April 29, 2023
Hey everyone! 😊 I promised to share our experience and insights about subscriptions, paywalls, and trials with you all. Here we are! 🚀
Last year was all about growth for us. We worked on core product features and MPF and by the end of January 2023, we had crystalized our short-term goals and long-term vision. 🤝
Our short-term focus was on retention and CAC/LTV growth, while our long-term vision was to develop an AI-coach for basketball 🏀
In Q1, we focused on retention and took some significant steps to achieve our goals, including implementing an AI-coach assistant (GPT-4), adding a casual mobile game (Scoring Machine), adding an NBA stats prediction game, and experimenting with paywalls and trials. 🤔
In this post, I will share our expectations and the final results of testing paywalls and trial length 😎
We used research by Revenue Cat to create a data-driven approach to making decisions (that huge spreadsheet). And we came up with three hypotheses to test 😇
1️⃣ First, we thought that a hard paywall would increase the conversion to trial by up to 2 times and the revenue by 1.5 times.
2️⃣ Second, we believed that a 7-day trial would increase conversion to CR by 20%.
3️⃣ And third, we hypothesized that lower prices might increase conversion both to trial and from trial to paid. 💰
The reality was different from our expectations. The hard paywall didn't work as we expected 😳 and we had a 2x drop in organic users 🙈 We were lucky to turn it off remotely without the app updated release (thanks to remote config 🤓).
We realized that we need to have even non-paying users using the free features of the app and inviting their friends, which is important for building a community 🙏
However, the 7-day trial worked exactly the way we expected it to work 🥳 We saw a 20-40% conversion to trial growth. But there was a difference in conversion rates between iOS and Android due to the difference in prices. After setting Android prices 2x lower than iOS in September 2022, we started making money on Android, and today, 45% of our revenue comes from Android with a 73% share of all our users. We realized that we can adopt the prices and localize the app to make money on global organic growth from Android devices 📈