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Simply · B2C · creative hobby learning apps

Price each country with your own Big Mac-style index, not currency conversion

Big ARPU jump in most countries; a few didn't work and were adjusted

Workedpricinglocalization

What they did

Years ago started with the Big Mac index itself, then evolved a custom index combining purchasing power with category-specific factors (what people pay to learn an instrument or drawing). Modeled one pricing strategy for all geos, rolled it out everywhere as a test, then optimized per geo over time and revisits as the app matures and reaches new audiences.

What happened

Significant, dramatic ARPU increase in the vast majority of geos; some geos surprisingly didn't work and needed adapting.

In their words

How Simply Finally Cracked Facebook Ads with Web Funnels – Yoav Sharon, Simply

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Yoav Sharon… low risk growth engine, right? There's not so much risk, of course. You will localize your app to a different culture, people will feel more comfortable using it. However, it's not that trivial. We've done two things that mainly work well for us in terms of localization. First of all, when you localize to a different country or you want to not only convert your currency there, but you really want to localize the pricing, which makes sense.

Yoav SharonSo, we created our own pricing index, like our own Big Mac index, similar concept that takes into account not similarly to the Big Mac, like the purchase power in that geo, but also other considerations that we can refer to when people think about using learning how to pay a musical instrument or learning how to draw. This is one thing that we've done and we applied this pricing scheme across all geos. We saw significant dramatic ARPU increase. In some geos, we were surprised that it didn't work, but we had to adapt there, but in the vast majority of geos, it really worked really well for us.

David BarnardWhat was the initial hypothesis or factors that went into the first test and then how many geos did you go into where your assumption on price was wrong and you had to change it? Did you start with the Big Mac index and work your way back or how did you actually ... Because this is something I hear a lot of people asking about. Actually, this is a question I get for RevenueCat all the time. It's like, you guys have all the data, you should create …

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Tags: regional-pricing, purchasing-power, big-mac-index