Celebs

Social bought Celebs after its viral peak, betting on universal curiosity. Celebs looked like a short-lived viral hit and was declining when Social bought it, because the sellers did not know how to grow it. Six years old now, it is bigger than ever and earns slightly more than Lipstick, which makes just over $300K a month.

The pitch was that half the world is curious which celebrity they look like, so the audience is huge. Social's test for a purchase is whether an app can scale profitably over the long term, not whether it retains well. Celebs sells weekly subscriptions priced from $6.99 to $14.99.

Superwall▶ 10:00

Removing the onboarding paywall won only after several failed attempts. Cutting the hard paywall at the end of onboarding was a big revenue-per-user win on Celebs, against the industry rule. Earlier tries of the same idea failed, then it worked once the rest of the app had been refined.

Celebs has about 10 places where users can convert, such as the result, sharing and reopening the app. Once those later placements were optimized, the first paywall was mostly friction, and users lost there converted better further down the funnel. Pablo: "one day didn't work then didn't work either and one day suddenly it worked."

Superwall▶ 16:00

Drop the onboarding paywall only when a later moment sells better. Without an onboarding paywall, send users as fast as possible to the moment of maximal intrigue, the part that creates the most willingness to pay. If no such moment exists yet, keep a hard or free-trial paywall at the end of onboarding.

Because results depend on context, Social tags every test with its hypothesis and reruns big-lift ideas as an app changes. The Celebs lesson is treated as friction removal, and the team looks for the equivalent move in each other app rather than copying the paywall change.

Superwall▶ 22:30