win my own game and I don't like to penalize and so when I'm running the other stuff sometimes I'm doing keyword research is this a valuable keyword and so I can run this for any app for anybody I'm not hurting them I'm only helping them but it's my way of getting

9:45a sense of is this keyword can it move if I gave it a little bit of a juice right and then that way I can do some market research around that and so then the problem is and I remember this from poof decade ago maybe more yeah was that there were some big apps that were accused of doing Shady stuff and their defense was we didn't actually do it a competitor did it to try and get us kicked out of the store and there's almost no way I can think of any way for Apple to figure out I mean aside from hiring private investigator and I don't know how crazy Apple gets

10:20and trying to figure this kind of stuff out but how would you know if Steve did it for me without me knowing or a competitor did it to try and get me kicked out and then this gets to the Crux of app review being a really hard thing there's been a lot of press the last few years about especially from Costa talking about all the scam apps on the store and then just the reality of it is there's so many things that Apple just can't enforce well and as much as they have gotten better at detecting various things it's this cat Mouse game where if you just do it different and

10:53then they can't detect it again personally I think I draw my moral line maybe a lot differently than you do and that's where I think our listeners are all going to be on a spectrum right of like how far you decide to go like I personally would not not feel comfortable writing a keyword-based campaign I mean this is why we're having like this conversation though is that to me that feels like cheating but your point is valid that if so many other apps are cheating if you're not cheating you're not playing the same game that everyone else is playing like how do you succeed in a marketplace where

11:30I I don't know what percentage it is but it's probably a small percentage but it's a small percentage of the more successful apps are cheating I'm doing quality fingers if you're not watching the video again I consider it cheating but it's part of the game that's being played on this Marketplace and if you're not doing it you are at a disadvantage so if like me you don't feel comfortable doing it you at least still need to be aware that it's happening so that you can plan your strategies around understanding that the competitors might be doing these things absolutely yeah David I'm not here promoting to do these

12:07strategies from a legal perspective I'm not promoting any of this stuff all right you run your own risk don't listen to me and take my advice on any of this stuff it's just that's my goal is look there are people doing it that are humongous companies and your goal whether you want to do it or not is up to you but it does work this is how you do it it is entirely up to you and I've talk to so many developers David that I think the apps business in its most simplistic form and feel free to disagree on this is just a funnel how are you going to get downloads whether

12:39it is because I've talked to people who've done it on tick tock on Twitter on Reddit on Facebook organically ASO it doesn't matter you have to think what is the top of the funnel and then you have to think okay once I get the download how am I get them to convert and so all these strategies we're talking about you don't have to do any of this stuff it's just you have to think about the funnel because I'll talk to people I don't even care about ASO I've got Twitter ads running profitably right or I've got Facebook ads running profitably so there's many ways to cut and win at this

13:09game I just want to make sure people are aware of what's happening in the space yeah what are some of your other top um edgy edgy things yeah yeah that's a good way to put it all right so I'll rattle through a few one of the things we used to do was you know the top three reviews show up because they're the most helpful yeah you can 3D touch that and you can sort of hack which reviews show up first so you can get a lot of your friends to vote the five star that has the most famous now you can try having the right keywords in there to try to show up

13:42higher the first three so you just get a bunch of people to 3D touch that and then hit helpful and then that hacks the algorithm that way and just to be clear well and 3D touch isn't really a thing anymore but so we call that long press long press is Apple's terminology so what Steve is saying is you go to the App Store you find a review that you like that is promoting your app mentioning the keywords that people care about demonstrating the intent that it's what's going to get you a conversion in the app and you long press on that review and it's kind of a hidden feature

14:16which this is one of those things it's a hidden feature and so it's probably gamed as much as it's actually used by like real people because who randomly on the App Store is long pressing a review and then when you long press it brings up a little dialogue of did you find this helpful and then you mark it as helpful and that actually influences which ones show up at the top but how many real people are actually doing this versus how many of your competitors are leveraging this to get the best possible reviews to show up first in the Sorting so that's what you're talking about and

14:51then do you have anything else to add there no I mean that front on the review side I'll leave with that the other edgy thing would be during the paywall view waiting five seconds to show your ex so that's another edgy thing that people do where you just have the little X just show up a little bit five seconds a little bit later and then that way it does increase Revenue it does work but it's up to you on whether you want to do it yeah and so then the edgy part of that is that you're kind of forcing people to think that it's a hard pay

15:22wall even though it's not I mean and so this is one of those where like maybe five years ago I would have been like oh yeah that's definitely something I would never do that's so deceptive this is the next phase maybe we should get on to is is that there's a lot of these kind of hacks where and this is a perfect example where is it immoral to not show the close button so that people who otherwise wouldn't have started a free trial now start a free trial because I think that's the only way forward yeah for some people that's probably going to be a little edgy but on the

15:55flip side one of the things I've been thinking a ton about with freemium these days is that people understand that things cost money and showing them a paywall is a reminder of that and if somebody is getting a ton of value out of your app is it really that much of a detriment to show the paywall on launch again five years ago I'd have been like showing the paywall on every launch that's like a total dark pattern and then I see my fitness pal doing it and my fitness pal is a great example because I've used that app off and on I subscribed for a year track my calories

16:27really closely lost some weight then I stopped using it then I subscribed for a couple of months I mean just last week I was using it to check in on how I'm doing calorie wise and I launched the app I get a paywall and for me I hit the little x button and they don't delay the X at least in the paywalls I saw I wouldn't be surprised if they do at some point or do it other paywalls or something but I hit the X and I kind of feel like hey I'm cheating the system I'm I'm getting value out of this app and I'm not having to pay the advanced

16:55features are super valuable and so I have paid off and on to get those more valuable features but I've been thinking about that how the user psychology of seeing paywalls frequently is not even necessarily always a negative thing so for some people yeah it's annoying like ah why are they showing the paywall like I'm just trying to log my calories but then it's oh yeah I'm logging my calories and using this app completely for free but there's actually a paid version and personally now when I'm seeing paywalls that's my psychology is hey hahaha hit that X and I'm getting it for free so any thoughts on that and any

17:28other thoughts kind of along those lines I know we talked about personally hard pay walls and I was sharing some data with our app now David I was against a hard paywall when we launched this so I want you to understand the full story we're talking my co-founder he's a developer we purchased this app he was like hey it's about to go it has no X and I didn't know what a hard paywall was at the time I was like why that seems hella me dude why are we doing that and he's like well that's how we built it and for me I like to think of

17:56myself as just somebody like that's a growth hacker so I'm like look I'm not going to fix that let's let the data kind of figure out what's going to happen and so we launched it as is even though I was opposed to it but then I looked at the data and I was like whoa that's a crazy we went from one to two thousand to ten thousand just like that with Organic downloads I was like wow that's crazy and so when we had to put the X in there we dropped five thousand now our app is super basic well you said you had to put the X Apple made you yes

18:22Apple's coming around and here's how I feel about this and I'm happy to say this publicly obviously but like it depends on your reviewer some things are against their T's and C's some things are just who you get to actually physically review your app and so while they might say that this is against our rules like unless I see it on paper I see so many apps doing it that I'm like you can't say this is against your rules if I see these many apps doing it right part of my job is looking at a ton of that perhaps and I see so many and I get

18:53to distill a lot of this but we had to put the X and our revenues dropped from ten thousand to five thousand now the reason why I feel like a hard paywall works for us is because it's such a basic app there's not that many features involved in it it's a one feature type of app that like once you're in you're kind of like that's it or maybe you wouldn't purchase and maybe we haven't done the math on LTV and all the retention since we're forcing it but when I looked at the numbers the numbers speak for itself so I'm not going to be religious about the fact that this is

19:21immoral I'm gonna figure out hey the numbers are telling me this is a good app people are staying on people are not asking for refunds so people are getting good use of it that's the whole reason we bought the app it's to your point earlier David and I think I'm glad you said it too because I feel like hey you spent so much time so many resources so much money on developing this app if I can get away with using your app for free guess what I'm gonna do use it for free right like but you spent so much time if your goal is to just make the

19:51world better and have me use your app for free good on you mate congratulations but if your goal is to build a business then you have to start thinking about how can I be more quote unquote aggressive with my marketing because if you feel like you go to great app if you feel like you're actually helping people then why aren't you charging we're doing this stuff for free but in the end you're gonna have to pay us if you want to work with us you're going to have to pay us if you want to work with Revenue cap eventually you're going to have to pay and so we built a

20:18great service that we believe in and our if our service isn't good it will fail it will crash and you can look at the numbers it's not like we're not giving away a trial we're doing a hard paywall and if the trial percentage was very low then you know we had a bad product but our trial to paid is on average it's 35 percent let the numbers tell me what to do it's funny you brought up uh hard paywall I wanted to get to that because I'm actually doing a hard paywall in my weather app that's gonna weather up 3.0 is launching in the next probably before

20:47this podcast airs but the reason I'm doing a hard pay while I really struggle with this for all the reasons you're talking about I mean everything from I don't want to be that app I don't want to look scammy I don't whatever but here's the thing is that with this update I'm releasing so much of the value is in widgets and complications so we built a really cool widget for the app and we built a really cool Apple watch complication well guess what that is really expensive for a weather app and so I could not come up with a good way to give that away in any kind

21:22of freemium scenario you can't put an ad in a widget that's a terrible experience I think Apple even has rules against putting ads and widgets can't put an ad in a complication the actual value prop of the app cannot be given away for free and the app itself is good but we've been more focused on the widgets and complications lately and so we don't want to give away the app for free as part of a freemium and show ads and then the ads is a whole nother thing and like I've been begging and you and I were at a conference last September and on stage I was saying we need for the

21:54subscription app industry so this is my pitch again the subscription app industry needs a good ad platform that does higher quality ads because I had Google AdSense in my app and I kept getting bad reviews I kept getting support requests of why are you showing gambling in your app they weren't actually game gambling but it was the slots games where it would be a really annoying animation and so people are going into my app I do genuinely care about the experience people have in my app and the experience was crappy no matter how many buttons I pressed in there people were getting ads for guns people were getting these Casino looking

22:31ads people were getting all these ads that they found offensive and that were annoying and a detraction from my product and so even if I could which with a weather app because every time you open the app it costs me money even if I could only give away the app itself and not the complications and widgets I don't have a way to monetize that I mean actually the app is losing money right now because we pulled the ads out in anticipation of this revamp and doing the hard paywall and so I've been losing money for like a year on that app because it's got no ads in it and it's

23:06got a lot of free users and it doesn't have many subscribers so anyways I'm going on and on about my own personal strategy but because I think there's valid reasons to do a hard paywall and I wrestled with it but we're doing a hard paywall and this is a case where and I think Apple does allow hard pay walls but I think you might have to convince them and I think I have a pretty strong argument here of why I need to do a hard paywall on this app so our hard paywalls a dark pattern well honestly I'm doing it because I want to create a better

23:36experience in my app if you start the free trial you're going to get everything and I'm gonna lose money on every free trial yeah for people who don't convert because I'm probably gonna lose 10 cents to 20 cents maybe even up to 50 cents or a dollar on every single free trial I offer depending on how heavy a usage the average free trellis uses so I'm actually giving value away for free in that seven for day free trial so doing a hard paywall as much as I would have been against it three or four years ago as much as some people might still think it's a dark pattern I pretty much

24:13have to do it with this app to deliver the experience I want to deliver so yeah that's where I landed on it and honestly from a business standpoint and having talked to you I'm probably going to make more money by doing a hard paywall than if I did do freemium for this app and there's something I want to experiment with in the future if I can figure out a way to do some kind of monetization with a better ad Network or something to have some freemium experience but it's tough it's tough to make that freemium work when you have those kind of costs yeah completely agree like I said I was

24:45against it too I was looking at other like AI tools right that help you create content and stuff it is all a hard paywall like don't get religious about this stuff like you go to any of your favorite web tools literally a hard paywall I'm looking at Jasper AI right like I was like all right what's a Content tool that I love that's an AI tool yeah here here's what we do but it's a hard big wall and AI is a great example right I mean some of the AI apps aren't offering free trials because it costs them a lot of money I'm complaining about weather app costs but

25:13like these AI apps often have very high costs and so even a free trial could lose their money so yeah that's a great example to bring up is that AI specifically I think we may even see a bigger wave of hard paywalls shorter free trials and things like that is it a dark pattern well when you're paying so much for the these AI training and AI inference and running the AI models it's not you're giving away value if you can't give it away for free you need to paint wallet yeah agreed any other dark patterns to wrap up this segment um let me well here I'll bring one up

25:52and and see what you think and see if you have experience with this I was looking at a few apps recently where they're pushing folks to the web I think I actually got to it through a web ad so it's not that they're necessarily pushing people to the web but it's like a web ad and so I'm in safari and the typical like long onboarding thing and then I get to the paywall and it's like start your one week free trial it costs us ten dollars to give you a trial which probably BS I'm going to calculate it and maybe I'll do something like this in

26:24my app where I'll tell people in the app that hey it cost me a dollar to give you this free trial because it is costing something now ten dollars to give people a seven day free trial I don't know what app is actually how they're doing the math on that um but then it gets options do you want to pay the full 8.75 that it costs us to get and it's like really specific as if they like really ran the numbers do you want to pay for the full cost of the trial or do you want to pay two dollars or you want to pay one I was like okay

26:52I'll pay a dollar seven days dollar whatever Apple pay comes up I confirm it now they have my credit card info on stripe so then I keep going through all the onboarding and at this point I'm just like yeah it's so much tax I'm just scanning I'm not reading everything at some point I hit a button that was like start your actual subscription now I actually I'll take it back I think it was fairly clear but I was expecting to tap that button and then the Apple pay sheet come up and then I cancel the Apple pay sheet but I tap the button and then they just immediately

27:27charge the card like 70 bucks because they got the credit card info with the one dollar free trial which again I feel like that was a little bit of a dark pattern telling me it cost 8.75 cents for my free trial or whatever but then they have the credit card on file so then any continue button any label that's not necessarily explaining it again I think the app that I was using actually did have the price and it did say something I don't want to totally throw any app doing this under the bus but they could technically because this is a web Apple's not reviewing it they

28:00could technically just have a continue button that doesn't say anywhere on there and they could charge directly to your credit card after that so have you seen this and what do you think of this as a pattern I mean not as much but as much as I like to talk about this black cat stuff I'm not a fan of all that stuff because sometimes I'll see this on upside all pages you add to cart you want to add this like oh my God you're really trying to sell like that stuff but fine I go no as long as it makes it clear that I can say no but I'm trying

28:26to look for the no I mean I know because I come from the web side of things right and so I know this stuff works I'm not a big fan of those either yeah I want to bring value and not try to scam you and I feel like once you're getting to the scammy again I was against a hard paywall and so once you get into the scammy's phase I feel like oh yeah let's not go there but one thing I would say for the hard paywall stuff if you've got sort of a meditation app if you got really good content in the app consider maybe my friend of mine tested a hard

28:57pay wall versus a lot of lock content he has a crossword app and he just made one free puzzle and he tested those two variations because I was first I was like dude you're giving away too much you're giving way too much away for free because in the end humans were against friction if you make it frictionless for us cool we'll just stay there we're never gonna pay you but if you built a good app that people highly engage by the way app so you tested that and he saw a boost in revenues by doing a hard paywall and then he tested hard pay wall versus just more lock content and so

29:26what I've been saying look if you don't want to do the hard pay well just lock up a lot of your content if you look at the big apps now like calm you can see that a lot of their meditations are all locked up and so what that gives you is the user can see a variety of content that you have but obviously they'll have to pay to access any of the content yeah that's a great counterbalance because we were talking about the benefits of a hard payroll but it's not going to work for every app eventually I'd like to figure out a way to do freemium in my

29:53app because there is a there's an aspect to people who've gotten more and more more comfortable I think in apps starting a free trial and realizing like hey I can use this totally for free get as much value as I can for seven days and then it's so easy to cancel and I'm a big fan of Apple and Google payments because they make it so easy to cancel on the web it's I mean like this specific app I had to do a chargeback to get my money back the one that I was talking about where I accidentally clicked which that's a whole other topic if you're doing web stuff you don't have

30:21apple enforcing rules on this kind of potentially more scammy stuff but what you do have is people who feel scammed are going to leave bad reviews and are going to do chargebacks with their credit card which gets expensive and gets you booted from stripe if you go to scammy you'll find out pretty soon when stripe boots you from their platform again it's a similar thing people complain about app review and there's legitimate complaints I'm still have lots of complaints that I send to Apple about app review but hey this exists throughout the whole world right you're running a restaurant you're going to have the health inspector come check

30:56things out out you know you're running a scammy web app you're going to have stripe shut you down people talk about oh free market and Apple's very restrictive and I've got my issues with that but like don't pretend you can just do whatever you want anywhere you want every business has rules that they have to follow in different countries they have to abide by the laws of those countries and different platforms that they're working with have to abide by those rules and so it is what it is so that was a deep rabbit hole but you were talking about hard paywalls and how that's not always the optimal strategy

31:25so I think you're absolutely right it's like there are times when having one or two things unlocked and then having everything else locked is a good experience because people actually get to see the value it's essentially all these little mini paywalls you see the little lock button and it's like oh I want that but I know I have to pay for that don't let my hard paywall talk bias you to think that that's the way to do it freemium is a great strategy for most apps and again I think what I was talking about I think the future of subscription apps is better freemium is finding ways to monetize those users who

32:03aren't going to monetize via subscription because like in reality socioeconomically and just mentality wise there's just tons of people who are never going to pay for your app and so the best thing we can do as an industry is be able to give more value to those who just aren't going to pay and find ways to monetize and then yeah lock features lock premium content lock what makes sense and every app needs to explore what actually makes sense to lock versus free and part payroll is kind of a cop-out just lock everything but in some ways a good starting point and then now potentially I get to work

32:40backwards of like okay now how can I give away something for free but yeah I think freemium is the right path forward for most apps but it's just a struggle to make it work well any tips on getting that balance right other than locking content because content's an easier one where I think you can give away a couple of meditations you can give away a couple of this or a couple of that but in more productivity apps that gets a little tougher I would say lock up as much as you can I think a lot of times people here we can go off this tangent when people are developing like a to-do

33:12list app it's like oh I'll ask for a review after 10. I'm like how many of your users get to 10 really low percent so maybe you should ask for a review right after the first one and then get them or during the onboarding process which we've seen work really well too to balance off buying for reviews will show the review prompt during the onboarding process or show it right after a paywall even if they can X Out hit them with the review prompt and so what I would say is I think too many times I look at developers I'm like you've just giving away too much for free you spent all

33:41this time you're so proud of this app but yet you're so afraid of charging for it look I've been there I feel the same way I'm trying to increase our prices and I'm like I don't want to do that yet I still want to be really affordable to the Indies and be the most effective and affordable app market agency so I feel the same struggle as much as I'm seeing here increase your prices or be more aggressive paywall I still feel it when it's our baby it still feels a little bit different to do it when it's our baby so I still feel it but that's why

34:09you need other people to talk to you they can be like look this is a great app like I'll talk to somebody like yo this is a great app how many downloads you get what how much are you making I'm like you know David we worked on this Android because people are like Steve this wouldn't work on Android and I was like challenge accepted and so I was like all right I threw an offer out to the audience like look I'm willing to work with anybody I'll give you a discount on some of our packages but here's what I want the case study and so one of our clients Steve this is for an

34:33absolute prank type of app he's like look at the charts a lot of the stuff that we're talking about a lot of things I've been sharing from a monetization perspective I feel David it's just more psychology based more than hey is this the right moral based stuff so when you have a paywall show it during the onboarding we've talked about Anya she said that was the biggest tip that I would have done once she did that her Revenue stubble and she has a panic she's is rooted panic attack so she's like I'm not going to do a hard paywall because if you have a panic attack you

35:01want to feel relief you don't want to absolutely pay so like cool so she allows people to x out but when she added it it doubled their revenues right this is against it and I was like what there's no way a friend of mine told me this tip in like end of 2017 18 range and I was like there's no way that works he's like nope double my revenues I just let the data and I think too many times we as experts you and I as experts we tend to say what is our opinion and so I always want to differentiate when I'm saying like here's my opinion ask David

35:26too or ask other people that might have the same thing or this is data driven and so I try to show data when I'm like look I feel confident that this works and a lot of times people ask me are you sure and I'm like look I wait I don't just share everything I wait dude I wait till like two or three and I'm like okay I feel pretty confident sharing this because the last thing I want to do is share something I feel worked once and it doesn't always work because the people like oh that didn't work and whatever you're sharing whatever how much data you have there are things that

35:53will and won't work yeah exact specific apps so at the end of the day and this is one thing I've struggled with over the years has an indie developer with limited resources limited development time is that I have not done a lot of testing in my apps and it's been to my detriment is that we launched something and it's clearly not working but it's hard to unwind what you did wrong and then try something new and try something new and try something new somebody was asking me recently I go what's the biggest mistake actually it was in the sub Club Community a little pitch for the community here if you're uh

36:25listening to podcasts and haven't heard of the community yet we have a private Community I think Steve's in there if you're not I need to get you in there I think you're in there but anyways there's an open question in the community it'll be a little old by the time this podcast here is but it's like what's the biggest mistake and so people are sharing their mistakes and so I was typing mine up and I think the biggest mistake I've made is not learning from mistakes is like you launch and you need to then try and find a way and it doesn't have to be a b testing it

36:53doesn't have to be super sophisticated it can just be hey this launch trial starts went way down okay let's try something new I had a big release with my lunch and a Pro app a few years back to capitalize on the home screen customization made like 20K that month but then we didn't iterate to maintain that lead and so to this day there's tons of home screen customization and widget apps that are making tons of money and I totally missed the boat on that because we had this big launch and then we didn't learn from the launch of what was working what wasn't and then keep building the features that we're

37:28going to keep people around and there were obvious things but this is what's hard if you're in India out there you don't have a ton of resources but that's how you actually grow instead of running the app into the ground like I have with some of my apps is that when Steve says hey do a hard paywall you do a hard paywall but then you look at the numbers if it's not working for your app don't do it do something different and don't take any of the advice we share on this podcast receive shares if he's sharing it if I'm sharing it it's probably that we've seen it work but it's not going to

37:56work for every out of money so yeah hey David I'll say this the biggest mistake I made if I were starting the app business today I would say I don't care what I think my opinion does not matter we're gonna let the data speak for itself whether it's ASO whether it's hard paywall whether it's trial conversion whatever long pay well whatever it is let the data play out because a lot of times how we're building new apps these days is we're letting the keywords because I'm going to be more Reliant I don't want to pay for traffic right so I'm going to be reliant on more keyword organic

38:26downloads but I'm letting the keywords tell me which app to build and I want to stay in a field where I know people are willing to convert there's a painkiller versus vitamin so I'm going to build an app that is more of a painkiller versus a vitamin and from all the categories of apps that we work with the mental health space the fitness health and fitness space tends to have the highest conversion rates so how I'm building my apps moving forward is looking at the categories where I know there's High conversion rates and look looking at the keywords and really figuring out all right what are some keywords that a lot

39:00of people are not paying attention to so my opinion does not matter everything is based on data yeah Thomas uh Petty I don't know if you listen to the last podcast up there's two episodes ago now but he was sharing on ad creatives he's like look I've been doing this for 12 15 years now he said on the podcast like I am no better than throwing a dart at pictures on the wall in deciding which ad is going to be the most performant I mean when you think about it that really applies to like your paywall design your paywall call to action whether or not you do a hard paywall or not you and I

39:33have a ton of experience have talked to so many developers have worked on so many different apps but even then you don't know what the right strategy is until you try a few things and again bigger apps yeah you can do super sophisticated a b testing smaller apps just try it yeah the numbers should be big enough to see the difference and this is where people get really hung up on statistical significance and everything like that but at the end of the day if you don't see a dramatic change then pick what you think is a better experience but you'll make some changes where it's just obviously better

40:06stick with those right and then just keep trying and yeah if you can and have the resources do more sophisticated testing but even then I think there's a lot of noise in the kind of a b testing Community when you're a b testing everything and every little thing and how one thing affects the other is really hard to suss out and the whole a B test everything is tough to execute in a way that you're actually building a great product you have to have a really good team to not just optimize your way into a crappy app that exploits every possible like base psychology of humanity so even if you don't have the

40:41resources you can experiment just do it and don't be like me launching an app making some good money and then just not following through yeah yeah and just start with the lowest hanging fruit I've got to many apps where I'm looking at their numbers and like I think your screenshots are ugly I think your icon is ugly what I look at your numbers you get great organic downloads 25 trial activation sixty percent child to paid there's nothing here why would I tell you to change your screenshots maybe that might impact it but you're doing pretty well six figures a month over six figures a month and so I'm like maybe

41:11play around with the trial variation it's really about looking at the numbers and figuring out what the data is telling you where you should go and what you should optimize and I think for Indie developers I'm just going to throw out a number out of the year but if you're not making at least a thousand dollars a month try a hard paywall because it will force users and it'll tell you if users actually want or need your app and if you're hard pay well your trial activation is solid but you trial the paid then you need to fix what's going on in the app right maybe

41:39you need to get them to use it or maybe they're telling you this isn't a painkiller this is a nice to have so I prefer to just be on the free plan and that way you can really figure out what to do next and that's why now I've become a proponent of the hard payroll especially for the beginning developers just to get your users to tell you do I really want your app or not because I invested it downloaded it and went through your onboarding but now I'm here and that's one of the things about a heart paywall that I think some people will see as a dark pattern is that yeah

42:07oh well people are going to start their free trial and just forget but these days people don't forget I mean yeah it's like a small percentage we shared numbers Revenue cat numbers and I've seen this in our data that there are apps that have five percent free trial conversion rates so 95 of people and some of these are even absolute three-day free trials so yes people will forget but it's probably in the low single digit percentages so if you think oh well I'm just preying on people forgetting to cancel maybe but you're not going to build a business around people forgetting there are apps that still do that if you dump a ton into

42:45paid acquisition if if the numbers are big enough that single digit low percentage of people who forget to unsubscribe will drive significant Revenue but for the average average developer it's a huge signal are people converting on the free trial or not and like you said that's a great way you switch to a hard paywall and you will see do people care or do they not care if it's single digit percentage you know you're not product Market fit that's a people forgetting if it's 10 20 people are finding value out of this so yeah I think that's a great hack to just as an early stage figure it out are people

43:21actually finding value all right well I've talked way too much but as we wrap up any last minute low hanging fruits I mean optimize your paywall man that's it optimize that's the one thing I would do add it to the onboarding process optimize your pay wall and then look at your main page if you do have a freemium thing and look at your main page I put a video up how a simple icon change that's a 57 increase in paywall views there are two areas that I would just fully optimize it's your onboarding experience and it's your paywall whether it's the plans that you have or whether it's a

43:54long pay wall short paywall whatever it is those that the two areas that I would play around with the most and then get to a stable part for me this is just my Approach get to a stable part where I'm driving revenues and then think about how I can drive more revenues off the top of the funnel and start operating this is awesome David thank you yeah really great advice so are you accepting new clients yeah if you want to learn more about us just check out our YouTube channel I mean that's what I would suggest I prefer you guys look at the freemium models back to the freemium

44:19look at our free YouTube stuff go through that YouTube channel youtube.com appmasters and if you are interested in with us it is at masters.com but we got team of 11 now I have to give a little pitch because you do you give so much away for free like you exemplify the freemium model but if you want to really get into the weeds with Steve it's going to cost you money just like if you want to use my weather app it's going to cost you money but the fun thing is this was not just an ad for your services I've listened to too many podcasts where it just ends up

44:48sounding like an ad so I appreciate that you will share so freely if not just hey come work with me and I'll share the real stuff you share the real stuff all the time today on the pi podcast and then on your YouTube channel so yeah even if you don't want to work with Steve he's got some really great content around all this stuff and you're I believe in 10 minutes you're gonna go live on YouTube so I think every Friday you do live shows oh one minute all right thanks Steve you're amazing thanks David bye see you then [Music] thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a

45:21review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community [Music]