How to ACTUALLY Convert App Users (and Make $10k+/Month)

If your app is getting downloads, but no one is paying, I can almost guarantee you're looking at the wrong problem. Because 90% of founders think they [music] have a conversion problem. They don't. They have a funnel problem. And in this video, [music] I'm going to show you exactly how to diagnose where your app is leaking money and how to fix it. I have talked to so many app founders who tell me, "We're getting installs. Our ads are working. People are signing up." But then I asked them one question. How many of those users are [music] converting? How much money are you making? And it's crickets. They're silent. I've been through this exact [music] problem myself. And after scaling multiple apps to tens of thousands of dollars in monthly recurring revenue, I can tell you one thing right now. Getting installs is easy. Getting those users to pay and maximizing your LTV, that is the hard part. Your app is not [music] a product. Your app is a funnel. From your marketing to your app store landing page to your onboarding to your payw wall to users [music] retaining inside your core app. And if even one of those steps is weak and it's leaking users, your revenue [music] dies. So in this video, I'm going to be breaking down how to diagnose where your funnel is broken, what types of user onboardings convert better, how to structure a payw wall that forces [music] user commitment and gives you the highest chance at collecting revenue, what to do when those users still won't convert, and exactly why most apps lose their users in the first 2 minutes of downloading. If you stick around until the end of this video and you understand how to fix these five things, your revenue will change overnight. Period. Let's get into it. Okay, before we get into the nuts and bolts, the real details of this video, I want to visualize exactly what I'm talking about here. This is your app. This is my app. This is every app in existence. It can every single app can be broken down into a simple funnel. And this is what it looks like. At the top, of course, we have our marketing message. Then we go to our app store landing page to the onboarding to the payw wall. And then of course the user retention actually inside the app. Every potential user for your product is going to go through this stepbystep funnel. And visualizing it like this and tracking each one of the analytics at each one of these steps is the most important part. And this is how you succeed in the app game. You need to button this up as much as possible so that you're not leaking users. Because if people hit your app store landing page and they just bounce and none of them install and none of them get to the onboarding, of course you're not going to succeed. So you need to understand each one of these parts intimately. So let's get into it. Of course, the most important part is the marketing message. This is where every user starts and the psychology, the mindset that the user has when you're doing your marketing is going to set the tone for the rest of your funnel. If your marketing message isn't strong, the rest of this doesn't matter. And you'll see this if you've ever run paid ads or if you've ever had a viral video that's done very well for your app, you will understand exactly what I'm saying here. And I'll show you a live example of that right now. So, this is my latest mobile app posted. And as you can see, we had a video go crazy viral. It was a super strong video on the 21st of last month. And just look at my app store conversion rate. The second part of the funnel from the app store landing page to conversion to download. Look at how much this spiked. You know, we typically sit on organic traffic. We sit around, you know, 10 to 12%. When this one video went viral, our conversion rate from app store landing page view to install went to 62%. Because the marketing in that video was extremely extremely strong. So again, strong marketing will make everything so much easier for you. And you'll see this on paid ads. Some of your videos will convert much better than others. Okay? So it's all a volume game. Keep that in mind. Your marketing sets the tone for the rest of your funnel. And then of course we have the app store landing page. What is your actual conversion rate when people see your app? What is the conversion rate to install? If you don't have an attractive looking app store landing page, if you don't have a five-star rating, if you don't have good screenshots, your drop off rate here is going to be massive and people aren't even going to install your app. And then your onboarding, how many users are you losing in the onboarding who don't even get the chance to see your payw wall. You need to visualize your entire onboarding. I like to do it in Figma. And you need to track the analytics between each one of those steps. Track the drop off rate between each screen. If you have some screen on your onboarding that causes massive drop off, you need to either change it or remove it. Because if you're losing users in the onboarding, they never have the chance to even see your payw wall. Your paywall rate is going to be low. And the payw wall is your money screen. All of this is just priming for your payw wall. This is the screen where you actually make money. And then of course, after they commit to your app, after they purchase a free trial or they pay for your plan or whatever, how are we retaining users inside of the app? And what you'll come to find is if you can't keep them busy for the first 1 to 2 minutes inside your app, they're going to cancel immediately. So again, we are going to diagnose this entire funnel and we're going to get into the nuts and bolts, but this is your visualization. Map this out for your own app and try to think about each step individually. Where are you losing a majority of the users? Is it in the onboarding? Is it in the payw wall? More likely than not, it's probably just one of these that you need to patch up and you need to fix. And if you can maximize the user retention from each one of these steps, I promise you, you will make so much more money. Your LTV will be so much higher and doing all of this will become a lot easier. The entire goal is to maximize the LTV so that we can spend as much as possible on marketing while remaining profitable. So, let's dive in to the details now. Real quick, if you're enjoying the video so far, I am hosting a live webinar where I talk about absolutely everything to build, scale, and eventually exit a successful mobile app business. Whatever stage you're at, if you're just thinking about building an app, if you're actively building, or if you're scaling, you will walk away with value from this webinar. The webinar is completely free, so join in if you want to build an app the right way and avoid all the mistakes that founders typically fall into. Link is in the description. I'll see you there. Okay, so let's dive into each one of the steps in your funnel. Starting from marketing to the app store landing page to the onboarding to the hard pay walls, the dripfunnel campaigns to user retention. We're going to cover absolutely everything that you need to be aware of. Okay, with marketing, you need a lot a lot of creatives and Meta and Tik Tok are literally screaming this at you all the time. With the Meta Andromeda update, the volume of ad candidates matters the most. They want you to be running campaigns with 30 plus creatives in there because the AI and the automation on their campaign and their ability to find your paying customers, the people who are most likely to pay in your app is so good. They do all the work for you now. You don't need to hire an ad specialist anymore. They want you to do three times as many ads than you were doing previously. And of course, the best place to get a lot of ad content is on postedapp.com. You can actually launch a CPM campaign where you pay creators based on how many views they get you. You can track your views over time. Here you can see all of your submissions all in one place. And again, conveniently, you can download each and every video. You can get the ad code and you are only paying for the amount of views that the creators get for you. So, this is the best way through the new CPM campaigns to get a lot a lot of highquality ad creatives to run paid ads. You build a custom brief, you choose where you want the creatives to be from, and they will all submit and try to get views for your product. So, this is the best of both worlds, organic, and you own the videos to run on paid. So, you need a lot of creatives, and you'll come to find that some of those will convert into paid users better than others. You only need one, two, maybe three ad winners and you can scale those to the moon. At PuffCount, we spent over $82,000 on paid ads. And we only had a couple a handful of videos that drove a majority of that spend. And one thing that's very important to keep in mind is you should be building campaigns based on conversions, not just clicks, not just installs. You need multiple campaigns. You can see at PuffCount when we were scaling our ads to the max, we had campaigns optimized for app installs but also purchases aka free trials. You need to be optimizing for events that are deeper in your funnel. If you build a campaign on Facebook ads or Tik Tok ads only focused around clicks, you're only optimizing for people to get to this step in your funnel. But again, for our winning campaigns, we're optimizing for installs, but also purchases, free trials. We're optimizing for people at this phase and at this phase, a couple steps deeper into the funnel. These are going to be people who are more likely to convert. Build your campaigns focused around conversions, not clicks. Next, something that is so, so important is your app store landing page. You need your app store landing page conversion rate to be as high as possible. Look at our conversion rate on our app store landing page, 23%. which is very good because a lot of our traffic is organic and then when we're running content, when we're running paid ads, our conversion rate is much much higher. It needs to be as high as possible. If your conversion rate on your app store landing page is low, you're going to be wasting your ad spend. You're going to be wasting your organic creatives. It needs to be as high as possible. Now, how do you make your app store landing page convert better? You need to have strong app ratings. It needs to be rated five stars. You need to have strong app written reviews. And your preview screenshots need to be clean and explain value. I'm going to show you exactly what I mean. Here was our app store landing page for Puff Count. Clean screenshots with value at the very top. 4.3 star rating. I posted 4.7 star rating. Value at the very top. Clearly explaining the value. Let's look at Dolingo. 4.7 stars. Value at the top of every screen. My Fitness Pal. Value at the top of every screen and a strong rating. These are the only things you need. You need clean screenshots. Have your friends rate your app five stars so you have a strong rating. And then of course your written reviews do matter as well. Look at all these apps. They have strong written reviews. These will all increase your app conversion rate. A little trick for you here as well. On iPhone, you can ask your friends to long tap on any app review. They can mark that review as helpful or not helpful. So what I mean by that is if you have a fivestar review here, if you get your friends to mark that as helpful, it will stay there. If you have a one-star review or a bad written review, you can ask your friends to mark that as not helpful and eventually it will be removed from your app store listing here. So, you can put in an effort to increase the reviews on your app store landing page. Okay, so we've got the marketing down, we've got the app store landing page down. Again, having a lot of creatives, maximizing those creatives for conversion, building your app store landing page up, getting strong reviews, having nice screenshots, that will do a bulk of the work for you here. Now, once they've downloaded your app, the onboarding, if you've watched the channel, you know what I'm about to say. A long onboarding to a hard payw wall is how you convert users. Duolingo making $38 million last month. They have an extremely extremely long onboarding. Their onboarding is probably 20 screens plus until you hit the hard pay wall. My fitness pal. Extremely long onboarding, asking you a ton of questions, customizing your experience before you finally hit the hard payw wall. Why do these apps do this? Because of the sunk cost bias. If you get the users to spend more time in your app and you ask them questions like, "What's your goal? Do you want to lose weight? Do you want to modify your diet? Losing weight isn't easy." Asking them about their problem. reiterating why the user has downloaded your app, making them walk through their own problems, setting goals, customizing their experience. This is so very important and it was one of the main reasons I was able to scale Puff Count to $45,000 in monthly recurring revenue because I copied the apps that were winning. I looked at My Fitness Pal. I looked at the mobile apps making millions of dollars per month. They're all running and onboarding, asking the user about their questions. Which area of your life is most affected due to vaping? How long has it taken you to quit? What are the side effects that you feel? Asking all these questions in a long user onboarding builds that sunk cost bias, makes the user feel their problem, and they're so much more likely to convert when you have an onboarding like this. And again, in order to optimize your onboarding, you need to be tracking each and every step in the onboarding, tracking where the user drop off is. If you're not tracking each individual step in your onboarding, you don't know where people are dropping off. As you can see at PuffCount, we retained 91% of our users after they had gone through this entire onboarding. Meaning 91% of people who downloaded the app saw the payw wall. 91% of people who downloaded the app had a chance to convert. And after that, 30% of them would commit to the free trial. Those numbers are very strong. The higher that you can get your payw wall conversion rate, obviously, the more money you're going to make. And a long user onboarding will help you do that. So study the winning onboardings. I have a link to here to the tool that I always use. Onboarding done, optimized. Now, let's move on to the payw wall. The number one thing I see here right now in the number one meta right now, and this is crazy sauce, is the three trust building screens. You can actually build screens that build the trust with your users. I call them paywall priming screens. Let's take a look at Cali. They did $2 million in revenue last month. And if we take a look at their paywall screens, they actually have three screens after their long onboarding. They have three screens. Screen number one, we want you to try the product for free. Re-emphasizing that this is a free trial. You will not get charged right now. No payment due now. Try for zero. This is not the payw wall screen. This simply takes you to the next one. Another payw wall priming screen. Building trust. We'll send you a reminder before your free trial ends. Continue for free. And then finally, we hit the real payw wall screen. Summarizing all of that. Try for free. We will remind you. And then in 3 days, we'll send you a reminder. And then your billing starts. This is the payw wall screen. This is crazy alpha right now. All of the top apps are doing these payw wall priming screens in order to build trust with their users. And I guarantee this will increase your conversion rate if you implement these priming trust building screens. Now, why is every app using a hard pay wall? You're probably thinking, "No, but I want to get users inside of my app, but I want them to try my product. I want them to try it for free, and then they'll have a better chance of converting." You're wrong. You are wrong. Make them commit to your product. If you make them commit, if you make them start a free trial, not only will your chances of making money increase, but the perceived value of your product will increase. If you give something away for free, it's perceived as less valuable. If you make someone pay for something, they will care about it more. They will put more effort into using your product. And if you don't believe me, just AB test a hard payw wall and a soft payw wall and let me know which one works better for you. I'm willing to put my money on. A hard pay wall will increase your conversion rate. And the beautiful thing is you can study winning payw walls. You can go to paywallscreens.com and you can study all of the winning payw walls from apps that are doing 70 $80,000 a month up to millions per month. You can study all these winning payw walls for free on paywallscreens.com. Okay, payw wall. Boom. Now, there is some extra little alpha that I want to give you here. Only 30% of the users on my previous app, PuffCount, ever converted and started their free trial. Which means 70% of the people who reached this step never paid. Now, 30% is a good conversion rate. Don't get me wrong. That is phenomenal. And I was able to scale the business to the moon with that conversion rate. But 70% of the people who hit my payw wall would never come back. So, we started thinking, how do we capture more of that value? How do we capture more of those 70% of users who will never ever come back? And the answer was dripfunnel campaigns. If the users don't convert on your payw wall, you can offer them discounts until they do. Because at a certain point, you can just assume that those users will never convert. they will never come back. So, why not offer them discounts until they do convert? And I'll show you what the results were of those campaigns. We ran a discount experiment campaign and we collected an extra $12,000 of lost value. If the users didn't convert on our main payw wall, on our hard payw wall, we would send them a push notification guiding them to this payw wall. Get 30% off for a limited time. Those 70% of users who didn't convert, we would always send them a push notification saying, "Hey, you didn't convert yet, but here it is. 30% off. Try it for free." And again, we captured an extra $12,000 of loss value just by sending this catchall campaign for those people who did not convert. Okay, so 30% of our users converted on the hard payw wall. We picked up an extra couple percent on the dripfunnel campaign. So boom, payw wall is fully checked off. Now, user retention. This is going to be the hardest part to solve in your app because all of this is pretty easy. All this is just based on data. But the user retention does come down to your core product. And this is not something that I can solve with you on this video because every product is different. The way users experience every product is a little bit different. So, this is easily the hardest problem to solve. So, I'd recommend solving all of these first. And by the way, if you're looking for a tool that will help you fix all of these problems, I highly recommend Adapi. I've been checking out this tool and they have absolutely everything you need to optimize your payw wall, your onboarding, your AB tests. They have a refund saver that will save you on potential refunds or cancellations. You can do pretty much all of this optimization that we just talked about in Adapi. So, give it a shot. They have a free trial. You can even visualize all of your funnels and your drop offs that I showed you right here. I had to use a bunch of different tools. I use Superwwell. I used Mixpanel. I used a bunch of different tools to get all of the data that Adapti will give you all in one place. So, check out Adapy if you are actively optimizing your app funnel. Okay. User retention. The one thing that I can tell you about user retention is in most apps, users are going to bail after the first 2 minutes. What do I mean by that? after they go through your entire onboarding, they go through your funnel, they commit to a free trial, the first two minutes that the user has experiencing in your app is the most important because if they don't reach the aha moment, if they don't understand what to do next, they will cancel because that free trial that they just committed to is still fresh in their mind. That money that they just paid is still fresh in their mind. If you don't occupy them, if you don't guide them how to see success in your app in the first 2 minutes, they are immediately going to cancel. They're going to cancel so fast. So, your only job is to get them to the aha moments as fast as possible. Guide the user through step by step. Show them little tool tips. Tell them how to use your app and how to see success in your app. For us, that looked like walking the users through the quit coach in PuffCount. After someone committed to a free trial and they got inside of the app, we would highly encourage them to start a quit plan. We'd make them set a quit date. We'd make them go through this entire quit plan funnel and set a goal. And this would occupy them for a long period of time. We would make them add in their quit buddies. They could track their friends and how many puffs their friends were taking. This would occupy their time. This would make our product more sticky so they didn't cancel. Do whatever you can to get the users to the aha moment as fast as possible. We covered a ton in this video. And if you have specific questions that you want to ask me about your app, shoot me a DM on Instagram at stephven.builds. I'm more than happy to chop it up in the DMs. Ask me whatever questions you have. Make sure to subscribe to the channel. And if you stuck around this long, you probably like the video. So, drop it a like. It would mean the world to me. I'll see you on the next one.