How Mimo Builds an Experimentation Culture with Ekaterina Gamsriegler

[00:00:00.000] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome to the Subscription League, a podcast by Purchasely. Listen to what's working in subscription apps. In each episode, we invite leaders of the app industry who are mastering the subscription model for mobile apps. To learn more about subscriptions, head to subscriptionleague.com. Let's get started.

[00:00:21.200] - Olivier Destrebecq
Welcome to the show, everybody. Today, I'm joined by Jeff and Ekaterina Gamsriegler. How are you guys doing today?

[00:00:27.700] - Jean François Grang
Great.

[00:00:28.120] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Great. I'm happy to be here.

[00:00:30.020] - Olivier Destrebecq
Yes, we're glad to have you. Ekaterina, you're leading a marketing department at Mimo and also used to lead the growth department over there. Can you tell us a bit more about what Mimo is and what your responsibilities are?

[00:00:42.630] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, of course. Mimo started as a coding app a while ago and actually to this point, grew to a very successful product with millions of users. In a couple of the last years, in addition to having the mobile apps and working on those, we also launched our own boot camp, Mimo Bootcamp, and also the web version of our product which is currently in beta.

[00:01:06.330] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
My role so far has been leading the marketing department and for a long time, I was also the product manager in the growth department, working with the engineers and the designer on multiple growth levers. Currently, I'm on a maternity leave, but I'm already looking forward to coming back in summer to Mimo and to keep contributing to growth and marketing.

[00:01:28.210] - Jean François Grang
You're saying that we are interviewing you during your maternity leave. We didn't know that. Congratulations, by the way.

[00:01:35.380] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Thanks. It's not very public, but yes.

[00:01:38.840] - Olivier Destrebecq
It's awesome.

[00:01:39.930] - Jean François Grang
It's good. It's a little amount of work and thanks for sharing.

[00:01:43.040] - Olivier Destrebecq
You've also become a mentor and consultant, and you've launched your own course on growing mobile app. I'm assuming you started that before the maternity leave, but never know, maybe that was your chance there. What motivated you to start that course?

[00:02:00.290] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
It was a very gradual process. Of course, not all of these roles happened simultaneously. I started with mentoring a couple of years ago, and after, I don't know, 15, you do 15, 25, 50 sessions, you realize and start seeing some patterns and start to realize that there are the same questions that you keep answering over and over again. Because also, most often I was approached by founders of mobile startups.

[00:02:26.580] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Of course, you start thinking, how can you possibly optimize that? How you can scale that? Because your time is not really scalable, but your expertise and some product, if you built it on top of it, might be. So this gave me the idea because I was also documenting in a lot of detail a lot of things I've been learning throughout my whole career.

[00:02:46.160] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
While I was already on the maternity leave at the end of my pregnancy, I had a couple of months to actually reflect on everything and to think how I can structure what I know, what I've learned, all of my experiences and pack it into a course. And it was also the same time when I got accepted to the Maven Accelerator Course building. I thought it's a sign that finally this couple of months would be the opportunity for me to do that.

[00:03:14.070] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
The good thing about it was that my daughter was to be born soon. So I knew that even if nothing works out, even if it will be a complete failure, I will soon have completely other spectrum of things to worry about. I'm not going to worry about that way too much and contemplate on that. That's why I just decided to do it and launched my first cohort end of November. I launched the second one already at end of February, a couple of months later.

[00:03:41.190] - Jean François Grang
It's really fun when all these personal and professional project just boot at the same time or born at the same time. I don't know, Olivia, if you experience the same, but for Purchasely, it was pretty much the same for me. My daughter was born when we funded Purchasely. It's really nice when all these pieces come up together at the same time. It's really stressful, but though it's the energy that you get from all these projects, they just fuel everything. So I think it's great.

[00:04:05.480] - Olivier Destrebecq
That's good. On my end, we actually decided to move from the US back to France when my daughter was born and then my son was born in France afterwards. So it was more like all those personal project and work change obviously at the same time. It was like, hey, screw this life. We're going to do something totally different. Totally reboot. Let's change everything at the same time.

[00:04:24.980] - Jean François Grang
Yes.

[00:04:27.010] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, sounds like a great time to do everything at once. No, but it just happens that these opportunities happen to come at the same time and what are you going to do?

[00:04:36.280] - Olivier Destrebecq
While at Mimo, you've worked to grow their app, promote their website and boot camp. I'm sure that's been a lot of work. Can you tell us more about the challenges that this presented?

[00:04:46.700] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, of course. It was a lot of work in the last year because initially, one thing is when you are working on just one product when it comes to marketing and growing it. And another thing is that suddenly there are two new products in your portfolio. Your portfolio is changing, your audience should keep expanding and you should start acquiring new users.

[00:05:06.610] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Also, another big challenge is how do you actually figure out how to sell the new product? So the go-to-market strategies, the communication strategies, even the positioning had to slightly change because for a very long time at Mimo, we had this perception by our users that our product is fun and really easy. And this easy is somewhat of a keyword for us because this was one of our biggest USPs that everyone can learn to code, that everyone can get the confidence that they can do that.

[00:05:38.760] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
We had to slightly also start giving users the idea that we are also very professional, that we have plenty of deep content, and that we can get the person to job readiness as well. So apart from being easy and fun, we also wanted to look more professional in this space because the boot camp would require that, otherwise, nobody would sign up for it.

[00:06:01.320] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Figuring out this balance was really an interesting challenge. Another challenge was that my team before, the marketing team, was mostly focusing on growth marketing because for mobile apps, which already was at the post-product market fit stage, it was necessary, of course, like growth marketing was our everything.

[00:06:20.480] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I was really lucky to have the team on which I can count to keep doing that while I personally could focus a bit more on product marketing, contribute a bit to the brand marketing strategy to also the current rebranding project that we are starting to roll out in phases these days. But figuring out the new audiences, how to sell the product with the completely different pricing was and a much longer decision making and conversion cycle. This was challenging.

[00:06:51.530] - Olivier Destrebecq
Can you actually tell us a little bit, you say the audiences are different. Can you tell us a bit more about how they're different? What was the old audience? What is the new one? And what challenge specifically did that present to get to that new audience, I guess, or sell to that new audience?

[00:07:09.030] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yes. Initially, our apps is the acquisition point, so to say, for also the boot camp as well, because a lot of promotions of the boot camp are happening inside the product and they go through lifecycle marketing to our existing audience as well to our existing users. And the difference is that users typically install Mimo when they want to get the quick start into coding.

[00:07:33.730] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
They want to see if in any way they actually can do it and gain some confidence in that because there are a lot of beliefs and that are deeply rooted that everybody thinks that coding is difficult. It's only for math wizard. You have to be great at X, Y, Z, especially math to be able to do that. So our app is designed to make it very easy in a gamified and rewarding way to make these first steps.

[00:07:59.840] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
However, when it comes to the boot camp, this is already the audience which has a little bit of experience in web development, probably has been through a certain portion of our web development path, and wants to change a career and pivot to web development.

[00:08:16.120] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Of course, the requirements that this audience has when it comes to the product and its quality is very different. Our teaching methods are very different there as well. It's like a proper boot camp with instructors, with a community, with a lot of challenging tasks and projects that are designed to help you build the portfolio to actually find a job in the end.

[00:08:38.650] - Olivier Destrebecq
One of the thing that struck me on your web page for the boot camp was a new job guaranteed in six months or something along those lines. I was like, Nice.

[00:08:47.040] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I think we already have more than 100 graduates and also the job placement rates are quite good for the boot camp. That's why we just keep going.

[00:08:56.890] - Olivier Destrebecq
Nice. I'm sure launching and growing this app, you probably got a lot of experimentation. Are there any take away you could share with us?

[00:09:04.760] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, I can share a couple. I think the first one would be that it actually makes a lot of sense to invest some time and energy into figuring out some product marketing basics and brand marketing basics before investing into paid user acquisition. That was the reason why we have not done it at scale for the boot camp because we really wanted to make sure that we can position it properly and then deliver on the promises that we have. So scaling user acquisition right away for the new product is something I would not do and we did not do it. Another thing... Yeah.

[00:09:41.050] - Olivier Destrebecq
Did you guys went with organic or did you also have paid acquisition but low level until you figured out everything?

[00:09:47.890] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
We went for trying to upsell it first to our existing audience, which already is familiar with our product. There were a lot of promotions that we had to place in the app. The idea behind it was that we have to make users, first of all, aware that the new product is there. And this worked out quite good, but conversions themselves did not naturally follow. They did not happen.

[00:10:30.330] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
To find this correct audience and the right moments to which we go in order to upsell the new product, this was how it started. This is where we were getting most of the bootcamp applicants as well.

[00:10:40.870] - Jean François Grang
In your user journey, do you believe that your users taking the course will be the one that are highly active and at the end, they will be converting to this new offer that you're launching, or will they live alongside with your existing users and it's totally different people?

[00:10:57.250] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
At least I believe at the moment that this will be just a small portion of the current audience that will be converting to the boot camp, simply for a reason that our segments are very different in the product and the motives and the jobs to be done, so to say, for which our product is hired, like the apps differ a lot. They vary a lot per segment.

[00:11:20.300] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
We, for example, have casual learners as well as the really motivated learners who want to get a new job. I think from what I remember, about 40% or 50% of our learners actually start with the app and want to become developers because we have this question in the onboarding asking them specifically why they're learning to code.

[00:11:42.160] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
You can imagine that because of the much higher price tag and because of a much higher level of commitment that these users have to make, this audience is just much smaller in size compared to our whole user base because a lot of them want to learn to code because they think it's a cool new hobby, because they want to keep their brain active because they want to get a promotion at work.

[00:12:16.210] - Olivier Destrebecq
You rely on your acquisition for your existing product and then you pick the right users to drive them to this specific offer that is highly valuable for both of you.

[00:12:26.840] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I consider it quite an interesting way how our business model has developed because I think in the end, there are lots of subscription apps out there and at some point everybody starts struggling with the lifetime values that are capped.

[00:12:43.440] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
The good thing about it is that in subscription apps, the lifetime values are very easy to predict. So you more or less know quite early in your journey, after a year or so, what might be your lifetime values based on the renewals and the recent. But they have this gap, which is hard to overcome. The boot camp was launched in an attempt to actually significantly increase the lifetime values in the end.

[00:13:05.810] - Jean François Grang
You mentioned that you asked the user why did they want to learn to code. Were there any reason that were surprising to you?

[00:13:12.650] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
No, I would say nothing very surprising. A lot of users want to build their dream project or something they always wanted. I would say that this is a very typical story. If we ask users via email, surveys, or interviews, it's a very common reply when they say that they actually did a bit of coding at school or university, and then they got a job in a completely different field, and now they're trying to get back to it because they have this idea that they want to bring to life. I think this is very common, but for most of them, this is more of a hobby, an additional project, something new to learn, which is great.

[00:13:53.170] - Jean François Grang
I went through the typical university route. It's fascinating to me to see that you can learn coding through an app nowdays. I'm like, Would I have enjoyed that at the time? It would have helped me move faster. Anyway, so you've run some experiments, as you told us, but you're also managing the team that was running some experiments. I'm sure it's a different story when you have to manage that team and have them run their experiments. So can you tell us more about that?

[00:14:20.760] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I can't, of course, take the credit for building the experimentation culture at Mimo. It was the whole team and the whole leadership team and multiple product managers. We all tried to improve it to whatever extent we can. So there were different problems along the way, and they're still present in every company and in every startup.

[00:14:42.750] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
First, it was very hard to increase a number of high-quality ideas for the experiments that we can run and implement right away. That's why also way before my time at Mimo, there was introduced a new format borrowed from Basecamp called the pitch. This was a very simple template, like a document that everybody could fill in and submit, and the relevant product manager would review and give feedback on that.

[00:15:10.690] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I think making this pitching process public and available to every team member helped us a lot to come up with a lot of great experiment ideas for the backlog. However, after some time, we also realized that our colleagues and coworkers are not always getting the right feedback at the right time. They submit great ideas but not necessarily get updated on what's happening after.

[00:15:38.170] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
That's why we also had to make some hard deadline for every PM to review the ideas on time and then to give feedback on those, to prioritize them accordingly if we decide to work on them. This really helped. At least it was not in any way discouraging for our coworkers and would help to keep the innovation going.

[00:15:58.760] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Often it was also clear that the pitch template, even though it's fairly straightforward, it has a part where you have to explain why this would be the problem you have to tackle, why this would be something to invest time and resources into, which basically means that you have to describe the potential impact that the new feature or this experiment is going to make.

[00:16:22.080] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
This should be quite a significant impact to the bottom line in order for the idea to come to life. This was not so easy for every team member to do because not everybody is extremely fluent in data analysis or our product analytics to actually say, increasing the conversion from X to Y is going to bring us that much in revenue or improve this another metric like the bottom line to a certain percentage.

[00:16:50.190] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
That's why we additionally also introduced a new format which was just called an idea. This could be literally anything you saw from a competitor or any insight you got from a user, which would not require everyone to invest too much time into polishing these details of what is it actually going to bring because this would be up to the product manager at this point to figure it out and prioritize accordingly. 

[00:17:19.370] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
The problems and challenges were revolving around, as it's called often, the local maximum problem, because we would, for example, take a paywall or take a certain screen, make some experiments, get significant returns and keep iterating on those. And then you would make up to five or six versions of the same paywall like one after the other because you want to keep iterating on your successes.

[00:17:44.540] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
At some point, you hit a point of diminishing returns, which usually means that you have reached this local maximum and you have to switch to try to find the global one again and to find an idea of something random to change and to start experimenting again.

[00:18:00.510] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
What I learned in the last years is that the best way to find this random, so to say, random idea just to implement is usually from user insights. It can be user interviews when you suddenly get some great idea and some cool insight. It can be user surveys. It can be even as simple as a user review, which can give you an idea of what this random can be.

[00:18:27.780] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
For example, I remember a user interview with one of our core users, as we call it, users who have no experience but want to become professional developers. Several of them were mentioning that it's still not clear to them what's the difference between the free version and the paid version of the product, for example. This, of course, naturally makes you think about some a comparison table.

[00:18:54.390] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
But how do you integrate it into the flow, into the upgrade flow? Is it really going to make an improvement? We tried and experimented with that. I don't think it made a significant difference, but the insight was there. It was not clear to users what's the difference. That's why they did not see why they need to upgrade. Communicating this better, communicating what's the value of the Pro version also was a huge insight for marketing like that we are clearly not doing it too good at the moment.

[00:19:25.490] - Olivier Destrebecq
It goes back to show how important it is to talk to your customer because, again, that's how you're going to find a big bets that you can make to try to towards the local maximum.

[00:19:34.870] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I can also add that you are often expected to move fast and at the same time you are expected to make these big bets and to bring some huge output. And this was, I think it's not often easy to take the time to find the time to actually dedicate a certain portion of the quarter with strong KPIs that you have with the ambitious goals that you have and to spend it on user research.

[00:20:03.490] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
That's why it's just really important to manage the expectations, to also to manage up and properly to communicate with the leadership team that, Okay, we're going to take this amount of time because we want to decrease uncertainty first, and then we're going to work on something big.

[00:20:22.430] - Olivier Destrebecq
We're going to change tag a little bit. We've talked about your work at Mimo, but you've said at the beginning, you've launched a course on how to grow apps, user base, and revenue. What I noticed is the tagline is take a structured, full-funnel approach to growing your apps, user base and revenue. Why did you choose that tagline?

[00:20:40.060] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Well, I think the keywords here for me are structured and full-funnel because even though at some point, like we already discussed being random and trying something random is cool, it still should be based on the user insights. I'm overall a big fan of planning and the structured approach to doing things. Another keyword here is full-funnel because I, again, don't believe that just improving monetization or just improving acquisition might necessarily make a huge impact.

[00:21:13.500] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Revenue is an output and there are multiple inputs to it. It can be happening like lots of growth levers across the whole funnel. That's why starting from improving your organic acquisition was up store optimization and finishing with optimizing your paywalls. It has to be structured and you have to find these different ideas of which you can estimate on the bottom line and actually see what is more likely to bring results in the short and long term, hence the tagline.

[00:21:43.970] - Jean François Grang
That's really something that we truly believe in at Purchasely for sure. You want to improve your revenue, but you want also to make sure that it won't have an impact on anything else in your app like the retention or your free users. It's great to, of course, showing more and more paywall will drive more conversion, but you also might lose some people in the process.

[00:22:05.310] - Jean François Grang
Of course, the conversion can be good, but it needs to be compared to your acquisition cost, for example. The return on ad spend is really something that is achievable only if you have that full funnel from acquisition to conversion for sure.

[00:22:19.550] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I totally agree. As soon as you switch to higher-level goals like lifetime values, customer acquisition costs, which multiple departments are typically responsible for, then you really need to have a department or a person or an approach that is overall taking into account the whole funnel.

[00:22:38.260] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Even when we analyze the experiments and propose them, we also have the template where everyone needs to define the primary success metrics, the secondary success metrics, but also potentially the guard rail metrics, so to say, and potential trade-offs, because clearly even if you increase the conversion, there is a risk that's going to increase the amount of refunds that you're going to get.

[00:23:03.130] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
It's going to probably sometimes decrease the quality of your customers and you might expect low in renewals in the future. So all of this, I agree, have to be taken into account.

[00:23:14.860] - Olivier Destrebecq
Putting free features into the premium plan might reduce your ratings on the store and so your ASO, et cetera, et cetera. So we know that everything is tied up together and you need to find the better mix. That's really, really helpful to have this full vision, full-funnel vision.

[00:23:31.970] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, totally.

[00:23:32.550] - Jean François Grang
You've already had two, or I guess the second cohort is in your course now. You've already had one before and you're already advising a little bit before. What are some of the mistakes that you've seen founders do when trying to grow their database and revenue?

[00:23:45.690] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I think the most common one is that somehow segmentation is not a very popular tactic that is used by the startups, at least not at the beginning of their journey for mobile apps. I don't yet know why. I think it's somehow also connected to the lack of product analytics, analytical tools, and it's the case that get integrated into the products at the beginning.

[00:24:10.230] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
But usually, it's somewhat of a revelation when I hold the workshop and show that the users can be segmented across. There might be multiple breakdowns of the user base. This is usually a revelation to a lot of people in my course and also in my consultancy work.

[00:24:28.160] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I would definitely usually advice to even do this at the pre-product market fit stage, because we also know that even if you don't think that you already have the PMF for your whole user base, you might definitely already have it for some of your segments. Figuring out what the segments are and trying to get more of this pretty much can be a faster way to success.

[00:24:50.900] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Another thing is that the monetization opportunities differ a lot based on the geo, based on the platform, based on the use case and user's motivation. No matter if we're talking about language learning or code learning apps or fitness apps, users, as I also mentioned at the beginning, trying to solve completely different spectrum of problems with it.

[00:25:15.130] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
All of this impacts the communication, the messaging that you're going to use in your onboarding and in your emails, and your lifecycle marketing overall, in your advertising activities. Not to mention that sometimes you might need to come up with different monetization strategies for each of these segments. I would say segmentation is more or less key to understanding your users and trying to convert them as well.

[00:25:42.940] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Another thing is also not talking to users and customers is a big issue that I also see across multiple companies. I myself am an introvert, that's why I can totally understand the anxiety it gives and the reluctance sometimes when it comes to talking to your user base. But it's unfortunately such a critical part and it's essential to do that. Instead, I see a lot of founders looking at the competition, which is also a valid strategy to some extent, but still nothing is going to substitute the great user research.

[00:26:17.930] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Another belief that the founders often have is that user research has to be massive, expensive, and tedious, and take a long time, which is not exactly true because it can be as simple as just analyzing your user reviews. Especially now with chat GPT, you can do it super easily and get so many interesting insights right away in front of you super fast.

[00:26:42.620] - Olivier Destrebecq
Interesting. You have to tell us how.

[00:26:44.140] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I think I'm actually a fan of a platform that is called Vexpower. They have a course, I think it's even free, about using AI to automatically analyze your user reviews. I think it's fairly easy indeed to keep track of that. Also, launching a couple of user surveys in your product and then interviewing a couple of the respondents who agreed to it might already give you a ton of insights before you also start seeing some patterns. It doesn't have to be long or complicated or expensive.

[00:27:21.140] - Jean François Grang
Yeah, I totally agree. An independent or an indie dev in the early days of the app store for a type sheet application, I won't name because it doesn't exist anymore. I remember that the reviews were really a source of inspiration for the features, et cetera, but there were also another one which was the support. All the emails that you get, even as an indie dev, you get all these emails, et cetera.

[00:27:43.690] - Jean François Grang
First, it's a great opportunity when you reply to the email to get five ratings. Like, if you like your application, give us a five rating because that helps us a lot. But it's also a great way of getting direct feedback from customers that are willing to speak to you. I think it's a great stuff.

[00:27:58.090] - Jean François Grang
There's also another one that I caught from Lenny Rachitsky, he's from the CEO of ProfitWell, who tells that when you unsubcribe from a product, you often ask, Why do you unsubcribe? But it's very rare that you ask the people, What did you like in the product? I think that's really something that needs to be asked to the customers, especially when they are leaving, because it forces them to remember why they subscribed in the first place.

[00:28:26.050] - Jean François Grang
It's a good thing to know your weaknesses, but also your strengths. I think it's really interesting to know that. It doesn't cost a lot to ask them in the survey, as you were saying, Ekaterina, or during the support phase, or reading the reviews on the store. I think, as you mentioned, it's something everybody should do, no matter the scale or the size of the company.

[00:28:46.280] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I completely agree. I think that's also a great tip that you mentioned from Patrick Campbell, I believe, the CEO, sounds super helpful. I also think doing exactly this and checking out how exactly users talk about us while leaving the reviews, how they refer to the product, how they describe it, what are the benefits, was also super helpful to us because it also helps you come up with a lot of ideas for paid user acquisition.

[00:29:12.350] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
We can pretty much take the quotes. You can use exactly the same language that your users are using when live in the reviews. Because you know that in this case it's way more likely to resonate with them, to resonate for acquiring the new users too. So many angles that are really helpful there.

[00:29:30.780] - Olivier Destrebecq
There's more and more talk about retention that's getting more and more important these days. Can you tell us why it's getting more important? And then what can people do to optimize retention for their app?

[00:29:40.680] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, of course. I have to say I'm a bit biased here because I'm a huge believer in the freemium model. I also understand why not everybody can afford doing that. I understand that not every startup and not every founder can actually rely on some users convert in the future. And that's why a lot of them prefer to go for more aggressive type of monetization.

[00:30:01.990] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
But I think this has so much value in it because first it helps your users to create a habit before they even pay, which makes them less likely to churn in the future. Also, of course, as long as the user is retaining and is active in the product, there are more and more opportunities to convert the user for you. Especially for apps that are powered by content and viral loops, it also decreases the friction and it helps you to keep this loop spinning because every new happy user can potentially bring some more.

[00:30:36.720] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
That's why I would say retention is critical. Of course, freemium model helps a lot with that. It just does a lot of heavy lifting for you already if the product is good. But when it comes to ways to optimize it, I think not much is changing here these days. A lot has to do with communication, lifecycle, marketing, right messaging at the right time to keep reminding the users of the value that they're getting out of the product.

[00:31:07.350] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
First, to help bring them to the aha moment, so to improve activation. Activation fuels retention, retention fuels monetization, and this is how it pretty much goes. One of the levers here can, of course, be improving your push notification prompt at the beginning, also figuring out the right time to show it and the right layout, the right design and the call to action around it, and then doubling down on push notifications and emails on top of that.

[00:31:38.680] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Also, I see a lot of examples these days, but I personally have not tried anything in this regard yet. It's also using the artificial intelligence for more personalized communication and for pretty much integrating it into your workflows so that every customer starts getting way more personalized message and built around their behavior in the product.

[00:31:58.930] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, this gets to value nurturing because I also noticed that very often and I also made these mistakes myself in the past. Even if you do all of this, you might still see significant churn. You might still see users churn and not renewing subscriptions. It means that you're probably not really communicating the progress that your users are making in the product also at the right time. That's why they tend to forget about it.

[00:32:26.440] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
They tend to forget where they started and have a solid comparison as to where they are at the moment to see how much value they actually already got out of your product. Having some overviews of that in the product and the profile sections that can be shared also maybe on social media and make it a little bit more rewarding and can also even help us with this.

[00:32:49.140] - Olivier Destrebecq
There's also something that few app developers do is promoting the evolution of the subscriptions. Because when you're subscribing something and you stay a year, the product continues evolving and new premium features add on, and you maybe not... Well, you won't be promoting them.

[00:33:06.010] - Olivier Destrebecq
A great example for that is, for example, Apple Music. They launched this new karaoke feature and when I opened Apple Music, I saw directly a banner promoting this new feature, which I will be using, but I know that because I love camera, to be fair. It's amazing feature. But it's something that we rarely see in applications like, Well, we've developed that new feature, we just put it on the side. We don't even know because if I'm subscribed, I don't even know if I would have it if I wasn't a subscriber.

[00:33:38.950] - Olivier Destrebecq
Now, included in your premium package, you get this new feature and you get an onboarding of that new feature, really helps the customer know that the value of his subscription is growing. For sure, the progress that you've made, all the achievements, everything that you brought, especially when you're learning or when you're doing some practice or sports or whatever is important. But also all these new features that you might not be willing to promote your existing subscriber with is really important to leverage and improve your retention.

[00:34:09.700] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I totally agree.100%. I also think the newsletters on their own might not necessarily get it. But that's why, as you said, you can also use in-app messaging in order to announce those. You can use also push notifications, you can use other communication channels. I think also Apple introduced the in-app events last year, which can also be used for announcing the new features as well. I think all of these channels can make a lot of sense for sure.

[00:34:39.000] - Olivier Destrebecq
Great idea, the in-app events, indeed.

[00:34:42.450] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I call it a low input, potentially low output tactic because we did it at a certain point quite extensively. It really does not take too long to create an in-app event. I wouldn't expect too much out of it, but it can give you quite significant awareness, to be fair. The amount of impressions you get can be quite huge. But I just would not expect maybe too many installs from there. But it, again, for a 10 to 15 minutes efforts, it's still worth it.

[00:35:15.150] - Olivier Destrebecq
You've shared a lot of answers, a lot of great thought with us. If our listeners want to learn more and hear more from you, where can they go?

[00:35:22.680] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Well, mostly LinkedIn, I would say. I'm trying to also be active on Twitter, but I have this fear of a blank page and that's why I don't really post much there at the moment. Pretty much LinkedIn is the platform where I'm happy to chat about anything.

[00:35:38.290] - Olivier Destrebecq
If they want to learn about your class, where can they go?

[00:35:40.920] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
My class is hosted on the Maven platform. This is where the landing page with all the possible amount of text is describing the course in a lot of detail.

[00:35:55.530] - Olivier Destrebecq
If people come from the Subscription League, can they get a discount or something?

[00:36:00.130] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Yeah, of course. For Purchasely with fans, yeah, you can.

[00:36:04.550] - Olivier Destrebecq
Olivier wants to improve the app skills.

[00:36:09.200] - Jean François Grang
I'm on the mailing list. I'm receiving the emails.

[00:36:12.810] - Olivier Destrebecq
Being a mobile developer is not enough. You want to be full stack, right?

[00:36:17.320] - Jean François Grang
Exactly.

[00:36:18.210] - Olivier Destrebecq
Come on, we want a discount, Ekaterina.

[00:36:20.160] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
No, of course, yeah. You can use the code League20 for everybody who listens to the podcast and wants to join the course.

[00:36:29.380] - Olivier Destrebecq
League like Subscription League.

[00:36:31.470] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
League, exactly.

[00:36:32.430] - Olivier Destrebecq
We'll put it in the show notes. Make sure it lasts forever because this episode is going to be listened for years. There is great, great insight. I'm really happy about how to develop the testing culture, experimentation within a company. That's really, really a great, valuable content. Thanks for sharing.

[00:36:50.830] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
I'm really glad.

[00:36:52.240] - Jean François Grang
Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing this with us.

[00:36:54.880] - Ekaterina Gamsriegler
Thanks for inviting me. I was super happy to chat with you.

[00:36:58.350] - Jean François Grang
You're welcome.

[00:36:59.130] - Olivier Destrebecq
On behalf of the Purchasely team, thank you for listening to the Subscription League podcast. If you've enjoyed what you heard, leave us a five star review on iTunes or other audio platform. To find out more about Purchasely and how we can improve your subscription business, visit purchasely.com. Please hit subscribe in your podcast player and don't miss any future episodes. You can also listen to previous episodes at subscriptionleague.com. See you soon.