Mojo - Strategies you should focus on for a successful subscription business with Jean Patry

[00:00:22]
Olivier: Welcome, everybody. Today I'm with Nico Tissier, CEO at Purchasely the next Gen subscription platform. And we're going to interview JeanJean Patry CEO at Mojo.

[00:00:34]
Nicolas Tissier: Hello.

[00:00:34]
Olivier: Nicolas, can you introduce Jean for us?

[00:00:37]
Nicolas Tissier: Yeah. Hello. So, Jean, you're the CEO of Mojo. You're an engineer with Matt background. You're passionate about programmatic design. So what is programmatic design? It's generating design with code and making it accessible to everyone. Always been working on video editing apps.

[00:00:57]
Nicolas Tissier: Four years ago, you create Mojo with the idea to make Instagram stories much more animated and dynamic. You participate to YC in 2018 and the success comes very quickly. Four years after Mojo has been downloaded more than 20 million times. You have 30K paying subscribers, which will make a lot of people jealous, I guess. And you generate more than €1 million of MRI with a brilliant team of less than 15 people.

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Olivier: So, Jean, after that great intro from Nicholas, is there anything else you want our listeners to know?

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Jean Patry: Hi, Nicolas. Hi, Olivier. Thanks for having me.

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Olivier: You're welcome.

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Jean Patry: Well, thanks for this intro Nicolas. I think it's a good summary. Thanks for that.

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Olivier: Cool. So when I read your intro the other day and learned a little bit more about you, there's one thing that was like, as a software developer, I have to ask you that question, which is programmatic design. Can you tell us in 30 seconds why you're passionate about it and why it's so great?

[00:01:57]
Jean Patry: Yes, definitely. Well, very simply, when I did my studies, I got passionate about video and music, especially music composition, and I was just spending my nights doing that. And also as an engineer, I was looking for a job. And the main question I was trying to answer is, can I not betray my engineering backgrounds and do what I love, videoing and music composition.

[00:02:22]
Jean Patry: And here comes Codes and programming design, which is about that, which is about turning code into design, into music, video, photo. I think it's because it's at the intersection of two things I love, and I think that's the main reason. And when you have hybrid passions, oftentimes there is a field has the intentions of that and it's about that.

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Olivier: Well, it seems like your passion has served you pretty well because Mojo has been pretty successful over the last four years. I'm curious to know how subscriptions are factored into that success?

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Jean Patry: Yeah, definitely. It's rather three years, actually, because we launched at the very end of 2018, but it doesn't really change the story. Well, very basically, I think we would not have been able to build this business so fast without mobile subscriptions. So it's very, I would say instrumental to our trajectory and especially our velocity.

[00:03:18]
Jean Patry: Basically what subscription did for us is that they instantly provided business models that was 100 percent fit for our value and made us able to distribute that wordwide without the knowledge in payment systems, basically. And I think another aspect is that subscriptions are also aligned and are aligning incentives between our users and us. Because it's always pushing us to offer new content, more content, and to always develop the product.

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Jean Patry: And actually adding content and pushing your product is what you need to do to succeed as a business, or at least as a software business. So it's the right business model to focus on the right things, basically.

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Olivier: Cool. And so you've talked a lot about the benefits of subscription and how they help you. A lot of people are talking about the downside of subscription being the fee you have to pay either to Google or to Apple or whoever owns the store where you're published. What's your perspective on that?

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Jean Patry: Yeah. So I think it relates back to what I just said about mobile subscriptions, which is that we wouldn't have a business if it weren't for Google and Apple. To me, this is as simple as that. So why I think that is because, the price of building your own subscription stack, like as a small or a medium company, is like enormous. It's really a skill you have to master. Payments it's not something easy.

[00:04:43]
Jean Patry: And I think if you're a medium business, this is worth more than the codes that you're giving to Google and Apple when you're building subscription on top of their OS's. I think it's the same if you're trying to take users to web payment workflow, because the question is, are you going to turn less than users by adding that flow? Well, I guess you will not succeed in doing that, not to mention the cut you have to give to web payment providers.

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Jean Patry: I think where there is maybe a debate or discussion to have is for, I would say super big companies with highly established brands, even outside of the app stores. But the wide majority of app developers are not in the situation. We are not in this situation yet. So I think talking about Epic, Spotify, etc, is an interesting discussion. But it's not super relevant to the question, is that worth it for app developers?

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Olivier: Definitely, yeah.

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Nicolas Tissier: What you're saying is that the app stores in general are more an opportunity for the small developers, and they can create troubles, problems, issues for the very big ones because of course they have a big brand. But for the small ones, the fees, I've never heard any small developers not saying that the App Store is a chance to distribute worldwide. I'm very aligned with what you're saying.

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Jean Patry: Yeah, definitely. It's really about distribution. Definitely.

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Olivier: So when looking at the Mojo app, one of the specificity of the subscription paywall is that it comes towards the end of the user journey, when the user has been creating content in Mojo. Can you tell us how you got to this design?

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Jean Patry: Sure. Just a quick disclaimer before I do that, we also display a paywall as part of the onboarding process. So at the beginning of the flow but that paywall is not really meant to drive the purchases. It's really about making the user know that we have a premium offering. I thought I should say that before answering.

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Jean Patry: But yes, you're right. What is quite specific about our app is that users are free to select all the templates that we offer in the app and even the premium ones. They can edit them, they can add elements to them, and it's only when they really want to actually create what we feel like is a real value of our app, like sharing what they created with those premium templates that are actually limited by the paywall. Which is basically telling them that those templates are premium and they should upgrade to our module pro plan to be able to show them, basically.

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Jean Patry: And the reason why it worked better for us this way is because actually we enable everyone to release the values that we can offer and educate them on what Mojo is about and what we make better for them before we're asking them to upgrade, basically. And it's really about connecting what you can call these aha moments very close and just before the moment where you're trying to convert, basically.

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Olivier: And was that an intentional design for you to have that paywall at the end, or is that something you got to slowly over time?

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Jean Patry: Actually, if I remember correctly, I think it came as an accident, a happy one in that case. But I think at some point, at first I think we blocked users from being able to edit the premium templates. And I think at some point we just, I guess, introduced the bug or changed that and realized it was a way better experience and it was even better for convertion. And actually, I would say the understanding of why came a bit after like it often does.

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Olivier: There is what we call some subscription fatigue for users around subscription. Are you guys doing anything to limit the impact of the subscription fatigue on Mojo?

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Jean Patry: Yeah, subscription fatigue. To me, I think it really happens when there is a disconnection between the value that people get from a service that's subscribed to and actually being subscribed to it. Many subscriptions on mobile or in general are quite expensive, especially if you look at the total yearly costs. And you can add up pretty quickly if you have several of them.

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Jean Patry: And maybe some products are overusing subscriptions and not really providing the offer that goes with that, which is actually adding content and improving your product all the time. And yeah, so if you're actually doing subscriptions and you're adding content all the time, I think it's the best way to prevent your subscribers from feeling that fatigue, basically.

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Jean Patry: And I think another aspect is also about making easy for people, for subscribers to cancel their subscription to your product. Because basically if you do not, they will churn anyway. That also actually they will get angry and turn into what you can call Brand detractors and have way more, I would say, detrimental effects on your growth and your public image, basically.

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Olivier: And I'm curious, you say you try to make it as easy as you can for people to unsubscribe from within the app. Is that something you mentioned actually in the paywall, like onboarding flow so they know ahead of time? Or is it just a happy moment when they discover later that they can cancel from the app?

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Jean Patry: Yes, that's a good question. I think we do have that. We have several versions of our paywall that we're testing, so I couldn't say if we had that information everywhere, but I think we are aiming for that. And I think the most successful subscription businesses, and especially on mobile, are the ones that are super transparent with their users.

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Jean Patry: And there is no point in hiding that. I mean, the clearer you get and better trust you create early on and the more likely you are to first convert people into becoming subscribers. But more importantly, have them retained on the long run, which is really about growing a subscription business is about.

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Nicolas Tissier: And being transparent like this, does it have an impact on the win back? Are you able to better win back users that have turned at some point? Do you have any metrics on this?

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Jean Patry: I think I don't have specific metrics on that. But what I can tell you for sure is that if at any point of the user journey you get them in the feeling that you betrayed them in some way, I think you will never get them back. So I think this is what we should avoid as much as possible. And one thing we're having with that, especially with the free trials on mobile, users going for a free trial have to cancel it 24 hours before the end of that trial if they don't want to get charged. And that's the app store's policies.

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Jean Patry: And it's not super easy to actually educate your users about that. And sometimes some of them get confused and end up getting charged by accidents. And this is bad because someone getting charged by accidents is not going to stay in the long run. They're not going to promote your product. You really don't want that, even if you're making some money when it happens.

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Nicolas Tissier: Do you sound like some push notification 24 hours before charging them? Because we know that some apps, I have a blink list in mind, they do that and they reassure the free users that they won't be charged by accident. Do you have something like this in Mojo?

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Jean Patry: I wish we did. We don't even send any notifications yet.

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Nicolas Tissier: At all? Okay.

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Jean Patry: Yeah.

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Nicolas Tissier: So it could be a good product to get the push notification authorization.

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Jean Patry: Definitely. Well, there are many things that we want to do to improve all those aspects that more, I would say established apps that have been here for a long time have been able to do. Yeah, but it's still in the list of things that we want to build.

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Olivier: So it actually strikes me that you guys have been pretty successful. You've been in the market for a while and you say you're not sending push notification yet, which some people would say push notification is a great tool to engage your user and all that kind of stuff. Is there any specific reason why you haven't prioritized push notification yet?

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Jean Patry: That's a good question. I think that the answer for that is because sending notifications and trying to have a better messaging for your users along their journey is really a second phase. Once you really perfectly nailed, your product market fits and are trying to optimize that to lift up your metrics, especially retention, so that you can grow even more and set the foundation for being a great business.

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Jean Patry: And I think we are in that transition. But before that, our focus was more around getting the value right for the product, and we're still working a lot on that. And we felt like as a team that it was more priority until then.

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Olivier: Yeah, definitely.

[00:13:42]
Jean Patry: Cool.

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Olivier: Thanks for the answer. Implementing subscription can be tricky. I'm sure you met some challenges along the way. Could you share some of those challenges and any advice that you might have for others going down the same path?

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Jean Patry: Sure. Well, I have one single big piece of advice for this, which is don't try to build it yourself. Basically use a solution.

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Nicolas Tissier: And I think I love it.

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Jean Patry: Like Purchasely, basically. Very simply, it will save you time, money, and more importantly, focus. Well, it looks like I'm doing some promotion for you guys, but actually it's really what I think. My general take on this is that I think ,at least this is what we do as a company, is we try to outsource as much as possible everything that we do that is not core business. What we are good at, so we can focus on the rest, which is the product, the value we provide, product, tech and marketing. What we should nail anyway. Perhaps or at least I hope so.

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Jean Patry: But yes, unless you are building a payment company and it's your business payment. I think it's a perfect example of a non core business topic that most companies should not build by themselves. To me, it's quite obvious. But I think I should pay tribute to my co-founder for that, who has the right instinct from Cisco.

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Olivier: He didn't want to rebuild the wheel. And so I'm curious did you directly go for a third party tool, or did you even try to do subscription by yourself?

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Jean Patry: We did not even try. And again, I think my cofounder, Francisco told me, he felt like it was at least a one person full time job, even at the very beginning. And he says there is no way around that if you want to make it work and not to be awake enough at night because you have subscribers that have problems with payments or that get charged by accidents or anything. And yeah, it did not take a lot of time convincing me.

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Olivier: Awesome. So earlier you've talked about a happy accident with the paywall that was moved further down the flow for the user. Is there any other happy accidents in the history of Mojo that you think are worthwhile sharing?

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Jean Patry: Yes. So there is another one that comes to my mind. In our product, we have two options for our premium plan, Mojo Pro and people can choose to pay either yearly or monthly. And originally on our purchase page, the monthly plan was selected by default, and one day we switched that by accident. And so the yearly plan was pre-selected instead.

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Jean Patry: And actually what happened is that the proportion of people subscribing to the yearly plan drastically changed from 30 percent to 70 percent. Basically it got reversed between the two. And it was a happy accident for us because the yearly plan is more interesting for us despite the huge discount that we offer. It is cheaper, but people that go for it tend to subscribe longer. And also we're getting more money early on that we can use to fuel our trajectory.

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Nicolas Tissier: And is there any chance that you can observe on the usage of the product itself, how they engage with it? Are yearly subscribers more engaged on the longer term with the product?

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Jean Patry: Oh, yeah, definitely. I thought it was maybe something specific to our products. And then I stumbled upon Duoligo that went public. And they're publishing a document six months ahead of public the S_1 documents. And in that they just mentioned that they're making three times more money from yearly subscribers compared with monthly, which I felt was like a huge difference.

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Jean Patry: And actually, it's roughly the same for many subscription apps. And what they did is that, they actually pushed people to go more for that offering because it was more aligned with using the product on the longer run. It was better for everyone basically.

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Olivier: I'm impressed that you're reading S_1 documents. Do you do that often?

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Jean Patry: No, I'm not reading them. I'm reading some, I would say, summaries made by analysts. 

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Olivier: Okay. That makes me feel a lot better. One thing that you mentioned when we talked last week was companies that succeed are the ones that do before they understand. Can you tell us more about what you meant?

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Jean Patry: Yeah, sure. I think it's one of the big lessons that we've learned when going to Y Combinator. What we really understood there is that one of the biggest predictors of success for any startup is really about its speed more than anything else. More than you know which market they go for, I don't know, how much money they start with or how good salesman they are.

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Jean Patry: And the reason for that is, if you try to build your own business, you're going to hit tons of rules. You're going to make like hundreds of mistakes and probably pivot several times before you find something that works. I think Mojo is our maybe 10th project. We tried a lot before that. Basically you better make those mistakes as fast as possible before you run out of money. But oftentimes it's not really about money, it's more that you get burnt out and you don't have morale to try another idea.

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Jean Patry: And so to go fast, actually what we experienced and I think now it has been theorized, is that you have to make experiments and bets. Nine out of 10 of those bets will fail. But if one works and if like 100X bets, that really reels huge benefits, you'll make more progress than if you try to analyze everything that we have to do and you try to plan ahead and trying to get an understanding.

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Jean Patry: And I think the other aspect of that is that, we are in a very competitive business. Like it's worldwide, it's distributed. That I would say the drawback of being distributed on the app stores is that you're competing against all the world instantly. And yes, also you will never be faster than competition, than the sum of the competition combined.

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Jean Patry: You need to have those happy accidents and you need to know to have those wins that really differentiates you that you will double down on and that will make you unique. And so you basically create your own category.

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Olivier: Cool. I know you guys are hiring and have open positions, so I'm going to put you on the spot and ask you to tell us why people should come work with you at Mojo?

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Jean Patry: Sure. So we have a lot of open positions at the moment. We're looking for Head of Growth, Senior Product Manager, Android and Web engineers, and many other positions Well, I think Mojo is a great environment first because of the mission. We're really passionate about basically enabling everyone to create super polished design on their mobile. And we already started doing that with social stories and now we are going for all social media and all digital content.

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Jean Patry: And that's an amazing opportunity also because there is no clear leader yet for short video content on mobile. And that's super exciting. At least we think it is I think the other aspect is that we are very few number of people with an already, I wouldn't say big, but already a strong business. And it's really an opportunity to have a lot of impact per person. And that's something we always try to optimize for because we feel like it's super aligned with some happiness because you feel like you're making a difference.

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Jean Patry: And last, I think we have, either if you work remotely with us or you come to the office, you'll see that there is a great vibe. It's a super nice group of human beings that are recurring for each other. That's super exciting about the change and that are really like hands on doors, always ready to get their hands dirty to make things move forward. So, yeah, for all these reasons, I think we have a lot to offer.

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Olivier: I'm curious. We're always looking for sneak peeks. What kind of cool features are you working on right now for a Mojo and are going to come out in the future?

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Jean Patry: Well, I will not, because as I said, going fast means not having a clear road map because you don't really have time to build it ahead. So that's the reality. But to talk maybe about the short midterm. We're working on tons of things, but there are two aspects that we are super interested in right now. One is short video formats on mobile, like rReals, TikTok and Shorts. I think it's a tremendous opportunity for us. Those are great storytelling formats for us, and it's really about turning your ideas into powerful visuals, and this is what we do best. We know we were just going full speed for that.

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Jean Patry: And another aspect is teams. I think with Mojo, we really succeeded in making a great tool for individuals trying to grow their audience and their business. And actually, there is no reason why Mojo shouldn't be great for teams. And I think it's really about making the product a bit easier to work with when you serve people. We're just doing that at the moment, also making it more visible to bigger companies as well.

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Olivier: Thanks for sharing all your secrets and your five year road map with us. Those were all the questions that I had for you today. If people want to learn more about Mojo, maybe learn more about you, where can they go? And if they want to apply for these jobs, where can they go?

[00:22:48]
Jean Patry: We have a website, and I think if you type Mojo app on Google Search, you'll stumble upon us. So definitely go there if you're interested in our open positions and on mine, I'm not a super public person, but I have a Twitter account and you can find me where I post work related stuff. It's Jean_Patry .And yeah, look for us. Well, thanks a lot for having me. I really enjoyed.

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Nicolas Tissier: Great Jean. That was amazing to have you on the show. Thank you very much for that.

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Speaker 1: On behalf of the purchasing 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 platforms. 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.