How I grow my App's monthly revenue from $200 to $3K

12 months ago, I quit my $3K/m 9 to 5 job, and start build my App, it only got $200 a month after 4 months. At that time I am anxious and depress. And now the revenue of the apps surpass $3K. And I think I could share what I did to get this.

Find traffic that really work.

I have tried lots of way to let people know my App, post here, post on twitter, send message or leave comment on other forum. I quickly find this not work. People don't like this kind of post, and these are too many people use Android but my App only work on iOS. I even tried Google Ads, 90% traffic are Android and from Indonesia. That's suck. Then I decided to focus on somewhere only iOS user, that is App Store.

I focus on ASO and App Store search ads (ASA), and that's really worked. More traffic indeed bring more download and revenue.

Re-design my paywall.

My App has three subscription price, weekly $8.99, monthly $12.99, yearly $99.99. I found people tends to choose short-term plan when they subscribe, and I actually want them to choose long-term plan. On the one hand, long-term plan could bring me more revenue, on the other hands, long-term plan actually have bigger discount. So I decide to re-design my paywall, and put the paywall after onboarding because I saw someone post on Twitter and say it's really work. And it's indeed worked. Long-term subscriber growing with the new paywall, this make my revenue across $2K.

Reducing refund.

Refund are sucks. It's not only means revenue loss, but also make me feel so frustrating. I even have nearly $1000 refund in June. So I decide to reducing it. I found a SaaS called RefundCat, it can let apple decline some user's refund request by response CONSUMPTION_REQUEST instantly. After I did some investigation, I paid $9.99 a month have a try, and it really worked. In July, 9 of 15 refund request was declined by Apple, most of them are yearly plan, that's mean I avoid nearly $900/mo revenue loss by a just $9.99 service. That's incredible. This make my revenue across $3K.

If you are an iOS developer, I highly recommend you use RefundCat.com to reduce refunds that because user's own fault. I have no vested interest, I just think it's genuinely useful and reasonably priced.