I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi helps you show the right paywall to the right user to increase LTV by up to 70%. Learn more →

Missed the first one?

The Simply apps have so much going on, I couldn’t fit it all in one newsletter!

Today, we’ll do a macro analysis of all the apps.

And then we’ll to look at Simply Piano’s web 2 app flow versus their in-app flow.

We don’t have a lot of time, so enough waxing poetically, let’s get started.

Full cross-app synthesis: the Simply playbook

Now with all four apps, here’s the shared framework:

The universal skeleton

Every Simply app runs this sequence:

1. Brand/landing frame (length varies by buyer psychology)

2. Account/profile setup (with multi-profile framing baked in early)

3. Attribution question (position varies by completion rate testing)

4. Identity ritual (name, signature, avatar, household type — app-specific but always present)

5. Age question framed as adaptive content, never demographics

6. Motivation/goal multi-select (emotional + functional JTBD harvest)

7. Skill self-report or probe (Piano uses both)

8. Practice frequency commitment (foot-in-the-door)

9. Equipment check with escape hatch (preserves funnel for no-equipment users)

10. Magic demo (the core AI/feedback loop, proven live)

11. Value delivery (actual lesson content or assessment before paywall)

12. Emotional completion beat (celebration, medal, confetti, identity reveal)

13. Paywall with individual/family toggle, 12-month anchor with discount %, monthly decoy, free trial on the anchor

Curious about signal engineering and mobile measurement?

Shumel Lais, co-founder of Day30 and previously founded Appsumer (acquired by InMobi), explains why most subscription apps feed ad platforms the wrong goal, how precision and recall reshape signal selection, and what a realistic measurement maturity ladder looks like in 2026.

Listen or watch on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

• Youtube ➡️

• Spotify ➡️

• Apple Podcasts ➡️

The five pillars of the playbook

Pillar 1: Frame every data ask as user benefit.

Age = adaptive content. Genre = personalized songs. Goals = tailored journey. They never ask for data without a framed-as-value reason. No app says “we need your age for demographics” — it’s always “your age impacts your vocal range / learning pace / experience.”

Pillar 2: Build commitment through ritual before asking for money.

Signatures, avatars, vocal range reveals, chord recognition, drawing detection, piano note detection. The user has done something real before they see a price. The sunk cost is psychological, not monetary.

Pillar 3: Prove the tech works live.

Every app has a “magic moment” where the AI/CV does something obviously impressive with the user’s real input. This is not optional in the Simply playbook. It’s the single biggest differentiator from competitors that just paywall a course library.

Pillar 4: Family plan is a portfolio strategy, not a pricing lever.

The household question (Piano), family profiles (all four), and “All Simply Apps” bundle (Guitar, Piano) are coordinated. They’re not trying to upsell individual users to family — they’re using the individual paywall to educate about the family plan’s value. LTV on a family plan across the portfolio is probably 3-5x individual.

Pillar 5: Backload the paywall, frontload the value.

Piano’s annotation confirms what the others imply: the intro lesson, skill probe, and magic demo all happen before the paywall. By the time the user sees a price, they’ve already experienced the product and built an emotional narrative about their progress.

The magic demo is the most important shared pattern across all four apps, and I didn’t say enough about it in Part 1 of the newsletter.

Every Simply app has a moment — before the paywall — where the app’s core technology performs on the user’s real input:

• Sing: the vocal range test. You hum and shout into the mic. The app tells you you’re a “Bass” and shows you famous bass singers.

• Guitar: chord preview and strum recognition with real-time feedback.

• Draw: take a picture of your drawing. The AI detects and grades it.

• Piano: connect your phone to your real piano, play a key three times, the app confirms “we can hear you perfectly.”

This is not the same as a free first lesson. A free first lesson shows you the content. The magic demo proves the technology.

Any skepticism the user had about whether a phone app can actually teach them music/art got destroyed by their own experience with it.

If your product has real-time feedback, AI magic, or smart detection — make the user experience it before you ask them to pay.

20 minutes is the portfolio-standard outcome claim

Guitar: “You’ll be playing a song with these chords in about 20 minutes!”

Piano: “You’ll be reading and playing these notes in about 20 minutes!”

“20 minutes” is a tested threshold. Long enough to feel real. Short enough to feel painless.

Pick your version of 20 minutes. Whatever your product is, what can the user credibly achieve in 20 minutes of first use?

Put that number on the screen.

What’s different by app (and why)

A few things worth calling out:

Sing opens with problem-agitation. Guitar opens with aspiration. People who want to sing are often insecure about their voice. People who want to play guitar are excited hobbyists. Meeting people where they are.

Draw opens with a teacher video. Because the buyer is a parent, not the user. Parents want to trust the teacher, not be sold to.

Piano’s landing is the whole portfolio. Because it’s the flagship — the front door for the whole business.

Attribution position varies. Sing frontloads “how did you hear about us?” to screen 1. Guitar pushes it 8 screens in. Draw puts it after a full identity ritual. Piano lands in the middle.

One last pattern to remember

Simply’s paywalls don’t work because the paywalls are well-designed (they really aren’t).

They work because by the time you see them, you’ve already played your first notes on your real piano.

The sale happens before the paywall.

The paywall just collects.

WEB FUNNEL TIME!!

Web Funnel

When I look at their Facebook ad library, they have the majority of ads leading to web, so this has to be a major acquisition driver for them.

Web:

Mobile:

• On web, we need hook them, and hook them fast, so we want super simple questions to get them to make some investment

• On mobile, they’ve already downloaded the app, so it’s okay if the first thing we do is ask them to create an account or profile

  • And they do tell you they adapt to your age, so it doesn’t feel like a creepy question

Web:

Mobile:

You can see on web, they need to do more selling and motivated with awards, social proof, and more.

On mobile, they don’t seem to make as much effort on “Selling” and focus on asking questions to show personalized value.

^ These two screens are important to review - they ask a question about your knowledge and experience. Then follow up convincing that you’ll get value fast!

This is the exact format they use in other apps (Simply Guitar):

People need to know they get results quickly.

Web:

• “Do you have a piano or a keyboard

• “Do you have any previous experience playing piano?”

• “No worries you’re in the right place!”

• “What kind of learning style do you enjoy?”

• “How often do you estimate you’ll practice?”

• “Every learner starts somewhere different”

• “Unlock new possibilities with the Simply Method”

• “What would you like to achieve?”

• “Awesome choices!”

You can see with the web flow, Simply Piano does a lot of:

• Ask a question

• Follow up with reassurance and/or positive encouragement

As opposed to mobile, it’s very tactical to get the info they need to personalize your experience.

The web flow as about 27 screens, while the mobile only around 15 because you actually start experiencing the product.

On web, you need to create more engaging flow since it’s so easy for someone to leave. It’s easy to leave on mobile as well, but your use has already taken the time to download the app, so they must have some level of higher intent.

From ’s Growth Gems:

Growth Gems

💎 Growth Gems #96 - Acquisition & Monetization: Web to app

This is a free newsletter where I share the key insights from the best webinars, podcasts, panels, and talks on growth...And dive deeper! Try it below👇…

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3 years ago · 6 likes · Sylvain Gauchet

Before you just go diving into a web subscription flow, this has tons of useful info to think about in terms of pros and cons.

Next steps in the web flow:

Back to mobile UI:

• You can see that they still ask some of the same questions across both flows, but the order of the questions is often different

On the web side, they still have like 10 screens and the paywall and then you have to download the app to truly experience the product.

Simply Piano on mobile doesn’t waste much time and gets right into!

The number one message from Part 1 of exploring Simply is:

Show value early and get users invested before the paywall!

The showing of value on mobile is much easier because you’re already in the product!

Okay, here is the web flow:

As you can see, Simply has to try much harder to show value in the onboarding before you even see the product.

I think they likely do a good job of this based on the scale of their business, but this requires a longer onboarding.

and the web paywall:

When we look at the mobile version, it feels like they’re not even trying to convert you.

But then we get into the actual product.

They’ve invested in a very strong experience, and high quality video.

High quality video or animations can much such a large difference in terms of perception of your product.

Similar to the other products, Simply Piano invests in the following formula on mobile:

Step 1: Create a truly valuable and great product.

Step 2: Create a simple onboarding flow with simple personalization

Step 3: Give people the first lesson free

Step 4: Lock subsequent lessons behind a paywall

Here’s the updated formula

The Part 1 formula was good. Here’s what Piano adds:

1. Create a truly valuable and great product

2. Focus the product on one core use case

3. If you have multiple apps, use the biggest one as the portfolio front door

4. Ask about household composition early to pre-commit to family plan later

5. Create an onboarding flow with simple personalization

6. Use a skill probe, not just a skill question

7. Sell users that they’ll receive value quickly (~20 minutes)

8. Add high-quality video as part of onboarding

9. Prove your tech works with the user’s real input before the paywall — this is the magic demo

10. Give people the first lesson free

11. Personalize the first lesson to their level

12. Create high-quality interactive experiences that keep people engaged

13. Turn the paywall into a multi-screen sales sequence, not a single price page

14. Show individual and family side-by-side, with family offering obvious extra value

15. Lock subsequent lessons behind a paywall

16. Price the app as a premium product, because it is

So what did we learn?

If you have a great product, don’t be afraid to let it shine.

You don’t need to convert everyone in your onboarding funnel, you can let them experience the product, and then ask them to pay for once they understand the value.

But web 2 app is different than mobile onboarding. You may need to sell a little harder than you’re used to in web subscription flows.

Here is a Whimsical board with all the screenshots →

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi helps you show the right paywall to the right user to increase LTV by up to 70%. Learn more →

Learn how Simply Sing, Guitar, and Draw, follow a formula to create a huge app business

Before we get there, I need to apologize. It’s been multiple weeks since I’ve sent a newsletter. I feel guilty because it’s not the promise I made to subscribers when they signed up.

I’ve been doing this for over 2 years, have written 100+ newsletters, and written one nearly every week.

I moved last weekend and life has been a bit crazy, but I’m going to try to do better.

Thanks for being here.

Onward!

To get back in the game on the right foot, I looked at Simply LTDs apps:

• Simply Sing - $500k/mo

• Simply Guitar - $1M/mo

• Simply Draw - $1M/mo

And somehow I didn’t look at Simply Piano which is doing $3M/mo

And this is only looking at in-app purchase revenue!

I see a lot of their ads going to a web subscription flow: https://join-piano.hellosimply.com/start/motivationsIntro

Wow. I’d be they’re doing millions per month via web2app as well.

Clearly they know something.

Here is their formula:

Step 1: Create a truly valuable and great product.

Ah, yeah, sorry to burst your bubble. If you’re new here, this isn’t a get rich quick newsletter.

The rest of the strategies they use for Simply Guitar, Piano, Draw, and Sing aren’t going to work for you if there isn’t real substance behind your product.

Step 2: Create a simple onboarding flow with simple personalization

Step 3: Give people the first lesson free

Step 4: Lock subsequent lessons behind a paywall

So why does this work? Because during “Step 3” when people are exploring the app, they get tons of value, make progress on what they’re looking to accomplish, and trust that the app will deliver because of what they’ve done so far, so they’re happy to start a trial or pay.

This is the perfect time to talk about Daphne Tideman’s Price Power Podcast episode on Activation

Daphne Tideman, growth advisor and consultant for subscription apps, explains why most retention problems are actually activation problems, how to distinguish vanity activation metrics from ones that predict real retention, and why the aha moment should start in your ads, not just your product.

Listen or watch on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

• Youtube ➡️

• Spotify ➡️

• Apple Podcasts ➡️

But my goal is to bring you insights you can apply today, so let’s get down to business.

You have a decent product, but how do you convince people of that?

Create a simple personalized onboarding flow

I skipped a few screens, but this is the gist of it

• Screen 1: “Become a guitar player”

  • Benefits not features, be exciting, aspirational, and emotional

  • “In a matter of minutes…” pair that with fast value and you have a winning combo

• Screen 2: “What of guitar?”

  • Ask the necessary questions to correctly personalize

  • This also removes doubt: “Now I trust they can help me learn with my specific guitar”

• Screen 3: “What would you like to achieve?”

  • Connect the reason for trying this back a person’s motivations

  • It helps you personalize the experience, but also helps them feel heard

• Screen 4: “What kind of music?”

  • Allows you to recommend music they actually want to play!

  • Make it easy on your users, don’t fo rce them figure it all out themselves

• “Do you know how to play these chords?”

  • Simple question to assess experience

• “You be playing a song in 20 minutes…”

  • Reinforces that they’ll make progress fast. Nothing is more demotivating than downloading, an app, getting excited, and then realizing it’s going to take days or weeks before progress

• “….play 3 times per week…

  • Make fast progress, but also if you stick with it, you’ll learn a lot over the next 30 days

  • Reassures people they’ll be able to accomplish their goals

• “How often do you plan on playing?”

  • Again, reinforces that it’s not a huge lift to learn

  • But also, gets people to start thinking about how this fits into their life and commit to a habit

• “How did you hear about us?

  • A extremely helpful question for scaling growth, learn more on that here:

And then into the loading screen!

Looks I have a newsletter for that too…

But the real meat and potatoes are letting your users experience value before asking to pay.

Sometimes you can do this during onboarding, but Simply sees that getting users to actually experience the product is the best way.

They don’t have a 50 screen onboarding flow, they have a few questions, and then get you into the first lesson.

And they’ve created extremely high quality video production to accompany every lesson.

This paywall is also not just a static design.

There is a long audio voice over that talks through all the lessons, the value, and sells you on Simply Guitar.

Simply Guitar is an audio related product, so it makes sense to have audio that is selling you.

Let’s update our formula a bit:

1. Create a truly valuable and great product.

2. Focus this product one core use case

3. Create a onboarding flow with simple personalization

4. Sell to users that they’ll receive value quickly

5. Add high quality video as part of the onboarding

6. Give people the first lesson free

7. During this first lesson, get people to experience value fast

8. Personalize this first lesson or first experience to cater to their needs or experience level

9. Create high quality interactive and dynamic experiences that keeps people engaged

10. Lock subsequent lessons behind a paywall

11. Price your app is a premium product, because it is!

This is getting a bit long - what if I follow up with 2nd newsletter this week that break down the rest of what they’re doing in the other apps?

I’ll also include their web2app conversion flow.

Alright, sounds good, I’ll talk to you again soon

If you can’t wait, here is a Whimsical board with all the screenshots →

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi helps you show the right paywall to the right user. Learn more →

Restock your paywall test queue

Let’s take a look around the industry to see what’s been working well.

Test 1: Design your trial

I’ve seen this working for a few different apps.

Essentially, you’re allowing users to pay for a longer trial.

I think the main affect here is psychological.

People end up starting the trial at a higher rate, and a small percentage of people buy the long trial, but it’s more they feel like they have a choice, and it all goes to annual.

Typically, what apps are doing is removing the monthly option and adding this longer trial in place of it.

If you have poor monthly renewal rates, this can be quite viable. If you don’t, it may be slightly trickier to make the revenue work.

🚨 New Price Power Podcast:
Churn is the silent killer of your subscription growth

Dan Layfield (Codecademy and Uber) teaches us his Four Horsemen of Churn.

What you’ll learn:

• Why your Stripe retry settings are probably wrong and how to fix them in 10 minutes

• How to calculate your growth ceiling using churn rate and acquisition numbers

• Why payment receipts might be reminding users to cancel every month

• How to price annual plans based on your monthly retention data

• How to build cancellation flows that save 20% of churning users

Listen or watch on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

• Youtube ➡️

• Spotify ➡️

• Apple Podcasts ➡️

Test 2: Lottery Scratch Card UI

I’ve seen this a few times now.

Essentially, you have a “scratch card” type design, and users can tap/move their finger a few times to reveal the discount.

You can show the offer here, or just have them tap to redirect to the paywall to see the offer.

It’s likely going to perform better to get someone excited here, and then redirect to your discount offer.

Test 3: Add a “Forever” discount

People like locking in a discount. You can get them excited with a “forever” offer.

This is a smaller test and faster copy only test, but I’ve seen it being used by quite a few apps today, so I’m confident it has something to it.

• Show the discount compared to your normal offer

• Position it as time sensitive or a one-time offer like you see here

• Communicate to your users they can lock in this discounted price forever.

That’s all for now folks!

Let me know if any of these tests are winners for you.

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

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Share this newsletter by clicking here.

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I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Wow. We’ve been working on this for months and this point.

And I’m so proud of what we’ve been able to create.

Welcome to the 48 Laws of Subscription Apps.

Learn from app growth leaders Thomas Petit, Sylvain Gauchet, Cristian Rotari, Daphne Tideman, Marcus Burke, Vahe Bagdasaryan, Olga Berezovsky, and more.

Botsi partnered with Retention.Blog to bring you 48+ tried and true lessons, patterns, strategies, and tips.

This book is grouped into four chapters:

1. Onboarding & Early Experience

2. Paywalls & Monetization

3. Retention, Engagement & Lifecycle

4. Analytics, Segmentation & Testing

We have 48 different lessons and learnings for you from the past year.

Could you go support this and help me to make sure others see it here:

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/jacob-rushfinn_welcome-to-the-48-laws-of-subscription-apps-activity-7440046297983893504-FouH

Since you’re a newsletter subscriber, I obviously don’t need your email again, but we put so much work into this that I would love a like and comment and share if you have a second in your day.

Here is the full book to download →

Ultimately, we have to thank the entire subscription app industry because we’re always learning from all the other impressive companies and apps in the space.

Thank you!

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

OR

Share this newsletter by clicking here.

Share

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi is AI powered pricing and personalized offers for your subscription app.

One of the most impactful levers is always price

The price of your app is intimately connected to your success and ability to grow

Also, this is called Retention.Blog, so we can’t forget about the retention impact of price.

One of the best ways to get someone to stick around and use your app is convincing them to pay!

How do you convince them to pay? Show them the right price.

It’s not true in 100% of cases, but generally, your paying users always have better retention than free users.

Correlation vs causation - did paying cause them to stick around? Or did they see a lot of value and it aligned with their needs so they paid?

Realistically, it’s a bit of both.

Psychologically, by paying, you’re making a commitment to use something. Otherwise, why would you have paid?

What can you try?

Michal Parizek of Mojo wrote a blog post for Botsi, and recorded a podcast for Price Power about all the learnings from his work.

I learned so much from Michal, and I’m pretty sure you will too.

From Michal:

Our success rate for pricing experiments was 56%, compared to only 14% for design, copy, and layout tests. That difference alone explains why we’ve prioritized pricing over everything else. In fact, we ran nearly 40 pricing experiments in the past two years

Listen or watch on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

• Youtube ➡️

• Spotify ➡️

• Apple Podcasts ➡️

What is the right sequence of testing and optimization?

Step 1: Get the price right first

Start with your top markets individually (not a global average).

Look at competitor pricing, your conversion funnels, and UA costs per country. If Brazil is way off, fix Brazil. Localization isn’t a later step, it’s part of getting the baseline price right.

This matters more based on your country mix, of course. If you’re heavily concentrated in one country, focus there, and come back to localization later.

But there are likely 3-6 countries that are important for you, understand what the right price should be in each of them

Step 2: Optimize packaging / subscription duration.

Once you’re confident the price is roughly correct, figure out which plan length (yearly, monthly, weekly) drives the most long-term value, and then optimize share toward that plan.

This includes testing the ratio between your yearly and monthly prices.

Michal says that adjusting the monthly price (while holding yearly constant) can dramatically shift behavior toward annual plans.

One of the biggest wins you can do for your app is increasing the percentage of people purchasing annual plans, and making the monthly plan higher can increase the perceived value of the annual plan.

Step 3: Tweak prices with finer precision.

After packaging is set, come back and do more targeted price adjustments.

Try tighter increments now that you know the rough range and the right plan structure.

Your ability to do this well will be dependent on user volume. If you have lower volume, probably skip this until later.

Step 4: Introductory offers and trial optimization.

Test free trial vs. no trial, trial length, selective trials by plan or region, and paid trial options.

Step 5: Paywall design and layout.

Michal was pretty direct that design/copy/layout tests were the lowest priority.

His experience showed only a 14% success rate on those compared to 56% for pricing tests.

That said, the most impactful layout tests were ones that effectively influenced packaging (like hiding the monthly plan behind “View all plans”).

FYI, this isn’t strictly a linear process.

But the core message was: don’t start with paywall redesigns when you haven’t validated your prices and plan structure first.

Image from: Pricing Experiments: The Backbone of Mojo’s Monetization Success

What are other tips and tests we can try?

1. Hide Secondary Plans Behind a “View All Plans” Button

Put the monthly plan behind a separate screen so the yearly plan appears to be the only option.

At Mojo this shifted yearly plan share from roughly 60% to 80% with no meaningful drop in overall conversion. The monthly plan still serves as a decoy that makes the yearly plan look cheaper.

2. Test Wide Price Spreads First, Narrow Later

Don’t test $48 vs $50 vs $52.

Start with big gaps like $40 vs $60 vs $80 to find the rough sweet spot, then run follow-up tests with tighter increments.

3. Use 7-Day Cancellation Rate as an Early Renewal Proxy

Over 40% of subscription cancellations happen in the first 7–10 days.

Track 7-day cancellation rate per variant and use it to project renewal rates and 13-month revenue. This lets you call a winner weeks earlier rather than waiting months for true renewal data.

1. Look at your historical data for the rate of users turning off auto-renew in the first 2 weeks - 1 month

2. Then look at the ending renewal rates for that same cohort of users

3. This should get you ratio of subscription cancellations within the first X days to users who renew at 1 year

4. Then, you can take this and project out for each variant of the users who converted, who will still be paying at year 1

4. Project 13-Month Revenue, Not Just New Revenue

For each test variant, combine new revenue with projected renewal revenue through month 13.

This allows for 1 cycle of annual renewals to be accurately compared with monthly plans.

Michal shared a case where a higher price point won on short-term new revenue but lost on 13-month projections because of elevated cancellation rates. The moderate increase was the actual winner.

5. Test Aggressive Price Increases

Mojo raised yearly prices 50% in the US and Germany with minimal conversion impact. They even tested 100% increases.

But don’t do it blindly, research the market and your conversions rates.

Michal felt this would be okay because prices hadn’t been updated in 2–3 years, competitors charged significantly more, and conversion benchmarks were above average for the category.

6. Localize Prices by Market (Don’t Trust Apple’s Auto-Tiers)

Apple just converts on exchange rates with no purchasing power adjustment.

Research competitor pricing per geo, compare conversion funnels across countries, and factor in local UA costs.

When Mojo dropped prices 25% in Mexico, they saw a 25% lift in new revenue.

7. Anchor the Yearly Price with a Monthly Equivalent

Add a simple line like “equivalent to $X/month” next to the yearly price.

This was a low test at Mojo that had an outsized impact, especially in lower purchasing power regions.

8. Optimize the Yearly-to-Monthly Price Ratio

Many apps default to a 1:7 ratio (e.g., $10/month vs $70/year).

Mojo found that a 1:4 ratio drove significantly more yearly subscriptions while holding overall conversion steady.

Will that ratio be the right one for you? It all depends on your monthly renewal rates.

Dan Layfield has some good thinking here on pricing ratios.

9. A/B Test Free Trial vs. No Trial

At Mojo, removing the free trial for new users hurt conversion.

Test it for your app - one could end up being better for you.

Also, test free trial on an annual, but maybe not on monthly.

10. Test Trial Length: 3-Day vs 7-Day

Mojo found virtually no difference in trial conversion between 3-day and 7-day trials, so they shipped the shorter one because it reduces revenue delay and improves UA payback periods.

11. Offer Trials Selectively by Plan and Region

Mojo only offered free trials on yearly plans (not monthly) as another lever to push annual adoption.

But in Brazil and Mexico, removing the monthly trial backfired. Those markets had the highest share of monthly subs and valued trials more.

Regional exceptions matter more the bigger you get.

12. Test Paid Trials (e.g., 30 Days for $5–10)

At the time of recording, Mojo was actively testing offering users a choice: a short free trial or a longer paid trial (like 30 days for $5–10).

This has started being called, “Design your trial”

One note, it does complicate analysis and requires enough volume to evaluate properly.

13. Use Data-Triggered Discounts Instead of Broad Seasonal Sales

Mojo’s broad Black Friday discount was net negative for new users (who already had high intent) and underperformed in high-purchasing-power markets like the US.

It only worked for existing free users and lower-income regions.

If you’ve run a broad sale campaign in the past, dig into the data about who actually converted, and where the lifts came from compared to your baseline.

Unfortunately, this data is hard to get without actually running a broad sale campaign first one year, and the learning for the next sale.

14. Discount Based on User Lifecycle Stage

By analyzing conversion by user age, Mojo found a clear drop-off around day 30.

Offering a 30% discount at that point boosted revenue per user by 87%.

A second trigger at day 90 with a 50% discount also performed well.

15. Segment Results by Traffic Source

Michal emphasized checking whether your UA channel mix (Meta vs TikTok vs organic) shifted during a test, since different sources bring users with very different intent and price sensitivity.

If your traffic distribution changed mid-test, that can explain weird results.

16. Re-Validate Cohorts 3–6 Months Later

Don’t assume a winner at day 14 stays a winner.

Go back and check those cohorts at 3 and 6 months to see if LTV projections held. Monthly renewal patterns and annual cancellation rates can shift over time.

This one is so important. You make predictions, but you need to monitor real behavior and continually be re-validating your assumptions!

Thank you, Michal!!

This is years of learnings and experiments, so we’re grateful to be able to learn from him.

You can go read the full blog post here:

• https://www.botsi.com/blog-posts/pricing-experiments-the-backbone-of-mojos-monetization-success

And you can watch or listen to the full podcast below on Youtube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts:

• Youtube ➡️

• Spotify ➡️

• Apple Podcasts ➡️

Want to get some help with your price optimization?

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Botsi builds and trains custom AI/ML models on your app and your paywalls, to figure out the right offer to maximize LTV for each user.

It doesn’t only sound cool, it works! (and is 100% compliant with Apple and Google)

Botsi combines device data (OS, model, country, etc) with your custom user data, and attribution data, to get high quality signal about the likelihood to pay and convert.

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I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Building a new feature is only half the battle

Getting people to actually use the feature can be harder!

How do you design a product marketing and feature launch plan?

What are the different elements that you need to think about?

If you’re a subscription app, part of the value promise you make to your users is that you’re going to be continually improving the product.

Gone are the days of buying a piece of software on a CD-ROM in box.

If you want people to stay subscribed, they need to feel like they’re getting value.

The tough part is that you can’t only improve the product.

You have to make sure everyone knows that you improved the product!

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi is dynamic pricing and personalized offers for your subscription app.

Botsi builds and trains custom AI/ML models on your app and your paywalls, to figure out the right offer to maximize LTV for each user.

It doesn’t only sound cool, it works! (and is 100% compliant with Apple)

Botsi combines device data (OS, model, country, etc) with your custom user data, and attribution data, to get high quality signal about the likelihood to pay and convert.

Click here to learn more →

P.S. Botsi is also my company, so schedule a call, mention Retention.Blog and you’ll get a 15% discount for your entire first year!

Have questions? Send me an email directly at jacob (@) botsi.com

Where do you start with a feature launch?

Before figuring out how you should promote a new feature, you first want to do some thinking and try to answer the following questions:

• Who is this feature for?

• Why did you build this?

• What was the issue before, and what problem does this solve?

• How will you measure success? (and what is success?)

• Do users need to change their behavior, or learn a new way of interacting with your product?

• Is it a big deal? Or a small improvement?

• Depending on your team size, who else should be involved?

• What is the timing? When will people have access? Do they need an app update?

• What is the messaging around this feature?

• What channels and tactics will you use to promote?

Let’s do an example together!

We can look at this new Strava feature together.

Strava rolled out the ability to see if a route requires a road bike or a mountain bike.

I can 100% imagine a world where I see this cool trail, I have my road bike, I drive all the way out and get there, then I get there and it’s all dirt and rough! 🤬

• Who is this feature for?

  • Bike riders

    • Both mountain bike/trail bike riders, and road bike riders

  • Active bike riders, and riders who want to find new places to ride

  • I could see it being for both more casual riders who don’t like being surprised, but also more frequent, active users who like to plan ahead and scout new trails

• Why did you build this?

  • We have a growing audience of bike riders, and we previously only categorized bike trails in general. We didn’t split by bike type.

  • We were getting user feedback that users got half way through a trail and it turned to gravel and they had to turn around

  • Mountain bike riders wanted to go find cool new places to try out, but couldn’t easily differentiate between road and mountain trials

• What was the issue before, and what problem does this solve?

  • Users would either have to do more research outside of Strava to figure out the type of trail, they would ride half way through and then have to turn around, or possibly worse, they would go all the way to some route to ride, but couldn’t because they had the wrong bike

  • The problem it solves is uncertainty around the trail type, surprises when you get there, or having to do extra research outside of Strava on the trail

• How will you measure success? (and what is success?)

  • Success definition: Our bike riders are less frustrated, have a better experience using the app, and use Strava to record more bike rides

  • Metrics:

    • Frequency of bike rides from existing bike riders

    • Monetization:

      • % of existing free bike riders who now start a trial

      • % of users engaging with feature announcement updates who start a trial (versus a baseline or control group)

    • Feature engagement:

      • % of new Strava users using the bike routes

      • % of existing paid bike riders using the “Surface” type toggle in bike maps

    • Retention:

      • Reduction in churn from active bike rides

      • Increase in retention from new/active bike riders

• Do users need to change their behavior, or learn a new way of interacting with your product?

  • There is little behavior change needed as this is a filter on the existing maps feature that users are already using.

• Is it a big deal? Or a small improvement?

  • It’s medium sized for a segment of the audience. Strava is majority runners, so the overall percentage of bike riders is smaller

  • For bike riders, this is a strong quality of life improvement that most will really appreciate

• Depending on your team size, who else should be involved?

  • Copy and design teams to help create marketing messaging

  • Product teams to help deploy in-app messages

  • If email and push notifications are managed by a separate team, involve them

  • Social media manager to create some posts and promotions

  • Customer support to update documentation, and potentially, send an automated update to users who have previously complained

  • Analytics to set up measurement dashboards to track metrics

• What is the timing? When will people have access? Do they need an app update?

  • This will be released for 10% of users first. We’ll test this for a week to ensure there are no unforeseen bugs or issues. If that look successful, this will be rolled out to the entire audience

  • Users will need to update their app to have access

  • There will not be any A/B testing besides the staged roll out.

  • All new users will immediately have access

• What is the messaging around this feature?

  • Users can now see different types of trail

  • Emphasize bringing the right gear

  • Casual tone, that excited, but not too exclamatory since it’s a “medium impact” feature

• What channels and tactics will you use to promote?

  • We won’t send a dedicated email to everyone, but will include this in the next feature release wrap up email. If these was for runners we would, but bikers still only represents 20% of our user base

  • For active biker riders, they’ll receive a dedicate new feature email

  • We’ll send a push notification to active users who have used the bike activity, or new users who haven’t recorded an activity, and are past day 7

    • (We have a strong new user activation flow that we know performs, so we don’t want to get in the way of that)

    • We’ll also trigger an in-app message to this same audience upon their next app launch. The in-app message will expire after 30 days for inactive users

🚨 New Price Power Podcast Episode:

I met Aliaksandra Lamachenka 3 years ago when her app idea was just that... an idea

She worked two, sometimes three jobs at once to make enough money to bootstrap her app. Taking a leap of faith and betting on yourself is terrifying.

But I was so excited to see when she finally launched Anticipate last year! 💙

What she'd do differently:

• 📜 Validate demand with a slide deck before touching the product

• 🤩 Look for "hell yes" reactions at every slide before building anything

• 🤑 Separate features users value from features users will actually pay for

• 📢 Choose first users for feedback quality, not install volume

Watch the full episode here:

Youtube ➡️

Spotify ➡️

Apple Podcasts ➡️

Some of you may be looking at this list above and going, “You want me to do this for every new feature?! I only have 8 people at my company!”

Yes, I understand, obviously, everyone can’t do this for every single update. This means that it’s up to you to decide whats a big enough deal that we want to promotion.

But don’t discriminate too much about what’s worthy. Users want to see that you’re improving your app!

Usually, you can measure retention or usage improvements from people who see or engage with “What’s new?” type messaging.

Also, for the “who else should be involved?” question, it’s likely to be fewer people at most app companies.

Duolingo will show new in-app messages to promote “Whats new” to you.

Look at both Strava and Duolingo’s in-app message copy: short, sweet, and to the point.

Measurement

I want to talk a little bit more about how you measure new feature success.

This is much harder than measuring monetization success because the right numbers aren’t obvious.

Still though, the gold standard for measurement of most kinds is a hold out group.

If it’s a big change, or a controversial feature, then maybe you want to A/B test the whole feature. Or launch for a small percentage of your audience.

Most of the time A/B testing every new feature is a waste of time. It makes you not accountable.

If you’re not able to A/B test everything, you have to hold the product experience and user experience to a higher standard. It’ll make you be more thoughtful and careful about what you release. Which will likely lead to higher product quality.

The exception is features that you think could have an impact on monetization.

Sooo if we’re not A/B testing a feature, how are we measuring results?

A few ways:

• Pre/Post Analysis

  • Did we notice a meaningful change in usage or engagement patterns?

• Cohort Analysis

  • For the cohort of new users who engaged with this feature, do they have different retention or behavior patterns to past new users?

  • For existing users who engage with the feature, does this change their behavior pattern compared to users who do not?

• A/B testing messaging

  • For your target audience who is going to receive promotional messages (email, push, in-app, etc). leave a 10% holdout group who will not receive any marketing messaging. Then you can understand how users who would not have organically engaged with the feature, and were driven there by marketing, whether this had an impact on monetization, engagement, or retention?

But don’t get too obsessed with measuring every single little detail if you’re a smaller app or small team.

If you think it’s making the product better, ship it, let people know about it, and move on.

Instead of taking over your whole screen with an in-app message, they have a takeover with in a specific feature highlighting what’s new for you to try.

This is a very thoughtful approach because it allows you to discover things on your own time, vs. being bombarded at app launch when you may be there for something else.

I’m not an active AllTrails users, so I’m unsure if all users saw this in-app message or only “re-engagers”

Showing the new content you’ve launched or features you’ve added is a great re-engagement tactic to bring people back.

Here’s another part of Strava where they have tooltips showing new features.

Don’t think that one mode of messaging will solve everything for you.

Try to develop a hierarchy of messaging channels that you use at different times and for different purposes.

And for good measure, one last deranged Duo I came across.

They’ve gotten pretty nutty, huh?

Another article for you to check out. I mention “What’s new?” type in-app messages are good for re-engagement.

If that was interesting check out this post I wrote a while back on “re-onboarding”:

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

How do you get featured by the App Store?

Who are these mythical people at Apple that make these decisions?

How do they decide?

How do I get my app featured!?

It used to be a big black box, and the kingmakers at Apple could decide to bless your app and change your life.

App Store features aren’t quite the same impact they used to be, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t attempt to get some new free traffic!

First, here is how you actually submit to be featured:

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-featuring-nominations/nominate-your-app-for-featuring/

These instructions are pretty clear, so I won’t go into the actual steps.

And I forget exactly when this happened, but being able to submit yourself was actually a pretty big deal.

There didn’t used to be any formal process.

The positives are that now anyone can submit.

The negatives are that now anyone can submit…

(this means that you’re competing with a lot of people)

Okay, so how in the world do you actually get featured?

One thing to remember: App Store editors needed content!

There are hundreds to thousands of placements across all the different countries, and they constantly need to feature new apps and releases.

Make their job easy.

Two proven strategies:

• Align with the calendar of seasonal events

• Use new iOS technologies

Seasonal event calendar

You should build out a calendar of all the different events throughout the year that can align with your app:

• International Women’s Day

• Easter

• Pride Month

• Back to School

• World Mental Health Day

• etc.

Build out a calendar of these types of events, and figure out which ones most closely align with your brand. Also, see if you can easily create campaigns around these days that offer exclusive content in your app.

Then, you’ll want to figure out your pitch.

How do you craft a pitch?

A good piece of advice from Talha Mumtaz in the ASO Stack Slack:

Try to find a feature in the App Store today from a similar app. Read through how it’s written, and try to write a brief that’s a similar style.

Think of it like PR, and you’re pitching. If you can write the story for them, it makes their job easier.

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In this episode, he breaks down how to create breakout creative hits, and why AI can scale ads, but it can’t create magic.

• 🇺🇸 US English ads can outperform local language versions in France and Germany

• 🔢 A 5% success rate on creatives is completely normal

• 📱 TikTok carousels are a hidden gem, especially for dating apps

• 🤖 AI video works for hard-to-source personas, but can't replicate the "happy accidents" that go viral

Watch the full episode here:

Youtube ➡️

Spotify ➡️

Apple Podcasts ➡️

Above is a great example.

Give the App Store editors strong copy to use:

“library of nearly 700 exercises”
“AI-powered routines”

“SmartGym’s AI-powered Smart Trainer (found on the app’s More tab)” ← give the editors direction on where thing are in your app

Highlighting the founder can also be a nice touch. Apple likes to highlight their developers and founders of apps to tell the story around them.

Give some personality to the founder and share the motivation of why they needed to build this product.

So now you have ideas, when should you submit?

In this same thread, Michal Mroz, Head of ASO at ZEN.com, shared some great advice:

• 6-8 weeks ahead normally

• But for big events, 10-12 weeks ahead

This aligns with what I’ve seen as well.

He has another good piece of advice: don’t only align to seasonal events, make sure to share updates, releases, and new features.

There are many different types of features, some seasonal and event based, some just to highlight new apps or features.

If we’re trying to get featured every 6-8 weeks, that’s every 2 months, so aim to have 6-8 “feature worthy” things throughout the year.

Again, think of this like a PR pitch.

This is an exclusive that you’re sharing with the editorial team. Make it sound exciting!

Bonus content! 😮

Applica just shared a phenomenal blog post on the Botsi blog breaking down the specific tactics of how to personalize your paywall to drive incremental revenue

Personalize your paywall →

Now back to the show…

Nastia Radek had a great post a while back giving some advice on pitching and the different types of pitches to think about:

How do In-app Events factor in here?

I’m glad you asked!

One of the best ways to get noticed is to be consistently launching in-app events.

Egor Kunovsky, had a LI post recently talking about the importance of in-app events:

“In-app events are not the tool to increase conversions. They are a tool to list your app for more search terms.”

And he is 100% right. In-app events drive extra visibility in the app store, so you more people can discover your app.

But they also give you additional visibility to the App Store Editorial team!

But don’t think you can just throw anything out there and get featured. I’ve heard the advice from Apple:

“They need to be rooted in actual new content or features. They can't be fluffy.”

So there are two ways to think about this:

1. Every in-app event I release needs to be new content or features

Or

2. Every in-app event I highlight to Apple needs to be new content or features

Because if you look at any big app today, they essentially always have an in-app live. This is easier for them because they have large teams and are constantly releasing new features and content.

I’d aim for somewhere in the middle between those two options.

100% submit to Apple when you have a big, noteworthy release or update, create the in-app event, and then also share the link and ID to that in-app event in your submission.

At a past company I worked at, most of the time the actual value of the in-app event is pretty low ( a few hundred installs), but every few events we would get featured for something

When they were tied to limited time or seasonal events, this would seem to increase the likelihood of a feature.

I also believe that in-app events are a great re-engagement opportunity for users who no longer have your app installed.

When I was looking in the App Store, I saw about 5-8 in-app events from apps that I used to have installed, but don’t anymore.

These were all shown to me first because I saw any IAEs from new apps I hadn’t used before.

The main message: Try to constantly be releasing new in-app events, and for the big ones, call them out to the editors.

Want some more guidance on getting featured? Go get Nastia’s full presentation here:

• Apptweak has another good post here: https://www.apptweak.com/en/aso-blog/how-to-get-your-app-featured-on-the-app-store

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi

Botsi is dynamic pricing and personalized offers for your subscription app.

Botsi builds and trains custom AI/ML models on your app and your offers, to figure out the right offer to maximize LTV for each user

Click here to learn more →

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I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

AI App monetization is a new world

I wanted to understand better what some of the top apps are doing today

The Photo and Video category has some heavy hitters at the top of the charts: Instagram, Snapchat, Youtube, Canva, Google Photos

But we’re not looking at these, we’re looking at 3 very successful AI focused photo and video editor apps.

The first is HubX’s app, AI Video

It was released last year, but it seems like they really ramped up marketing in January to hit $1.6M in revenue in the last 30 days!

The 2nd is Bending Spoons app, Remini - AI Photo Enhancer

Wow. Around $6.5M in the last 30 days, and nearly $20M over the last 90 days.

And this has been sustained over quite a long time. In Dec 2025 the previous 12-month rolling average was $6.9M per month…wild.

P.S. Remini has some of the most interesting monetization and paywall options I’ve seen in a while. If you’re going to look at anything, check them out.

Last, but not least, is Pose: AI Photo Video Generator

Pose did $2.1M in the last 30 days.

It was also released 12 months ago by the developer “Spark Dynamic” (haven’t heard of them…)

Shout out to Appfigures for all of this data.

HubX - AI Video

AI Video starts with a pretty standard onboarding carousel:

Obviously, all these carousels are video to show the value of the app. And honestly, they’re pretty engaging and entertaining.

Note: See the ATT prompt on the first screen? This is how to get the best performance I’ve heard from many reputable sources.

A few more carousels to swipe through.

Each one shows a picture of you that was uploaded, and then what you can turn it into.

It’s pretty immediately understood by the user what you can do.

This is great.

I give this advice to most people. Show the review prompt before the paywall!

162,000 ratings for an app that is 1 year old. Yes, slightly lower quality rating, but I believe the volume/frequency of rating will outweigh this in terms of ASO.

Before they show the paywall, they show a simple graphic with the trial toggle to clue you in that the trial is enabled.

Interestingly, there is actually no toggle on the paywall.

And it’s not a free trial! You pay $4.99 for a week, then it upgrades at $14.99 for subsequent weeks.

After that, they prompt for push notifications and then we’re into the core app experience of uploading a video and all the different options. I’m not going to go through this process.

🚨 Price Power Podcast Alert!

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👉 Why blended CPA is irrelevant
👉 The "creative equals targeting" framework
👉 Account architecture: Why Meta's consolidation advice can hurt
👉 Signal engineering hierarchy

And much more…

Watch the full episode here:

Youtube ➡️

Spotify ➡️

Apple Podcasts ➡️

Next up, Bending Spoons’ Remini AI Photo Enhancer

I didn’t expect this from Remini, two heavy screens of legal disclaimers.

Maybe because of legislation around facial recognition they have to do this? And it’s better to get out of the way up front?

Next, we have some simple personalization and two questions:

• Gender?

• What brings you here?

Bye boy. ✌️

I selected Custom AI edits and look at that! That’s what they show me :)

This is super simple, but extremely effective personalization.

“What do you want to use this app for?”

“Cool, here is exactly what you wanted and a visual example of how it works”

This is an example that nearly any type of app can replicate.

Social proof

• Millions of people are doing it, why shouldn’t you??

Labor illusion

• Loading screen to show all the work the app is doing to create a personalized experience for you.

Okay, let’s break down what this paywall is showing:

• A weekly plan for $9.99, with 1 week free trial

• A yearly plan for $79.99, but you have $0.99 for the first month.

And then they have the “Enable free trial” button at the top, but I don’t think it actually changes anything.

It just selects the weekly plan option with the trial.

I’d bet most people end up picking the weekly option.

But if you select the Yearly, you get a generous month for only $0.99.

• Does this help reduce billing issues?

• Does this improve conversion rates because it’s a month out so you’re more likely to forget?

Then we’ve got a few other options if we tap the “Other plans” button.

If we select “Lite”, we get the same 1 week free trial, and $0.99 offer, just at a lower price and with limited features.

Having cheaper options behind a “View all plans” can be helpful for motivated price sensitive users that are willing to explore for a deal.

These were all interesting, but the paywalls in the app are even better.

First, we have additional reinforcement of the value you get personalized based on your selection during onboarding.

If we tap the PRO button on the homepage:

If you look closely, it’s actually pretty similar to the offer from onboarding.

But the positioning is excellent: “We’re offering a free week of AI”

And then they let you design your trial or plan.

It defaults to weekly, assuming if you didn’t convert up front, you’re not quite ready to commit to a longer plan.

And now I can either start paying immediately, start a free trial, or pay $0.99 for the first week.

But instead of being forced to pay, it feels like Remini is offering something special you shouldn’t miss out on.

Then, we can change from Pro to Lite, and also change between weekly and yearly.

On the onboarding paywall, they didn’t offer a free trial for weekly, but here they do!

And there is no $0.99 trial for the Lite plan.

With the Pro and Lite plans it gets a bit complicated, but I love the core of this “Design your plan” paywall.

Last, we’ll look at Pose: AI Photo Video Generator

Kind of similar to Remini!

A gender question, and then asks what you’re interested in.

Unlike Remini, they don’t immediately show the example of what you selected.

They do have a customizing/loading screen to use the labor illusion.

And they also use this trial toggle animation like AI Video!

(hint: if two apps making millions of dollars are doing it, you should probably try it too…)

Then, the paywall!

Sorry if the image is too small for everyone, but we have one plan for $12.99/week with a free day trial.

Pretty straightforward.

But if you pay attention, they do have some personalization based on what you select!

I selected the “Diamond Drop” option (you know me…can’t stop the drip)

And they show the image of that option on the paywall!

Simple personalization wins.

I’ll say it again for those in the back: Ask your user what they want, and then show them that!

After the paywall we have account creation and notification prompt.

Good setup so it doesn’t get in the way of the people seeing the paywall.

Now into the home screen. Pretty standard view of a bunch of image and video options.

Floating bar to “Become Pro”

If you notice, this is a different paywall image.

I didn’t convert on the first paywall, so you shouldn’t show it to me again.

One interesting note: This paywall CTA just says “Start Free Trial” and doesn’t say anything about the trial length.

You can see it’s 3-days, and the onboarding paywall says this on the CTA, so maybe that’s why they got away with it here.

What did we learn?

Make an AI video app about a year ago, and now you’re crushing it, right?

Well, we all know it’s not quite that easy.

So what can we actually take away:

• For most AI apps, you don’t need some long onboarding flow. Get people to value.

• Super simple personalization in the onboarding flow with 1-2 questions can work well

• Weekly plans are the default for AI apps as most people want to try them out

  • Don’t default to long trials because people will use it for a few days and then never pay

  • Weekly plans don’t feel intimidating, so I bet a lot of the revenue from these apps is people forgetting to cancel, or using it for a couple weeks and then canceling

• None of these apps push “credits” too hard.

  • One paywall lists a credit limit, but they’re not too worried.

• Use a “trial enabled” animation to clue people in to the free trial and get them comfortable

• Try a “design your trial” or “Design your subscription” paywall

• Want a lot of reviews? Ask everyone to rate your app before the paywall

Know someone who’d like this post?

Want to see the full UI/UX for these apps? Get the Whimsical here:

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Let’s flap our wings and take a trip through the evolution of Finch

If you don’t know, Finch has grown like crazy over the last year.

They’re a self-care app, where you take care of a little bird to take care of yourself.

$30M+ last year!!

A ton of this is driven by paid UA - 210 active ads on Meta. They also do a lot on TikTok.

But we’re not here for ads, we’re for what happens after the ad!

Perfer a video format? I talk through everything in this newsletter and more here:

Please excuse the wild Youtube thumbnail style. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

Click here to watch the full video breakdown of Finch ➡️

What can we learn?

• We’ll start with January 2024

• Then see their onboarding in July 2025

• And we’ll end in the present day, January 2026

Create an engaging hook very early in your onboarding

You have some of the highest drop off rates on your first screen. Figure out a way to engage them, and do it fast.

Finch got this right from the start.

1. Pick a color

2. Hatch a birb!

And throw in a fun little hatching animation.

Not asking for any user info, just a fun and easy interaction, that inserts a bit of personalization.

Next, you select a gender for your “birb”, a name, and a trait.

Finch is building investment in the product, but without you sharing any information on yourself!

I get to build my own little self-care pet.

Tip: Peep the “Shuffle” option. If you have a place where people need to enter a custom response, give them preset options to make it easy.

Interaction is good, but don’t let someone get stuck.

Finch now asks me for my name, but that’s it so far.

They give me choice of what a name means to me and then I get the first real taste of gamification!

By answering a question, I earn points and rainbow stones.

Your onboarding should give people a feeling of what the real product will be like, and this simulates earning things for interaction just like the real UX.

I’m going to skip a few explainer screens and move to the paywall:

After you complete onboarding, they ask for you to pick a goal.

Next, they show the paywall.

In 2024: standard blinkest trial timeline style, 43% discount, for $39.99 per year.

After the paywall, you land on the home screen, and you see your goal you selected.

You tap that goal to earn energy to eventually go on an adventure

It’s honestly pretty damn cool gamification.

Your bird is gone for 8 hours of real time. You have to come back into the app to see what they got. It’s building an instant habit loop.

Finch has phenomenal gamification and habit building.

Now let’s look at what’s changed over the years!

Nearly the entire early flow is the same!

They did move the “What’s your name?” question to close after inputting your birb’s name. This feels more cohesive.

The largest change is they added a whole new series of questions asking information on you!

I don’t believe they actually use this for much personalization, but I’m sure they learned and saw from other brands that when people are able to share information on themselves, they feel the product will be better tailored for them

There is also the time and investment put in through these questions that make people more committed once they see the paywall.

I’m not going to go through all the questions as many of them are pretty standard for health and wellness apps (you can see them all in links below)

We’ll pause and dig in here - these are new also!

They’ve added a loading screen and created a “Starter plan”

This closes the loop and makes you feel like they took into account everything you shared. In reality, these are pretty much the same for everyone.

And if you look back, these are all the same goal options you originally had to choose from. (we’ll come back to this)

They’ve now shifted to a multi-screen paywall!

I recommend anyone who has a trial timeline style paywall test this out.

Why does this work?

• You take the same message you had on the paywall and break it up into bite-sized digestible chunks

• You’re able to emphasize “FREE, FREE, FREE”

• The biggest challenge is people just leaving when they see a paywall because they don’t see it’s a trial, so you can reinforce this message

• And you’re able to mention the trial reminder and discount

• THEN, you reinforce everything one more time on the actual payment screen

If it’s important, don’t be afraid to say it twice because your users won’t read it the first time.

After the paywall:

HDYHAU! Read more on the importance of “How did you hear about us?” here:

Streaks!

Everyone’s gotta have streaks.

Finch is so gamified, it’s almost surprising they didn’t have them before now.

Let’s go back to this goals from above.

You saw how previously, Finch had you select goals, and now they auto-select a bunch of goal in your “plan”

These materialize here and solve a sort of cold start problem.

If a user didn’t select enough goals, they wouldn’t be able to just tap a few times to earn enough energy, and that would force them to have to tap around the app more, potentially not reaching the “Send your Finch on an adventure” moment.

Now, Finch auto-populates a bunch of goals, you tap a few times, and you’re pretty much guaranteed to reach that “Aha” moment of I tap on things to earn energy to send my bird on an adventure.

Remove barriers creatively to get people to experience the value of your app faster. And to get a higher percentage of people to experience that value!

I know I said I was going to go through 2026 as well here, but it’s really not too different.

If you want to see it you have two options:

• See the full Whimsical here →

• Watch the Youtube overview where I review everything in detail

Learnings summarized:

1. Create an Engaging Hook on Screen 1: First screen has the highest drop-off rates, so engage users with fun interactions (pick color, hatch egg) instead of forms or data collection.

2. The “Not About You” Personalization Trick Users customize their Bird instead of sharing personal info, which lowers the barrier

3. Help your users: When users need to enter custom responses, provide preset options, like Finch’s shuffle

4. Real Product Experience in Onboarding: Finch users earn points in onboarding so they experience gamification mechanics early

5. Multi-Screen Paywall Strategy Break a single paywall into multiple screens that emphasize the important points (free, trial, discount, trial reminder)

6. “If It’s Important, Say It Twice”: Users won’t read critical information the first time, so don’t be afraid to repeat key messages

7. Add “How Did You Hear About Us?”: Self-reported attribution data is a valuable additive in the iOS world

8. Investment Through Questions: Adding questions about users’ lives (even if you don’t use the data much) creates perceived personalization and increases commitment before the paywall through sunk cost.

9. Close the Loop: Show a loading screen and generated plan to make users feel their input was heard

10. Solve the Cold Start Problem: Don’t land users on an empty screen. Finch Auto-populate multiple easy goals so they can immediately engage and earn rewards.

11. Remove Barriers to Activation: Identify your activation moment and creatively remove friction so a higher percentage of users reach it faster.

13. Create Habit Loops: Finch’s bird goes on an 8-hour real-time adventure, forcing users to open the app multiple times on day one and building an instant habit loop.

Thanks for reading Retention.Blog! This post is public and free so share it with your mom, dad, aunt and uncle so they can be even more confused about what you do for work.

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I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

I went back through the last year and pulled out my favorite tips from about 50 newsletters.

I wrote ~50 newsletters in 2025 and only have 25 tips, so every newsletter didn’t make the cut. It’s the best of the best!

🔗 Your email client will cut off somewhere half way through this newsletter, so click here to open on web to see everything and prevent that in the first place.

Ahead is an amazing app, and there’s tons to learn from them. They do an amazing job of looking at tactics that work, and then adapting them for their product. So here is our first tip:

1. Don’t just copy competitors, understand the why

Rather than blindly replicating what others are doing, break down the goal behind a tactic before adapting it to your own product.

• Why is this tactic effective for this product?

• Does it leverage any psychology?

• Does it align with my product’s core value and audience?

2. Try micro-commitments early in the user journey

Ahead shows how subtle interactions like “draw a checkmark to continue” instead of a simple “Next” tap can increase engagement before a paywall. These micro-commitments increase investment and buy-in to improve the chance of making it through onboarding and converting.

Next we have a breakdown of how Headway evolved their onboarding overtime

3. Evolve onboarding incrementally. Start simple, then iterate toward richer flows

Headway’s onboarding didn’t start as a lengthy, personalized experience. It grew over time through deliberate iterations.

Don’t look at large apps and jump right into a 50 screen onboarding. The chance of that working are much lower.

4. Don’t activate lifecycle marketing until the rest of your funnel is strong

The ceiling for revenue uplift from lifecycle marketing is limited because most subscription apps convert on Day 0 or never at all, so lifecycle work only moves the needle so far.

• Fix your product conversion and onboarding first. Strong early engagement gives lifecycle campaigns something to amplify. Campaigns won’t overcome a weak core funnel.

• Only invest in a lifecycle tool, and possibly a person to manage it, once you can reliably convert a good baseline of trial users. Retention Blog

• For smaller apps, start simple with product-triggered messages (e.g., push reminders, basic email triggers) before layered lifecycle sequences or heavy automation.

• If you don’t have a freemium product, the base of active free users you’re able to convert will be even lower

5. Build meaningful 2nd offers instead of giving up after the first paywall

Even though the first paywall is critical, most users (90%+) don’t convert. There’s still value in trying to convert them with another offer.

• Offer a limited-time discount or alternative pricing: Think inexpensive lifetime deals or discounted plans for users who didn’t subscribe initially (e.g., a low-cost lifetime price can appeal to price-sensitive segments).

• Re-engage with contextual messages on app open: Show value reminders or alternative paywalls explaining key benefits more deeply. Someone opening your app again is a high intent signal!

6. Extend onboarding into the post-paywall experience

Too many apps stop their onboarding after the paywall and drop their users and some complex home screen. Goodbye users.

Actionable ways to apply this:

• Transition users into a guided first task after they pass the paywall take them straight into a meaningful activity (like a “first lesson,” setup step, or personalization question) instead of dumping them on a blank dashboard.

• Repeat value messaging where it counts — reinforce what they just paid for by showing how to use key features step by step (not just generic screens).

• Personalize the next screens based on onboarding choices (e.g., interests or goals) so users feel the app was designed with their needs in mind

(look at the article to see how Imprint evolved their post-paywall flow. It’s good)

7. Add a HDYHAU question to your onboarding

This newsletter is worth reading through in full. Or at least reading the quotes from Sylvain, Thomas, Jakub. Quite informative.

“How did you hear about us?” (HDYHAU) question doesn’t replace traditional attribution (like SKAN, App Store Connect sources, or modeling), but it adds another valuable perspective to what your tools show you — especially in a post-ATT world where last-click data is imperfect.

8. Make your paywall more interactive

Instead of a single static paywall screen, consider using multi-screen, story-like experiences (similar to Instagram Stories) for your offers. In the example from Flo, they:

• Trigger the interactive offer from multiple entry points (e.g., in-app banner, push notifications),

• Use curiosity-inducing copy like “Reveal your discount”, and

• Allow users who already know what they want (e.g., a discount) to skip ahead.

Stop showing the same static paywall every time. Get creative.

9. Use widgets and Live Activities to stay top-of-mind

Actionable ways to implement:

✔ Build a core value widget that shows meaningful metrics (like goal progress, streaks, minutes used, etc.) — not just branding.

✔ Use Live Activities for real-time events tied to user activities (e.g., a meditation timer, session tracker, or countdown to next recommended action).

✔ Prompt users contextually to add the widget — for example, after they complete a meaningful first action or hit a milestone — rather than as a generic signup ask.

10. You can now offer alternative purchase flows and capture more revenue outside of Apple’s IAP

Man, do you remember the excitement and hoopla around this?

Some apps are using this effectively, but certainly not a majority. And remember, this is still US apps only.

✔ Start with post-initial paywall upsells (e.g., discounted upgrades or alternative plans) rather than replacing your primary IAP flow right away. This can limit risk while you understand impacts.

✔ If you’re under $1M in revenue, don’t bother. It’s likely a distraction and the lower conversion rate from directing to web will probably make it not worth it.

There is still a lot of opportunity here and I’m not 100% sure of all the best practices.

Gmail cuts off right about here for me, click here to read the rest on web →

11. Use strategic plan structuring to nudge better subscription choices

Nebula’s subscription tiers illustrate a deliberate pricing structure:

• Weekly plan with a 3-day free trial (likely converts users who are unsure).

• A 3-month plan without a trial priced slightly below the year (acting as a price decoy).

• Yearly plan with a good value proposition.

Because the 3-month plan isn’t a strong value play versus yearly, it likely makes the yearly plan look more attractive — boosting higher-value conversions.

They also use a secondary offer with a free trial tied to the yearly price if users skip the first paywall

12. Structure your A/B tests properly

Key parts of a rigorous test:

✔ Calculate sample size and test duration in advance

• Don’t guess, estimate how many users you need based on baseline conversion and expected lift.

• Consider your minimum detectable effect so you don’t end tests before there’s enough data

✔ Test one thing at a time

• Isolate variables (e.g., just copy, or just layout) so results are attributable to a single change.

• Avoid overlapping experiments that can muddy results by splitting your audience unintentionally

✔ Don’t stop early, even if you hit statistical significance early

• Let the test run for the full pre-determined length — results can swing day-to-day if you stop too soon

✔ Randomize audiences and check tracking

• Make sure your experiment assigns users randomly and consistently (the same user should always see the same variant).

• Double-check that all events you plan to measure (e.g., trial starts, key actions) are being tracked before you launch. Discovering you don’t have all the data after you go to measure and analyze really sucks.

13. Segment users by early behavior to tailor pricing offers

Instead of one paywall for everyone, look at how users behave in the first session or onboarding.

Actions you can try:

• Low-engagement segment: Users who skip onboarding questions or don’t take core actions → show a discounted offer or extended trial.

• High-engagement segment: Users who complete key actions early → show your standard or premium plan without discount.

Apologies for the interruption - this is a good opportunity for a Botsi plug:

I shared this on LinkedIn, but I'm excited so you'll have to excuse me sharing again!

Model training took a few weeks, but when we deployed the trained model, there was a pretty obvious impact.

On average, revenue is up 21% and new subscribers are up 11.6% since we've deployed.

We typically launch models as an A/B test, so 50% of your new users get your baseline paywall, and 50% of your new users will see Botsi AI Pricing.

This way, we can be confident in the true incremental impact.

Read more here ->

Okay, back to your regular scheduled programming...

14. Break down core KPIs by segment (don’t look at averages)

Evaluate retention, conversion, activation, ARPU, renewal, and cancellation rates for each segment. Averages are always wrong and deceptive

• Platform: iOS vs Android vs Web

• Geo/demographics: Country, age bracket

• Attribution source: Organic vs paid channels

• Zero-party data segments: Onboarding questions like “What’s your goal?”

• Behavioral segments: First 30-minute actions, feature usage patterns

15. Use cohorts to isolate changes over time

Segment users by install date (cohorts) when you analyze retention and conversion — this tells you whether product or marketing changes actually move the needle.

Actionable steps:

• Build weekly/monthly retention cohorts and track changes after product updates or campaign launches.

• Compare segments like “users from ASA campaigns in Week X” vs “users from another channel in Week X.”

• Look for patterns in drop-offs, not just overall retention %.

16. Add lock icons to premium features

What to do

• Place a lock symbol on content/features that require a subscription.

• Do this throughout the app in menus, lists, cards, etc.

Why this matters

• This reminds free users what they’re missing — which tends to bump trial starts and conversions.

• In experiments from the field (e.g., Mojo team), simply showing locks increased free-to-paid conversion

17. Add more “Unlock/Upgrade” CTAs throughout the app

What to do

• Don’t limit “Subscribe” or “Get Premium” buttons to the paywall — also include them in:

  • Settings screens

  • Feature screens (e.g., text editors, dashboards)

  • Profile tabs

  • Sidebar or footer on major pages

Why this matters

• The post points out that additional CTAs in context catch free users when they’re already motivated— e.g., when trying to use a premium feature.

18. Label your app or screens as “Free Edition” in multiple spots

What to do

• Add “Free Edition” messaging in app headers, home screens, or near feature names where free users see it often.

Why this works

• Subconsciously reinforces the idea that the experience is limited — and that there’s more to get.

• Think of it as light scarcity framing without being pushy.

19. Offer a second free trial to returning users

If you have a freemium app, a decent free user base, and/or free users returning to your app, try giving them a second free trial.

Don’t do this immediately after they completed their first free trial, but if you have a decent base of free users who already completed a trial, it doesn’t really hurt you to offer them another one. It’s unlikely they’re going to convert without some type of offer, so this can be good instead of offering another discount.

20. Follow up immediately with an offer after new users exit your app

Right after a new user closes the app without converting, send a push notification that includes a discount.

New users have the highest intent and may just need a nudge or reminder.

21. Send a second offer the next day

People forget. If someone doesn’t act on the first conversion push, follow up the next day with the same offer. This simple repetition can capture users who were simply distracted or wanted more time.

22. Personalize goal inputs continuously through onboarding and paywall screens

Zing asks users to choose their personal goal early (e.g., muscle gain) and then re-uses that same phrase everywhere — in onboarding screens and on the paywall — to reinforce relevance. Simple string personalization usually boosts engagement and conversion

How to apply this:

• Capture one or two zero-party data points early (e.g., specific user goals or preferences).

• Surface that data repeatedly in flows — in guidance, contextual micro-copy, and on the paywall itself (e.g., “Your X plan is tailored for [goal]”).

23. Define a Specific Activation Metric (not just “activated”)

Activation should not be vague. It should be a quantitative metric tied to user behavior that predicts long-term retention and value. It’s not enough to say “user onboarded”; you must define a metric that correlates with later retention and monetization.

Read the post to actually learn how to do it, but here’s a quick summary:

✔ Brainstorm a set of candidate events that users might complete early and that signal value received (e.g., “completed first core action,” “set a goal,” “finished 2 sessions”).

✔ Select events that are:

• Meaningful — tied to value your app promises

• Early — can be completed soon after signup

• Predictive — correlated with longer-term retention Retention Blog

  ✔ Combine events into a defined activation metric (e.g., “completed 2 core actions within the first week”).

24. Test the placement of account creation in onboarding

Tiimo moved its account creation step earlier to right after the initial welcome screen instead of just before the paywall.

Placing this ask when users still have high initial intent can increase account signup without sacrificing paywall conversion later.

Another good option can be moving account creation to after the paywall. Either way, test the placement to figure out how to maximize conversion

25. Invest in a distinct visual identity

Tiimo uses engaging, memorable imagery and custom illustrations that communicate personality and differentiation in a crowded category.

If you’re trying to build a brand, you have to feel unique and different. If you don’t care about building a memorable brand, you can ignore this :)

How people feel when using your product is what they remember. Spend an unreasonable amount of time on design and it’ll pay off.

Wow! What a year!

It’s was pretty darn cool to go back through the last year of content and pull out my favorite tips.

I have a list of 2-3x more than what I shared here, but I tried to pull out the most actionable items.

That’s what I promise in this newsletter, so I gotta keep my promises!

Out of any newsletter over the last year,
this one is worth sharing!

Thank you all for your support this year ❤️

Onward!

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Q5 is almost here.

You still have time to create some seasonal paywalls.

Let’s look at some ideas for different types of paywalls and offers.

Tell a Story

Engage users with the IG story format.

Create a simple narrative around your sale to better sell your offer and product.

Lifetime offers can work!

For your subscription business, lifetime isn’t a great idea to do all the time, but the holidays are different.

People who normally wouldn’t buy can be enticed into larger purchases!

Create some interactivity

This level of detail will probably be tough to get done before Dec 26, but maybe for January?

Flo has been using this “scratch off” style paywall to reveal your discount.

Interesting and fun is better.

Use the same paywall, but add an in-app message

Building a new paywall can take a while.

Use the same paywall design, but deep link to it with a simple in-app message that can be more creative!

If you have CRM / lifecycle marketing tools that allow you to deploy a new in-app message without any coding needed, this can be a super fast way to create a new experience to promote an offer to your users.

Yes, you’ll still need some dynamic capabilities on the product level of your paywall.

Even easier, just use iOS Offer Codes

You don’t even need to build a new paywall!

Just create a new offer code in App Store Connect and deep link to it.

Apple will give you a link to use and you can send users to this link from in-app, emails, push, and more.

🎙️ New Price Power Podcast Episode!

Ekaterina Gamsriegler (ex-Mimo, Amplitude Product50’s Top Growth Product Leader) breaks down why most growth teams struggle not because of a lack of ideas — but because they optimize the wrong things, in the wrong order.

Ekaterina walks through real-world examples across onboarding, paywalls, trials, activation, and pricing — showing how user psychology, perceived value, and expectation-setting matter more than dashboards alone.

What you’ll learn:

• Why growth doesn’t start with an MMP — and why product analytics matter more early on

• How to break KPIs like CPI or trial starts into inputs you can actually control

• Why prioritization, not ideation, is the real bottleneck for growth teams

• Why complex personalization is often overrated — and what works better instead

• When lowering prices is the right move (and when it’s dangerous)

• Why fixing your pricing story often matters more than changing the number

Watch and listen here:

➡️ Spotify 🔗
➡️ Youtube 🔗
➡️ Apple Podcasts 🔗

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

OR

Share this newsletter by clicking here.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi:

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on building a company.

That company is Botsi. We power AI Pricing for your subscription app.

How does AI Pricing Work?

1. First, you’ll tell us what price points and paywalls you have

2. Second, you’ll send us some contextual and behavioral data on new users

3. Third, we’ll send you back the right paywall to show each user (in real-time)

Schedule a demo at Botsi.com →

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Congratulations, Tiimo!

And everyone on the team who helped contribute to this achievement.

Tiimo is a planning and to-do app built for neurodivergent people.

The founders:

• Melissa Würtz Azari

• Helene Lassen Nørlem

Who better to learn from than the App of the Year!?

Lesson 1: Differentiate

How crowded is the planner and to-do list app space? Really, really, really crowded.

But if you can differentiate and position yourselves, you can stand out.

If your app is for everyone, it’s for no one. Who are you building for?

🎙️ New Price Power Podcast Episode!

Lucas Moscon is the founder of Appstack, a mobile growth and attribution mastermind, was a senior UA manager at MonkeyTaps, and advisor for huge companies like Life360.

That’s a long way of saying he knows his shit.

What you’ll learn

• “Most apps don’t actually need an MMP anymore”

• “Fingerprinting is BS - 90% is via IP address”

• “Your iOS RoAS is probably wrong. You need to use a blended ROI”

• How to correctly design conversion values for SKAN without over-engineering

• Why focusing on payback windows (D60–D180) outperforms optimizing for short-term ROAS

• Why probabilistic fingerprinting is still powering the ad ecosystem — and why Apple hasn’t stopped it

• and more

Watch and listen here:

➡️ Spotify 🔗
➡️ Youtube 🔗
➡️ Apple Podcasts 🔗

Lesson 2: Continually test the placement of critical onboarding screens

I looked at Tiimo in June 2024, so we can compare what’s changed

One of the highest drop-off points is account creation.

But. It also can be productive because it creates higher intent users.

It’s not important to make sure every single user makes it to your paywall.

It’s important that the right users who will pay make it there.

June 2024:

Previously, they had account creation right before the paywall.

Dec 2025:

Now Tiimo has account creation right after the initial welcome screen.

This can be an effective tactic because people have the most energy and intent right when they download your app.

If someone isn’t willing to create an account when they have the highest intent, do you really think they’ll pay you?

Also, this separates two large asks further away from each other: account creation and the paywall.

I bet this boosted account creation rates, decreased onboarding drop off, and improved the trial start rate.

Lesson 3: Put your users first

If you noticed above, immediately after Tiimo asks you for account creation, they ask if you’d like to receive updates.

This is atypical.

Most products just send you updates and promotions.

But this doesn’t fit with their brand or philosophy.

It would 100% build some early trust with me as a user.

Lesson 4: Have a visual identity

I wrote a little about this in July 2024:

Tiimo does such a nice job having a distinctive feel.

Their engaging and unique illustrations instantly tell who they are.

“We’re creative”, “we’re different”, “We’re full of life”

Maybe most importantly, you remember. It doesn’t just blend into all the faceless and nameless software you use every day.

It instills emotion.

If you want to be remembered, you can’t be the same as everyone else.

Not to mention the fun change of adding their little purple circle mascot person!

Old:

New:

The hands don’t really match the body, but we’ll let it go…

Lesson 5: Use simple paywall personalization

I’ve given this advice before, so if you’re still not doing it, this is your signal to launch a test.

Add simple string personalization to your paywall.

Tiimo asks new users if they’re neurodivergent.

If they say, “yes”, then they change the title on the paywall.

Simple as that.

Asks users what are your goals, something specific about their experience, or some other question that will change their user type. Then personalize the copy based on that.

I’ve rarely seen this not have a positive impact.

Lesson 6: Simplify

Tiimo has two “quiz” type questions before the paywall today.

In 2024, they had 3 questions.

Not a huge reduction, but shows their desire to simplify based on their improved understanding of their users.

Look at the difference in copy:

• “This describes me best”

• “Are you neurodivergent?”

A much more focused and simple message.

And their pricing was so confusing:

Who is each plan for?

$6 vs $8 is such a small amount it makes the choice harder.

It says monthly for each, but then down below it’s annual…

Let’s look at the updated paywall and plans:

ahhh, that’s better. So much easier to understand.

One plan, two price and length options, both 30 day trial (which is interesting for a monthly plan…)

Lesson 7: Keep testing pricing and packaging

We had two lessons wrapped up in one there. Simplify, and keep optimizing your pricing and packaging.

If you didn’t see, Michal Parizek, Senior Product Growth Manager at Mojo, wrote a break down on all of his pricing tests and experiments.

He boosted ARPU by 60% year over year, and had a 56% win rate on price tests compared to 14% on other experiment types.

You can go read the full post here: Pricing Experiments: The Backbone of Mojo’s Monetization Success →

Pricing is often one of your most powerful and impactful levers, so you should not ever think of your pricing and packaging as “Done.” It’s an ever-changing offer that should update as your product and user base evolves.

Lesson 8: Your product will change

I understand this one may seem a bit obvious.

“Duh, Jacob, I know my product will change.”

What I mean is that your differentiation and features and how people think of your product will change.

And it should.

“…if that’s what you meant, why didn’t you say that the first time, Jacob?”

What got you your first users, won’t be the same thing that gets you a million users.

For example, Tiimo was promoting “body doubling” in 2024

This is when you can have someone else present to help you focus. Tiimo did it very video.

In 2025 there is no mention of it:

I’ll admit it’s possible they’re using CPPs and still have one thats dedicated if you come from an acquisition source that promotes body doubling. But regardless, it’s no longer front and center.

Body doubling is a super cool feature that probably got them some early fans, but it may not have appealed to everyone.

As your audience and user base grows, your product needs to change as well to meet their needs.

Lesson 9: Make it easy on your users

I love this little feature.

I don’t know what routines I should pick. What do I do? Stare at the screen until I get frustrated and close the app? Randomly tap some to move on?

Oh wait! I don’t have to do any of that! Tiimo will “Suggest for me”!!

For some reason, having the app suggest habits for me feels so much better than me randomly tapping a few just to move.

It felt easy and smooth. Versus annoyed because I don’t know what I want.

Empathize and anticipate where your users may get stuck.

And give them a hand!

If you can show off the value in your “AI Planner”, even better.

Lesson 10: Keep on holding their hand

Do you think your product’s job is over after someone starts a trial?

Of course not.

So don’t just drop your user into some confusing home page with a million options.

This also offers you a chance to help set up the app for the new user.

Look at everything Tiimo includes in the onboarding after the paywall!

Also, let’s compare how much simpler and focused this UX got compared to what it was previously.

They broke the set up into steps at least, but it’s only half the screen, you’re distracted by the other half, there are no preset options, and it’s all very crowded text and design.

Then, look what is waiting for the user after they complete these 5 steps…another 5 setup steps!

P.S. Curious how many downloads App of the Year will get you?

Appfigures estimates ~200k downloads over Thursday and Friday after it was announced.

Lesson Summary:

1. Differentiate

2. Continually test the placement of critical onboarding screens

3. Put your users first

4. Have a visual identity

5. Use simple paywall personalization

6. Simplify

7. Keep testing pricing and packaging

8. Your product will change

9. Make it easy on your users

10. Keep on holding their hand

Want more lessons?

Well, you may have to do some of the work yourself.

Here is the Whimsical board with Tiimo today, and Tiimo from June 2024.

See their entire onboarding flow, new and old →

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

OR

Share this newsletter by clicking here.

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Learn from Zing AI’s onboarding improvements

Zing AI is a fitness app that’s part of the Palta group.

They’re pretty successful, but I noticed they recently had a major revamp of their onboarding flow.

Luckily, I had recorded what it looked like before, so we can compare and contrast.

I’m also trying something new! I recorded a video overview companion.

This is a secret, unlisted video on Youtube that only you have access to via this link:

Can you please let me know if you like these “video companions” or would like to see more onboarding video breakdowns?

P.S. If you watched the video, you saw I used Appfigures for some revenue research. They’re offering a sale: “Our BF promo is 50% off any plan from Monitor and up for up to 12 months (capped at $300 per month). Monitor, Optimize, and Boost are ideal for ASO, while Grow, Grow Plus, and Grow Premium include those plus deeper app intelligence.” 
Get it here →

I think we’ve got some cool things to learn from Zing. Let’s get started.

First screens in their flow:

Lessons:

Continue to iterate on your initial message that users see:

• Zing when from “Zing Coach” to, “Meet Zing, Your AI Coach”

Try different engaging formats on the first screens since there is such a high drop off rate here

• Zing is using the IG Story format to auto-scroll or allow people to tap through to create a more dynamic experience

Hook people early:

First, I got to pick my coach that I resonated the most with.

Generating AI coaches is certainly easier than recording real people!

Zing added a more conversational style via a specific AI coach “persona.” You’ll see them use this coach throughout onboarding to almost function like a mascot.

These little hooks and give a more friendly and engaging feel.

Simple and direct personalization:

A great personalization technique:

Ask someone what their goals are, and then reference that specific goal through onboarding and into the paywall.

My general advice is complex, fancy personalization is really hard to get right, but simple, direct string personalization like you see here usually works and has a positive lift.

Short and concise copy is better

Never skip a chance to simplify your copy.

Which copy is easier to understand and more likely for people to read?

Pretty obviously, the new copy. It’s also much more direct and accurately explains the use case.

Shorter copy, and more clear?! That’s what we all should be aiming for.

Utilize “personal” touches

Zing uses your coach to offer helpful pointers and guidance to create a friendlier feel.

Don’t stop innovating with new features

Zing Vision is quite interesting! It feels a bit impractical to use on a regular basis at a gym, but it seems cool. Talking about cool features like these, even if impractical, could create a more positive impressions as a “high-tech” product.

The conversational WhatsApp coach is even more interesting to me.

We used to see this with Facebook messenger bots, but those lost steam pretty quick.

Is this a viable new engagement and retention channel? Unclear. I would bet the people who do it are pretty engaged, but it’s chicken or the egg, they may have already been pretty engaged.

Still, it’s a cool extension of the product.

Help users understand your notifications

Zing gives a pretty real “screenshot” and example of what a push notification will look like.

Great tactic to give users trust that they’ll want notifications.

Reinforce your message

Zing continues to use the “Muscle Gain” personalization in the whole onboarding flow.

They use reinforce that this plan is personalized to me by reiterating all the information I shared.

Commitment Prompt

For Health and Fitness and Education apps, this is a tactic you should try. I’ve seen it work so many times, it would be silly not ot.

Old Paywall:

New Paywall:

• Shows only annual plan on first page

• Added a trial toggle (defaulted to off)

  • I’ve heard that you should test with both off and on and see which works best for your app

• “View all plans” has the other products to drive more annual revenue

  • I’ve seen this setup work well to push more users to annual, but still give people who aren’t ready another options

• Uses “Muscle Gain” personalization again

  • Emphasizes benefits more versus just getting access to your plan

Use Exit Offers

Show another offer if someone doesn’t convert.

Seeing 10% of conversions come from this 2nd offer isn’t uncommon.

I especially like their seasonal paywall!

Or, you can try using Botsi: AI Pricing for Subscription Apps

We’ll help you show the optimal price, product, and paywall to each user

Schedule a quick chat at Botsi.com →

P.S. When you schedule a demo and mention Retention.Blog you’ll get 20% off.

Keep people engaged after the paywall

I didn’t purchase or start a trial, but Zing has a super colorful and engaging screen with happy smiles to try to prevent you from leaving after the paywall.

So many will see a paywall and then close the app, “Ugh, you’re asking me to pay?!”

I’m sure you see this in your data. But most people close the paywall, and so you have one last chance before they leave to hook them again.

“Discover your first workout” creates some curiosity as well

Calendar reminders?

This is the last thing I wanted to show.

If you don’t start a workout immediately, they prompt you to set a reminder in your calendar!

They need to ask for permission, but it’s asking to schedule 134 events!!

I’m super curious how many people agree to this, and if it works.

I’ve thought about trying this in the past, so I’d love to hear from someone who’s done this.

I hope you found these quick hits helpful!

It was great for me to see how their onboarding had evolved.

If you want all the screens it’s at the bottom of this board here. (along with a bunch of apps. scroll down.)

Whimsical Board link →

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Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

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I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Activation and Aha! Moments

Your activation moments are one of the most critical things to understand to drive retention.

The stage is set immediately for good retention upon a new user trying your app.

The trick is figuring out how to get them to unlock and understand the value of your app, fast.

But not too fast.

Activation and Aha! moments have become a popular framework for thinking about how to solve this problem.

So what is an Aha! Moment?

Typically, this is the moment where your user experiences the core value of your app for the first time.

They don’t have to say “Aha!” out loud, but if you can get them to do that, you’re probably on to something :)

This will, of course, be different for different products, but some examples may be:

• For a workout app, a user starting their first guided workout

• In Canva, it may be a user exporting their first design

• For a meditation app, completing their first guided meditation

• For Duolingo, completing their first lesson

• For MyFitnessPal, tracking their first meal

• For Kindle, starting or downloading their first book

I think you get it.

It’s that initial moment of joy from the user when they realize that your product can start to solve their problems and help them.

There are the emotional and experiential elements, but there is also the quantitative side. Is this moment predictive of long-term retention or value? We’ll get more into that in a minute.

• First, I’m going to talk about the journey to getting towards this activation or Aha moment.

• Next, I’ll share some resources for how to truly do this quantitatively from my friend, , at Data Analysis Journal.

• Then, we’ll talk about how to actually get people to complete this activation moment and change behavior.

Definitions and clarifications

There are Aha! moments, activation moments, and then there is your activation metric.

Typically, that Aha! moment is when a user first uncovers the value in your app. This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the same as your activation metric. It depends on how your company or team uses it.

Activation moments can be multiple subsequent moments that build toward your core definition of “Activation” or your activation metric.

Some teams only have one “activation” moment, but they also have setup moments to lead to activation, and habit moments that reinforce activation.

I generally think of the Aha moment as that first real moment where the user experiences your core value.

The “activation metric” is your quantitative, ideally causally proven, definition of metric that you use across dashboards and measure to define your activation rate.

For example, for a workout app, the Aha moment could be completing your first guided workout.

While the activation metric may be completing two workouts in the first 7 days.

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ok, back to activation…

Journey Towards Activation

So how do we get started?

Before we do anything quantitative, we need to start brainstorming.

What in the world could our activation metric be?

You tell me.

Generally, you’re going to have a sense of the possible moments or events that could be your activation metric.

But going back to what we said above, start thinking about those emotional moments in your app where people start to understand your core value.

What events do those align with?

Let’s continue with our workout app example. I’m going to brainstorm some possible events:

• Instructor selected

• Completed onboarding

• 7-day workout plan picked

• Completed 1 workout

• Completed 2 workouts of different types

• Completed a multi-day workout plan

• Received personalized workout recommendations

• Recorded feedback on my workout

Okay, that’s good to start.

I think you get a sense of what we’re looking for.

We want to be looking for events in our app that happen relatively early, can be completed by all new users, and are connected to our core value.

If your app is built around generating personalized recommendations, maybe “Received personalized workout” could be more viable.

If your app is built around each person getting a specific plan driven by a specific workout instructor, maybe “Instructor selected” is interesting.

My point is that even for products that may seem similar (workout apps), there are going to be nuances to your core value that influence your activation and Aha moments.

Depending on how big your team is, it can also be valuable to get multiple people involved in this brainstorming and make it a collaborative process.

Realistically, you could probably come up with all the possible activation moments on your own. But once you figure out what it is, I can guarantee that you won’t be able to make a large difference in it all on your own.

Changing retention and engagement patterns are hard problems that have to be done collaboratively. Ideally, you want the whole company or team onboard.

They need to understand what you’re doing and why. So the more buy-in you get early, the better.

Now we have a good list of possible metrics.

Can any of the events be done multiple times? If so, add completed 1, 2, and 3 times to start.

E.g. Completed 1 workout, completed 2 workouts, completed 3 workouts

There are a few ways to start narrowing these down.

From Merci Grace and Lenny’s Newsletter:

“Once you have a candidate for your activation metric, you need to test whether it works for your business. To do that, check that these things are true:

1. You can ship experiments. You can build good in-product tests with enough power to make them useful.

2. You can post wins. You are able to increase the rate of activation over months or quarters.

3. Increasing the rate of activation does not destroy the relationship between that activation metric and longer-term retention.

If these are true, you have a foundation to experiment with adjacent funnel levels, like investing more in demand gen or monetization.”

So thinking about that, do any of the events we identified seem like things that we wouldn’t be able to increase or influence over a period of time?

At a certain point, “Instructor Selected” will likely cap out and not be able to be increased long-term.

Possibly, we don’t want everyone to do “7-day workout plan picked”, and it’s beneficial for some users to select shorter plans.

And “Completed onboarding” probably isn’t aligned enough with our core value.

So we’ll narrow down to:

• Completed workout (1, 2, and 3 times)

• Completed 2 workouts of different types

• Completed a multi-day workout plan

• Received personalized workout recommendations

• Recorded feedback on my workout (1, 2, and 3 times)

We’ve “qualitatively” narrowed down our list. Now let’s “quantitatively” narrow down.

This is much easier to do if you have a tool like Mixpanel or Amplitude compared to by hand. It’s possible with many other data analysis tools, but the main piece you need to be able to accomplish is:

• Create segments of users who have completed these events

• Plot those segments against user retention to see how they differ

These are the types of charts we want to create:

We want to start understanding, based on these events, and the users who completed these events, what is the correlation with retention.

Visually, it’s easier to start picking out which events are front-runners.

Once we see maybe the top 3 events, we’ll want to create segments for each frequency of the event as well.

And let’s add time and frequency. E.g. Completed 1 workout in 7 days, 2 workout in 7 days, etc.

We can also do correlation analysis in Excel, but it gets complicated pretty quick. (at least for me…)

The other element of retention we want to be aware of is: are we measuring general session retention? Or do we have a higher bar of retention that equals doing a meaningful action in the app? This raises the bar a bit higher than simply opening the app, but also means you need more data.

Realistically, how quantitative we get depends on the size of our product and how much data we have.

If we’re newer or smaller, we may not have enough data to build a good regression model to prove out the connection.

It’s likely okay to stop at trying to understand correlation in Mixpanel or Amplitude, and then try to run some experiments against these metrics to see if you can influence retention.

At the end of the day, you’ll need to run experiments against the metric anyway, so don’t waste your time trying to build some complicated model when you don’t have enough data anyway for it to be accurate.

I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but we have an unreal guide on price testing on the Botsi Blog from Michal Parizek at Mojo I don't want you to miss.

➡️ Check out the post here (and send us a like 😀).

From Michal:
"Our success rate for pricing experiments was 56%, compared to only 14% for design, copy, and layout tests. That difference alone explains why we’ve prioritized pricing over everything else. 

In fact, we ran nearly 40 pricing experiments in the past two years—twice as many as any other type."

Where are we at now?

• We have a few possible metrics

• We’ve plotted them on some graphs to further validate there is a correlation

• We’ve filtered out from a qualitative perspective which ones don’t make sense.

Now for the big guns

We want to run a correlation or regression analysis on the data we have to prove or verify that we’re looking at the right metrics.

The first post I want you to reference from is:

How to do linear regression and correlation analysis

Lenny's Newsletter

How to do linear regression and correlation analysis

👋 Hey, Lenny here! Welcome to this month’s ✨ free edition ✨ of Lenny’s Newsletter. Each week I tackle reader questions about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career…

Read more

3 years ago · 198 likes · 5 comments · Olga Berezovsky

The second post is: Why Your Activation Analysis Is Wrong - And How to Fix It

Data Analysis Journal

Why Your Activation Analysis Is Wrong - And How to Fix It - Issue 247

Welcome to the Data Analysis Journal, a weekly newsletter about data science and analytics…

Read more

a year ago · 8 likes · 3 comments · Olga Berezovsky

Yes, this is a paid post, but if you’re truly working on finding your activation metric right now, pay for a month, pay for a year, it doesn’t really matter. The ROI for your business from this and other posts from Olga will be immeasurable.

At the end of this, we’ll have done some correlation or regression analysis, and have an Activation Metric definition that hopefully, has a strong correlation proven

Image from Lenny’s and Olga’s post above.

We’re done right?

Of course…not.

Correlation does not prove causation.

The next step is to try influencing our new found activation metric!

Let’s say that we find that “2 workouts completed in the first 7 days” is our new activation metric.

We see a strong correlation between these metric and 30-day retention.

Now we need to understand all levers and breakdown the path for user to get there.

Our activation metric is the output.

What are all the inputs towards that metric?

• Onboarding completion rate

• Account creation rate

• Workout preferences selected

• Push notification opt-in rate

• Early re-engagement notification tap rate

• 1st workout completed (gotta do one before you can do two!)

• User acquisition channel source

So now we go to work on experiment ideas for how to improve all of these inputs.

Use RICE prioritization (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort)

And figure out what tests to start with.

The largest predictor of users getting to complete 2 workouts will be, “Did they complete 1 workout?”

This sounds obvious, but it illustrates how we want to work backwards to figure out the different steps to optimize.

It’s obvious 1 workout leads to 2, but what leads to 1 workout? Slightly less obvious.

Then, before you start prioritizing, remember to break these inputs and funnels down by different segments.

For our workout app, there are going to be some key early questions we ask our users (or should ask) to understand differing performance.

For example, the user who says, “I work out at home” vs “I work out at a gym” will likely have different results.

The user who works out at home can start anytime they’re at home. The other person has to remember next time they go to the gym.

Maybe you want to ask both users when they typically work out, or when they plan to work out next and send them a reminder at that time?

Or you can ask, “Are you ready to work out now?”

This is just one example of how the intervention you should test will not always be the same across all segments.

You want to be careful of getting too many unique interventions for many segments, but if you have a few big swaths of users with different use cases, they may need different experiences.

Here are a few different ideas for how to improve early activation rates:

• Create a Custom New User Experience: Don’t just drop users onto a generic homepage after they’ve completed the initial sign-up or paywall. Instead, design a dedicated flow that guides them directly towards experiencing the core value of your app.

  • See that here:

• Integrate Guidance Seamlessly into the UI: Avoid relying heavily on intrusive tooltips. Instead, build the guidance directly into the user interface. If a user is clearly struggling or tapping around confused, then a tooltip can be a helpful intervention, but the primary design should make the next steps obvious.

  • Flo, for instance, integrates guidance into its UI to ensure new users know exactly what to do

    

    .

• Personalize Early Experiences: Use the data you collect during onboarding to tailor the experience. If a user indicates a specific goal, immediately offer content or features related to that goal.

  • For example, Balance found that if a user selected “Sleep” as a goal, asking them if they were ready to sleep now allowed for better personalization of recommendations. This makes the app feel immediately relevant and valuable.

  

• Build Intent and Excitement with Positive Emotional Nudges: Long onboarding flows can be highly effective for products that have an emotional connection. Use this time to build excitement and commitment.

  • Here are some onboarding tests:

• Strategically Place Account Creation: While early account creation can cause drop-off, it can also lead to higher-intent users. If you’re confident in your ability to convert users through follow-up email campaigns, collecting an email early might be valuable.

Leverage Lifecycle Marketing for Activation

Your lifecycle marketing channels (email, push notifications, in-app messages) are powerful tools to guide users to their “Aha Moment” if they haven’t reached it organically.

• Drive Core Product Actions: Identify the key action that signifies a user has experienced the “Aha Moment” and use your lifecycle campaigns to push users towards it. MyFitnessPal, for instance, knows that tracking food is the most important first step for new users, so their early messages are all geared towards encouraging that action.

  

• Implement welcome and early re-engagement notifications: The first 24 hours to a few days after installation are crucial, as the likelihood of a user activating is at its highest.

Use Gamification and Engagement Loops

Making the activation process engaging and rewarding can significantly boost completion rates.

• Incorporate Gamification Elements: Introduce features that make the initial experience more interactive and rewarding.

  • Imprint, for example, uses gamification by allowing users to gain XP for completing lessons and encouraging daily streaks.

  • We know Duolingo is the king of gamification with streaks and notifications

• Design Engagement Loops: Create systems that encourage users to return to the app.

  • Finch successfully uses engagement loops by having a self-care pet that goes on a journey and rewards users for checking back into the app at specific times. This incentivizes consistent engagement and helps build a habit.

Move the Aha! moment into onboarding (before the paywall)

I wrote about this app Rosebud a while ago. It’s an AI journaling app.

I thought they did a great job of getting new users to experience the value before showing a paywall. You’re able to complete a full journal entry with their AI suggestions.

It may be tough for every app to truly bring their real app experience before the paywall, and it may not be in your best interest, but you should be thinking about how to get users to experience value faster.

For a plant scanner app, you can show the functionality with a sample “plant scan”

Time to get to work!

You know what activation metrics and Aha moments are, you know the path to get there, and you even have some ideas for how to improve these in your own app.

I can’t do all the work for you.

Remember, creating a strong and engaging new user experience is hard work. If it was easy, everyone would have a great product with high retention.

But this is your opportunity! Most people won’t put in the work.

The more time you invest here, the better you’ll understand your users, you’ll build a more engaging product, and start to build a competitive advantage.

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

OR

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Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi:

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on building a company.

That company is Botsi. We power AI Pricing for your subscription app.

How does AI Pricing Work?

1. First, you’ll tell us what price points and paywalls you have

2. Second, you’ll send us some contextual and behavioral data on new users

3. Third, we’ll send you back the right paywall to show each user (in real-time)

Schedule a demo at Botsi.com →

P.S. When you schedule a demo and mention Retention.Blog you’ll get 20% off.

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

When should you add push notifications to your app?

After you have a new user flow that converts decently.

Push notifications aren’t going to make or break your product, but they can provide a nice little boost.

And they’re relatively simple to set up (compared to email).

You can try local notifications or push notifications.

Local notifications are usually decent for regular scheduled reminders that repeat.

Triggered push notifications usually give you a bit more control and are often sent via lifecycle marketing tools.

Start here on picking a tool:

Okay, so what notifications should we try sending?

After a new user closes your app and doesn’t convert, send them an offer.

New users have the highest intent to use your product, so don’t give up if they don’t start a trial immediately.

Moongate sends a notification pretty immediately after you close the app as a new user and offers you a discount.

Then, they follow up the next day with that same discount. People forget about things all the time, don’t assume they still don’t want to use your product.

Does your app have regular use case?

This certainly isn’t groundbreaking, but so many apps do it because it works.

Try to connect this reminders to real world use cases.

For sleep related apps, this is obviously easier:

But usually, there is someway to connect your app to regular use that is helpful to your user:

Price Power Podcast New Episode!

This is Retention.Blog, but we talk about monetization too. We launched the Price Power Podcast to talk about pricing and monetization, but also talk about all things subscription apps…

We had Ashley Black, Google Ads expert on to talk about optimizing your Google App Campaign.

What you’ll learn

• The most common mistakes when moving from CPI/CPA to tROAS (targets too high, windows too long)

• How to set a realistic ROAS target (start ~20% below goal) and ramp it without killing volume

• Volume prerequisites for value bidding (why you need revenue events, not just trials)

• and more!

Listen here:

➡️ Spotify 🔗
➡️ Youtube 🔗
➡️ Apple Podcasts 🔗

If someone isn’t engaging, you can then stop sending these messages if you worry about uninstalls.

Sometimes this type of message (“we’ll stop now”) is actually pretty effective to drive action:

This is a good reminder, be human and have a personality in your messages.

Sure, you can get some performance out of generic reminders, but try to bring some excitement or emotion into your notifications.

This another I love from Ahead:

Even if I don’t respond to this immediately, I’m going to read it and it’s going to put a smile on my face.

There’s no A/B test that will prove this, but if can put a smile on someone’s face you’ve greatly increased the chance of them using your product.

Remember, humans are driven by emotions.

Okay, what else do we got?

AllTrails recommendation notification is programmatic and personalized to my location.

You don’t need to get this fancy to start. Will personalized recommendations likely improve performance? Yes, but simply using the words, “Recommended for you” I’ve found to be powerful.

Calm’s recommendation is not personalized. It’s just a generic meditation.

But they’ve also seen that push title copy works well.

Try it out.

This is a triggered notification that is meant to drive towards a first setup step or activation moment.

Coinstats knows that they need you to connect your portfolio before they can provide real value.

This notification is sent pretty soon after I closed the app the first time without setting up my portfolio.

So you don’t just want to “Welcome” someone into your app, you want to drive them towards the next best action.

Not ground breaking either, but re-engagement type notifications usually work at least a little bit.

Test out different copy here.

We’ve seen in the past referencing the specific number of days they’ve been gone for can work well: “It’s been 7 days”

It’s not fool proof, so test it out.

Don’t just send one sale message.

You need to send a few, and try to add sense of urgency and excitement in each one.

They do a decent job of trying to get you excited.

Want more push notification advice?

I’ve got some here in a past blog post.

Here’s a snippet from this past post to expand on sale notifications:

Tips on sale notifications:

• Keep them simple and communicate the offer upfront.

  • Don’t get too cute. You shouldn’t need clever language if the offer is good

  • Adding a sense of urgency or that this offer is special can work well e.g. “ending soon” or “best offer ever”

• Send multiple sale messages, but don’t overload users. 2-3 is good

  • Sale announcement, sale ending soon, and if it’s a longer sale you could also send a sale ending in 24 hours

    • You may want to reserve the 24-hour message for people who have clicked or engaged but have not purchased

  • You can also offer a discounted subscription a few days after someone signs up.

    • The longer you wait, the lower the conversion will be. But the lower the cannibalization of people who would have bought full price.

    • A/B test it, but often showing a discount nearly immediately if someone doesn’t convert on the first paywall will drive more revenue than waiting. People lose excitement after the first day. Or forget and lose interest entirely.

Retention.Blog is sponsored by Botsi:

For the last year and a half, I’ve been working on building a company.

That company is Botsi. We power AI Pricing for your subscription app.

How does AI Pricing Work?

1. First, you’ll tell us what price points and paywalls you have

2. Second, you’ll send us some contextual and behavioral data on new users

3. Third, we’ll send you back the right paywall to show each user (in real-time)

Schedule a demo at Botsi.com →

P.S. When you schedule a demo and mention Retention.Blog you’ll get 20% off.

📣 Want to help support and spread the word?

Go to my LinkedIn here and like, comment, or share my posts.

OR

Share this newsletter by clicking here.

I got tired of reading high-level strategy articles, so I started writing actionable advice I would want to read.

Every week I share practical learnings you can apply to your business.

Small changes to convert more users

These tactics are focused on post-onboarding or after showing the initial paywall.

None of these are going to completely make or break your product, but add all of these tactics up, and they could account for a meaningful conversion bump.

FYI, if you don’t have any free experience in your product, these probably won’t be extremely helpful.

But if you do, read on.

1. Add lock symbols to premium content or features

Simply reminding people that the content is locked and they need to subscribe to get access can often improve free-to-paid conversion rates.

The Mojo team runs tons of experiments, and it appears they learned this as well.

We launched a Podcast! PricePowerPodcast.com

Episode two is with .

Anthony is former VP of Growth at Acorns and shares his awesome framework for building world-class referral programs.

Listen or watch here →

P.S. Please give us a like or subscribe! It means a lot to have your support.

2. Add “Get Premium”, “Unlock Pro” buttons

Simple has a big button on the home page to prompt you

You can see Mojo has a “Get Pro” button in the previous screenshot

3. Add more Unlock buttons to other screens

So this is kinda continuation of the previous item, and essentially the point is add more “Unlock” buttons on more pages, versus only on your homepage

Here is Zing AI coach with an Unlock button on their settings page.

You know what they say, “Don’t ask, don’t get!”

Sorry, I know no one says that. It’s a stupid phrase from a TV show I was just watching.

I’m going to bet this is a joke for like 3 people who read this…

The show is called Platonic with Seth Rogen, and it’s surprisingly good!

Okay, sorry, back to our mobile apps.

4. Label your app as “Free …” multiple places