Replace the hard paywall with a free plan plus a 7-day trial of the best version

Phil CarterYeah. So one of the fun things about being a growth advisor is you just get to work with so many different companies and you sort of start to develop pattern recognition of what works. So there's a lot of different examples I could point to, but we've been doing a lot of work recently specifically on helping companies move from hard paywalls to freemium, which could be challenging.

Phil CarterIt's sort of like moving from playing checkers to playing chess because it requires a lot more sophistication. But one of the tactics we found is really helpful there is what we call a multistep paywall. So basically moving from a single hard paywall that's just basically, "Hey, you got to pay for this product now to this product is free and it will always be free, but we want you to try the best version of it. And we'll give you the best version of it for a seven-day free trial. But after that, we'd love to have you continue paying for subscription to get maximum value."

Phil CarterAnd so there was a case recently, I won't name the client, but we saw a 75% increase in LTV per user through the implementation of this multistep paywall along with some other pricing and packaging optimizations, which has pretty fundamentally altered the full potential size of this business because now they've moved from a hard paywall that's excluding lots of people to a freemium model that is just growing much more quickly through organic acquisition.

David BarnardYeah. In the state of subscription apps report, we showed that in our data, hard paywalls perform five times better. So I love that your biggest win is going against the grain. And we talked about that in the episode Jacob and I did about the state of subscriptions is that there's a lot of reasons to still use freemium and don't take that 5X increase in LTV as a sign, you should absolutely do a hard paywall.