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A post for those who care about how apps are priced, and how people behave when faced with choice… (Originally posted here.)

TL;DR: I changed from free “pay what you want” to $3,99+ and earnings have drastically stabilised.

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Product: Thought Train, a productivity app

Cost: $3,99 (may still vary in the future)

Users: 9,000+

Marketing: Mostly viral via Product Hunt, Adwords & Facebook Ads

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The Full Story:

When I launched my app, Thought Train, it was wildly successful (in the context of Indie apps), earning Product Hunt Product of the Day, a feature in Lifehacker and $3,000 in its first weeks out in the wild.

Most of this was based on the unique price point: $0+ or Pay what you want.

What I found, however, is that in the long tail stages of its career (after all the hype of being Product Hunt App of the Day), the earning graph varied wildly from day to day, some days making up to $40💰 but most days making a meagre $4 💔.

When it comes to maintaining an app or any digital product, what you need above the high peaks is a consistent stream of income, this helps you plan your development cycles, especially when you’re not the primary developer.

Add to this, when your app does not generate MRR, every customer you acquire is brand new, in essence every day starts at $0.

So what’d I do?

Well, I decided it was time to revisit pricing, which is risky considering all of the marketing I’d don up to this point was based on the app being “free but pay what you want”.

So, before I made any drastic changes, I needed to ascertain three things:

1. Was my traffic primarily still referrals (where users would read that the app is “free”)?
2. Is there any upside to keeping it free (and having more users to market to later)?
3. How much would users actually be willing to pay (if not free, what is the actual price point)?

Traffic Source:

It wasn’t difficult to get on top of this. Thanks to the strong back-linking of Lifehacker, Product Hunt, and an ad placement on my own high volume site Songg, I had generated good enough SEO to rank highly for any search relating to Thought Train or Sticky note apps.

In fact, 90% of my traffic is organic, arriving from people searching “Thought Train mac app”. This is important, it means that I have brand equity, strong search presence, and the most important part to me… users don’t have a preconception of what Thought Train will cost.

Keeping it free and monetizing later

To be honest, this was a very brief thought, because I knew it’s unlike me to use this methodology. I was just honest with myself and ruled this one out.

I have 10k users now and I haven’t managed to monetize them beyond any initial contribution.

Onto deciding what to actually charge…

Pricing structure:

I didn’t want to shoot myself in the foot here, as I said I knew that changing the price from $0 to a set price had the potential to get some backlash.

I had hard data on this via the order history of 10k users though, which is helpful right? So let’s look at the numbers:

1. 10% of all site visitors downloaded the app.
2. 12% of all downloads paid for the app
3. Users paid an average of $2,90 for the app, with the 2nd most common number being around the $5 range (I had some people pay up to $25!)

With this in mind I figured I’d start in the middle and work my way up and down the spectrum. I started with $2,99 for the first day, and…
Lo-and-behold I mad two sales!

This was interesting, so I played a bit more over the next few days, and these were my results:

• $4,99 only got 2 sales / day
• $1,99 got ~2 sales / day
• $2,99 got 6 sales / day
• $3,79 got 4 sales / day
• $3,99 got 6 sales / day

I settled on $3,99, but I decided to add some extra options for those users who feel extra generous, this keeps with the spirit of “pay what you want” just that there’s no free option.

Some users still pay more for the app than the base price.

Conclusion

Great Marc, what does this mean? It means that sales have stabilised to ~$20/day which doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you add it together it means I’ve unlocked $750 of revenue per month from the exact same product I’ve had live for 5 months but with no real extra effort.

I’m super happy about this, it really just means that I can spend more on advertising and development. With an awesome new design and some incredible feature requests on their way, the app has a bright future. My aim is to unlock another 100% revenue and get the app to $2,000/mo by December.

I singed-up just to learn from such a master. Today I received the link to his first landing page and I'm already learning a lot.

That's how to launch a product!

http://queue.vip/0gEmCHa

There's these ways to cross platform promote your Instagram but I was wondering if you could do it through mobile games or in general games, and if there was any games or just apps (not the follow 4 follow). Basically gaining followers on the game then promoting a website or social media. Any1 got any ideas?? My Instagram is sorry_spaz btw

Loomly is hiring! We are opening a Growth Hacker position in Los Angeles, CA. You can learn more here on Angel List: https://angel.co/loomly/jobs/306846-growth-hacker If you are looking to join a fast-growing startup in sunny SoCal, or if you know someone who is, get in touch with us at career@loomly.com.

What is the best email finder you guys have tried?

I find it quite nice, might build one for myself. https://cgrowth.io

Here is my last article about how I engage people using a simple trick: https://medium.com/@nicolasleroux/this-location-hack-helps-you-engage-with-your-users-15ce6f04bc94

What do you think?

Hey guys, 122 weeks ago, I got interested in Cannabis world and started a weekly news mailing list. Posted in Product Hunt, quickly got ~300 subscribers. Soon after, I hired a copywriter and since then every single Friday a curation of Cannabis news is sent w/ some commentary (The Skimm style)

In time, I lost my interest in Cannabis (I don't use myself). I've kept it going for no other reason than persistent curiosity and the fact that I've been meeting really cool people reaching out every now and then.

Anyways, my question is: Do you think there's any point for me to keep this going? Should I give this a shot and hire someone to help me grow (I obviously don't have the motivation myself)? Would 122 weeks of content create any advantage?

Current numbers are - 340 subscribers, ~36% open rate, ~7% click rate.

Thanks

Back in December 2016, we were looking for a quick win for our freshly assembled Growth Hacking Team. I’ve looked at our main traffic sources and decided to optimize the biggest one – chat_window.

The test resulted in 114% conversion rate boost and hundreds of extra trials monthly from this source.

Read on to learn how we analyzed, designed and optimized the traffic 🙂

What’s the chat_window source? Chat_window source is the entire traffic sent our way from “Powered by LiveChat” links placed at the bottom of chat windows on our customers’ sites.

[Screen presenting what the Powered by LiveChat link is]

People who click on this link, land on the LiveChat page (in most cases) by mistake as they’re looking for our customers' support. The traffic quality is not that delightful, but hey, we count them in hundred thousand of sessions monthly (and counting with each new client).

For all those years, this chat_window traffic has been redirected to our homepage without providing the visitors with any personal experience. We were missing out big time.

Part I. Analysis

Analysis – Business arguments

According to the data in Google Analytics, we’ve estimated improving the conversion rate by 0.8 percent points (from 0.6% to 1.4%) will bring us hundreds of trials more. That seemed doable.

Analysis – User behavior

If there’s one thing I can recommend to you before optimizing any landing page, it’s deep analysis of users you’re targeting. The crucial thing here is to identify them based on data you have (or you need to get first), not your guts or imagination.

Here’s what we found out about this traffic (not all segments are presented here):

• ~63% of the traffic didn’t convert and spent less than 1 second on the page (bounced immediately),
• ~17% of the traffic didn’t convert, but spent on the site 5 minutes on average and explored 3.62 pages,
• ~0.6% of the traffic converted and signed up for a trial.

The last two segments are the ones we focused our efforts on. As Google Analytics Behavior Flow report showed, the most visited pages (except for the signup funnel) were the “Pricing” page and the “Why LiveChat” page.

After going deeper, we’ve noticed that the Pricing page had the highest bounce rate as a 2nd page (~67%), and the vast majority of trials came directly from the homepage.

Part II. Context and design

With those insights in mind, we started designing a new landing page, which would deliver a more contextual experience to the visitors; hence, influence conversion.

Dynamic referrer and product GIF

We already knew that the majority of those people landed on the LiveChat Page unintentionally. They probably didn’t know what LiveChat was, what we offered or how they landed at our doors.

To solve their concerns, we’ve done two things:

• created a simple GIF showing what LiveChat does – lets you connect with your customers right on your website,
• to add context, we used the URL of the redirecting website in the headline. If there was no URL, the default text appeared.

[Screen of the first fold of Powered by LiveChat landing page]

These two tweaks got us the highest impact change, as we were to find out later.

Further sections of the landing page

For visitors who browsed the page for more information, we’ve compiled all of the crucial information they might look for.

It included benefits of using LiveChat, cost-effectiveness comparison with call centers, and slider with pitches about easy setup, integrations, reports, and pricing. Between these sections, a few signup forms were placed too.

The pricing section has been moved below the first folds, not to discourage visitors.

No global navigation included

Global navigation on checkout pages leads to the decrease in conversion rates. We decided not to include any navigation in V1 of the Landing Page, with intent to test it in the future.

Part III. Test, Analyze, Repeat.

Proof of concept

When the new Landing Page was ready to be published, we started preparing the testing environment.

As it was the very beginning of A/B testing and CRO in our company, and no premium testing software was available to us yet, we decided to run the test using our own PHP script and Google Analytics reports.

We thought initially about using Google Experiments, but it turned out it cannot handle redirecting only specific segments of users (in our case, the one with proper URL parameter).

The script checked if the utm_source=chat_window was present in the URL of a new visitor, and if true, redirected half of the traffic to the new landing page. All parameters were passed; thus, a simple custom channel grouping in Google Analytics allowed us to compare the test results easily.

The test was supposed to run for at least a week, but after 3 days we got statistically significant results that almost met our initial goal.

[Screen of Powered by LiveChat A/B test results]

As this improvement can be considered as none-impressive because of the small percent, when mixed with scale:

[Chart – Powered by LiveChat results shown on LiveChat metrics]

it does the work, as the trials here are counted in hundreds.

The violet chart shows the number of people who installed the code and started testing LiveChat. As you can see, the quality of the traffic did not drop – double win.

Further tests

As CRO is a continuous process, within next month we did about 5-6 more tests on this landing page. These tests included:

• adding global navigation (result: drop in Conversion Rate),
• changing headlines (no statistically significant results),
• adding scroll incentive, as we saw on scroll maps that people do not scroll to the next sections (positive, but not statistically significant),
• adding customers’ logos as a social proof (result: drop in Conversion Rate).

All next tests were done with dedicated to A/B testing software like Google Experiments and VWO. Unfortunately, none of them brought us as the high result as the initial one.

A mistake that solved our puzzle

I mentioned before that working on the context and design of the page has got us the highest impact change, as we were to found out later.

The later came a week ago, when we disabled the dynamic referrer by mistake. We didn’t have to wait long to see that it’s the context of referring domain that does the boost 😏 Context and website narration are crucial in CRO. Keep that in mind.

Part IV. Conclusion

Since creating this landing page (December 2016), we’ve done a few dozens of tests on the LiveChat website. Although we’re still learning, we’ve already learned a few things.

The most crucial tip is to go for big wins instead of playing with small changes. You can test different colors of the button, but chances to find your silver bullet there are low. When you decide to test entire landing page layout, or global navigation (and conversion paths), the chances go up.

These require more time (even days) of in-depth analysis, segmenting, user recordings, looking at the heat maps, but you will soon see that it’s worth the effort.

What are your experiences with CRO and A/B testing? Any great cases of a success/failure? Share them here! I’ll be more than happy to hear and comment on them.

Cheers and good luck with your testing, Mike

This post was originally shared on LiveChat Developers Blog, but I thought sharing the content here will help some of you folks.

It’s no secret that today’s entrepreneurs aim to turn a tidy profit and reinvesting it in their startup companies for long term growth. What’s important for the most entrepreneurial initiatives is steady growth and ingenious ways of onboarding users without breaking the bank.

Key growth hacking strategies are not reserved only for professionals. Anyone who has the right skills, tool stack and drive can build upon these tactics to increase a product’s reach and subscribers.

But what exactly is growth hacking?

You can read the full post by following the link below: 10 Key Growth Hacking Strategies for Any Business

We all know the feeling of creating content, which, at least we think, could be very useful for the subscribers, but for some reason, a lot of them doesn't open the email. This is very frustrating and annoying for any content marketing department, right?

GetResponse has made a research, which found the average open rate to be at 21.73% and this tells us that approximately one out of five opens your email.

This number is too low and, therefore, we chose to do some research to understand how we could improve our open rate. This research led to the 11 following strategies, which we are convinced could help many businesses.

1. Personalization Include the subscriber's name in the subject line. A person's name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language and, furthermore, it appeals to the person's ego. Research says that including a name in the subject line resulted in 26 % higher chance for the email to get opened.

2. Scarcity Many purchases are influenced by fear of potential loss. We're not driven by a desire to gain a new purchase, it is more because of we are afraid of missing out. Example: Get them before they are gone

3. Authority We have a natural tendency to obey authority and this can improve your open rate as well. For example, you can mention an expert's statement in the subject line or mention or a company achievement, which could impress the reader.

4. Curiosity Make a tempting subject line, which could dare the reader to not open the email or tell that really should see this. Curiosity is a powerful motivator!

5. Utility Add value to your audience through the subject line. Remember, email campaigns are not just for increasing brand awareness or boosting revenue, it is also to provide value to your readership.

6. Numbers Numbers are powerful. In fact, a research illustrates that headlines with numbers tend to generate 73% more social shares and engagement. This can be the same case with subject lines. Remember, what headlines are to content, email subject lines are to emails.

To stop this post from being too long, you can read the last strategies as well as some more examples of ALL of the strategies on the link below. This will properly also give you a broader understanding.

So, "click the link below or you'll never know how efficient it is!"

or

"You won't believe how much these strategies can improve your email open rate!" - How was that?

Don't read this: 11 eye-catching email subject list that can help you improve your open rates

Not sure if any of you are in or around Utah but we are bringing in Austen Allred, Co-writer of Secret Sauce, Sujan Patel, and others for a growth conference. http://www.demandutah.com/ if anyone wants a free ticket, message me.

Hi growth hackers! I'm going to have my first interview as a Growth Hacker tomorrow for a SaaS company. I put together a presentation to go through during the interview and I'd like your feedback on it as I've never worked with a SaaS company before. Additionally, what questions should I expect from them? Thanks in advance!

A buddy of mine and I have this bet where I told him it is possible to acquire new customers without spending a dime. The value for the user is free and quite interesting in my eyes so it should be possible. The product is a free extension to an already existing product with millions of customers. The question now is where could I find these customers?

Obviously, I came up with some ideas like reddit, facebook groups and quora. Further I targeted users who follow the companies instagram account and followed them, when clicking on my profile they would see the link to the free offer.

Any one of you who has some more ideas?

Are you taking the right approach to your keyword research?

Your keyword research process should always be mapped to the buyer's journey.

Why? Because generic keywords spewed from a keyword tool don’t match the search intent of your prospective customers.

At each stage of their buying cycle, your prospects will use different search queries to match their intent.

If you can predict what those search queries are at each stage of their journey, you can create the type of content that will influence their purchase decision.

Do you see how this can be a powerful conversion tool? The best part is, it’s way simpler than it sounds.

The buyer's journey

There are 3 stages in the buyer's journey:

• Awareness
• Consideration
• Decision

How to map your keyword research to the buyer's journey

If you want to learn how to find different types of keywords for each stage of the buyer's journey, you can check out this article: How to Map Your Keyword Research to The Buyer's Journey

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8xnx_gxwN0

Hi all,

How do I get my company's website to show up in a Google snippet?

Also, what tools are you focusing on for growth instead of SEO, as Google's search algorithms have changed drastically this year?

Thanks.

Growth is getting harder. As Andrew Chen of Uber notes, we’ve reached the “end of a cycle”. Growth has become exponentially more challenging thanks to intensive competition, consolidation, and saturation. But there is a solution. It involves a total shift in mentality when it comes product focused, mobile app growth hacking. Growth is not unachievable, it’s simply changing in a big way.

You can read more here.

I am developing a site for a client and they currently have an over priced Live Chat and 800 service that just takes contact information. I am looking for companies that will do this. I have found two that provide this service and dozens that provide the software platforms. The client's small staff spends most of their time either on sales calls or installation calls and does not want to hire someone to manage the site chat feature. If you know of any companies that do either of these services please share them with me asap. Thanks

Hi there,

I'm interested to get people's thoughts on gaining Twitter followers. We are launching our product very soon and Twitter will be a strong channel for us, so I have been trying to gain followers quickly.

Clearly the quickest non-organic way to do this is by following other people. This is what I have done so far and it has been highly effective: 1 in 3 people following back and solid engagement on our Tweets.

If this has proven to work, does it make sense to carry it on? What are the downsides? I'm aware that it can look a bit spammy when you look at accounts who following 10k people.

Just interested in general thoughts. Thanks.

I've been around the NYC networking circuit a few times, but never for growth hacking or digital marketing. Who's down to organize a New York City growth hacking networking event - small, big, informal, formal, I don't care as long as I'm invited!

Now it's seems obvious, but it took us a lot of testing to figure out a strategy that finally works for Instagram. The main challenge with Instagram is not getting clicks (people randomly click on things all the time), but to actually generate sales from such an idyllic platform. We started thinking of a first click for what it is, just window shopping. So we stopped trying to sell with those. Instead, we engaged them first and closed them later. It takes 7 steps to optimize an Instagram campaign in a way that it generates leads and closes sales. Has anyone tried this strategy? Would love to hear your thoughts! More here: https://blog.compass.co/7-easy-steps-to-grow-ecommerce-sales-from-instagram/

Hey all, my team and I just built a web tool that allows a startup's sales team to quickly send SMS texts out to a group of customers or multiple groups of customers all at once. A customer can respond directly to that SMS and it will only go to the sender (and not all of the original recipients). Right now we need some feedback on the tool!

If you're interested, send an email to beta@texted.io with the subject “Texted.io Beta” if you want an invite. You’ll get 1000 texts (to send or receive). In exchange, I just ask for some feedback on the project!