How Simply Piano grows

On the Japanese country manager's advice, replaced the minimal Western best-practice paywall with a long, colorful, scrolling one-pager: the company story, founders, values, and many user quotes/social proof.

'Premium awareness test': a soft paywall at the end of Simply Piano onboarding. It won significantly on ARPU and ran for months, but subscribers it brought mostly used the touch-screen courses and had no piano or keyboard, so got little yearly value. Deeper segmentation showed kids did find value (replaying songs before getting a keyboard), so it was removed for adult-only accounts and kept for accounts with kid profiles.

Instead of sending social-ad clicks straight to the App Store (a big ask for people in a 'lean-back' scrolling mindset), run a web flow that carries the ad's message through onboarding to the paywall: e.g. a parent-targeted ad leads to onboarding addressing a parent's needs for their kid. The flow takes about two minutes, builds intent and explains value before the download. Deliberately not a copy of the App Store experience; framed as audience expansion rather than fee savings or attribution. Creative, placement and destination (web vs store) are tested per app and maturity.

Share plans, roadmaps and challenges with Apple and Google account managers; monthly meetings, fortnightly for Simply Piano, with both platforms. Early on, sent developers to WWDC with real problems from building the sound-recognition engine and got access to Apple's audio engineers. Adopt new platform features quickly and ask where the app lags their benchmarks. Fly to meet them.

Already translated into 11 languages. Built a model scoring each geo on potential (incremental audience and ARPU) and confidence in reaching it; chose Japan. Localized songs (e.g. anime), the UX, App Store creatives and currency, and hired a Japanese country manager. Principle: localize a limited scope but to the highest, consistent standard (e.g. German forms of address) to keep trust, then go all in.

Simply Piano started as single user/single profile. After seeing several household members use it, Simply introduced a family plan, later expanded to up to five profiles and access to multiple apps, so at any time someone in the household is using it.

Introduced monthly plans because an annual commitment deterred some learners, then after heavy pricing tests shifted Simply Piano toward monthly while keeping annual for discount-seekers. Only done in mature apps with strong monthly renewal; less mature apps still split. Rationale: monthly renewals turn usage/retention wins into revenue signal fast.

Users said they sing while playing, so the Simply Piano song library shows an indicator on pieces also available in Simply Sing (play and sing together with a spouse). Cross-promotion is only done where it adds user value; new apps otherwise grow with their own independent playbooks rather than pushing traffic from Piano.

When a new device is coming, decide which product fits the form factor best and set up a pod working closely with the platform to have the app ready at the device's release (e.g. Simply Piano on Vision Pro, with a Carnegie Hall standing-ovation moment at the end of the first course).