Simply

A short web flow warms lean-back Facebook scrollers before they download. People scrolling social media resist being sent straight to an app store download. Simply's web flow opens with one simple question, can take a few minutes and explains the value first. It made Facebook work for Simply for the first time, and web flows brought about 20% of revenue in the past year.

Sharon: "Our web flow helps us move people from a lean back mindset through consideration." Older Facebook audiences need more warming up. Leon Cass of Speak saw the same pattern and tied it to age, since millennials are app native.

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Match the ad, onboarding and paywall as one flow for each audience. An ad aimed at parents leads to a web onboarding about a parent's pains and needs, carried through to the paywall. Tests of this full ad-to-onboarding-to-paywall path raised conversion significantly.

Deterministic web attribution makes this personalization possible, which is harder with app store campaigns, especially after Apple limited ad tracking. Custom product pages are only a partial workaround. Creative, placement and destination are tested together, and web to app is one route among several.

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The point of the web is new audiences, not fee savings. Simply found the main value of web flows is reaching incremental audiences who would never download from an app ad. The flow explains value and sets expectations for the paywall instead of copying the store page.

The host called the net gain from moving purchases to the web close to marginal. Sharon treats web payments as a money decision, not a protest against Apple: send people wherever earns more. The web also lets Simply say "welcome to Simply" and sell every app as one bundle, which an app store click on one app cannot.

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Households using several apps and profiles retain far better than anyone. Seeing that users came from households with several creative interests, Simply added a family plan, then multi-profile accounts with up to five profiles across all apps. Multi-app, multi-profile accounts have by far the strongest retention in any cohort.

Someone in the household is always engaging, so these accounts churn less. Cross-promotion happens only when it serves users, such as flagging songs that exist in both Simply Piano and Simply Sing.

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When to pitch the bundle is set by testing each app and ad. Simply Guitar's first paywall does not mention the family plan. Some apps start with a soft paywall and others wait until users feel the value.

The choice depends on the app's maturity, the expectations the ad set and the current campaigns. Each app runs its own growth playbook first, and the bundle is promoted as a separate angle.

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Simply built its own Big Mac style index to price each country. Instead of converting currency, the index combines purchasing power with how people in each country value learning an instrument or drawing. Rolled out as a test, it lifted revenue per user dramatically in most geos.

A few geos did not work and needed adapting, and the pricing keeps being adjusted as apps mature and reach new audiences.

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Move to monthly plans only once monthly retention can carry them. Monthly plans give a fast feedback loop because every usage gain shows up as a renewal, while annual plans bring cash up front but hide usage for a year. After heavy pricing tests, Simply's mature apps get better LTV on monthly plans.

Annual stays on offer for users who want the discount, which ranges from about 60% to 70 to 75% and is treated as a key lever to test. Sharon: "The move to monthly works only when you have good enough retention renewals on your monthly plans."

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Weekly plans clash with learning a slow skill. Simply tested weekly plans in some apps but does not offer them now. Learners of piano or singing cannot judge progress every week, so a weekly payment decision works against how people learn.

Sharon: "you cannot judge yourself every week."

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Segment a winning paywall test before rolling it out to everyone. A soft paywall at the end of Simply Piano's onboarding won big on ARPO, but months later the subscribers turned out to be mostly touch-only users with no keyboard who paid for a year and got little value. Simply removed it for adult-only accounts and kept it only for accounts with kid profiles, where kids did find value.

The lesson Simply draws is that usage and retention, not short-term conversion, show whether a change really wins.

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In Japan a long, detailed paywall beat the clean best practice. A deep localization with anime songs, new UI, translated store assets and local currency lifted every metric except paywall conversion. After a very long one-page paywall with the company story, founders, values, many quotes and lots of color replaced the clean one, conversion skyrocketed.

The fix came from a Japanese country manager who explained what local users expect. Sharon: "best practices can take you up to a certain point but you really need to understand the intricacies."

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Localize deeply or not at all, because shallow work loses trust. Localization covers content, songs, translation, store assets, pricing and creatives. Localizing the first-time experience but not the product behind it costs users' trust.

Details like how German addresses people matter. Pick a scope, do it at the highest standard and go all in only after gaining confidence.

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A delightful AI moment showed parents the value and became ad creative. Simply Draw uses AI to animate a child's finished drawing, so kids run proudly to their parents, who see positive screen time. Putting it in the first-time experience raised the pool of paying users, parents shared it on Instagram and it inspired ads.

Sharon: "Many of our creatives are being inspired by real usage." Simply Draw grew revenue about sixfold last year.

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Launch each app separately with its own pod and growth playbook. Simply Piano, Simply Guitar, Simply Sing and Simply Draw each start as separate apps built by small multidisciplinary pods that study what stops people learning a hobby. Simply Piano holds about 80% of the piano learning app market.

Pods reuse early growth and customer discovery playbooks with the same principles but not the same steps, and not every launch succeeds. Sharon warns portfolios usually fail because economies of scale are rarer than people think, citing Duolingo pulling back and Mind Snacks' roughly 10 language apps.

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Switch campaigns off in separate geos to measure cannibalization. Simply turned off app campaigns in one Google geo and web campaigns in another, then watched organic traffic and interplay between apps and between iOS and Android. The goal is enough truth in CAC modeling to place the next dollar.

Sharon: "it's never about perfect attribution."

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Sharing plans with platform account managers earns access fighting them would not. Simply meets account managers biweekly on Simply Piano, shares roadmaps and challenges and asks where its apps miss benchmarks. This brought beta access and design partnerships, and developers sent to WWDC with real sound recognition problems got help from Apple engineers.

Even small developers have an account manager. Simply dislikes the fees but accepts them as part of the relationship.

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Build for new devices early as a bet, not for revenue. For Vision Pro and Android XR, Simply picks the product that benefits most and spins up a fast pod working with the platform to ship at launch.

Sharon: "It's not about an ROI right now with the direct revenues." Design partnerships and goodwill are side benefits.

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