18+ tips to use today from MAU

MAU 2025 Learnings

Jacob Rushfinn

Jun 22, 2025

Hey there, it’s Jacob at Retention.Blog 👋

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.

Last month I went to MAU and it was the biggest MAU ever!

It was a great conference, I met lots of people, had lots of fun, stayed out too late, blah blah blah.

Let’s cut to the chase and get to some learnings you can use.

Here are my favorite presentations:

Advanced Monetization Strategies from Vahe Bagdasaryan
Beyond the Standard Paywalls from Tigran Mkrtchyan
How GOHUNT Drove Breakthrough Growth By Focusing on the End-to-End Customer Journey from Anthony Scarpaci and Lane Colyer
Optimizing Onboarding and Monetization at LingQ by Thomas Siegl and Mark Kaufmann
7 Counterintuitive App Growth Strategies That Actually Work by Steve Young

Here are 6 tactics from Vahe you can try tomorrow:

Win-Back Offers: Trigger these at key transition points in the subscription journey: Cancellations and Expirations for both a trial and a full subscription

Give another free trial: A lot of times people start a free trial, but something happens in their life that they’re not able to dedicate time to actually try your app. Give them another chance.

Skip the free trial and give a discount: You can try showing a trial to start, but then also offer a discount on the annual plan if they subscribe immediately.

Here is one interesting implementation of this from JustFit I shared a while ago ➡️

Multi-page paywalls: An emerging trend I’ve called out before. This is worth test if you currently have a trial reminder or trial timeline style paywall. I have another example further down

Don’t give up - show an exit offer: People who don’t convert initially clearly have lower willingness to pay - see if there is still some desire to convert, just at a lower price

Transaction abandonment: Similar to an exit offer, but these users have even higher intent because they tapped the purchase button, but for some reason, didn’t complete the transaction. Again, don’t give up.

Trial toggles: If you can get just a small percentage of the user base to convert immediately with a trial, this can be a huge ARPU win. Vahe mentioned that he sometimes sees the trial defaulted to “On” work better, and sometimes it only works if it’s set to “Off”. Test it and see.

Pretty good tips, huh? Well, we’re just getting started.

Next we have: Beyond the Standard Paywalls from Tigran Mkrtchyan

These are some of the most creative paywalls I’ve ever seen.

Also, Vahe used to work at CoinStats, and Tigran is there currently, so maybe there is something in the water…

These animations+paywall beat the standard paywall by an average of 2.9x!

They didn’t jump immediately to this animated style, they first tested the waters on Halloween.

This style showed an improvement which gave them confidence to experiment more broadly.

What should you take away?

You can likely be waaay more creative with your paywalls than you currently are
If you get a win, don’t stop there. Understand what is causing the result and double-down

Next, let’s check out:

How GOHUNT Drove Breakthrough Growth By Focusing on the End-to-End Customer Journey from Anthony Scarpaci and Lane Colyer

If you’ve got a solid product, but you’re still figuring out how to grow, you have to do your homework.

Or maybe get some help on your homework from Anthony.

Before getting started, you need to build out a growth model to truly understand all of your metrics, conversion rates, spend, and retention rates to figure out unit economics and then to prioritize tests
After you figure out the data, you also have to map out the customer journey
- What is the marketing lifecycle and what is the customer lifecycle
- How do you tie these things together?
  - This is where the magic happens

Without knowing all the levers and conversion points, it can feel quite overwhelming to understand how to grow.

Breaking down all the different inputs for your overall growth will form the foundation of your growth model. And then you can start to understand where and how to make changes.

You may look at the data and see you need a 30% higher LTV. Which feels impossible.

But when you break it down, that’s actually a 7% better CTR, a 5% better retention rate, a 10% better trial start rate, and 4% better trial conversion. All of a sudden you know where to focus, and it feels within reach.

Let’s look at some of their wins:

What changed?

Better designed onboarding
A real welcome screen
Communicates benefits better
Explains the trial timeline

But to be honest, the real change is that they ask for a trial start immediately instead of waiting until later.

If you don’t show a paywall before someone gets into the product right now, fix that and I almost guarantee a win (send me a check later).

Let’s also look at their web funnel improvements

First off they found success with these types of ads:

So they updated their web onboarding funnel to feature these same types of designs (along with a bunch of other standard checkout page optimizations).

Create a user journey that feels continuous and has consistent UI/UX from ads to conversion funnel into the product.

Here is the before:

We’re not done yet!

Let’s look at Optimizing Onboarding and Monetization at LingQ by Thomas Siegl and Mark Kaufmann

A higher percentage of users opted-in to push can amplify the impact of all your push notifications. Don’t underestimate the impact if you have a bad opt-in rate.

What can you take away?

Benefits, benefits, benefits. Users don’t want notifications, users want to achieve their goals
Tie these reminders to progress. And use visuals to hammer that message home
Don’t say “Enable notifications” - it has a negative connotation. I think this implementation of “Yes please” on the CTA is good. Or make the CTA copy something contextual to what notifications solve

“If you test anything, test your paywall”

Look at that, the winning version lists out actual benefits, not just features. What a surprise :)
They also simplified the plans offered to only annual and monthly
There also isn’t a clear CTA button on the old version which is weird.

Did you think we were done?!?

Last, but not least we have:

7 Counterintuitive App Growth Strategies That Actually Work by Steve Young

I’m not going to list out all 7, but here are a couple:

Try a hard paywall

Try a hard paywall early on - this will help your monetization and drive better growth.
- As you grow, continue to test whether a soft paywall could help drive more growth through an active free user base that has more WOM. This isn’t guaranteed though and adds more complications to your business
- I’ve shared it once, I’ll share it again, Felix from Pok Pok had a great presentation dedicated to hard paywall actually from MAU last year:
  - Hard Paywalls: How New Apps Can Thrive in a Crowded Category →

Multi-page paywalls:

From this:

To this:

I love this test - pay what you want!

I’ve seen this a few times and I wish more people would try it. I think that if it makes sense, it can really earn you some loyal customers.

Now we’re actually at the end :(

If you liked anything, go check out these people:

Advanced Monetization Strategies from Vahe Bagdasaryan
Beyond the Standard Paywalls from Tigran Mkrtchyan
How GOHUNT Drove Breakthrough Growth By Focusing on the End-to-End Customer Journey from Anthony Scarpaci and Lane Colyer
Optimizing Onboarding and Monetization at LingQ by Thomas Siegl and Mark Kaufmann
7 Counterintuitive App Growth Strategies That Actually Work by Steve Young