GTM Sauce

Tinder · B2C · dating app

Sell the travel feature on its own for 1 day, 3 days or a week

Conversion jumped, but it pulled buyers away from the cheapest subscription

Mixedpricingpaywall

What they did

Passport (travel mode: swipe anywhere in the world) was previously only in the subscription. Chosen for unbundling because only some users need it, occasionally (when travelling or meeting people outside their city) and they don't want a subscription commitment. Offered as a standalone a la carte purchase for 1 day, 3 days or a week to capture non-subscribers. Criteria used: features whose use is situational (like Boost, Super Like) suit a la carte.

What happened

Conversion 'went crazy' but cannibalized Plus subscriptions; price likely too low

In their words

Dynamic Paywalls That Drove Millions in New Revenue – Shawn Gong, Tinder

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Shawn Gong… feature is part of the subscription, so you have to get a subscription to use it. And then, like we talk about the challenge for that is for some users, they only want to use it when they plan to travel or to meet people outside of their home city. And then they might not want to buy a subscription because they just don't want to have that commitment or they don't feel like they need to use other features. So that's a perfect candidate for them.

Shawn GongSo we test out the features. So that helped us able to capture non-subscribers, for the users who just want to buy a la carte for this Passport feature, and then they can use it for one day, three day a week based on the offers we provided, and then they can enjoy that benefit to meet people anywhere in the world.

David BarnardSo how have things been going with the Passport feature and it being unbundled from the subscription? Have you seen uptake?

Shawn GongYes. Actually, I think it's so fun to talk about this because it was not launch and then success story, that's it. Not that simple. We learned a few things based on our test. First thing is when we launched this standalone a la carte Passport feature and then the conversion went crazy. It was great. However, we noticed like, oh, that hurts our Plus subscription because some user decided to only buy this feature not to buy subscription.

Shawn GongBut that can be a couple of things. So one is, oh, maybe we price too low, it's too affordable and then so it's like no-brainer, so user use it. The second thing we do is like, oh, we should increase the price for a la carte and to see how that will change the conversion and then subscription cannibalization. So we definitely noticed that the subscription cannibalization reduced as we expected, and then the conversion reduced a little bit, but …

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Tags: a-la-carte, unbundling, cannibalization, consumables