What's your sign? (part 2)
Chani and Nebula
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.
I’m sorry, I’ve never done this before.
I had to write a part 2!
I wrote everything about Chani and thought I should break up the Astrology app post into two parts.
If you didn’t read Part 1, check it out. The Chani astrology app is making $40-50 per download.
Yeah, you read that right. I don’t get it either. Go check it out.
Today we’re looking at Nebula
Nebula is making ~$450k/mo on iOS on about 128k downloads per month
These are more reasonable numbers, $3.5 per download
It seems like May and June of last year they were doing closer to $1M/mo, so I’m wondering if they’ve shifted more traffic to web to app funnels.
Let’s check out Nebula’s onboarding
They start with a pretty standard goals question
And then the following screen is personalized based on what you select.
The only option I selected was “Receive daily insights and tips”
It’s pretty clear that there is room for more personalization bullets on that 3rd screen.
This is also common style:
Ask about goals
Personalized screen based on response
Then dig into the goals question with 2nd follow up question
Another personalized screen based on your response
“Wow, this product is built for me!”
Do users have that conscious thought? Probably not, but these little positive reinforcements usually do help.
Now we get into the astrology personalization questions:
Ask question → Personalize based on question
Choosing unique testimonials that are relevant to the user can be effective. I’ve seen this work in a few different instances.
I’m going to skip a few screens, but here is another example of that:
This is interesting, it appears they’re priming you for the Premium subscription even though the paywall is still a few screens away.
There are 5-6 more screens!
Right before the paywall, they show a loading screen that rotates through a few testimonials
Let’s take a look at the subscriptions they offer:
Weekly for $7.99 with a 3 day free trial
3 months for $39.99, no trial
Yearly for $49.99, no trial
What’s going on here?
People that aren’t sure, go to the weekly and a lot of people probably get charged at least once from the trial converting very quickly.
The 3 month plan is clearly just a price decoy to make the yearly look more attractive.
Who is going to spend $39.99 for 3 months when you can get a full year for $49.99.
As you may have noticed, they had a secondary offer in case I don’t convert
This has a modified Blinkest trial timeline, and a 3 day free trial for $39.99 a year.
Again, that 3 day free trial will get a lot of people who don’t cancel immediately.
I closed this as well.
But it seems they’ve effectively created a hard paywall. If I try to go back, I just get stuck in this cycle of this screen and then the paywall showing:
The home screen of the app shows for a second, but then is immediately blocked by this paywall.
And then I also lose the discount offer? Seems odd.
So now we’ve looked at two of the top astrology apps, and man, they couldn’t be more different.
If you missed part 1, go here:
Chani is driven by an influencer, while Nebula is driven by mostly paid user acquisition.
Nebula has a longer onboarding funnel and hard paywalls with a 2nd offer.
Chani has no paywall shown on the first session and users have to explore to find premium features.
Both are doing quite well, but I’d assume that Nebula invests most of the profits into funding additional user acquisition, while Chani is likely mostly profit.
Really what this shows is that subscription apps are a powerful way to monetize online traffic, regardless of whether that’s organic from your following, or from paid ads.
Check out the Whimsical board here to see all of Chani and Nebula
Botsi is now live.
I’ve been working with apps for 12+ years now.
For the last 1.5 years, I’ve been working to build the tool of my dreams.
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