GTM Sauce

Soundmap · B2C · music collecting game app

Sell power-ups on top of the subscription, like 2x more songs nearby

Guest says it captures what each user is willing to spend; no numbers

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What they did

Subscription captures most of the value; consumables and power-ups (e.g. discover two times more songs in your area) capture extra spend from users willing to pay more.

What happened

Guest says they are able to capture all the value users are willing to spend.

In their words

Buying vs. Building: Scaling Beyond a Single App — Josh Peleg, BlueThrone

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Josh Peleg… Soundmap, for example. Soundmap, I spoke to the founder a while back now, a great guy called Zibo. Soundmap is Pokémon GO for music. So you'll walk around your city using your phone, and you'll find tracks in your city and you'll collect that music track, whether it's a Drake song, and then you'll be able to trade that with someone else. Maybe they've got a Metallica song and you can trade that. So there's peer-to-peer sharing there as well.

Josh PelegNow, they have a subscription, which is capturing majority of the value of the users. But they also have consumables and power-ups that, for example, let you discover two times more songs in your area. So they're able to capture all the value of the user that they're willing to spend. And I think the issue here for a lot of consumer apps is that they don't all lend themselves to this kind of monetization. But the real unlock we've seen from Blue Throne's level, talking to hundreds of app founders a month, is the ones that can crack this generally can create deeper LTVs, which gives you way more breathing room on your CPIs and your marketing budget.

David BarnardYeah. I think this is such an underexplored space so far in the non-gaming app world. And consumable IAP in some ways is probably the holy grail. And this is what we see with Tinder. And Tinder is a perfect example. One of the things we talked about over lunch was this famous graph from Ravi Mehta, famous to me. I just think...

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Tags: consumables, hybrid-monetization, power-ups