Early Stage Strategies to Drive App Subscriptions

you left a lasting impact that he's just calling me James now everybody's James from now on all right I'm gonna do something a little bit different put together a pretty good panel of guests so I'm going to introduce them one at a time is everybody up we're sunny there he's not here all right let's go all right here we go she is the co-founder and cmcpo chief product officer of mindful mamas they are an app supporting the wellness of mothers through curated programs including mindfulness tools daily practices and techniques let's give a round Applause to Jillian Lee Stout next she's the CMO and co-founder of true healers a Marketplace to instantly book expert Wellness services for the mind body and spirit let's give it up for a melody boselin [Applause] and Sonny should be here somewhere so we've got a what do you guys want you guys want to sit you want to stand I thought we were gonna have a couple more chairs

foreign Sandy too all right Jillian kick us off I know you've done a lot of things here we'll share hello okay that is on is it on yeah okay yeah okay for me you know the reason why I wanted to talk about this I think everybody talks about the big when you're big what do you do but everybody has an infancy stage and so we're going to talk about how do you generate revenues when you're just getting going going and Jillian you have a very spicy topic that you want to lead it off with go ahead kick it off I'ma let you say it about which spicy topic because I feel like I have a lot of them the semi oh yeah oh yeah we have a an experiment we're running right now uh we're an all-female team a bunch of moms I'm the only one that doesn't have human children just for children but the rest have human children anyway the name of this experiment is the semi-hard paywall and it always makes everybody giggle so

I'm sorry if that's offensive to anyone but that's what it's called and the reason is that after speaking with Steve about removing the close button on the paywall I was convinced we needed to try this experiment so we actually have I think we have a screenshot of it we have a two uh page paywall and so what we did is yeah you went further yes oh yep um we removed the x button on the first pay wall and so we used to have an x button on both pay walls and so they would get this first like list paywall and then if they wanted to find out about um you know other offerings that we had they could view all plans so what we did is we made this semi-hard by removing that first one and then they can go to the second paywall and still close and we saw some really interesting um results from this uh and that's on the next screen how do I just ah yeah so here you're gonna see like this is like the real deal I guess

people don't always share real numbers but those are some like real numbers so I hope that you're impressed and that I'm not just embarrassed showing you these but um we were seeing active free trials for our app sitting at about 500 active free trials a day at the beginning of December and then we always see a big spike in New Year's seasonality and then I released um a uh version a build in the app that had a bug that I wasn't aware of and that's where you see that giant like pew crash in my active free trials where that double pay wall stopped showing and so after we fixed that we started to see the increase not only from showing the double paywall but then also removing that close button and now we're actually tracking and continuing to climb close to what looks like our seasonality which is blowing my mind and this bug taught us something interesting and that is that it wasn't just about the conversion on the single

screen but what we found is that it's actually that two-step that's allowing us to capture users who don't convert initially on a second screen and so from an accidental bug we learned a couple of interesting things so yeah that's my controversial topic mostly because of the name of the experiment let's go back to the semi-hard part so this timeline one is the first screen if I how do I X out of this how am I able to see hey Mama you deserve this so the only way you can close that or the only way you can get to the second screen is if you see the little view all plans at the very bottom in this teeny tiny text that button is what takes you to the second screen oh I see and then that the pictures at the top actually um cycle through it's a gallery and that starts to show you some of the different features and things we have stats and stuff that run so it gives you more information about what you actually get

some social proofing and things like that yeah I love it you want to get into some of that the the web stuff that you guys been doing too um yeah I can talk about that so in terms of um yeah this is just like how it impacted our initial conversion events so the first was like free trials and then it's a similar graph for that but um so one of the things yeah the next screen is is fine this is basically the same thing it just shows you that like so the first my big drop off was the bug and then by putting the double pay wall back we saw our initial conversion increase by that four percent and then doing the semi-hard paywall now I've recovered up to the 16.4 and that's download to converting to trial or purchase so that's a big impact for us those are amazing numbers I mean the they are oh good average that I've seen is anywhere from like five to ten percent you're doing pretty well but anything from 10 to 20 you're doing

exceptionally well also something early stage you don't always know if you're doing a good job or not you know you're kind of guessing so yeah thanks oh my bad yeah so one of the things that we talked about when we were initially discussing this talk is really about like creative strategies for early stage um the term I like to use is where a lean mean startup machine so we have limited resources limited Talent limited it feels like everything and so getting really creative on how can we get people to convert for us in particular one of our challenges is um engineering resources and how we're deploying our funds so one of the ways we found to do this is by doing some stripe transacting through a stripe payment portal I hope there's no apple people here and we do this through email campaigns so and initially we were doing a manual like activation for users to turn on their subscriptions which I know is a

big lift but the whole point is to like generate Revenue at the early stage so you do the fast and dirty stuff um and so this is just an example of like a three-tiered offer campaign we have that goes out to our users via email and this is for users who haven't started a trial or done any initial conversion in the app we try and capture them through email campaigns and this bypasses their app experience altogether but the idea is to try and capture more conversion if we didn't initially in the app right also it's a heck of a lot easier to test pricing and Promos in stripe than it is in setting up all your like apple configurations for your product so this is like kind of a fast and dirty nitty-gritty way we do that and I just want to show some examples we I also want to just brag about our email open rates and that's why those numbers are up there because they're really good we think yeah those are amazing you know I had

one client where she wanted to create a a store within her app and I was like you know what there's an easier way to do this let's just recommend some products from Amazon become an affiliate for them send in email she gets about 30 open rates and I mean pretty close to your open rates but and then we may like look it's not a lot but we made 100 bucks like it was easy just one email recommending some products on Amazon and we're able to make some money out of it then now I'm like all right your consumers are probably going to buy from you if you recommend a product it's a little quick and easy test there too all right Mel you got a similar case study about some of the website I absolutely love this stuff because sometimes you just don't understand if it's a ux problem if it's a UI problem if it's a product problem and so things on the web a lot easier to test than getting the developer to to do everything so let me

go to those slides real quick oh here we go okay yes so our app is a Marketplace to book different Wellness professionals massage therapy tarot readers everything from Wellness to witchy and we hired all of our healers we call them healers um and the problem was is we had so many good quality healers because we do background checks we make sure that they're experts in their field we make sure they have their certifications so you're not just getting um a Tarot reader or a sound healer from you know Google you're getting a legit one so we had so many high quality healers on our app that we found that people didn't know where to start so we have more than 35 different categories and then we introduced something called a concierge service so the concierge service basically matches you with a Healer after taking a quiz and it's a more personal way to get to know our audience and test to see what they're interested

in so we started with an email that leads you to the quiz and then from there our team will match you with a Healer and make sure that you have a great experience and we found a really great conversion rate with that people love quizzes people love being asked about themselves how many of you guys have ever taken a what's my spirit animal quiz or what house in Hogwarts am I um so people love that and it just gives us a chance to like I said make it more more personal and the conversions were were pretty cool I mean within a month if you wanna thank you um this is just in a month um and we have different campaigns running some from our website some PPC campaigns um and then just in the email nurture flow but you'll see we got 51 leads just within the last month or so without even trying um these are just people coming to our website doing searches for various healing services so pretty awesome

I love this strategy I love the strategy because frankly you can set up a PPC campaign a Facebook ads campaign I had one client that I was talking to he was literally using a zap entirely for quizzes and that was it and you're trying to upsell them to a one-on-one Consulting but that's the power of quizzes too so I love that and then sunny I didn't do a proper intro for you because you were gone I was late so Sonny's got a platform where they help coaches product size their services their content into an app and he's got a lot of great if you guys are doing any type of influencer marketing this guy knows how to take your followers into subscribers so you want to share some of that strategy yeah totally thank you so much Steve my last name is dulay and my team always says that we've been delayed whenever I'm late so all right sorry about that um okay so I think we had uh the next slide yes perfect so uh just like Steve

mentioned that my company is called breakthrough and and essentially we take and the way I like to explain it is we're like only fans but for wellness and and mobile first um so basically on the left what you'll see is Sam gactis he's a wellness influencer very flexible and we've made his app called stretch and we have a white label platform so we can launch a new app in a single day and without any paid ads we've gotten almost in the last two two years and change we've gotten almost a million downloads across all of our apps it's zero dollars in paid ads and you know our strategy to do this was very influencer heavy so we've uh so Sam is one of the influencers that we work with and we have 65 others um but essentially what we what we have done is created this platform this app that Sam can kind of claim it to be his app and just upsell it to his followers um various strategies have been doing

giveaways and sometimes we do challenges on the app and that's a great that's a great way to like bring the community into the app and just say hey to participate in a giveaway you can win maybe a yoga mat or you can win some 100 gift card but what you have to do is you have to post um about the app in your story so then all their friends are seeing that they've posted um and and so that's been a great way for us to get a lot of downloads really quickly and um I think except for the next one um one thing I want to mention so in the last three years I myself am not an influencer um I have like 300 followers on Instagram but um working and being very close with a lot of a lot of our partner our partners who are influencers I've learned a lot about kind of what makes them tick and what they are and one of one of the things that's common across all influencers and this by the way is like not your Twitter or LinkedIn influencer

this is like Instagram Tick Tock YouTube influencer they all have a love and hate relationship with the platform to all of them like love being there but they actually hate it too and you know I I really realized this recently where for me having breakthrough is my company it's my baby for them their business is not their baby they are the business and that's a that's a quite a distinction where they can never turn it off so lots of emotionals ups and downs having said that one of the one of the metric that's really uh affects their mental health is their engagement that's where you see the little key beside the orange graph so this is a this is a influenced City that we use on our team just to see what is the engagement and different demographics of an influencer back in like two years ago I was very tied up with the follower number if you don't already know follower number does not mean anything

so somebody could have 300 000 followers if their engagement is like 0.1 or 0.01 three people will download that app you know so we've realized like as you can see so this this particular tool tells us what the medium median engagement rate is so this is Margaret one of our partners she's amazing got a really good engagement rate um yeah so engagement rate is super key and also the demographics I got one more was there like a Target engagement rate that you're looking for usually more than the median um at least one percent um what we've seen in in really good circumstance in really good cases like Sam I showed you he has 400 000 downloads he's been able to get 200 000 downloads or sorry 400 000 followers and he has 200 000 downloads on the app so because he his engagement is like 10 his engagement's really high without doing any paid ads so we're looking for at least at least that one percent yeah and I personally

found anytime you can Niche down you know a lot of times from an ASO perspective you might be just going after workouts at home workouts when you Niche down to like just say stretching I know Sam's number one for stretching the higher conversions you get Jillian type of conversion numbers when you Niche down like that and so I really like that and that's where the set my heart comes into play too oh this is one other thing that we've done so we're a wellness platform so we strictly only do Wellness apps so one of the things that we've realized um just experimenting a lot for early stage growth has been aligning ourselves either on world events or a specific holiday like if you go to Google and type in what are the different list me all the holidays or you tech people can ask chat gbt and you'll get a massive list like one of the one example that I'm sure 50 of the room does not know about June

21st is international yoga day does anybody know know that you did not that was our biggest Revenue Day last year because we have a bunch of yoga apps and we aligned ourselves with that day and use that day to promote you know free yoga challenge 50 off promotion this is a graph of when covid-19 first happened um and like in the US it was like shelter in place the way we responded to it we actually didn't even try to make money from it we were just like let's just help people and do what what can we do so what we did is for a few of our yoga apps we made a yoga challenge to be free for everybody everybody's stuck indoors it's like okay at least let's stay sane and use our apps to do a free yoga challenge and then literally every week after that our subscribers numbers just kept climbing so even though it was free that was one of the content that was free in the app to bring people in but people

still saw the value and then our subscriber numbers accelerated Jillian on the topic of giving away things for free you have a partnership thing that you did too yeah that graph you were showing with the arrow for when covid-19 everybody got locked in their houses actually like the day we launched our app was the day our governor put us in the stay-at-home order so moms were going nuts which was good for us I guess maybe I don't know um yeah so another place that we've seen success is in Partnerships and we kind of discussed this a little bit but I think in terms of Partnerships the thing that I want to highlight like the biggest takeaway is I think authenticity so as a company I feel like this can work really really well for a brand it's worked well for us when you are authentic about that Partnership if it really truly is something that hits at the core values and core message of the company or something that you know

is at the core of what your users care about for us that's PSI postpartum support International is a hotline that any mom can call at any time to get resources if she's struggling with postpartum mental health issues and so with postpartum support International we've done several campaigns with them but basically we offer as a scholarship a one year of access to the mindful Mama's app for any mom that contacts PSI and receives any of their services and when we first ran this campaign we've been running it for about a year we had 942 activations from our initial Campaign which kind of blew us away we had this huge influx of downloads that were organic and because we weren't adequately testing our deep link flow we didn't realize initially where they were coming from but that's you know another I guess topic um but we figured it out and it was from this campaign and we're now seeing uh it's been interesting because it's just

in the last month we're seeing purchases from these moms that were on these PSI promo codes that are buying subscriptions now that their promo has expired we got so and we continue to get moms that are downloading from this PSI campaign we've done several campaigns in Partnership um with Brands but as a wellness company it's something that we really we try to be very careful we don't want to contribute to the noise right we're really about mental Wellness supporting mental Wellness we know that moms are already overwhelmed we know that moms already feel like they aren't meeting the expectations of society the last thing we want to do is throw a bunch of products at them that we're going to continue to make them feel like they're not doing a good enough job right so we take that really seriously which is why we're so um specific about these types of Partnerships or co-marketing campaigns this one's been really successful for us

I love that all right Mel will you let's talk about community building and the things you guys are doing with your healers yes well I love that you mentioned authenticity because that's something really really huge for us is building an authentic Community not only with our audience and our client base but within our people as well so when we started we were very super humble um just a few healers at a time and we were thinking how can we get them involved and build this community so what happened is we started doing Instagram lives once a week where we would have different healers on to talk about their specialty this is Tasha love right here she's a hypnotherapist and they loved it so much that they wanted to come back and then they go a little deeper into what they want to talk about and we get bookings just for this Instagram live content and what I also found is the healers themselves

they they love being promoted so they'll promote on their page so it's free promotion for us because you know they're saying oh we got featured on true healers they're really proud of it and then we get their following In Their audience I mean it just kind of snowballs into this really cool Community we do amas ask me any things with some of our healers we actually have one tonight with a life coach um and then sliding into DMS um I know it's kind of a joke but not really because we reach out to our audience individually when our app launched our app launched in last July um I messaged every single one of our followers saying hey we're live check us out by the way here's a discount and we got a bunch of Engagement from that um and a bunch of good conversions um but also people realized that we were people behind a brand um and we're still building that community and it's awesome to see that

engagement and that participation um and we also had in-person events that we would use to uh like one was a yoga and full moon ceremony where one of our healers would make we made an event bright before the app launched and we would have people come physically meet our healers to help build that authenticity and connection with our app and our brand and our people behind it and then last but certainly not least communicating like a human has been really really big for us because we are a wellness app and we don't to sound all Brandy I've always been kind of against doing things business as usual so I find that people really resonate with our authenticity and just we talk real sometimes I'll throw in a few curse words here and there um you know keep it cool but yeah yeah I totally aligned with that uh building an uh authentic community and an authentic post even as an influencer um one thing that I just wanted to add

was if speaking to the people who are interested in like hey I want to get an influencer in my business and how do I get these big influencers that have a million followers because if you DM them likely you're not going to get a response because you go into this little other inbox that they usually don't look at so the way to get get a hold of them has you can try to DM them I've gotten a few of our influencers through DMs and and I just got lucky I guess um the big one is email email works like magic so I've used any of these like mail merge softwares like streak or um there's a bunch bunch of other ones where you can do automated follow-up campaigns um and I've had a lot of success with that um also you know you don't want to just do spray and pray like I'm now really good friends with with my influencer friends they get so many emails from all these companies saying hey let's build your app and they haven't even looked at

their page they already have an app so um if you can personalize it and you know with these platforms you can add variables and stuff and you can really hyper personalize um the one strategy that we've found is going to places where the influencers hang out already so one example is we were this last year a big vertical for us was to go into meditation so we're like okay where do meditation influencers hang out then I found out there's an app called inside timer which has 6 000 meditation coaches on it and so I just got my assistant to just pull a list of all of them and email addresses and stuff like that and then we we didn't hit all six thousand obviously we qualified and hit a subset and that had insane open rates on on a cold email so and I have an article that I can share with if anybody's interested if you want to add influencers to YouTube to your business I want to piggyback on the email idea

you saw those open rates right Circle back to that again um I think one of the things I've learned just early stage is especially fundraising having these like talks with investors and you're you know trying to find product Market fit you're trying to validate the product I initially was really resistant I didn't want the team spending time on email campaigns or things it's like we're trying to build an app not an email newsletter Well turns out if I get really good conversion in the email and I need to generate Revenue at the early stage I need to get creative and I need to stop being like a purist about the application and look Instead at where where are my users where can I you know touch them and where are they listening to me and um it's it's just interesting because it's like thinking outside of the product in order to generate that early traction to continue with your mission or your vision of building your product

and and being open to different ways of doing that um I accidentally built a feature uh by and we learned this by we were emailing our moms every single day with stories from the team in the community and so we started they loved it and we started these daily push notifications just as like a transition when I had to hire a different marketing director and when the new marketing director came on I told her oh you can just turn off those pushes it was just until we got somebody new in the position our moms were pissed they loved those daily affirmations and I don't know how many people hear that from their customers like yes send us a push notification every single day send us an email every day but we learned that these are different places that our users are listening to us and they're wanting us to communicate with them and bring them value and so why not use that as a channel to try and convert it might not

be in the application but you know what if it grows that Revenue you're going to get more investors excited about what you're doing and so you know it's just about thinking about that long-term goal I think Nell you got anything to add I love email I mean I know we talked about it offline about monetizing your email list and it's it's the secret sauce I mean social media which is where we built a big part of our community we have no idea what happens when the algorithm changes and I think right now about two percent of any businesses content gets seen by Their audience uh with email you own them they might not look at the email that you send them but you do appear in their inbox and that's another brand touch point that just hits them and builds onto that that trust so I I love email you know I sent an email to my list and I was like email is not dead or I said something about emailing he's like

email's dead and I'm like bro you just replied like come on he's not dead so James I mean John do you have any other can we open up to some questions yeah let's take uh I don't think I'm on here but let's take a couple questions real quick and I'm gonna hold you a mic that I don't think is oh there is thank you question for Jillian you said the stripe is way easier compared to apple to test the price points is it because you don't use a software like Revenue cat or even if using a software Revenue cat where you can a B test is a steel stripe better we're we're using Revenue cat that's where those graphs came from um the for the first ones that you were seeing that was a huge game changer for us we implemented Revenue cut in quarter two of last year I mean it changed everything we have a native Android app a native IOS app and then like I said we're doing some transaction for web so yes Revenue cat definitely helps us with

being able to test pricing and products and things but it's still a development lift to implement those different pricing options and to make sure that your paywall is going to show the right price to the customer with the right logic and we initially just had those two products set up and so it's actually something I'm working on now it's getting more pricing testing and things going that we are able to focus on that but you know in terms of um also with these Partnerships and things I want to be able to easily have promo codes and or influencer marketing I want to give Jenny 20 to all of her mom Community a quick promo like apple apple does not make that easy they have some new products in app store connect that we're learning about but again early stage limited Revenue limited development resources like we don't necessarily have access to the latest and greatest tools and configurations or

if the SDK updates you know uh am I going to update the SDK or I'm going to put a new feature in or test like I have to make really hard choices at this stage cool and time for one more quick question and quick answer hi I just want to congratulate you for the moms app because you're reaching a market that is not easy to reach because they're just getting into this cool thing called the internet so receiving news feeds make them feel cool and that's the market that you're reaching but that wouldn't work for Millennials we hate newsletters we hate that freaking like every Weekly Newsletter yeah we can Google it thank you but I don't need it in my inbox so that's pretty cool that the moms like their newsletters because that means your Market reach is on spot so congratulations thank you awesome thank you Steve and panel please give them a round great job guys great job wonderful thank you and by the way that

was not Sunny's fault that he was late we've been messing with the agenda and so like it was our fault so just so you know you can pay me later I love that question that answer or sorry question that you had about the newsletters because um yeah I get like 200 300 pitches a day my email address my email is a is a nuclear Wasteland you know there's no chance I'm gonna see that well there's some chance but anyways Okay cool so we have another we have another session obviously and this one is about acquiring users for free I assume it doesn't include robots I hope it doesn't include robots this session is by Francisco Cornejo please welcome him [Applause] no robots yes and it's it's a very nice p