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How to Transform ANY Business into a Profitable APP Business #appbusiness #appdevelopers

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The bottom line

A creator with an existing audience can turn teaching content into a profitable app by pre-selling it, then running a subscription built on real use. Doing so funds the build, validates demand, and gives the audience a way to act on what they learned.

Key takeaways

  • An existing audience gives an app high-intent users and a ready launch. 2:55
    • Miracle Morning already had 4 million books sold, a movie, 500 podcast episodes and a community asking for an app.
    • 80% of downloads come from people who watched the movie, heard the podcast or read the book.
  • A cheap pre-order proves demand and pays for the build. 3:48
    • A $5 pre-order sold about 18,000 apps on launch day, and that money funded the later subscription business.
    • A pre-order needs only screenshots, an icon, a listing and a light beta build, which can keep updating while it sits in pre-order.
  • A subscription lasts only when people actually use the app. 18:25
    • Weekly plans mostly attract people who never use the app, so Miracle Morning offers only monthly and annual plans.
    • Out of 100 downloads, only about 20 start a trial, and that gap is the main worry.
  • Onboarding is the main sales moment, so the paywall belongs there. 12:04
    • About 80% of people who download an app don't return the next day, and many never reach the home screen.
    • One client showed the paywall before the sign-in screen. Paywall views rose from 40% to 94% and sales rose 52%.
  • Tracking data, ratings and marketing from day one avoids costly early mistakes. 32:04
    • Missing analytics events left the team deciding by intuition a year and a half into the subscription.
    • Turning on the rating popup lifted the app's rating from 4.3 to 4.9 within a month, after a year of slow growth.

The app ends up becoming like your digital accountability partner in your pocket.

Josh, builder of the Miracle Morning app

Chapter summaries

0:00 Why years of flopped apps led to Miracle Morning

Josh built apps for a decade without a way to reach buyers, and a book with a ready community fixed that.

  • Getting an app to market was harder than building it 1:01
    • Friends called each app genius, but Josh wanted to move on to the next build.
    • Past software needed carriers like Verizon and AT&T and makers like Apple, Samsung and LG to all say yes.
    • Ads worked by luck a couple of times, but never the way he wanted.
    • He calls that carrier and OEM model "really hard."
  • The book left readers juggling apps, which showed the gap 2:10
    • The 2017 book let readers choose their own routine from many tools.
    • Josh ended up using three apps each morning, and it felt chaotic.
    • His idea was an app that makes the book's lessons playable and interactive.
    • He visualized, affirmed and journaled about building it, and two years later he spoke with author Hal Elrod.

3:27 Pitching a cheap, pre-sold build

A small fixed-cost build that earns money before launch removes the author's risk.

  • Josh offered a first version for under $20K in three months 3:27
    • Hal had been quoted hundreds of thousands of dollars for apps.
    • Josh promised it would be profitable before launch day.
    • Apple lets you set a price on a pre-order, so people pre-download while you build.
    • Paid apps are rare now, which made the model unusual.
  • The app works best when it turns reading into daily action 5:59
    • Morning routines can go thousands of ways, so the app picks one guided path.
    • The target user wakes up scrolling social media and news.
    • The flow is to read the book or watch the movie, then open the app and press play.
    • The feature backlog is "endless."

7:20 Bringing the community into the app

Owning the channel lets a brand pull its audience back every day.

  • Moving 350,000 Facebook members into the app gives control and retention 8:00
    • The brand controls the whole experience and builds brand equity.
    • Daily 30-second wisdom videos from Hal, Josh and others make it feel like a friend.
    • A social post is easy to miss, but an app controls notifications, text, email and an in-app inbox.
    • The model is the feel-good morning TV show.
  • Opening and closing the day gives users a trigger to return 10:30
    • Miracle Evening makes it the last app at night and the first in the morning.
    • The app follows the book, which added an evening chapter in December.
    • Steve says the hardest part for any app is the trigger that gets people to open it.
    • The routine itself supplies that trigger: "I'm up."

11:15 From paid app to subscription

Keeping the paid purchase free and putting only new value behind the subscription made the move fair.

  • The first-time experience is where most people convert 11:15
    • It goes against the habit of winning customers before selling.
    • Onboarding is called the number one feature because everyone sees it.
    • Steve says this is when people are most ready to see pricing.
    • The goal is an onboarding that sells the value of Miracle Morning.
  • The $5 app became the free tier, and the subscription added only new things 12:57
    • Some buyers said they had already paid.
    • Many paid apps stop improving because buyers pay only once.
    • The first version was a 30-day challenge with check-offs, tracking and community accountability.
    • The subscription added playable content: put on headphones and be guided through the morning.

14:35 A video-gated beta of super fans

Making people submit a video turned a half-million-person email list into a small, committed beta group.

  • Asking for a video filtered the list down to the most devoted fans. 15:34
    • One email to the list of about 500,000 brought 400 video submissions within 24 hours.
    • A plain "join the beta" would have drawn 30,000 to 40,000 sign-ups, more than Apple's beta limits allow.
    • Testers joined a Slack community and Zoom calls to help shape what the app should become.
    • The video asked people to share what they love about the Miracle Morning and how it changed their life.
    • Many testers had kept the routine for 1,000+ days, so the team could learn what would get them to use an app at all.
    • A guest from an earlier interview got hundreds of beta users from a private Facebook group and earned $10,000 in her first week as a paid app.

17:25 Plans, platforms and markets that won't pay

The plan you offer, the platform and the country each change who pays and who actually uses the app.

  • Weekly plans fit utility apps, not a habit brand. 17:59
    • Weekly plans work for utilities, where people aren't sure they'll use the app long term.
    • Photo and video apps sometimes see a higher lifetime value with weekly plans.
    • A new onboarding question rates the user's morning routine from 1 to 5. The most common answer is 1, "non-existent".
    • Answer 2 is "not good" and answer 3 is "average", so these users need real help, not a quick trial.
    • The team might test weekly one day but doesn't expect to.
  • Android converts about half as well as iOS. 20:05
    • Trial sign-ups on Android run at about half of iOS, sometimes less.
    • Lowering the Android price was tried, though community members may object.
    • A cross-platform framework made Android cheap to add.
    • The book is in 40 languages and 100+ countries, and the app is downloaded in over 80 countries.
    • The rule of thumb: for reach go Android, for money go iOS.
  • Markets that won't pay for subscriptions may need another model. 21:53
    • A new survey asks users who close the paywall why: no localization, too expensive, or unclear value.
    • Camera Plus shows banner ads during onboarding, and its ad revenue reportedly rose.
    • Sponsors chosen per market, such as two or three brands for Brazil, would fit better than a random ad network.
    • This may suit Android better than iOS.

24:36 Building a daily habit

A habit forms when the app is on the home screen, tied to an existing trigger and followed by a reward.

  • The first step is a spot on the home screen. 25:04
    • An app that is out of sight is out of mind.
    • A widget costs at least four app slots, and the next size costs eight.
    • So first win the home screen, then upgrade users to a widget.
    • The tactics for moving users there are kept private.
  • Tie the app to a ritual that already exists, then reward it. 26:45
    • For a family movie app, Saturday movie night is the trigger.
    • Siri can answer movie questions through the app, and each family member's review trains the recommendations.
    • A calendar event can deep link into the app.
    • Zero fasting sends a weekly digest with a "click to tweet" brag. Make customers look good and the habit loop repeats.
    • Suggested reading: Hooked and The Power of Habit.

29:10 Using personal data to bring users back

Showing people their own history and data gives them a reason to return and builds loyalty.

  • Spotify's year-end review turns user data into a shareable moment. 29:15
    • It shows users the data held about them.
    • It has built-in social sharing and virality, and it connects listeners with artists.
    • Many apps now try to copy it.
    • The same idea could suit other apps where the user's own record is interesting.
  • A viewing archive with ratings would keep Netflix-style app users loyal. 29:46
    • Netflix recommends titles but doesn't show what you watched, what you said about it or your scores.
    • Seeing how the algorithm works, and training it, would add trust.
    • One user relies on Just Watch to remember what he has already seen, so he doesn't rewatch a movie.
    • An email like "you liked Inside Out, try these older ones" could pull users back, and a view of friends' reviews would add a social layer.

31:41 Mistakes to avoid: tracking and marketing

Luck and an existing brand carry a launch only so far, so tracking, store basics and marketing belong in the plan from day one.

  • Tracking events for the first day, three days and first week lets data replace gut feeling. 32:04
    • Some releases are held back so a new event can run for a couple of weeks first.
    • Josh describes changing a button or text on a feeling, then finding the data can't confirm it.
  • The launch ran on community luck, and a marketer from day one would have helped. 33:23
    • A net promoter score of 68 meant fans spread the books and movie to each other.
    • Podcasts and speaking, already done for the book, did the promotion.
    • Hundreds of thousands of Facebook followers and an email list could have fed early ad data. Meta already knows where the fish are.
    • A marketer would also have handled the customer life cycle.
  • Basic app store optimization gives a big email launch extra push. 34:57
    • The title carries the most weight.
    • It needs no hire, only knowing the basics before launch to half a million subscribers.
  • First open to paywall view is the number one metric. 35:44
    • You're going to miss 100% of the shots you don't take, so aim near 100%.
    • The other funnel steps are install to trial and trial conversion.
    • An app with 5 million monthly active users saw revenue and retention rise after it added a paywall to onboarding.

37:01 Ratings, reviews and email

Prompting for ratings at the right moment lifts rank and credibility, and email covers what the in-app prompt misses.

  • Ask for a rating right after a trial starts. 38:19
    • One App Masters case moved the average from 4.5 to about 4.7, with 4X more ratings in a month.
    • Starting a trial shows intent to like the app.
    • Users who review unprompted tend to be less happy, and more ratings help store ranking.
  • On iOS, a link parameter can push written reviews by email. 39:32
    • Josh's iOS count sat near 3.2 thousand ratings for two months while Android kept climbing. He suspects Apple wants reviews, not just ratings.
    • Add action=write-review to the App Store link and send it in an email.
    • It works only for users who still have the app installed.
    • Apple dislikes incentivized reviews, so a contest is risky.
  • Email is an underused channel in apps. 40:07
    • Changing a subject line from "the benefits of working out" to "our most popular workouts" raised the workout rate 1.8x.
    • It targeted trial users inside the 7-day window.
    • The client believed one workout would keep them for good.

41:22 Starting local and timing sign-in

A first version can work without a backend or login, but accounts matter once you want to reach users.

  • The $5 first version stored data on the device with no backend. 41:25
    • Data uploaded once the backend shipped.
    • A user who got a new phone before then would have lost data.
    • Accounts are still needed to communicate with users.
  • Sign-up can come after the paywall, as Cal AI does. 42:24
    • Its onboarding login has an X, and sign-up is required only after the trial starts.
    • Josh's advice to flip the order meets pushback, and Cal is the example he shows.

In the growth library

Josh and Steve P Young, Josh: app builder behind the Miracle Morning app; Steve P Young: founder of App Masters, an app marketing agency and podcast. A creator-led app launched as a $5 pre-order to an existing book and podcast audience, then converted that paid base into a subscription business. The talk covers validation through a beta filter, paywall placement, plan and Android pricing choices, and the analytics, marketing and ratings mistakes made along the way.

Lessons that draw on this:

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

Transcript1118 lines
0:01

what is up sub Summit thank you guys for being here this is the app side of things apps apps anybody no all right we're talking about apps and we're talking about how to build high margin digital tech software using your community Creator yeah exting follow existing Brands everything in between I am Steve p young founder of app Masters we are the number one app marketing channel and podcast all about apps we have an app marketing agency where we're our mission is to be the most effective most affordable agency out there talk a lot about SEO for the App Store monetization stuff and today we're going to talk to Josh who's got a great app called Miracle morning if you haven't heard about the book it's based off the book too and so we're going to break it down Josh let's start because we and you and I have been creating apps for 10 years thinking we have the greatest ideas but then they flop so it led you to Miracle

1:01

morning yeah so I've been building apps for yeah almost a decade now and as somebody that loves Building Product the hardest thing once I have the product and people my friends and family are like this is amazing this is genius is how you going to get it to Market and then right when that happens it's like H I'm like ready to move on to the next thing and I built so many different apps and we we would we would run ads and we we' got lucky a a few times with a couple different products sure but ultimately like it didn't it didn't end up going the way I wanted it to we had we had different softwares that we built that were that had dependencies on the carriers uhuh and the the OEM so we built like integrated app technology for Verizon AT&T uh we we needed to get the Apple Samsung LG and and all the OEM to say yes and then we needed to get the the carriers to say yes and that was just a hard business model really hard business

2:05

model and um when I read the miracle morning book in 2017 the book said like oh you could wake up in the morning and you could do all these amazing things for yourself and here are all these different apps and tools and ways that you can do it you could choose you could choose your own adventure and you could do it for as little or as long as you want and for me I was like all right I got to download all these apps and do all these things and I found myself in the morning like using three different apps and and it it was it was a little chaotic so I I came up with this idea of like what would it look like to build an app that that basically takes everything that you learned in the book and bring it to action and make it playable and interact and and add interaction to it and um and that's exactly what we did and Miracle morning already had 4 million books sold they already had a movie movie there 500

3:01

podcast episodes they had a community in the they had a community that was already asking for an app yeah so I was like okay I'm going to build the I I'm going to use the tools of the of the miracle morning which teaches you to visualize and to affirm and to to journal in the morning and I started visualizing me building the miracle morning app for halad and I started affirming that I was going to do that I started journaling my ideas and all the things that I wanted to do and uh two years later I ended up having the conversation with Hal and he he thought apps were going to you know it's I've gotten quotes for this before hundreds of thousands of dollars and I'm like hell I'll I'll build a V1 for under 20K in three three months it will be profitable before the day it comes out we'll do a pre-order we'll sell it for $5 and not many people sell $5 apps in the App Store these days it used to be a

3:56

thing where you had to pay to then download an app app and uh we we decided to to do that cuz you could actually run a pre-order in the app store and have people pre-download it so while we were building it we were we were gaining pre basically pre- downloads were you able to set the price as a pre-order yeah okay yeah so it's five $5 and you know we when we the day we the day we launched we sold 10 tens of like I think it was like 18,000 uh subs or apps not even subscri sction it's just apps yeah and then we use that money to then build a subscription business that's awesome so those are not technical on the app side of things you can pretty much to put an app in pre-order you don't actually need a working build no so you just need to screenshot app icons an app listing and then just do the pre-order as long as there's some beta so that Apple can improve it you just need a very very light version because while it's in

4:56

pre-order you can actually continually update that build so that you can see the traction if there is traction go ahead and continue and finish up the build as well but Josh KN looking back on this now the app done very well for itself are there key components that you're looking for like why Miracle morning why this book or could it be any book that could be applied to this it's not necessarily any book but you know I think in 2024 one of the biggest one of the biggest opportunities is if there's any book that's teaching you how to do something and you can create create an interactive digital experience based on those teachings so you could actually take action because how many times do you go to a conference you learn something you read something you watch something somebody tells you to do something your coach tells you to do something but then you end up not taking action on it you have no accountability

5:45

so the app ends up becoming like your digital accountability partner in your pocket that that can guide you to do the thing that these creators are teaching okay right so it's like if if you know one of the one of the big opportun unities for for us was we wanted to we wanted to make it easy for you to do the miracle morning you read the book and it tells you all these different ways and you kind of have to figure it out on your own you got to download these apps and you can you know morning routine could go in any direction there's thousands of ways that you could wake up and start your day right so we wanted to make it easy for people that we knew weren't really intentionally having a having a good experience in their morning we're kind of just waking up and scrolling on social media and reading the news and taking care of the kids and driving to work and we we wanted to make it easy for people to read the book or watch the

6:42

movie get all Juiced up about like wow if I do this my life can be so much better and then be able to just get into the app press play and take action be guided through an experience and be able to take all of the lessons and key ideas from the book and and and build out experiences and our back L is like endless cuz it's it's literally infinite of what what we can do you made the backlog for features yeah it's it's it's it's endless and by the way should I wear these are these better it's nice okay I don't want to ruin my hair all right but you're not hearing anything different I I hear like you speaking like a mouse okay good I'll get closer so I really like that strategy Josh was you were utilizing an existing Community what I've been doing now is building apps based off of Just market research what people are looking for in the app space and not leveraging like what my head and my brain says is a good idea but literally

7:36

what people a good idea for you to put that on I don't know I think I go without it but literally what people are searching for instead so beyond Community are there anything else that would help your anybody else that's wants to build an app that has a community that has a brand hey look for these key elements and components and this will translate well into the app space yeah I mean we we had Comm we have a community on Facebook and now we're we're looking to bring our our Facebook community of 350,000 people into into the I see we want to we want to be able to bring them from Facebook Community into our app so we can control the whole experience and and and from like a brand Equity standpoint that's that's awesome we can get all our community to come into the app it also helps with retention and what we're what we're wanting to do now is create like daily nuggets of wisdom so if you just just

8:42

came into the app just similar to like how back in the day when you wanted to you turn on the TV and you watch The Good Morning America show or you know some good day good day good Morning Show like the reason why people do that is because it it gives them something that makes them feel good or gives them a new piece of wisdom they're learning something new and we we want to use we're building something right now where you can we have like a daily dose of wisdom where Hal is how and myself and a couple other characters are going to be recording 30 second videos and it's just about like what's one one piece of wisdom that we can give them and and sign off with like in a friendly way it's like we want to be like the digital friend it's like you open up the app in the morning it's like you know that when you open up this app there's going to be someone that offers wisdom to you that feels like a friend and I think that

9:34

that's a huge opportunity for Brands to to be able to have like daily doses of wisdom that bring people in it's a notification you have a new video you have a new video message from hell you have new video message from Steve and um you know we see that on Instagram we see that on Facebook you know if you go live on on Instagram the chances of me seeing that you go live or that you post something is not as is not as high as if you're a brand that has an app that's controlling the notifications and using text and using email and using inbox in inapp inbox features to be able to interact with people I like it and I think with apps it's so difficult to get people into apps I know and so I like the fact that it's Miracle morning it's a morning routine when you wake up the trigger is I'm up let me check out the miracle morning routine and kind of go through that because I think that's the hardest part especially if you got an

10:27

entertainment type of app is what is the trigger that's going to get me to open up the app yep so there's a few things that we we've been working on with that and one of them is is ending the day and starting the day so now we just added Miracle evening so now you're it's the last app that you use at night and it's the first app that you use in the morning now did users ask for this or you just like this would be a great idea so Hal released a new version of the book back in December and one of the new chapters of the book was the miracle evening so we the the book upgraded so the app upgrades with all the new teachings of the book so it it it fit really nicely with that anything from like just a monetization perspective that you can share that's worked out well for you yeah I mean I as far as what I mean one of the things that I was trying to get you there one of the things that works well

11:21

for the app space is during the onboarding experience to have a pay wall the and it's counterintuitive to everything else that you might seen get them win your customers over then try to sell them but the app space actually when they're going through that firsttime user experience is when you should try to hit them with their pricing page that's when most people convert so sorry I was trying to get you to go there we we know that okay yes this is what Steve talks about a lot um and data shows that like 80% of people that download apps don't even come back the next day yeah so and then there's a huge percentage of people that don't even make it to the home screen to see all the things that you've built so it's like we we like to say that the onboarding is your number one feature because that's what people end up seeing the most so we're we're definitely focused on having an amazing experience

12:16

that helps sell the value of of Miracle morning we're very fortunate that they are higher intent because the 80% of our our downloads come from people that have watched the movie listen to the podcast or read the book so um that certainly does does help um I like it one thing I want to transition into is you launch as a paid app you sort of validate the idea that people are willing to download and pay for an app how is that transition to being more of a subscription app what did that look like any barriers any negative feedback that you got from customers because they technically just paid you $5 now you're asking them to pay a bit more to stay on the subscription yeah so the the way that we decided to do it was the $5 app that you paid for became free so the thing that you paid for was now the free feature the free features of the miracle morning app so everything when we released the subscription

13:18

everything that was the part of the subscription was something that you didn't have so I think that that helped I'm sure there were some people that like I already paid uh it's very non-traditional to like pay for a $5 app but at the same time I think it's really important that if you are selling a $5 app you look at all the the the apps that are you have to pay for to then download and the the mindset is is like these these app companies aren't actually upgrading that experience it's like they could just make an app and you know maybe just maintain it because it's you're not subscribing to anything so it's like you don't necessarily need to be adding more value because they're not paying for more value so a lot of you know a lot of the apps that we see for paid are don't aren't necessarily upgrading themselves as much so we wanted to really add a massive upgrade to the app which would allow people to

14:13

like the first version of the app was like do a 30-day challenge and check it off and track it and have an accountability from the community to make sure that you you did the thing that you said that you wanted to do yeah when we transition from a $5 app to a subscription app we decided to make playable content that you could just wake up put headphones on and then and then just be guided through a Morning Experience where you don't even have to think about it it's the first thing that you're doing in the morning and um after 10 minutes you're like wow I feel so much more energy and I feel like I'm going to have a productive day and that I I understand what my intentions are and I feel more grateful and I'm like ready to do all the other morning activities like taking care of the kids and making breakfast and going to school and driving to work and everything like that so I know one of the past guests I

15:01

had on she worked with influencers to build out a social Med media planner calendar app and it was a private Facebook group where she got a lot of beta users like hundreds and what she launched as a paid app she made $10,000 within the first week it was amazing and she was like look they told me what to build so did the miracle morning Community tell you what to build that first version so that's a that's a great question so and perfect segue cuz pro thank you what we what we what we ended up doing was because we knew that so many people in the community wanted us to build an app we said tell us what you we're we're launching we're launching a new app and we're launching a beta program and if you tell us what you love and appreciate about the miracle morning and how it's made an impact on your life via video you submit a video wow we will enter you into the the beta group so you could be the first to experience it and

15:56

help us create the future of the m morning app one email within 24 hours we had 400 video submissions and we had 400 beta testers so and these were our super fans these were people that were a comfortable enough to get on video and share their experience which was already an amazing filter of like these are the type of people that we want to be in our beta test and um yeah it just worked really just worked really well can I ask how big the email list was it was a half a million wow that's crazy at that time yeah yeah 400 is a good amount of people yeah well the the video was the filter right no I know you don't even care what the video content if we just said hey you want to be a part of the beta test we would have got you know 30 40,000 beta testers and apple wouldn't allow that so you made it harder for people to say yes yeah just to see how well much they wanted it yeah cuz we wanted to

16:46

like we wanted to we started a slack Community for the beta testers and we would have zoom calls and everything and we wanted beta testers that were willing to get on video on zoom and interact with us and you know nurt nurture the community you know bring together a community of people that are helping us crowdsource what to bring you know how we can help them because these were people that already had existing Miracle morning uh routines these were people that were either a already using apps or doing it outside of the app or a hybrid or both and it was really interesting for us to understand what would get them to use an app if they've been doing the miracle morning for a thousand plus days yeah so one thing I want to transition to as well is I'll be talking about this tomorrow and my talk but like we found that three plans tend to convert the best so typically having a a weekly or weekly monthly and yearly those are the

17:39

obvious ones monthly thre month yearly tend to convert the best and I know yearly is doing really well for you but yearly on Android and yearly on iOS is a little bit different too right so different yeah um we we do two plans by the way so we do we do an we do an annual and a monthly weekly is a is a good plan however the people that end up paying for the weeklys are the people that techn are the ones that don't end up using the app and in in 2024 it's really important to to to share that if you want to be successful in this business it's really about getting them to use your app the days of getting them to subscribe to something and not use it is not is not workable anymore and it it I mean it it definitely lasts it gets to a it you can make money but it's not necessarily sustainable and I like to build products that I want people to use and that's actually what keeps me up at night is

18:47

like how to you know it's like you get a thous 100 people to read the book today and 100 people you know 100 people download the app and only 20 people end up sub starting a trial like that's that's that's what keeps me up at night is like how to get the people to start the trial because I want them to start the trial because I want them to do the thing that I know is going to help them live a better life and we just started a we just added an onboarding question on a scale of 1 to five how's your morning routine and the N number one response is number one which is non-existent number two is um it's um it's it's it's not good and number three is it's average so so like I know that these people that are downloading the app that are reading the books really need our help and a weekly a Weekly subscription doesn't necessarily um fit our brand it might be something that we would we would try but

19:47

I I don't think so we' seen good results with weekly on the the video photo video side of things sometimes it has a higher LTV even the the yearly I think it works well weeklys work well for utilities y in the sense it's like I want to I'm downloading the app to do this thing and I'm not sure if I'm going to be using this long term so I think it works well for that as far as iPhone and Android and conversion it's it's completely different I think we're seeing like half for Android as far as the amount of people that sign up for a trial and then some yeah sometimes even even less than that to to the point where we have tried lowering the price for Android versus iPhone which is you know if if community members start speaking out it's not necessarily the best the best thing but like but like ultimately like if it ends up getting them to buy the thing and they end up using the thing and it ends up helping

20:47

them that's what we're in the game of doing right looking back would you still have an Android version yeah we I mean we use we built it in a framework that allows us to build both so we didn't we didn't build native so it it really isn't too much work for us to have Android and because the book's been trans Amic morning book's been translated in 40 different languages and read in over a 100 countries uh we knew that we had an international audience we have people downloading the app in over 80 countries so um we had to go Android because you know we live in you know we just heard this last talk how many of you have Android but like you know here in America it's like it's like split but outside of outside of America there's there's certain countries that are only using Android so I know Android you know if you want the reach go Android but if you want the money go iOS and some apps don't have an Android version and do

21:40

pretty well yeah because Android just doesn't convert as well as iOS and it it it also gets me thinking about you know trying to understand different different cultures and how what their buying habits are so what we're now starting to do is we're now starting to I I don't think I've told you this we're now starting to survey why they hit the X oh so X on the pay wall yeah why they hit the X on the pay wall why they're not starting the 7-Day trial we're now starting to survey and understand why is it because it's not localized is it because it's too expensive is it because you don't know what it does and we're trying to understand that and one of the one of the things I learned at Mau was potentially in certain markets where they wouldn't pay they don't pay for subscriptions it's like give it to them for free and run ads or try to find a different completely different business model or different markets uh which is

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interesting and something that we potentially want to explore because one app I just saw it's going to go on our YouTube video YouTube channel soon is an app Camera Plus if you guys want to check it out literally has ads banner ads during their onboarding experience and I was like is This brilliant or crazy and so I can see some dirty looks but actually when I shared this on social media the people said it actually does work that PE that their ad Revenue increased now I think it's a little bit too aggressive personally but the numbers say that their ad Revenue went up when they showed yes right on the first very first screen and even check it out it's a pretty cool flow because they'll have onboarding screens the pay wall you hit X on that they have another screen where they're engaging with you and we have seen that engaging with your users just like you're doing by what's your morning routine does increase

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conversions on those pages they're even sh Show bigger ads on there it's pretty crazy I think it's an Android play personally I would do it on Android but I don't know if about iOS yeah on that one and if it's a if we're doing it for a specific Market rather than them just being random ads yeah I would actually want to find somebody to sponsor Those ads right a specific brand for that market whether it's you if it's Brazil I would find two or three brands to be the ads for the app rather than putting an ad Network in that's just random and doesn't isn't necessarily cohesive with the experience of the app like actually if you're going to run ads actually add add value and bring on brands that you that you love and that you support to to uh show to these people so great we do have questions you I have question but John do you got anything for us

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for our product we do movie andv reviews parents and we have a lot of content to really te parents about um you know what you have any advice build kind daily or weekly have it um for our users because it it's tough It's not like if you have any advice on best how to build that yeah I mean first and foremost my my favorite thing is to get them to put the app on their home screen that's something that we're working on right now it's like you got to have like that beach front condo on on the home screen because it's like if it's out of if it's out of sight it's out of mind um widget ioset well so we talk about this a lot in internally that you know a widget is a minimum of four apps that you have to remove from your home screen and it's and then it's it's it's four apps or the the next size widget is eight apps so we're starting with can we get them to put the app on the home screen and if

25:45

they can do that well then we can upgrade them to a widget if we if we know that they do that and one of the things that that we're doing um actually I'm not going to share that I was going to say I wanted to but too too soon not yet you got to pay for that yeah um how were you gonna say how you get users move the app onto the home scen that there's some strategies on that yeah okay yeah um when it's not recorded John but I will say is like I mean look we have movie Nights my family's here but maybe Friday nights Thursday nights like hey Saturday night is the big ritual there go yeah if we can kind of build something around that that seems actually I think my challenge is I always have people at the organization to build habits gamey the app like it's kind of buzz I'm just trying to find a way actually useful not like trying to force AIT on it's actually buil around what they're I think it's you know with

26:48

with AI I think there's a there's a huge opportunity because ultimately you know it's all about asking questions now right there's there's an app in interface but there's also like having the app and integrating the app with Siri and being able to ask Siri the question for that app that allows you to go into that app and get that answer right because it's ultimately you're trying to train the behavior of like if I'm looking to figure out what movie to watch with my family I want to use this app to help me and then once I watch this movie and then I provide feedback on my experience with this movie and allowing the mom dad and the kids to each give their own review that then trains the algorithm which then could provide an email newsletter to tell the you know to to to tell the mom or dad hey here are the suggested movies for next next Saturday or even doing like a calendar integration where you accept

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the calendar permission and now it's like movie night is now part of part of the calendar and then you can have the location in the calendar event be a deep link that brings them into the app yeah yep do that yeah so there's I mean we can we can certainly talk after this but there's I mean it's the ideas are infinite of what's what's possible and I I think that there's a good use use case for that I think you have a great trigger right like it's hey movie night so you have that and then I think it's just a reward that builds the habit I mean there's obviously great books about this like hooked and then I like The Power of Habit too so those are great books but those you you have that initial trigger and I think just ultimately figuring out what they want to do and then giving them reward one of the apps I give you an example but I saw really good results with this people are tweeting this out but it's called zero

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intermittent fasting I've been using this for years but they used to send me a weekly digest being like hey Steve you've fasted like 20 127 Hours I am bragging here this week and then it said click to tweet this and I I went and follow that hashtag and people were tweeting this and obviously it makes me look good and so like what can you do to make your customers look good so that they it becomes that Perpetual habit Loop you got the trigger which is the hardest part John and then it's just building out the rest and you'll figure that part out yeah and you look at like what what Spotify is doing with like the end of the year review it's like you know people are trying to replicate all of that right Spotify is basically showing you all the data that they have about you at us at the end of the year and it's and it's amazing and it's it's got the social sharing component it's got the V you know the verality

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component to it it's fun it's exciting and it connects you with the artists and I think that there's an opportunity you know like Netflix shows you what movies and TV shows and things that you should watch based on what you've watched but they're not showing you all the ones that you've watched and what you've said about those things what you think about them and what the score is is for those those movies so I think something that would keep people coming back into the app and create loyalty would be being able to have the archives of everything that it is that you're watching and being able to see under the hood what the algorithm is doing I think that the it's it's okay in certain use cases that could be applicable to you guys to show how the algorithm is actually working for you and and how you can help train that algorithm to help you find the right movies with the with the appropriate

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ratings and things all right anybody else have anything John I like that too because I use this app called just watch my wife and I will do yeah I have no idea what to watch sometimes and it's a way for me to say I've seen this because I have watched movies twice I don't like to do that I'm like I I seen this I think I've ever seen this but anyways it's a way for me to remember what I've watched and then I go for it like when we're looking for a movie cuz I I like their like algorithm oh you like this I I find a movie I like and I look for like people also like this and that could be a way for you to send an email or anything just be like hey you like this inside out too you might also like these other older ones too and I don't know if this already exists but like the social component of it could be amazing right it's like who are all of your friends that watched this movie what did they have to say

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about it what did their kids have to say about it like there's there's something really cool there okay yeah amazing all right circling back to you Josh from since you've launched and knowing everything now and since we've been doing this for so long is there anything that you would change or any big mistakes that you learned to got that got you to this point oh yeah this is a great question question so if any of you are looking to build an app or currently building an app or in early stages um the one one thing I'd recommend is to make sure that you understand that your data right away that you're building the app and that you're building in all the events to actually understand what what everybody is doing in your first version after the first day after the first three days after the first week so the sooner you know how they're actually using the app the sooner you could be making uh database decision rather than like

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intuitive heart-based decisions that we've been making for like the last andong the last year what we've been wrong on and we've been yeah we've been wrong you know it's like sometimes it's just a feeling that I'm going to change this button or this text and um and we're still you know year and a half into the subscription we're still often asking ourselves questions and looking at the data and realizing that we didn't set up the events right to have to be able to properly answer these question questions to the point where the only way that we can make decisions is by by our intuition and in our heart and or sometimes we be like we can't release this yet because we need to we need to add this event and let it run for a couple weeks so we can then answer this question so we can decide what to build yeah um so I would say anal analytics is is very important um and then I would say the other one is

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hiring a marketing team so we were we were an app that had an existing brand and community that was based on my business partner being on podcasts speaking on stages and the we have a really high net promoter score we have like a 68 MPS so the community would just Ripple the books and the movie to to each other and we when we launched the app we were able to rely on the existing Community the existing email list and social media and and everything like that and then we're now at a place where it's like now we actually really need to do marketing we haven't we haven't really done a whole lot of marketing we' just been lucky that like the podcasts are landing this the speaking is landing it was stuff that we were already doing for the book so the app never really did any actual marketing uh so we can just focus on creating a great product and focusing on the user experi experience so I wish I I

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wish I would have I wish I would have hired a marketer like from day one yeah to to handled the customer life cycle experience and to be able to start running ads I mean we already had hundreds of thousands of people on Facebook we already had an email list like apple could have helped or Facebook meta already knows where the fish are and we could have already had a lot of early early on data running running ads and doing those things I think the so I do lot of SEO for the Absol store called ASO and I think just having that just the basics done like the foundation stuff so if you know anything about SEO you'll know a lot about ASO like having the right title that's going to have the highest weight so if you guys had that when you did your big launch to the half a million email subscribers at least that gives you a little bit of push and you don't need to like honestly hire anybody you just need to know a little

35:19

bit about the ASO Basics to have it ready and rocking and then from the event side of things you know like you said the onboarding is at first feature so we really look at the funnel from that onboarding so where are people dropping off in which phase install the pay wall view install the trial conversion install yeah those are the numbers that we look at so like install or technically a first open to a pay wall view is your number one metric because you're going to miss 100% of the shots you don't take but the so you want to get that close to 100% as possible and sometimes I've seen this where where we had one client where we flipped so he had imagine he asked you to sign in through Apple and Google social s in and then he showed the pay wall you can't exit out of either page right you just have to leave the app yeah all we did was flipped it we just showed the pay wall and then asked you to sign in his

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paywall views went up from 40 to 94% and his sales went up 52% that's what I mean like really look at where the drop off is because with a bigger client we have seen to your retention point he he didn't have his pay wall during the onboarding do really well but and they've got organically a million downloads 500 monthly active users five sorry 5 million monthly active users when they finally added the pay wall to their onboarding guess what happened their revenues went up and so did their retention so I feel like with subscription apps I'd lean towards that a little bit more but with subscription apps people who pay pay attention and then people pay well and we have the the numbers I know it is one Justa one case study I feel like it's a lot of users too though entirely and there's a there's actually another Pro tip that came up for me that we completely missed out on and I want to actually talk to

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you more offline about this um and that's getting getting ratings and reviews early on like because we pre-sold the app we had 18,000 people download the app and we didn't do the the popup that got them to write the to to to you know where the stars come up and you press the star and then um you could rate it so like our our ratings didn't really grow until like a year after we weren't really focused on ratings so like there was a huge opportunity for us to just get that that um huge boost in ratings uh much earlier on yeah and and I see so many apps that that launch and don't focus on that and then they have their big you know they they they have their big campaign they get their 10,000 downloads and they missed out on all those opportunities to get people to write reviews which helps you rank higher in the app store which helps give more credibility and um and and when you're not getting people to

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you're not prompting people to write reviews those that write reviews without being prompted aren't necessarily as good as you want them to be so piss off so we we also saw that our rating wasn't as high as it as it was it was like a 4.3 and as soon as we turned on the the popup it went to a 49 Within month so yeah we have a case study where we added the rating the default rating prompt right after people activated their trial and we saw the average rating go up from 4.5 to I think like 4.7 something range and then we had like 4X more ratings that in a month because they obviously showed intent they're like I like your app enough to start a trial would you mind rating it and just showing that default prompt worked the the the one thing that I'm now starting to see that I actually it's actually relevant for this conversation that I wanted to talk to you about was I'm not on on Android I'm still seeing a climb with this with

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this um this methodology of just having it pop up with iOS I'm I'm seeing it stuck it's been stuck for like two months at like 3.2 th000 reviews and or ratings and I think it's because we're getting a lot of ratings but they're not rating a lot of reviews so Apple's like all right you keep getting ratings but you're not getting reviews so we're actually not going to give you your ratings and it so I don't know if you have any yeah there's a there if you do the parameter I think it's action so you you have the App Store link and you put a little question mark I'm going to get really geeky here my wife's going to love this all right so you put a little parameter and it says like I think it's action I have the link it's action equals and then write review you can send an email blast with that link and it'll pop up the whole write a review thing so as long as they have the app installed still you can prompt them easily write a

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review and I I have that like so counterbalance it with the with with email to get them to write a review yeah I think you know we actually haven't even done that yeah in the app space I think the under underutilized channels are email yeah yeah we you can see some really good results with email and especially one client we had where we changed the subject line from the benefits of working out to our most popular workouts we 1.8x his workout rate and this was for those who activated a trial but we didn't want them to cancel they're in the the 7-Day window and so we wanted them to work out once cuz the the client felt like hey if they can work out once they're going to be with us forever and I'll give you guys the the exact link I'm going to pull it up anything I miss did you create a contest for the review have you ever seen anybody create a contest for the reviews where it's like if you write

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a review the top 10 best reviews will win something or I think you can but Apple doesn't want you to incentivize reviews so you got to be careful with you be sending an email yeah you should be okay hopefully they're not on the email yeah yeah John any last things you want to talk about before we say goodbye yeah one

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yeah yeah so the miracle morning app was a the first version of the app that was $5 was a local app we didn't even have a backend yeah so we were saving the data locally and as soon as we released the back end then it just uploaded to the back end and their data was saved so technically if they if they didn't if they got a new phone they would have lost their data but but um you could store it you could store it locally and they don't need to H sign they will have their own unique ID but you know they eventually you'll still want them to create an account if you want to be able to communicate with them but like they can fully use an app and save their user data and to the device but if they lose the device they break the device if they get a new phone then then they won't yeah I mean like apps like com have an x on their their login screen on their onboarding and they'll let you like log in afterwards so yeah cm's

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interesting because John like I was saying you know that pay wall flipping sign in C after you activate a trial you have to sign up you cannot do anything else to access your premium content so because I always get push back when I tell people just flip it like don't make them sign up just ask them later they're like well and I get all this push back and I show that Cal example okay so the the URL is just your app store link that little question mark if it's not already there and then action equals right Dash review action equals right dash you'll text I'll text that all right Josh anything else I missed please say no if any if anybody in the audience is is looking to build an app or has an app or needs help with their app that you know I've spent the last 10 years building apps and if uh there's anything that you want me to help you with so you don't make the same mistakes that I've made over the last 10

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years I'm happy to support yeah Josh is a great product and development guy and we've done this for a very long time and so check out Miracle morning app but then just check out Josh on LinkedIn yeah as well thank you guys for coming really appreciate it I'll see you on the next chat