The Greatest App Growth Hack in the World 🚀

Welcome back to SubHub, the podcast where we dive into the strategies behind standout app businesses. Today I'm joined by Steve Young, founder of Appmasters, an app marketing agency that's helped thousands of indie developers and app teams unlock massive downloads without massive budgets. Steve also hosts the number one mobile app business podcast and a popular YouTube channel where he shares tips on marketing growth and app store optimization for today's mobile economy.

In this episode, we delve into Steve's signature approach to app growth. From ASO and the power of influencer marketing to the importance of datadriven decision-making, we break down the exact strategies that work when you're starting from zero. Whether you're an indie developer or part of a larger team, Steve's insights offer valuable strategies to elevate your app success. Here's my chat with Steve. All right, first things first, I think we want to welcome Steve Young to the show.

Welcome. Welcome to Subhub. Thank you, man. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited. Of course. Yeah, me too. So, today I think we're going to be covering um something kind of specific and hopefully very useful to our both of our audiences. And it's really about kind of growth hacking and and how to get uh you know get your app in front of more people and and get it to be more successful. I think I actually talked to Vitality about this exact strategy, but for those who aren't familiar, this is what I call the greatest growth hack in the world. And it's really meant for zero to one strategies, Ben. I think if you're established app, you don't need to think about all this stuff. But if you're a zero to one app, you're just trying to find some traction for your app. It's early days. Maybe you tried some meta, maybe you tried some Apple search ads, maybe you tried ASO and nothing was really going. This is this

is the greatest growth hack in the world for this. So, just to give you some context, I know Ben, thanks for the intro, but just to give you some context, too, for those we work with thousands of apps before with some of the biggest companies in the world and you know, we've done a podcast for years before, right? We started in 2013 and we've, you know, talked to the biggest people in the app space. Ben, I used the podcast to learn from my heroes in the space, including Chris Barton, early on.

So, thank you, Chris. I will always be, you know, indebted to you for coming on and me really feeling like I made it when I talked to the co-founder, Shazam, and the like the first CEO. But, we've talked to some amazing people to really learn from them and really digest that and use that to help others grow their apps, too, including our own apps. And so this is what I'm having fun. All right, guys. I'm not trying to be like, oh, egotistical. I'm having fun with it.

It is the greatest growth hack in the world because it can kickstart any app. And so I'm going to break down one of the best case studies we have for this. So, first things first, take a screenshot of this. I'm going to if you're just listening to it, then get ready to take notes or have your notetaker app ready to go, too. But you want to do a ratings prompt. Now, this is for, like I said, this is for apps that are just trying to get going. if you have zero ratings, right? I'm like, how are you going to run Facebook ads?

How you going to run Apple search ads? Like, you're they're not going to give you the impression share because you're probably going to have a low tap through rate. Maybe Facebook's going to be a little bit different, but your install rate might not be there. And so, the way I started thinking about this, Ben, was sort of utili like, you know, you hear about habit stacking. This is growth stacking in my opinion because I've already done certain things that I know work. So, I've sort of stacked all the growth hacks into one greatest growth hack. So, one, I know that if you ask for your rating, a rating from your user during the first-time user experience, about 1% of the downloads will leave a review. Okay? And that's important. I'll tell you why that's important. Two, you want to do the ASO because if it works, you'll kickstart your ASO and you'll be ranking for a lot of great keywords that

after the growth hack, you'll have sustained download growth. You'll get a burst, but we're hoping for sustained download growth. So, you want good ASO, and we're not going to go into detail for that. Secondly, to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of downloads, again, that 1% number is coming in. Now, we want to do a lifetime offer for your app. And I know what you're thinking. I have an AI app. I have usage cost. Trust me, you can spend the 5,000 on Meta or some ad platform.

Or you can spend the 5,000 on actual usage costs. Now, you're not you know your numbers. If you can't do it, I'm not going to force you to do it. I'm just telling you for those who have minimal or low usage costs per user cost, then do this lifetime offer for free. And then we're going to promote it on a platform called App Advice. That's for free. We own India app Santa. That's like a group or app sumo where you'll have to pay for these type of promos.

But app advice is free. So I always say start off with app advice. All right. You with me so far, Ben? Anything that you want more explanation on these points? Yeah. So I think I think uh this makes total sense. I would say for the for the beginning there with ratings. Um it makes total sense, right? That that people are not going to be interested in an app that has no ratings or has one rating. Uh, so when it comes to that first piece of advice and and getting that that prompt in there, getting it part of the first user experience, getting people to rate it, um, what would you see as far as numbers that would allow that would let you feel comfortable to maybe move on to the to the next steps or or where you feel like then the ratings are in a good spot? And and kind of as a follow-up question, are we looking at this from from the perspective of simple human psychology of of an actual human looking at your

app store listing and observing the rating count and using that in their own decision-making process and whether they're, you know, further interested in the app and or are we talking about something related to, you know, algorithmic popularity of your application due to ratings? Uh, or is it both? Maybe. I'm such a probate. I'm going to know all your answers and I'm going to answer it in the same order that you just asked for it. Okay, the reason why that it is the ratings prompt during the first-time user experience, I would say about 100. And that's why I came up with the idea, right? We need 10,000 downloads. The times that I have done more than 10,000 downloads, I've done a lifetime offer for free. So 1% of 10,000 is 100. And I that is a number I just made up, but I've read other books that kind of back up 100 being a good number. So it's just triple digits, right? It's not a whole lot, but it's

something to get some social proof in there. So, that's why you want that in there. So, I'm that second answer is 100. Uh, are we looking at this mostly from the perspective of humans, right? Or No, it's both. It's definitely both, right? It is definitely both. it is humans just to see it because you know a lot of times even on Google the way SEO is ranked especially if you look for like calorie tracking app right and you'll see on mobile Google web mobile search web you'll see that app Google is starting to show apps under that search and that rank rating that sorting is ranking is sort of through from my judgment in my personal opinion right now is because of ratings so for the algorithm and for real humans So, as far as the lifetime offer and kind of the specific length of two days, is there something behind the two days? Is it is it maybe because of the idea that it's that it's kind of specifically tease?

You know, you're trying to sort of garner specific attention in a specific amount of time or is there some other reason why two days kind of seems like what we found is you don't need to do longer than two days. App advice when you run on App Advice or Indie App Santa, the first two days are the biggest boost anyways because these are daily deal sites and so you're just old news at that point. And so you can do seven days if you want, but we only want to do two days because we see the biggest impact. And on day three, we'll even see revenue starting to come in because some people have just missed out on that promo. And so long as downloads are continue to come in, people will end up actually buying as long as you built a good app. So here's the app advice. If you go apps gone free, you'll find it.

Look on Twitter, you can see all the information that you need to promote your app on there. Okay? But this is a screenshot, just a visual to show you how it happens. They have an app called Appscon Free in the App Store. That's where most of the downloads would come from. So, one app we did, Ben, we did 106,000 downloads in a matter of couple of days. All right. Yep. So, it went crazy. Lifetime offer for free, and it was a AI note-taking app. So, just FYI, there were some inherent costs, but the developer was willing to take the risk.

We had 800 new ratings, 200 in the US, 600 worldwide with an average rating of 4.8. All right, because here's the premise, right, Ben? You got something for free. Then if you got a ratings prompt right after that, what are you going to do? Yeah, you're you're much more inclined, I think, to give a rating and probably to give a reasonably high one because of that, you know, positive association that was made there. There you go. Then you get a point for that. All right. The app made $7,000 within its first month post that growth hack. All right. Now, how is that in relation to how the app was doing? It was just making a few hundred bucks a month. Then it launched in August of 2023. The developer decided to work with us in December of 2023. We did some ASO. Everything we showed you from before. We did the ASO. We did the payw wall update and we ran this growth hack in early January and since then it

has transpired. Now you're like thinking, Ben, maybe because you're very detail- oriented. I can tell. You're like, Steve, why are the sales going down? I wonder, right? You got a huge bump in in January, but why is it going down? Well, Ben, great question and great observation. Sales are going down. That's because we had such a boost on this green line which is app refer which is app advice right we had a big boost and so that helped the sales in that first month but if you look at the blue line where app store search so more of the organic so ASO downloads we're actually climbing up so it helped skyrocket our downloads and our sales because now we're converting more organic we're getting more organic downloads and we're getting more organic purchasers. Yeah. I mean, you're you're really using the promotion to fuel that longer term growth, right? Because you're improving things like your ASO

through uh both the improvements you've literally made to that and also things like your your ranking is just higher now because you have more ratings, you have more popularity. That's that's how the engine works, right? So, you're you're it's almost like you're you're fueling a fire. So, you're getting that initial burst, but then you're also kind of, you know, setting yourself for a longer term grow. Stop taking away my spotlight. Okay, that's enough of you.

All right, I'm supposed to be saying these things. All right, I'm just messing. So look, in September, it sustained, right? This was September 2024. And when we finished the year 2024, you know, I think this that's why I love this case study, Ben, because we went from 200 bucks a year to $7,000 uh a month. 200 bucks a month to 7,000 to ultimately $90,000 in sales for the entire year. So where else can you spend pretty much no money except hiring us maybe or just re-watching this video in terms of like growth hacking an app and making it this successful? Now, does it always work out this way, Ben? I wish it would because then everybody would be rich. It doesn't always work out this well, but again, where else can you do a growth hack that can get you this type of results? I dare you to come up with it. Yeah, I mean, the ROI is is extremely impressive. Uh, have you noticed with this kind of growth hack a

particular category or categories of app that tend to work better on? Are there things where maybe you you could give some negative advice, but like if you're doing X, right, this is probably not going to work for you? Yeah. I mean, look, if you already got an app that works really well and you got about over 100 ratings, there's no reason why you should do this, right? But the category of app I think the more that it appeals to a broader audience, the better it's going to work out. This is an AI note-taking app that 106,000 downloads, like we rarely do six figures in downloads. the the ones that are more like meditation oriented or fitness oriented, that one applies more to a general broader audience, those tend to do well than like niche apps like I'm going to do an ab workout, right? That's probably not going to work as well. It will still help because, you know, here's some other case studies that

we've done this app. Here's our app. We did 10,000. This was just the difference between Indie App Santa and App Advice and you know, like app Indie App Santa we own. So I'm like, "All right, you're you know, we do well too just in case." Yeah. And then our second app, we took it from zero to just a few thousand dollars a month, right? So this is another way. This is a brand new app. We launched it. We got to $1,000 right away pretty quickly using this grow attack.

So yeah, anything that applies to more of a broader audience to answer your specific question and and really so the the takeaway here is like fairly broad audience also likely pretty early, right? You're starting out in your uh you know in your journey. you're not a giant established thing with huge ad spend and like that's a whole different set of problems, right? With a whole different set of solutions. Um, but I think for zero to one, this makes total sense and it's actually I I have my own app and uh I'm at the basically at the zero spot. So, I may very well take this advice myself and see see what happens.

Please let me know how it goes. Are there any other tips that you can provide? you know, we're looking at specifically 0 to1 these these new folks maybe around like ASO. Um there's all the there's lots of general advice out there. Is there any kind of really specific ASO hacks that you've seen work recently that that are just kind of burning up the chart compared to kind of, you know, the general advice that you can get anywhere?

Oh man, you want me to reveal the the entire thing? Okay. Well, I'm going to give you some. I'm trying to share not as much anymore because we've got a pretty decent platform now and anything I say generally gets taken. But anyways, that's so what I would say, Ben, is don't sleep on niche apps. Okay? And this is in line with ASO. So, for me, you know, there's a lot of tracking apps and a lot of people are just focused on the same tracking apps. And I'm like, bro, like without revealing the things that I know, I'm like, there's a lot of tracker, blank trackers that you're not paying attention to that from an ASO standpoint, probably easier to rank for and drive that early traction so that you're not relying on like how do I get this app going? Oh, I got to spend money on money on meta, right? Like, so it's free if you can get something to work.

So find niche keywords. And why I like niche keywords are here. Example of apps that we've personally worked with. So I know the exact numbers, but these are the sensor tower numbers that I'm providing for you. Right? They're you don't need that many downloads to make a whole lot of money. That's the cool part of niche apps because they tend to be more painkiller apps as I like to call them because you're solving a real need for somebody. It's more niche. So think meditation versus anxiety relief. one has less volume in terms of searches, anxiety relief, but a greater need. And if somebody downloads an app for anxiety relief, guess what they're more likely to do? They're more likely to pay you.

And I've seen it time and time again. So, I can show you some of my favorite tools to use. But what I've been doing from an ASO standpoint, because ASO is getting so hard these days, Ben, is finding the need first. So, finding the keywords first, then building the app for that. So because for the first 10 years of my app journey where I was building apps especially in the first let's say definitely in the first couple of years I was building apps that I thought should be in this space right and now I know how hard it is to market and the money that you have to spend and just testing a stupid creative I'm like dang it man I want the easy route what are people looking for let me just build that and that's where we've seen some really good success on and so I'm very bullish on the AI I space you might have those numbers too through Adapti. You know the AI apps are tending to perform pretty well. And so think about there's

a lot of categories in the AI space. We worked with one client that we launched a brand new AI app. Ben just using ASO alone. We got it to $5,000 in revenue literally within the first month just because the category was ripe. like not a lot of people were focusing in on using AI for this particular category. So that's all I can say and I can show you the numbers to back up so that you know I'm not just trying to talk blackmagic here but at the same time like I'm trying to be more cognizant of what I say. No. And it's not blackmagic.

I I can I can vouch for it as well from the adapty side that that's definitely what we're seeing. I think making uh kind of changing your if especially if maybe if you're an indie or you know a small team and you're working on trying to you know just be successful in the app store as a business uh I think Steve's advice of instead of building stuff that you just think should exist in the world which is a very noble cause in general uh if if your goal is specifically to make revenue maybe even in the short term that you know the strategy of of let's maybe back into an app idea through the the purpose of you know the the structure of keywords and what is both popular but not too popular and and and has interest in the space but not too much interest in the space so that you know you can still have there's still room for you to kind of uh you know elbow your way to hopefully to the front of the chart if you can. So, I

think that makes total sense and and I I it is an interesting dichotomy of we just spent 15 minutes explaining how to, you know, growth hack your way into popularity and our the advice was don't be too too specific with those because that can be make it more difficult. That's true. And and and now we're saying kind of the exact opposite, but that it's it's they're both I think both good pieces of advice and they both um allow you as an app developer or company to sort of approach this from two different perspectives and and hopefully gain success in either way. And it's really up to you as a dev, as a team on kind of which way you want to go. Um, and and I've definitely seen both of both strategies work. So, uh, you know, since then like one of our better performing apps right now. It is more of a niche app in the AI space and we're about $2 to $3,000 a month now with very minimal like ASA spend about maybe $100

to $200 a month on ASA spend. But we found the keyword. It was a more niche keyword. We're able to get it to number one pretty quickly and using the a lot of AB testing with the payw wall. We've been able to get like weekly doing much better from an AI perspective. And so we're starting to see the revenues 3x since we've switched over to giving a 3-day trial on the weekly versus 7-day trial on the yearly. So that's a brand new case study.

Yeah, it's interesting that the that the trials it seems like the trend seems to be that they work better when they're shorter, which you kind of would that seems maybe a little bit sort of against what you would imagine just thinking about it sort of cold, but for sure. So, here it is. This is an app. I I have this in here because this we did the app advice campaign right here. That's where we got downloads. So, these are first-time downloads and this is by month. We last we launched last October 2024. So, I just wanted to show you that, hey, we're getting downloads.

Like, we're not it's not like the sales were like very low. And you can even see in October did pretty well. November pretty decent, but in April, March and April higher, but like April, not too much different from November, right? Just keep that in mind. Not too much different from downloads, but we're getting downloads. So, we we AB tested this these pay walls. A versus B. A has $50 year price with the 7-day trial, and this payw wall is working pretty well for most of our clients. B has no trial on the yearly now, but a three-day trial on our weekly, which is $7. So, the prices are still the same on both pay walls. It's just the trial and the layout is different, right? And what we saw was B saw 3x more sales. And I'll kind of break down. This is A. This is what it looks like. So, this is the yearly 7-day trial. That's what we're pushing. The weekly has no trial. None of these have trials.

We were we made $2,000 within the first three months. So, this is from really we launched around October from October to really January. I even went a little bit longer in January just to give it more data. But we this is how much we're doing total of those three months about $2,000. $800 of which was from the yearly trial, right? 7-day free trial. Now, we saw people activating trial, just not a lot of people were paying us.

they cancelled pretty frequently. So, we made $800 and they made about two, you know, $300 from the lifetime offer, but $800 for the yearly subscription. Now, when we switched to this payw wall where free trial is enabled and the default is the weekly and then if you hit free trial enabled, then the default is yearly. So, technically, you know, if you want the trial, you have to sign up for the weekly essentially, right?

Here's what happened to this payw wall. The sales we saw 3x more sales here and this is from February to late April. The weekly 3-day is winning, bringing in $4,000 worth of sales for those three months. And now the yearly has brought in even more at $1,000. Now it has no trial than it ever did with the 7-day trial. So you really have to play around with payw walls. Even though I felt very confident that this payw wall works really well, I was like, I'm confident this is great. It still didn't work for the the nature of this app. the nature of this app calls for this type of pay wall and you'll see I think Ben more people moving to weekly. I mean I already knew certain categories and if you're going to ask photo and video AI apps tend to be the main categories I've seen weekly work really well on like logo makers things that are like more one-time use type of thing. Weekly does really well. So, I'm I'm thinking weekly

is going to do well, too. And I'm sure you guys have the data or some report internally that says, hey, you know, shorter like lower prices, higher like weekly, you know, higher whatchamacallit subscription length or lower subscription rate would be better. Yeah. I think particularly for things that maybe like you said more transactional that it's almost like the people they they treat the weekly almost more like a transactional thing, right?

We're like, hey, I'm going to use it for a while. It's really great. I'm going to cancel it for a little bit because I'm not using it. Oh, and then but I need it again. So, I'm going to go reactivate and use it some more. And you could get more revenue than you would if if they just maybe tried it once for a month and you're like, it turns out I didn't out of the month I didn't use it that much, so it doesn't feel like it's worth it to me. And you cancel and you never come back. Absolutely. I think I think with weekly it makes it feel more transactional to them, which you know, you might think is maybe a downside. And I think I think you're right that depending on the category, it certainly could be a downside. Um they you know, they subscribe and go, "Oh, never mind."

Right? But with things that are sort of transactional in nature, like you said, a logo maker or whatever, um I think the the weekly gives people more flexibility and I think people value that and so they're going to they're more like you more likely to interact with your app and your subscription kind of, you know, in fits and starts throughout the the long term. Well, that was such great advice. Huge thanks to Steve for joining us and sharing over a decade of his experience.

I for one really appreciated the insights and I'm definitely going to try out some of those growth hacking techniques that you suggested with my own app, Solar. So, I'll be sure to report back on how it goes. To everyone watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, thank you for watching and listening. If you found this episode helpful, please give it a like, leave a comment, and subscribe to the channel so you don't miss future episodes. And if you're listening on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or anywhere else, we'd really appreciate a rating or review. Thanks for tuning in, and we'll see you next time.