Double Mobile App Sales as Indie Software Developer

Here you can find the video version for the post: YouTube

I have three apps in the AppStore now, but one of them drives most of the revenue. This App is to train to hold your breath longer, it may sound strange, but if you do free diving or other water sports, this can be a very valuable skill.

I like to spend part of my vacations under the water. That's why I developed this App.

Anyways, back to money. Last year I did a Few changes in onboarding flow, and that helped to bump monthly sales from about $400 to $ 1'000

Here is how I got from $400 -> $1'000: YouTube

$ 1'000 per month is nice money for a side project, but I was thinking about how to increase that more.

There are a few different ways to do that. You can surely try to get more users to use your App by doing more marketing and ranking better in the AppStore. I will leave this for later. Now I decided to try to increase the conversion rate from free to paid users.

A few years ago, I would try to add more features to convince free users to decide to use the paid version, but after a few years of indie development, I know it is not working. Cutting features from the free version could do the trick, but I don't like to do that and prefer to keep my App useful for free users.

What did I do:

So, I should try to improve the paywall to make it more attractive. My goal was to increase trial sales.

I had two theories to test:

Clean purchase screen

The current paywall includes three different purchase offers. Monthly, Yearly, and one-time purchases.

I prefer to sell yearly subscriptions, the best option for the users, and include a free trial. A one-time purchase is here for a few users who hate subscriptions and want to buy once and forget.

We have a classic three-price offer with the best one in the middle. You can see this pattern everywhere, and it is pretty popular but an old tactic to sell products, fast food, whatever

So, I decided to simplify the main screen and offer one product that I like to sell - a yearly subscription. I already have a screen with just one product and use it for discount offers.

This screen works well in onboarding flow and helped last year to get the App to $ 1'000 in monthly sales.

Fear of starting the trial

The second thing I wanted to try was reducing the fear of starting the trial.

I already saw that some users start the trial and cancel it immediately. In this case, the user will still have access to the premium feature until the end of the trial period but will not be charged automatically.

Another group of users still pick monthly subscription even if it is more expensive in the long term. Perhaps that's their way to try the product without getting a yearly subscription.

So to reduce the fear of starting a free trial, I decided to add a reminder about the end of the problem in the purchase flow. Messaging on the sales screen is a bit different as well.

The call to action is - to start a seven-day free trial today, and you will be reminded to cancel it if you don't like to.

So, what was the result?

Trials after changes in the payment screen skyrocketed. I have twice more trials started now than before. The current low is the previous high on my sales chart. So this is a clear win, and my experiment is successful.

But what about the sales, show the money. :)

By adding the notification to cancel the trial, there is a chance to lose some sales. But I'm not sure it is good for the product to keep around paid customers who just forgot to cancel their subscription at the end of the trial.

For my product, this is working fine as well. I pushed it over $2K in monthly sales, and the result seems stable.

I'm not yet on my goal to get 3K this year, but I'm getting closer.