How to Get Your First Subscribers: Advice for Indie Developers

coming up I'm going to share with you a very interesting growth act and one of my favorite case studies of the Year stay tuned what is up app Nation it is Steve p young founder of app masters.com and we've got an interview that I did with the folks at adapt where Vitali their CEO interviewed me for their blog and we turned that into a Blog article that you can read if you don't want to watch my voice on here and I'll link that into the show notes but it talks all about how to get your early users for absolutely free what's the toughest part about being the app subscription business and the fastest app that we grew to date and spoiler alert it just happened this year all right let's bring in Vali hi Steve how are you doing I'm good how you doing all right thank you for joining this interview I'm gonna ask you a couple of questions about mobile you know you're a big expert in Mobile subscriptions and probably you have the

largest Channel about how to monetize your mobile app whether it's subscription app or even a game we all know about it what's your opinion about what's the hardest think about monetizing consumer subscriptions man the hardest thing is really I think the growth honestly I think we with all the tools out there the bottom of the funnel I mean maybe because I focus on that a lot too that I feel like if an app has downloads fality we can make more money right if the app already has downloads and they're getting decent downloads we can make money from that we know what pay walls work we know what we can kind of figure that stuff out I think that's the hardest equation to solve is when you have no downloads and you have no paying subscribers but if you have downloads and no paying subscribers we can fix that equation or if you have paying customers but you need more downloads we can fix that too but when

it becomes an XY equation that's how I like to say when it becomes an XY equation where I don't have any downloads and I don't have any paying customers that becomes the hardest part of this and I think too many times people are coming in trying to build the end solution the fiveyear feature set versus like the one-year feature set because they see their competitors and they're like hey look at they have all this stuff we're so much better I hear that all the time right vialia you might hear it all the time too it's like oh we're so much better than our competitors I'm like yeah I hear it from everybody let's prove it let's let the market decide because the market doesn't care what this little feature that you have is much better than your competitors the market just cares about what they care about right what they want out of the app let's say we're in a hard case right let's say I'm an India

developer I have a full-time job and I want to get some some dollars for my site project this is probably a reasonable goal and we see tons of IND developers to do this let's say I've developed a new application maybe it's a simple utility app or simple photo editor or something like that I have no literally no idea about how to get the first subscriber or the first dollar from this application what would you recommend me to do maybe first one two three steps besides from watching your YouTube channel of course this is definitely the first step that every developer must do I I really think so but what are the next steps so here's what I would say if you got a photo editor if you already have an idea then just think about top of the funnel and I had a conversation with the Indie Dev out there David I'll just say his first name thank you David at an event we're talking about like ASO and ASA being a

good starting point for these beginner apps valal so you can start cheaply testing because with Asa you just need keywords you don't need the meta SDK you don't need anything all you need is just the keywords just to get some downloads to get your numbers your trial activation start trial your trial dep paid everything that adapt already reports back to you what are those numbers if those numbers look good so you're getting a plus five trial start over 30% trial to paid then you got pretty solid numbers that's industry average I don't know what you guys have heard or what you guys have seen from all the clients you work with but from I heard from other sources is about 2% installed to paying customers is on average so if you're already at that Mark then it's just bringing in more downloads at the numbers that you need to get it at but I would start with ASO and ASA because they're the easiest I

have a growth hack that I love to run I'm going to share my screen real quick and this is my favorite growth hack to run so it's an app advice campaign and T will'll need a lifetime offer so those who are watching this a lifetime offer needs to be a non-consumable inapp purchase don't make it a subscription it's not a subscription it's a non-consumable inapp purchase that's the only thing you can bring down to zero so the an apppp purchase there so what we do is we do the ASO we give a lifetime offer away for free so if you got a photo editor app maybe this is a bad keyword but you have photo editor in the title you have remove background in the subtitle whatever those main keywords are do that keyword research and then you run it on app advice you're going to make your lifetime offer I don't care how high you price it price it at $199 I don't care $49 but make it expensive we're going to make it free for Just 2

days on app advice because we've done the ASO and we're asking for the review prompt early on in the app user Journey that first time open here's what's going to happen all right Vali here's our favorite case study of this year 2024 we did 106,000 downloads for an AI app that's in the transcription space and we did 800 new ratings 200 the US 600 worldwide and we made $7,000 within the first month of this app with ASO only dude to give you some context the app was making about $100 a month and the client came to me and said hey Steve should I run Apple search ads and I said you have five reviews and you're making about a hundred bucks let's try this growth hack real quick because I think I can get you to at least $1,000 in Revenue like the whole idea of this fatality was I knew about 1% of the downloads would leave a review before I start any type of paid marketing I want my app in the app

stores to look like they've got some traction about 100 reviews good ASO then I'm off and running and so now what we able to do with this app in August of 2024 we've been able to hit $10,000 in Revenue just pure organic now we can start to think all right we've got the numbers we've got the traction and now we can start thinking through meta strategy how do we really scale this from $10,000 to 20 ultimately 50 to 100,000 that is an indie app story and I love the success story because he was just making a few $100 he wanted to run Apple search ads I said hold up before we do that let's try this and then let's run Apple search ads I told him valal I think I can make $1,000 doar from this whole campaign and then now once you have $1,000 doll that you've made you can reinvest that money rather than always investing from your savings reinvest from your revenues that's how I like to frame it sounds really cool is

there a particular Benchmark or a threshold where you think it's time to start scaling with social media ads like Tik Tok or met or Google all right I started with this so I did my research maybe even using threee tools I started to do ASA or something like that as a next step right I see some traction and it's really hard to scale IA right because yeah it's a good starting point but the volume is limited because not everyone uses search in the App Store but you get a quality traffic so when is it a good time to start scaling into social media I would say anywhere from let's say 1,000 and up and I'll tell you my story too I was was able to make 1,000 just organically from our apps we tried to run Apple search ads and we got it up to 3,000 at a positive row ass like a 2X row ass right spending about a th000 making 3,000 so that's a combination of organic and ASA and then I was like I can't scale it anymore so

after a few months of just being stuck there with Asa I was like damn I need something else so now it's time to really think about a different Channel but I think it got me to a certain point so had I known all this before I would have definitely started with just $1,000 right I'm in a better position right now I'm not doing this on the side I've got money to spend all that stuff I got money to invest in this so I would probably say get to that first 1,000 and then if you're going to be patient go ahead and continue with it but if you're going to be impatient and you want faster results go ahead and start that after that one 1,000 is it 1,000 per month like 1,000 Mr or 1,000 Revenue let say in like three months I would say Mr I feel a little bit more comfortable with an MR yeah those are just my numbers right like I the way I always frame it cuz I always get this question is how patient are you cuz if you're

patient keep going right that took me like from March was our highest month 3,000 spending 1,000 and then ever since then we've teetered around 2 3,000 and now we're in September that's six months later so obviously I was patient but I wish I went a little bit faster and knowing what I know now we're launching a brand new app in the AI space that I'm heavily trying to invest some Capital behind and I'm going to deploy the strategy that I just shared with you this growth act and then we're just going to run you know Facebook at pretty much soon after that I feel confident in what we're going to do because I've also found Vitality like if I had to pick a client that had UA and needed help with ASO I'll pick that but if I had a client that just said I need help with ASO only that is my only growth Channel I'm like you already putting me in a tough position to lose yes I can win I'm that good I'm just kidding yes I can win

where I feel like I'm good enough that like this case study but this is not the norm right this is a great case study that when it works it works beautifully but it doesn't always work as well but's say I start a paid user acquisition right and I host back my Revenue data and downloads data back to ad networks so I have a cost per install cost per free trial activation cost per paid subscriber and so on which one would you use to optimize the compete the trial you always try to optimize some people are even going away from this and not having a trial and just going straight to purchase so that might be working for certain AI apps but I would say optimizing for the trial is the way to go you know all the best practices will tell you optimize for the purchase event whatever that may be so if you're a game then that first purchase or that first level that initiates the first purchase I know it's a lot of data but for more

subscription based apps which you and I really play in I would say just start a campaign looking for people more likely to activate a trial yeah I would would definitely agree with it because of scan to be honest because of this apple privacy stuff you you're really only able to PA back the first event and not the renewal event so definitely you should optimize for the first purchase event or for the first trial event this is definitely what you want to do I 100% agree with it all right let's say I optimized my user acquisition campaign the paid user acquisition campaign and then we're inside the application what are the reasonable next steps to get more money so I would just optimize the onboarding the pay wall I mean that's really it you guys came up with the number I think it's like 60 to 80% we've talked about this offline too if you do nothing else optimize that op boarding optimize that pay wall that is what is

going to get you the biggest bank for your buck in there once you get the downloads just start optimizing and I people ask me all the time how soon should I optimize write the freaking way in my opinion okay because for me I want to test how willing people are willing to pay for the you know long time and I know you and I did content together and I said but tell how would you launch a brand new app and you said with the hard pay wall and I was like tell what is a hard pay wall the first time I heard somebody call it that and I was like oh interesting so I like to give credit where credits do but I'm like oh that's perfect and that's what we just did and I still remember that conversation because I was like I was against a hard pay wall I thought that was very scammy but as my old boss said let's let the data tell us let's not let our opinions decide what we're going to do let the data decide what we're going to do and

the data told us that a hard pay wall does really work well for certain Niche apps so if you're just starting out maybe even test like your advice I follow that advice like it I think it works better just force them long term you might not want to do a hard pay wall but if you're a niche app P tell like I talked to somebody that we talked to months ago and I met them in person and they were like Steve follow that hard pay wall advice and it worked like a charm and I was like yep especially for utility apps we see a lot of hard pays to be the best comparing to free or even other introductory offers so it's definitely something if you have a VPN app for example you should consider this at least trying it what are the most popular mistakes when you want to make an experiment with your payment screen on the pay wall I would say no call to action I've seen that frequently and look I think users are not always smart

they're not very techy like we are we're in the app space so we feel like everybody should understand so the biggest mistake is sometimes I'll just see the plans and no button and people just assume that people are going to click one of the plans to initiate the checkout like don't do that just put the call to action everybody likes buttons put a big button that says get started we've a tested the the call to action we've seen continue work the best versus start free trial on iOS and start free trial so shout out to teimo who was in our community he did that and he saw that start free trial did better on Android so that was his case study continue versus start free trial continue on iOS start free trial on Android I would say that I think the other Pitfall is probably undercharging we'll see case studies and somebody in my community John he tested $20 versus $30 he was $20 for the longest time in

the US he moved it to 30 until to get this not only did he make more money because he was charging more he actually saw his conversions go up that's a win-win usually you increase the price and the conversion goes down a little bit but you just make more money and offsets everything but he saw the exact opposite his trial conversions went up as well as his revenues obviously right I have a really really interesting example example where one of our friend they tried to scale their application from the US market to Brazil Market at first they tried the same pricing and it didn't work out at all because like they don't want to pay like 15 bucks a month this too expensive so what they did is they decreased the price by something around 50% but one year LTV increased by 30% because they got much more renews it was extremely unexpected because in reality when you want to optimize your subscription application you want to

optimize not really the first conversion rate these are really nice proxy metrics but what you really Target is LTV of a year or something like that right so this use case was something I did not expect to be honest what's your largest subscription check that you ever paid I don't think it's been that much the only one that comes to mind is calm I signed up for their lifetime offer so I already signed up for the year and then I'm going to assume calm is a smart I signed up in December of a certain year then following November I get an email saying hey get 50% off the lifetime and and I was already considering whether I should keep the yearly or should I just continue it right I was already thinking on that and then it's like a 7day sale and then it's like last chance and I was like ah fudg it let's just do it and so I pay them $150 for the lifetime offer and then the $60 so they got two what is

it 210 out of me something like that so yeah that would be probably the highest how many active subscriptions do you have yourself besides call that's a good question I probably have like six or seven I've got a lot because I have all the streaming Services if you want to count that that might not show up in the app store and then just here alone not take all the subscription Services away I probably have eight subscriptions right now just on my iPhone subscriptions St quite a decent number yeah I have only one yeah support to developers yeah true we do also as well yeah I only subscribe to straa besides streaming services my only subscription is Trava what's the fastest growing app you worked with you can say just numbers you can avoid saying the name but just curious I avoid saying the names half the time just cuz I didn't get their permission but I would say the one I just worked on the one that we just took

to really like six figures ARR within the first few months and that was the fastest like I've never I've seen other things where we've taken it you know two 3,000 and then 4,000 and then it had to work for that but this one just like hit I think the other one I worked with to I shared the hard pay wall strategy we took an app that was already making about $1,000 and we flipped it to 8 to 10,000 just optimizing the pay wall and the onboarding hard pay wall by the way valal and we saw 10,000 with a hard pay wall but 5,000 with a soft pay wall and so using adapt which that app did we were able to change some things around on the pay wall without needing a new update and so that really worked out well but that would be the fastest growing because T we didn't even do anything to the ASO it was already doing downloads about 100 downloads a day that's why I said when I say all you need is 100 downloads a day to have a

sixf figureure business just because I really just did it right like I did it we're doing this with this app too those would be the two that come to mind R thank you so much thanks for having me appreciate it