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4 Features You Need Before Your App Launch

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App Masters11:22Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Build tracking, an onboarding paywall, an early review prompt and a hard paywall into the first version of your app. Most buyers decide in their first session, so these small tweaks decide whether the app earns enough to survive.

Key takeaways

  • Even the best apps lose many users after the first day, so the first session must do the work. 9:35
    • Voodoo's day-one retention of 40 to 60 percent counts as a good rate.
    • So the first version should be a little more aggressive, to reach a second stage of roughly $5,000 to $10,000 a month.
  • Most buyers pay during onboarding, so the paywall belongs there. 3:01
    • 60 to 80 percent of paying users buy before they use the app, and developers see an instant revenue lift once they add it.
    • A remote switch lets you turn the paywall off one day and on the next to compare user behavior.
  • A hard paywall with no close button lifts revenue when downloads are steady. 6:39
    • One app went from $1,000 to $10,000 a month with the same downloads by tuning the paywall, raising the price and removing the X.
    • When the hard paywall was lost for a month, sales halved to $5,000. Other apps report three times more sales. It suits apps with about 20 or more downloads a day.
  • Asking for a review right after the paywall brings more ratings without hurting the average. 4:00
    • About 1 percent of downloads leave a rating, so more downloads and earlier asks mean more reviews.
    • A softer option is to ask on the second open, or right after a first action such as one to-do added or one meditation done.
  • Tracking each onboarding step shows where users drop, so you know what to fix. 0:47
    • Aim for a paywall view rate near 100 percent of installs or first opens. If 90 percent see it but only 3 percent convert, fix the paywall.
    • One client cut onboarding from seven screens to four and conversions rose. Another added three benefit screens before the paywall and saw a 234 percent increase.

Anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of all the people who end up buying from you will buy before they even use your app.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Track the onboarding funnel

Event tracking replaces guessing with numbers about what new users do.

  • Firebase or Mixpanel can track every onboarding step. 0:47
    • Without tracking, you are shooting in the dark.
    • A daily Mixpanel email reports how many users activated a trial.
    • One app averages 15 to 16 trial activations a day.
    • B7Dev adds the tracking events for its clients.

2:56 Put the paywall in onboarding

Showing the paywall before first use is a proven habit that developers wish they had started sooner.

  • The early paywall feels backwards but works. 3:01
    • Steve first heard of it from a friend around 2017 or 2018.
    • Skipping it is one of developers' biggest regrets.
    • B7Dev built the remote switch for a shared customer long ago.
    • After the switch is turned on, every new install sees the paywall in onboarding.

4:00 Ask for reviews early

A review prompt right after the paywall builds ratings, and a huge free user base is the wrong goal for small apps.

  • The default App Store prompt belongs right after the paywall. 4:03
    • The average rating suffers less than expected.
    • It brings more five-star reviews.
    • Steve himself asks on the second open.
    • Asking right after a first action is another timing.
  • Chasing free users first suits big players, not small apps. 4:58
    • Large firms can raise money by showing millions of free users.
    • Investors usually want to see real numbers.
    • Small teams starting out can't copy that plan.
    • The tradeoff is free users now against paying users later.

5:41 The hard paywall in practice

A hard paywall is a cheap test that shows early whether people will pay.

  • Being aggressive early can beat the usual cautious advice. 5:48
    • Stores call early review asks too aggressive. Not asking usually gets zero reviews.
    • Common wisdom is not always right. Real cases show small tweaks make a big difference.
    • The first goal is to survive.
  • A hard paywall means no close button, so a trial must be started to use the app. 6:39
    • Little content online is free anymore.
    • It is a fit for apps that need early revenue to show investors before the next round.
    • The founder first opposed it to avoid scope creep. His co-founder had already built it, and the data won him over.
    • Remote config lets the paywall be changed without a new release.

7:45 Survive first, please everyone later

Paying users who stay are worth more than a crowd of free ones.

  • Free content makes everyone happy except you. 7:53
    • Free riders cost money to serve and pay nothing.
    • Some users will delete a paid app. Fewer users who pay and give useful feedback is better.
    • Praise with zero money in the bank does not keep the app alive.
    • Revenue pays for promotion and future versions.
  • Advice from people who have done it beats generic promises. 8:57
    • Many vendors offer marketing or development but do not know how it works in real life.
    • Many founders stall at stage one because they focus on the wrong things.
    • Real results shared by customers are what make advice credible.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young and Chaim Sajnovsky, Steve P. Young is founder of App Masters; Chaim Sajnovsky is at B7Dev, an app development firm. Four features to build into an app before launch: onboarding and paywall tracking, a paywall shown during onboarding, an App Store review prompt after the paywall, and a remotely configurable hard paywall. One client app went from $1,000 to $10,000 a month with the same downloads by optimizing the paywall, raising the price and using a hard paywall.

Lessons that draw on this:

More from App Masters · The whole library, and ask it anything

Transcript293 lines
0:00

coming up here are four things you better do to your app before you launch it stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of appmasters.com the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and your revenues and today we're going to talk all about the key features you really need in your app to help with your eventual growth and joining me like always is Heim from B7 Dev the app development firm that I know and trust b7dev.com I'm our last video series I'm gonna miss you after this okay I'm always here I know you're just a phone call away all right well the number one thing that I think the feature wise is tracking your onboarding pages so one of the key metric that I look at is paywall view over install or first open right and I want to make sure that rate that conversion rate in terms of view rate that paywall view rate is close to 100

1:08

as possible because most people buy during the onboarding process and so you want everybody that's opening your app for the very first time to be seeing your paywall and so you can use either Firebase and you correct me if I'm wrong or mix panel we have a I get a daily email for one of our apps with a mix panel report that says here's how many people activated trial for me and so we're averaging 15 16 trial activations but that's the number one thing that you got to make sure you build yeah you have so today you have a lot of packages to do it mostly focusing on that on Firebase I'm expanded again is this is the difference between shooting in the dark I mean you don't know what your users are doing and to keep track of them at least in a statistical way okay to know what they are doing of course that you know more than me about all kind of technical details to to other techniques another technicalities but

2:06

mostly techniques to do the customers or the users to use more the app or to activate earlier and again even you recommended to us to customers to do the modifications that you need to track all those events for us yeah because we've seen really good results with like decreasing onboarding screens one of my our clients went from seven to four and he saw an increase in conversions one of the other clients we work with only show the paywall and did not have an onboarding screen so we added three different screens to talk about the benefits of the app he saw a 234 percent increase in overall conversions so having that detail allows me to kind of figure out where are the holes in your app and then if it's the onboarding screen if you're seeing 90 but only seeing three percent conversions then we know we have to focus on our paywall which leads me to the next Point show your paywall during the onboarding

3:01

process anywhere from 60 to 80 of all the people who end up buying from you will buy before they even use your or app I know it's counterintuitive but it's been true since 2019 when a friend of mine first told me actually I think it was like 17 or 18 but it works it's one of the biggest regrets that app developers have because once they did it there's notice an instant increase in Revenue so make sure you show your paywall on the onboarding process yeah also it's a really great idea that we did the you know a long time ago for a customer that is a common customer that is that you can activate and deactivate remotely the paywall so you can easily show you look we deactivate the paywall so you see what is the behavior of the users here and then tomorrow we activated remotely so everyone installing the app will be with the payroll just on the onboarding so you will see the difference I mean it's not

3:55

today it's not that hard to be done and to show the results very short time and then number three Heim this works like a charm but you show the default app store review prompt on the onboarding process process and after your paywall that has shown to increase your number of ratings your average rating does not suffer as much as you think it will but it will lead to more five-star reviews by just asking people for a review yes even before they use your app I've seen it work really well and from a math data standpoint because I love data about one percent of the downloads will give you a rating so you know if you can drive more downloads you'll get more ratings now people tend to wait you can if you don't want to be that aggressive I do it on second open so that's another option and the other option is obviously after a user has done something within your app so if it's like a to-do list app they've

4:52

added one to do if it's a meditation app they've done one meditation ask for that review right then and there just pop it up a lot of misconceptions from the user side of you you know they say I want a huge number of free users before we convert and then maybe it's not the rate approach for them because they are starting small this is okay for big sharks in the industry when you have okay we will release I mean we have the money to do it we will release a new service a new app and we will give a lot of free users then we will have millions we just raise the phone to the investors we have millions of users for free and then give me all the money that I'm asking for if you want to be a part of the app and it doesn't work like this usually they want to see numbers okay and then not always the the Free Riders are the number that they want to see they want to see how you plan to monetize you are asking for reviews to

5:48

the store they say is too aggressive okay but then show me how you do at what moment you do it in order to get a better number of reviews okay and maybe usually what you get is zero okay so so maybe it could mean it's more convenient to get aggressive from the start I mean not everything is is so evident from the common the common misconceptions so so I recommend everyone watching this video maybe talk with this team about this because he has real world cases showing that small tweaks can do a really big difference for for the app for the success at least you need to survive in the first the first time speaking on that I'm here's the smallest tweak that you can make if you have good downloads here's a small and I would say good downloads anywhere from like 20 downloads a day and up here's what we see do a hard paywall hard pay wall just means there's no X the app is free to download and if you want to use the app

6:47

then you're gonna have to activate a trial if you look at com these days there's very little content that is technically free so a hard pay wallet Works we've seen it with our app where we we lost we launched as a hard Bay wallheim I was against it but my co-founder was like no we got to do it or we already made it like that and I didn't want to have scope creep so I was like okay I'm not gonna mess with it right let's just get the data and the data showed that we were making we went from a thousand dollars a month to ten thousand dollars a month with the same amount of downloads by optimizing the paywall increasing the price and doing a hard paywall guess what when we lost the hard pay wall for a moment we lost half the sales we made 5 000 that month because there was an X and the X makes a huge difference so other apps we've worked with they've reported three times more sales I mean it really depends on

7:36

your long-term Vision but if you're just getting going and you need that early revenues just to show the investors for that next round then I would say test the hard paywall and Heim I love what you said remote config be able to configure your PayPal remotely beautiful the important Point here for new developers the new upreneurs is to survive into the market if you spend a lot of money giving a lot of free content okay you will be paying the party for a lot of Free Riders you will make a lot of people happy everyone but you so they the idea is to okay maybe the people will say okay this is not a free app I will delete it anyways the final result is the same for you even if you you have less users but they will be paying and they will be giving useful feedback instead of okay I like it very much but in zero money on the bank so the first idea is to survive to keep alive in order to promote the app to to

8:35

give more inputs to the app to give a future versions okay and not just to make a lot of people happy because you know small tweaks they do a lot of difference and I really recommend to work with Steve on this because you have a real world examples from my my perspective that I talk with on a weekly basis with new appreneurs or customers and Etc it's really hard to get people that knows what needs to be done or at least what is not what you need to do okay they will tell you a lot of stuff yeah I can do marketing for you I can in developed this for you and in the end they don't know on real life how it works so small tricks that really work I really recommend to listen to what the Steve is saying otherwise we won't be promoting the show all this time and after all these years because we are really happy with the customers that they share the results that they get working with the state okay it is

9:30

b7dev.com if you're looking app development firm I think one closing thought I want to leave with Heim is track the onboard team everything is a first time user experience because even the best apps tend to have really low day two day one you know Voodoo looks at 40 to 60 of day one that means you know 40 to 60 percent of their users are leaving so that's a good retention rate and that's why we say like be a little bit more aggressive in that first time user experience and in that initial V1 launch stage so I've said it beautifully so that you can get to stage two whatever that stage two looks like I mean I have been doing this for long time and people get so stuck up on stage one that they never make it past to stage two and I would say like stage two is maybe anywhere from like five to ten thousand dollars like they won't hit that because they're so focused on the wrong things and that's what we're both

10:23

here to do is to really help you guide him on the development side and meet on the marketing side all right this is great Heim thank you so much for sharing this last time b7dev.com a long time partner of the app Masters Channel and team I'm I really appreciate you sharing all your valuable content thank you and then by the way I promise here because otherwise I won't be doing I will be starting my channel really soon but I need to promise here in front of everyone because otherwise I'm like two years from now trying to start it but I have no time I will be starting very soon to do my own channel also sharing with the Steve okay so more for more different approaches for rational development okay I will be doing some kind of episode I love it and once he has that up I will let the entire app Masters family know as well so I'm said it he's gonna get it launched all right guys thank you guys

11:13

for watching and then stay tuned And subscribe to the app Masters Channel and then heim's new channel when he launches it as well and I'll see you on the next video