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How One iOS Developer 2X Sales by Optimizing His Paywall

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App Masters12:24Open on YouTube
Chapters show their main points

The bottom line

Putting a paywall in an onboarding flow, locking most features and making ads longer for non-payers doubled in-app purchase revenue and quadrupled ad revenue. Small changes to the first-run flow can revive an app that already has steady downloads.

Key takeaways

  • The app earned little because its paywall was hidden. 2:16
    • Before the change, the app opened straight into use. Users only saw a price in settings or after tapping a premium toggle.
    • By December, sales had slid to one or two a day, after two years of steady decline.
  • An onboarding sequence that ends in a paywall puts the offer in front of every new user. 2:41
    • A few taglines build interest, then the paywall appears. The paywall's pricing and options did not change.
    • The home page now puts the premium feature front and center, and the remove-ads button stays as a second route to the paywall.
  • Locking features and lengthening ads make staying free costly. 4:17
    • Users who close the paywall get a mandatory video ad of about two minutes. Before, ads were a couple of banners and one or two 30-second ads.
    • Free features were cut from three to one, so people could no longer use the app fully for nothing.
  • Sales and ad revenue rose sharply after launch and kept climbing. 6:38
    • The change went live on January 6. Sales went from one or two a day to consistently above the 50 mark.
    • Downloads rose too, though no keyword changes were made. Steve suspects revenue is a keyword ranking factor, as one client lost a top keyword after moving payments to Stripe.
  • This fix pays off most for apps that already get downloads. 11:00
    • An app with thousands of downloads a day is easy to fix. An app with no downloads and no sales is a much harder problem.
    • The $500 audit paid for itself quickly, and the developer is now copying the formula into his other apps.

It shows you the power of these small changes, like really focusing on their numbers.

Steve P. Young

Chapter summaries

0:00 A decade-old one-function app

The app is a simple utility from 2011 that still earns about $1,000 a day, which makes it a good test for small changes.

  • A single-purpose app built in 2011 has sold steadily for years. 1:06
    • It came out when one-function apps, like the first phone flashlights, were popular.
    • It earned about $2,500 a day in 2020, then dipped after the pandemic.
    • Josh picked a function the phone did not do well natively.
    • App details are hidden to protect him from copycats.

2:14 The onboarding sequence

Leading every new user through a short sequence before the paywall makes more of them buy.

  • More people seeing the paywall means more purchases. 3:15
    • The first taglines build some pressure, so users think this looks pretty cool.
    • In-app purchase revenue rose immediately.
    • Steve suggested making the sequence friendlier, a path leading people down the "rabbit hole".
    • Josh changed only a minuscule price detail, and people still paid.

3:55 Making free use inconvenient

Annoying ads and fewer free features turn impatience into payment.

  • Ads were rare and are now much more annoying. 3:59
    • Ads used to pop up when the app's main function stopped, and between only some screens.
    • A banner ad was added.
    • Closing the paywall leads to the long video ad, which pushes people to pay to skip it.
    • Either way the app makes money, from ads or from the purchase.
  • Impatient users will pay to remove the wait. 4:45
    • A Miniclip marketing director once said, I monetize off of impatience.
    • Users who want the app to work will wait or pay.
    • Steve: users will not pay if most features are given away.
    • A great app with many downloads can afford to be a little inconvenient.

6:12 The launch reversed a two-year slide

Locking features, with prices and unlock options left alone, was enough to turn declining sales into daily growth.

  • Sales climbed every day after launch. 6:38
    • The chart shows one big spike at launch, then steady daily growth.
    • Before the decline, the app made well over $10 a day.
    • The developer was happy to make $10 in a morning in December.
    • He says the app is now on track to get back to its old level.
  • Revenue may feed keyword rankings. 8:18
    • The download rise is unexplained, since no keyword work was done.
    • One six-figure-a-month client lost a number one keyword in the month payments left the App Store.
    • Steve suggests comparing units before and after the update to test the link.
    • He admits the correlation could be wrong.

9:09 Long ads pay for free use

Forcing non-payers through longer ads turns every declined paywall into ad income.

  • More aggressive ads earn more money. 9:19
    • Steve expected edgy ads to hurt, but more ads means more payouts from Google.
    • Ads went from a couple of banners to more banners plus the long video.
    • The developer says the numbers speak for themselves.

9:58 How the audit led to the fix

A one-hour paid audit found the real problem at once, and the fix came from copying a template.

  • The audit named the paywall as the problem right away. 10:38
    • The developer found the audit through YouTube and Steve's website.
    • He reasoned a losing app has little to lose from $500.
    • Steve sent Google Slides with examples, and the developer copied the formula.
    • The rest was dissected later in the meeting.
  • The result changed the owner's plans for the app. 12:13
    • He had planned to sell the app because it was losing money.
    • He no longer wants to sell it.
    • Steve says personalized strategies work better than watching videos.

In the growth library

Josh (anonymous indie iOS developer) with Steve P. Young, Indie app developer (client) and founder of App Masters. A decade-old one-function iOS utility app doubled in-app purchase sales and grew ad revenue by about 4x after adding an onboarding sequence, a front-and-center paywall, tighter feature gating and longer ads. The pricing and paywall options did not change, so the gain came from showing the paywall to everyone and making the free path less comfortable.

Lessons that draw on this:

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

Transcript395 lines
0:00

coming up you're gonna hear a case study where we increase in-app purchase Revenue by 211 and AD Revenue by 443 stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of appmasters.com and I wanted to share this awesome case study so thank you Josh for doing this with us where we really looked at an app kind of made some changes and we're going to go through all those changes and had a huge impact on not only ad Revenue which I'm super proud of because I have less case studies on that and then in-app purchase revenues as well so joining me is the Indie app developer I got to spend some time with his name is joshcoin Josh welcome to the show thanks it's great to be here thanks for uh thanks for having me on so we're gonna hide a lot of the nature of the app and that is because I want to protect Josh because when we do these type of videos I'm thankful that he's willing to share so much of the

0:52

data so just for that to protect Josh and prevent a lot of coffee cats for coming in we're gonna actually hide a lot of the details of the app but you're gonna get a lot of info in terms of what changes we made all right Josh tell us a little bit a background of the app when did you create it and how long it's been in the App Store yeah sure so uh I created it back in 2011 basically around that time there was a lot of one function apps that were like making your lights on your iPhone work I think that was like the first rendition of the flashlight on the phone and I saw that as an opportunity to just develop an app that does one function literally just one thing so I tried to think about like what else can I make that is just kind of like native but not well built into the app by itself or built into phone by itself so I came up with this idea and uh sure enough build a one function app that has just been crushing it for a

1:39

bunch of years at this point um in 2011. so wow that's amazing roughly how many dollars you get a day uh close to a thousand a day at this point I mean sometimes um like 2020 it was way higher I mean like just because people were home you know so people were bored trying to find out what else they could do with their phones and uh I think there's like 2500 or so a day at that point but it it dipped after the pandemic released you know a little bit here but thanks to Steve was able to get it back up a little bit too so let's see all right well we'll take a peek like I said we're hiding a lot of this stuff the nature of the app too I guess get a sense oh Josh all right go ahead this is the before uh so yeah so it was just like when you opened it before it was just you would just open the app and it would prompt you to use the app the end nothing really nothing fancy about it um if people wanted to pay for the the

2:27

internet features then you have to go to the settings and then there was a enabled there so like you scroll through it and then from that point could pay it wasn't uh prompt in the beginning of opening the app and that's what you helped me develop yeah and then afterwards we did we added onboarding sequence and then I'm hiding everything with the tagline tagline tagline and then paywall so a typical onboarding sequence is what we have here so the onboarding sequence um you know you suggested I make it a little more friendly and like lead people down this rabbit hole if you will of of what they're expected so there's a couple taglines in the beginning like building up some pressure for people be like oh this looks pretty cool then the next one like a little bit more tagline of like leading them down this hole and then it hits them with the paywall and from that point that I mean that increased immediately the the internet

3:15

purchase Revenue because like you said the more people that see the paywall the more people are going to pay for it and then here is the home page from before so not too many changes I think the the before is you had to go into settings to find the pay wall right here we make it front and center you still have the remove ads type of thing right here and so you have that way to get to the paywall but at the same time we want to sort of highlight the premium feature up top right here too right exactly and then the the Locking feature was also um more I mean obviously in the before it was there but the new one now there's like I think I just changed the price point or something just minuscule when people still pay for that so it might be a good time Josh to ask you like where were the ads placed because we have this remove ads but where were the ads generally where were they popping up yeah sure so um the ads would pop up

4:02

when people would use the app like actually have the function that it's supposed to be made for when they would stop the function it would then pop up and then I believe it was in between some of the screens but not all of the screens so I just made it more annoying basically just a lot more annoying when people X Out of the paint wall without paying for it they get a video ad that's like a mandatory two minutes people don't want to see that they're not interested in that at that moment so that also helps you know get rid of the paywall like if you don't want to see that then pay for it yeah if you do want to see the ads well they're going to make them really long so that way you're going to have to pay for them eventually one way or the other it's going to make money I want to pause real quick here two and one of the things we added here was a banner ad you got to make it annoying right like a lot of people

4:42

don't want to pay and one of I think about the person an old interview that I did with mini clip the director of marketing or something he was like look I monetize off of impatience for a game and you're kind of doing the same thing you think about any git game like sometimes you'll see an ad after you hit play like and then you're like you want to play the game obviously you made a great app Josh you get tons of downloads but like you want the app to function and so yeah you're just gonna have to wait for it if you don't want to pay for it for the paywall as you can see I've been talking about for a long time we went from short now Josh you actually didn't I know one of the big things when I saw your app I was like how do I see the paywall and you weren't promoting any pricing so it wasn't until like you hit a toggle for a premium feature that you saw hey do you want to pay correct correct exactly yeah there was nothing

5:24

stopping people it was just if you wanted to hit that toggle then it would pop up and say hey it's gonna cost you X dollars to use that feature and then we went with the long pay wall for this as well so I don't want to spend too much time on it and then here and the other thing too like I also was giving away too many things like you said like there was I think three of these features that was that were free and now there's one and everything else is locked so that helped too because like people would be able to try it and really just use it for free yeah you got to make it difficult like they're not gonna pay you if you've given away most of the features you know it's just like why I mean you built a great app they're here they download they decided to be here and so yeah like force them to be a little bit inconvenient did you do anything like when this pay well I can't remember when we first looked at it but

6:07

did you have all these options available on the the paywall too this is at least one what do you mean like if I try to pick would I get just so if I wanted yeah they were all there okay so the pricing didn't change and then the options to unlock everything and have all these speeds that didn't change anything either correct yeah cool so long there just uh just showing it that's it lock the things love it all right let's look at the look at the results so tell me when it went live Josh remember yeah so we're live on the 6th of January okay right here which is I think that big spike in the middle and then it's just been increasing pretty much every day since then yeah big spike right right we uh launched it and uh I mean you can tell like looking back uh to December like I mean I was making Maybe one sale a day maybe two it was not going well it was like I would be happy in the morning if I made 10 bucks like

7:02

it used to make well over that every single day and then you know it's been decreasing consistently for the past two years so I just need to get that back up and I think we're on the on the track to that for sure yeah you can see it we're down right here now we're consistently above the 50 Mark too that's awesome what happened here with the the units you got an increase in downloads too I have no idea I don't have no clue what the issue was with that but that's awesome I mean something something must have changed like uh keywords or something but you know what would be interesting because you know we are we're trying to put like the keyword factors and part of it I feel like is revenue so it could be now we might be making the wrong correlation here and I'm willing to be wrong about this but it could also be would be curious to see is like what are those units since you did the update since you've seen an

7:46

increase in Revenue because then you can really see all right yeah I am getting more downloads I am getting more proceeds so if we even just this January 4th to whatever we can sort of compare that too I love it congrats yeah so it was a big jump and like I said it wasn't making that much uh the past couple years like just decreasing consistently but not anymore now it's going back up which is great and then I mean I mean you'd be the expert on this one but do you think that the downloads are increasing since the the in-app purchases are increasing and the dollar amounts increase then maybe the ASO has kind of shifted like I think this is more value yeah I think so and we have one client Josh where we actually lost we're number one for a keyword didn't make any ASO changes but they took the in-app purchases from the App Store to a stripe payment page so they're actually making more money obviously but the App

8:33

Store and this was like a six figure a month type of app the app store revenues just dropped or pisses like just took a downfall right because everything was happening through Stripes business-wise is a smart decision but keywords could drop and if you look at the days that the month that it dropped it was around the same time that they made that change in the app so I do feel like revenue is an important factor of keyword rankings too I said Apple would basically say hey your keywords are more important now is making more money exactly and if you did nothing to the ASO and you're seeing an increase it could be some correlation between revenue and downloads too yeah yeah it didn't it didn't change it so okay and we'll just want to break it you know this is the cool part Josh because I wasn't sure about like I I think I'm pretty good at the like the payroll optimization but I know about ads but it

9:19

almost seemed like the more edgy show the more money you're gonna make absolutely yeah absolutely it's the same it's the same concept right if you keep showing ads and then people are gonna and then Google's gonna pay for them you know and if I make the ads really long because it used to be a couple of banner ads in like one or two thirty second ads within the app yeah but now it's more banner ads and very long like two like I said two minutes of ads like every time somebody doesn't click yes to pay on the paywall they get a two minute long ad yeah I love it and it has worked for other people too anything else you want to highlight here Josh yeah sorry no no not really I mean like the numbers just speak for themselves you know I don't really have to sell it it's it's working well congrats my friend that's really cool can we just talk about real quick like how I how I found you and how our

10:02

meeting went yes please that's what I was asking you anyway so I'm glad you brought it up yes please um sure so I mean obviously like everybody else I'm sure they find you from YouTube and then I did some background research and went through your website and found like the the audit that you have and figured you know it's losing money now it's a business expense if I pay you you know for the hour of your time to go through the app figure out what the hell is wrong with it and then I can't lose anything right like I lose 500 bucks fine I lose 100 bucks but if I pay the 500 bucks and it works out which clearly it did then it's it's a win-win for both of us so you know you spend a lot of time with me going through that and um right off the bat you're like this is the problem just number one here's the issue pay well make it make it paywall make it on morning screen work and then we can dissect the rest of the stuff as we get

10:48

going in the meeting which is what we did you know took a bunch of notes you sent me some Google slides with example what to do and pretty much just copy the formula and here's the result speaks themselves I love it I was going to ask you because what temp did you because I love seeing apps like this especially when you already have downloads and you're getting thousands of downloads a day like that is so easy to fix versus if you're not getting any downloads you're not getting any sales much harder problem I just uh took your ideas and put them putting them into other apps that I own now as well so we'll see we'll see how that does it also that's awesome that 500 is going to pay back really quick there Josh if the audience wants to connect with you in any other way do you want to send them anywhere or do you want to remain hidden I'm going to remain hidden quite honest and remain hidden thank you Josh I just I you look

11:33

I thank you from the bottom of my heart for allowing us to share this case study because it shows you the power of these small changes like really focusing on their numbers especially if you're in the audience and you have downloads and Josh is like look the downloads are going down the revenue is going down what can I do or the downloads are pretty consistent but the revenue is going down what can I do to really inject some life in it like look it just takes a couple of different changes and you can watch all the YouTube videos you want but then when you get customized personalized strategies that's where we can do wonders too so Josh thank you so much man it means the world to me that you were so open and honest and sharing all this data with us yeah guess what I mean thank you thank you for your expertise in helping me just move this up in the world and you know I came to you I was going to sell this out because

12:16

I was losing money but now I'm not really thinking I want to sell it anymore that's so cool I love it I love it all right thank you guys for watching and I'll see you on the next video