What's your sign?
Nebula and Chani Astrology Apps
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.
Astrology is big business
I was looking in the App Store and there is a whole Featured section dedicated to Astrology apps! (in Lifestyle category)
I wouldn’t say I’m the prime target for astrology and I’m usually quite the skeptic.
But after I played around with these apps, I started to get it a little.
They’re fun!
If you base your whole life on astrology, I may give you an odd look, but I started to understand the appeal.
We’re going to look at two Astrology apps today:
Chani
Nebula
Let’s start with Chani
Chani is doing almost $800k per month on iOS alone!
What’s even more interesting is that they only get 16-17k downloads per month.
They have an estimated 1.2m lifetime downloads, and they’ve made $31M on those downloads!
Data from Appfigures
They’re making $25-50 per download…
How?!
If I’m honest, I still don’t fully understand
Apparently, Chani Nicholas is an astrology influencer, so she is driving traffic to her app from her audience.
I’m guessing that the most engaged of the audience end up downloading the app, so they’re very high intent users.
Let’s check out the actual app.
We’ll start from the beginning.
So she essentially ignores any best practices I’d advise:
Log in and Sign Up are both equal size buttons and they’re kind of small
She doesn’t have any SSO (Google, Facebook, etc sign on)
When you select Sign Up, the Name, Email, and Password fields are all on the same page (increased cognitive load)
You have to confirm your password
Then you have to confirm your email by entering in a code
The email doesn’t even have a link back into the app
The next set of screens are a bit more standard and all make sense for astrology.
Right before you get into the actual app, she does a good job showing value and what you should expect (gives you an astrology reading).
But then she talks about everything you get for free in the app. This would normally be advised against because it’ll make people less likely to pay…
This “One More Thing” screen I like, it’s helping you understand what to interact with and how to get help.
And now we’re into the app!
Wait. She doesn’t show a paywall?
Doesn’t everybody advise: “Make sure all new users see a paywall” ??
I had to tap around a little to even find a premium prompt.
I’m going crazy!
The paywall is decent, but have to scroll down to see the CTA buttons to purchase
Neither the annual or monthly are auto-selected, so I have to actively select a plan
Here the first thing that I would try to use somewhere else:
I had never seen this prompt before - can someone explain how you do this?
I’ll go research myself, but if someone wants to tell me, that would be cool too.
I even went through with starting the trial because I was curious if she had upsells!
Nope. No immediate upsells.
If we do the math:
~16.5k new downloads last 30 days
~$800k revenue last 30 days
$48 per user
With a $100 subscription, either:
40-50% of people convert to paying users
or she has crazy renewal rates
It’s probably a bit of both.
I’m still a bit at a loss.
I think it comes down to the fact that people love Chani (the person).
It may not be any more complicated than that.
“Wait, Jacob, where is the 2nd astrology app?!”
I wrote all this about Chani and so I’m going to do a part two on Nebula.
I didn’t realize I’d have this much to look at with Chani, so I think I might send the part two tomorrow.
Check out the Whimsical board here to see all of Chani and Nebula
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