Jillian Lee Stout
Co-founder and CPO of Mindful Mamas
Where to hear and read about Jillian Lee Stout1 episode or test
Jillian Lee Stout is co-founder and CPO of Mindful Mamas, an app for moms that she has grown on a small team with scarce engineering time. The thing most worth learning from her is to drop product purism early and test fast, cheap channels such as a two-step paywall, email and mission-led partnerships.
I need to stop being like a purist about the application
Early Stage Strategies to Drive App Subscriptions
Jillian Lee Stout: the story and the lessons
1Stout's rule for early revenue: go where users listen
Stout dropped product purism to find early revenue. She says a small team should ask where its users are, where it can reach them and where they listen. Engineering time and funds are the main limit at this stage.
She had resisted spending team time on email campaigns until strong email conversion changed her mind.
She switched on early subscriptions by hand through Stripe. Mindful Mamas sent users to a Stripe payment portal that bypasses the app, and the team activated subscriptions manually. She says the point at this stage is to generate revenue.
Stripe also made pricing and promo tests easier than Apple product configuration: "it's a heck of a lot easier to test pricing and Promos in stripe".
Revenue outside the app gives her investor traction. Early revenue from channels beyond the product makes investors more excited about the long-term goal and keeps the mission funded.
2How Stout built the two-step paywall at Mindful Mamas
Stout removed the close button from the first paywall screen. Both screens used to have an X. Now screen one has no exit except a tiny "view all plans" link, and screen two shows the other plans and can still be closed.
Screen one is a list paywall headed "Hey Mama you deserve this", with images cycling through features, stats and social proof. In her words, the second screen captures "users who don't convert initially".
The two-step paywall lifted download to trial or purchase to 16.4%. Conversion rose about 4% when the double paywall was added, then reached 16.4% after the first close button was removed.
The host puts typical rates at 5 to 10%, with 10 to 20% exceptional. Stout notes that early on you can't tell if you're doing well, so benchmarks are a guess.
She emails a three-tier offer to users who skipped the in-app paywall. The email goes to users who never started a trial or converted, and it sends them to Stripe instead of the app.
The team reported strong open rates and uses the channel to capture conversions missed in the app.
RevenueCat helped with price tests but still cost development time. Mindful Mamas added RevenueCat in Q2 of the prior year across native Android, native iOS and web. Different prices need logic so the paywall shows the right one, so only two products were set up at first.
She says of RevenueCat, "I mean it changed everything". Apple also makes quick promo codes hard, such as a 20% offer for an influencer's mom community, so a small team must choose between SDK updates, features and tests.
3Partnerships and daily messages at Mindful Mamas
A Postpartum Support International partnership produced 942 activations. Mindful Mamas gives one year of free access to any mom who contacts Postpartum Support International. The first campaign brought 942 activations, and those moms buy subscriptions as their promo codes expire.
Stout says the partner must hit the company's core values. The team stays selective because moms already feel they fall short. The campaign has run about a year, and more moms keep downloading from it.
Moms protested when Stout's team turned off daily pushes. The team emailed daily stories from the team and community, then added daily push notifications as a stopgap. When pushes were switched off during a marketing hire transition, moms were upset because they loved the daily affirmations.
She took it as proof that these were places users wanted to hear from the team.
4Stout's mistakes: untested deep links and a broken build
Untested deep links hid where the partnership downloads came from. The Postpartum Support International campaign brought an influx of downloads, and the team did not know their source at first. They traced it later.
Her lesson: "we weren't adequately testing our deep link flow". Verify deep links and promo code flows before a partnership launches so you can credit and measure the source.
A buggy build stopped the paywall and crashed free trials. Stout released a build with a bug she was unaware of, and it stopped the double paywall from showing. Active free trials fell from about 500 a day in early December.
After the fix, trials climbed back toward the usual New Year's seasonality. The incident confirmed the second paywall step was driving the gain, and it is the case for checking every build for paywall bugs.
Early Stage Strategies to Drive App Subscriptions
Three early stage founders share the scrappy tactics they used to get revenue before they had big budgets: a two-step paywall, email offers outside the app, quizzes, partnerships, and influencer and community work. The standout results are a 16.4% download to trial or purchase rate, 942 activations from one partnership, and almost a million downloads with zero paid ads.
Stout dropped product purism to find early revenue. She says a small team should ask where its users are, where it can reach them and where they listen. Engineering time and funds are the main limit at this stage.
She had resisted spending team time on email campaigns until strong email conversion changed her mind.
She switched on early subscriptions by hand through Stripe. Mindful Mamas sent users to a Stripe payment portal that bypasses the app, and the team activated subscriptions manually. She says the point at this stage is to generate revenue.
Stripe also made pricing and promo tests easier than Apple product configuration: "it's a heck of a lot easier to test pricing and Promos in stripe".
Revenue outside the app gives her investor traction. Early revenue from channels beyond the product makes investors more excited about the long-term goal and keeps the mission funded.
Stout removed the close button from the first paywall screen. Both screens used to have an X. Now screen one has no exit except a tiny "view all plans" link, and screen two shows the other plans and can still be closed.
Screen one is a list paywall headed "Hey Mama you deserve this", with images cycling through features, stats and social proof. In her words, the second screen captures "users who don't convert initially".
The two-step paywall lifted download to trial or purchase to 16.4%. Conversion rose about 4% when the double paywall was added, then reached 16.4% after the first close button was removed.
The host puts typical rates at 5 to 10%, with 10 to 20% exceptional. Stout notes that early on you can't tell if you're doing well, so benchmarks are a guess.
She emails a three-tier offer to users who skipped the in-app paywall. The email goes to users who never started a trial or converted, and it sends them to Stripe instead of the app.
The team reported strong open rates and uses the channel to capture conversions missed in the app.
RevenueCat helped with price tests but still cost development time. Mindful Mamas added RevenueCat in Q2 of the prior year across native Android, native iOS and web. Different prices need logic so the paywall shows the right one, so only two products were set up at first.
She says of RevenueCat, "I mean it changed everything". Apple also makes quick promo codes hard, such as a 20% offer for an influencer's mom community, so a small team must choose between SDK updates, features and tests.
A Postpartum Support International partnership produced 942 activations. Mindful Mamas gives one year of free access to any mom who contacts Postpartum Support International. The first campaign brought 942 activations, and those moms buy subscriptions as their promo codes expire.
Stout says the partner must hit the company's core values. The team stays selective because moms already feel they fall short. The campaign has run about a year, and more moms keep downloading from it.
Moms protested when Stout's team turned off daily pushes. The team emailed daily stories from the team and community, then added daily push notifications as a stopgap. When pushes were switched off during a marketing hire transition, moms were upset because they loved the daily affirmations.
She took it as proof that these were places users wanted to hear from the team.
Untested deep links hid where the partnership downloads came from. The Postpartum Support International campaign brought an influx of downloads, and the team did not know their source at first. They traced it later.
Her lesson: "we weren't adequately testing our deep link flow". Verify deep links and promo code flows before a partnership launches so you can credit and measure the source.
A buggy build stopped the paywall and crashed free trials. Stout released a build with a bug she was unaware of, and it stopped the double paywall from showing. Active free trials fell from about 500 a day in early December.
After the fix, trials climbed back toward the usual New Year's seasonality. The incident confirmed the second paywall step was driving the gain, and it is the case for checking every build for paywall bugs.