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COPY THIS $5M APP FLOW TO SKYROCKET YOUR REVENUE

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App Masters10:39Open on YouTube
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The bottom line

Calm earns over $5 million a month with an engaging onboarding, a free-trial paywall, and a sign-up forced only after payment. Any app can copy this order, because paying first and signing up second lifts sales.

Key takeaways

  • Calm's flow earns over $5 million a month, mostly on iOS. 0:25
    • Sensor Tower and AppMagic both show over $5 million. Android is a smaller slice, and the figures are only rough estimates.
    • The most popular purchase is the $70 annual plan.
  • Most buyers pay during onboarding, so the paywall belongs inside it. 4:34
    • Onboarding uses odd-number stats like 92 percent and a testimonial from a member since 2019 to warm users up before the paywall.
    • The paywall offers a seven-day free trial with a "try for free" button, and the free part matters.
  • Showing the paywall before asking for a sign-up increases sales. 6:08
    • Clients say they must force an email first. Calm shows the paywall first, then forces the sign-up, and still does very well.
    • Letting users close the sign-up screen is also an option.
  • Sharing and review prompts after the paywall turn happy users into growth. 7:39
    • Calm makes quotes easy to share, and many users post them on social media.
    • A review prompt after the first meditation works. It also works right after the paywall, whether or not the user subscribed.
  • Gated content is where app monetization is heading. 8:35
    • Calm has hardly any free content, and what exists is hard to find.
    • A harder "pay or get out" paywall is expected to become more common.

This is the best way of doing it: get people to pay first and then force their sign up.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 Calm as the benchmark

Calm shows how high a meditation app can climb, and iOS is where the money is.

  • Calm sets the ceiling for any meditation app. 0:38
    • Put most growth and marketing effort on iOS.
    • The AppMagic figure combines iOS and Android.
    • Revenue estimates are not always accurate. They give a rough ballpark.
    • Pricing history shows Calm testing prices, maybe a new $60 plan. Only annual plans seem to be offered now.

2:13 The onboarding before the paywall

Each onboarding step either engages the user or gathers data, so the paywall lands on a warmed-up buyer.

  • Asking what brings users in lifts conversions and shows what they want. 3:11
    • Options include develop gratitude, improve performance and better sleep.
    • The answers can be reused in store screenshots.
    • Repeating a goal like increase happiness in screenshots has improved downloads.
    • Echoing what users say they want also raises sales conversion.
  • Account and notification requests are kept soft. 3:54
    • Users can close the log-in screen. It is framed as saving progress.
    • Notifications are pitched as stay motivated.
    • Email, Facebook, Apple and Google log-ins need more development, but they are best practice.
    • The system pop-up could probably be shown alone, without the extra screen.
  • Calm should test a paywall timeline. 4:52
    • Blinkist shows day one unlock, day five reminder, day seven charge.
    • That layout performs well.
    • Longer paywalls have also done well and are worth testing.
    • Calm does well even without these changes.

5:20 Tracking sources and the locked app

Calm collects data and gates content before the user signs up, and it makes the sign-up a hard stop after payment.

  • A "how did you find us" question gives cheap manual attribution. 5:21
    • Answers like podcast ad or friend and family show which source drives more conversions.
    • TV and podcast ads get hard to track as an app grows.
    • It is one more data point inside onboarding, with no extra tracking tools.
    • It lets you start measuring channels that normal tracking misses.
  • Without an account, most of the app stays locked. 5:49
    • Discover is locked and the profile shows no sign-up yet.
    • The Premium tab opens the paywall again, in a different style.
    • The tabs show the whole app, so users see what they would unlock.
    • The paywall comes back each time the user reaches for locked content.
  • The sign-up screen after payment blocks everything else. 6:41
    • Users can't open the meditations they paid for until they sign up.
    • This answers clients who say the app breaks without an email.
    • The point is that a forced email is no excuse to skip the paywall first.
    • Anyone who wants Calm's results has to play the same way.

7:28 After the trial: referrals and the recap

Once a user has paid, the app turns them into a source of referrals and reviews.

  • A referral program works when sharing is easy. 7:39
    • Starting the trial unlocks all the content.
    • People want to refer an app they love, if you make it easy.
    • A good existing user base is the asset to use.
    • More of the speaker's clients are now building referral programs.
  • Calm's flow is a checklist any app can follow. 8:30
    • Great onboarding, little free content, and an account forced after payment.
    • Sharing with a friend, a solid referral program, and a review ask after the first meditation.
    • The review ask can also go inside onboarding.
    • The aim is to make it easy for users to share, review and pay as much as possible.

In the growth library

Steve P. Young, Founder of App Masters. A teardown of Calm's onboarding, paywall and sign-up flow shows which patterns a meditation app earning over $5 million a month relies on. The key lesson is to show the paywall before asking for an account, then force sign-up after payment.

Lessons that draw on this:

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

Transcript283 lines
0:00

coming up here is the five million dollar app flow that you have to copy stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of rapmesters.com the place you go when you want action-packed content related to helping you grow your app downloads and those revenues if you want to work with us go check out appmasters.com to either learn with us or hire us to help grow your apps faster and cheaper than anyone else here is a meditation app that is making over five million dollars a month the reason why I want to highlight this app is I love their app flow and there are some strategies in here that are working today in 2023 so let's take a look at the app the app you guys might be familiar with it already it is calm and I am picking on them a lot we've all heard of calm they're doing phenomenally phenomenally well they're huge in the App Store according to sensitar here's their iOS Revenue set five million

0:57

dollars and then Android for those who are trying to be on Dual platforms great but you can see Android is a smaller piece of the overall Revenue pie it's just the nature of the bees right so if you had to focus on when I try to focus a lot of the growth and marketing efforts on iOS and I also want to pull from appmagic magic.rocks and they've got over five million dollars here this is combined I talked to that magic guys I was like what is this Revenue number they said it's a combined revenue number for IOS and Android but gives you a sense now these numbers aren't always accurate so I want to make sure I highlight that but they give you a rough ballpark of how well an app is doing so if you've got a meditation app and you're trying to grow it here's the ceiling obviously it's huge right so let's take a look at their most popular in-app purchases so what are people buying looks like most people

1:48

are buying their annual plan of seventy dollars they've been testing out different maybe they just launched a 60 one here too so you can see all their pricing and this is from sensor Tower but you can see all their pricing that they've done historically and what's the most popular one the most popular one is their annual and I think it's only annual plans available right now okay I've got no association more calm by the way okay but I do love their flow and here's what I really wanted to point out so here's the first thing you see you always want a good onboarding process and I love the designs of this onboarding process and one of the things I really want to highlight too was they are using stats if you've taken any copywriting class you know that having stats and numbers here and odd numbers like 92 percent actually increase sales so this is a great job of telling people what the app is about but also putting

2:42

in the social proof in here to really ripen or sweeten the user to eventually get them to pay when they see that paywall so this is a fantastic onboarding process and they have changed this since I last looked so this is up to date as of today the last onboarding screen has a testimonial which is amazing too and a member since 2019 so it's 2023 right now that's a few years that they've been together Allison so I love this messaging really phenomenal job you can get started or log in now again here you want to engage the user you calm as asking users what brings you to calm develop gratitude improve performance better sleep all that stuff you want to engage the user because that also increases conversions and dually that's even a word but it also gives you Intel on what users want from your app so you can regurgitate if it's increase happiness you can say that in your screenshots and we've actually seen that

3:43

improve downloads by just regurgitating what a user is already telling you what they're here for you can actually improve your conversion rates in terms of downloads and your sales okay next thing they ask you to log in they don't require it so you can X out but you can create a account to save your progress best practice they have continue with email continue with Facebook Apple Google all the big guys okay do that does require a little bit more development but it is good because you know I've shied away from Facebook now these days and I just use apple when I can love the way they ask for push notifications so if I hit allow the pop-up appears stay motivated by turning on notifications okay I think they can get away with just showing the pop-up here too right and having this but again this is how they do it now here is the thing you want to have your paywall your pricing page on the onboarding flow because most people who

4:38

buy they buy during the onboarding process so calm has it your plan is ready unlock calm seven day free trial really important try for free and subscribe really important the free part on this call to action and then they have the pricing here now one thing I would adjust is we've seen these timelines if you look at blinkis where it says day one you unlock everything day five will tell remind you to cancel and then day seven you'll be charged those are performing pretty well so if I were calm I'd be trying to test that we've actually seen longer pricing paywalls do well too and so they should be testing that as well but that's neither here or there they're doing well this is their paywall IX out of this and then they say how did you hear about calm so it's another great way of asking users how they found out and then you can have some data on whether it's you know podcast ad or friend or family

5:31

that's driving more conversion so this is all more data and a really easy way to do sort of like manual attribution on your end because sometimes you know especially as you get bigger a TV ad or a podcast ad is very hard to track so this gives you the flexibility to start tracking through that here's all their tabs again I didn't pay for this yep so you can see most of the contents locked right here if you tap on Discover locked here's my profile I didn't sign up yet and then premium you get the paywall again right here different type of paywall but here's the big kicker and I've seen this too right so pay attention here you want to show the paywall before you ask people to subscribe and I get Kickback all the time so here com shows you to sign up and then shows you the paywall now if you reversed it you showed the paywall and then you ask people to sign up you will actually increase sales okay now clients have

6:31

said to me Steve I need to force people to give me their email address otherwise my app entirely breaks and I was like so I can't show the paywall before the sign up page I cannot and I say ha look at these guys look at calm they have the paywall now granted I did hit premium they have the paywall they force you to pay first and then they ask you they force you to sign up because you can't as you can see on this paywall on this page you can't do anything else but sign up you can't discover their meditations that you paid for you have to sign up so that's one way of doing it this is the best way of doing it get people to pay first and then force their sign up you can allow them to x out to sign up but do not give me the excuse to I cannot show my paywall before the sign up it doesn't matter these guys are doing it they're doing very very well so if you want to reach those Heights you're going

7:27

to have to play the same way the other thing I want to point out is this is no I did sign up for the trial I am actually a paying customer of calm so I want to get that out of the way as well I signed up for the trial here just to see what happened you can see everything is unlocked now I love a referral program I'm working with more clients on this referral program because if you have a good user base please utilize that base because people do actually want to refer your app if they love it you just have to make it easy for them okay so column is really good about sharing this if you look on social media a lot of people are sharing these quotes on social media and then after the meditation they do ask me for a review prompt so you can wait we've actually seen good results of asking for this review prompt after the onboarding process so maybe after a paywall is where we're putting it in our apps if

8:17

you subscribe we show you a review prompt if you don't subscribe we show you a review prompt right so after the paywall we're showing the review prompt we do see good results with that too but I wanted to highlight this all of this if you do nothing else I'm going to pause here take a screenshot of this okay just to recap great onboarding sequence for calm hardly any free content I do think that there is going to be a move to be more of a hard paywall where you either pay or get out right and calm kind of has that in the middle there is some free content but you're gonna have to find it it's not they don't make it easy you force users to create an account after they've paid you and then you allow users to share a meditation share with a friend all that stuff the referral program really solid and ask for a review after a meditation the first one okay you can ask for it during the onboarding process too but

9:04

definitely ask for review prompts make it easy for users to share and leave reviews and pay you as much as possible here's my pitch I like to look at lots of apps if you love this type of detail where we break down now we don't do it for all apps when we find something interesting we create a video like this we break it down all within our app Masters Academy Community I have courses just like this that break down our entire ASO process our Apple search ads process all our monitors Asian tips and we've been doing more of these where if we find something interesting we give you the entire app flow of an app that's doing really well and we show you hey here are the things that we want to copy that we are currently testing and I've got a new course that is spanking you that is the fastest way to get to your first one thousand dollars in subscription Revenue so if you want access to all that go check out

10:04

appmastersacademy.com and if you just want to work with us let us handle all the ASO all the monetization all the Apple search ads the Google ads then paid marketing we'll check out appmasters.com that's it if you thought this video was useful share with a friend hit that like button but share with a friend do me a favor I want to grow this channel to 100 000 by the end of this year so share this Channel with somebody you know and love and if you got any questions for me leave a comment below and I'm going to do more content related to your questions alright that's it for now I'll see you on the next video