| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOYQeDsDOPw |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42qyv7sp6y807fa868yfpr |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42qyv7sp6y807fa868yfpr |
| Date | 2023-08-11 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LOYQeDsDOPw/sddefault.jpg?v=64d272b2 |
foreign [Music] ation it is Steve p young founder of appmasters.com fresh off the I just interviewed with David Bernard from revenue cat and sub club though that
podcast will be out soon and today we’ve got a phenomenal guess we’re going to talk all about AI look it’s everywhere everybody’s talking about it how but how can you use it to increase your app engagement and joining me today is go sheppy he is the CEO and co-founder of soulston and we’re going to learn all about that right now [Music]
welcome to the show Joe thanks Steve it’s good to meet you you like that snazzy intro what do you think that’s beautiful it’s beautiful been on some podcasts lately and I’m like this guy’s killing it well thank you I’ve been doing a 10 plus years hey I want to say hi to a few people let them know I see them what’s up Angelina Kevin’s here we got waruna David from Nigeria we gotta like really diverse Eric hey Eric San Jose hit me up
bro I’m out here and then George is here Patrick what’s up fam is Fridays with that Masters show you here Venezuela all right what’s up Luis and then we got a lot of people saying hi so hi Jay and then nurix as well all right Joe let’s break it down so I’m gonna bring up your website but let’s break it down like we typically talk about this and you you say like hey stop thinking in numbers start thinking Human Instead tell me a little bit more about that Joe yeah I think you know and if we
look across all the different industries that are being you know leveraged right now if you look at apps for example look at what happened with like ATT and and SDK you know app basically tracking going away um and what happened with idfa and as a part of that um you know we look to how do we create great experiences how do we do good marketing how do we build products and really at the end of the day if you look at like the landscape of of artificial intelligence today or if you look at the landscape of product development a lot
of people got comfortable with really depending on focusing on the just the data and what was coming from behaviors and product usage and then like this SDK thing happened or sorry um idfa thing happened it just threw everybody off and they’re like okay how do we go back to really understanding our audience and what we kind of focus on at solston is solson’s a an AI that through gameplay through how people play games as many of us know about three billion people in the world play games every day uh we’re able to
take that behavior and kind of in the same way Google is like we’re going to build the the cognitive or the the we’re going to make everything searchable um solson’s really building the cognitive layer of the internet so how do we take all this behavior and then understand people and then power app developers game developers to actually understand the human behind the user so that we can really focus on things that matter like uh retention engagement and build experiences that have a lot of longevity to them so how does it all work Joe like is it an SDK like to break it down for
me like the Practical side of things too yeah so how solson were works is if you’ve ever taken like the act or sat if you’re in the US it’s like an Adaptive assessment so to speak so what we’re doing is people are playing a game or using an app there’s an interstitial or a pop-up and it says hey we want to improve your experience they they take that and what it actually is it’s a scientific grade psych assessment we measure about 300 different psychological traits everything from your motivations to your personality
your values cultural attributes um and it’s constantly learning so as you’re answering questions it’s actually learning about you as you’re doing it that’s like our sample Baseline and then what we do next is um there’s a saying that I love it it’s show me how you play and I’ll tell you who you are I used to be an adventure based psychotherapist and you know we we know for example that if you do things in non-play environments just to have like a new synapse form it takes about 400 repetitions if you do something in a
play environment it only takes about 20. um if you look at how people play and and the actions that they take when they play they’re much more indicative or representative of the actual person so the next thing we do is while people are playing games for example um we take this this data and then we start to predict using that initial sample as like our basis of Truth um we’re doing two things we’re predicting like what groups they fit in from a like-mindedness perspective so not based on Behavior not based on their
demographics but really who they are and it’s kind of like a real-time Harry Potter Sorting Hat where it’s like ooh there’s a group of people in this experience that are super courageous and fearless and value nature and culturally they’re individualistic and this has all these implications in terms of how we design and build for them and do marketing for them so what we’re able to do is understand basically the landscape of the audience and then the second part is we are just literally directly assessing traits from play like oh that person rebuilt their base pretty quickly
well what does that mean and is there statistical significance there that lines up with like the original assessment that we send out and so what ends up on the other end of it is basically as a app developer as a game designer you all of a sudden have a real-time pulse on who your audience actually is uh as human beings not just uh you know 45 year old males that like I don’t know McDonald’s and here’s some demographic information too so it’s it’s
gives us like such a rich picture of your audience now I know you might not be able to share all your great case studies out there Joe but is there an example that you have that kind of like you’re like hey you know we had this data set we used it and they did X Y and Z live Ops whatever it was to help improve engagement or monetization absolutely I mean that happens across basically every single one of the customers that we that we work with so where it usually starts is we go to the the customer and say what’s your number one thing right now and one of the things we have noticed is you know since
the idfa deprecation happened there’s been a much bigger focus on retention uh than before you know you can’t just retarget people and bring them back into your experience as easily as we once could so retention retention retention retention um everything from like big MMO games like Eve online you know they’ll come to us and say we’re 20 year old game we’ve been doing this forever we’ve a b tested everything you can imagine um how do we get day seven retention up and okay let’s let’s look at the data
and we notice for example there’s a bunch of people that were really high on altruism that weren’t making it through the first seven days so through our API you can then take those IDs and then match them up against experiences or part of the experience where they’re able then to basically engage in altruistic acts so hey help a guild member help a friend help a then they come back to us and go are we’re having 20 more people literally make it through the the first seven days so it’s a
Quantum Leap that happens and what effectively is going on is you’re going from a behavioral and demographic reality to a cognitive behavioral reality so you’re able to just touch upon the experience that much better um we just had similar thing happen with a game called Heyday uh many of you might have heard of it big game yeah so similar thing we’re assessing the audience looking at the different traits in the audience and then optimizing The Experience based on that um their day seven retention um went well beyond what what they were expecting it to go up
um they kind of wanted a tenth of a percent and it went I think uh 22 or something like that so uh it’s it’s you know those are retention focused efforts but really how it ends up getting used we say like solstice limited to two things um the imagination of the company that we’re working with and their Tech stack so I mean people use soulston to do everything from like player matching so you’re matching based on the psychology of players not just like whether they’re winning or losing uh personalized offers so people will go hey I’m gonna send out
you know this this new item and I’m gonna send it to the the dominant people in the game and you know buy this thing and crush your enemies or you’ll send it to the people in the game that are you know more collaborative hey buy this thing and help your guild and they’ll say Okay conversion went way up um we’ve had people like bigger companies use it for intake for customer support where the support person will get the communication style of of the user actually and we had one company come back and set our NPS scores went up 30 points and we did a study on it and I’m
like what was the study because they were like confused if it was you know erroneous and they said what ended up happening is all the all of our customers thought that we literally um changed out our customer support team like we hired a completely different group of people same customer support team the only difference was they saw the communication style of the person and the feedback was that the the users felt more heard they felt more heard now by the company and listened to nothing nothing fundamentally changed other than the fact that the people on the business
side actually had their communication style so there’s a broad sort of application list there same with marketing and creative um we’ll get into that world a lot where especially now we know that um creative optimization is one of the best things you can absolutely do to really you know make sure you’re bringing in your ideal customer profile bringing in your ideal user from the start because that’s the person that you’re going to be able to nurture the easiest as well so we had a game for example where across all the traits we measure their VP of marketing and
basically saw that in their specific game um that that caring and family were like two of the highest values of like the 70 values we measure um and it was within their their ideal customer profile so there’s other customer profiles there are other groups in their experience but this was from like their ideal group that they knew was scaling and growing within the experience and um this this game was would used to be called or is called DragonVale and they couldn’t beat the red baby dragon it was always like anything we do if we put red baby dragon
it works really well um their VPN marketing came back and said hey like can we just put baby dragon with family caring about it and they got 34 uh increase in conversions um compared to anything that they’d had in the last eight years so order of magnet to shift and but all that was happening was you’re taking the values of the person that you actually want to bring in you’re taking those and you’re just creating this is nothing you know this is the Mad Men Days of marketing
like you’re just actually really understanding your audience and building for them and I think we drifted away from that because we got too comfortable with machines optimizing things and tracking stuff and so the the new era I think is really about um you know understanding our customers Joe first off your website’s amazing I love websites that do this stuff it’s pretty cool Eric’s got a question Joe it says sound solson sounds fantastic how many dau’s daily active users does an app need to work with solston
successfully and who’s the solstent target audience what’s up it’s like doing your work for you thank you thanks thanks Eric um so we we can work with companies that are pre-launch or building um we have a product called Navigator so everybody that ends up in our database so that was measured psychologically you’re given a unique ID um one of Sultan’s principles is is privacy is power so we never track personally identifiable uh information this is also why a lot of big companies
like to work with us because they’re able to separate identity data from sensitive data which is the the psychological data and so our Navigator product uh basically you can have zero Dau what that is is say you’re developing something new and you’re like you know it’s um the the number one um app in the game store for sports right now is NFL Rivals they came to us and said we’re going to build a game off of NFL IP but we want people who are like into crypto as well so we can go into our database and say
you know here’s 20 000 people that we’ve collected across all these experiences who have told us that they’re into NFL um the IP in some sort of way shape or form and that they’re into crypto in some way shape or form and then you’re able to actually see that audience I think part of our job as entrepreneurs is to figure out where the world is going and meet them there so they’re actually already able to know who those people are and they built that entire experience off of that and then that’s part of what helps it you know when you
go in and you already have that product that they didn’t even know that they wanted and it’s there um so we can work at that on the live product kind of the Eve online example the personalization stuff um and we’ve had some pretty interesting non-gaming companies do things there as well so with with gaming developers and game companies are um in terms of like uh how do you get the most out of traits that’s our live product uh you’re you’re definitely going to want to be a game game developer for the most part um we can start to work with with live
products when it’s around a thousand Dau so it doesn’t have to be a huge a huge sample size at all yeah um to do the psychological prediction work we need about 5 000 profiles so that being that being said so we’re able to sample the audience pretty well around a thousand Dau to get 5000 profiles typically speaking our assessment is about 10 of daily active users will take that on the first day and it’s kind of just like a biological sample like we don’t need to do it across the audience
or things like that but given that that sort of gives you a picture of you know if we want to get to about 5 000 people well we probably need about a 50 000 person Dau where you’re actually measuring everybody based on the the AI so that’s kind of that gives you a spread there but already just with like a thousand people um you’re gonna get a really representative example of who your audience is and what a lot of customers do when they’re in soft launch or when the app’s smaller they buy a navigator audience because they go like who’s the
bigger Market that’s here like is NFL NFL crypto people who’s that and then they’ll they’ll measure the smaller group and what they’ll be able to see is are we actually bringing in the highest spending highest LTV um we also have a proprietary metric called a user centered score or a player centered score that measures the um LTV likelihood over like a long period of time plus the actual uh bio psychosocial benefit that your game has or product
has on that person so what’s kind of cool about that is it’s actually saying like you know um maybe for you NFL is uh or NFL Rivals is actually going to help you sleep better at night or help psychologically in terms of depression anxiety or help with your social life and so it’s actually predicting is this product and that’s is it beneficial for you and that’s part of why solson exists we’re asking how do we make technology more regenerative for people how do we make a world where you leave technology
going you know I feel like I got more out of that than I than I put in I’m probably like listening to you know Steve’s episodes and and shows you know you feel energized by it you leave it you’re like this was awesome um so you know that’s part of our goal there but what’s cool about those metrics is it it leads to much more sustainable products as well so that’s one of our goals like you just don’t want to build an app and then uh you know a year later two years later like we’ll use Game of War as an example that
game made a lot of money but it’s not around anymore um Clash of Clans was also making the same amount of money back then and if you look today they’re still making you know close to a billion a year year over year and they’ve been doing that for 10 years now that’s a much better business than a game that spikes drops and that’s I used to know um uh one of the the head of game game design that machine Zone who did game of war and actually their their VP of data is a very good friend still um and so you look at the strategy they
had they actually said like they got to point the reason they did those Super Bowl commercials they literally churned through every single person they could have possibly found in Facebook so they had to start actually looking for users outside of it and so you know in a way the way the way we see it is um sustainability and really kind of like building that Foundation like that’s part of the new UA strategy that’s part of the new marketing strategy is retention is building environments that people can stay in over a period of time so yeah working
with us um you know we can start from zero we also have a uh Solstice we call an accelerator program where we work with uh startups or smaller companies that might be pre-revenue and so we have programs for that where you can come in and at a free level and then if you raise money or with profitability um our model kicks in but we try to make it easy for all different tiers of companies to to start to understand their audience better Hey Joe if I can stick with the NFL Rivals example a
little bit so they came to you and said hey we want you know NFL people but people who understand crypto and then how did how did your assaults and kind of take that and be like well we should talk about X Y and Z and our creatives or I mean how does that all work is it do they need to already be launched or could you have done it like before pre-launch yeah it’s all pre so this was all pre-launched so interesting every time we assess somebody in a game so let’s say let’s say you’re playing I don’t know um fortnite we’ll just use that example we don’t work with fortnite just to be
clear but a lot of people play fortnite so like let’s say you’re you’re playing fortnite and you know there’s a pop-up and it says we want to improve your your experience for you take that questionnaire at the end of that process so that questionnaire it’s about 75 of it’s psychometric so that’s the that’s basically your your personality your cultural attributes your values and then some of it’s also um survey based so like you’re paying points with the game things like that so that’s basically this profile that comes together well
about 25 of it it is demographic and it is sentiment based too so we ask you like you know what are your favorite Brands what are your favorite movies what are your favorite IPS all those sort of things um and then what we’re doing is in the game we are also able to attribute uh any sort of like you know if you if you purchase something in the game and we know okay this person purchases I don’t know swords a ton like you can start to attribute different information to different profiles and the way to think of it is like uh um you know if you’ve used mid-journey
or some of these like other AI tools where you’re generating images or something like that you know you’re taking this huge swath of of data of interaction data and then you’re building out profile attributes so people who are lower on on openness for example are more likely to be from Oslo like that’s actually true but you know there you can actually start to learn like location interest things like that based on who people are um and so from that so from those questionnaires when those profiles
happen those individuals end up in our database so if we think of this from a gdpr perspective if I can interrupt like how do we know how do we get that data these people to fill out the form if our game isn’t launched it yeah yeah so so that’s so what happens is so all these profiles are coming from live games so first party oh I see yeah and then if the game isn’t launched yet if the product isn’t launched yet sulson basically has the largest psychological database in the world so kind of going back to the fact that three billion people play games on a daily basis so
that’s three-fourths of the global technology consumers only four billion people have smartphones so then let’s say you’re NFL Rivals and you come to soulston hey we’re building this new NFL game what we’re going to do is query our database from all the people that came from those live games kind of cross and we’re going to be able to say yeah we have 30 000 profiles who you know and they’ll give us criteria they’re like uh anybody who played Madden games for example anybody who said NFL is one of their favorite Brands so you can give us
criteria for that like um Fall Guys for example uh one of the things they did they said hey we’re gonna go to free to play We’re not gonna be just a PC game anymore can we get an audience of people that played all of these game mechanics but have never played fall guys before and only play free to play so you can give us like a pretty rich Target and then what we’re able to come back with is like I was just talking to Disney the other weekend I’m like yeah we have over 300 000 people in you know the database
that we know play Disney Plus or use Disney plus sorry um they use Disney plus and then what we’re able to do is basically you get this dashboard and it’s kind of like here’s the different personas here’s the different psychological groups here’s their motivations here’s the IP that they’re interested in so from the start you have a really clear idea of of who they are and then during the development process what a game like NFL rival does um which is this is super cool I wish I used to be the head of ux at uh Big Fish Games out in Seattle
um one of the things I wish we had back then so as they’re developing the game like let’s say they’re like what art style should we use what theme should we use what interface like what UI style should we use we’re actually actually able to test all those things so we have an internal lab where also we also have a another um you know if you’re if you have your own lab or if you have your own research team we’re able to work in that context too what we call it is our typing tool so you’re actually able to see hey you know for Persona one that they’re
actually the biggest part of the market there’s about 200 million of them um they’re the high they spend the most on apps every month they actually had no usability problems in our play testing but Persona 4 had all the usability problems and by the way when you guys recruited for play testing 9 out of the 10 play testers were in Persona 4. and we see that all the time with a lot of bigger companies where I mean we have this at Big Fish our whole play testing group was nothing representative of our ideal audience you know these are professional play testers they’re there
for the Amazon gift cards you know these are very different than the the people that are like actually part of that that audience good for usability problems but what’s able to happen then is while you’re going through the development stage it’s almost like you’re developing alongside the market so that by the time you get your product to Market you just get to meet them and then what happens is within a couple weeks your you know sports games number one in the app store for sports you know so it’s it’s and that we’ve repeated that process several times now so it’s I love it it’s just
great you kind of helped the process because I work with a lot of companies who will put out these personas right and be like hey this is Maggie she has a kid and this is the type of person she likes this and then we go out but I don’t actually know where that data is coming from how they’re making that thing but now you’re like hey here’s all the data go find Maggie it sort of informs how you’re gonna go Target people on let’s say Facebook or Instagram or even Tick Tock you know it kind of helps all that stuff because I found that the more targeted you can be the you know the higher those conversions and the longer to stay yeah
I think one of the most dangerous things about launching an app especially these days is people will mistake um early engagement if you don’t actually understand who your ideal audience who your ICP is your ideal customer profile and you start to see engage engagement data early on what can happen is companies can end up focusing on that group of people and now you start to optimize an A B test and iterate for that group of people and then what can happen is months later you come to soulston and say hey we have
like about 30 000 daily active users and our products just not scaling and we’ll say let’s have a look and we’ll assess that audience and say you know there’s only about 80 000 people in the entire Market that actually fit this group of people or did you know that um this group of people spends on average three to four dollars a month on apps but you know all those features that you made that basically what they’re doing is they’re pushing out this same group of people also really like this IP and they spend fifty dollars a month on apps but
they’re like way different personalities so you’re actually excluding them so starting with you know how are we thinking about scale starting with what’s if we think of um Monopoly Solitaire was another one they came to us and there’s a company called mobilityware and said hey we bought Monopoly IP what should we do um you know and they had they had a strong hypothesis they said you know we make solitaire games we think that’s a good idea and so we said okay let’s let’s look at that let’s look at an audience of people that like Monopoly
and also play Solitaire interesting group of people and we looked at the different personas um when you just took the Monopoly audience the the highest LTV group the biggest group the one that spent the most money Solitaire was not in their like top 10 list of games so we probably don’t want to make that game for them however there was another Persona in there who also spent a significant amount Market size was well over 100 million people looked at that group and Solitaire um one of the major solitaire
games was their second most played game who said here’s our people so we started out with a really clear idea of who our Market was and who that audience was and what their motivations were all this sort of stuff and it was actually interesting their their VP of marketing said you know our game team has a really different idea of what game they’re they want to build compared to what the audience looks like and I said that’s okay like if you guys can afford to build two prototypes and let’s test them let’s just let’s let’s test them against
the audience and the soulston version ended up performing significantly better I mean it’s it’s your audience that’s there they made the game um this is I think their their second highest grossing product they have at the company now you know in terms of Revenue so it’s I mean it’s kind of crazy um and their VP of marketing is great he’s like Joe sometimes this is like it feels so simple it’s stupid because it feels like common sense um but Common Sense isn’t isn’t always common and I think it’s it’s the hard
thing sometimes to do to take a step back because we want to build we want to create we want to move forward but sometimes taking that step back to really intimately get to know who is the optimal group on the other side of the market and we invest so much energy into building apps Building Products building games that to me it’s always like why are we not building this towards the optimal optimal outcome so yeah pretty cool to see this is crazy because you never think like these two things I had a client back in the day Joe where it
was like uh words it was kind of like Solitaire meets you know Scrabble but then we were kind of just he was like this is a great idea and I love the gameplay I loved everything about it but it couldn’t it just didn’t work maybe it was just there wasn’t enough overlap we didn’t have Sultan to tell us hey there’s not enough overlapping with these groups well that’s that’s a perfect example and you know so one of the things I love about what we do is we get to empower entrepreneurs who typically like they have a really good Insight or there’s something that’s there and let’s say that you know that
exact example we pull up that dashboard and we say yeah you know what there’s one big Market here and this is the IP that they love it’s stranger things can we can we cry that’s just an example but could we cross example could we go and pull in that IP or if we can’t pull that IP because we don’t have enough money can we build tropes around that can we build that vibe in the product and all of a sudden like hey wait um organic is happening we’re not even having our our cpis just went way down
and because that’s what we see when when you really leverage the correct like theme Arts style IP it really it drives CPI down and it drives row as up it drives your LTV data up because now people are actually moving into it based on things they care about and they stick better if I really care about Monopoly if I’m like a monopoly fanatic I’m gonna spend way more time like trying to like that game or like that like everyone’s had like a band they love and then they come out with like a Bad album and they’re like you’re
still really trying to like you’re going to listen to that album at least a few times because you’re like I really want to like this album you know so you you get a lot of Leverage when you actually design things into people’s um value systems especially values are even deeper than brand affinities you know sometimes those like people’s values correlate with with the brands where you can see some interesting data there like hey everybody likes this brand is actually they’re really high on value in respect that’s interesting but
and you can kind of see the brand values and their values connect and that’s how we help Brands too but if you look at you know if I’m if I’m designing to your personality to your values you know if you’re a super super extroverted person and you’re coming into experience and it’s you know crickets and quiet and and it’s probably not going to resonate and you’re in a Nook and there’s a book and one person by the herself um but if you’re introverted great you know and some games have a lot of mix
but we do see games for example like we had one game we started working with where they’re like yeah our our early retention day one retention is just like terrible like what what do we do once we get people past day one things go grow really well and so we look at the audience and their level of empathy was like off the charts so it’s very very high statistically compared to other other groups and um this game in particular uh basically so one of the things we know about people that are high on empathy in terms of Engagement is the more facial expressions you have
they tend to engage more so this is what they were talking about creative ads um things like that especially with babies or younger things um so that’s something that you know if we see that in the data that gives us a lot of insight from marketing first time experience well this game um people only got murdered in it uh and so the the first time user experience was basically it was as a murder mystery game um you didn’t the first person and it was already done with they’re gone so you didn’t get a chance to help them you
didn’t get a chance and there’s very little facial expressions that were being shown in it too so they were completely missing the boat on who their actual audience was and who was coming into the game and you can kind of come to it from like hey these are mystery people these are people that are into that genre into that style and you can go out guns blazing like it’s 2016. that doesn’t work anymore like we get to see all these games get built and all these products go to market and just year over year we measure ux metrics too
um usability the Baseline keeps getting higher and higher and higher so like it’s just that’s a baseline now that’s not ux that’s just like your product needs to be usable but what we also see from from the whole Market is focused attention levels keep getting lower and lower and lower so you’re now competing from an attention perspective which a lot of people don’t realize more than you ever were before you’re competing against other games other apps TVs and also other experiences that post covet
people are more you know think you know thank God getting more into being outside again and you know you’re competing against all that and so how are you thinking about integrating into a day in the life of your of your user and a lot of people got used to covid A Day in the Life is screen time during covid um that’s not that’s not the natural way that humans like to live and that’s just which is a good thing and so you know how are you we have another customer for example who expert team had built
several highly successful High Revenue games before um the the team’s really close they’ve done it many times they built them all on behind their computer it was a mobile game and um didn’t understand why metrics weren’t working out uh the play sessions were around 20 minutes a play session um did research on it figured out that everybody who had that Affinity towards that IP that’s it was a cooking game that side type of things
um they’re actually only using their apps pulling out their phones when they’re at bus stops um on the toilet bathroom so what does that mean for play sessions that means you know hopefully something that’s less than three minutes you know because all of a sudden you’re there and you’re just you know where did John go John’s missing he sees in the bathroom he’s yeah but and that probably you know that does happen right you know it’s it’s one of the things that they weren’t doing is matching that the reality of the actual
user I love it yo I like to think of myself as a highly empathetic person so I was very curious when you like we noticed and I’m like bang on that ahead I do look at that like I vibe off of people off of like their vocal tone their facial expressions and that’s what gets me going up going too and so when you said I was like oh that that I feel that I feel that yeah and so yeah if you came into experience we knew that about you it’s like you’re gonna feel like hey this is for me where there I mean
there’s people that are lower on that and that’s you know all those facial expressions are going to freak them out they can’t you know they can’t handle it all um I never realized that like my facial expressions and my vocal tone might be like putting some people yeah whoa too much yeah too much real yeah all right Eric’s got a question what are the solson personality quiz type were they like interstitials they appear to users in a game do we control when and what is asked to yep so we work with the
like we work with the product or the game company so for the 95 of the time it’s an interstitial uh pop-up uh hey we want to improve your player experience inside the game the user clicks on that and what happens at that point is actually they get pulled out of the game this is where we pass the user maybe this is a little too technical but we pass the user ID as an encrypted variable so this is the moment where their game identity their personal identity gets separated on our side so
from a gdpr perspective we do this to separate identity they go through our process and then at the very end of it they click on a deep link that takes them back into the game or into the experience so that deep link I think about 80 percent of our customers do do something rewarded so here’s your five Gems or here’s your 10 power-ups or things like that um we don’t see huge differences in engagement if that’s done or not done typically the more engaging the product it is that’s the main area where we see
engagement differences so outside of gaming for example um we’ve we’ve done this with like ancestry.com as an example um you’re not going to get the same percentage of Engagement but you’re still going to get more than a significant amount of spread across that that group and in that case like we can deploy in uh you know in in the website through um we’ve even done through email um I think we did text message once so there’s a lot of ways we can do that the
idea the main idea though why we like to do it in a in a game or through the app is because we want to pass that URL variable so on the back end in the future you have the API so that you can personalize things to that that group where we have companies that create first-time user experience funnels there’s a word game that the people that were higher IQ with higher education got bigger words to spell early on in the experience um so they’re able to take that on the API side so we can do it without transferring that ID but then you sort of lose uh lose that
um I don’t hope that answered the the full question Eric’s very engaged he’ll let us know okay yeah Eric let me know let me know if there’s more to that all right Jeff a lot of great stuff I love talking about this I used to read NLP type of books instant Rapport was one of my favorite books early in my 20s so anything that talks about more the psychological aspect of things like it’s something that Joe like honestly when I looked at it I’ll be like yo come on it’s kind of like wufu type of stuff and as you get talking about I’m like this actually
makes sense you know what I mean like we do like have just this like onboarding experience of just like super basic stuff and then when you can put tie-in emotions and as a marketer for me I’m always like Go On Emotion like play off the emotion but then when I’m building these like screens and ux experiences it goes to Wayside for some reason yeah yeah and we don’t have the support systems for it so I mean I I built my whole career in ux and ux design and I was a ux director at
McCann Erickson like big Ad Agency and we build these experiences and literally how I sit there and go who am I building this for Dan Dan is a 27 year old male he likes Tech he you know it’s like this is if if I had to buy Dana Christmas present I am going to fail like this is going to be a really crappy Christmas present you know and if you think of like the people in your life who you know really well um you know maybe it’s your partner
maybe it’s your best friend I hope you can buy a better present for them than some other app developer or some game designer could and the reason why you can is it’s all the the you know you might say it’s subconscious related stuff but it’s actually because you understand their personality you understand um sort of their their the Mind behind the person um you know how like culturally what are they like personality what are they like um yeah emotions are a part of that cognitive landscape but it’s not everything you know sometimes if you overweigh on emotions because emotions
are fleeting they come and go like clouds you know but some people have emotional Styles so that’s a little bit more interesting so solston tends to focus on what are the what are the enduring things about a person you know and that’s the thing like your interests change so you know your best friend knows you from high school and they’re like yeah you know what um uh like he loves these these CDs these are like really cool CDs that he it’s like if you just keep that static image of that person it’s like that’s they’re probably not first off CDs are maybe not a relevant technology anymore but maybe
this person is like I saw this thing on like in like South Korea where like CD players are coming back for like some people so it’s like maybe they’re really into that style or that fashion but like you’d have to really know the person to know that about them and know that that’s you know that’s interesting so what we’re able to do is basically like a lot of designers product developers come to us um like the former VP of strategy at Activision she was like I felt like um I would have like five crayons to build things but after solston I have like all the crayons and I know that my
audience really likes magenta and teal and yellow uh and then I can use those colors to craft something that I know is going to be really really cool so that the the hard part about this is is you know what a lot of people uh I was going to interrupt you but this is a great way to interrupt you all right Luke says I have a range of physical prop board games murder mystery games Luke hit me up dude I love this stuff I get 40 000 website users per
month and over 10 000 people have asked to be on my email list for when I release the next game consolson give me good info what types of apps games these people might use if I build it yeah yeah that’s that’s the answer yes yeah perfect use case so like we would we would assess um that that list or that audience and we’d literally be able to give you an order um themes IPS tropes um basically you’re starting from their their Center so that’s like that’s an
exact use case I love it I got one more question for you Joe but before we get into that question let’s do some app Audits and I like to start off every app audit with some dad jokes [Music] all right Joe you’re the guest got it ready to go all right you know so so I I was briefed that this might be a part of this and I’m gonna be honest um we’re I don’t know if anyone has watched the the great on Hulu
um there’s there’s a phenomenal dad joke that happens at some point in that show and I was like I need to go find that joke and then got by the wayside so I was like okay I have to rely on just some of the classics which um I mean my favorite probably is super lame um what are the plates say to the other plate what lunch is on me all right I like it it’s brutal all right we’ll let the audience decide yeah all right Joe I got this uh what do you call
a group of fat babies I know I’m going there all right heavy infantry infantry I said it wrong there you go all right all right put as if you thought my joke was better put J if you thought those joke was better and then yo we’re playing for dinner all right whenever we see each other our drinks okay so the people put in the comments and then if you want to for us to look at your app on a future live stream we
do have a long way but just go to appmasters.com audit all right well let’s take a look at Eric oh that’s why Eric’s here all right Eric we’re looking at Eric’s I have all right this is Eric Schneider he’s been asking all the questions Joe try to pick some games for you as well okay he’s got this tiny and then Eric says keyword optimization this is my most popular game and it’s published by Blue Ox and it seems like it has enough installs and daily users that we should be able to do better I’m
hoping you can give some advice on some keyword ideas I might be interested okay and some consultation okay all that other stuff we can talk about one-on-one cool keyword optimization you have you want to start anywhere so let me I’m actually like I’m just gonna open up our product um so crosswords I think yeah maybe maybe just to start here so how we would typically approach something like this because it’s a it’s it’s a crossword puzzle game yeah yeah tiny little crosswords so what we would do is we’d
we’d launch an audience of people that play crossword games and we’d start to look at at the data so I’m going to pull up on the back end um our one of our it might take a second I’m going to message one of our Engineers okay um to make sure access to it but I’d want to look at like in our case we have broad genre so this would fit under a puzzle so what I want to look at is um first off uh what is someone kind of from a creative perspective what resonates with these people what other types of games they play in what other
IPR that interacting that’s where I’m going to start before I start to go to keywords um the reason for that is when we see uh creative optimization that accounts for about 50 of your marketing Roi compared to keyword uh keyword optimization ends up being and this might be different for your product specifically but in that case we tend to focus on that first so I would want to be looking at your like your your key icon um doing some testing there some of those screens that’s where we’d want to start and we’d want to be doing that off
of some of the values so let me get I’ll get the puzzle audience up and show you guys what what some of those things are or tell you guys what some of those things are um and in terms of keywords if we’re looking at puzzle um let me get let me get back on because that we actually in the product um we drop uh keywords and copy words based on the psychology of the audience so if you can give me one second I’ll open up the product for the time from an SEO perspective for Eric look Eric I agree with Joe completely because that’s
the first thing I notice in crossword I’ve got some experience in it like it is going to be hard for you to rank so you’re gonna have to figure out like Beyond ASO what is it what’s the funnel and so just one part of the funnel it doesn’t have to be an entire funnel right we work with a lot of clients that use rely on meta Apple search ads Tick Tock You Name It Whatever ad Channel that’s out there they they focus on it so I don’t think it’s too much of a keyword play for you given that the competition is very very heavy the thing that you can try to test out is you’re
not utilizing the US app store is indexed by nine other localizations including Spanish Mexico which we’ve used for so long you know Arabic Vietnamese I think French too look it up I’ve got some videos on it but you want to put a different subtitle in the Spanish Mexico if us is a primary Market you want to have different subtitles in there different you know title to to try to optimize for it but again I kind of agree with Joe here like the visuals is what I would probably lean on because I
just don’t think from uh keyword ASO purely organic downloads perspective you’re going against some of the behemoths out there so the other tricks I can tell you is maybe lead with crosswords versus not and so that’s one way to do it because we have seen autofill work pretty well for other clients where they’re not ranking high for that primary keyword but they are showing up for the autofill of that primary word might be another way to kind of tackle this part but you had the data for me
um yeah unfortunately I’m we we just migrated our whole demo system that has all this stuff and I’m talking to the the engineer right now I think what what I’d be happy to do is send this over separately so we’re not like taking too much time here um but I think I could just from from recall and memory I can I can tell you this so um I do I do know that people that play puzzle um if we look at their key motivators so we look at things like
status orientation we look at things like um uh eagerness to learn a lot of different traits the number one trait that we see from a just an intrinsic motivation perspective um with with puzzle games in general is this trait called pride and productivity so it’s literally a motivation for how much have I done and achieved and can I be proud about that afterwards so when we look at like word optimization whether it’s in and I kind of look at just in the copy you know if we say like
a little crossword with a big twist can you figure it out where where I’m coming from is how are we actually targeting key key motivators so is there anything in here that you’re actually going to pull on some of those strings from a motivational perspective and like um you know the the tiny little crossword for example um what I what I would guess is and I would love to see this audience I’d love to actually look at who they are because that’s what we tend to lean on science but it’s probably a lot of people who are optimizing from a Time perspective
and getting that feeling of like being productive if and working with smaller smaller crosswords and they can check you know do more do more and less time so if we’re thinking of of the words that we’re using to optimize for that I think that you know anything that’s around you know um achieve accomplish get things done um if you’re just thinking of the actual copy itself and then in terms of like uh doing an actual um audit from a search perspective that’s like a much bigger activity where
you’re gonna have to I mean you’re gonna have to employ I think someone like Steve what I would love to do is give Steve someone like our product so he’s actually able to do that work and then look at the motivations of of that group and understand who they are and then understand what they’re actually going out and searching so it’s very hard to actually know that without understanding the the different aspects of that that audience so I know that wasn’t that’s not super helpful because I don’t literally have this up to look at it I’m not just going to give you flaky advice
either no I agree I I’m not like that either there Eric says well yeah that makes sense in TLC users tiny little crosswords thanks Eric I had to do the abbreviation for you complete puzzle packs and daily puzzles I see in my solitaire card games that users love statistics and see how they’ve done also yeah exactly so so if you look at like we had one puzzle game for example that wasn’t doing as well um but their IP was geared a little bit differently so we looked at that audience and um that that company had uh they had
personas and they called them completionists so um you know completionism isn’t really a trade as much as it is a behavior like we complete things we enjoy so to speak and so we looked at their psychology of this game and this group had really high levels of status orientation so actually in the other game where they were not completing stuff it was the same user IDs like just add some stuff where you know hey you’re on a leaderboard now there’s high levels of status Etc and that’s part of what made that game unique is they were able to sort of acquire this this abnormal
group in the puzzle space that had high status orientation but what I’ve seen like literally with every single puzzle game we’ve worked on um is a high motivation in general for pride in productivity and so that’s where yeah showing basically letting people be proud of of how they’ve been productive so what are the tropes and mechanics you can use there and then how do you actually place that so when you go to place that in the creative what I would want to see with like tidy little crosswords is who’s your market now and
then based on that we could get an idea of who are the other what other products that they’re using what are the experiences that they’re they’re engaged with and then from from that we get an idea of like the Delta of the bigger Market that’s there and maybe some of the if we think of a Venn diagram um what are some of the art styles or themes like we gotta have a lot of black and white going on right there that might be great but we might also see that there’s other things we can do I know I mentioned that DragonVale example with going from red baby dragon to baby dragon following you know kind of with
family and that was 34 conversion increase on top of anything they’ve done in eight years this is like a game that made hundreds of millions of dollars so in that in that sense like a lot can happen from those things first and then those things provide I think a lot of the foundation for I kind of view like the the keyword stuff as like that comes after we take care of um I really think creative optimization are that like that’s the foundation that’s the the basement level
um that that we want to build and then we can build build on top of that so I would rather you um not be kind of like squeezing the last parts of the lemon juice out and really kind of getting to the the fundamental yeah I mean one thing I can say too with air for Eric is like using some of that knowledge that Joe has just talked about and putting it on the onboarding because the onboarding was like do you want a tutorial and then boom right and one of the best practices Eric is having your paywall during the onboarding you don’t really have a paywall because besides like this unlock all puzzles here but you can you know
lean in on the motivation of like you know get more done in less time type of thing and then do you want to unlock all your puzzles because the first the onboarding experience is where most people are going to buy and so I would probably put that in here and okay good I have I see this so I like this I think I don’t know how you feel about this joke but I don’t almost want its own individual paywall I like the the showing two options that’s what I was hoping he would do but I almost want like this to be a nice visual element
because it feels it’s bland to me but I don’t know if that’s going to impact anything so what yeah what what so is is this maybe to ask a question um when you when you surface this what point do you surface it in the experience right and is this the is it just kind of a sub like it’s a one-time purchase on a long time purchase yeah it looks like it’s someone and is that it we just yeah so I clicked on like World of entertainment and so for those who might just be listening to the podcast we’re in the app and we’re trying to
unlock one of the puzzle pieces and then what Eric has done is says you can unlock all for one for ten dollars or buy just that pack for which I like I wanted to see it but at the same time I’d almost want a visual not just a little apple alert you know pop-up you like the push notification pop-ups that you have the HTT pop-ups that’s what it looks like right now yeah so so I think on on RN you know with with these types we obviously like to get something to move more towards some sort of
subscription it’s just a better business model agreed for you so that’s you know I think actually going back and thinking about your business model because this is nice when you’re a startup like you got to bring in money you’re there’s something that’s there that’s but it’s long term you know it’s it’s it’s going to have a limit it’s gonna have an upper limit and what we talk about a lot is like high value conversion items so you can actually think of it as a and you might already know this high value conversion puzzle so what you actually would want to understand is like what
puzzle within this experience is actually the puzzle that is converting the most and if you think of kind of building a journey for your your audience from day Zero like when is it how do you nurture them into that puzzle and then if you think of like you’re thinking about this in terms of like time to Value so where where on that Journey do they get to that puzzle and then after that puzzle are we surfacing a high value conversion moment or high value conversion item in this case you can already start with with an offer to you know hey maybe you
want to unlock this but what we also see is you know based on different like with puzzle games for example based on different personality types one of the biggest challenges is difficulty uh tuning so we’ll see people that are like really high on resilience tend to convert after they’ve like failed like four times um and then people that are really low on psychological resilience um they’ll they’ll churn if something’s too difficult for them so we had a we had one um actual it was a word puzzle
game and their day seven retention uh it was like around 15 it went up to 27 because all they did was difficulty tune so they just made sure that that high value conversion moment was based off of kind of challenge so I think what you can do is if you don’t want to be super sophisticated about that um you know even if you don’t use a customer like solston sending out a basic survey to your customers getting an idea of education level can actually go a really long way if you’re average
like if your average education level in the game is somebody with a Masters or PhD and you go to like a high value conversion moment it’s probably going to be you’re going to want to focus on a more challenging puzzle and how are you nurturing them into that more challenging puzzle earlier on um because oh it’s tough this is really fun I want to buy more versus hey our average user is uh is a high school student or um you know they’re they’re maybe in their 40s but they um they only graduated they did some college for
example and so I think what you want to really discover is what is your high value conversion moment and then ideally what’s your high value conversion item and what sort of subscription might you be able to create out of uh out of this like we’ve in game since we think of it as like a battle pass I love it and he does ever versions of doing or visions of doing subscriptions for my next game awesome Eric’s ultimate yeah Eric does work I have a friend of mine has a crossword puzzle and he does subscription he’s just pretty well in the app space so yeah I think the the
main thing we see is like these these types of games they just have upper limits because we’ll have smaller companies come to us and say hey we’re we’re looking for a publisher or you know here’s where we’re at what do we do and we’ve been getting some traction and usually like there there’s Revenue that’s there and it and it looks good but the big guys think we’re like if you look at an Activision or a supercell you know they’re thinking they’re like this game has to make at least a billion dollars and then there’s a certain level of architecture that that game has to have to support that that so I kind of look at as an
entrepreneur’s Journey like these types of products are um what they really are and I think what you have Eric is like I think of it as like product sentiment fit where you have like you’ve captured a really powerful sentiment within the market and then you’re generating Revenue within that and then it’s like yeah of course how do you how do you even take that gravitas yeah and channel that into your billion dollar product so if we think of like um calm as a as an app example
um they actually the first thing that they released was a web application that you had to hold your mouse still for like two minutes yeah and then if you held your yeah if you held your mouth still you could share it on social media um and that was what they used to kind of convert people through that um backflip games is another example so this reminds me of I think it was called Paper Toss so I’m I’m good friends with Julian who founded backflip and uh Paper Toss was literally like uh I think buy
it for 99 cents when it started out and all you did was you know throw paper into like a basket yeah it was kind of like pretty simple game kind of Addicting um they had that well a lot of people don’t know is that’s a big part of how they generated a lot of the organic underflow for DragonVale so I think what’s cool about you know being an entrepreneur being in the space what you know Eric I think just understanding what audience you’ve already captured that other people haven’t been able to capture and then that helps you build
that Journey out for them and that helps you create your Universe I think going back to idfa and a lot of the problems that are happening there um what we see is this is part of why game companies are acquiring more games because then they can keep them in their universe so the next level of competition is going to be about what is the universe of audience that you know is like Disney versus Nintendo you can think of it on a micro level like if you understand tiny crossword people better than anyone else well what’s the next adjacent thing so you’re building out the affinities of that audience and
really thinking about you know if you’re if you’re having in-app purchases um it’s nice to sort of think like Disneyland you you buy the ticket to go to Disneyland um if you’re Kanye and Beyonce you can stay in the tower for forty thousand dollars a night you know which I think they do like once a year but like there’s Club 33 I think that costs like 250 000 a year to stay to subscribe to Club 33 membership you know and that’s that restaurant but it’s like you can also bring a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and some water and enjoy the
park and so they’re able able to convert across different price tiers and so almost like going into you know I love the idea where you’re going with your next experience but thinking in terms of like how are you converting across across different price tiers um and then that way you’re able to cater to a lot of different revenue and income streams um and this seems like to me this seems like a really kind of cool um viral product that you’re actually able to build and make money off of right now yeah nothing happened Eric
after I finished that puzzle nothing happened like you didn’t give me that moment to share kind of like home did right like they do hey finish this meditation you can they can share it on social media and tons of people are sharing on social media all right yeah that’s a really good one just to add on that Steve because that was a great idea I don’t want to let it slip all right that’s that pride and productivity piece so we said that that was one of the major motivations for puzzle people hey I did this many puzzles and this you know today and they’re able to that’s literally letting them show that pride and productivity well and you know know
it was because of what you were saying too Joe that I was like yo all your because I am that type of person you know I wanna you know I played pickleball and I was like I want to get a medal on this like thing you know I want first I want metal and I needed that for for me for you know the metal is important so and you’re just giving me a check mark and I’m like Eric I I want to feel bride in this and you’re just giving me a little check mark for this like come on give me something exactly yeah I finally I finally I got
the the dash I got it from our engineer I got the dashboard up if you guys want to just know like maybe just some of their interest categories I can drop that so if you look at the so this is interesting so we look at just the puzzle space in in general there’s there’s seven major Persona so think of it as Harry Potter seven major groups that we see this is a living breathing thing and if we look across the the market um the biggest group contains about 152 million people
um probably the group that that I’m really interested in is um there’s this group that’s about 109 million people um but they have a little bit higher uh what we call player centered score so I’m gonna jump in and I’m going to talk about some of their their activities and and interests here uh real quick you can’t share what you’re seeing and yeah unfortunately yeah unfortunately okay I wish I could um you know so if you look at like the other games that they’re playing there’s a lot of like this I think this is
really interesting so this would include you know people that are playing these sort of games but there’s a lot of like homescapes gardenscapes um of course there’s Sudoku in there but like wordscapes Words With Friends um merge Mansion so what we always say like from a categorical perspective when you start to see certain patterns in a space like home skates gardenscapes merge you know you can take tropes from some of those categories and interject them into what you’re doing and it can create a really really cool unique experience um education wise basically pretty much
all of these um groups have at least college degrees um you know Masters Master’s level so I think that’s really interesting if we’ve got like the top traits for I would say like this is probably one of the highest LTV groups in the that has still like a big population size pretty high pretty high motivation for um fearlessness um meaning like what we see from a conversion perspective is are they allowed to take risks in that experience
um so where are the moments where what we see um with conversion moments too with people with fearlessness hey this is this is a challenger puzzle this is one of our toughest puzzles if you buy X um it’s going to help you on your journey through this puzzle so you know is there is there something there that can happen that’s usually a big conversion moment that might be one more thing you could add from a purchase perspective that might be you know outside of being able to unlock everything um so yeah maybe there’s some some high
level stuff there that’s kind of interesting I love it Joe I was thinking like Eric’s giving away a lot of hints like you know the high motivation like the high reward type of the the fearlessness I’m just like that was the initial thing I kept happening I was like look that’s a lot of freaking hints that you’re giving away and it doesn’t feel like it’s a challenge to me anymore given that you’re giving away so many hints like I don’t know as you were talking about that I was like this is what I felt when I initially saw this the number of hints it was a 80. I was
like that feels like a lot yeah that’s that’s a lot of hints and so that’s like that’s a perfect example of of that fearlessness motivation so if you let people know like hey this is a really hard hard one or this is a challenging one and if you buy a hint you get your hint package so like let me let me buy x amount of hints um that’s going to be pretty cool and that also would be a really nice friction point to get people into buying the if you want to go for the full
purchase like oh you know what I paid for so many hints in the last couple weeks like I should just buy the whole thing like if that’s kind of if that business model worked for you but think hints are something that you can definitely definitely leverage all right I love it all right you’re in time we challenge your puzzle love it so all great so all right Joe you’re gonna have to trust me here but I tallied up the score as we’re going through now one by one vote all right so I was up by two and then barely won by one so James
thanks to you I won the first round all right well let’s go into round two where’s my sound effects all right Joe you want me to go first you want to go first I’ll let you go first this time okay I I do have one more that I pulled up this one isn’t that good all right a caveman and a bear walk into a bar bartender says okay what’s your story caveman replies bear with me
all right um I think I’m like I got I got some on my phone and I’m like these are just all so bad oh me too I take literally screenshots my family like they’ll hear the screenshot know he’s like oh dad found a dad joke all right um why don’t scientists trust atoms why they make up everything all right same thing same rules okay Jrs Hey Joe I do want to ask you this like of the questionnaires what do you feel
like is the one most important thing so I’m sure the audience would love to use soulston but if there’s like something that we can start acting in putting into getting like user feedback what’s the one question that you feel like reveals so much more about a person or about an audience yeah yeah yeah so so and so and so a lot of people have always kind of like defaulted to NPS and also I’ll start with what doesn’t work and what does what it does tell you um so I think like you know when you ask
hey would you share this experience with a friend How likely are you to do that right um you know typically what we actually see is some of the best products um early on can have um actually some like pretty bad NPS scores um and we actually see sometimes some of the most engaged players um write the worst store reviews so like when we were at big fish like skating reviews one star I don’t trust the developers this company’s we’d go back and look at that person and go
hey this guy’s one of our top Spenders you know so I think what you’re what you actually need to be more interested in is is how much do people care and so as a part of that um we looked at emotions for example and in game engagement and said could we see anything from this and what we actually saw was you know are you happy with the experience so the more happy people were when they when they played games or engaged with with apps I actually had nothing to do with uh LTV of of the customer in fact it show nothing so what
we actually saw did though was how labile emotions were meaning did they have highs and lows and so like kind of looking at your product as what you’re going for is a heartbeat you want a living thing only dead things have flat lines so we want something that is actually giving people of course we don’t want you know crazy super lows but don’t take it personally when you get that worst review ever that might be someone who really cared so one of the questions that we like on um on the ux side of things and we measure this this
ux metric called in durability in durability is the likelihood that a person is going to engage in your spirit experience over a long period of time what’s so cool about this endurability metric is that when we actually collect because we integrate with most of the games we work with so we actually get to see the LTV data from the game and what’s really cool about endurability is over 90 of the time this metric is actually correlating with LTV and we’re talking like actual long-term LTV so
we’ll have games that we work with early on and they say hey these you know these are our power users these are our best users and we’ll look at them and like that’s Persona too let’s look at Persona 4. um Persona 4 actually has a higher in durability level with your game I bet yeah when it comes to day 300 they’re going to outspend the ones you’re talking about right now day 300 comes around and like we’ve seen it for five years in a row now sure enough it happened again they outspent them and so what what question
can you ask well this is now where we get into soulston territory where you know surveys so if you ask one question of a person this is part of the problem with nps2 um we talk about things like construct validity so am I measuring what I intend to measure reliability if I ask you that question now and in a year from now are you going to answer the same or differently like if I ask you for example how happy are you um let’s say you say on a scale of one to ten and you say eight okay like that
might that might be that and I ask you again in a year from now and you say six that’s not good reliability we’re we’re changing sort of things and of course like your happiness is is going to be changing that question actually has very poor construct validity as well for measuring happiness so we know that when you ask someone how happy they are it’s actually not indicative at all if anything the one thing where it gets a little bit of signal for is actually Indulgence so people that on average tend to say they’re happier when asked tend to be slightly more indulgent than
people that that don’t but there’s a lot of better questions to measure Indulgence so what I’m going to give you guys is a freebie so a question that what we tend to look at is like what are items when we say items we mean questions that perform really well to measure certain things the reality is is you need to typically ask multiple questions to actually get at an accurate measure of a thing so you can’t just say here’s the one question but one question if I was to say if you want to better understand you know is is this going well or not you want to ask in in your
way how worthwhile is something to somebody that’s probably the most powerful question you can ask related to product because that loads on in durability as a construct and what you’re actually understanding by by asking how worthwhile something is you’re asking them not about relevance um not about did they click it and go into it uh we we did this with one of it’s a massive IP uh we were optimizing some creative for them based on their
Their audience and they came to us and they said this is our best performing creative it’s got like like millions and millions of installs and the cpis are ridiculously low well so we’re talking about relevance we’re talking about novelty here and so what’s the problem I said well the return on ad spends abysmal like the people that do install from it from it don’t spend um we looked at the creative and what was there and there was literally zero resonance zero in durability in terms of the people that were coming in the
product Market fit was very very off so it was showing something very different than what the experience was and I said we want to make creative that yes this may be incredible from a CPI perspective from an install perspective but you got two options either you’re changing the game and the game is already a big game that was really profitable um doing really well or where you know going back and changing the creative what do you want to do change the creative so we want to do is find creatives or early experiences that are enduring So like um Eric back to your crossword puzzle if you went through all
your different levels and you had your customers and you said you know which of these levels is the most worthwhile for you that’s going to be really good Insight in terms of of what is actually the one experience in there that they’re gonna that’s gonna keep them coming back over a long period of time and that that’s back to my Disneyland example you want to build Disneyland you want people coming back in two years spending money and being like yeah this is still great this is we still love this because once if they’re in your Universe still that allows you to build other products and
move them through your uh Universe which is pretty cool I love that worthwhile I love it I’ve already clipped it up so we’re gonna definitely show that all right Joe you won this last round so we’re tired but let’s get into the other Eric’s app real quick and see if we can zoom past this but he he wants driving you and becoming profitable so Eric’s the other Eric Benoit I think he’s got this ballpark deal and it’s a rental property calculator so here I’m gonna pull up the iOS version here and then
you wanna you wanna say look you’re a big creative guy so I’m gonna hold here and let you take the floor Joe yeah so I guess like I’m gonna have some I’m gonna have more questions before I have answers so uh earlier rental calculator ballpark deal all right so who is there what we usually notice with with apps like this is there’s usually a specific Market that you’ve been able to capture early on can you tell me what you might know about them so far yeah so
Eric’s here we launched we just launched subscriptions last week okay congrats Eric and then we’ll get I’m gonna assume it’s for like these Airbnb people let’s see what he says is this this US market is it a certain State um good question Real Estate Investors and agents in the in the US and is it people buying rental properties I’m gonna assume it’s yeah 95 U.S okay and
is it a certain certain State and do you know anything demographically about them either like age range you like to know it all on Joe well it’s it’s you know this this comes back to it’s what what we don’t want to do is Cowboy uh Cowboy marketing and cowboy ux um I mean what’s a cowboy analogy from sorry you can go you can Google it type in like all right type in cowboy ux okay um and cowboy ux or Cowboy marketing is
jumping in jumping to conclusions without really understanding the the market who it’s for um what their core needs are like what are their pain points what so if you were to work with soulston we’re going to ask you a lot of these questions you know beforehand and we’re going to take what you know and then and we’ll get to like some there’s General heuristics that we you know things we can do here but really what what we don’t want to do is just like hey here’s advice and here’s unsolicited advice that is an opinion so if we look at like what the
approach we would take at Solstice all maybe I’ll start there and then we can jump in the product so right now if we’re looking at rental calculator he says I don’t know but likely 35 to 55 and he is a cowboy we work with Cowboys too so and and we we kind of go more towards the the calculator approach so like if we’re looking at rental calculator um you know ballpark deal and we’re starting with iconography color everything that’s here the first thing that soulston is going to do is say well
you know who’s using this right now and we’d want to actually send out our assessment to them to get an idea of who they are and then we’d want to know like your competitors and what the bigger part like what else are they using and how we start to take over that as well yeah he says it’s a tool to analyze whether a rental property would be profitable or not decide whether it should buy or not super super cool and so like my first first question is is that you know do you know if um these are just people that are straight up going for rental properties or do you have a Airbnb part of this segment too
yeah deal check is the competitor deal checks the competitor okay I mean I would lead with that right like I don’t know Joe you tell me but like Eric said tool to analyze whether a rental property will be profitable and then it’s kind of like you’re not saying that you know what I mean like you told me that but you’re not seeing that in the screenshots yeah so the the steps you want to go through without seeing what solston says is first you start with your ICP who is my ideal customer profile you have to know that better
than your competitor the second you have to know what are their pain points so what are the what are the pains that you know hey it’s I don’t know if this rental property is going to be profitable or not um and then what you do so if you’re thinking the top of your funnel top of funnel is all about building interests and then addressing pain once you’ve done that well now you get to your value prop we do this at X percent better or this X percent faster or whatever that is and so when we look at like the screenshots that’s what I that’s the journey I’d want to be going through so
we just purely look at the the business and you probably already have a lot of intuition around this like what are the from your ideal customer profile what are their biggest pains I think Steve was already touching that what are their biggest pains and it’s kind of like screen to screen at the screen think of that actually as a user Journey I’m going left to right and it’s like um you know find out how much a property is is worth uh you know or or know what’s the best deal if we look at the the calculator start
stuff so I’m just speaking from my past career as a ux director at Big agencies we deal with something called cognitive load a lot and what what we’re starting with here is a very high cognitive load so people kind of what you want to do is this thing called Progressive disclosure so if you are able to interact with this calculator that’s awesome but let’s do that towards the end after we’ve really driven home the value props I’m seeing these like value props that are you know calculate cash flow for a rental property I want to get hit with my key
pain point so hard in that first thing and then same with um you know iconography this is you’re kind of hearing a theme here so back to this is from Neil Nielsen and all the research they have creative optimization accounts for 50 of your marketing and what’s there all the other stuff if we’re talking about brand keyword optimization targeting that’s all the other 50 and brand um I always say this is a new startups um brand is you know if you look at big companies apples these kind of groups
it’s all about brand brand is the privilege you get to focus on when you get past you know 20 30 50 million in Revenue um that’s when brand starts to be the thing before then it’s all about the fundamentals and so what I would do is see Steve nodding his head but like what I want to do before that is look at like the icon here I see a house and a calculator but what is what is there from a a brand perspective that’s also you know or not
from a but from a pain point perspective that’s pulling me in and so I would want to probably iterate on on that a little bit and I would want to definitely iterate on um the value props that are shown with uh with these different images here and then I think there’s a lot you can do um with you know keyword optimization and things like that post posts getting that done yeah I mean I’d like to go on the fomo or like the fear aspect of
things when I’m thinking about marketing company and it’s almost like I don’t want to lose money right like you want to invest smartly you want to really figure out know the numbers you know these are things that I’m fearful of if I’m gonna go into real estate I’m like hey is this going to be profitable for me am I going to lose money and that’s it yeah everything else like you know it’s like doing your taxes you I never want to do it right like I’m just like and this feels that way there’s a lot going on here yeah I think you know um like like compare it maybe
to like what is it called um air DNA I know that’s you can you can go and look and discover um you know what what features should be in an Airbnb how do you make air bnbs profitable that’s right it’s it’s kind of like it’s the same so one of the things you can do is look at you know who are good tech companies good competitors what are their value props to obviously can you can do that but what how you’re going to really win in the market like what we would do at solston is we would
say let’s launch an audience of people that do real estate investment and when we look through we look for a really interesting group of people that um you know use more apps use technology and then we’d start to focus on their motivations and sort of your point Steve you know if if they’re you know um higher on on things like extroversion if they do have more risk-taking aspects to them fomo can be great fomo can also turn off some audiences too though so
you know a lot of times we we play with those insights and we a B test um part of I think you know before knowing the audience it’s it’s a it’s a ye who experiments the fastest wins so you know I don’t know how many people you have going through this but one of your goals early on is to get your get that top of funnel of when we think of marketing you need to create that inflow of people and then test test test test test that’s how backflip games got to
the red baby dragon you know they start to get people going through that installing and then they see wow red baby dragon’s performance performing better than anything else let’s get red baby dragon in there that icon’s like that that first thing that sort of brings people into the the product and I’m like is is a calculator with a home on it if I I think of is this the best rental property because what you’re playing with is metaphor here so your symbol is a value prop for what I should be doing is is that symbol telling me that I’m
going to be able to to get this and then in the first screen is what’s the imagery in there is that the aha moment from that so I think that there’s a lot from there that you can already play with and getting people through and just a b testing and I could see like things getting better there but the second part is you know even if you’re not working with a solsten calling up like a lot of the big games and big apps that get launched in the United States they literally start so small like there’s a um a game called toy blast
that was made by a bunch of Turkish developers and they found a group of women who are like in their 40s who like no joke um their favorite movie was Dirty Dancing and favorite book was the Bible and they’re like we are gonna make something just for this group of people and so if you look at like I would look at who are your current like high engage users and I would call them up and I would get to know them if you haven’t already I’d get to know them incredibly well he’s got 5K people using in a month yeah so that’s awesome
have you done have you done a survey with them yet I started asking them about their their behaviors and who they are and where they get the most value from your product and what moments are are really powerful worthwhile as as we said earlier so I’m going to go into the app itself and then I got a heart stop in five minutes so I’m gonna go through this real quick for you Eric but yes he said long way back but Eric like when I went to the app you’re just loading me right into the calculator you want to have an onboarding experience we have this case study of an app where he was just
putting his paywall one of the best practice show your paywall during the onboarding process and he was just showing his paywall he’s making money by the way and then he added to what Joe’s been talking about a lot of more benefit oriented stuff more psychological stuff like make a resume that wins interviews yes that’s exactly what you want a recruiter tested CV maker model resumes templates built to impress and then he showed the paywall and he saw a 234 increase and this is for one of his smaller apps but as some of his biggest
app he’s seen like a 30 increase so you want to have an onboarding process and show that paywall during the at the end of it I love apps like these Joe because it’s so niche that you should understand your users like in and out right like you know the benefits and the more Niche it is because it’s rental property calculator that’s where there’s High intent High engagement the 5 000 monthly users you’re not even asking for a review and also like higher conversions and so I
think you’re charging a little bit too low but I don’t know the market any well that well but oh it’s 20 bucks a month okay that’s not bad I put a yearly option here’s what I found for my data Eric I believe in the rule of Threes I believe you should have three plans one you can have the monthly plan you should have a yearly plan and then you should have a complete decoy plan that gets them in either into the monthly or the yearly whatever your highest LTV plan is going to be because we’ve seen the more plans you have this is a yes or no decision if you have
those three plans like I laid out it’s either where’s the value I’m because it’s a niche app I’m already coming in with the intent and there’s High intent High conversions so let them choose which one is the most valuable for them and for an app like this I would actually explore a weekly option because weekly options are starting to because I have to assume this person might be in a deal in a rush I need a calculator I don’t want to put spreadsheets anymore so think about a weekly option I’d go weekly monthly and yearly and then I
force people depending on your LTV maybe monthly makes sense but force people into either the weekly or the yearly plan they tend to have longer LTV than the monthly plan yeah and just to add to what Steve said just already what’s on here like finally a rental calculator that works if I got hit with that like in that first kind of opening up of the the screen yeah I’m already so much like this is actually I would be one of your your customers for this so I’d be someone who would download this and probably look at it and if I got hit with that I’m way more likely to to get in and totally
agree with what Steve said we want people to get into the yearly plans ideally and so you know you can price that out in a way that that makes it look very appealing to get into a yearly plan exactly exactly it’s 100 bucks for a year and then this I love this message I’m at 42 properties and about to close on three more I’ve used this app to evaluate each one like it’s perfect like the social proof you use a lot of properties if it’s working for him cool you know what I mean yeah what’s what’s what we talked about before addressing pain point so you’re using your own user
pain Point lots of properties okay then there what is the value prop so that the user is doing it for you so I really like that yeah one of the things I like to do too Joe is like I like to go into my competitors app and just read through the reviews and see what people love and people what people don’t like and then I I can then sort of it gives me inspiration in terms of like what I can use I forgot what they called it uh but it’s like what kind of messaging I can put in to my app yep and I think that’s
that’s where solsten you know a lot that people come to us at that stage like I think you can get pretty far through um working with competitors and what’s there but when you’re it’s like everyone’s heard this you know if you’re always swimming you know to the to the gold medalist you’ll always be the silver medalist and if you talk to Michael Phelps and said hey you know who are you competing against he no one himself and so what we really want like is what Steve like I think what you’re saying if you’re you know if you have a if you have a small budget um looking at competitors is a great way
to get you know uplift uh and and move your metrics but soulston’s really in the interest of um we’re interested in making billion dollar companies we want to help people get big and we want to help people maintain those and so what we don’t want to do is limit that for you so then the way that happens is with you understand the pain points and the value props better than those people and you might have something that they don’t have and so we want you to be able to own that and then they’re looking to you because you’re the bigger competitor
um to them so that being said totally totally agree though when you get that or like if you go on their Instagram page sometimes and look at hey which posts did people like the most of that you can rip that out and and leverage something like that so those are like those are I think very um it’s like the first stage of the business very entrepreneurial experimental let’s get this to at least a baseline but then that next stage of the business You’re Gonna Want To Know Your audience better than than they know theirs I love it the website is
stolson.io solstice.io if you know how to spell it don’t worry it’s already linked up in your favorite podcast app or your YouTube description and I have it pulled up right here as well Joe if the audience wants to connect with you in any other way do you want to send them anywhere else yeah you can I mean you can connect with me on LinkedIn um and definitely respond respond there otherwise if you’re like interested in kind of what your own profile might look like we did a pro bono thing during covet it’s just wellbeing.solston dot IO and you can actually see your site
profile so that’s not a it’s not an Adaptive test like the one we sent out and it’s a bit longer but it’s actually it’s a medical grade test um it’s Anonymous so you just get an ID at the end it actually doesn’t take any identity no email this is not a marketing funnel for us it’s literally just your chance to the same thing you would spend like a thousand dollars at seeing a psychologist um we just put it out there for free because people were struggling during covet and we just kept it up as a way you can see like your motivations your
personality stuff it’s kind of cool that’s really neat and then Eric says thank you Steve and Joe yeah I’ll link up the well-being but Joe’s LinkedIn profile is linked up into the show notes he’s got shorter hair so you might even be like this is the same yeah he’s got shorter hair the beard beard and longer here right now so yeah same person though yo this is such an enlightening conversation man I really it was definitely worthwhile my friend thank you so much for coming on and doing this thank you guys and go
check out solston.io as well all right that’s it oh all right next week we’re going to have let me just plug next week real quick uh oh yeah we’re gonna have a friend of mine who’s an indie developer very successful we’re gonna really break down some of the copy some of the strategies that he shared with me in terms of like winning back users ASO everything you need from an indie developer he’s done really well so we’re gonna have him on he agreed to come on and share some of the stuff that I’ve already started sharing for him so let’s see what he’s
gonna be on next week join us every Friday at 9am Pacific thank you Joe for going a little bit longer than usual people are still here so I love it thank you so much all right have a good weekend see you guys bye