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

Follow us on Twitter
‣ David Barnard
‣ 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.

On the podcast: Microsoft 365 app monetization and optimization, and how Microsoft is building successful apps–recorded live in Vegas at the Mobile Apps Unlocked (MAU) conference.

Key Takeaways:

📱 The App Store advantage: Microsoft's data reinforces that the App Store, despite the fees attached, offers significant advantages. The seamless experience from things such as pre-attached payment methods results in a conversion rate from trial to paid that is five times higher than on other direct channels.

🚀 On the App Store, think like a startup (even if you’re not): Despite Microsoft’s strong brand, success in the App Store requires the agility and innovation of a startup. The platform's democratic nature allows new startups to challenge established companies. Continual innovation is essential and you need to be at the top of your game with ASO.

🔗 Bundling apps can mean better retention: Combining multiple apps into a single subscription can boost user retention by meeting a variety of needs. Even if a use case is one-off, there will be other use cases met by other apps. This strategy generally involves developing a wide range of features rather than focusing deeply on a single application.

🧠 Integrate AI thoughtfully: When integrating AI, it's important to consider if it genuinely enhances the tasks users perform and brings a desktop-level experience to mobile devices. This ensures the technology is both practical and user-focused, and not simply jumping on the bandwagon.

⚖️ As you scale, prioritization never becomes any less important: As the number of monthly active users grows, you need to think bigger and bigger in terms of impact. Focus on optimizations that affect large user groups. Simple improvements in app reliability, performance, and the purchase process can often impact the largest number of users.

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

[1:14] From desktop to mobile: Microsoft is famous for its desktop software, but it’s increasingly prioritizing its mobile apps to keep up with consumer trends.

[3:09] Paying by phone: Users prefer to make purchases using their mobile device — trial-to-paid conversion rates are nearly 5x higher on mobile than other channels.

[4:56] The start-up mindset: Think like a start-up to stay agile against the competition in the app stores.

[6:21] Value they can’t refuse: To retain users over the long term, Microsoft bundles multiple products and features into a single cost-effective app.

[8:22] Staying ahead of the curve: The key to becoming and staying a leading app? Neutralize the competition, differentiate, and incubate.

[17:19] Lighting up the small screen: Apps like Photoroom and Microsoft Copilot are using AI to make tasks historically done on a desktop easy on a mobile device.

[21:09] You can’t do it all: Prioritize the app optimizations and features that will have the biggest impact on your business.

On the podcast:The importance of passion for the product you’re working on, how to differentiate in a crowded market, and why achieving the ‘viable’ in Minimum Viable Product is harder than ever.

Key Takeaways:

📉 Ad-based revenue models too often lead to a degraded user experience. For ad-supported products, the real customer is the advertiser, not the end user. This causes a conflict between doing what’s going to create the best product and what’s going to drive the most advertising revenue.

🚀 The bar for what makes a “viable” MVP is always getting higher. While no app first ships as a fully-formed 1.0, it’s now rarely viable to launch an app as a barebones MVP (minimum viable product). There are just too many apps offering too much competition to not offer a compelling reason for a user to switch.

🔍 The “Jobs to Be Done” (JTBD) framework allows you to dig deeper than surface-level features. Gathering user feedback is essential, but users rarely request what they truly want. JTBD demands going deeper than feature requests by addressing the underlying need that the user wants to fulfill.

❓ To get to the root cause of a user problem, ask the “five whys”. When a user makes a request, get into the habit of asking “Why?”. The more times you ask, the more clarity you’ll have on what you actually need to build, giving you jobs-to-be-done that can best meet the needs of your users.

🌀How to capitalize on “black swan events”. Adaptability and swift action are key to managing unexpected high-impact events. It's essential to pivot from past decisions without being anchored by sunk costs and to act and ship quickly to capture new opportunities.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Seasoned Internet entrepreneur with over 25 years of experience building groundbreaking apps.

🌿Formerly an early employee at Mint, Val had a vision for a better, more user-centered financial health app.

💡“Try to pick a problem that you want to work on for 10 years — even if it were to fail. That’s how I feel. Even if Monarch were to fail, I would feel good that we moved the ball forward, we did something, we helped people along the way.”

👋 LinkedIn

Episode Highlights:

[7:54] Ads vs. subscriptions: Why subscriptions (not an ad-supported model) were Val’s first choice for Monarch.

[9:12] The real MVP: In today’s subscription app world, the bar for a minimal viable product has gone way up.

[13:46] Just ship it (or don’t?): Getting customer feedback during the design phase may take more time up front, but it means identifying your users’ key “jobs to be done” in fewer product iterations.

[23:10] The five “whys”: Ask yourself… what is your app really selling?

[24:56] Disappoint-Mint: How Val went from the Mint team to creating Monarch — and what happened when Mint shut down.

[34:17] Modern marketing: Talking to potential users on forums like Reddit can be an effective way to build trust and win fans.

[36:31] The butterfly effect: What’s next for the Monarch team and business.

[38:02] On a mission: Val and the Monarch team are passionate about helping users improve their financial health.

On the podcast: The past, present, and future of Meta ads, tactics to scale subscription apps on Meta, and why you should probably exclude younger audiences in your targeting.

Key Takeaways:

⍰ Why Meta Ads? Its vast reach and precision targeting make Meta the best platform for discovery. Ads seamlessly integrate with organic content, providing a native experience for users and transparency for advertisers.

📈 Simplify for efficiency. Kick off with broad targeting within a consolidated account structure. As your understanding and budget deepens, become more targeted with tailored ad variations.

🎯 Strategic targeting tips. To elevate conversion rates early on, sidestep users under 25 or 30 and prefer manual campaign setups. This initial focus enhances control, paving the way for more automated refinement later on.

🧘 Navigating SKAN with patience. Prioritize trial events and give the data time to crystallize into actionable insights. Rushed evaluations can deceive; allowing at least a week can provide a more accurate picture of your campaign's impact.

🦾 Harness creative diversity and precise placements. Scaling up means evolving your creative approach to suit distinct audience behaviors across Meta's diverse platforms. Meticulously analyzing demographic and placement data ensures your ads resonate more profoundly with your target audience.

🖥️ Tips for better ads. Study native content and competitors to design ads similar to what users already see. Test new creatives in separate campaigns to protect your main campaign’s performance.

About Guest

👨‍💻 Independent consultant who helps subscription apps unlock Meta as their primary growth channel.

📈 Marcus has over a decade of experience with a background in both gaming and consumer tech, working with companies like Forge of Empires, Blinkist, and Tandem. You can also find him on LinkedIn sharing practical advice on Meta Ads, Web2App, optimizing paywalls, and improving user onboarding.

💡 “Don’t target too narrow. These algorithms usually need a lot of reach so they can use the data to find the right audience for you. If you apply a ton of targeting restrictions on top, then usually you pay a premium for targeting more granularly while performance is not necessarily better.”

👋 LinkedIn

Episode Highlights

[9:18] Before and after: How Meta ad marketing changed after Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT).

[17:56] Working within limits: The pros and (multiple) cons of SKAN 3.

[20:36] Into the Meta-verse: Why subscription apps are uniquely situated to benefit from Meta ads.

[23:40] (Best) practice makes perfect: How to optimize Meta ad campaigns to find the right audiences and maximize ROI.

[32:56] Right on target: Unlock your app’s advertising potential with more advanced creative and placement strategies.

[35:06] The other half of the equation: Ads are just the beginning of the customer journey — make sure your entire funnel is a seamless and compelling experience for potential users.

[48:25] Get creative: For the best ad performance and ROI, create ad content that matches what your users are looking for on social platforms.

[52:13] The future is bright: Upcoming developments like SKAN 4 and Meta’s Aggregated Event Measurement (AEM) should make creating and analyzing Meta ads easier.

On the podcast: The many failures of his recent app launch, the surprising results of his first-ever A/B test, and the many reasons why you shouldn’t plan a big app launch.

Top Takeaways:

🔄 Continuous evolution over big bangs: For subscription apps, frequent updates create enduring value, outpacing the impact of sparse, major launches. This steady stream of enhancements keeps your app relevant and signals relentless improvement to your audience.

🌱 Opt for flexible launches: Avoid putting all your hopes in one major launch. A strategy that includes multiple, smaller launches allows for adaptability and maintains your app's presence against the backdrop of an unpredictable news cycle.

📰 Press is unpredictable: Understand that media coverage does not guarantee app success. The broad reach may not always align with your target audience and many factors are outside of your control. Keep swinging, though, as some hits will indeed make a substantial impact — just keep your expectations in check.

💰 Adopt value-based pricing: Pricing should reflect what customers value in your app, not just the costs to provide it. Value-based pricing doesn't necessarily mean charging more, it just means charging the perceived value. Users don’t care about the costs of providing a service.

🔍 A/B testing insights depend on the nature of the cohort. The origin of your app's users — e.g. via launch events or organic growth — plays a crucial role in interpreting A/B test results. What did or didn’t work for one group isn’t necessarily applicable for the next — so test and draw conclusions appropriately.

About Guest:

👨‍💻 Growth advocate at RevenueCat and indie developer of apps like Launch Center Pro and Weather Up.

🍎 Although he’s neither a designer nor a developer, David has been building the kinds of thoughtful, intuitive apps he wants to use since the App Store first launched in 2008.

💡 “The tough thing about getting attention is you do have to do something unique… and that’s the trade-off. The calculus for me was, ‘Let’s wait and try to make a big splash with all these things.’ But really, we could have already launched the widget, and just adding interaction would have gotten attention.”

👋 LinkedIn | Twitter

Episode Highlights:

[11:04] Just ship it: Don’t try to release a ton of new features at once — you’ll get more attention and benefits by releasing incremental updates.

[23:11] Failure to launch: What’s the worst that can happen on your app launch day? A major Apple announcement!

[32:09] Riding the wave: Offering a launch-day sale on your app is a great way to increase conversions when you release a major update.

[36:16] The value of value-based pricing: Set your app’s price based on your target customer’s perceived value of your solution, not your idea of how much it’s worth and costs to run.

[42:54] Dog-fooding the ’cat: David used several RevenueCat features (like Paywalls and Experiments) to set up and monitor the results of the Weather Up 3.0 launch.

On the podcast: RevenueCat’s 2024 State of Subscription Apps report, the state of the app industry more broadly, and why a slight drop in renewals in 2023 isn’t as bad as it may seem.

Key insights:

📈 Optimize conversion rates: With a 1.7% average conversion rate from downloads to paying subscribers, there's a wide gap indicating room for improvement. North America shows higher conversions, spotlighting the need for regional price optimization.

🗓️ Persistence pays off: The top 5% of apps outearn the bottom quartile by 200 times a year post-launch. If year one is tough, consider pivoting or trying a new approach.

🗺️ Strategic focus is key: North America leads in app revenue, but don't overlook markets like South Korea, Japan, and India. Choosing the right platform and regional focus is crucial.

💲 Retention is crucial: A 14% drop in subscriber retention highlights the need for apps to focus on retaining users who truly value their service. It's vital to distinguish between loyal users and those less engaged.

📱 Reactivation grows with scale: While over 10% of churned subscribers resubscribe, reactivation becomes significantly more impactful as your app grows. Early on, prioritize acquisition and retention over win-back campaigns.

About Guests

🎙️David Barnard is Growth Advocate at RevenueCat and host of this very podcast.

👋🏼David’s LinkedIn

💻Jacob Eiting is the CEO of RevenueCat, a self-proclaimed computer person, and often co-hosts this podcast with David.

👋🏼Jacob’s LinkedIn

Links & Resources

Check out RevenueCat online

Episode Highlights

[1:31] Weathering the storm: After several years of turmoil in the subscription app industry, things finally started to settle down in 2023 — and app businesses are thriving.

[7:12] The business of intelligence: AI technology leapt forward in 2023, and mobile AI apps saw big wins.

[14:07] Stop guessing, start acting: The benchmarks in the 2023 State of Subscription Apps report can help you make data-driven strategic decisions.

[17:37] The state of the (app) union: Five key takeaways from the report that identify industry trends, potential pitfalls, and emerging opportunities.

[38:44] First impressions matter: Most trial starts occur within 24 hours, so make sure your user onboarding experience is compelling.