| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKif3Eo3frk |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kw1f616ggyq7gkaz6p9d7041 |
| Readwise ID | 01kw1f616ggyq7gkaz6p9d7041 |
| Author | Adam Lyttle |
| Category | video |
| Site | YouTube |
| Published | 2025-07-16 |
| Saved | 2026-06-26T08:01:48.751000+00:00 |
| Tags | adam-lyttle, app-development |
Readwise Summary: Adam Lyttle shares how he got his first 100 paid app users by using free trials and well-placed paywalls. He explains that disrupting users just enough encourages them to subscribe without making them quit. The key is balancing free core features with valuable extras behind a paywall to create a sustainable paid app model.
It’s the question that I get asked all the time. How do you actually get someone to pay for your app? In this video, I’ll show you how I got my first 100 paid subscribers and how I now convert over 1,000 users per month from free trial to paid. I’ll cover what finally made people pay, the strategic placement of payw walls, and balancing paid features verse free features. Less than 10% of people who have an app idea ever actually generate a single dollar.
This is the result of a very scientific poll I recently did by asking ordinary developers. I started monetizing my apps in July 2021, and I really had no idea what I was even doing. There weren’t any resources online. You just had to try random things and see what actually worked. Well, I struggled for a whole year. I barely got anyone paying to use my apps. It was kind of soul crushing. I
couldn’t support my family from building apps alone and I still had to do freelancing and a bit of white hat hacking on the side just to keep on top of the rent. I didn’t want to do that forever. I hate freelancing. I hate feeling like I have a boss. And it turns out I’m just not very good at deadlines or working under pressure. I would overcommit and then at the end of the day underd deliver. And that’s probably because I spending most of my time trying to build my own apps on the side.
I was experimenting with different monetization models until one finally worked. And then when it worked, it really worked. In June 2022, I got 116 paid subscribers. In July, that was 113. And in August, 117. So, what did I do differently in mid 2022 that boosted my paid subscribers by over 5,000%. When I first started building apps, I was too
scared to charge for them. People just don’t want to pay for this, right? I don’t like paying for apps myself, so why would anyone else? And I know that sounds really weird coming from someone who makes a living off paid apps, but this headspace was really sabotaging my own success as an indie app developer. Initially, I’d only charge a couple of dollars to unlock all of the features in the app for the life of the app, like a single once- off purchase. And people just weren’t paying. So, it kind of
reinforced my worldview. People just don’t want to pay for apps. And this is just life. This is the way it’s going to be, and it will never be a real business. This will just continue to be a hobby. The only thing that changed my mind was one day I was browsing on Flipper. This is the site that lets you buy and sell digital assets. Think like websites, SAS companies, and even apps. And for the first time, I saw how much money apps were actually generating in the app store. And hang on a minute.
People do pay for apps. They just don’t pay for my apps. What am I doing wrong? All of these apps on Flipper had the same business model, paid subscriptions with free trials. And they weren’t charging a dollar here or $2 here. No, no, no, no, no. These apps were like charging $10 a month. So, I made a subscription for $10 a year with a free trial. And this was a gamecher. Not the
subscription part, not the pricing part, but the free trial part. With an upfront payment, a user needs to make a pretty big commitment to purchase your app. Now, the free trial lets me be a bit more adventurous where the payable will actually pop up within the app. Before, they were only showing when a user tried to access a premium feature. Now, I can add them anywhere. I mean, like anywhere. My apps became a spammy mess of payw walls appearing at every moment, and the
only way to get rid of them was to subscribe. I don’t recommend this. Don’t do this. But it did help me understand the best converting areas to put my payw wall right after the onboarding process when the user wants to do the core thing that your app does and when the user relaunches your app. A payw wall with a coolown timer works best and it seems to be best practice to actively disrupt the user’s flow within your app. I found this interruption forces the user to
wait even if it’s just like 3 seconds. That timer is enough to just disrupt them. Okay, before you comment that this is not a very nice thing to do, just remember that our industry is pretty much the only industry that I can think of that our business model is to simply annoy and disrupt the user as much as we can without making them quit the app entirely. We do this with ads, with locked features, and with patent interrupts. Most users sign up for your free trial straight after the onboarding
flow before they’ve even used a single feature of your app. The free trial gives users the peace of mind that they can evaluate all the features right now because after all, they’ve downloaded your app for a reason. So why wouldn’t they want to try everything? I was previously putting the payw wall only on the features that were locked down in the premium functionality and users would only see them once they tried to access those features. But now I put the payw wall in the free features too,
right? When the user wants to do the thing. This forces a pattern interrupt and severely hurts the flow of the app. Put yourself in the user’s shoe just for one minute. They want to perform a single action in your app and they tap on that action and now they have to wait a few seconds. Annoying. Someone using your app enough who values their time will subscribe. Check out my MakeTune app. It lets you turn a normal photo into a Cardon. The payw wall is shown immediately after the onboarding flow.
And when you select a photo and click the generate button, you’re immediately thrown into a queue. And you can get instant access to the feature by unlocking premium or you can wait. If a user gets enough value from this app and they continue to generate photos, after a while they get tired of waiting and just want faster results, so they subscribe. But what features should you lock behind a payw wall anyway? Have a look at your app through fresh eyes and
ask yourself, what are the core features that the user is here for? These are the features that you offer for free. And what are the value ad features? These are the features you put behind the payw wall. The best way to visualize this is to imagine that you’re about to rebuild your entire app from scratch, but this time you’ve only got a few days to create it. What features are you building and adding to the app in a couple of days? Chances are these are your core features. And if you’re being
honest with yourself, you’ll cut back a lot of those non-essential features to just the ones that you can build in the next couple of days. Then the non-essential features are the ones that are the value ad features of your app. And it’s worth noting that all of this advice is for premium apps, apps that have a core offering and then features that are locked behind a payw wall. But where it differs from a normal premium model is adding that patent interrupt to disrupt the natural flow of the app’s
usage. If you hit that right balance, just annoying enough to make people want to upgrade, but not annoying enough to make them want to delete your app, you’ve got a model that will land you your first 100 paying subscribers.