In my previous newsletter, I talked about the “secret” weapon I’ve been using to improve my life continuously: a weekly Mastermind session with three very good friends of mine, where we learn and advise each other on various topics.
I’ve got a few replies with general comments about it, alongside some interesting questions from you (thanks for not allowing this edition to flop completely).
1) How did your group start, and how can I find the right people to create my own?
It all started with an invitation for my friend and ex-business partner, Yuri Moreno. He shared this article about “The Elephants,” a modern Mastermind group (an idea introduced by Napoleon Hill, the author of one of the most-sold books ever).
What’s important to say here, though, is that I already knew everyone from the group: Caio Mattos and Denis Andrade. I already respected them and had a good idea about what it was like being around them. So when Yuri told me they were on board, I already knew it’d be foolish of me not to give it a try.
If I were to create a new Mastermind today, I’ll sit down with myself and think of people that:
I could learn a lot from more than one area
Have at least one area of their life where they’re “ahead” of me: fitness, relationships, finances, work, or mindset-wise.
After I put that list on paper, I’d ask those people if they’d like to create a Mastermind with you. If they say yes, then use the answer to the following question as a map to decide what to talk about.
2) How do you decide what to talk about? Do the meetings always have the same format?
We have two types of sessions: fixed commitments and discussions.
The fixed ones currently are:
Reset reviews: every month, we share updates on goals and progress around: health, relationships, work, finances, and hobbies
Book/Documentary Club: every ±6 weeks, we sit down to discuss what we just read or watched. Then every ±3 months, we vote on what we want to read or watch. From documentaries on plant-based diets and e-sports to the most interesting authors I got to know – like Seneca, Victor Frankl, and Franz Kafka – we try to pick reads that will open our minds to something new.
Game nights: we fill the gaps with simple multiplayer games to wind off and talk shit. We started with Poker, and last week we played Unrailed for the first time (this game is really fun, btw!).
Then we have sessions where it’s all about learning new stuff. It can be something that one of us knows more than the others (I talked about Freud and Phenomenology once, for example), or we bring a guest to teach us something cool and different (let me know if you want to be one of them), or if one of us needs to share a deeply personal problem, then we also have a safe space to talk it through and help. Those are the sessions we bond, I think.
3) What about the other things? Like, are there any downsides to having such a group?
Great question. There are also problems involved, of course, although I wouldn’t necessarily label them as bad.
The hardest thing is keeping accountability and having everybody aligned as much as possible. To keep it simple, we created a spreadsheet with all the dates and the theme of each day – and then we put it on paper if someone misses a meeting.
We also created the rule that if just one of us can’t attend, the others will go on without that person. That’s to avoid a situation where one person spoils the commitment of the rest.
Then the other thing is that it’s natural that everybody will not be 100% committed all the time. Only some people will think that the topic for discussion is super interesting. So I guess it’s also about being thoughtful and transparent to each other and enduring when things aren’t going well.
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So, that was it. I hope that is enough information for those who are considering creating something similar and inspiring others who miss being part of a group with like-minded people. If you have more questions, hit reply 🙂
Btw: I plan to bring AI to Easy App Reports later this year. The idea is to provide actionable insights and optimization suggestions based on the data we bring from the app stores and other sources. The thing is that most companies don’t have the fundamentals in place to leverage AI for data analysis. So I see this as a big, juicy, business opportunity if you ask me.
A dope growth hack from a Portuguese fintech
When my partner and I incorporated Easy App Reports as RC5 Lda in Portugal, we got this remarkable letter from Coverflex just a few weeks after we started operating.
I’ve been following these guys on LinkedIn for a while now, as they seem to have a pretty exciting way to run Growth there. I found this letter a perfect example of how startups need to think outside the box and go offline (why not?) to get their customers:
A few components that I found interesting about it:
Using bold text to highlight business problems and tease the customer
A calculation of how much value they can create (who on earth wouldn’t want to save 1k euros per year per employee?)
Clear call to action via the QR code and other links
Love: How to rethink Marketing for Digital Products: I got this book as a gift from Patrick Goldsteen and I have already recommended it to at least five people since I started reading it. This is an excellent book for anyone considering moving into Product Marketing or if you’re a Product Manager who wants to know how to market your product better.
🛠️ Tools I’ve been using
My prayers were listened to: finally, someone solved the problem of dealing with multiple calendars and project management tools. Let me introduce you to Akiflow.
As an independent consultant and entrepreneur who struggles with focusing, it’s easy to get lost in all the different commitments I’m making with multiple people. With Akiflow, that’s no longer a problem. I’ve been using them for about two weeks now, and it’s been a total game-changer. Now I finally have clarity on what should I prioritize my tasks during the day, even if they’re spread in Jira, Notion projects, Trello, and email.
Use my referral link to get $10 in credits (I’ll also get $10). Akiflow is not sponsoring this newsletter, by the way.
💡 Quote I’m pondering
Someone power-hungry makes a new rule at your workplace. It’s unnecessary. It’s counterproductive. It’s an irritant. It removes some of the pleasure and meaning from your work. But you tell yourself it’s all right. It’s not worth complaining about.
Then it happens again.
You’ve already trained yourself to allow such things by failing to react the first time. You’re a little less courageous. Your opponent, unopposed, is a little bit stronger. The institution is a little bit more corrupt. The process of bureaucratic stagnation and oppression is underway, and you’ve contributed by pretending that it was OK. Why not complain? Why not take a stand? If you do, other people, equally afraid to speak up, may come to your defence. And if not—maybe it’s time for a revolution. Maybe you should find a job somewhere else, where your soul is less in danger from corruption.
This is one of the oldest rules in the ASO playbook since the App Store was launched.
It’s so simple, and everybody says they understand it, but it’s 2023, and I’m still finding marketers needing to correct this. It’s so painful. But not you, of course, because you’re a reader of this newsletter 😉
The rule is that one shall not repeat keywords on its title, subtitle, or keywords.
In the example above, we managed to increase the number of keywords in our app by 53%!
And if you think that adding 8 more keywords it’s not a big deal… Think again.
Remember that the algorithm will combine these keywords because users can (and will) use multiple words to describe what they’re looking for. I could search for an “ai video editor”, or an “video editor with captions”, for example. So, every single keyword you add exponentially increases your ASO fingerprint in the App Store.
The same goes for Google Play, except that you might want to repeat keywords on purpose in the description. But that’s a different thing.
I’d say that 95% of the success cases I built when I had my ASO company back in the day were due to this simple best practice. Damn, I even overachieved my app growth OKR when I joined OLX in my first year just by doing this. Getting good results is easier when you understand the mechanics behind the algorithms.
And now you tell me that what I’m saying is too basic.
Yeah, I agree. Still, as I said, I see mistakes like this almost every day.
But if you want hard, then hard it is. Because, building on top of this tip, you can use an advanced tactic to 10x your fingerprint. Yeap. Not another 53%, but 10x. And it’s not an easy one to pull off, for sure.
So, stay tuned because, in the next few editions, I’ll bring part two of this article.
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🇧🇷 No meu curso de ASO eu coloquei todas as minhas dicas, truques, e processos que usei para crescer apps de empresas como OLX, 99, Vivo, PlayKids, Whitebook, e muitas outras. Ele custa ⅓ do que qualquer freela ganha por mês em um projeto e já ajudou muita gente a avançar na carreira (dá uma olhada nas reviews). Dá uma olhada.
$100M Offers: a much more interesting approach to The Product Launch Formula
I am an ingrate toward the man whose overconfidence caused him to open a restaurant and fail, enjoying my nice meal while he is probably eating canned tuna.
If you’re an entrepreneur (or a parent), you’re likely to know exactly what this feels like. Resurfaced using Readwise.
🛠️ [AI] Tools I’m playing with
This is an enhanced version of Chat-GPT itself. This tool was recommended to me by Yuri Moreno, and I haven’t logged in on OpenAI since then. What I love about it:
Having multiple folders to organize my chats
It offers an easy way to save and organize my prompts
Access to their prompt repository (not great, but good for inspiration)
It adds links to related Google Searches along with the answers
Instead of paying a $20/mo subscription to OpenAI, I can use my API key ($1-$2/mo) and make a one-time purchase to Typing Mind for $39. I’ve been using it for two months, so I’ll save some money next month.
The only downside is that I can’t use GPT-4 in it yet because I need the API key (which is only available for developers who are contributing to the project for now), but I hope that in the coming weeks, that will change.
The 3 essential layers of a Marketing CRM integration
If you do CRM as part of your Marketing mix, you gotta know this one by heart.
Many people have this image that an integration of a Marketing CRM tool as one big rock. That couldn’t be less true, though, as it’s much more layers of the same cake.
Having the wrong mental framework around leads to multiple issues, from failing to communicate expectations properly to poor/incomplete integrations. I’ve seen way too many companies that struggle on getting value from their CRM operations simply because the teams can’t rely on the data they have there.
So let’s start changing that today. Here are the three fundamental layers of a CRM integration you need to know:
The SDK: a code snippet that goes into your website/app. It’s responsible for sending information about the user’s device, its location, visited pages, etc. On apps, the SDK also handles push notification opt-ins, for example.
The Events: key actions your customers take at your website. Every button, form, or element the user interacts with can be an event. Events are primarily used to track conversions.
The User Properties: everything you know about your customers can help you segment. That’s the most neglected layer, but it’s an instrumental one as it’ll allow you to cluster your users into different segments like personas.
I’ve made this simple drawing to try to illustrate it (feel free to share it with someone who needs this):
If you understand what each layer has to offer and how it’s supposed to work, then planning your integration should be a straight-forward exercise. The same logic holds for fixing an integration.
You might want to watch this walkthrough video I’ve made showing my process of how I craft email sequences from scratch on this link (automatic subtitles available)
I’ve been giving it a thought, and I realized that it’d be cool to start putting stuff on paper and share it with others to get some feedback. So here’s what I’m thinking:
I’ll make an English version of it
The current lessons will be fully tweaked and revised
I want to add at least 3 new modules with 2-3 lessons each, making it the most detailed ASO course out there. I want to go deep in advanced topics such as: Internationalization, Advanced Keyword Research (with a brand new Excel template), Leveraging App Indexing and Spotlight Search, Leveraging In-app Events, Bundles, and Benchmarks, How to get featured, CPP and PPO testing… There’s some little things as well, but those would be the big rocks.
Then I also want to add an introductory module for those new to Marketing or the App Industry.
I might do live cohorts this time.
Launching a course was of one the most fulfilling experiences I’ve had in my career so far. It’s so interesting: you put stuff on paper, some people learn from it, their lives get slightly better as a consequence, and then they come to you to talk about it. It’s kinda insane, tbh. So my end goal is to simply hear more testimonials like these for next time:
To dedicate to a project like this fully, I’d need at least 150 students, though – which I believe is doable but stillrisky if you’re a father and solopreneur like myself. So I need more time to think this through.
Then, the question is: would you take this course? Or maybe you know someone who would? Or maybe you’d at least help me spread the word? Hit reply and let me know. That might be the spark I need to get stuff moving 😉
I found a lot of gems in this episode despite the fact that I notice that Alex tends to benefit a bit too much from hindsight. Still, I enjoyed their conversations. Some stuff I’m taking with me:
“This is what hard feels like”: you NEED to hear this story (34:40)
Measuring your success by comparing yourself to your parents
Balancing success and feeling content
Avoiding the shiny object syndrome
💬 Tip from the book “The Great CEO Within”
“Get two highlighters, pens, or pencils of different colors (red and green are ideal, but any will do). Print out the last week of your calendar when you were working.
Go through each workday hour by hour and ask yourself, “Did that activity give me or drain my energy?”.
Highlight those that gave you energy in green, and highlight in red those that drained your energy. There are no neutrals; every hour must be marked one color or the other.
When finished, look for patterns of where and how your energy is drained. Now think of ways to outsource or eliminate those activities.”
This person does not exist: although there are certainly fancier options out there, this is an ok solution in case you need to generate a face without paying for it. Or, if you’re willing to invest a bit more, you can give this other one or Fotor a try.
I recently stayed at Novotel, and I noticed these ads from Calm at the front desk and elevators:
A few thoughts crossed my mind when I saw these:
“This is pretty cool! Looks like a win-win deal for everybody: the guests, Calm, and Novotel.”
“Is this an ad, or is this a partnership?”
“I wonder what the results are, though. Are they being able to measure this properly?”
Later at night, I found this article that explains the whole partnership.
In a world where everybody seems to be pushing for short-term results and cheap conversions, this felt like a breath of fresh air to me.
A Shortcut to Measuring Engagement
How to measure your product’s stickiness today without going hardcore on data crunching by using GA4 or Firebase:
Write down how often your customers need your product to do their thing: daily, weekly, monthly (quarterly or annually could also be an option, but it’s not covered on GA4). That’s your product’s “natural usage frequency”. There are fancy ways to calculate this. But, honestly? If you know your customer, you don’t need any of that (you can always ask your founder or customer support person – they’ll know for sure).
If it’s daily, then DAU (Daily Active Users) is your main metric. But, you can compare it to weekly to make it more insightful.
So, in this example, you should be looking at DAU/WAU.
The question it answers: from all the users we’ve had in the past week, how many interacted with our product in a single-day window? That’s it. That’s how you instantly know your product stickiness.
Here’s how to find that info: open your Google Analytics 4, click on Engagement, and scroll down. You’ll see your “User Stickiness” there. That’s what you’re looking for.
Now, look at the trend. You can instantly know if your engagement is flat, rising, or dropping. Cool, right? It could be better, but it’s better than just looking at daily visitors or MAU.
“I don’t get it. Looking at Monthly Active Users (MAU) is just as useful”
Not true. If your customers use your product daily or weekly, it’ll take 3-4 weeks to realize what’s going on, which can be quite dangerous for your business.
“What if my product has a quarterly/yearly usage?”
GA4/Firebase doesn’t offer this, primarily because the more inaccurate it gets as you stretch the time window. In this case, an in-house solution would be better, or you’d have to upgrade to a tool like amplitude.
“But on GA4, there’s a lot of visitors, not real customers. Their dashboard isn’t reliable.”
It’s a matter of configuring your GA properly. You can then filter for logged-in users only if that makes sense. There are better solutions. But, the reality is that most teams don’t have the BI support to extract this information, so it does come in handy.
Another option is always to learn a bit of SQL, but that’s a story for another day.
🛠 Tools I’m using
I’ve been playing around with Descript for a while now, and the more I use it, the more I want to use it. This shit is magic. It even works in Portuguese (it’s not as good, but it gets 85%+ of the words right).
At the moment, I’m using it to prepare a few shorts and interview drops for my YouTube channel:
📕 Books I’m reading
Anything you Want by Derek Sivers: If you want to hear a story of a guy who built a multi-million dollar business trying to make his business smaller, not bigger, and delivering value above everything else, this book is for you.
Derek is in my top 5 favorite non-fiction authors, and he once again crushed it with this book (I have no idea how I forgot to read it sooner). Just like the Calm ad, this book feels extremely refreshing, especially compared to all tales we’re bombarded with about trying to get rich fast and growing companies like crazy.
Here’s one of my favorite parts (Portuguese):
Quote of the week
Understand ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you – The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, by Eric Jorgenson
I usually don’t brag, but the content we’ve been putting out in the App Bakers newsletter is just lit. If you work with apps and you’re thirsty for high-quality content on how to grow an app, then I really recommend you subscribe now.
PT-BR: recentemente eu liberei as entrevistas todas do meu curso de App Store Optimization de graça no YouTube.
Estimating campaign results without conversion tracking
We’ve all been there.
You’re running a campaign with a decent budget, but there’s no conversion tracking in place.
Because of that, you can’t quite report more than cost, impressions, CTR, and clicks. As a marketer, that’s not really a spot you wanna be in. Well, unless you could find a way to get close enough to reality without relying on engineering 😉
Here are three ways to achieve that:
1. Use the overall conversion rate of your product: on apps, for example, you can know how many in-app purchases you sell daily in total, but not necessarily by traffic source. In this case, you could take your app’s overall conversion rate and assume your campaigns perform similarly.
2. Ask BI for the number of conversions registered in your products’ database during a given time: let’s say they tell you that you had 92 sales registered on your database last month. If you divide that by the number of visitors you had in the same period, now you got an assumed conversion rate that you could use.
3. You can get a benchmark from a market study: this is not ideal, and I wouldn’t recommend this approach to make any big decisions, but I’ve seen it being used for back-of-the-envelope calculations. Still, if your company doesn’t know how much it’s selling, then maybe that’s a strong signal you might have bigger problems to worry about.
By the way, using assumptions like this (in the right way) is a clear indication of seniority. The opposite is also true. So learning how to feel comfortable with using proxies is a great way to get to a next level in your career.
⭐ Extra tip: when reporting results using proxies and assumptions, it’s always a good idea to mention how you got that number somewhere in your presentation.
Easy App Reports and a new newsletter: App Bakers 🥐
If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I built a SaaS with a close friend a year and a half ago. Back then, I thought that If we got 20 subscribers in the first year, I’d consider it an ultimate success.
Fast forward to now, we reached 170 customers from all over the world. Pretty mindblowing, to be honest. It’s incredible what happens when you build something that solves a problem you deeply understand – and there’s enough demand for it.
One of our main initiatives is this newsletter on Analytics and Marketing for apps. We’re calling it App Bakers.
Soif you’re here for all the app-specific content, you might want to check it out: click here.
I’m personally curating the content that is going there and I’ll also write/record original content whenever possible.
Takes on Apple Search Ads
In December, I spoke at the App Growth Week about Apple Search Ads and the impact of UA on organic rankings. Now they released the full interview on YouTube, so I thought maybe you’d like to watch it:
HelloNext is a web-based platform that enables users to manage and prioritize product feedback from their customers. It offers a variety of features such as customizable feedback boards, voting systems, and integrations with popular tools like Slack and Trello. I use HelloNext on Easy App Reports because it’s simple to understand and manage all customer suggestions, with that in hand we can priotize every single sprint fast and easily.
📕 Books I’m reading
The Great CEO Within is a comprehensive guide to building and scaling a successful business, written by veteran CEO and executive coach, Matt Mochary. The book emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and continuous learning as key traits for successful leaders and provides practical insights and advice on topics such as creating a vision, building a strong team, setting goals and metrics, developing a company culture, and managing growth. With valuable insights from Mochary’s own experiences as a CEO and executive coach, “The Great CEO Within” is an essential read for entrepreneurs and CEOs who want to take their businesses to the next level.
Quote of the week
It’s a cliché question to ask, What would I change about my life if the doctor told me I had cancer? After our answer, we inevitably comfort ourselves with the same insidious lie: Well, thank God I don’t have cancer – The Obstacle Is the Way by Ryan Holiday.
In Steven Pressfield’s book, “Put your ass where your heart wants to be,” he defines commitment as exposing yourself.
Funnily enough, sooner, on the same day, my wife and I were looking at our yearly income since 2012, and we noticed something.
During our first seven years together, we just “ate bush” – as we say in Brazil. But since 2020, our lives have gotten significantly better. So, looking at that, we did what any human being would do: we started to look for that critical moment that unlocked all of this. We were looking for the silver bullet.
Instead, we found that there wasn’t a single heroic act that changed everything. It was more like the seeds we planted suddenly started to blossom “out of the blue” after a few years of grinding.
And then, looking closely at how those seeds were planted, we noticed that it came with lots of exposure and real-life consequences. So, yes, Mr. Steven, I agree with you.
To make it tangible, I’m talking about things like going bankrupt twice in the same year. Or having to sleep in your aunt’s living room for a few months when you’re expecting your second kid. Having no vacation whatsoever for eight years straight. Happily accepting a demotion. Developing a chronic illness from overworking and living a sedentary lifestyle for years. Being crazy enough to quit a well-paying dream job with a fancy title for the uncertainty of being an independent consultant.
But each and every one of those things also provided a stepping stone or forced me to find a new path – and those would always be much better than the one I was in before.
Then, sometimes someone will come and ask how did I make it “Head of” in my twenties or how I’m able to ship so much stuff and grow my career so fast (by the way, I don’t feel like I’m successful yet or that productive. But I understand why it might look like that from other people’s point of view).
My usual response is that it is as much about the sacrifices you choose to make as it is about dedicating yourself to your life’s work. I’m talking about things like:
Investing in courses and training over traveling and leisure.
Working 60+ hour weeks over having a balanced life during a few months.
Attending work events over eating out with friends or simply being at home.
Embracing financial risk with the possibility of a jackpot over a nice stable job.
Commitment to your life’s work over commitment to building someone else’s dream.
So my follow-up question usually is: if you’re really committed to turning things around, what would you be willing to sacrifice?
And let me be clear here: I’m not advocating for anyone to follow in my footsteps. They were often reckless and unhealthy (I guess the word dumb could also be used to describe certain decisions I’ve made). I could’ve taken things slower. Likely there was an easier path, and now I see I didn’t have to sacrifice my health so much. Still, Amor Fati.
Measuring Growth on a B2B SaaS
In my head, I see Growth from the perspective of filling a leaky bucket:
There’s how much water you put in
There’s how much water you lose to leaks
The ratio between the two will determine how fast your bucket fills.
At Easy App Reports, we measure Growth by looking at the following:
How many new subscribers weekly subscribers we get
How many do we lose
Below is the graph I stare at during our weekly reviews. In one image, it tells me how are our acquisition and retention going and how fast the business is growing:
I also have a small table with Milestones right beside it. That’s because data without context is just not as helpful or actionable. Having our most significant wins and losses side-by-side with our main KPIs clarifies the things that move the needle.
Then, I use input metrics to visualize how much water is coming on the hose – and how much of that water is staying.
From the acquisition perspective, in our case, that’s traffic and product-led leads.
From the retention perspective, it’s all about activation rates (the percentage of new users who manage to set up and use the product for the first time within their first week). We know that because we were able to establish a correlation between users not being able to activate their connectors with their likeliness to churn within the first days after subscribing.
To wrap up:
Overview (weekly)
New vs. Canceled Subscribers + Active Subscribers
Milestones and MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)
Input Metrics (daily)
Acquisition: Traffic, Leads, and Conversion Rates
Retention: D7 Activation Rate
Having a look at these takes just a few seconds, and it provides me with everything I need to know about how the product is performing.
When I sit down to write in the morning, I literally have no expectations for myself or for the day’s work. My only goal is to put in three or four hours with my fingers punching the keys. I don’t judge myself on quality. I don’t hold myself accountable for quantity. The only questions I ask are: did I show up? Did I try my best?
Are you “there”? Or are you somewhere else?
Only when the pain of not doing it got greater than the imagined pain of doing it did I somehow find the balls to pursue what I really wanted and had been obsessed by.
You can be a full-time writer, one hour a day.
The ability to self-reinforce is more important than talent.
Numi: the most beautiful and useful calculator you have ever used (probably). What I love about it is that I can label my numbers, making it super easy to share formulas and calculations with the people I work with. 10/10.
This has to be one of my favorite principles of all time because it’s so versatile.
Despite being useful when creating ads, writing content, and designing landing pages, I also discovered how powerful it could be when reporting to executives.
Here are a few examples of reports that raises more questions than answers:
This year’s Cyber Monday campaign was a success, the best one we’ve ever had!
Our open rate was 21%, which could be better. We’ll see what we can do to improve it, but it might be just seasonality, so I’m not that worried.
We’ve got thousands of new TikTok followers this week because of the new video scripts we have been using this month.
Can you spot what’s wrong or missing in the above? They share one thing in common: they’re all based on telling people your opinion on what happened rather than showing the evidence behind it.
Here’s how it could be improved:
Our Cyber Monday sales were 12% higher this year, leading to $3.2M in revenue (9% against last year). This was due to a higher conversion rate on our checkout page details on this report. Kudos to the team on this one!
Our open rate last week was 21%, but our average is 25%. I have a couple of hypotheses on why this is happening and will get back to you by Friday with more details.
Our new TikToks went from 5% to 11% engagement rate. In this analysis, you can see the spikes in followers within 36 hours of each post. Overall, we attracted 42,173 new followers, a 3x increase compared to last month’s period.
The formula is as follows: show numbers, not your judgment on the numbers; link additional studies if you have them; be ok with not having the answer; ask for more time or additional help.
The new kid on the block: Lensa
This week, we saw the rise of Lensa, a 4-year-old app that is now breaking the internet (and flooding everybody’s Instagram feeds) with its AI-generated “Magic Avatars.”
To this day, there are over 362,000 posts with the hashtag #lensa on Instagram:
But there’s something special and unique about this: unlike other growth loops we see out there, this one drives revenue directly, not just acquisition.
That’s because you must pay at least 3,49€ to get your avatars. Yeap, that’s right. People are actually paying to get on this trend. I don’t remember the last time I’ve seen anything like this.
I quickly drew what I believe is their main growth loop at the moment:
Lensa Growth Model
On top of that, their App Store rankings are also snowballing (driven by their number of downloads in a short period) – making their distribution even more powerful. Pretty cool stuff.
📕 Books I’m reading & Tools I’m using
The 48 Laws of Power (PT-BR): The author, Robert Greene, has studied power and its effects for many years and compiled all his knowledge into this book. The 48 Laws of Power is not just a dry, academic treatise on the nature of power. It is written in an easy-to-read style and full of examples from history, biography, and pop culture. Oh, and if you’re bothered by the idea of participating in games for power (or the simple idea of learning about it), maybe you’re exactly the kind of person who should read this book.
Synthesia – AI Video Creation Platform: I’m playing around with it, and I must say I’m impressed. I’m probably bringing an example to this newsletter once I have one to share. For now, I’d recommend exploring it by yourself.
Maybe you noticed I’ve been absent for the past couple of weeks. Sorry for that and thank you for sticking around. I’m a big advocate of consistency though so, naturally, I’m frustrated that stuff like this happens.
Anyway, I’m also thinking of solutions already because I know I’ll probably have more weeks like these. So soon you might notice I’ll change the format sometimes, making it more concise and powerful rather than long and detailed.
On a more positive note, it’s been a great couple of weeks with my speaking gig at App Growth Week, a work trip to the Netherlands, some traveling with the fam, and exciting plans for Easy App Reports.
But without further ado, let’s get into this week’s newsletter:
3 metrics to master your app’s subscriptions
If you’re used to looking at new subscriptions to measure your growth but can’t seem to understand the forces at play around it, this article is for you. Hell, I guess it’s probably even more helpful if you don’t have access to fancy dashboards or a data team to help you out every step of the way. All tips I’m giving here can be retrieved directly from Google Play or the App Store.
Anyway, I’ve worked with multiple app subscription businesses in the past eight years, and if there’s one thing I learned, it is how to take a holistic approach when diagnosing growth problems.
When understanding how to grow a product, you must look up and down the funnel to understand all variables to identify problems and opportunities. In the article below, I’ll go through some of the shortcuts to understand the levers involved – and maybe it’ll help you get a feeling of where your opportunities are.
Moving beyond Sales Conversions
The first thing you can do is have your cancelations alongside your new subscriptions: that’s the easiest way to level up your analytical game. By doing so, you can have a more holistic view of your subscription growth and understand if you should focus more on acquiring subscribers or on retaining them.
Extra tip: look at your install-to-subscription conversion rate to get a sense of how well your product can convert free customers into paying customers.
Ideally, we want it all, of course, but it’s crucial to have in mind where’s the biggest problem so we can put our eggs in the right basket.
Think about it: you’re building a recurring revenue business. Therefore, increasing the total amount of active subscribers is what you want – not only acquiring new paying customers.
The longer your customers stay subscribed, the more your revenue will grow. That revenue can then be reinvested in expanding your acquisition channels and improving your product.
So creating the habit of looking into cancelations as frequently as you look into acquisition is the easiest way to get used to looking at the whole picture.
If you’ve never seen this information before, here’s how to find it:
App Store: Apple makes it hard to extract this Information as it’s only available through their API. Luckily,Easy App Reports provides a connector so you can pull that information to Google Data Studio.
Google Play: Go to Monetize > Subscriptions > Overview – also available on Easy App Reports
Net Subscriptions
Building on cancelations, I see it’s helpful to look at “Net Subscriptions” too:
New Subscriptions – Canceled Subscriptions = Net Subscriptions
This will give you the ratio between your acquisition and churn, providing a shortcut to measure your Marketing and Product efficiency throughout your funnel. Cool, right? I look at this metric daily as it contains the most crucial information I need to know sales-wise.
One thing to watch out though: today’s subscriptions don’t drive the cancelations of today. It’s more likely that the cancelations you see today are actually caused by customers who subscribed weeks or months ago. So some people might say that it’d be unfair to run such a calculation. I admit they’re not entirely wrong.
If you’re an Excel pro, though, you can adjust that calculation based on the time lag between a subscription and a cancelation to get a better proxy.
For example: let’s say your users stay subscribed for nine weeks on average. What you could do to incorporate that into your formula is:
New Subscriptions (9 weeks ago) – Canceled Subscriptions (9 weeks ago) = Net Subscriptions
The disadvantage of this model is that it can take weeks or months to have this overview, making it a lagging metric. And we know what happens to lagging metrics: they’re ignored.
So I’d still advise you to run it the way I initially proposed and keep this shortcoming in mind.
Voluntary vs Involuntary Cancelations
I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to differentiate these two. Your reactivation tactics must be utterly different when approaching voluntary or involuntary churn.
Voluntary: your user made the decision to cancel and proactively did it.
Involuntary: the subscription was canceled automatically due to multiple failed payment attempts, or the payment method is now invalid.
80% of the results I get for my clients are driven by involuntary churn recovery. Here’s how to find that information:
Google Play: Go to Monetize > Subscriptions > Overview (also available on Easy App Reports)
How to approach it
Involuntary: follow up with your customers, offer help and provide simple instructions on how to reactivate their subscription. It’s a good idea to gently remind them of what they’re missing as well to increase the likelihood of getting that customer back.
Voluntary: These are people who made a conscious decision to walk away from your product. As a consequence, the chances of recovering such customers are tiny. Brian Balfour (ex VP of Growth from Hubspot and the founder of the world’s leading Growth program, Reforge) has a pretty solid case against trying to regain such customers – he even calls this a “Hail Mary resurrection.”, and it’s an opinion I share.
The best thing you can do here is to work backward from the reasons why your customer churned in the first place and improve your product to prevent it from happening again in the future. This leads us to our final metric:
Explore your “Cancelation Reasons” often.
I’m blown away by how many people don’t know this one. Marketers, Developers, Product Managers, and even Founders miss it. But not us. Right?
Google Play and the App Store provide high-level information on why your customers unsubscribe by running a survey. Yes, you heard me: you already know why your customers are churning. Now, you just have to take that information and act on it.
Google Play: Go to Monetise > Subscriptions > Cancelations > Cancelations with written responses – also available on Easy App Reports
Ok, now what?
Now that you have a better picture of what your app’s growth looks like, you can work backward to figure out what are the best initiatives you might want to do to grow your sales and revenue.
Is your churn growing? Maybe it’s time to invest in product development or tweak your traffic sources.
Is your acquisition going down? Time to do your best User Acquisition work out there.
Acquisition and Churn are the same? Pull one up and push down the other.
It’s a simple thing, and it’s underestimated at the same time. Often we get trapped in optimizing for something that we don’t understand why is behaving in that way. Hopefully, during this article, I was able to provide you with a few tools to crack the problem so you can be more successful with your app.
📕 What I’ve been reading
The S.W.I.P.E.S. Email: this newsletter is super fun to read and I always learn something new, even if I just scroll through it for half a minute. For me, it serves as a constant reminder that building visually appealing content is not always necessary.
The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide to Life: I have a book club with a few friends and this is the one we’re currently reading. Lots of people make jokes that life doesn’t come with a manual, but maybe it’s because they didn’t read this book yet. I already read it a couple of times but I’m planning to read another one because there’s just so much powerful stuff in every line of this book.
How to write a one-pager: “Your colleagues are most likely building decks of 50-80 slides to present a strategic recommendation for executive approval. Decks of this size take the better part of a week to build, over an hour to present, and at least an hour for an executive to review before and after a presentation. Slides tend to be crammed with data and hard to understand without live voiceover. A one-page memo, on the other hand, is a simple, disciplined approach to getting alignment and buy-in for strategic initiatives that will move the needle for your business“. I rest my case.
If you’re new here, maybe you don’t know that I bought an app a couple of months ago.
Then I recorded myself creating its new text metadata (title, subtitle, keywords, promotional text, and description) in Brazilian Portuguese – obviously.
The video below was recorded at 5 am, and I wasn’t at home, so the quality isn’t great. Still, I think it’s a nice example of a non-scripted “quick and dirty” kind of optimization:
So on the 23rd of September, our first app release was approved by Apple.
The results were instant:
🔥 8.7x more impressions: 107 to 939 (per week)
🔥 8.2x more downloads: 5 to 41 (per week)
Not a lot, but, hey, we’re going places!
Then it was time to understand why exactly this happened.
I was able to track down a couple of keywords that are responsible for this result: “tela de carregamento” (charging screen), and “papel parede natureza” (nature wallpaper).
We’re not ranking well in the other search terms to make any difference, so I’m just ignoring those.
“Well, but it’s just 45 downloads a week”
Yes. And here’s how I see it:
Brazil went from being our market #20 to being our market #2, right behind the US. That with just one round. Mind-blowing. What else can we do in other markets, then?
We know we can rank in the top 25 for queries with a search score of 30 or lower now, a crucial piece of information for our next round;
We got results right off the bat.
“What about keywords added to the Promotional Text field?”
Yeah, we’re not ranking for any of those. Apple is still not indexing it.
It’s on the roadmap
We plan to decrease our pricing now. $5,99/week for a charging animation app is borderline insane.
Once we do that, we’ll have another chance to tweak our keywords, as well as maybe launch a new in-app event.
If you have any ideas or suggestions for what we should do next, feel free to reach out.
📕 What I’ve been reading
New Ad Placement Options – Apple Search Ads: Apple continues to push its ad game aggressively. Now they added placements on the Today Tab and… The Product Page tab. That means developers can finally buy their space on a competitor’s page. Interesting.
One-year challenge: Turn a $20k Investment into $500k: I’ve been following this challenge since day 1. He’s using Facebook to grow and it turns out it’s working pretty well. There are many mud-throwers at Meta right now and companies are pulling investments from there. My take? That might be a great reason to consider Meta if the traffic costs are going down there. Why not?
