Struggling to grow
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ppl-exams-easa-faa/id1309249425
Hi everyone!
I have this app (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ppl-exams-easa-faa/id1309249425) for a year in the AppStore that makes around $300/month but somehow I can't manage to increase that.
At the moment, I am not doing any marketing ads. I tried to do Search Ads for a couple of months in the AppStore, my downloads and usage increased a lot but my revenue was mainly the same.
Any idea how to grow such a niche product?
Thanks!
What's your strategy on reaching out to your target audience (to get more eyes on your product)? How are you adding value to those communities, or what's your approach to create the 'funnel'?
When I started my side-project (https://tripfate.com), I honestly thought I couldn't get more than 40-50 members, but that changed when I started approaching travelers on Reddit and other platforms, and just tried to add value to the discussions in whatever way I could. If it made sense for me to talk about my project, I would - and I ended up with more than 7000 new subscribers in ~14 days.
I know it can be hard at times, but stay motivated and participate! Your app seems great and I can definitely see the value for the niche - you just need to figure out how to reach out to that audience and gain credibility.
That's very good feedback! To be completely honest with you, I am not reaching out. People come organically to the app and then 10-15% convert to a paying user.
I think you are right, I should start exploring the niche communities and approach them there.
Thank you a lot for the help and nice words :)
I think you should really try to find where your target audience hangs out and communicate with them: reddit communities/Facebook groups/newsletters? Maybe you know some offline schools or instructors and they might be interested in promoting your app?
Btw, do you have competitors?
Yeah, I think that needs to be the next step. I tried before to email some flying schools without any success, but now the app is a bit more mature and also I shouldn't give up after 10 non replied emails.
I do have some competitors but they are not offering any different feature than me so I guess refining how the app looks from the store is also something I should work on.
Emails are tuff business to generate leads from.
The book:
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
Book by Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler...
The book above goes into detail on email marketing. It was a great read and I learned a lot from it. But to save you a bit of time :)
ps - it's been 2-3 years since I've read the book but it seemed like it has become standard behavior in the tech scene here in NYC.
Hope it helps :)
JA
Pretty simple - my CFI recommended I use Dauntless as my test prep software. Students are going to take their CFI recommendations. I assume you know some CFI's if you're making this app, go talk with them and see what it would take for your app to beat Dauntless in their view. If you do or can meet that, then go to pilot meetups and meet as many CFI's as you can. One busy instructor will be getting several students a month through their PPL exam, and that unlocks more positive feedback loops of happy students telling their friends.
Have you looked into any articles or courses on App store optimization? That could potentially help increase the visibility in the app store. It'd be good to address some/all of the reviews as well. For example, the first review I saw was a negative review that says the answers are wrong. That's a critical concern to address, imo.
Hi Joan,
Growth is a slow, methodical process that requires a lot of experimentation and trial and error. What have you tried so far? Are you tracking your users actions at every step of your "funnel"?
You said that search ads increased your traffic a lot (I assume this is downloads?), so that could be a positive sign that you have room to grow your revenue. But you must be sure that your ad was targeting the right audience - if not, you might have had a lot of people downloading the app who didn't understand what it was for, and weren't potential customers. That's bad, obviously. It means your CAC (cost to acquire customers) was unnecessarily high because you were paying for ad clicks that weren't valuable.
If you're sure that you had a lot of highly qualified downloads, then you must have a bottleneck somewhere else in your app's sales funnel. Maybe people are happy using your free content and don't see the value of upgrading? Maybe once they start using the app, they are having a poor experience? I see that your app has 4.6 stars, which is awesome! But perhaps it's worth looking into the bad reviews and fixing what they mention. Each person who leaves a bad review has probably 100 similar users that face the same problem, but simply uninstall and don't leave any review.
Yea, I have Firebase analytics in my app. I can see when people use my app for 2-3 days then they always end up converting.
For the SearchAds I actually used the Advance one, because I thought I could target the users better. Maybe I should give it a shot on Basic ads, who knows maybe Apple's algorithm is better than me.
I normally have a look at the bad reviews and try to improve them, I also had some conversations with users who give feedback through the app (which surprisingly is a lot!). I have to admit that I've been a bit lazy the last weeks and I haven't kept up as I used to, something to change for sure.
Great feedback here, thank you loads.
One last note: Seems like you could easily calculate the LTV of your average customer - it's the weighted average cost of your IAP products, right? So as long as your CAC is lower than your LTV, you're golden! Doesn't matter if you are getting a 1% conversion rate on those ads, you'll be making money. Then you can figure out how to improve the conversion rate afterwards.
Could you break down those abbreviations for me? :D
Sure, haha. LTV is the "life time value" of your customer, or how much money you can expect to make from a paying customer. Since I think you are doing a one-time sale of products via IAP (In app purchase), it's easy to calculate the LTV for your customers. It would be the average of each of your products for sale, weighted by what percent of sales goes to each product.
So eg. if you know that out of 100 sales, 60 are for a $4 product, 30 are for a $3 product, and the remaining 10 are for a $11 product, your average LTV of a customer is
(60/100*4 + 30/100*3 + 10/100*11), or $4.4.You can use this value as an estimate of how much money you would earn for an average user who converts to a paying user, right? That gives you an important measure when you are trying to figure out how much you should spend in marketing, sales, etc. in order to make a sale. If you are spending $200 on an advertising campaign, and the campaign is converting 10% of visitors into paying customers, then you can expect that for every 100 downloads, 10 of them convert to paying customers, and those 10 customers are worth $44. Well, that's bad because you spent $200 in order to earn $44. If you break it down to individual numbers, you spent $20 to get each paying customer. This is your customer acquisition cost, or CAC. Each customer's LTV is estimated to be $4.4.
In this case, your CAC was higher than your LTV.
On the other hand, if you spend $25 to acquire 10 paying customers, your CAC is $2.5, and your LTV is still $4.4. Awesome! You can increase your marketing spend higher and higher, since every $2.5 you spend gets you $4.4 in return.
Make sense?
Have you considered doing content marketing and limited-time offers? With a 10-15% conversion rate (as mentioned in another comment), it seems like all you need is eyeballs.
No I haven't tried that, I do have an on-going offer that if the users send me their flying school contacts, I give them a 15% discount. My plan here was to partner with schools but so far I haven't got any reply from the schools.
I'm curious to know why do you think limited-time offers could work here. How I'm seeing it, the target users are not looking for bargains, just an easy and reliable product (which I hope I'm offering).
Limited-time offers gives the users something to lose by not acting. I don't know if it'll work well on your audience, it's just an old sales tactic.
That's true, I might give it a shot and see how it performs.
Creating the same app for android could increase your market. (Unless pilots-to-be tend to have an iPhone.)
Do you have any numbers on the the percentage of "free users" that eventually do an in-app purchase?
The Android version is on the making :)
The business model is: You can do 3 tests for free and then it's a one-time payment to unlock everything forever.
In general, I have around 10-15% conversion. Is that a good conversion? I always thought so but maybe I can work on increasing that number.
Just curious, why did you go for a 1 time payment instead of sass?
I didn't put much thought on it, I thought it was the "only" way to go.
I recently have the itch to change it to a subscription model so I might do it soon.
I'm planning a redesign so that could be a good time to introduce subscriptions.
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I have no idea, but that number is higher than I would expect. Maybe you can raise the prices - the conversation might drop, but people with genuine interest will probably buy anyway. That won't bring you 10x MRR though :)