GTM Sauce

An AI Bible study app · B2C · Bickster app

Test lifetime prices from $4.99 up to $49.99 at fixed ad spend to find the ceiling

$29.99 beat $49.99 on day-one revenue; a later $39.99 now beats $29.99

Workedvalidationpricingapple-search-ads

What they did

'Proof of pay': ship a real app with a simple onboarding and a hard paywall showing one offer, submit every price you want to test up front, and run Apple Search Ads at the same daily spend (~$1K/day to learn fast; far less works over a longer period). Change only the lifetime price, walking it up: $4.99, $9.99, $29.99, $49.99. Read results directionally (day-one revenue per user), not for statistical significance. If you can't get past ~$4.99, drop or change the concept.

What happened

$4.99: ~16% install-to-purchase; $29.99: 6-7%. $49.99 had lower day-one revenue per user than $29.99, so they settled on $29.99 with no other optimization. A newer $39.99 price is now beating $29.99 'by a good margin'. ROAS climbed 25% -> 50% -> 75% -> about break-even.
Stage
pre-scale validation

In their words

How He Built an $800K ARR App Using Simple Strategies

Play from 17:41

… you can build apps for five different types of concepts right and then you test the concept right and then you find which concept makes you the most money and that's when you invest and maybe I'll find maybe they don't make any money and then you have to say okay forget it but at least you didn't spend a lot of time and money on something that doesn't work right um so i love it uh you know this is our we we got into so our chatster app i'll give

17:41

you a little background this real quick our chatster app is an you know it's an ai app and we dug in some of the data and we found that um people who do religious queries really are stick around right they're they're just they love they love ai they love a whole lot of stuff so you know and so we said okay let's do it let's let's see how you know let's do a specific bible app for it So we did a Bible app and, but once again, we had to go through the process, right? And proof of pay is all about ladders, right? You start with a low price and you work your way up to you find a price that works, right?

… you kind of go on to the next concept, right? And our concept right now is understanding the Bible, right? Using AI to help people really dig into the meaning of the Bible. if they're stuck on a verse or they want to relate it to their own personal life. They want context. They want to also understand if there's another, you know, chapter or another book that's related to this. It really helps people get into the Bible deeper and faster, right?

18:44

Before you go through pages and figure this all out. Now with AI, like it just speeds everything up, right? It's amazing, right? So we're seeing a lot of demand for it. And this is our first test that we did. You know, we sell around a $29.99 price and said, okay, hey, you know, this is kind of, let's go, right? Because, you know, that's really good. You know, we got about 6%, you know, the $4.99 is about 16% conversion rate from install. And then the $29 was about 6% to 7%. So that's really good looking at our other apps or other numbers. So we said, this is just the beginning.

19:14

We didn't even do anything. Generated the app. We did some marketing, right? Simple paywall, simple onboarding, no real bells and whistles, no optimizations. and we got right to $29.99 right away. So it was awesome just to get to that point without a lot of effort. And you're running Apple ads? Is that what you mean, my daily ASA price walk up? Yes, we use Apple search ads first to test this out because you can get high intent and you can mix in …

… already had a chart in the beginning of people. Remember, I remember 1% after 1% of the revenues after soft paywall close. So like you might want to do soft paywall after you get some traction but initial tests like yeah do a hard paywall chris if i can break down this chart a little bit are you keeping asa spend a little bit while you're you're so you're keeping asa spend constant while you're testing out different pricing points is that what's

22:27

happening here okay yep got it yep yep same same amount of money um you know same amount of dollars we're investing and then just putting a new same paywall don't even change anything just the price changes boom not even the the sale or anything we just change the price that's it right and then we just keep testing and testing and testing until we get some directional. Like, you know, we went to a little farther. We did a more statistical significant, you know, on that $4.99. I don't think you have to do that. You know, it depends on what you want, but just directional, right? That things are going the right way, you know?

22:58

And if I may, like, add on top of this, like, would you almost recommend, like, hey, in the beginning, simple, like you said, simple onboarding, simple paywall, and then submit all these different prices so that you can on launch a b test a bunch of different prices and those are you you keep you kept it simple that's your playbook simple onboarding simple paywall a couple of different prices that you can a b test while you're running apple ads …

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Tags: apple-search-ads, proof-of-pay, price-ladder, lifetime-plan, hard-paywall, constant-spend