Adapty’s Subscripton Solutions with Dima Podoprosvetov | Appvertiser Chats #5
Hello! Dive in this intriguing chat about suscription solutions. Here we go!
Welcome to Appvertiser Chats #5, Dima! We are glad to have you here. Dmitrii Podoprosvetov is the Co-founder and VP of Sales at Adapty.io, and today we met him to get to know his company, get insights on subscription tactics and ask him his opinion on the future of mobile app trends.
Q: To break the ice: what is your favorite mobile app?
A: If it’s just a personal question, I’d simply say Instagram. But if we’re talking about some favorite app we’ve had any relationship with here at Adapty, I’d go with Genie – AI Chatbot. It’s an app by our client that quickly bootstrapped with the help of paywall A/B testing and still keeps high positions in the stores, despite Chat GPT having released its official app.
Q: Great! Now please introduce yourself and Adapty.
A: My name is Dima, I’m a co-founder and VP of sales at Adapty. I’ve got 18 years of experience in IT, having worn many hats in engineering and business areas. As for our product, Adapty is a revenue management platform that helps app developers and publishers grow their apps. Our service tackles multiple issues:
- Developers benefit from a ready-made backend with an easy-to-use SDK for seamless in-app subscription integration, saving them months of in-house development. Adapty handles validation and maintenance.
- Marketing pros and growth managers get powerful subscription analytics for crafting winning growth strategies, from basic metrics to revenue and LTV predictions.
- Product owners enjoy an efficient framework for boosting revenue. They can effortlessly create attractive paywalls with the built-in editor and run A/B tests for specific user segments to pinpoint their app’s ideal markets and audience.
Q: What’s your favorite thing about working at Adapty?
A: I like being a part of something more than just a commercial product. We genuinely help developers and app publishers solve many problems at once, saving their time, money, and human resources. It’s the mission of our team – to make operating in the world of mobile subscriptions much easier and more flexible by providing enterprise-level tools even for small companies and developers.
Q: What are some of the most innovative ways you’ve seen Adapty used to improve user acquisition and retention?
A: We like coming up with innovations in Adapty and releasing new updates every month, but we also like it when our clients find innovative ways to use our product. For example, this summer we released Paywalls 2.0 – a new paywall management system that, apart from many improvements, enabled our clients to set up precise targeting for A/B testing. They can now set up different audiences based on many criteria, including region, age, channel, language, etc. So one of our clients used our paywall builder to create dozens of different paywalls adapted for certain audiences based on country and language and ran multiple paywall A/B tests, which resulted in finding the most profitable markets they later focused on.
Q: How do you use data to optimize your paywalls and subscription plans?
A: It’s always important to keep your finger on the pulse of the market, no matter what business you’re in. In the mobile subscription business, if you pay attention and follow the top players and experts in the industry, you’re sure to find hints, tips, and insights that can be used to optimize your monetization strategy. Besides, many data companies pretty often publish incisive reports on the state of the mobile industry, which are often even shared for free. This summer we also released our annual report – State of in-app subscriptions in the US 2023 – which is free and full of insights, like which product combination is the most profitable, how many products you should and shouldn’t place on your paywall, which type of subscription has the highest LTV, and much more. Such reports are not direct commands to action, but they’re a great source of information to base your experiments on.
Q: What are the biggest challenges you face in managing mobile in-app purchases and subscriptions?
A: From the user’s perspective – there are several challenges:
- Integrating in-app subscriptions into your app. In order to work with transactions, you need to create your own backend with a separate server for purchase validation. It’s not that easy to implement, let alone time-consuming. Even if you manage to come up with your own solution, it must be constantly maintained in order to work properly. It’s almost undoable for small developers and unsafe for the bigger ones.
- IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). This unique identifier number that used to be assigned to every Apple user was widely used for attribution purposes. Marketing services, analytics systems, and, more importantly, ad providers could easily get access to this identifier, as well as the personal user attributes. Such attributes could be used to launch ad campaigns for the most relevant audience and get high-quality traffic to your app. But starting iOS 14 this information is not accessible by default which made working with attribution much harder and finding the right audience almost impossible.
- Fast and effective hypothesis testing. Continuing with the IDFA issue, many developers and growth managers faced the problem of what audience to experiment with. Having no attributes makes launching an A/B test a shot in the dark: even if the traffic quantity is enough it doesn’t mean that it’s of good quality for your app. Plus, finding a decent service for testing may also be a challenge.
- Trying to keep everything together. If you want to approach your app business seriously, you need to be able to solve the aforementioned problems and manage to keep track of all your data. And it may be pretty overwhelming. Many developers tend to use separate tools and services for each particular purpose which prevents them from seeing the whole picture and as a result, leads to less profits.
Adapty helps with solving all of these problems and even more. App developers easily integrate our SDK into their apps, which takes no more than a few hours. Adapty provides the whole backend with server validation, so they don’t have to worry about maintenance. Since our service tracks all the subscription events and collects almost 20 different metrics, it provides enough information for proper user segmentation which allows for targeted A/B testing. And the most convenient part is that everything takes place within one web service that also supports 3rd part integrations, so you can connect it with other products you use.
Q: What are your thoughts on the future of mobile in-app purchases and subscriptions?
A: To put it generally – finding alternatives for mobile user acquisition and app stores with alternative payment systems. The monopoly of Apple and Google leaves less and less freedom for developers and marketing specialists in terms of working with users. The latest lost case of Apple in Europe leaves much hope for alternative payment methods to be added to the App Store. But the changes happen too slowly. If we once again recall the IDFA problem, it still remains a huge pain for the mobile world. So one of the ways of dealing with this, we consider going on the web, by making the user onboarding take place entirely on the web, not in the app. Such an approach may show a different look at the attribution problem, as well may help developers use alternative payment methods at the end of the onboarding process.
Q: I love your Paywall Newsletter. What are some of the latest tips you’d like to share?
A: Well, the Paywall Newsletter is not so much about tips and hacks, but rather about finding ways to improve this or that paywall. Yes, sometimes we deal with dark patterns but we never encourage our readers to use them. We like to say that the most universal way is to be open and user-friendly with your paywall: keep the design simple and informative, don’t overload the screen, make sure you properly communicate the values of your app, and never stop experimenting.
Q: What is something that most people working in product or lifecycle marketing don’t know yet, and they would benefit greatly from being aware of?
A: To our surprise, not many companies and developers know that you need to experiment a lot in order to find your audience or market. So finding a proper service for A/B testing is a huge part of success. Not everyone also knows about web-to-web. Mobile developers don’t pay much attention to what’s happening on the web, while this channel becomes pretty attractive as a means of dealing with the IDFA problem. Having app onboarding on the web may become a new standard for working with attribution.
Q: Could you share a paywall easy testing framework, for an app that is achieving its first 100K users?
A: I’m afraid, there’s no silver bullet, you have to experiment. To make the process as painless as possible, you may start by looking at our report and using the market benchmarks we provide. It’s also important to analyze the niche of your app to find the right segments for targeting (age, gender, country, etc) and then run tests on this audience. And of course, the most convenient way of doing this would be with a solution like Adapty.
