On the podcast: What to do when there are no jobs to be done, how to build innovative features, and why copying Duolingo’s engagement strategy probably won’t work for your app.

Key Takeaways:

🏆 To win over a mass market, you need to discover your app’s trigger. Apps serving niche audiences often have a well-defined job-to-be-done. Apps aiming for broad appeal, however, need to identify the triggers in a user’s daily life they will optimize for, in the absence of a specific user goal.

🪄 A framework for user retention. Apps that serve a mass audience need to work extra hard to engage and retain users. While niche apps might be inherently more retentive, they too would benefit from making the app: magical, relevant, intuitive in real-time, novel, and pleasurable.

🥅 Why you might not want to make “the Duolingo” of your niche. Apps like Duolingo try hard to shame you for not using them but make completing the day’s goal quick and easy. This approach may not be suitable for all long-term goals and doesn't work well when your aim is to retain as many users as possible.

🧑🏼‍🎨 Innovation isn’t accidental, it’s designed - here’s a framework to help:

1. Always align with your mission.
2. Visualize the specific user you’re building this feature for.
3. Specify the triggers you’re addressing.
4. Know the job to be done for the user.

Think through all of these areas when prioritizing your backlog.

👍🏼 Some features should be considered must-haves. Features that all your competitors have, fulfill a promise you sell users on, or whose absence will drive users to a competitor, or cause high levels of frustration if missing, should be prioritized. Deciding whether to prioritize these over innovative additions is up to you.

🦄 The other feature category to build for is “delighters.” While it’s difficult to know whether a feature will delight users, they typically drive retention, complete a known job in a delightful or magical way, and create “aha” or “wow” moments for the user.

About Guest

👨‍💻 VP of Strategy and creator of core features at Welltory.

💡Asya leads her team to build thoughtful, mission-aligned features that delight 8+ million active users.

👋 LinkedIn

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‣ Jacob Eiting
‣ RevenueCat
‣ Sub Club

Episode Highlights

[0:44] The Welltory story: How (and why) Jane Smorodnikova founded Welltory.

[6:55] Trigger happy: Some apps don’t have an obvious “job to be done.” When this happens, finding and nurturing the trigger for users to open your app is crucial.

[10:18] Making magic: Welltory’s framework for building a delightful, sticky app: Make it magical, make it relevant, make sense in real time, make it novel, make it pleasurable.

[21:14] The Duolingo of wellness apps?: Why Duolingo’s retention strategy wouldn’t work for Welltory.

[26:16] An innovation framework: When deciding what new features to build, align with your mission, know your personas, identify their triggers, and figure out what immediate and high-level problems you’re solving for them.

[37:11] Driving retention: The secret sauce for retaining users for the long term? Make your app experience magical and novel, provide relief, personalize and gamify the experience, and give users bragging rights and social sharing features.

[40:32] Feature deal-breakers: Make sure you build both must-have and nice-to-have features to avoid frustrating users and prevent them from switching to a competitor app.

On the podcast: How developers can launch and optimize their app listings on the Google Play Store. A conversation from Google I/O 2024 with Sarah Karam, director of Apps Partnerships at Google.

Key Takeaways:

There are now more ways to optimize revenue with Google Play Commerce, such as installment subscriptions and automatically adjusted local pricing.

On Android, the leading apps diversify their monetization. Instead of offering just subscriptions, for example, they offer IAPs to cater for diverse user preferences. Tipping, for example, has seen huge growth.

The leading Android apps also adjust their overall approach to cater for the huge and diverse user base. Just replicating your iOS strategy will only serve a small fraction of potential customers. How can you serve someone on a $200 phone as well as a $2000 one?

“The consumer rarely buys what you think you sell” and understanding this can lead to secondary product-market fit, unlocking new growth. Stop thinking about your app in terms of the feature(s) it offers and more about what problem it solves.

About Guest

👨‍💻 Director of Google’s Apps Partnerships team.

🤖 Sarah is passionate about helping developers succeed on Google Play Store and the Android ecosystem.

👋 LinkedIn

Resources

Google Play Academy

Guidelines to Getting Featured on Google Play

Guides to Help Grow Your Business on Google Play

Google I/O 2024 Keynote

Engage SDK

Custom Store Listings

Google Play business community on X

Android Developer YouTube Channel

Episode Highlights:

[3:57] Feature presentation: Getting your app featured on the Google Play Store can be great, but it isn’t the most important thing (and you still need to market your app to take advantage of being featured).

[8:46] Proactive engagement: Google’s newly announced Engage SDK (currently in developer preview) will surface apps at relevant times for users in the context they’re most likely to engage.

[13:53] Easier ways to pay (and get paid): New commerce options — including newly accepted forms of payment, installment payments, and student and senior plans — allow Android developers to serve more users around the world.

[23:37] Custom is key: Google Play Store listings can now be customized by the keywords users searched to find the app.

[29:38] Diversifying payments: Apps that offer in-app payments (IAP) in addition to subscriptions tend to perform better than apps that offer subscriptions alone.

[31:54] iOS =/= Android: To take full advantage of the Play Store, developers need to think about the diverse devices, budgets, and preferences of the 2.5 billion Android users around the world.

[34:40] Baby steps: Small experiments (like offering a paid 7-day pass instead of a free trial) can help you determine what works best for your app and tailor your offerings for diverse markets.

[45:00] Penny for your app?: Tipping is a surprisingly effective way of letting users pay for your product.

On the podcast: How the Microsoft 365 team optimizes their apps for the app stores and the top paywall optimization tips for enterprise apps and start-ups. Part 2 of our conversation with Ramit Arora.

Key Takeaways:

💼 Use jobs-to-be-done to inform your app store optimization (ASO) keywords strategy. Optimize for keywords that align with what your potential audience is hoping to accomplish. To discover what these keywords are, use the same user research that informs your product roadmap.

🔐 Use Apple Search Ads (ASA) to unearth highly profitable keywords for ASO. A mistake that some apps make is to rank for keywords that are easy to rank for, not for ones that will drive revenue. Use ASA to discover which keywords are driving subscription growth, not just downloads and engagement.

💲 High-impact paywall experiments that work for Microsoft will probably work for you. These include making the more expensive (family) plan the default option, anchoring the price of yearly plans to the monthly equivalent (emphasizing value), and ensuring that free trial offers use the word “free” on the CTA button itself.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Product Manager on the Microsoft 365 (Office) Mobile and Mac team.

🚀 An expert in subscription management, growth, and monetization strategy, Ramit leads the apps like a start-up.

👋 LinkedIn

Episode Highlights:

[3:31] Choosing key keywords: Don’t go after keywords simply because they’re easy to rank for — select keywords that will actually drive value for your business.

[8:54] The golden ratio: Even Microsoft has to balance their LTV vs. CAC.

[10:58] Android vs. iOS: Right now, it’s more difficult to monetize on Android, but it’s a promising market.

[13:01] Testing, 123: Microsoft optimizes paywalls with friendly CTAs and GIFs that show (rather than tell) the value proposition.

[15:55] Premium presentation: Simple changes like switching the order of subscription options on your paywall can result in a lift in conversions and revenue.