Great product matters

You don’t need a great product to get subscribers... but you do for them to stick around!

Believe it or not, it’s not that hard to get users to subscribe to your product or take on a free trial. Strong copy, a good offer, a smart paywall placement, and you’ll get a fair initial conversion rate.

No wonder so many stick a paywall at the end of the onboarding flow before users even experience the product. Maybe more surprising is that that paywall tends to perform really well. And sometimes it’s even the best performing one.

That first paywall performance comes from a combination of:

🫶 Knowing your users
🔥 Good marketing
📣 Good communication in and out of the product
🪜 A decent activation funnel

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At that stage, you’re selling the dream. The real problems come after. Once that person takes on a trial or a cheap subscription offer, can you get them to stick around? Can you get their trial to convert into a paid subscription?

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This is no longer about how well you communicate about your product (well, it still is, but no longer the main thing) but really about the product itself. Does it live up to the dream you sold? In product terms, does it do the JOB your users need to be done?

🍚 Is it sticky?
🏈 Is it easy to use?
🍿 Is it enjoyable?
✈️ Is it reliable?
💅 Is it personalized?
💙 Does it deliver value?
🌂 Does it solve a user problem?
🐤 Does it trigger an instant aha moment?
👯‍♀️ Does it trigger a network effect?
👩🏽‍🍳 Is it a match for your audience? e.g., Do you have a product/market fit?

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Building a great product experience is hard and requires a wide range of skills, a user-centric approach, and time. Lots of time! While building a paywall that sells requires a strong understanding of your users to create solid messaging and knowing the best practices.

In an ideal world, you’d have plenty of time and resources to only focus on building value first, before you start selling. As we don’t live in an ideal world, you may have to do the selling first to enable you to build value second.

Even so, you’d only be buying yourself a little bit of time before your product experience speaks for itself and churn starts to kick in.

What is Aperture?

Hello, you, reading this. Aperture is a growth agency that specialises in creative advertising and product optimisation. That means we can develop your creative strategy, run your ads, and optimise your product.

Some of the companies we've worked with are Memrise, TomTom, The Smurfs, Juno, and Mindful Mamas.

Led by Hannah Parvaz (App Marketer of the Year, 4x Head of Growth), Aperture is a team of experts assembled from the best companies such as Bumble, DICE, Busuu, Luno, Bauer Media to bring in-house knowledge to your team and help you find your focus.

Snapshot by Aperture

Snapshot is our newsletter. Once a fortnight, we'll tell you stories like how we reduced a Meta CPA by 94%, produced UGC with 92% thumbstop rates, and experimented our way to a 59% increase in MRR.

Come on then — take a look behind the scenes. You're invited.

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✍️ By Léa Samrani. Léa is a Product Growth Consultant at Aperture that specialises in subscription apps and product led growth. She has over a decade of experience growing top-grossing apps, such as Bumble, Badoo, Busuu and Uptime. Find her on LinkedIn here.

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