Breaking Through A Competitive App Category

0:01 [Music] what is up app Nation it is Steve Pou young founder of vms.com and happy holidays to you all I am in a very festive mood and I've been gone for the last couple of weeks we visited the team in the Philippines we had a company Retreat and that was so awesome to see everybody in person a little bit weird at first but it was amazing amazing that's why I've been off the past couple of weeks but we wanted to come back right before the holiday to share some amazing content with you and if you're new to the channel this is the channel that's going to really dive deep into the weeds of how do you grow your

0:47 downloads and ultimately your sales and today I've got a phenomenal guest for you someone I got intro to from Kevin Rose and we'll talk about that particular story but they've been able to really break through the very very competitive meditation mindfulness space and their unique approach to breaking through we're going to break that all down right now for you today so let's without further Ado let's bring in Jack [Music] [Music] schikman Jack Welcome to the show my friend Steve great to be here that video

1:33 is awesome I need to get that for every every show I do love it hey it's Unique to us I I thought it would be fun to have and it's something I created just on canva by the way and then I had my team created it for every guest but I really want to congratulate you on the success of the way app it's phenomenal I'm a user of the the app I'm a big fan of yours too let's start you know I know a little bit of the background and Henry who's the I would say the lead medit of the app and one of five or six Zen Masters in the world five yeah in his lineage of Zen from Japan yeah that's amazing that's amazing so what even got you started because I've worked with you know I told you early on I was like you know we work with a lot of

2:19 meditation apps and that's the main category that I talk about because everybody wants to release one what were you seeing the market like what made you want to build an app like this yeah yeah you know it's funny like people a lot of people said you're trying to launch a meditation app like that's crazy you know there's 3,000 of them that already exist right yeah like one of the most yeah saturated and competitive spaces uh in consumer apps um but basically yeah I should say uh that that Henry who's also my uncle and co-founder and meditation teacher uh we were we were talking a couple of years ago and um you know I had been I was a nous meditator I've been trying a bunch of apps uh myself and kind of finding just through

3:04 personal experience and then we were talking to a bunch of other users as well and kind of doing our research like there's a big gap in uh in meditation like the meditation app space right because you've got millions of people who know about meditation who have tried meditation or who want to try meditation like Steve I'm sure you've got a bunch of friends or maybe even yourself right at various points he like man I know meditation is good for me but I just can't stick with it like I just can't make it a habit so there's this like gap between intention and action uh and so there was like this limitation in uh in the current space of meditation apps and so we yeah we had this crazy idea that like we we could do something different and solve that Gap yeah I like it and

3:50 the difference is really why don't you talk about it Jack I mean it is One Singular approach to meditation versus what Jack has called the Netflix and most people try to do the Netflix meditation where there's ton of content you have no idea which ones to choose but you just said hey here's one path that works for most people you got to follow this path exactly yeah so that there's basically we just took this big ux gamble actually because I think like the design Paradigm for like for most apps is hey choice is good right give the user more choice but actually when you're trying to learn something when you're really trying to like go on like a skills based Learning Journey like is choice that good uh and actually you

4:35 know we did yeah in the kind of the user research we did the Deep user research we did at the start you know we interviewed loads of people who basically spend 10 minutes 15 minutes 20 minutes scrolling through options in their current meditation app and it's kind of equivalent to like a little bit of a doom scroll right you just you keep scrolling and the time that you could have spent doing your meditation you're spent in a sort of decision paralysis mode so we said okay we're just going to rip out all the choice uh and you're just going to be presented with one thing you can do which is the first step and when you've done that there's only one thing you can do which is the second step and then it's basically like this sequential linear Journey that just and when when we have that content model we can then also do another thing which is we can take someone much deeper right because now you're on a path you're on a

5:22 you're on a curriculum you're in a system and so that's where Henry as a zen master like his depth of teaching and WID could could really come through and it's like hey this is this is really trying to replicate what it's like to study every day with with a Zen master like what would that Journey look like and then that's that was like our guiding design principle basically yeah I love it all right if if you're in the audience and joining us live Martin in India how's it going he's in Vietnam right now too hey Jackson Vietnam okay I don't know if I blew up your cover Jack but Yan is here too is using timer and times considered keyword duplication not necessar neily Y and I would test duplicating anyways so that's just a little ASO hint and then Rudy good to see you and then John good to see you if

6:08 you guys got questions for Jack or myself please make sure you leave it in the comments Jack I really like that Henry shows up as a first video a friend of mine who has the miracle morning app he has a video too with Hal who's the author of The Miracle morning book anyways it he has a video and he's like yeah having a video especially when you have someone that is somewhat well known in the space does help with the the overall conversions and retention of the app too yeah and we found you know uh a lot of folks who uh want you know want to meditate want to have a practice they're looking for a teacher right like to build that relationship with someone who is going to reliably train you over the long term so when we were building this app we wanted to put Henry really front

6:54 and center so yeah he's in the on boarding uh you see him a lot like it's really uh and that that kind of makes sense because it's really an expression of his teaching like he studied for meditated for 35 years and everything that he has learned has been distilled and and put in into this app for for the user to experience the when you said you were doing user research how long was it and how did you know that you know you get the Steve Jobs quote if I asked my customers or the Henry Ford quote if I ask my customers what they wanted they want a faster horse not a car right so how did you know whether to take the feedback as if like it's going to really pay off for you versus not yeah great question um we just tried to do it super iteratively so like you know step one was hey let's uh let's

7:41 just do some interviews okay we got a hypothesis step two we did a diary study where we just did like the raw the rawest possible version where it's like I'm going to just send someone 10 like unedited sound files in a Google Drive doc right and like can you just do one of these a day for 10 days how how does that really really rough prototype there was was no app there were no screens and we got feedback from that and then it was like okay next month we're going to take the learnings from that and we're going to do like uh the most Bare Bones at prototype with a slightly more refined set of set of uh audio files and then just doing it like that so we got these like very frequent kind of course corre course correcting touch points from like a small group of users and I guess the other point as well is that we spent a lot of time finding uh which was

8:28 kind of hard actually finding like a group of uh what we who we was predicting to be our core target audience so it's like we're getting feedback already from people who we who we're building this app for right from the start I like that how did you know that like how did you guess like what was it because I think people people Jack the the response the reason why I'm asking this is like when I'm working with clients sometimes they're like it's for everybody man like it's for everybody so how did you decide like this would be the perfect audience for us yeah you know there was um I'm going to forget who said it uh or maybe it's like not attributable but there's like a a kind of a classic uh Silicon Valley startup quote that I really love which is build something that a few people love rather than a lot of people like and we really

9:13 took that to heart you know it's like you better to have a small group of people who like Rave about your product and you find product Market fit for then you try and build something that like thousands of people are like yeah it's kind of okay you know um so we had are and it was yeah it was a little bit of a hypothesis but back to that point around um you know there's existing meditation apps right there's these there's big incumbent players that have been around for a long time because of that there's a growing group of people who have been there done that like we call them headspace graduates it's like they've used that app they've got what they can out of it and they're looking for the next thing yeah and you know that's who we really built this for it's like someone who's not just a beginner but is ready to take their meditation to the next level it's like how do I do that how do I do that what do I what do I

9:59 choose what's my support stop structure and so that was how we found you know that that was we we look for those people oh I like it you hit on something because I am one of those people like I did call them for the longest time I've moved to pelaton because I'm a heavy pelaton user but the thing I hate about it was like I don't know which one to pick like honestly I'm just here to do my 10 minutes a day and get out and be done with it but it's funny that you said that because I that's what I thought about as someone who started using the app and I was like oh I love this I don't have to think about it I just turn it on and I pick the meditation too yeah yeah you know one of The Inspirations for us as well was dualingo uh really cool app also like a single path right I mean if you imagine that it's like they've broken it down you've got the different content blocks like a really clear information

10:45 hierarchy and when you load it up it's like okay I'm learning Spanish I'm learning French and whatever it is and it's just like takes you on a path um and yeah we we wanted to kind of be yeah we wanted to be the dualingo for for meditation I love it was this hard Jack to be like nope you gotta finish the first one before you can get to the second one man it was tough yeah man we had to make a lot of trade-offs to stick true to that uh you know that principle of like there's no choice um and because you know you get different there are lots of different even for the the like the Target demographic we're trying to serve there's different there's different user archetypes right some people have more experience less experience they want to get different things out of it so they might see content on day 30 and they're like oh well give me that content now you know

11:31 and it's like no no you've got to go through Days 1 to 29 to get there um so we yeah but we we we we stood firm and you know we built in messaging in in on boarding in the early content to explain like why we've done this and to encourage users to trust into this yeah very different uh content model and ux ux journey look I know you I know the numbers that and how well you've done so congratulations on it one thing that I hope the audience realizes too is there's no real path to success you can see on Jack's on the way app there's been no pay wall jack made it a point to be like you open the app you get you see Henry he talks a little bit and then you go straight into the journey and the way

12:16 and so I really like that Jack I don't tell talk to me about that approach like because all the best practices say and you know this now you know this too but you made this concentrated effort to be like nope we're going to try to get you on this journey first make make you love our app and then get you to potentially pay us yeah I um it's uh it's such it's such an interesting question right I I really believe in uh in minimizing time to value for the user so it's like what's the shortest way in terms of time in terms of number of TAPS like getting someone to feeling like oh like some kind of feeling in our case it's a meditation like feeling good uh feeling some some calm feeling some peace feeling like they've learned something but of course for other apps it can be whatever the value is but how do you

13:03 minimize that time and yeah for me like throwing up a pay wall before you've given someone that experience I'm sure that can work in some context but for us we're like hey we want to give you a really good chance to to like uh yeah to experience you know a few sessions and this and this path to say hey this is for me this is not for me and then uh and then there's the invitation to to go to go past that through the payall to the audience promise I'm going to get to Jack's growth strategy and how he's able to grow pretty much organically so far but Jack I want to stick on the product one more thing so there's meditations where you sit and there's ones where talk and Henry will talk to you about what's the way right here's what I really love this is what I told you pre- interview the the feature I love okay so this is the talk he's

13:50 gonna just explain what is the way and I'm going to hit play on this here's the feature I really love I could actually 1.5 this because I was like okay this is just him talking about it like I'm just I'm not here to potentially meditate I'm just here to learn from Henry about what this is and I love that you added this feature and Jack I did look to see if meditations had for me to speed up you're like no no no no just for the talk you can spe that up yeah yeah that's right I wonder if uh Steve I'll be Keen to hear is 1.5 enough like do you want a 1.75 do you want a 2X 1.5 is enough but you a 1.25 but 1.5 is definitely enough cuz certain what people I'll listen on 1.5 certain people I'll go 1.8 I used to do two but I'm like getting older and my ears aren't as

14:36 strong anymore so I got it one point two is too fast now yeah yeah yeah but yeah definitely like I think um it's important for us to it's super important for us to um give the user that like that background that theory it's like we're really trying to help someone learn uh and and like deepen their practice so you know it can't all just be hey here's a medit Med itation is a meditation like we need the theory as well but of course we recognize that people are coming to the app primarily to meditate so it's like we want to be you know give that context but not like uh but give some optionality around it as well so it's like you've got to sit through it but you can speed it up a little bit yeah I love it and Mato says look I love the ux easy simple and looks amazing he's got a question thanks for sharing Jack here's a question if the ways tailored to

15:22 people who are getting started or used to meditating how do you go about keeping people for a long time what yeah that's a that's a really great question um the at the moment we it's it's one path so it's it's essentially like one size fits all so what we did was in the content we spent a lot of time pitching that content just right so that there's going to be it's possible for a beginner who's totally new to uh to to kind of enjoy it and to learn but it's also got stuff in there for more advanced meditators now I will say that was like our our first like our we launched with but our plan that we're going to we're going to get to in 2025 is to actually have uh based on your your a couple of questions that you can fill out in on boarding your level of

16:08 experience um basically cater to a total beginner in a slightly different way it will still be a single path but there'll be a little bit more introductory content a slight different onboarding ux just to help someone who's a beginner uh kind of ease into it before we start hitting them with the more uh the more advanced stuff but yeah great great question I love that approach Jack I mean you said it best build something that few people will love but not everyone will like I forget the exact quote but you you can always expand but you started with the people that will love this product and then slowly as you get traction and you make Headway or you get traction and some product Market fit then you can always expand to the other people later on yeah right yeah it's like the concentric circles approach yeah likes your answer okay let's talk

16:57 about well I want to say hi what's up Miguel to see you and then since we're getting into the growth side of things Steve how is Tik Tok ads is it effective on app downloads or is Asa better Jack you have any thoughts on this you're the guess man uh I would love to have a I I don't know this is Tik Tok ads is uh is Uncharted Territory for us so uh I defer to you on that one Steve okay the it really depends honestly we have seen that sometimes it depends on here's what I would say NX I look at the volume right because we we've SE I've heard it all t or Tik Tok organic Tik Tok ads meta ASA just ASO people have found tremendous success doing just ASO and ASA and so it really depends on the nature of your app ASA is

17:43 a higher converting channel in terms of but it can also be limited in the amount of scale that you can get and so and it could also get expensive because we're all fighting for that one spot so if there's volume people are searching for your type of app like meditation and mindfulness ASA would be a good platform but well for one of our other clients Tik Tok was way more effective than meta or ASA because there was not a lot of search volume so we had to push and Target the Right audience for us and Tik Tok became a better channel for us given our audience that we're targeting so that's how I would answer it it always depends okay Jack what I also want to talk to you about is sort of your growth now that you've talked to your users did that Google doc which I love these type of stories by the way nothing jazzes me

18:30 up than hearing those type of stories what was your approach to launching this app and getting that early traction you needed yeah yeah yeah yeah so I mean I would say that uh first and foremost we were a 100% focused on the product it's like we we knew growth was important but we just wanted to give ourselves enough time to make sure the product was like as good as it could be I mean that we had product Market fit basically right so you know we launched we launched like it was kind of a it was really an MVP approach right like we're going to launch enough content and enough path with enough of a a smooth ux to really test the hypothesis of like is this single path going to work and then we're going to iterate as fast as possible so there were loads of features that you know uh ear early users were like oh man

19:17 I want to be able to download sessions for offline I want to be able to bookmark sessions like we didn't like for later we didn't have any of those features so we had to like work really quickly to then to to to to add all those and kind of fit in the gaps and so I just want to say like I think like I really believe in the philosophy that like growth starts with a really good product uh and that that has to be like the first thing you tackle uh that said once we felt like after you know three or four months uh in the market and we were getting really really strong feedback and really strong engagement and retention uh we started to think more around growth uh but for us also we wanted to lean as much as possible into organic so that meant two big strategies for us

20:03 uh early on the first was what can we do on on Word of Mouth and the second was what we can do on earn media um and on the on the word of mouth side we we kind of realized that with uh with Med with meditation with meditation apps like the the just the fact that the kind of the space we're in uh people can have really deeply positive experiences right like they can um we've had people emailing us saying that meditating with the way has helped them uh recover through drug addiction uh it's helped them deal with like family members passing on there's people who've been trying to meditate on off for like

20:48 10 years 20 years and they haven't managed to do it and then they've tried the way and man they can finally have a practice so like these experiences can be really positively transformative for someone and that's um that is that makes people want to share it right that's like a really strong intrinsic motivation to bring that into the lives of your friends and family so we started to realize that oh wow we have a group of of users who were really strongly motivated to help share this so then okay we're like okay what can we do to help facilitate that because at the start it was just like they could look tell their friend about it and then the friend had to go and download it themselves and it was like you know there's no like smooth facilitation there so what we did was okay like how can we how can we make that as smooth as

21:34 possible so uh you can you can share the app itself you can share all the content in the app that was a really big one so you see the end of every session there's a button that pops up says share this and so if you're like doing a meditation you're like oh man my buddy you know Steve would really love this one couple of TAPS you can send it to them uh and then uh and then they can access that for free uh and that's been that's been huge like that's been a really big um driver of shares uh we also uh added a a referral bonus so that if you share the app with someone uh they get some extra free sessions so that their pay well gets kicked back basically um there's like when you complete certain parts of the pathway there are Graphics that pop up that you can share as well to social media um and we even actually added this

22:21 feature um that uh where you can gift an entire subscription to to a friend so what that means is that you can actually just like buy a whole 3 month or 12 month subscription for someone uh and folks are are doing that so they want to share share not to share the app but actually like share the app and pay for it for someone um so all of that basically was what we did I mean you you just go top right top right button on that screen take you to the account oh okay and then you see where it says uh yeah share a subscription gift a subscription wow and people just gift it huh people gift it yeah of course around the holidays uh that's a that was a that was a really big thing as well but um yeah that been a really uh really nice

23:06 way of seeing uh seeing the community kind of kind of grow that's amazing all right and can I go can I ask you more about this like okay let's say pick everything whoops I want to take screenshots because I think it's really cool I'm gonna click this and then I type in and do I pay through apple or do how how are you doing this just it's an it's an inout purchase so uh if you you fill out your you fill out the details of the of the person you want to receive the gift uh you fill out your details as well so they know who it's coming from they're going to get sent a beautifully branded email that says hey Steve has bought a gift for you um and then you just check out with in in that purchase so it's like super uh low low touch um let me see don't have to do any other

23:52 like any other credit card stuff wow that's amazing and how how am I able to readed it you just know yeah so as the as the receiver um you're going to yeah there we go see so it's just like you check out oh and it's a onetime charge too so I only pay for the one year and as a receiver I only get the one year for free EX exactly yeah nice I love that receiver just gets sent an email um that's saying hey Steve's bought you this this beautiful gift and there's a deep link and they can activate it um they set up an account and then it's uh yeah it's it's it's free from there what are you using for the Deep LAN we use Branch nice yeah pretty robust John says gifting is an awesome idea I loved it and I know my team is onu is

24:38 writing notes like we love this idea like we're C this on up I love it okay Adam just came in what's up Adam Jack did you use any services to track friend referrals or did you build a referral system yourself yeah we we use Branch as well um which was pretty plug and play uh we got it like uh yeah up and running within within a week uh then that lets us that lets us track uh track friend referrals to their deep link system yeah yeah love it our mobile says Jack do you meditate yeah I I do I do I do uh I love man I love working on a product that I that I kind of built partly for me really for me like I was user number one um and uh so yeah we do uh I meditate I use the app uh and we do like yeah we do

25:25 team meditations every team meeting with the uh with the team we uh we do the first five minutes is is meditating yeah it's the ultimate dog fooding right you got to use got to use your own product well if you read the article Jack wasn't always a meditator until yeah he's like hey my boring you I'm gonna quote you jack oh this boring this guy that I thought was just a boring Uncle turned out to be a pretty cool dude yeah so to speak on te crunch it is on te crunch for sure no it's true like I definitely thought for yeah most of my life the meditation was just like a waste of time I just didn't understand why anyone would do that like it's just 10 minutes out of your day you're losing right uh and I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that now but uh that's that's uh that's what I thought and then yeah two and a half years ago all changed and I realized what how good meditation can be

26:12 uh can be for someone yeah the earn media side of things was they let me just hit on that a little bit was it a like an agency or did you guys just go out and try to earn that media and reach out to various Publications yeah yeah we um it was a I would say it was a mix of of like grind and luck um we basically turned into like we create we set up a really serious robust like CRM style Pro like sales process basically so we made a list of 150 Target podcasts that we did like deep research on for like uh the engagement they had uh the the SE like the space they were in the the listenership that they had

26:59 uh we there was there's some really good platforms out there that let you see this kind of this kind of data for different podcasts and um podchaser was one that we we we loved and so we built like okay here's a 150 Target dream list um of podcasts in yeah Health Wellness spirituality meditation like um you know those kinds of those kind of uh Arenas and then we yeah we just went through one by one um do we have any warm leads uh do we have like are there email addresses online we can find again some of these some of these platforms have like production teams or uh like other uh Affiliates that they're they're involved with have their email addresses listed so you can reach out to them um and yeah we just went through it and and

27:46 we were a bit lucky because Henry uh had already some exposure and some following so had had a bunch of Connections in the in the podcast uh in the podcast World which was which was a helpful head St and then we also uh we were really uh I would say kind we were really on it like with every time we had a new connection we like offered the podcast host the app for free we offered their team the app for free uh we gave them the kind of you know the story around it and I would say it helps that Henry is like a great guest as well you know he's uh got a got a great voice he's his Z Master he's a cool dude uh so um there's like you know it's always like a rich a rich conversation uh for the for the host um um but we yeah we were he we we managed

28:31 to land like 40 plus podcasts uh in total so it was like a real it was a real tour um and then every you know every time it's like okay can we where can how can we mention mention the app uh can we link to it in the show notes uh all that all that good stuff and I think that there was one other element as well which I don't know if this is going to be like a replicable growth hack uh but it definitely helped us and that is that Henry had a book come out around that time so this is like in the summer so we've been live for like three four months we were really gearing up with a podcasts and uh he had a book come out that was really like a very complimentary piece to the app it's called Original love and it goes in it's like the same teaching philosophy that you find in the app but

29:17 just in book format and um so that was a really nice you know having a having a book out as a really nice uh in for a bunch of podcasts right it's like you can talk about the book you can talk about app so that was like a help as well yeah I love it I think it speaks volumes to just sort of thinking about the app space as just one of you know van says what's your distribution channel it's been pretty much this right earn media I would say and it has it just been podcast or have you done to try I know you were featured on Tech crunch but have you tried to do any type of like press too just typical blogs and stuff and yeah we uh we did like we reached out to um you know we did a we did a a full search of like all the journalists who had written you know top 10 meditation apps 2023 or you know

30:04 here's what Forbes thinks you should be using in uh January 2024 and we reached out to a bunch of uh of journalists and writers and bloggers and we didn't have a whole lot of success honestly like it was without a warm lead we found that quite challenging um with the tech crunch we did have a warm lead and so it happened kind of kind of quickly so that was awesome so I think yeah that space if you're kind of going cold that we anyway we found that we found that pretty challenging well that's amazing that it's just primarily I love hearing that because then I can safely say like you've been able to achieve what all that you've been achieved primarily through podcasts like different huge podcasts I mean Tim Ferris Kevin Rose those are some really legit podcasts you've been on too yeah definitely and it's interesting the podcast right because um some shows

30:52 you see a bump within 24 hours and then some shows you don't see a bump for a long time and then but then like three months after it's gone live you'll you'll get an email from a a user it's like hey I heard you guys on this random podcast from three months ago and I downloaded the app and I love it it's like what so I I don't know like I guess there's like so much podcast content now people develop these like backlogs you know it's like you save all these episodes you're gonna listen to and you kind of get to them later um so uh yeah it's it's podcast is also a little bit fickle it's not like you you know one drops and then bang immediately you can you can Bank a bunch of extra users the next day but definitely for exposure it's uh it's a it's it's it's it's it's a wonderful uh yeah it's a wonderful strategy definitely recommend pod Chaser that was the the tool all right yeah got some questions from the audience ready

31:37 have you played around with ugc content yeah great question the answer is no but hopefully soon that's going to change um definitely uh love love the strategy and um I think the perfect ugc I mean come on I mean yeah Henry I love this too yeah like give yourself 10 minutes you can listen to 10 minutes right now if you want it on the website I love that feature too can you guys hear that can you hear that Jack I can't hear that okay sorry they're missing out on on Henry's Henry Henry's voice but let me try to see if I can I can do it I can do it while yeah here I'll give you another question Ivon says what do you think about Tik Tok organic content is this something you're planning to do yeah 100% um I uh like Tik Tok is I

32:24 think an incredible platform you can gain a lot of exposure very quickly and I think also what's exciting there is like with you know you don't have to go to like the the biggest influencers like with a really good micro influencer strategy uh you can actually I think you can really move the needle um so this is definitely something that we're interested in uh in exploring in 2025 for sure I read a great book I have it right here I listened to it in case I cheated but it's 12 months to a million by Ryan Moran and he talked about micro influencers and you know a lot of the book I was like oh this is what I did cool and then the the part of the influencer stuff was just look for 10 to 50,000 and so we're we're trying that for a few of our clients too and I've heard of on from other clients that I've known they're just like they've done organic

33:11 Tik Tok and that's how they've been able to really grow to really six figures a month just through organic Tik Tok now I know nothing about this I think I've aged myself out of it but that's what I've heard from two different people in two different industries that probably don't know each other too all right Jack I got it here you go here's here's your hi so in this session we're going to explore an old zen practice known as just sitting simply sitting a friend of mine spent time in a monastery in the far west of Japan and the monks would get up in the early morning before Dawn and she would join them in the Zeno when it really good you know I wish I had that voice

33:58 people feeling a little bit calmer I hope so yeah for sure for sure all right Captain Michael says do you normally play the influencers or affiliate Partners up front for your app exposure or do you have any Revenue sharing Partnerships yeah this is a great question I um I think the answer is the answer is going to be both um right I think uh I think both models can can work I I do love the idea of like in any partnership right not just we talking about influencers but like aligned incentives I think that's really really important it's like we both do we both do well we both don't do well together um and so for me like yeah the revenue sharing model is uh is is a great way to do that um but yeah of course I think

34:45 both come work for sure um Michael what we I did a podcast episode if you do influencer marketing or affiliate marketing for Indie devs on YouTube you'll find the the video and the podcast but this guy talked about he was a marriage app and he like you jack he went out to podcasters and podcasters because pod I've been doing this for since 2013 the podcast there's no Revenue model right unless you get ads but like only the biggest podcasts have make money from ads and so for the smaller ones they're looking for a revenue model and that's where Affiliates so that's what he did every podcast they were on they had an affiliate model and they would be like look if you can send these users we split the income and he built the he's a developer so he built the affiliate system himself but it's a great episode

35:30 especially For You Indies out there I think with the influencers generally paid up front that's what they prefer to have versus a REV share unless maybe you're talking to a micro influencers but the biggest bigger influencers that we work with they just generally want money up front versus rev share all right Mato thought it was Liam n for a second and then Michael Lov The Voice well all right I like it uh let's see what else what else am I missing Jack that you want to make sure we we talk about yeah I think um we've that was like the the interesting thing about um about on the growth side right is that uh We've we're we're basically like yeah 100% organic uh till now and I do think

36:16 that um there's still loads more that we can do uh and you know for an app for any app that does it's very content heavy like we create so much audio video uh like Graphics you know there's a lot of like raw material there for for earned media and so one thing that we haven't really tackled but I'm really excited about for 2025 is like how can we create uh earned media that can that can be shared like that's valuable that folks will want to will want to share whether that's like free meditations that can go on YouTube whether that's um stuff that can go on Instagram like you know quotes wisdom people want to share people want to save uh I think that's also something that's really interesting

37:01 can be can be a really like powerful free right uh growth growth uh growth strategy I love it and one of our clients really huge app they got five million mully active users past client of ours but there's there's been a lot of sharing in this app too and so just like you jack they were like not so concerned about monetization because once they can get people using the app and doing stuff within the app they they know there's that virality component and that's going to lead to more organic Word of Mouth growth and but what they did see was they never had the pay wall during the onboarding experience Jack they added it their end goal Jack was higher retention they added the pay wallet to the onboarding they saw an increase in sales obviously but an increase in retention as well so that

37:48 that is the yeah it was interesting and they five month five million monthly active user so I'm like okay that's a pretty sick did they figure out like why what what what was like what's going on there that the payr increases retention it's like is it the part of like it's like a commitment you know you commit as a user so you're going to be you going to use that more yeah that's what we think too right and funny enough I I have a community of app entrepreneurs as well and we had a meeting earlier today and somebody in our community he tested out a couple of different things where he had people try to engage with the app first and then show him a pay wall and then not just you have way more engagement he just did one little thing right and then he versus just directly showing the paywall and not having them do anything and he saw the one that just

38:34 showing directly showing the pay wall won which was surprising because we all guessed the other one would win because they were more inclined so something to play around with that's why when people ask me questions I'm like I've heard it all dude you're just gonna have to figure it out but here's the general best practices that has worked too so find the find the PATH find the way that works for you VP says Steve I love your show I have an that's about to launch in a month or two and I've implemented some of your tactics and looking forward to reaching out to you and your team sounds good thanks for being here and nurx says Steve that jok's time so Jack here we go let's get into the app audit segment and then we like to start off every app audit with some dead [Music]

39:20 jokes all right jack you have I forgot to ask you before the interview do you have some dad jokes ready to go man I got some D JS I got some D JS I got some game I'm going to assume that my team warned you all right you want to go to first or you wna you want to go second you're the guest I'll let you decide uh I'll I'll let you I'll let you lead I'll let you lead I'll return fire let me make sure the buttons work okay it's been a couple of weeks since I've done this all right here we go I got more Christmas theme I thought meditation theme jokes but then I was like these weren't really good that's so I went Christmas theme jokes all right jack why is Santa go music school why to improve his rapping skills there you go all right jack what

40:06 do you got all right Steve uh I ordered a chicken and an egg from Amazon really I'll let you know that's a good one I like that one but Jay if you thought Jack's Joker was better put s in the comments if you thought my joke was better andu is we're gonna reward you have to vote we're gonna I think what we did last time was oh rewarded somebody that won okay just vote and then we'll pick a random winner and then you'll get a free promotion through India appena so I want the votes all right and then Sanu what a Trader he voted for you he's part of my team and he's voting for you what a Trader Sanu there you all right thank you John all right let's get into the app audit side of it and I want to thank our sponsors for this app audit look if you're

40:51 looking for actually let's go into [Music] it's long enough all right thank you to ASO mobile if you're looking for an affordable ASO solution check out ASO mobile I think there's some discounts that's still going on at Masters 40 try out that discount code you should get 40% off any of their plans ATMs 40 should get you that so thank you to Asom mobile.net to check them out and they're Ukrainian company so if you want to support our Ukrainian company you know it's a great way to do that as well all right and if you want your app audited in a future live stream well easy just go to atm.com audit and we'll take a look at rares rares app all right jack here it is

41:36 whoops let me this the stage it is a journal app so we don't we just do them on order guys we're not picking out specific ones I used to do that it was too much trouble I just go in order so first come first serve anything on the App Store front Jack that you want to give feedback to rares about you know I like I really like the um uh the call outs uh on the screens like it's I can eyeball that and really see like the value proposition uh what I get out of the app I wonder if you've got you've got four there if you could use one of them for uh like a bit more of uh the benefit the user gets like not just the functionality but like what that gives you or maybe a testimonial you know because it's like you've got space for

42:22 four you could use one of them for like a bit of social proof or some other element to make me want to download yeah I like that anything else um I guess star Jack so I'm just trying to you know what saying like it's an awesome rating but there's only seven and depending on on how many users it's like some way of bumping that up you know if there if you've even got like a couple of hundred users an email going out to them saying hey if you're loving it would really appreciate a rating I think like getting that number up from seven to double digits would really just help when I eyeball that it's like okay yeah this is a you this is a really well reviewed app that's uh it's part of that that social proof right yeah I like it I like it and I kind of wanted to check out what you guys had on yours and I I agree I think

43:09 too many people too many developers kind of lean into the features versus the actual benefit so like deep in your meditation Journey obviously you have meditation in there you want to match that with the first screenshot and then you want to talk about the benefits and I like that your your social proof is like hey this is his end master and obviously you have more social proof with being on Tim Ferris Kevin Rose and Tech Crunch and all that stuff but you know Jack practice what he preaches Jack I looked before I was like did is Jack practicing what he's preaching but he is and so I wanted to pull that up too here cool I like it all right let me get into the app itself because I got some ideas for you rares on how you can growth hack what Jack said to get to more than seven ratings I do think it's important it's going to be part of the entire ecosystem

43:56 of your growth all right let's get into the app wow it's cute I love these little animations Jack like I think it adds so much more to the app like I I was talking to another client of ours and I was like dude I love this animation like it just makes me feel good the first time I see it like I think this app is GNA be good yeah yeah right just yeah this is great rares I love that that color change that's really nice nice very nicely done oh okay the status symbol is at the right next to the next button so what is your emotional state I'm pretty happy actually thanks to Henry okay not to you jack thanks to Henry I'm pretty happy

44:42 that's how it should be uh journaling is a regular habit man I really like that dial in the bottom right that's like populating as you do it just so let you know it's not like a a huge form you've got to waade through yeah me too I'm going take a screenshot all right uh what the areas you like to focus on maybe relationship spiritual growth sure bullets probably one to five I like the I might just make this oh okay that's cool all right you're all set oh so notifications in the onboarding flow that's that's great and if you noticed

45:28 you get the review prompt I like this too so now all you need rares is more downloads okay here's where it gets interesting so nobody wants to start a premium right like you say start premium now so what we found Jack is continue tends to work better than any other call to action on the pay wall anything you want to mention on the pay wall too you know I love like having tick tick value proposition tick value proposition but six it's probably a few too many right a little bit too much copy it's hard to like eyeball that so I don't know I know it's tough like we've we've been playing around with this as well but getting that down to three max four just helps someone like you know in like just digest that quickly and look I think you can go up to $2 dollar a year

46:14 I think what you can also do rares is give a trial we have seen that having a trial increases conversions too you just got to be pay attention to your trial to paid metric as well the what you can also do is just put the trial only on the annual that's it and that's we've seen good results doing that and everything else looks really good I love I love having that that testimonial as well like the five star review there that's that's really nice probably the margin maybe a tiny bit long as well but it's I think it's great great positioning yeah so I'll just RAR you have a lifetime offer that I saw on your app store Page what our best growth hack in the world to get to 100 ratings try to hopefully get product Market fit

47:01 to get some early users and feedback from those early users what you do is this lifetime offer that you have hidden somewhere on your pay wall you put it on your pay wall you make it for free you tell a website called app advice that you're making your lifetime offer jack up your lifetime offer it shouldn't be $20 it should be probably $50 $100 in there tell them you're going to make it for free because it's going to be a non-consumable inapp purchase you can do that within App Store connect make it free for just two days tell them tell app advice about it and then that should get you tens of thousands of downloads which since you're asking for your review on the onboarding experience and you built a really great app it should help you get to close to 100 ratings and kick in your ASO as well and the cool

47:46 thing is you get some great user feedback and I've gotten some user feedback from people running this campaign on my own apps even AI apps where I know there's inherent cost I've given away a lifetime offer for free just to get those early users and early user feedback and the good thing is if nothing else hits you will definitely get more ratings but don't tell Apple don't share this with apple because when you're asking the ratings on the onboarding experience Jack since I've shared this strategy it's not sometimes it gets deleted for some strange reason with Apple so and trying to keep certain things more secretive than just exposing it all right jack it was pretty close one two three three four five and then I got one two three four hu your vote was

48:32 the tiebreaker I'm going to blame you for Jack winning so we're gonna play for a pint Jack maybe I don't know if you drink I don't really drink that much but I'll have a pint with you how about that coffee we'll play for a pint that sounds there you go all right round two my friend you want to go first or you want me to go first uh who went first last time I did yeah I'll go I'll go first this time there was a better joke by the way Romain how does a man on the moon cut his hair how Jack he Clips it I like that okay this gonna be tough all right I gotta go good one now that's a good one all right I think I've already lost this okay I'm gonna give you my best

49:17 shot Jack what do elves learn in school man I feel like I can get this one okay Jack it's not part of the rules you're not supposed to land my joke okay let me land the joke just say what what okay thank you elves learn the alphabet there you go all right that was round two all right thanks for all the votes but we're gonna close that and then we'll go into the next round so put J if you that Jack's WOTE joke was better which I would vote Jack and then put s and then I'll owe Jack a pint of beer next time we see each other in person any plans to come to the St Jack yeah for sure cool we uh I come come pretty regularly so okay uh to LA or do you go to Bay Area la la and Bay

50:04 Area and Santa Fe New Mexico which is where Henry is based so those are like way yeah nice dude that's awesome very Zen like yeah Santa Fe is yeah it's a beautiful spot yeah yeah I like it cool I actually went to a like a a temple like a Buddhist temple to meditate for an hour this is a few years ago but I was going through some things and I just wanted to relax and it was a pretty interesting experience just meditating with people for a whole hour they had different chance and so yeah when you said like we there we wanted to head space graduates I was like yeah that's me and way you put it in nice nice nice that and that that was in Santa Fe or that was somewhere else right that no it was just in the bay it's yeah yeah I

50:50 just found some Temple and yeah I I just went there it was for free some donations if you want to do it but yeah all right let's get into the next app Tim's app all right you guys we got we got some votes coming in now topcat I see your comment in there and I'll get to it but let's get to Tim's app real quick it's got It's a coaching app so here you go Jack I'll let you leave yeah this was this was really cool uh I uh I'm looking forward to like tennis being included because I'm a tennis player and I always I'm kind of like doing this just with like my camera on my iPhone right and then like looking at it and so I think this is a really cool really cool idea um I uh yeah I didn't have like a bunch of bunch of comments like I think this uh on on the on the the landing on the um

51:35 the store listing page uh like I thought it it looked pretty good like showing off all the key functionality of the app um you get uh I like the elevate your coaching experience that's like a nice like a nice tagline um and yeah I thought it was pretty clean okay and Tim wants help on onboarding pay wall so looking to increase revenue and stay competitive in the market so Tim I'm going to soon you got pretty decent download ratings so maybe you're getting good amount of ratings too as someone who coaches his my sons and daughters football you know a bunch of their Sports I love anything that helps with the coaching experience so let's get into the onboarding and pay wall stuff to help Tim here with his app all right welcome to tool for video analysis yeah love it oh I love

52:20 it compare your videos you might want to work on the spacing Tim the UI who this is messy yeah I had a couple couple of comments uh on this on this one because this is like you this is thrown up right away in the on the onboarding right so yeah um I think just that what we were talking about earlier Steve about how uh letting the user experience some value before showing showing the pay wall uh is one option um and then but if you're doing that and the pay's coming right up uh I think there's again there's like a lot of copy to try and absorb here right it's like uh am I looking at the the the

53:05 USBs listed with the ticks all the testimonials all the reviews all the ratings all the different options below it's like kind of a lot to to try and Eyeball for the user like making making user to do quite a lot of work to like process this page yeah we have some data points that having a video does work better sometimes for certain categories and what I would think about is you know the onboarding maybe ask like what sports do you coach how many teams do you coach because obviously the more teams or the more Sports I coach in the more value I'm going to get from this app and then you have this bronze silver gold you can start tailoring these some of these plans based off some of the answers kind like what Jack said with his new onboarding that they're working on they can tailor the meditation path

53:50 based on the questions you're going to ask and I would maybe even just try a video that shows off the app versus trying to explain it and we have seen that for certain categories of apps having a video on the pay wall converts better than just normal texts like this too so get through that all right let's get into this I think I just wanted the comment on the payall is like yeah I think it's great I think it's great to have tears uh and I think if that's done well that can be uh you know you can you can nudge folks towards certain tiers based on the feature set you include there but those that bronze silver gold the differentiation between tiers was based mostly on like how much cloud storage you got like 10 25 unlimited and it's just at this stage in my onboarding

54:36 I don't have a reference point for like how much I'm going to use like is 10 enough 25 enough so like the the nudge to get me to the higher tier uh is being having to be done without any context um you know I mean so it's like uh if we're going to have the payall here then you got to help me contextualize like why I need the 25 you know like put that in in the terms it's like obvious like oh my God I you know I've got to upgrade because it's just a slam dunk for me yeah I almost prefer I agree with you and I almost prefer a simplified pricing and then as they use the app then you try to upsell them right and then so I would probably just try to sell this because I have 10 gig seems like plenty for me and just try to sell this before I and then they like oh hey you're power user now do you want to

55:21 upgrade to more storage so let me hit that storage and get me to upgrade but yeah completely agree with you you the last thing I'll add Jack is Tim you should add a way for me to upgrade on this I mean I know you're probably waiting for me to do a cap but there are some people who just love the app and want to pay you don't make them find the upgrade button just put it big like you have import right here and import right here you can just change this upper column import to a crown or you know upgrade to Pro features or unlock more space whatever right whatever the benefit is you can just change that button because you have two Imports here and there but for an app like this like Jack I think even you know we've seen certain types of Niche apps do better with hard pay walls which is essentially you can't X out of it you either pay or

56:06 get the hell out of my app hey he's here Timothy good to see you Tim glad you made it Jack I've got some good news and bad news the good news is we're almost done okay the bad news is you lost my friend we we we have to go to the round two oh my God I didn't think that I would win but thank you was the what was the score I didn't see it was like four or five to one man I bummed yeah sorry bro so all right mate let's go one more oh man this is my my weak this is my weakest okay all right all right here we go Jack remember you just say what okay Jack what do you call an obnoxious reindeer what do you call an obnoxious

56:54 reindeer what rude food off I don't know if that was a good delirium that's abismal um okay uh Steve what is Forest gumps password what Jack One Forest one I like that all right see Jack I knew the answer I did not step on you're a joke that's how you do it all right ion he just so quick on the trigger to do that all right s do we have a winner were you able to pick a winner tom cat says hey Steve I did a free month in December on Indie Absa and doing a lifetime membership for January thanks oh let me know how it goes for those who are not familiar with Indie appsa we are

57:39 like an app Sumo or Groupon for apps and we acquired this business earlier this year well just really a couple of months ago and it's done really well and that's why we're giv away free promos too all right Marco oh Marco already has some all right Marco you're the winner reach out to us we'll set you up with a free campaign on the app Santa he's already run a campaign too thank you aanu for taking it over and I think that's it Jack anything you want to I missed that you want to make sure we cover Before We Say Goodbye no that was awesome it was really fun chatting Steve thanks for giving me a go at the the dad joke game oh wait who won okay it looks like you won so I did you you redeemed yourself my friend oh man on that one yeah so there you go all

58:24 right hit the like button thank you John thank you do the promo John tell tell them what else to do besides hit the like button all right tell them what to do all right Marco says thank you all right the app is called the way go check it out it is a phenomenally well done app I love all the meditations we played Henry's voice so you can get a sense of the type of meditation the calmness that you're going to get through Henry's voice I just love that you don't have to pick you just go through the path and the meditations are freaking awesome and if you're just trying to learn about it and the talks you can speed that up if you're crazy like me you can speed that up but the meditations you're going to have to sit through great great app Jack congrats on all the success so far can't wait to see you what else you're going to do in the future because you've done a great job so far but once again is the way on Google Play and the App Store as

59:10 well go check it out and Jack's not going to bother you to pay you got to love the app and then he'll eventually ask you to pay later on he really want you to love the app all right jack anywhere else you want to send a user no that's all good yeah the way app.com and uh yeah Steve thanks so much it was really fun yeah all right guys I think I might be back I might do a surprise show in between the holiday break but we are definitely back January 10th and we've got a great episode or for you already lined up the New Year is already filled out and then I'm going to come back probably February just do a solo episode with that so I might pop in January 3ish just to see if you guys are interested in tuning in but if not just join in January 9th and we'll be back better than ever ever and we're going to talk

59:56 about Facebook ads and how do you run it on a very small budget because I know all the conventional wisdom will tell you you need to spend at least $ three to $500 a day blah blah blah blah but we got somebody who was able to do it with just $50 a day and just $500 monthly budget and he actually works for a company that spends lots of millions of dollars on Facebook too so he's seen both sides and he's been able to work on his own side project for just $500 a month we're going to break down that strategy for you in the beginning of New Year all right that's it Jack I know you're like ready to go to sleep thank you so much for staying up late in Vietnam thank you guys for joining merry Christmas happy holidays and I'll see you in the new year thanks guys have a great have a great time that's it thanks everyone happy old days