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Simply Piano · B2C · piano learning app

Pick one country by upside and confidence, then fully localize songs, screens and store

All Japan metrics grew except paywall conversion, which fell

Mixedlocalizationmarket-selection

What they did

Already translated into 11 languages. Built a model scoring each geo on potential (incremental audience and ARPU) and confidence in reaching it; chose Japan. Localized songs (e.g. anime), the UX, App Store creatives and currency, and hired a Japanese country manager. Principle: localize a limited scope but to the highest, consistent standard (e.g. German forms of address) to keep trust, then go all in.

What happened

Metrics grew as expected except checkout/paywall conversion, which flat-lined or decreased until the paywall was localized too (t14).

In their words

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

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David Barnard… can't crack Germany, I'm going to send them that clip because cracking international markets really is a ton of work and it is an investment and you have to think about it like that because if you just change the price and expect to crack a market, that's not how you crack a market. Any other top lessons or interesting geos where there were counterintuitive things that you learned that maybe you could share and at least give people a head start?

Yoav SharonSo, yeah, actually one of the most mind-blowing learnings that we've had at some point in time at Simply Piano, we decided we already had been translated to 11 languages. And we decided we want to go to the first geo where we're going to really localize, not translation, but fully localization. So, like we always do, we created a very thoughtful and deep model that estimated the potential of each geo in terms of what might be the upside in that geo, the incremental audience and incremental ARPU, but also what is our confidence that we can really meet that potential. So, we landed on Japan. Japan for us for Simply Piano was our first deep localization that we wanted to grow.

Yoav SharonSo, we started, like I mentioned, we're highly confident that we can really reach this potential. We localized some Japanese, some songs like from anime and all the UX was changed and app store creatives, everything was translated and localized, of course, currency to Japanese and all the metrics started growing great as expected, except for one metric, the checkout conversion, the paywall conversion, it did not move even on the contrary, it even decreased and we didn't know why. Come on. It's like we did everything properly. We brought in a country manager, Japanese country manager, a great guy, and he reviewed our flow and he told us, "Guys, you're not treating the paywall properly us, we're used to all the best practices in paywalls, make it very clear, least disruptive.

Yoav SharonYou want to minimize the details on the paywall. You want some social proof, you want some things, but overall you want a very clean paywall." The Japanese 180 degrees are opposite. They expect very detailed story of the company, of the founders, of our values, of all the things that you're frustrated that no one reads, they want to read all the social quotes and a lot of colors. I'm telling you, you can't even believe we had a very long one …

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Tags: app-store, deep-localization, japan, country-manager, market-scoring