Swap your confusing in-app shop for a standard paywall with a free trial

Joseph ChoiWhat was the monetization strategy? How did you make your 15k a month, like onboarding, paywalls, trials? Yeah, what were some of the most important things that you kind of learned making your first app?

Jack FriksBasically, I just wanted to see an idea come to life, which was like a new way to stop scrolling instead of putting time blockers up. I wanted people to have hobbies, you know, hobbies that they enjoyed and be able to get action plans to do those hobbies. Um, so you're going to see here, this is like my original paywall. I wasn't thinking about like too much about how monetization worked. I had like credits, this Quench credits, and they were confusing and users didn't understand it at all. So that didn't very work very well, even when I launched the desktop app originally before mobile app. Um, people are kind of confused on how it worked, and not many people ended up buying it, uh, but a few people did, which was pretty crazy for me. It was like my first money on the internet.

Jack FriksAnd then I realized slowly if I want to get people off their phones, I need to make a mobile app version, so that's what I ended up doing. It ended up looking kind of okay. Basically, like you add a hobby to your list, and then you can use a Quench credit to get a plan for it. And this is like when ChatGPT was kind of just first coming to the mainstream like, and you could do cool things like this, like get custom plans for any topic, that's how …

Jack Friks… showing the app demo, and some of those blew up too, which was very nice, but it was very inconsistent, um, to get any downloads. And then this is like before and after, kind of interesting of, I guess, what my paywall, if you call it that, looked like and how it was monetizing. But before on the left here, and then after when I like I used, uh, Superwall and I could make like something a lot nicer, and then that helped my monetization a ton.

Jack FriksUm, just having a trial alone and using Superwall to like make these paywalls and test things, was like kind of my light bulb moment for making money with this app after like 5 months of, I think, $500 to $1,000 with my poor paywall, and then after that, it kind of started going up to like, you know, $2,000 to $3,000, $2,000 to $4,000 a month. But yeah, this is like the very rough drafts of the app, and then I even had someone redesign it. Um, it looks really nice now, but it was like this is over a course of a whole year, like this isn't something that I guess happened super quickly.

Joseph ChoiI guess like you went from around one that like the paywall is when you went from about $1,000 a month to $2,000 to $4,000 a month. What about this paywall do you think made it higher converting?

Jack FriksSo, I guess the main thing was realizing that paywalls exist. Like before, I kind of ran into Superwall, I didn't really realize that this standard was like to have a paywall. I just had like a shop where you could buy the premium access, so it would just say you need premium, and they'd have to go find the premium access themselves, figure how to get it. I added the paywall first with RevenueCat, but like you can't I couldn't customize anything. It was like very clunky. And then I migrated to Superwall and I could like test, you know, I could test the headers, I could test the copy, like what actually works better, what converts to more dollars per user, I could like gate certain features.

Jack FriksAnd like just playing around with all those things over the course of like three to four months, let me get like the average user way more likely to actually buy the app, like just all these little things testing and doing. And I think initially, what really helped was the free trial, like having an option, um, and Superwall kind of made me realize that's like a standard. Just the standards, I guess, there that I didn't know of and wasn't aware of, cuz it's my first mobile app. And then Superwall kind of has those baked in, like they have the standards baked in, and I didn't have to think about it. I realized after this what the standards are, but just putting the paywall up, and now I could do it on my new app in like, you know, five minutes set it up. It just like increased the chance that someone's going to buy, cuz it looks like legit. This is I mean, I don't know if you'd buy from this left one. I wouldn't. So-

Joseph Choi[laughs] Definitely not.