| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-K7I3KnFns&t=3211s |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42w2vvvzbqk1aefe8md28h |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42w2vvvzbqk1aefe8md28h |
| Date | 2026-04-17 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/f-K7I3KnFns/sddefault.jpg?v=69de9b56 |
I’m going to do an intro and then I’ll bring you in. What is up App Nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. It is a special episode because it is both our birthdays. It’s my birthday today and my guest’s birthday and we’re bringing you
the best content that you’re going to get. So, what if your app is not growing? Is it your ads? Is it your features? Is it something else that’s preventing you from growth or could you start with user psychology from the very jump to ensure that you’ll find success? Well, that’s what we’re going to talk about and we got a great guest for you, Colin Hodge, who’s going to break it all down for you right now.
Colin, welcome to the show, man. Thank you. Happy birthday. So great to be here with you today. >> Yeah, this is so exciting. I know, this is great. Great introduction, thank you and then we got some birthday wishes from the crowd. Yeah, come on, lot of birthday wishes, right? Like I’m very insecure, Colin, so I need I need all the love I can possibly get. So, just so >> Bring them in. Colin is a startup founder, growth
expert behind apps with over 100 million, 100 million users including the top 10 dating app Down and I want to talk about the first journey of Down as well and he’s been able to make apps grow and he’s got a great book out right now and if you go to colinhodge.com/book, it really breaks down the psychology and the things that he’s used to grow to 100 million users and it’s called Outrageous Startup Growth. Colin, how did I do?
You did wonderfully. Yeah, great intro. So excited to be here. Um as you said, all I’ve done in my career is connected to psychology and understanding how people think. And it is wild how much just knowing this stuff and learning the cognitive biases and how we make decisions can completely change your outcomes, your success levels with growing apps. Yeah, do you have an example? Absolutely. So, uh you know, I I started
Down, it’s a dating app. I started it in 2013. Uh So, now it’s our birthday, so we can feel a little bit, uh that was so long ago. Dude. And when I started it, uh what I realized is the the dating site, the dating app that I was working on before that, it just was not clicking. It was not reaching people, it wasn’t getting attention. And in hindsight, I realized that a big part of it was there wasn’t authenticity in it, there wasn’t the consistency that
people look for when they they look for a new solution, and there wasn’t anything that evoked emotion. So, we make most of our decisions through emotions and then we rationalize them afterward. And so, when your app evokes that emotion, it brings some sort of reaction from people, that’s when you know you’re onto something. And you know, my app, uh Down, which was originally called Bang with Friends,
that evoked some strong emotions. No, that that and I wanted you to say it because that Colin and I did a podcast, that was like 2014 or 2013 when he had Bang with Friends, and I was like, “Whoa, this app was taking off.” And it was like everywhere in the news, and I was like, “Okay, Colin.” Then I you know, I begged him to come on, and we did a podcast when it was audio only. And so, it’s a full circle moment to see you write a book all about the success and then having you back onto the show as well. Yeah, it’s definitely full circle. Since
then, I’ve grown that app to 17 million users. It’s It’s amazing to to see, you know, the level of user success go up, revenue 10x in the last few years. And then, of course, I sold the company, which we can get into the whole journey, but I bought it back. And when I sold it, I worked on other apps and grew them to massive amounts. Over that’s where we got another 60 70 million from a live streaming app, bunch of other dating apps, another like 10 20 million. So,
all in all, I’ve seen growth from every type of app, every sector, and frankly, every region. And as I’ve grown them everywhere, it’s tapping into how we think. That’s what enables us to do better marketing and do better product work. I love it. You’re like, 17 easy. You know, like, I can do 60 now. That’s awesome. >> Yeah, you got to level up, man. Well, I love me a presentation, Colin,
so you prepared your framework for outrageous startup growth and using the psychology behind it. So, you want to pull that up? I’ve got it up, too, if you want me to pull it up. I got you here. All right. We’ll go to slideshow. All right, and then I’ll bring it up right here. >> uh please, like, let’s chat through this. Just interrupt me as you can, and I want to just walk people through the hidden psychology behind the app growth. Uh so, first, I like to start with a confession. You know, this stuff is
really real. And my confession is that when I see apps like Clubhouse during COVID or any other apps taking off, I’m actually a bit jealous. Like, it inspires a lot of jealousy in me. Like, what what are they doing? What magic are they using to catapult to the top of the App Store and get so many downloads, so much word of mouth? Um, and it was frustrating. So, I felt like, okay, there’s got to be something more here. And what I dug into
was it’s it’s actually not magic. You know, it’s it’s something deeper that they’re tapping into. And on the surface for us on the outside, it might appear like magic. But once you learn about how we think, how decisions are made, then you realize that it’s actually empathy. They they have empathy for how people feel. Empathy is just a way of understanding how somebody feels in the moment and how they think. So,
I realized that in my own stories, in my own success stories and failures, this empathy really creates growth. And then I also came to some hard truths. So, first hard truth is like we, you know, as people who run and grow apps, we always think of like growth as a funnel. It’s like, all right, you got to optimize the top of the funnel and track each step. And of course, funnels are useful, but growth is not a funnel alone. Like growth with just a funnel means you’re just linearly changing parts and hoping
something grows. You know what I mean? Mhm. Yeah. It’s actually about feeling first. So, what I mean by that? When I look at what we’re when I’m when I’m trying to grow something, I don’t think about I’m going to try to convince you with logic. I’m going to make a case why my app is better than that one and why you should download this one or why you should stick with my app. Because we as humans, we don’t make decisions based
on logic all the time. In fact, almost all of our decisions, 90 plus percent, approximately, are made with system one thinking. And that’s basically our emotional fast thinking brain. It’s the part that is pattern matching all the time and making these like split second decisions. And then the system two brain is a slower logical one that we we call on it when we have to really problem solve or reason through something. So, if you’re
making your potential users weigh things and think uh about, you know, the really deep problem solving things or weigh the pros and cons on something, then they’re investing a lot more energy and time and they’re thinking more logically about it, but that’s pretty rare. So, what we want to do is we want to first appeal to their feeling and their the their emotional brain. I love it. Have you heard of um Daniel Kahneman and this like psychology of system one and system two thinking? No,
Colin, but I I I remember it’s crazy when you look back on your life. Now I’m 46 and I’m just like yo, like all the books I was reading about building rapport, psychology, and you know, I try to read I don’t even know I’m looking over here. This is my bookshelf, but like and how we use it today and I’m just like, wow, that’s crazy. I don’t know how to say it, but I you know, Steve Jobs said it best. You can only connect the dots looking backwards and I’m like, I’m literally using all these things and
I guess I’ve always been fascinated about rapport, psychology, how do you connect with somebody instantly? Like one of my favorite books called Instant Rapport and I I read through that in my 20s like the early 20s, right? And then I’m just like, I must have always looked at that person in the room that everybody is like drawn to and be like, what is that person doing and how do I emulate that? Oh my god, so are we the same person? Yeah, I I think we are. We’re We’re born on the same day.
We might be. Dang. All right, so that’s actually that motivation, that like observation of sociology and psychology, why you know, why is that person so magnetic and how do you meet your partner? That’s actually what got me into the dating industry in the first place and that’s why I created the app because I was just endly endlessly fascinated by all of those factors and trying to get better at them, but also trying to understand how they work because there’s a fundamental curiosity I had about just
like, how does this work? Nobody taught us about this stuff. And so, that’s why we need books like this to try to teach ourselves and understand better, dig into it because unfortunately, most of us we don’t have the the benefit of learning about that at a deep level beyond now, you know, a TikTok or Instagram reel, but that’s not going to really get you what you need to grow your app. Yeah, I appreciate the confession too because I feel the same way. I’m like, I’m a little bit jealous first. Like jealousy is the first feeling that I
feel. And and I I’ve come to sit with that jealousy and realize it can be useful. It’s a useful tool. It’s telling me, “Hey, there’s something here that you can learn.” But your first reaction, that first instinct is, “Uh, they did something that I should be doing or that, you know, some accomplishment that should achieve.” But it’s better just to learn about it. And, you know, I don’t know about you, but I also see a lot of them and I think, "Uh, I’m jealous of the success a little bit,
but then I’m also very happy I didn’t start that particular business." Yeah. But I don’t want to be in the business of certain things. Like I didn’t I don’t want to run an Uber for instance. It’s just not that interesting to me even though they’re massively successful, right? Yeah, I love it. Yeah, well, I want to give you some love too. >> You do. It’s calling. Lot of love emojis. All right. Awesome. Awesome. So, as I started to dig into this jealousy and I started to use this as a tool instead, I realized that psychology is everywhere, right? And and so, it’s it’s
in our apps, it’s in the app marketing, it’s in the product, but it’s in the offline world, too. So, next time you go to a cafe, where you go to a restaurant, want you to look around and see all of the pricing psychology they use, all of the subtle psychological biases that they tap into. Give you an example. So, in my book I write about I was sitting in a bubble tea cafe. I love bubble tea. It’s it’s another confession. And as I was sitting there, I realized
that the design of the cafe I just sitting there within the first like 30 seconds, a customer has at least a dozen different impact impactful things that that have to that they have sorry, that they have to deal with as they’re coming in and the store design is meant to push them one way or the other. So, this store for instance, had a a really dumb door design, where people were always their double doors and they were always opening the wrong one and it one was
locked. And so, I saw at least 30% of their customers walk away because they were embarrassed by opening the wrong door and they couldn’t get in or they couldn’t figure out how to get in the right door. So, that’s just the before your customer even comes they they see your storefront basically, you know, the the analog here for us is like they see your App Store page, but they can’t figure out how to download the app. That’s what’s happening there. And I think that’s crazy
when you start to add it up and then you do things like, well, where do you funnel people in the line, right? What sort of what is the waiting process once you order? How is the ordering happening? All this stuff has subtle psychology and things that are going to impact you. So, of course, as a retail business, you want a bit of a line sometimes to show, hey, this place is popular, right? Yeah, I like it. And I’m going to pull this back up because I think I’ve been talking about this so much calling like
and I think you did phenomenally well with Bang With Friends and now it’s calmed down, but like it’s getting noticed. Like I feel like distribution is so important and I always say this quote and my cousin who started paying attention to my YouTube channel was like, you know, Steve this first time founders focus on features, second time founders focus on distribution. And I just love how you use psychology as a way to for distribution as well. Oh, I love that quote and it’s so true because I don’t know if I’m a second
time founder or like 10th time founder now, however you count it, but I am just so focused on distribution. Like how we going to get this in front of people and get them to to use it. So absolutely. Um I you know, I I love basically when I am starting to notice this stuff everywhere, then I also feel like I kind of have a superpower and I’m immune to other people using it on me. So going back to like that the restaurant or the
cafe, when I look at the menu, you notice that certain things are priced kind of outrageously, especially at a restaurant, right? So look at the the wine menu next time when you go somewhere. You’re going to notice that there’s a cheapest bottle and then there’s the one right above it, right? The second cheapest bottle is actually the one you want to avoid. So this is the one trick that you want to take you want to be careful of when you’re ordering wine. The second cheapest bottle is what we call basically a compromise option and
it’s because the nobody wants to look cheap in front of a date in a group and so you avoid that bottle that is going to make you look cheap. The cheapest one like no no way, right? But you also don’t want to spend a ton of money, you’re on a budget. So they know most people are looking for that compromise option and the value you get from that by paying an extra 10, 20, 30 dollars for that bottle of wine is actually
going is actually worth a lot less than what you’d get in the cheapest bottle or the one just above it. So, they use this with with anchor pricing, which you might have heard of before, but basically you set a high anchor price above it. You know, if if this if your cheapest bottle is 20 bucks, 20 you know, 25 bucks, your second option is 40 bucks, and then you have a high anchor option that’s like 120 bucks, right? That’s the the baller option. Um and maybe my prices are outdated cuz
I don’t drink wine, but um that high anchor, you know, now you’re thinking 120 bucks, well, I’m not going to spend that, but 40 bucks doesn’t seem so bad. And so, this psychology when you once you know it, you can look out for it everywhere in restaurants, cafes, in apps. Um so, now I feel like I’m just like, you know, x-ray vision and spotting [ __ ] everywhere. I’m guilty of that, Colin, cuz I tell people cuz I’m thinking marketer, I’m like, okay, here’s what you want to do. Have a cheap option, have something
right in the middle, so that people and then have a really expensive option because the ballers will just be like, give me the most expensive one. I’m just going to get that regardless. And most people will be like, get the middle option because it’s just a slightly more than the cheapest option and it comes with so much more. And so, I’m literally doing that and I’m guilty of being a marketer on that, but it reminds me of a quote that my dad always said. He’s like, "Steve, when you buy something, either buy the most expensive one or the cheapest one. Never buy the middle one
cuz you are like he used to you are settling, my friend." So, he’s like, “I’ll either buy the cheapest cuz it’s the cheapest or I’ll buy the most expensive because it’s the best.” And so, that’s what he’s always said to me. Your dad, he gave you good advice. You know, and you say guilty and I I get it. I I use this stuff too because at the end of the day we have different types of customers that we’re bringing in and our job is to help them you know, basically get on the path to success and we need some of those ballers to subsidize the experience so
that we can run a positive experience and a successful experience for the rest of the users, too. So in exchange, you know, they might opt for the higher priced option and then they’re going to move on their way faster, right? They’re not going to worry so much about how much it costs and all that. They just want to get to the result and that that is fine. I think in general when we’re using psychology for our users, we just want to make sure, you know, my my rule to stay on the ethical line is am I
trying to move them along to a place of success. And if I am, then generally that’s you’re on a good path. Yeah, that’s how I feel, too. We are the same person, I think. Awesome. So, I like to tell people, you know, we we think about growing apps and how to how do we master our uh our industry as app developers and I like to say actually it’s pretty simple. So, there are just three things every app needs to do and the first is get
noticed, you know, it’s the distribution. How do you make sure people actually notice your app and want to download it and go through the whole sign-up process, all that stuff. That is hard, right? It’s it’s very hard, but you need to make sure you’re appealing to them in a way that is going to get you noticed and not blend in and it’s so much better to be noticed than it is to be ignored. So, one instinct a lot of us have is, you know, we attach our ego to our apps and
our self-identity and so then we’re afraid of being judged, we’re afraid of standing out too much or trying like some crazy stuff. Well, what happens then is you tend to blend in with your competitors and the rest of the industry. Yeah. Oh, I want to give an example. Uh Down is our dating app. We have our icon at the top here, okay? And um if as long as, you know, viewers are not color blind, hopefully you’re not, but these colors can really help you to see the
contrast. So, in our industry, you have a lot of reds and oranges, um Tinder’s little flame logo is there. You have Bumble with the yellow, you have Her in the bottom left there, it’s orange. Lots of those colors, right? Um and then you have darker and more, I would say, like cleaner, sort of more urban, uh and kind of type set font. So, you are you have stuff like, you know, the Hinge logo in the upper right, you have Field and Three Fun. So, these are all
the, you know, trying to appeal to, “Hey, this is very elegant and we’re like a highbrow app, right?” So, at Down, we’ve tested hundreds of icons, right? And this is just one of the tests, but it’s a recent one, and the reason I included it is because it does a few things using contrast effects to try to make sure we get noticed. And the first is our color. So, we go with a a deeper purple that none of our competitors are using, and it appeals a
bit to the passion and the mystique about using a casual dating app like we are. The second is that we um and this this leans into some other effects, but you can see we kind of personified our letters, uh the D and the O from our logo, and now they’re two characters that are kind of flirty and chatting or dancing together, or something, right? So, now we’re creating some sort of liking effect. Maybe you’re more, you know, people show that they’re more
likely to like a brand if they can identify with it and feel like it’s more human. So, now we’re kind of conveying that and creating a bit of that, "Oh, this is a little more approachable than some of these kind of boring and stodgy apps that are like, “Oh, we’re just like a type setting.” It is name, right? And then the last thing is we do hint a bit more at what it’s about with the devil horns on the O, the little flirtatious eyes there, and the
tongue coming out. So, all of these things play together to try to get us noticed when somebody is for dating app, hookup app, casual, any relationships, right? Matching, all that stuff. When our icon shows there, we want people to actually have their eyes drawn to it and be like, “What are those two characters doing? What is happening here?” And that stands out from the crowd, but the important thing is it’s contrasting with the typical apps and logos that are going to be seen around it. I love it.
Hey Colin, did you ever think cuz I think a lot of people are like, “I don’t know. I want to show this off cuz I think the the screenshots are wonderful too and align with what you’ve been talking about.” Do you ever think like, “Oh, well, if we’re testing purple, we better get purple screenshots too.” Like, does that stop you from just being like, “No, forget it. Let’s just test. Like, who cares?” So, we are not super strict on aligning all of our elements and colors everywhere. There is a consistency effect that people want, but we AB test
the hell out of everything. And so, right now this deeper red performs better for us and helps us stand out on the screenshots. But we found that this that icon is the one that is performing better for there. And it’s just probably an artifact of the placements that, you know, Apple puts the icon and versus the screenshots, right? So, you don’t see the full screenshots in all the views. You have to tap into it, etc. But the icon is pretty much everywhere when you search. Um, and especially we get a lot of our
traffic from keyword searches, not from necessarily people browsing the category. So, we want to be competitive with those top, you know, let’s say 20 different keyword searches that we’re competing for. Love it. Great stuff. >> Yeah. Um and we we have tested, you know, yellows, purples, blues, reds, multi-colors, tie-dye, all these different screenshot colors and backgrounds, and we’re going to keep doing it. So, a month from now, these are might be completely different, but the point is that you’re using this
contrast effect to get noticed, and that’s the first thing that you need to do. It’s not just colors, of course. I do want to say that. Plenty of other stuff uh from the first screenshot there, you know, we we try to talk first of all like a lot more just straightforward than other apps. They’re seeing for something a little different. I was going to mention that. Yeah, thanks. Uh having two people, you know, kissing, but we kind of make it mysterious and cover it with our logo. Like, this is all stuff that helps you to get noticed
if somebody is scrolling. Mhm. Yeah. You know, every And it says open-minded for whatever you desire, casual or serious. Like, a lot of people are like, “No, you know, get married here.” And it’s always about that. And you’re like, “Well, let’s just Life is fine.” You know, this is for the fun crowd. Yeah, it’s for the fun crowd, yeah. Uh we like to appeal to people who don’t feel like they need to have their life plan and their relationship plan all figured out and like, “Oh, I’m on a schedule and I need to do this right now.” and all that stuff. We’re trying
to open be a open and community and open-minded and accepting community that is going to welcome you in no matter what you’re looking for. And so, some people do want casual, and we want to provide that and be a really safe place, open place for them to explore those desires. But, some people want that to casual approach to actually turn into something serious, or they come in wanting serious, and we want to make sure that they can still be very forward
with their turn-ons, their desires, their who they are as a person. So, that’s that’s why from the app perspective, we’re in the casual space and we have a mix of users, but definitely, you know, the average user on Down is so much more open-minded than you’d find on other apps. Good. Excellent. All right. And let me go back to my slide. Sorry about that. No, it’s all good. I just threw it on you.
No, all good, man. So, another example of getting getting noticed here is where I started with my confession. You know, Clubhouse for those who don’t remember, uh very viral live audio app with chat rooms that were hosted by all sorts of celebrities and people big in the tech world. Um went viral during COVID. You know, uh lots of copycats got spawned. I created um when I look backward, I created this cycle of FOMO, and I wanted to demonstrate
how did they create this magic, right? So, the first is they created this social proof starting with their friends, the high net network people, and celebrities. Now, we can’t all do that the way they did. They had a big leg leg up because they had previous startups and a big network of people that they could bring in, but you can create social proof in other ways, and we’ll get into that later. Next, they had scarcity. So, I I don’t know about you, but I was fighting to try to get an invite. You know, they only provided two invites
uh to people, and that scarcity went ahead and fed into the feeling of exclusivity. So, high-status people, only a few invites, keep it tight and exclusive, and that way it’s, you know, feeling like, “Oh, this is a really special place to be.” And of course, they had urgency. So, those limited invites, if you didn’t use them, I had people say, “Hey, I have an invite, but if you’re not going to use it, then let me know because I’ll give it to somebody else, you know?” So,
that’s one element of that scarcity creating urgency to use it right away. The other is because they were ephemeral live chats, they disappeared. You know, if you weren’t in the moment, then you were you missed out on the show. You missed out on the good thing. So, that created an urgency as well, and that fed back into the social proof of sharing live and all that stuff. So, this cycle really generated a lot of success for them because they had such a strong base with their social proof, but they did really smart things to make sure that as
they scaled it up into a point till they collapsed, of course, um that they created this massive cycle of FOMO. Yeah. Hey, Colin, if you don’t have social proof, like to the developer founder out there who’s like, “All right, Colin, that’s great, but they had so much social proof. They raised, they have these connections.” What Which other one would you start off with of the three? Of the four, I mean. Oh, yeah, really great question. I would start off with
I I So, I I try not to just start with one, by the way. So, I would probably combine an element of uh exclusivity or scarcity depending on what industry your app is in, what category, and urgency. So, urgency is like the definite one I would have, and then add one of the others, maybe both. The reason why I say that is you want if there’s some sort of urgency you can create in the app experience or in the sign-up process, then people are
even without the social proof are going to feel like they need to sign up faster. It’s going to improve all your conversion rates and people’s excitement about it. And then, when you tag team that with, let’s say, exclusivity, right? So, it’s invite-only because you want to start small and make sure it’s a very curated, very positive experience for those first thousand users, right? Then you can create this you know, mini cycle and start to add things like, all right, now we have
really great testimonials from five users who love this stuff. We can start to use that as our social proof. So, it can help you build the rest of the blocks here. Yeah, I love it. I love it. And I’ve heard influencers say, I put my profile on private because you more people want to follow. Yep, that’s the exclusivity. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. >> Absolutely. All right. Next after you get noticed, you need to know that emotions drive installs. So,
as I said that we have two brains basically and people are not always logical when they’re making these decisions. What app should I download and you know, all that stuff. So, you want to remember that you’re appealing to that first fast thinking and pattern matching brain and that’s using all these things like the contrast effect, like thinking about what colors to use and and how to stand out and frankly, how to appeal to them in a way that meets them where they are. And what do I
mean by that? So, let’s say that you’re you know, your top feature for your app, the way thing that makes it stand out is a feature about all right, I just you know, we’re going to look at some examples, but one of them really is pointing out that they don’t have ads in their app. And they’re they’re saying, hey, you’re probably annoyed by ads and we’re going to we’re promising you no ads. Right? So, that is that’s great that that’s there’s some appeal there, but what if you could package that in a way that phrases it as
a benefit instead of just a feature? So, when you talk about no ads, yeah, most people get it, but if you phrase it as you’re not going to be, you know, free your mind from clutter when you’re using this app, right? No distractions, no no ads are promised to you. That phrases it in a way that their first brain, their system one brain, does not have to comprehend, you know, well, why
would I care about no ads? They get it right away. And maybe a better example is with our, um, you know, when we’re trying to get people to, um, download we don’t appeal to them in a way that’s like, “Hey, you know, this is community that is just a, uh, casual dating app and you can match and meet with people.” That’s not emotional, right? We we talk about “Are you thirsty? How are you feeling in the moment, right? Are you thirsty for something different?” Not, you know,
match and date with other people. And I think in our other audit we’ll go through an example of somebody who’s doing that, too. Yeah. Little sneak peek right there. Little sneak peek. Uh. Nice. Um, so basically, yeah, market to their mindset, not the metadata. Metadata is like, you know, age and all the biographical information. Of course, you want to know it, but you need to understand what their mood is and what they’re thinking in that moment when they’re getting exposed to your app through the App Store or through other
means. Yeah. I love it. All right. Second, you want to inspire action. So, this is the second step to growing an app and inspiring action just means, you know, frankly, we’re all lazy. I I don’t know about you, Steve, but, you know, I’m lazy, especially when I’m using somebody else’s app. Um, don’t, you know, I I don’t want to do don’t make me jump through all these hoops and, you know, all this stuff. We’re we’ve all been annoyed by this stuff, right? >> Yeah. So, how do we inspire action? We need to
tap into ways to get people to actually follow through on their actions, uh, on their goals, right? So, we want to one, use commitment devices. Commitment devices are things like setting their expectation and having them say, “Hey, I’m committed. I want to use this app for a week and try to get a few matches, right?” So, use commitment devices like that. You can even use hard commitment devices. This is what gyms use. Gyms with memberships, you know, they charge a high price and this recurring
membership that inspires people a lot of people to actually use the gym cuz without that, you know, a lot of people don’t go. So, think about how you can inspire actions and I go through in the book all the various ways you can inspire them from that to reciprocity, you know, giving them a small gift for free and then people are more likely to pay it back. Um and in our onboarding, we like to set a high bar with people, which I’ll get into in a bit of the action we’re
inspiring is like, “Hey, you need to make a great profile because otherwise, you’re not going to get the other type of action that you want in our app.” And so, when we do that, we we say um we say, “Hey, for instance, let’s say we want men to add at least three real photos.” We would say, um 90% of men on our app have at least three photos. That inspires people to be like, “Oh, I got to keep up with the competition here, right?” So, that’s inspiring action.
I love it. I love it. Awesome. So, in general, what we’re doing is we’re engineering the user’s environment for better decisions. So, decision engineering is like so important and and it’s something that throughout your app from the very first time they’re they’re onboarding and signing up through every interaction, paywall upgrades, right? Those are decisions that we can engineer so that they are nudged in the right direction. Um so, as an example, in our in Down, we
made our onboarding longer and the conventional wisdom, and I get annoyed as well because I’m lazy, is that users don’t want, you know, longer onboarding and sign up processes. It’s just a pain in the ass, right? Um, what we try to do, what we thought here though, is we need people to feel more committed. And so, we did uh, we took it from a 12-step, uh, pretty simple, each step was like one one question, you know, choose your thing as your onboarding to 15 steps.
And we wanted to increase it because we had this theory, if they commit more, if they understand better what our app is, then it would work. And here’s what we added. We added a threesome feature. I want to blow it up. Yeah. >> Just so everyone can see it. That’s great. Awesome, awesome. So, we we just did a simple thing. We asked them, are you open to threesomes? Yes or no, thanks. And then if you said yes, we
let you say, do you have a partner already? If not, if you do, or either way actually, then you can say, what is your threesome fantasy? So, appealing to them and getting them thinking about, oh, okay, I understand now this app is a little different than the other app dating apps that I’ve gone through the sign up process. We’re signaling it’s an open-minded place that allows you to find more than just one partner at a time or that sort of thing. You can find your group play
sort of um, mentality, your group play feature that you want here. And it helps to really get people more invested and excited cuz now they have a more full profile that is telling other people, hey, yes I or no, I’m into threesomes and here are my fantasies, right? Deeper investment, took them a bit more time, and here are the results. So, very mature app, we’ve been around 13 years, and when we ran this, we moved our day three retention by 18%. And it had a
really nice effect that it also increased our matches and conversations by about 18%. So, that’s really good movement. The nice side benefit, it increased our paid conversion by 26%. So, running any experiment that doesn’t even We didn’t touch the paywall. We did not change the paywall at all, and it increased it by 26%. So, massive win just by appealing to the user, getting them to invest more with something called the IKEA effect.
Um IKEA after the infamous furniture that, you know, the $40 cheap table that you spend 4 hours fighting with and putting together, you’re now a lot more invested in using that and see more value in that because you invested that effort, right? You got progress versus the $40 cheap table that you just buy from somebody else. So, investment effect, IKEA effect, very helpful here. And it aligned the user because I realized there are two types of
friction, and we were not adding bad friction. Bad friction is stuff in your sign-up process that doesn’t deepen their understanding and their connection to what your app is doing, but good friction is stuff that does that that and gets them more progress, gets them on the way toward more success, right? So, in your app, it’s very important to not just slice like a surgeon and, you know, cut out all the things that are friction, but think about what is adding bad or good friction.
Wait, Colin, if I may, like, why do you think this question added good friction? Is it leaning in Oh, yeah. I won’t You’re going I won’t I won’t say anything off of that. I’m like leading the witness. It is leading the witness. Uh So, so, our our theory on this and and we’ve seen feedback in reviews and user interviews and stuff like that is that people when they first come into our app, even though we think that our you
know, our app store listing is pretty straightforward and helps us differentiate, most user users, they still don’t know deeply what this app’s about. And so this helps them to understand one, that Down is differentiated. It’s different than the other apps cuz most apps don’t ask about this stuff in such a straightforward way and kind of like conversational way, right? It’s not it doesn’t feel, you know, very stodgy and like, you know, the way that you would see this question if it was on Bumble or Hinge, right? So
um second, it it creates a deeper investment. So they now um have two or three more data points that they’ve invested in and they’ve set the expectations of, oh, I might meet somebody to be my threesome partner, right? I might meet that person. So it’s expectation setting of you can find this type of person here and that’s very exciting for people who are in the threesomes. Even for those who say no though, we
didn’t see a decrease in retention or anything. It didn’t turn people off on average more than the previous funnel and I think the reason for that is we are still conveying, hey, this is an open-minded place, but just because this is not your particular turn-on or desire doesn’t mean that it’s not the place for you. And so we were able to now we know more about you, you created a deeper profile. It’s kind of the difference between like, you know, are you very committed to um to you know, signing up
for something if all you had to do is put your name or if you filled out a deeper profile, does that create more of an expectation and and commitment from you to follow through and see, what am I going to get from this app? Yeah. And I like how you said it, it’s bad friction versus good friction, because I think the conventional rule is, you know, what I’ve always said is health and fitness education, dating, they want you they want good users. Like they don’t care about users quantity, they care about quality. And so, but the way you put it
is so it’s so much better cuz I’m actually working on onboarding for one of our apps and I’m like I better re-look at this through this this lens, the good friction versus bad friction. I’m like, what are we adding here? Like I don’t know why we’re asking this question. Are we helping them understand it or are we just asking them for the sake of asking them? Like it makes no sense. So, I have to look at it through that lens. I kind of did, but I I want to make sure I really did after this conversation. Excellent. Yeah, yeah, and happy to dive into those together, by the way. It’s pretty fun exercise to realize like
yeah, there’s good friction and how do we identify that? So, uh framing really does change everything. So, when you’re, you know, framing effects are there are myriad number of them and and a big part of this is, you know, if you’re making the same decision like the price of the wine example that we gave before, um that framing really changes it if that higher price bottle’s not there. Suddenly that, you know, the compromise option is no longer a compromise. It’s just the more expensive bottle. So, framing all the
decisions changes everything and you want to be cognizant of what is on the the page, you know, where you’re asking user to upgrade, where you’re asking them for push notification permissions, whatever it is, and what came right before it. So, what is their mindset? What are they feeling in that journey? All right. Moving on, um open loops. I don’t know if how deeply people go into this stuff with, you know, social media, TikTok, and
Instagram, etc., but open loops really make you want to close them. And um you need to keep them coming back. So, the great thing about open loops is if you think about any TV show you’ve watched like, you know, you’re watching a series, they love cliffhangers. They love to leave you hanging and just like, “What’s going to happen next episode or next season, right?” And so, we can do the same thing when we’re thinking about designing our apps and trying to get
people to come back. As an example, progress bars. One of the, you know, most oldest part of the UX that we’ve had in apps and even before apps, progress bars are a form of open loop because a lot of people respond to, “Okay, I’m at 80%. I want to get it to that 100% and just close it out.” So, think about how you can create an open loop and have people motivated to close it.
Cool. Moving on, I know we’re I don’t want to use too much time. So, the third is like, keep users coming back. That’s the third job you have to do. And my favorite way to do this is something I call magic moments. So, magic moments are basically they’re the small windows of time in the user’s journey where you can have outsized huge gains. And so, you know, a typical user journey for a dating app might start with like hope and confusion here on the left, goes to excitement, you know, goes down
to impatience and distraction maybe during part of the onboarding process or after that. Um when they start to get attention, they have renewed hope and then hopefully when they get matches and start chatting with people, satisfaction. But every app has a different journey and and mood uh cycle that you want to map and you can map that with user surveys and other stuff. Um there’s a second uh there’s a a big type of magic moment that I want to talk about and that’s the moment it truly clicks for your user.
Some people call this the aha moment. I call it a magic moment because it really does create magic when it comes to your metrics. So, one of the big apps I worked on was a live streaming app. And if you’ve never used a live streaming app, basically you’re watching this content creator for hours on end. They’re live, they’re talking to you, they’re performing maybe music or just chatting or whatever it is, exercising, etc. And your job as the viewer is to keep them going, right? So, a lot of viewers
um like to see, you know, like the attention they get from this content creator who feels a bit famous and feels like a little out of, you know, hard to reach, but through this app, through live streaming, now you can reach them. And we, when I was working for that company, I figured out like, okay, there’s something we got to do to to find this magic moment. What is that moment when the value of our live interactive video really clicks for users and becomes so apparent for that
viewer, right? And so, as I was pondering that, worked with the data team, and we tested some stuff out and dug through the data. And of course, what did we find? Well, we were able to double the retention with the users that we got through an experiment. We were able to increase our free-to-paid conversion by 50%. Wow. But these are huge numbers, and you might be wondering, okay, what did you do, right? What we did was we relied on the
reciprocity principle, that it’s better to give than it is to receive. And we gave these viewers of the live stream a free gift in the app, a little animation that they could send to the streamer, to the content creator. And they could basically, the streamer could poke the viewer, and the viewer could poke the streamer back. And when we did that, what it did was it took the viewer out of this mindset of, hey, I’m
just this is just like another video app. I’m just passively consuming. And it made them part of the show and felt they felt recognized. And suddenly it clicked that this is interactive media and there’s value here because they are part of it. And they were able to interact directly with the streamer and they saw their name come up in the chat. So the whole thing was about streamer has a gift, they can give it to the viewer, the viewer can then poke the streamer back. And they’re part of the show. And so by
by inspiring the viewer with this reciprocity principle, they suddenly were much more likely to engage with the streamer with more gifts, which means spending money on points to stick around and and form a deeper connection with that streamer and to watch more streams and have long longer watch times. So it was a huge win for the the app and it’s a magic moment because once we started to drive more and more users to
see that value, of course, the overall retention rose, the overall conversion rose. Okay. I want to poke some users then, Colin. Kate, I’m poking you. Thank you. And then we’ve got Happy Birthday. Thank you. Shane, I’m poking you, too. All right, thanks for lunch. >> Nice. And >> it. You’re using it right away. Yeah, yeah. >> I love how you actually during your open loop, you’re actually doing an open loop. I caught that, Colin. And I am coming to be to close. Thank you to my wife from from in Croatia and
so from paddle as well. So I will be there. Aha. Print me a max. So I’m poking you, too. Give me some money, okay? Give me some money. All right. I love it. >> to go into the last one, piece? Oh, yeah. Let’s get into it. So I have a lot of founders, a lot of app marketers tell me like is app app store optimization is ASO really worth it? And >> Yeah. my answer is well, think about it like this. You let’s say you have a retail place, a
retail shop. You’re already paying rent to have that shop and if you’re not doing App Store optimization, you’re just dumping that money down the drain. You’re wasting money on your rent. So, why are you doing that? Because 30% of all of your sales, unless you have completely gotten around the App Store monetization, are going to Apple, are going to Google, right? And so, you’re wasting that money. You might as well make the best storefront possible and
not waste that money. And it I think it’s so important for us to to make sure that we are thinking about that. And I have the results to back it up, right? You’re already paying for rent for the space, so use it. Um the results to back it up are App down. We get pretty much all of our organic downloads, not you know, maybe 80 to 90% plus from App Store optimization and we get over 300,000 downloads a month and
closing in on 400k, 4 4 million, sorry, a year. So, you tell me if it’s worth it or not. That sort of downloads, you’re paying for it, you might as well use it. Colin, I’m stealing that. H, we should send that to Alok, our sales guy and that’s the way that’s the pitch for him. So, I love it. Thank you, Colin. Please, please use it. Yeah. Um So, I’m going to we’re we’re closing out on the sides here and I want to just say um a bit of a controversial take and
that is you know, it used to be that we as founders, we all wanted to be on the front page of TechCrunch and we wanted to be mentioned in those headlines. And now, it’s you know, you see the stories of somebody growing an app going viral because they mastered TikTok or they engaged like hundreds of influencers and did that. But my take is that the channel doesn’t [ __ ] matter. So, There’s Colin. I like this Colin. There we go. Uh it Because
I I look at them and I I think, you know, not on every channel. I’m not mastering every channel right now, but I know that I can because I’ve seen enough channels and I know that TikTok, Instagram, SEO, ads, you can grow any one of these and you can make your app more successful or get it launched as long as you know that the playbook is the same. And what do I mean by that? The playbook is empathize with your users. Whether you’re using, you know, any social media to do it or your ads,
you need to meet them where they are and understand their emotions and what they’re going through. You need to engineer their behaviors for success. The stuff we talked about, you know, nudging them along, giving them, you know, more investment so that they are ready to move forward, um making sure their actions are properly incentivized, all that stuff. And then you need to find the magic moments. Those are the the things that you can intervene at just the right mood, the right part of the journey, and get them to take an action that leads them to greater success and more
revenue. So, my advice is just stop blindly chasing channels and tactics that you see the hottest new thing working. Of course, you need some channels and tactics, but don’t just blindly chase them. You want to use user psychology because it always wins and it applies to every damn channel. So, with that, um I want to open up a contest. What do you say, Steve? Should we do this? >> it, Colin. Yes. Yes, absolutely. So, my book is out. Uh it just came out this week. Um and we’re already number
two in the entrepreneurship category on Amazon. Uh if you want to win the book for free, right now we’re going to give one away. Uh like and comment on this YouTube stream. Um you know, uh I don’t I think we’ll do it randomly, but I’ll give you extra credit if you um if you do a funny comment or a really good comment that makes us pay attention. Get get us noted get noticed. We don’t want to ignore your comment. So like and comment on this YouTube stream
something about the book. How about we put you know the keyword win. Is that cool Steve? I love it. Hey man, I’m following your lead and I’m going to we’re going to do more. So by the way, these comments while I love them they’re they live on the live stream. So put it in an actual video then that’s what Colin I will be looking at. So these comments thank you H. Yeah, so you’re going to have to do that and then you go ahead finish it up and then I’ll add the extra stuff. All right, and then there’s a bonus gift
if you do end up if any of the App Master listeners buy the book I want to give a a very quick ebook zero to one app launch playbook. This is going to give you the the basic steps. We didn’t talk about this today completely but this is about you know, if you’re just thinking about launching your app and you want to get it out there. These are the the steps and the framework based on user psychology that will help you go from zero to one and just when you buy the book, you know, you can go to my site email me mention
App Masters and I will send you that. So yeah, want to say that and feel free to find me at colinhodge.com. I’m not going to leave this up long. You can search for me. But yeah, I love to give away a book here and we can spin the wheel or we can do something else if you want. Okay, I love it. No, I want to for those we’re going to add on so we’re going to Colin’s going to pick one and then I’m going to pick the other one. So long as this for maybe calling you you make it special for within the first hour or so
and then the rest of the people who watch the replay you know, we’ll pick a few others. We’re going to pick nine others. So we’ll complete the whole 10 and then we’ll send you that book as well. And so go ahead and Mac Matthew Clark says, “For you’re not I’m getting this book anyways.” And then that’s what helps Mina region founders, send the book, please. All right, so I’m at just just leave a review. Colin, I want to recap real quick. So, I took all your slides and I love you know, one thing I’ve learned about business is just
it’s a simple formula. You know, it’s simple math and you kind of put it perfectly here. Get noticed, that’s step one, that’s distribution. Get action, get them to convert, and get them coming back. 1 2 3, simple math formula and it it is and then thank you so much for the examples, but I wanted to make sure I put them back-to-back so that people are reminded. Just it’s just simple. And like you said best, the channel and I like your take, man. I do. Channel doesn’t matter, it’s the playbook that matters and you can replicate the playbook anywhere you go, no matter what the channel is. It is
just user psychology. Colin, thank you much thank you so much for doing this. Love the session here as well. The excellent Anyone else you want to send them besides Colin Hodge and I’m going to pull that up as well. And then the what’s we can do that. Yeah. Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s the best place you can see find out about the book. You can follow my Substack. I think I’m closing in on 15,000 subscribers now. Uh we’re going to hit 50,000 within a
few months. So >> bro. just started a few months ago and uh I’m excited. I share a lot of the insights there, too. But the book really is the last 2 years of me pouring through my notes trying to distill what is the playbook to grow a start startup in a sustainable way that doesn’t feel so hectic and like you can’t do it. I want to give other founders this piece of mind of like, “Okay, there’s a foundation here. I’m not just blindly chasing tactics.” Yeah, a lot of great people near
That’s awesome. >> near I yell, uh yeah. Let me ask you something. Was it like did it feel any way when you were saying, “Hey, we’re going to call it Bang with Friends?” Uh Go ahead. No, I was going to say, like, at AppMasters, like, I didn’t come up with the name. Like, I had a community, and, you know, originally, I called it Mobile App Chat, and then I was like, “I don’t like that name anymore. What should we call it?” And somebody in the community was like, “Let’s call it AppMasters.” It made me feel funny. I’m like, “I don’t want to call myself an AppMaster.” Like, this is like, you know
what I mean? I’m like, “This doesn’t feel right.” But everybody said, “Yes.” Like, I was like, “No, that feels funny.” But everybody was like, “No, I love that name. I love that name.” And then I was like, “All right. Let’s just, you know, forget my emotions around that name, and let’s just see what the data says, and let’s call it that.” So, I was just wondering if you felt something similar. I mean, I was just as shocked and uh, you know, struck with hilarity when I was talking about the name at first, as well. So, uh And I didn’t realize, like, you know, we
connect the dots in hindsight, right? So, I didn’t realize that it was such an important thing for the name to stand out, and to It could be one of the tools to help you get noticed, right? So, at the time, I was just like, “Yeah, of course, we’re going to call it Bang with Friends.” But uh then we started to talk to other people, and they’re like, “Wait, you said Bang with Friends? That’s hilarious. Really? I want to try it.” And just immediately, their faces lit up. That was such a strong thing. Now, not every name needs
to be provocative in that way, right? I’m not saying that. It’s just one way to be outrageous. You can be outrageous in other ways. But with AppMasters, you know, if your audience is telling you, “Hey, this is what you are to me. This is what you stand for.” And like, yeah, embrace it. It’s okay to embrace a little of that discomfort because that’s how people are seeing you, and it’s as long as it aligns with what you are. Like, yeah, you’re an AppMaster. Of course. It’s It’s been 12 years. I’m still trying to embrace it. It still It me
feel funny when people are like, “Oh, I am talking to that master.” I’m like, “No, but thank you. I appreciate it.” That’s a sign that’s a sign of an app master, right? So, the Dunning-Kruger effect, you are basically proving that if you’re not comfortable with it completely, then you’re still you still have that growth mindset, right? You still you know what you don’t know and you know that you’re not perfect yet, you’re not you haven’t mastered anything, you’re just a lot more advanced than you were 12 years ago, I’m sure. That’s it, man. That’s it. I didn’t know if you wanted to take a
look at the app. I want to make sure we’re good on time, but I’m happy to just The only thing reason why I asked was like obviously you know the space, but you give some insights, but regardless like Yeah, okay. Well, let’s look look at that one last app and then we’ll we’ll get Colin’s take on it and then we’ll say bye. So, I apologize. >> our jokes, buddy. Our birthday jokes. Oh, [ __ ] All right, let’s do the dad jokes. Thank you for running the show. Everything >> to do it now?
Hell yeah. If you didn’t The answer was hell yeah. All right. All right, Colin. I got one. I’m going to just do an old one. Uh-huh. Okay. You want to go first? You have How about you go first? >> you’re the host. Okay. You’re the host. You go first. That’s fine. Uh let me pull it up. I Dude, I have a a dad joke folder of my favorites. And it’s an oldie, but I’m going to do an oldie cuz you know what? It’s our birthdays, Colin. We deserve a break. >> And we’re oldies. Yeah.
All right, here we go. Do do do do do. Colin, do trains have teeth? Do trains have teeth? I don’t know, do they? Then why do they chew chew? That one works really well with the kids, actually. I’m sure, yeah. You get You need a little chew chew action. Uh All right, awesome. I’ll go back. So, this one I think is pretty fitting because of you know, I created a dating
app, but my girlfriend broke up with me when she found out I had nine toes. What? Turns out she was lactose intolerant. There it is. All right, but just for our birthdays, put SRC. We’re already doing a lot of giveaways, so do us a favor and it’ll Hey, giving is better than receiving, so we’d love for you to give a vote. Just put S for me and then C for Colin. All right, Colin, let’s give some feedback to Desireland while we wait for
the votes to come in. All right. >> you just run the show here. Sounds good. So, Desireland obviously somewhat of a competitor. From what I’ve seen, they are focused on the Indian market. Just so everybody knows what we’re dealing with here. I think some of the advice I have like it the starting point is can they empathize a bit more with their target audience? Like who who are they? What are their motivators?
From the description, the screenshots, I think they could go a bit deeper on really identifying like who are they trying to attract and do a little better. Looks like you have different screenshots than I did when I looked last night. Maybe they’re testing a different one here. Um but the ones I looked at last night, a lot of a big part of their pitch is that it’s anonymous as a dating app and so it wasn’t clear exactly if people were
you know, they’re primarily trying to appeal to people who want to actually meet offline in real life or just kind of indulge their fantasies and chat with people in an anonymous way. And so I think adding some clarity around that and what what is the user benefit they can get would help a lot. And this one doesn’t have it as much, uh but it still does look a little bit fake. Um >> Yeah. Uh you know, a lot of like AI photos or
things that are clearly stock photos. Um the other one uh that I looked at yesterday, like those ones are clearly like stock photos. So, try to they should try to find people that look a bit more like their target audience and look like they could be real users. Um and definitely be careful if you’re using AI-generated photos. They shouldn’t look too AI because a lot of users, especially in the dating industry, they’re just so used to bots and fake profiles that we go out of our way to make our app feel a lot more
authentic. And then we follow through by photo verifying everybody that they’re real and that they look like their profile photos. So, just be careful about that here. Um you know, even though it’s anonymous, you need to find a way to to bridge that gap a bit. I love it. Hey Colin, let’s do this and then we’ll end with this. We’ll go rapid questions or the from the audience. Yeah. >> Matthew says, “What specific questions on the onboarding would you say are good and bad friction?” Any Yeah, Matthew, thank you so much for the
question. Uh it’s going to vary by app, but for our app, you know, the bad friction was we were asking things um about you know, what are your how far do you want to search um in your pro your for profiles and stuff like that. Um and deeper things that were, you know, about building a profile. So, if you’ve ever used a dating app that asks you about um you know, your Let me find a good example. Um Let’s see. You like Yeah, what do you prefer bars or clubs
and stuff like that? Do you really need to ask that in the onboarding or is that something that you can figure out later, you know? Um for fitness apps, a lot of them kind of go a bit too deep on things like the, you know, asking about their history and all that stuff and you could go more with motivating them on, “Hey, let’s talk about, you know, what are your habits? What are your goals?” All that stuff, instead of uh doing stuff that doesn’t really help, or even getting a profile photo of the user
for a fitness app. Is that necessary, right? So, stuff like that. I love it. The and then Ahmed says, “Any advice for the AI tools I can help us improve conversion rate optimization?” Yeah, so uh I actually don’t use AI tools that are specialized for um for CRO, but uh I think, you know, what I generally would do is one, uh make sure that whatever tool you’re using, it is using a psychol-
psychological approach to understand what why the conversion would increase. So, that’s that’s the the basic uh thing, and our team has distilled all of my tips into their AI, basically. Oh, nice. That’s awesome. And lastly, I will end with this. I forgot to remind the audience. So, we’re going to do a big promo for our birthday, and we have a community, colinhodge@founders.co, and you can get 50% off. I’m turning cuz I’m 46 now. We’re going to give 50% off
all our community and courses annual plan, if you use the code HBD. So, happy birthday, HBD Steve 50, HBD 50. HBD Steve 50, you guys save 50% off, and we’ll run it for a week. And hey, we’re going to use some of the things that we just learned from Colin. A little bit of urgency, a little bit of exclusivity, because it is all at founders in the community. And once again, it is colinhodge.com/book. And do what James Patterson is going to
do, everybody. Thank Colin for the great presentation. Go buy the freaking book, right? And that’s what James is going to do. So, join in on the fun, and we’re going to I’ll I’ll I’ll pick nine for those who comment. Colin’s going to pick one of those who comment in the next hour and then we’ll go from there. Colin, thank you so much for coming on and doing this, coming back and doing this. Thank you so much, Steve. This is fun. I hope it’s helpful and yeah, looking forward to giving some of these books away. So, buy it if you don’t win it, but if you do, our gift to you and thanks a bunch,
Steve. Happy freaking birthday, buddy. >> And to you, >> birthday, buddy. Yes. Yes, sir. Hey, congratulations on your success, man. Let’s not wait 10 years again to do this one more time. Excellent. Sounds good. Take care, Steve. See you guys. Have a good weekend.