7 Counterintuitive App Growth Strategies That Actually Work | Steve P. Young at MAU 2025

Thank you guys for being here. Look, I know it's been a long day and I'm super excited to take everything I've learned and really start applying it now. And so hopefully for me, I want to leave you guys with one monetization tip that will instantly increase your revenues. All right, here we go. So coming up, we're going to show you which AB test. Now, this is very interactive. All right, I know Rachel told me to keep it at 20, but if you got questions along the way, go ahead and ask. All right, because this is the last one and you guys, we're gonna show you which payw wall won. Have a guess in your mind? You might be surprised by the answer. I'm gonna show you what the hell this means. What happened here? We bought this app, grew it. What happened right here? I'm going to show you the strategy that caused this decline and how simple it was. And lastly, if you love this blink this payw wall, I'm going to show you something

that's going to even beat it. All right, that's what's in store. You excited? But first, let me tell you a little bit about myself. Those aren't familiar. I have a YouTube channel, podcast I've been running since 2013. I know I'm old, but I was born in Burma, came to the States when I was just six years old. Look, not to get a little philosophical, we move away from that marketing a little bit, as an immigrant, I was always like trying to assimilate, trying to belong, right? But you know what? I'm claiming it. I was born here. I'm proud to be Burmese American. All right. So, it all started here. started with the mic. I had apps. I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what that journey would look like. So, I said, "Hey, I'm gonna learn from the people who have made it and I'm going to help people learn along the way." So, I hit record and my life completely changed since then. So, that was 2013. We now

have a team of over 30. A couple of people are here as well. We work with some of the biggest clients and people are here there and some of the smallest clients in the world. And we're really trying to focus on like creative marketing strategies. Growth hacking for the buzz term. We like to do that. So here's some cool guests that we've had on. Here's some apps. These are just trust symbols. All right. Monetization of apps unlocked. Anybody know that MAU actually stands for mobile apps unlocked, right? Not multi-active users.

The event. All right. So I kind of wanted to go MAU theme as well, aka MAU. All right. I'm going to skip over this because I think everybody knows this by now, but I wanted for anybody that's new in the app space. I still have this slide. Yes, I'm not going to make you play, but having your payw wall during the onboarding process will instantly 2x your sales. Why, you might ask? Because most people who buy buy during the onboarding process. That's over 60% 60 to 80% of all the people who buy buy before they use your stinking app. It's that simple. So you want to show your pay wall during the onboarding process.

All right, homepage. The number two I go back. Number two, wrong button is the homepage. So literally 90% of all your conversions are coming from these two pages. This is just one app's data by the way. All right. All right. So homepage. Now, let's have some fun. I know it's an old one. So, if you already know the answer, raise your hand anyways because frankly, you know, I see a lot of people and I want to see a lot of hands. All right. Who thinks it's So, look, the only difference is there's a star, there's a crowd. Who thinks it's a raise your hand, please? Who thinks it's B? Everybody.

All right. Good. I've shared it too much. All right. 57% increase in conversions. Yes. Test that homepage call to action. In fact, I'm going to give you a little bit something different from this. Sometimes the text that you use impacts your trial conversions. So unlock everything versus get pro features. Play around with that text. What we found with other clients is get pro features actually led to higher trial to paid than unlock everything. Unlock everything had higher trial activations but lower trial to pay. All right, discounts. Back to these numbers. Most people buy before they use your app. Here's why I think discounting is so popular. Think with Google.

Obviously, we all know discounting works. You know, I've been guilty of it. I'll pause here and I Thank you for yawning. But I had one of your slides now, I didn't take a picture, so I'm going to hold if I see cameras. All right. 77% according to Amplitude, the average app loses 77% of daily active users within just three days. What? I know. Six days according to adjust before somebody just ultimately says, "I'm out. I'm going to leave."

That's why I feel like discounting is important. If you're not doing some form of life cycle marketing as well, I think you're missing out. So, we all know discounting works. This is, I believe, to be a better way of discounting. We got A, where just shows 50% off. We got B where it says 50% off, but you can also save a little bit more. I think the answer is obvious. Who thinks it's A? I was debating on whether I should ask this or not. Okay, everybody else thinks it's B.

Okay, thanks Murf. All right, it is B. So, pick what you want works better than just showing them a discount. You don't want to give them too many options, but you want to give them some options. In fact, it's surprising that you think everybody just slide right and pick the lowest offer. Not the case, but this is one of our clients apps, but there it's pretty equal this special discount. You can see it's not a lot, but it's something. And in fact, if you're not utilizing the app store connect win back, especially for you guys who have a brand, right, we're running massive UA campaigns, we actually see for one of our clients, the win back within app store connect. Okay, there's a little win back on the lefth hand side of app store connect. Utilize that. We're actually starting to see some sales coming in. It's not a lot, but it's takes you like five minutes to get some sales. All right, so here's headway.

This is their payw wall. They show a discount right on their homepage. It's 50% off. Again, most people I talked to Headway, most people are buying this, but a good number are also buying this one as well. Here's their reading. Now, everything is locked, which, you know, spoiler alert, there's a little thing on there. Locking more content does work. So, you pick a book, you hit read or listen, you hit the payw wall, you hit view all plans, you see all the plans, you hit X, you hit X. They're like, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me hit you with something else." And they give you 70% off. And I talked to Yeva from Headway. She's like, "Yes, it works. It drives revenue." Yes, it's not a lot, but yes, it still works. Right.

So, let's go to payw walls. Here's a Cal AI. Anybody catches? Yeah. Is it good? Cool. So, one of our clients tested this uh Cali. I didn't like this payw wall as much this payw wall flow because I thought this was the lead to the Apple subscription like you're gonna have to pay, right? So, one of our clients thought the same exact thing. So, this was his payw wall. He then tested A versus B. Now, this is new. Who thinks it's A?

That one. Just that one single page with the video. Awesome. Who thinks it's B? Suckers. You think everything's going to be B? It's A. Yeah. In fact, like play around with it. So, here's the thing that I want you to take away from it. Sometimes videos does work. Videos do work better, right? This is one of our we did a podcast episode about this, but this was his initial payw wall. This developer with graphics, illustrations, moved to photos, saw an increase, moved to video, saw even a better increase.

So, videos on paywall do work pretty well. All right. And here's the stats. I always love to have a chart to make it look like for real, for real. All right. Number of plans three according to Dapy and a lot of the the partners that you know three is the most popular plans. So I always try to lean with three right as you can see that slider was three. Everything works in three. Okay. So I wanted to test this blink this plane wall because I was like I want to see if I could beat this thing, right? So here was what we did. We all know why it's popular. Hopefully increase the conversions increases your like complaints about oh I forgot to cancel.

All right. So when you hit view all plans, all you see is this. So I thought, hey, and one of our clients did exactly that. I thought, hey, instead of calling it view all plans, what if we just showed the monthly price? Functionality is literally the same, right? You still see this, but what if it would dig better? All right, you guys are in still pick B. I have this feeling already. So it is B. We saw a 31% improvement. That's why that's why I say two plans are better than one. Three plans are usually better than two. Now, every app is different.

You're going to be like, "That's Steve character doesn't know shit." So, it is app dependent, but mostly speaking, yes, this works. Thank you, Dehawk. All right. If you still like that veil wall, you're like salivating over it. This is the best way to do it. Now, Ka from our team tested this with one of our apps. I think it works better. Our our case studies show that having the if you're promoting the yearly and most people are buying the yearly, this is probably the best way to go. If you're doing a weekly plan, probably not. All right, so this is the best way. And even if you didn't have this because you're like, technically, Steve, I can't send a push notification two days before their subscription. Just leave it out. Just leave it out. Okay, that's then. This is the now. All right. This was one of our clients, and I love this case study so much. All right, I love it. So, this is a Figma file, but it's a huge client of

ours, and they saw there was a seven-day trial on the yearly. Look, I'm not a Figma expert, but there's a 7-day trial. Everybody was buying the yearly, so they said, "Let's keep it clean. Let's remove the monthly. Sales completely tanked. Completely tanked when they removed the monthly." That's why I like options, right? Because the monthly is there to show you how valuable and how cheap and how much discounted your yearly offer is. Again, three plans, the most optimal, usually speaking. All right, I love it so much. Here's how I normally do the the three plans. The cheap plan, the monthly or the weekly, the highest LTV plan generally going to be your weekly or yearly. One of our I won't spoil it. All right. And a decoy plan, generally three months or six months.

And that decoy plan is just to be like there's a book great book predictably Irrational all right if you're picking between Rome and Paris you're like great great cities but then you see Paris with free breakfast then instantly you're like yo we're going to Eiffel Tower and that's what it is a B and then have an A minus it will work a bit better all right which plan to promote this is one of our apps I only have this chart to show you we were driving downloads like it was not, you know, it's not a lot, but we're getting decent downloads organically. Here's what it what we did.

We launched with A. Now, the yearly has $50, 7-day trial. The B is defaulted to the weekly with a three-day trial. All right, ladies and gentlemen, get your hands ready. Put your cameras down. Who thinks it's A? Thank you, brave soul, my man. Who thinks it's B? Yeah, it is B. So 3x more sales with B. Here's the original payw wall. We only made about what was this, man? My old eyes. About 700 bucks with just the yearly offer. Everything was promoted. I'm sorry. 800 bucks, right?

This was the 200 bucks of the lifetime offer. So when we had this payw wall, we only made 800 bucks in the three months we launched it. Again, I was getting downloads. People were activating trial. The trial that paid was a very, very low rate. So, when we switched it to this payw wall, and we need to further optimize this, but it is an AI app. When we switch to this payw wall, bang, we just made more money. And look, we made more money on the yearly without the stinky trial. Thank you. It works. So, really play around with the payw wall.

Depending on the nature of your app, weekly might perform well for you. AI apps I've seen work weekly do pretty well. Photo and video do pretty well with weekly plans as well. All right. And Revenue Cat, shout out to them. AI apps do print money. So if you're thinking about an app idea, I'd probably stick with an AI app, too. All right. So, I went to that chart. Hard or soft pay? Well, the only difference between the two is tiny little X. We saw 2x more sales, but we did not have the tiny little X. That was a chart from the little from the beginning. This is what happened. We bought this app, was making just a few thousand dollars a month, just charging $3 one time in app purchase. new onboarding increased that price to $60 a year instantly with no new downloads. Took it from one to2,000 to eight to$10,000 a month. That easy.

Then somebody told us, I won't tell you who sold us. Somebody told us you can't put that X. All right. So, I saw instantly sales decline. My Mix Panel email, I got an email every day said it went from 13% trial start to six. Just that stinking little X did. we we're figuring out a way to put the X back. We went back to 8 to 10. So test the hard pay wall, especially if you got a new app and you're trying to test product market fit. Make force that decision on them, right? Pay attention to the trial that paid the trial activations should be close to 10% on a hard pay wall. All right, this is Calm. This is my example of saying, look, Calm, yeah, they don't have a hard pay wall, but a lot of their content is locked, right? If you're giving away too much, you're not forcing your users to pay. Same with headway.

One free daily rate. That's it. That's all you get. So, if you want to do not as aggressive as a hard pay. Now, I do think a hard pay wall probably not a great long-term strategy, right? Probably not a lot great long-term strategy, but in the early days when you're trying to go zero to one, test it out. Here's some semi-h hard pay walls I want to share with you for those who are like a little bit like queasy about doing that scamia thing. You hit view all plans for this app. I forget what the app was. It's a kids app. Anyways, you see the plans and then maybe later.

You hit maybe later, you get to the homepage. So, that's a semi hard. Obviously looks like a hard pay wall, but not really if you keep tapping around. Here's zero. Big fan of this app. You cannot swipe down. I know it looks like it, but I really like this model, too. Especially the web dab campaigns, you can probably do a paid trial term. So, I like this. I haven't tested it myself, but you cannot scroll down. It is a hard pay wall. But if you can be patient, five minutes later, they did they do send me a text, a little push notification that says, "Hey, you can start using zero for free." So, these are just examples if you want to not be as aggressive with your hard pay wall. All right, I tapped it. Magically, the X appears and I can start using the app and start fasting. I know you're taking a lot of pictures, so I need your feedback on some of the games I still have. All right, appreciate you. Content gating.

All right, content gating does work. I'm going to keep your hands down. It helps just get more content. One of my friends stuck at $8,000 a month, tested long pay walls, tested hard pay walls. He saw a little difference between a hard pay wall and locking more content. He's a nice guy. He's British. He's like, "All right, I'm just going to do more lock content." And that's when his sales finally increased and went over the 10 $10,000 a month. So, get more content.

The more free stuff you give, you think people are like, "Oh my god, so much free content. I'm going to be on this app forever." Six days. Remember, 77% of your average losers are lost in the first three days and six days before you're out of here. All right, let me show you some more examples. That's it, ladies and gentlemen. Keep it short and sweet. Rachel, three minutes left. Holla, let's go. Look, if you want to follow uh our channel, just check us out. We are an app marketing agency, but what I tell everybody is go check out the YouTube. Make sure you like my style first and foremost, and then if you want to work together, go ahead and reach out to us. Otherwise, enjoy the free content. Thank you. Thank you. That's it. All right. Any questions?

Ready for the ready for the pool? Pool a or you know afterparty? Who's a pool? No. Okay, I'll see you there, David. Who's after party? All right, hop. You're the only one, bro. Enjoy. Anybody else need anything? Amazing. Well, have a great rest of the day. I hope you guys enjoyed Mau. Thank you guys. Bye-bye.