| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnqjBY3tUo8 |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kty51aqhvhxdj91q8zjhp05f |
| Readwise ID | 01kty51aqhvhxdj91q8zjhp05f |
| Date | 2025-11-04 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/UnqjBY3tUo8/sddefault.jpg |
[music] All right. Thank you guys for being here. So, I’m going to go through a few things today. I’m going to show you the You know, it’s kind of weird being up here talking about dark patterns and black hat strategies and being associated with this. But anyways, I’m going to show you a strategy that helped this app make over $40,000 within the last 30 days. And is it still working?
Next, I’m going to talk about the growth hack that took this app from just a few hundred to $90,000 with very little spend on app marketing. And Apple might be sending warnings if you do this particular growth hack. And lastly, I’m going to tell you this strategy that I’ve heard a lot of big companies are utilizing. But first, let me introduce myself a
little bit. I was actually born in Myar, Burma. It’s near Thailand. Here you go. If you guys aren’t familiar with it, came to the States when I was just six years old. I sold cassette tapes. I felt like I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Didn’t know what that journey would look like, but I started making apps in 2011. just on the side. If you’re I’m in the Bay Area, so if you’re familiar with that area, I took BART, was coding, standing up, and trying to build that entrepreneurial dream. I was starting to make about 1,000 a month with
Just Apps on the side. So, in 2013, as a lover of podcast, I decided to start my own, see if I could turn this little side business into a full-time business. So, I started interviewing some of my heroes in the space. That’s how Dave and I connected. Chris Barton, CEO and co-founder Shazam, David Richel, creator of Color Switch. Matthew Hall, creator of Crossy Road. I tried to learn from my heroes in space to see how they did it and through that
learned some things here and there. And so what we’ve done since then, six months after starting the podcast, I ended up fulfilling that entrepreneurial dream and leaving my full-time job and pursuing this full-time. So now we have a team of 30. We work with some of the biggest apps and some of the tiniest apps in the world. Here’s a little social proof for you guys. And then here’s our YouTube channel. I’m like 200 away from 70,000. So maybe we can get there. You live streamers out there, there’s a little QR code. Help me out. Help a brother out. Also played
badminton. All right. I don’t know. I threw that up there. Made the varsity team as a freshman. I’m pretty proud of that. And then went to state three three years sophomore, junior, and senior year. All right. Little disclaimer. Like David said, it’s kind of weird being associated with this. All right, we had a David and I did a popular podcast on this on the sub club podcast. You guys want to check that out. We talked a lot about the different strategies here. And so I have to let you guys in on a little secret. You see, I talk a lot about
black hat strategies, but I have a source. Okay, the source is Eve B. Wong. All right. She’s the one that’s telling me all these strategies. I have no idea if these things even work. I DON’T WANT TO BE associated with any of this stuff. She is my particular source. You can see right here, she’s telling me all her little secrets. So, I’m going to represent her on stage. All right? Get my drift? I’m going to represent her on stage as I’m presenting this. So, the number one strategy I want
to talk about today is, and I’m going to give you a little hint. It’s this one. Anybody want to guess what it is? Any brave souls out there? It’s keyword installs. These are pretty easy. It’s you buy, according to Eve, you buy installs based off the keyword that hacks the algorithm to get you higher rankings in the app store. Now, according to Eve, again, it is it was
way more effective in 2017. Still kind of works today if you can find the right keywords. still works. But Eve told me that she talked to big ga companies. I almost gave it away. Big companies that are utilizing this particular strategy. Literally was on a call with them. Sharing notes. Like David said, she’s mad at me. She’s mad. All right. I wasn’t supposed to fill that secret. But like David said, we just want you to be equipped to know what’s happening so that in case you’re like, why is that bating me? You know.
Secondly, on the topic of keyword installs, if you were not indexed for your primary keyword bug identifier, right, there are places where you can get keyword acquisition. So, if you’re not indexed, these places will help you get indexed. And this is straight from one of their websites, right? So, I can share that with you guys privately. I
mean, Eve can according to Eve. All right. The other thing is fake reviews. Do not do this. [laughter] All right? And I know a lot of big companies are doing this too, but do not do this. In 2015, Eve discovered that, hey, I wonder if you leave a review for a friend’s app with the keywords that they want to target, will that help ASO rankings? So, when she did that back in 2015, it worked like that. One review, 16 to four. Perfect. Again, don’t do it. Don’t do it. Apple
has removed over 143 million. I’ve talked to clients, they’re like, “Yo, that was my friend. That was my mom whose review they they removed.” So, Apple’s doing a very good job and being diligent about removing these. But obviously, reviews are a signal to the end user whether you’re a good app or not. And so, you know, be careful. Obviously, now with AI, people AI generated reviews are flooding the app store. Apple’s really really cracking
down on all these strategies as well. And I’ve heard from other developers that sometimes they get a one-star review, they’re like, “That has to be my competitor. That has to be my competitor.” So, I know this is a a tactic that some shady developers are doing today. Look, we got a full hour. So, if you got any questions, I could see you or just raise your hand, interrupt me anytime. All right. Now, here’s a strategy that, how should I phrase this? Does work and
I’m going to show you. It’s called brandjacking. All right, so everybody knows Nano Banana came out. All right, September. Guess what? On Google, if you search for Nano Banana, Google doesn’t even rank number one for this. It’s Nanobanana AI. If you go to the website, check this out. They’re not affiliated with Google. Pretty funny. Brandjacking right there in the app stores. pretty high search traffic score 61. Pretty darn decent. Let’s see what types of app shows up.
Google’s actually number two again for Nano Banana. Now, if you look right now, they are number one. All right, this was a slide I shared a month ago, and it’s pretty fascinating. So, let’s see if there’s getting these apps are making any money. So, I picked the first one. According to app figures, this was the app that made over $40,000. And guess what? The last 30 days when Nano Banana became popular. It’s a interesting strategy brandjacking. So trying to promote this talk. I posted
this on LinkedIn. I was like, “Hey Apple, I’m going to be talking about these strategies at RevenueCat, but why are you letting these apps go up in the app store leveraging nano banana and you’re taking some of my strategies away from other developers.” So that was October 1. Pay attention to the date. Let’s go back. This is the search results as of yesterday for Nano Banana. All right. Very little. Before eight of the top 11 now
some guys snuck through. That’s the problem with app store reviewers. It just depends on who you get, right? It depends on who you get. So play around with that app submission time. You might find some interesting patterns there. But this number one app was removed from the app store. I don’t know if I had that sway. But that was October 6, a few days after my LinkedIn post. So I earned my stripes with Eve. All right. Eve said, “Steve, you can join me in superhero status.” So thank you, Eve. So this is a growth act
that I absolutely love. I’ve been running this since 2014. All right. But recently, we’ve gotten in trouble a little bit, and I’ll show you the email that you might get if you run this particular growth hack. So, here’s the strategy that took this app from just a few hundred bucks a month to 7,000 within its first month and ultimately to 90,000 within its first year. If you don’t believe me, that’s purely organic. I give you the numbers. You can do sales by source type. You can see
70,000 came from app store search. So, primarily more organic downloads, organic sales. All right. Here’s what we did. Here’s what I had called had called the greatest growth hack in the world because it worked every single time I did it. Now, it doesn’t always work this beautifully, but it does work. Ratings prompt due the first time user experience. I know 1% of all the downloads will leave you a review if you ask for it during the onboarding process. I’m going to get to number one anyways. This could be deemed a gray hat strategy. Number two, do some proper
ASO. All right, check out the YouTube channel. You’ll discover a lot of ASO strategies. create a lifetime offer, make it for free and then promote it on different services. We actually acquired Indie App Santa last November and it’s just like AppSumo Groupon but for apps. All right, you make your lifetime offer for free. So here’s what happened. Here’s the website. We did 106,000 downloads. I had to delete. Before I would share like the exact dates where it came from. Now I got to be more secretive. 106,000
downloads, 800 new ratings, right? that 1% is holding true. And then we were able to spike the download so much the ASO kicked in that we’re able to sustain the download growth and get to 90,000 within the first year. But here’s what’s happening now. Respectfully, Apple, Apple allows us to make our lifetime offer zero. If you go on Google Play, you can’t you can’t
select zero. You can’t select it. But Apple for non-consumable inapp purchases allows us to make it zero. So here’s somebody on Twitter that I saw this tweet. This is recent October 9th. He said, “Look, I made my one of my offers for free and I got an email right away. This is the email. I blew it up for you guys and this is the email that you might get.” Now, what I believe is happening, this is just my hypothesis, is, and I’m going to share these slides in a little bit later, but Apple’s
cracking down on a lot of these strategies because there’s fraudulent payment. Now, obviously, there’s a lot there’s a spike in payments, but they’re all free that happens because of this campaign. Now, what I also know about this campaign is 10% of the downloads will actually take advantage of your offer. So, if you get 100,000 downloads, you’re looking at maybe 10 to 15,000 people who are taking advantage of your lifetime free. Now, that obviously triggers something within Apple to send you this email. The other thing I told you to do was ask for the review. You
gave up a lifetime offer for free. The least they could do is leave me a little review. That was my growth hack. Like, I knew I could get to 10,000 downloads. I was like, if I have a brand new app, how do I get to a 100red ratings really, really fast? Get to 10,000 downloads. How do I get to 10,000 downloads? Well, the times I have done it, it’s a paid app going free. If I have a subscription app, let’s do a lifetime offer. That’s why I came up with this idea. But this is what’s happening. So, just in my opinion, just X out the Radies prompt. Be careful. It does work. Just be
careful is all I’m going to say for now. All right. Here are the other benefits. I had to cross out App Store ratings again. Look, I love this campaign so much because it kickstarts your ASO. It also gets users to give you feedback on the app. I’ve literally gotten emails from people after running this promotion on my app saying, “Hey, have you thought about this particular feature?” I was like, “That’s actually a good idea. Let me think about that.” And then this is my favorite part. People will ask me for
the deal. They’re like, “Hey, I missed out. I’m suffering from X, Y, and Z. I really wanted your app.” Granted, I don’t know how they’re able to afford an iPhone and not pay for like a $20 product, but hey, they do ask for the deal if they miss out on it. So, you only need to make the deal for two days. All right, any questions so far? I’m going to go quickly on this everything else. I’m going to throw everything else into this very bucket right here. Even I talking, exchanging notes, and she tells me hard payw wall. All right, now I love
a hard pay wall. All right, that just means pay or get the heck out. So, I’ll show you an example. Here’s one of the apps that we had. The only difference between the two is that X in that corner. Okay, this X halfed our sales. All right, I’ll show you the chart. Hard payw wall, soft payw wall, hard pay wall. That little X is that dip. Now, again, it depends on your reviewer. I like this strategy,
especially if you’re brand new. You force users to either pay or leave. So you figure out product market fit. All right. So I love the strategies. Some of my favorite apps have a hard pay wall and doing hundreds of thousand dollars a month. So it really depends. But we have seen developers get an email from Apple saying don’t do this. All right. Asking for a review. Dave and I were talking. I was like, "Oh yeah, thank you for that reminder. This is Calai. A lot of different apps are doing this. They’re asking for a review before they even hit
the pay wall." Now, I was like, “Ask for the review after the payw wall because they got a lifetime free offer and so why don’t you just ask for the review?” But is this even shadier? You’re asking for a review before asking for any money. I don’t know. Just exposing what’s happening in the app stores. Now, if you are going to do this, if you are going to try to ask for a review, I will tell you this is probably the one of the best ways to do it. Show a fivestar, show some testimonials, and show other people like you. We’ve
seen that work really, really well, especially that five stars at the very top. It helped increase your five star ratings. Now, you could also gate it. Do you like the app? Do you not like the app? If they like it, then obviously ask for the review. That’s another option, but this works, too. All right. Manipulating more helpful. So, I’m on the Apple Music. I’m a subscriber, by the way. I see their ratings and reviews, and certain times you’re like, “Hey, how do I get rid of this one star from my default page?” I’m going to tell you how to do it. All right. All you got
to do is find a review that they Apple ranks pretty well, ask a couple of your friends to hard press that review and hit helpful and that will start changing the algorithm. And there are some places maybe you can scale that up a little bit faster if you don’t have enough friends. All right, platform specific keywords, liquid gas, glass. I was talking to somebody, a developer who’s done very well for himself out in Brazil. So if you know who you are, he’s leveraging
this strategy. Not for liquid glass, but this works very well, too. And this is sort of grey hat, right? An app exists on the app store. An app, let’s call it web app exists on the web. This is brandjacking, right? But doesn’t have an app store presence. So leverage these for ASO. It works really well. But this is an example of that. But like we found out with Nano Banana. Be careful. Okay. Obviously bot and fake installs. I think
this works a lot better. Not a lot better, but if you’re going to do this, probably works a lot better on Google Play because Google obviously shows you the amount of total downloads an app has, whereas Apple doesn’t. And so if you’re on Apple, maybe you’re just trying to hack the App Store rankings. And then we’ve seen this work in like 201819 where you throw a you flood the app store with some like Twitter viral content. You get into the top charge and then you because you’re in the top
charge you sustain a little bit. So same idea here but I think it’s more interesting on Google versus iOS. All right, listen. The app store is cleaning up. This is a graphic that I took from the Apple website. Here’s some numbers for you guys. You can read it. It’s just a a lot of it’s just Apple saying we are cleaning up the app store. All right, the review submissions people have been rejected. Ratings and reviews again, they’re getting removed and then fraudulent activities. This is why I
think my growth hack is starting to cause problems because of the fraudulent transactions and then the review forming sucks. But this is this is just my opinion. Okay. What I would say to Apple is Apple again it’s my opinion. You told us to think different. So while I agree certain things are very sketchy and should not be allowed. I also feel like certain things like these
strategies I’ll explain the tweet a little bit later but certain things like these strategies look we know it works. It’s only benefiting you Apple the platforms with a hard pay wall. So, let’s try to find that happy medium. And I think we’ll get there, you know? I mean, 2024, they’re like, “Hey, let’s clean up the app store. Let’s do a really good job.” 2025, we’re feeling that effect. And then hopefully 2026, it’ll be a nice balance. This look, this is a indie developer out in India that we helped out. Like, this
is a lot of money over there. I’m like as many big companies that we work with, this is these are the type of stories that really light me up when we get to work with some indie developers who are trying to live that entrepreneurial dream that I get to live and we take this app do the ASO. I’m right on certain things and it’s helped out. It only helps you. So, all right, Apple. I won’t ask for the reviews. Let me go back. I won’t ask for the reviews. heard message clear, but let’s not, you know,
the thing I think is going to happen is we’re just not going to be able to make our lifetime offers for free anymore. That’s what I think is going to happen because Google doesn’t allow us to make it free. So, anyways, look, the reason why I wanted to say this was this was a tweet way before I even had a podcast. I was doing apps, you know, like any entrepreneur, I was like, let me build in public, right? So, say I woke up feeling like I can work from anywhere. So, I got a couple of kids. I want to spend time with them. I can do some
marketing. That’s my passion, right? I can code, but marketing is my passion. And I can help others. And that’s what we’ve done through the podcast, through the agency, through our own apps, and everything else, right? And so, all I’m saying is be careful out there. Some of these work. And what I would ask Apple, this is just me again, is respectfully, let’s figure out what’s good still and what’s really, really bad, right? All right. Enough of this. Let’s get let’s keep it
light. All right. I don’t know if you guys listen to the podcast, but I like to do some dad jokes on the podcast. So, we got a dad joke for you guys. How do you know an app brand jacking? It keeps name dropping its competitors. There you go. You allow. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. [laughter] All right. You guys got any questions? >> Yeah. Don’t say the app.
Okay. >> One of the things we did find with uh with the hard pay that’s a challenge is a lot of people don’t understand that the button get in the app store, you know, used to say free. A lot of people still think it means free. So there’s people that will download your app and then leave an immediate onestar review saying bait and switch it’s a scam, it’s
not free, etc. Um, and that’s definitely a challenge in terms of like, you know, keeping keeping your review score intact. So yeah. >> Have you done I’m going to give Will credit from recipe. Have you done the recipe payw wall? >> I don’t know what that. >> Do you know what that is? Okay, I’ll share this with you. So that’s what we discovered too on that slide on that app. Here’s one way to negate it and we saw the same thing. We were getting one star reviews being like this app is paid. So here’s what we
found that works really well. Rest me Paywall really great app but this I’m giving Will credit for this because he first shared this with me but we’ve seen this work well especially if you’re promoting yearly baj out there he said it works with weekly. We tested with our weekly, we didn’t see the same results. It actually were >> went down when we added these two screens, but just adding these two screens, it’s a take on the Blinkist pay wall if you guys are familiar with that. >> This, you know, everybody knows this.
And so I just thought at the time when I felt this, I was like, this is a way better way of doing it. And through our tests, we have seen this one. So try that first. I’ve got other ideas I’ll share with you. I mean, David kind of mentioned it, but I don’t want to share it on this live stream because then it becomes ineffective, right? But I’ll share with you an idea that I have for a hard pay wall that help might help with that, too. We have one right there. >> Hello. Um, how do you weigh up I suppose
if you’re doing some maybe black hat techniques? How do you weigh up the risk of um, sorry, sorry, is there more of a risk of doing those techniques when you’re a smaller developer versus kind of being the big guys? Because I suppose if if you’re a big player in the game making loads of money, Apple might not be so prone to be like tell your app off the market where if you’re small, they’re going to be like boom and ban hammer you. >> Yeah. So actually it’s switched in my opinion. Okay.
It’s a lot easier to run these strategies when you’re a bigger app because it’s harder to detect it, right? And from what I hear, especially these keyword installs campaign, you could run it for any app. I could run it for yours, I could run for yours, I could run it for anybody’s without you even knowing it, right? And so if from Eve’s experience with bigger apps, it’s a lot easier to move the needle because they have the download velocity, they have the
revenues. One of our clients a few years ago, pre- pandemic, we were we were able to get them number one for a keyword, one of the high converting keywords, right? And they ended up going from inapp purchases to Stripe. And guess what happened to that keyword? like literally on that day it went from 100,000 App Store Connect to about 10,000 legacy revenues and our keyword rankings just dropped. So I do think this is just one case study but I do
think that revenues play a part in how well you rank and so if you’re a bigger app it’s a lot easier to to move it. So anybody else? Yep. It’s hot in here, right? Unless it’s a sweater. >> So, recently, even though this tactic isn’t new, but recently, I’ve seen a lot more people start utilizing weekly subscriptions.
Yeah. >> What have you seen as far as why people would start doing weekly subscriptions? You know, I think there’s been a lot of tests, monthly, annual. I think LTVs on annuals kind of people say yeah LTV is higher but cash flow faster if you go monthly. What are you seeing around weekly? >> Yeah, it depends [clears throat] on the app, right? We had we have an AI app that we have. So like if if you think about single-use apps, weekly will perform better. PDF converters, photo
video space tends to weekly performance better. So here’s one of our apps that we have. This chart just to show you we’re getting downloads through organic means. You can see what I did right there. That spike a little lifetime free offer. But this was our app, right? This is what you’re talking about, right? This is one of our better performing pay walls on A. So, we tested this versus B, which is what you’re probably used to seeing, right? Especially for these weekly offers, really high converting payw wall if you’re trying to push weekly. And we saw 3x more sales just by switching to
this. So, if you want the long story, here’s the long story. I’ll go back if you guys missed it. We’re good. All right. I’ll send you all the slides. This is the be one of our best performing pay walls where we’re promoting yearly 7-day free trial. What we were seeing was people are activating trials but not paying us. They just kept canceling cancelling cancelling because they just maybe want it for a week and then they want to go away. We made $800 within the
first three months with the yearly. Watch this. We moved to here. So, if you hit the toggle free trial enabled, you’ll get the weekly. If you un enable it, disable it, proper English, you get the yearly, right? No trial, by the way. Here’s what happened. The yearly, that’s the one thing I want to point out. I wonder if I could do it this way. Nope. $1,000 within the next three months without a freaking trial. Without a trial. and we got way more
people on the the weekly offer and people weren’t cancelling as much and they were just renewing. So if you I I should have my revenue cat stats up here just to show you the difference in LTV as well. But we saw an increase in LTV just because nobody was paying us the yearly. They just wanted to try it for a little bit and then get out. So it really depends on the nature of the app. But weekly has performed pretty well for the photo video space and AI space. Here’s a reving cat data.
dig more into the uh weekly subscriptions uh on the apps where you’re running this something actually I’m I’m hoping with revenue cap to to share some data on at some point in the future. Um but are those weekly converting to annual because I mean the way we’ve talked about on the podcast, we’ve talked about in private like it it’s also just you’re playing a different game. you’re you’re optimizing for a shorter term revenue over the long term,
but are you seeing those weeklies turn into annuals? Are you offering those weeklies saying, “Hey, you seem to be really enjoying the app. Like, switch to the annual.” And I mean, in apps that you’re talking to that are working well with the weekly, what are you seeing on that LTV? Is it just that the LTV is higher because people forget to subscribe for three months or can you convert them or like what’s going on with the actual like under underlying business? Yeah, I think that’s probably it, right? Because that’s what we see when we’ve moved over to weekly. Sometimes they’ll just stay on or forget
or just do it for like two or three weeks and that makes more money. The thing that I’ve also seen work pretty well, we had one client that we were looking at making about 6.99. David, guess when it was actually shown, not on the onboarding, not on second open, but on third open was when you saw this payw wall. And so
we’ve seen other apps where they’ll do a 7-day yearly and a let’s say 299, 3.99 for the first month, no trial that renews at the yearly. And I think that’s a more interesting strategy to start to try to test out like hey if you believe in the long term like this is an app that you’re going to use over a year then maybe start off with a introductory offer instead of a trial have a trial because trial tends to work better but have a lower price trial so instead of a
free trial. Um, I guess my question is about consequences. I’m curious like what you’ve seen. You know, if you want to get really creative, turns out your creativity run a foul of the app store, any of the stores rules. Uh, and I’m kind of interested in a comprehensive list. Everything from, you know, an angry email to temporarily banned versus permanently banned. Like, I’m just curious like, you know, any anecdotes
you have on that. >> Yeah. So, one of the indie apps Santa we we got it removed from the app store. Apple sent us a notice saying I think it was like we’re trying to copy the UIUX of the App Store like you’re literally replicating the App Store. I decided to never respond to that email and then a month later they decided to take the app down and we’ve been having troubles bringing it back up. The good news is it was never dependent on the app downloads for driving users. But most of the time, I would say I’m not going to even throw
it, but like 80 90% of the time Apple just slaps you on the wrist and says, “Hey, don’t do that.” And then usually it’s that’s all. The one guy I did talk to, this is very rare, but one guy I did talk to, he got his app removed and account suspended, including his revenues suspended because he kept buying reviews. And I was talking to him because we’re on the call. He’s like, “Help me get my app up.” And I was like, “Did you not get a warning from Apple to not buy those reviews?” And he’s like, “Yeah, but I still did it.” And I was like, “Well, bro, that’s your fault then. Like, I can’t help you there.” So,
it’s very rare, but if you ignore Apple or if you continue doing after their slap on the wrist, that’s when you tend to really get in trouble. Anybody else? Okay, I won’t keep you. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate the time. >> [music]