GTM Sauce

Tinder · B2C · dating app

Put a toggle in the top bar that opens a new paid tier

About $50M in revenue from one small A/B test

Workedpaywallexperimentation

What they did

In 2018 Tinder A/B tested a toggle in the app's top navigation bar that let users enter a new subscription tier directly. Treated as a small-to-medium 'throwaway' test on the experiment roadmap; the design team opposed adding the top nav. Result was read off the daily revenue dashboard. Guest's broader advice: audit where users can reach premium features and add more prominent paywall entry points; don't bury them in the nav.

What happened

Generated about $50M in revenue; the guest cautions it may not transfer to lower-intent apps like meditation.
Stage
scale (~50M MAU)
Effort
One A/B test, sized small-to-medium

In their words

How a Single Paywall Experiment Generated $50M – Jeff Morris, Chapter One, Ex-Tinder

Play the episode

David BarnardYeah. One particular experiment that you mentioned was a single experiment that generated $50 million in revenue. Tell me about that one. I mean, at Tinder's scale, maybe that wasn't... And maybe you can fill in the details there of how big the scale was, but tell me about that one experiment that generated $50 million.

Jeff MorrisYeah. So probably in 2018, it was actually a really fortunate surprise, tested a toggle on the top of the application where you could enter a new subscription tier from the top nav bar. And obviously talking about real estate, that was a really premium piece of real estate within the product and people would tap on it. It was almost like we almost discovered new real estate because the design team actually didn't want us to have that top nav, which is always a tension by the way. You have to have a beautiful product, but you also have to be creative in how you monetize. And so really we always had a roadmap as small, medium, large Excel experiments like everybody else, and I would probably say that was a small to medium experiment. It was kind of a throwaway AB test. And you wake up and you look at the dashboard I was talking about and you're like, wow, crap, this thing is really working. And those moments are really fun.

Jeff MorrisYou get some of that when you're working at a smaller company. I had the benefit and fully aware of how lucky I was to be working at scale with 50 million monthly actives and a product that people were willing to pay for. So if you tried putting a top nav into a meditation app, I'm not sure if it would convert as high as what we were doing. But the point is you should constantly be thinking about where users can access your premium features, where the paywalls are placed. And often I find people are just not thinking creatively enough. Maybe you have some nav buried in your nav that people just can't access, and it always surprises me. I think revenue teams should be on the whole a bit more aggressive in terms of pricing and entry points because again, if your product's great, people are willing to go along for the ride.

David BarnardYou brought up something in there that I wanted to talk about next anyway. And it is the tension between creating a quality product and caring about the users and the mission and things like that, but then also monetizing. And so it sounds like that $50 million paywall was a tension in the company of the designers not wanting the top nav pitch. But how do you balance those things to keep the product quality up while still monetizing as …

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Tags: ios, android, paywall-placement, entry-point, navigation, subscription-tiers, ab-test