| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ngi0ds51oYU |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kty4yphk5hx06d96wzymffp4 |
| Readwise ID | 01kty4yphk5hx06d96wzymffp4 |
| Date | 2025-06-24 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ngi0ds51oYU/sddefault.jpg |
[Music] [Music] Welcome back to SubHub, the podcast where we dive into the strategies behind standout app businesses. Today Iām joined by Steve Young, founder of Appmasters, an app marketing agency thatās helped thousands of indie developers and app teams unlock massive downloads without massive budgets. Steve
also hosts the number one mobile app business podcast and a popular YouTube channel where he shares tips on marketing growth and app store optimization for todayās mobile economy. In this episode, we delve into Steveās signature approach to app growth. From ASO and the power of influencer marketing to the importance of datadriven decision-making, we break down the exact strategies that work when youāre starting from zero. Whether youāre an indie developer or part of a larger team, Steveās insights offer valuable strategies to elevate your app success. Hereās my chat with Steve. All right, first things first, I think we want to welcome Steve Young to the show. Welcome. Welcome to Subhub. Thank you,
man. Thanks for having me. Iām super excited. Of course. Yeah, me too. So, today I think weāre going to be covering um something kind of specific and hopefully very useful to our both of our audiences. And itās really about kind of growth hacking and and how to get uh you know get your app in front of more people and and get it to be more successful. I think I actually talked to Vitality about this exact strategy, but for those who arenāt familiar, this is what I call the greatest growth hack in the world. And itās really meant for zero to one strategies, Ben. I think if youāre established app, you donāt need to think about all this stuff. But if
youāre a zero to one app, youāre just trying to find some traction for your app. Itās early days. Maybe you tried some meta, maybe you tried some Apple search ads, maybe you tried ASO and nothing was really going. This is this is the greatest growth hack in the world for this. So, just to give you some context, I know Ben, thanks for the intro, but just to give you some context, too, for those we work with thousands of apps before with some of the biggest companies in the world and you know, weāve done a podcast for years
before, right? We started in 2013 and weāve, you know, talked to the biggest people in the app space. Ben, I used the podcast to learn from my heroes in the space, including Chris Barton, early on. So, thank you, Chris. I will always be, you know, indebted to you for coming on and me really feeling like I made it when I talked to the co-founder, Shazam, and the like the first CEO. But, weāve talked to some amazing people to really learn from them and really digest that and use that to help others grow their apps, too, including our own apps. And
so this is what Iām having fun. All right, guys. Iām not trying to be like, oh, egotistical. Iām having fun with it. It is the greatest growth hack in the world because it can kickstart any app. And so Iām going to break down one of the best case studies we have for this. So, first things first, take a screenshot of this. Iām going to if youāre just listening to it, then get ready to take notes or have your notetaker app ready to go, too. But you want to do a ratings prompt. Now, this is for, like I said, this is for apps that are just trying to get going. if you have zero ratings, right? Iām like, how are you going to run Facebook ads?
How you going to run Apple search ads? Like, youāre theyāre not going to give you the impression share because youāre probably going to have a low tap through rate. Maybe Facebookās going to be a little bit different, but your install rate might not be there. And so, the way I started thinking about this, Ben, was sort of utili like, you know, you hear about habit stacking. This is growth stacking in my opinion because Iāve already done certain things that I know work. So, Iāve sort of stacked all the growth hacks into one greatest growth hack. So, one, I know that if you ask
for your rating, a rating from your user during the first-time user experience, about 1% of the downloads will leave a review. Okay? And thatās important. Iāll tell you why thatās important. Two, you want to do the ASO because if it works, youāll kickstart your ASO and youāll be ranking for a lot of great keywords that after the growth hack, youāll have sustained download growth. Youāll get a burst, but weāre hoping for sustained download growth. So, you want good ASO,
and weāre not going to go into detail for that. Secondly, to get the biggest bang for your buck in terms of downloads, again, that 1% number is coming in. Now, we want to do a lifetime offer for your app. And I know what youāre thinking. I have an AI app. I have usage cost. Trust me, you can spend the 5,000 on Meta or some ad platform. Or you can spend the 5,000 on actual usage costs. Now, youāre not you know your numbers. If you canāt do it, Iām not going to force you to do it. Iām just telling you for those who have minimal or low usage costs per user
cost, then do this lifetime offer for free. And then weāre going to promote it on a platform called App Advice. Thatās for free. We own India app Santa. Thatās like a group or app sumo where youāll have to pay for these type of promos. But app advice is free. So I always say start off with app advice. All right. You with me so far, Ben? Anything that you want more explanation on these points? Yeah. So I think I think uh this makes total sense. I would say for the for the beginning there with ratings. Um
it makes total sense, right? That that people are not going to be interested in an app that has no ratings or has one rating. Uh, so when it comes to that first piece of advice and and getting that that prompt in there, getting it part of the first user experience, getting people to rate it, um, what would you see as far as numbers that would allow that would let you feel comfortable to maybe move on to the to the next steps or or where you feel like then the ratings are in a good spot? And and kind of as a follow-up question, are we looking at this from from the perspective of simple human psychology
of of an actual human looking at your app store listing and observing the rating count and using that in their own decision-making process and whether theyāre, you know, further interested in the app and or are we talking about something related to, you know, algorithmic popularity of your application due to ratings? Uh, or is it both? Maybe. Iām such a probate. Iām going to know all your answers and Iām going to answer it in the same order that you just asked for it. Okay, the reason why that it is the ratings prompt during the first-time user experience, I
would say about 100. And thatās why I came up with the idea, right? We need 10,000 downloads. The times that I have done more than 10,000 downloads, Iāve done a lifetime offer for free. So 1% of 10,000 is 100. And I that is a number I just made up, but Iāve read other books that kind of back up 100 being a good number. So itās just triple digits, right? Itās not a whole lot, but itās something to get some social proof in there. So, thatās why you want that in there. So, Iām that second answer is 100. Uh, are we looking at this mostly
from the perspective of humans, right? Or No, itās both. Itās definitely both, right? It is definitely both. it is humans just to see it because you know a lot of times even on Google the way SEO is ranked especially if you look for like calorie tracking app right and youāll see on mobile Google web mobile search web youāll see that app Google is starting to show apps under that search and that rank rating that sorting is ranking is sort of through from my
judgment in my personal opinion right now is because of ratings so for the algorithm and for real humans So, as far as the lifetime offer and kind of the specific length of two days, is there something behind the two days? Is it is it maybe because of the idea that itās that itās kind of specifically tease? You know, youāre trying to sort of garner specific attention in a specific amount of time or is there some other reason why two days kind of seems like what we found is you donāt need to do longer than two days. App advice when you run on App Advice or Indie App Santa, the first two days are the biggest boost anyways because these are
daily deal sites and so youāre just old news at that point. And so you can do seven days if you want, but we only want to do two days because we see the biggest impact. And on day three, weāll even see revenue starting to come in because some people have just missed out on that promo. And so long as downloads are continue to come in, people will end up actually buying as long as you built a good app. So hereās the app advice. If you go apps gone free, youāll find it. Look on Twitter, you can see all the information that you need to promote
your app on there. Okay? But this is a screenshot, just a visual to show you how it happens. They have an app called Appscon Free in the App Store. Thatās where most of the downloads would come from. So, one app we did, Ben, we did 106,000 downloads in a matter of couple of days. All right. Yep. So, it went crazy. Lifetime offer for free, and it was a AI note-taking app. So, just FYI, there were some inherent costs, but the developer was willing to take the risk. We had 800 new ratings, 200 in the US, 600 worldwide with an average rating of 4.8.
All right, because hereās the premise, right, Ben? You got something for free. Then if you got a ratings prompt right after that, what are you going to do? Yeah, youāre youāre much more inclined, I think, to give a rating and probably to give a reasonably high one because of that, you know, positive association that was made there. There you go. Then you get a point for that. All right. The app made $7,000 within its first month post that growth hack. All right. Now, how is that in relation to how the app was doing? It was just making a few hundred bucks a month. Then it launched
in August of 2023. The developer decided to work with us in December of 2023. We did some ASO. Everything we showed you from before. We did the ASO. We did the payw wall update and we ran this growth hack in early January and since then it has transpired. Now youāre like thinking, Ben, maybe because youāre very detail- oriented. I can tell. Youāre like, Steve, why are the sales going down? I wonder, right? You got a huge bump in in January, but why is it going down? Well, Ben, great question and great observation. Sales are going down.
Thatās because we had such a boost on this green line which is app refer which is app advice right we had a big boost and so that helped the sales in that first month but if you look at the blue line where app store search so more of the organic so ASO downloads weāre actually climbing up so it helped skyrocket our downloads and our sales because now weāre converting more organic weāre getting more organic downloads and weāre getting more organic purchasers. Yeah. I mean, youāre youāre really using the promotion to fuel that
longer term growth, right? Because youāre improving things like your ASO through uh both the improvements youāve literally made to that and also things like your your ranking is just higher now because you have more ratings, you have more popularity. Thatās thatās how the engine works, right? So, youāre youāre itās almost like youāre youāre fueling a fire. So, youāre getting that initial burst, but then youāre also kind of, you know, setting yourself for a longer term grow. Stop taking away my spotlight. Okay, thatās enough of you. All right, Iām supposed to be saying these things. All right, Iām just messing. So look, in September, it sustained, right? This was September 2024. And when we finished the year
2024, you know, I think this thatās why I love this case study, Ben, because we went from 200 bucks a year to 90,000 in sales for the entire year. So where else can you spend pretty much no money except hiring us maybe or just re-watching this video in terms of like growth hacking an app and making it this successful? Now, does it always work out this way, Ben? I wish it would because then everybody would be rich. It doesnāt always work out this well, but again, where else can you do a
growth hack that can get you this type of results? I dare you to come up with it. Yeah, I mean, the ROI is is extremely impressive. Uh, have you noticed with this kind of growth hack a particular category or categories of app that tend to work better on? Are there things where maybe you you could give some negative advice, but like if youāre doing X, right, this is probably not going to work for you? Yeah. I mean, look, if you already got an app that works really well and you got about over 100 ratings, thereās no reason why you should do this, right? But the category of app I think the more that it appeals
to a broader audience, the better itās going to work out. This is an AI note-taking app that 106,000 downloads, like we rarely do six figures in downloads. the the ones that are more like meditation oriented or fitness oriented, that one applies more to a general broader audience, those tend to do well than like niche apps like Iām going to do an ab workout, right? Thatās probably not going to work as well. It will still help because, you know, hereās some other case studies that weāve done this app. Hereās our app. We
did 10,000. This was just the difference between Indie App Santa and App Advice and you know, like app Indie App Santa we own. So Iām like, āAll right, youāre you know, we do well too just in case.ā Yeah. And then our second app, we took it from zero to just a few thousand dollars a month, right? So this is another way. This is a brand new app. We launched it. We got to $1,000 right away pretty quickly using this grow attack. So yeah, anything that applies to more of a broader audience to answer your specific question and and really so the the takeaway here is like fairly broad
audience also likely pretty early, right? Youāre starting out in your uh you know in your journey. youāre not a giant established thing with huge ad spend and like thatās a whole different set of problems, right? With a whole different set of solutions. Um, but I think for zero to one, this makes total sense and itās actually I I have my own app and uh Iām at the basically at the zero spot. So, I may very well take this advice myself and see see what happens. Please let me know how it goes.
Are there any other tips that you can provide? you know, weāre looking at specifically 0 to1 these these new folks maybe around like ASO. Um thereās all the thereās lots of general advice out there. Is there any kind of really specific ASO hacks that youāve seen work recently that that are just kind of burning up the chart compared to kind of, you know, the general advice that you can get anywhere? Oh man, you want me to reveal the the entire thing? Okay. Well, Iām going to give you some. Iām trying to share not as much anymore because weāve got a
pretty decent platform now and anything I say generally gets taken. But anyways, thatās so what I would say, Ben, is donāt sleep on niche apps. Okay? And this is in line with ASO. So, for me, you know, thereās a lot of tracking apps and a lot of people are just focused on the same tracking apps. And Iām like, bro, like without revealing the things that I know, Iām like, thereās a lot of tracker, blank trackers that youāre not paying attention to that from an ASO standpoint, probably easier to rank for
and drive that early traction so that youāre not relying on like how do I get this app going? Oh, I got to spend money on money on meta, right? Like, so itās free if you can get something to work. So find niche keywords. And why I like niche keywords are here. Example of apps that weāve personally worked with. So I know the exact numbers, but these are the sensor tower numbers that Iām providing for you. Right? Theyāre you donāt need that many downloads to make a whole lot of money. Thatās the cool part
of niche apps because they tend to be more painkiller apps as I like to call them because youāre solving a real need for somebody. Itās more niche. So think meditation versus anxiety relief. one has less volume in terms of searches, anxiety relief, but a greater need. And if somebody downloads an app for anxiety relief, guess what theyāre more likely to do? Theyāre more likely to pay you. And Iāve seen it time and time again. So, I can show you some of my favorite tools to use. But what Iāve been doing
from an ASO standpoint, because ASO is getting so hard these days, Ben, is finding the need first. So, finding the keywords first, then building the app for that. So because for the first 10 years of my app journey where I was building apps especially in the first letās say definitely in the first couple of years I was building apps that I thought should be in this space right and now I know how hard it is to market and the money that you have to spend and just testing a stupid creative Iām like
dang it man I want the easy route what are people looking for let me just build that and thatās where weāve seen some really good success on and so Iām very bullish on the AI I space you might have those numbers too through Adapti. You know the AI apps are tending to perform pretty well. And so think about thereās a lot of categories in the AI space. We worked with one client that we launched a brand new AI app. Ben just using ASO alone. We got it to $5,000 in revenue
literally within the first month just because the category was ripe. like not a lot of people were focusing in on using AI for this particular category. So thatās all I can say and I can show you the numbers to back up so that you know Iām not just trying to talk blackmagic here but at the same time like Iām trying to be more cognizant of what I say. No. And itās not blackmagic. I I can I can vouch for it as well from the adapty side that thatās definitely what weāre seeing. I think making uh
kind of changing your if especially if maybe if youāre an indie or you know a small team and youāre working on trying to you know just be successful in the app store as a business uh I think Steveās advice of instead of building stuff that you just think should exist in the world which is a very noble cause in general uh if if your goal is specifically to make revenue maybe even in the short term that you know the strategy of of letās maybe back into an app idea through the the purpose of you know the the structure of keywords and what is both popular but not too popular
and and and has interest in the space but not too much interest in the space so that you know you can still have thereās still room for you to kind of uh you know elbow your way to hopefully to the front of the chart if you can. So, I think that makes total sense and and I I it is an interesting dichotomy of we just spent 15 minutes explaining how to, you know, growth hack your way into popularity and our the advice was donāt be too too specific with those because that can be make it more difficult. Thatās true. And and and now weāre saying kind of the exact opposite, but that itās itās theyāre both I think both
good pieces of advice and they both um allow you as an app developer or company to sort of approach this from two different perspectives and and hopefully gain success in either way. And itās really up to you as a dev, as a team on kind of which way you want to go. Um, and and Iāve definitely seen both of both strategies work. So, uh, you know, since then like one of our better performing apps right now. It is more of a niche app in the AI space and weāre about 3,000 a month now with very
minimal like ASA spend about maybe 200 a month on ASA spend. But we found the keyword. It was a more niche keyword. Weāre able to get it to number one pretty quickly and using the a lot of AB testing with the payw wall. Weāve been able to get like weekly doing much better from an AI perspective. And so weāre starting to see the revenues 3x since weāve switched over to giving a 3-day trial on the weekly versus 7-day trial on the yearly. So thatās a brand new case study.
Yeah, itās interesting that the that the trials it seems like the trend seems to be that they work better when theyāre shorter, which you kind of would that seems maybe a little bit sort of against what you would imagine just thinking about it sort of cold, but for sure. So, here it is. This is an app. I I have this in here because this we did the app advice campaign right here. Thatās where we got downloads. So, these are first-time downloads and this is by month. We last we launched last October 2024. So, I just wanted to show you that, hey, weāre getting downloads. Like, weāre not itās not like the sales
were like very low. And you can even see in October did pretty well. November pretty decent, but in April, March and April higher, but like April, not too much different from November, right? Just keep that in mind. Not too much different from downloads, but weāre getting downloads. So, we we AB tested this these pay walls. A versus B. A has 7. So, the
prices are still the same on both pay walls. Itās just the trial and the layout is different, right? And what we saw was B saw 3x more sales. And Iāll kind of break down. This is A. This is what it looks like. So, this is the yearly 7-day trial. Thatās what weāre pushing. The weekly has no trial. None of these have trials. We were we made $2,000 within the first three months. So, this is from really we launched around October from October to really January. I even went a little bit
longer in January just to give it more data. But we this is how much weāre doing total of those three months about 800 of which was from the yearly trial, right? 7-day free trial. Now, we saw people activating trial, just not a lot of people were paying us. they cancelled pretty frequently. So, we made 300 from the lifetime offer, but $800 for the yearly subscription. Now, when we switched to this payw wall where free trial is enabled and the default is
the weekly and then if you hit free trial enabled, then the default is yearly. So, technically, you know, if you want the trial, you have to sign up for the weekly essentially, right? Hereās what happened to this payw wall. The sales we saw 3x more sales here and this is from February to late April. The weekly 3-day is winning, bringing in 1,000. Now it has no trial than it ever did with the 7-day
trial. So you really have to play around with payw walls. Even though I felt very confident that this payw wall works really well, I was like, Iām confident this is great. It still didnāt work for the the nature of this app. the nature of this app calls for this type of pay wall and youāll see I think Ben more people moving to weekly. I mean I already knew certain categories and if youāre going to ask photo and video AI apps tend to be the main categories Iāve
seen weekly work really well on like logo makers things that are like more one-time use type of thing. Weekly does really well. So, Iām Iām thinking weekly is going to do well, too. And Iām sure you guys have the data or some report internally that says, hey, you know, shorter like lower prices, higher like weekly, you know, higher whatchamacallit subscription length or lower subscription rate would be better. Yeah. I think particularly for things that maybe like you said more transactional that itās almost like the people they they treat the weekly almost
more like a transactional thing, right? Weāre like, hey, Iām going to use it for a while. Itās really great. Iām going to cancel it for a little bit because Iām not using it. Oh, and then but I need it again. So, Iām going to go reactivate and use it some more. And you could get more revenue than you would if if they just maybe tried it once for a month and youāre like, it turns out I didnāt out of the month I didnāt use it that much, so it doesnāt feel like itās worth it to me. And you cancel and you never come back. Absolutely. I think I think with weekly it makes it feel more transactional to them, which you know, you might think is maybe a downside. And I think I think youāre right that depending on the category, it certainly could be a downside. Um they you know,
they subscribe and go, āOh, never mind.ā Right? But with things that are sort of transactional in nature, like you said, a logo maker or whatever, um I think the the weekly gives people more flexibility and I think people value that and so theyāre going to theyāre more like you more likely to interact with your app and your subscription kind of, you know, in fits and starts throughout the the long term. Well, that was such great advice. Huge thanks to Steve for joining us and sharing over a decade of his experience.
I for one really appreciated the insights and Iām definitely going to try out some of those growth hacking techniques that you suggested with my own app, Solar. So, Iāll be sure to report back on how it goes. To everyone watching on YouTube or listening on your favorite podcast platform, thank you for watching and listening. If you found this episode helpful, please give it a like, leave a comment, and subscribe to the channel so you donāt miss future episodes. And if youāre listening on Spotify, Apple Podcast, or anywhere else, weād really appreciate a rating or review. Thanks for tuning in, and weāll see you next time. [Music]