hello I'm your host David Barnard and this is a very special episode of the subcl club podcast I've been at google.io the past couple of days and we are on campus with Sarah Kum the managing director of app Partnerships at Google Play on the podcast I'm going to be talking with Sarah about how to get Google's attention highlights from Google IO and why hitting copy and paste on your iOS strategy is probably not going to work on Google Play Hey Sarah thanks so much for joining me on podcast today hi David I'm so grateful to be here thank you for having me yeah and thanks for inviting me to google.io the last couple days have been a blast learned so much more about Android I've for years so many of the revenue cat customers and people I talk to are on Android I'm not but I'm pretty inspired I kind of want to build an Android app now good uh so it's really fun being here and kind of learning way more about the Android ecosystem all that y'all are doing to help developers out so thanks for inviting me of course I'm so happy you were B to make it to Google IO it's our annual event our Marquee developer event and this one was a great one I'm very energized tired and energized at the same time I'm grateful you were here so you could hear all the flots and yeah so I wanted to kick things off talking about your role at Google so tell me what you do at Google and how you help Google Play developers yeah sure so I lead our Google Apps Partnerships business development team so we work with developers all over the world and primarily our job is to enable them to succeed hear their feedback on what's working well what could be better on the Play store and on Android overoll and share that with our product engineering teams and kind of build this beautiful flywheel of f products over time I love my job I get to talk to developers all day hear what they're working on what excites them what's concerning them and take that back to the team we're a pretty small team we are Global but we have a limited number of people in each region but yeah I've been doing this for a few years now and absolutely love what I do awesome I think the first question every single person listening to this podcast is going to ask is how do I talk to Sarah and her team so I have to ask elephant in the room how do people get in touch with Google and get the attention of Google yeah it's a question we get all the time as well we try our best to talk to as many developers as possible so I'll say especially those that have worked really hard their app is really really strong and they've scaled product Market fit we absolutely do our best to work either oneon-one or one to many in some form we do have some really good resources and we have a way to get in contact with us via support Channel we also have an incredible play Academy which I highly recommend to anybody including our very mature Partners we have so much resource there on how to build an incredible app so we do try to make it not required to talk to us to be effective on play as much as I you know my team is incredible and the work they do is great we don't want to make that a barrier to entry to be successful but we do have ways to get in touch and we'll make sure we as after this podcast that people have those links but yeah I'd say it's really critical to invest in the platform that's the best way to get our attention yeah and that makes a ton of sense there's hundreds of thousands of developers maybe even Millions at this point and millions of apps and as big as Google is you can't staff a develop a relations team with like 10,000 people so it is hard and I know Apple's the same way it's hard to get in touch but there's a reason and it makes sense we're all humans trying to do our best to help people and so you can't always get that kind of one-on-one attention but it's cool that you do that as much as you can because then that feedback is super helpful and I think it's important for people to understand to that that feedback is getting to Google that Google is out there talking to developers and again unfortunately you can't talk to every single developer so if you're listening to this podcast and like I want to talk to Google and you don't ever get to talk to Google your feedback is probably getting communicated in other ways from other developers and stuff like that and then like you said we'll include in the show notes some links to contact support and other things and people do read that like there is a big team getting that kind of feedback the other elephant in the room that everybody's going to ask is then okay I can't necessarily just reach out to Sarah anytime but how do I reach out to the editorial team like how do I get my no we do get that question a lot we have an incredible editorial team they work tesly they're also Global across every region and they really work hard to look for the best apps for the right user at the right time you know hidden gems they really take their craft seriously I've discovered so many apps I would have never found without the editorial team so I'm very grateful for them but similar to our team they're very Limited in resources I'd say the best way to get their attention the editorial team is to build an incredible app have a very high user rating a lot of the features we announced to IO and previously to use them all to really do everything you can to make your app meaningful delightful valuable to users that is what we look for in featuring because we know that typically is what will actually work really well and users will get very excited about those apps so that's the number one thing like that is a Minar you know so just everyone should should really level set on that and then as as possible we have resources that again we'll link to in the show notes where people should read the guidelines kind of what they can do if they want to get featured we do have methods to make sure you're in the best possible position it is discretion of our editorial team and we do a lot of user research on what we know users want to see but yeah we absolutely love featuring wonderful apps it's just mutually beneficial we love to do it so if you're listening out there and you want to get featured look at the link that's in the show notes and please use it go through all the steps yeah I I was reading that last night and I found that link researching last night and put it in the show notes and apple has a similar page and it's a similar kind of process but like if you're going to reach out to the editorial team actually read those things don't just send a plank email uh read those things and try and take off as many of those as you can and then reach out to the editorial team you know everybody wants to get featured so I'm sure the editorial team is just inundated with apps that frankly haven't checked some of those features and so you want to make sure that you do have a good rating like it's just the reality if you don't have a good rating that there's signal there and you need to do some work on your product so I know you probably wouldn't want want to say that but I'll say that I appreciate you saying that I also will say we've tried similar to us not being a gate to being successful on Google Play that you don't need to work with somebody at Google to do that we also try to make sure featuring is not a gate to be successful it's wonderful we definitely love to feature fantastic apps but we often urge people who are so fixated on getting featuring from the store that is wonderful and there's so much else you can do we announced a lot of IO yesterday and we continue to put a lot of work into making the store work effective and wonderful channel of distribution and Discovery and engagement for all developers even if you might not be ready for featuring or you might not know how to go about that so really urge everyone to not anchor exclusively on featuring as the method for um growth there's so many things you can do right and something we talk about on the podcast constantly too is like there are thousands of ways to get attention from affiliate marketing which I never thought for apps but we've had podcasts talking about how effective that can be to influencers to press to paid marketing to physical mailing I was talking to somebody recently like that's a thing again because it's actually fairly cheap and you can be targeted and like I haven't heard of an app doing that but I've talked to people who've seen that be successful in other businesses but maybe you should experiment with if you have a broad market app or a more regionally focused app like there's so many ways to get attention I do feel like primarily working on iOS myself and a lot of Indies I think get this perception of like if I can just get featured that's going to like make or break my business but to be honest even on iOS it's not what it used to be you know back 10 years ago yeah getting features could be huge but then problem with my business and this is going to be the same for so many developers who are like oh I'm going to get featured and even if they do get featured on the Google Play store which you then realize is like oh that's a great Spike but you still need to mark it so like build the foundation first you got to do the work a lot of foundational work and continued work you can't just rely on getting featured to build your business 100% it's not it should be a yes and not an either or exactly exactly so I want to move on to Google IO really fun being here in person the last couple days and I think a lot of our audience again like me sitting here talking to somebody at Google but our audience is often more iOS focused and you a lot of developers Focus their efforts and attention more to iOS but Android is such a massive opportunity and so for those who aren't paying close enough attention I did want to give some highlights from Google IO for them to go dig in and then to also see and contrast like Google's doing some really cool stuff yeah but the Google Play store has a ton of opportunity and is innovating in a lot of ways so I wanted to talk through some of the announcements at Google IO do a little highlight reel so that people can then go dig in a little deeper but the first thing I was super excited about is the engage SDK so tell me what that is is yeah so excited about the engage SDK as well it's a pretty big shift for us and you know I should mention that I've been working on this team for several years and I've seen Google Play go through so many stages of evolution and maturity so I'm so blessed that I've seen that and now more than ever we're very focused on apps we have an apps GM meca who spoke in our play keynote yesterday along with other incredible speakers we also are really thinking about the various categories within apps and how we develop meaningful experiences go a little ER than you know maybe just generic apps as a category so the engage SDK was born from this research we found where so many users have apps on their phone in the multiples of tens typically above 50 above 80 in many markets and they're just not using them as regularly as they should I think we can all relate to this um you got just like a lot a lot of icons and at some point you probably had a very relevant use case and then you forget to go back maybe even the same problem comes up in your life again but you just kind of oh I forgot that I installed that app you know 6 months ago and talking to Partners and developers like my team does many developers don't have a use case that needs to be daily you know some apps are daily use and that's the intention some will not be daily or if they are daily you might just miss some of that content so we knew that was a problem we wanted to help solve and we thought through like what does that look like what could we be doing differently and so the engage SDK is a way for developers to share with us on device in a very personalized and private way content that's relevant to the user on that device so for you you know your feed in YouTube might be one example or what you recently bought in a shopping app that kind of thing to just provide you a little bit of contextual information and gather that up in clusters that make sense depending on the use case if it's a social use case or shopping whatever it might be that we know users tend to kind of think about their apps in different groups so that's what it was born out of we announced at IO that it's now in developer preview and anyone can go follow the link and start building for it which we're very excited for and we already have some fantastic partners that we announced on stage Spotify Uber e McDonald's Tik Tok many others and so I'm super pumped of how this is going to evolve really our mission is to bring that content that your all building all the developers that are listening to this to the Forefront and show contextual personal information on a regular basis so that users don't have to go hunt in their wall of AD icons and instead it will just come to them in this experience so very excited for what we're doing with engage SDK so I got a little sneak peek and I know it's not coming till later this year but I'm excited aome again another thing that makes you want to build an Android app because this looks really cool and things like Tik Tok and Twitter and YouTube they kind of have this natural draw you're standing in line at a grocery store and you want to kill some time and you get drawn into those things but of course more and more as a society we realize that's probably not the best thing for a human to just be consuming dopamine hits constantly and and what's really cool about the way this is designed and the way it's going to be surfaced throughout the OS is that it maybe kind of breaks that chain a little bit there's an app Headway that has this really great ads like stop Doom scrolling and learn instead they kind of summarize books and it's an easy way to get some bite-size insights that actually benefit your life versus like Doom strolling Tik Tok or whatever I mean Tik toks a great I don't want to totally throw them under the bus but I think a lot of us find we engage too much with those what excites me about this is like it's going to surface apps and context and features that maybe people should be interacting with more but that don't have that kind of natural draw that you're standing in line and think to do and so I think it's going to be a really great feature not just for like developers to get people back into their apps but also just to help people diversify their experience and maybe get some of those more meaningful experiences on their device brought to them and having those triggers to go back to those things instead of it getting lost in the sea of apps and not even remembering ABS I mean we definitely our goal is to help users be more intentional it's really part of Google's mission is very much about access to information useful information at scale and this is one way where instead of you on autopilot kind of like you mentioned going to your phone and maybe just missing out on so much of the additional things you can do there and maybe just defaulting to the same behaviors what if you see everything that might be relevant to you that maybe just wouldn't be top of mind to your point because of just the nature of that app not being as frequent potentially and you are in control you can see what you want to access what's relevant to you and then go a level deep and again back to my team and what we care about making sure developers are getting that benefit um and seeing that traffic back into their apps also having full access and control over what is shown to the user it's very personal on device yeah I do think there's some strong element of intentionality here to help users really use their phone as a supercomputer and take advantage of the full Corpus of insight and data and services on it yeah Switching gears a little there was a lot about the Google Play Commerce capabilities and I wanted to kick that section off talking about the continued expansion of payment options I think this is something that's lost on a lot of folks especially people who are like web web web we need to like pay on the web well Google has 190 markets supported 165 carrier billing options 300 different local payment options like the Commerce capab like the ease of payment on Google Play is something the teams have been putting a ton of effort into to make it so much easier for people to pay which is what you want as a like you want to make it as easy as possible and users to purchase and Google Play has been doing a ton of work on that front we have I'm so happy to appreciate you saying that I am so excited about what we announced and I mentioned this to you you know I think harisha leads that team we work very closely on developer feedback constantly are listening to the ecosystem what's working what could be better what forms of payment they want what features in the flow and the by flow would be useful to them so everything we announced I just as a giddy kid like I was listening like yeah that's what this developer wanted or that developer wanted or oh we for the last year we've been talking about this so I've never been prouder than yesterday every single feature that we announced was very much based on feedback from from the ecosystem and yeah we announced new payment forms in Brazil pix which is a huge payment form there super popular that it's now available on Google Play billing and in India we've expanded UPI options also similarly the incredibly popular form of payment in India and we also added new ways to pay like installment payments Which is popular not just in Brazil but also in several European markets we've made that available we're really working on not just access so anyone can pay more effectively using the form of payment they want and better ways to make sure the buy flow is relevant if you're a student you can now pay or as a developer you can set student plans senior plans so many things we announced have just been in the works for a while they're not easy it's yeah you alluded to it takes us a lot of time a lot of resource this is somewhere we definitely invest across Google as well but yeah we're very proud of the payments platform we also announced over 200 million subscribers across all of our Corpus of apps in the ecosystem so really proud of the work the team is doing there yeah so you mentioned installment payments when that was announced I think in the developer keynote I thought and then I saw tweets and other things it's like wait a minute that's just a subscription but it's not and then it like took me a minute to kind of realize how cool that actually was is that one there's countries like India where there are heavy regulations against recurring subscriptions because it can be problematic and people are taking advantage of it and personally I think there should be more and more regulation about making it easy to unsubscribe and giving users more control because when you're have the capability to automatically take money from somebody's account that's a weighty responsibility and so I believe in it as a software developer as an effective monetization tool that benefits both users and developers by incentivizing that continued investment but it doesn't work for everyone it doesn't work in every country it can be problematic and so installments are a way to have a nonrecurring subscription but that isn't such a big like for a lot of people upfront paying 60 bucks can be a huge hit to their budget absolutely so yeah tell me more I mean I'm Jing on cuz I I love the space so yeah I feel like we could talk all day about subscriptions so you're totally right that it's both about being creative and making sure we're being thoughtful and not everyone in the world subscribes the same way and not everyone in the world wants to subscribe at all you know installment payments like you mentioned is not just popular in Brazil for users who might feel the sticker shock of a large amount it's actually just the way to pay I mean even if you can afford it it's kind of or that you're not thinking too much about the actual price it's just the methodology that people tend to prefer you know it's something we've been investing in for many many years we launched our subscription Center I think we were one of the first platforms to have a subscription Center and we were very bullish on easy ways to cancel and I do remember I have to share this because it's accurate when we had that kind of easy cancel button that where you didn't have to call a human you know those you know there was like this time where you had to call constantly to and unfortunately still happens in many situations and we were very strict that like nope there's going to be a button and we're not going to allow if developers say hey I don't like this button and we got a lot of feedback from our partners saying I want you to remove that button it's it's increasing my churn and on other platforms my churn is better and I think it's because of that button and we were very firm on it they like nope we're very we hear from users and to your point unfortunately there are some bad actors out there who really try to dupe users into recurring payments on things they didn't even know they were paying for so we've always been really passionate about not just like we love subscriptions we think that's such a fast growing space there's so much Innovation happening and we announced some of that too on how to think about different price points different plans all of that but also to be really careful that you got to build that trust first if us don't feel like you're going to give them an easy way to cancel or they think you're going to renew in the background without telling them it can just do a world of harm we take that really seriously yeah a couple other cool things in the payment space that I thought were really interesting was ask someone else to pay that's so cool and I know it came out of the family purchase which I actually use with my kids like they have to ask to buy they actually even have to ask to download which I love that as a parent but ask somebody else to buy you can ask anybody bu divers of pment might ask a friend if you're using the app and they were like hey you really need to get this app and you're like okay you pay for it and now on Android can be like you send them the link and they pay for it yeah I think again we really try to listen to what our users are telling us what our developers are telling us and because we're such a global platform we announced we have over 2.5 billion active users across the world we find these interesting patterns where people don't behave the way somebody in the Bay Area you know my behave with with how they pay so yeah that came out of our feedback on you know this is something we've been looking for same with some of the various plans we announced yesterday on student plans and Senior plans so I'm really excited about it I think when whenever we announce these features I think of it as growing the pie of options yeah and that is only good for different types of developers different regions and use cases and you kind of dropped it in there but I I wanted to go deeper on the student plan thing that was another thing that I think super cool you there is talk about how tough it is to monetize some of these younger users high schoolers college students they don't have the kind of disposable income that career professionals have and so being able to have a flow inside Android that verifies you're a student and then when you're no longer a student you no longer get like that's really cool it is very cool and I love that we're allowing a flow for when you're no longer a student that you can quickly move to the next non-student plan in a seamless way as well so you don't turn out that user yeah it's such a critical area for us you know you saw a lot of what we announced at Google IO not just on playing Android but more broadly centers around learning and students are a huge part of that so we're absolutely a company of Learners it's I feel like we're a little bit like University so is a lot we do for students because we know it's such a critical space And We R all students one day in some form and we know that like you said it's not always easy to pay for really meaningful apps especially now with Gen apps there's so many useful apps that you know we know students should be using so we're hopeful that a lot of developers take advantage of student plans yeah that's super cool and then similarly having students have to verify that they're a student and then that student status expiring you'll also introduce some tools to help developers prevent price Arbitrage so not only can you not pretend to be a student but if you're in the US you can't pretend you're in India and get a discounted price I never even thought about that but again like Google operates at such a large scale around the world that you probably seeing the data these like price Arbitrage of people using vpns and stuff so now Google Play tools to help prevent this kind of price Arbitrage yeah definitely and that's something we have seen on our end quite a bit like you mentioned we're a very Global business we operate you know across so many billions of users and so many markets so one thing we've done is when we're noticing uh a higher propensity of Arbitrage if a currency is fluctuating we know developers will have especially those that maybe offer at scale lots of Ip will have to scramble to figure out oh how do I handle this and that's not the kind of thing we want our developers spending a lot of time on it's not ideal really complex to solve complex and difficult so we know that's something we think is a platform we can really help developers to address that and just take that stress out of their days and handle it as much as we can on the platform level so I think that's a mindset we generally take we don't want developers to have to worry about things that we can help solve and make better on a platform level yeah another thing that is so much harder for developers to do but is something the platform can do a better job at is a new feature device recall is that people will wipe their device and like get free trial every seven days figure out way another kind of Arbitrage of like redo the free trial over and over again and so now there's ways in a privacy focused way to prevent those kind of things as well yeah absolutely I mean again we know some people will Factor reset we can address that and that not be an issue for developers and again we're just trying to make sure as a developer when you're getting subscribers when you're getting people buying your products and using your products we want them to be well-intentioned the users that you're trying to Target and that you have the right safeguards in place to make sure you're not having to do a ton of extra work to ensure you have the right users coming for the right reasons right and the last thing from Google Play that I wanted to highlight again another thing that's really cool is that you can now create custom Play Store listings targeted on keyword so in the past there's been deep links to the custom there's been a lot of options for these custom Play Store pages and now you can Target based on keywords so excited about about this we've been investing a lot in our custom store listings adding more features so that you as a developer can experiment can customize the actual store listing based on the audience and this is another way that I think we hope will help developers to maximize the value of the organic traffic they're getting search is such an important part of the Play Store we're search company we have Decades of experience in Search and we know how important it is to make sure if I find your app based on a certain keyword search that you might want to show me a very different custom store listing experiment to maximize my conversion so so excited we're also suggesting the keywords that are important ones for you to customize based on I'm really excited and I hope more developers will take advantage of this so that they can really boost their conversion rate yeah and the Google keynote was many jokes made about it ai ai ai Gemini Gemini Gemini so there's been a lot of talk about AI this week and broadly this year what are some of the ways you think Google Play developers can leverage AI in the most impactful ways I do feel like can be a distraction it can lead you down paths that maybe aren't optimal for your business so I know you and your team talk to a ton of developers and this has been a hot topic for over a year now so what are some of the top ways you think that AI can help developers and actually increase business instead of kind of leading them down rabbit holes that aren't going to actually benefit them I think that's a really good point that AI is a tool and it's a super powerful very exciting tool and now with the power of the models especially the custom models the multimotor models there's so much more you can do as a developer to either decrease your time spent on something that maybe you could be a lot more efficient with or maximize the value the experience for the user so I'm really excited about it I do think you're spot on that where you use AI in your business whether it's user facing or internal needs to start with what problem you're solving and if there isn't a real problem that you're solving either for the user or your business probably not the place to use AI or probably anything really you know you shouldn't be in the business of building demos for users but I think for what we've heard from many of our partners and the developers at large developer ecosystem on where they're finding success with AI a lot on content creation I think back to custom store listings a few years ago if you were to have to customize based on so many variables keywords regions AdWords campaign everything in that nature you're going to have a team who's like doing a ton of custom creation of assets and testing those out it is important work what if that team could be using tools and therefore they can spend their time on the more complex work of understanding what's working and use those tools to create those assets in a faster way and often those assets can be created you know even better with more riffs with tools so I think a lot of it on content Creation in all ways and forms we're seeing feedback that it's been very successful still requires a lot of human verification and hopefully that goes back into your model whatever model you're using so you can get better over time I think another space we're seeing a lot of success is in helping the customer experience both the customer feedback and any support systems that you might have as a developer but also just making sure you're asking in a contextual way for feedback getting feedback loops from the customer there are some areas I think we're seeing slower adoption like whenever it's user facing I think there's some concerns of is this going to be good we don't want to denigrate trust but that's said I think it's just the beginning I think there's so many exciting things that we're seeing many of our partners adopt and also seeing as a system we're seeing usage in really interesting areas so yeah whether it's on device models that we announced in the keynote the content creation multimodal models especially if you're a video creator back to you know kind of making sure you're engaging your users across the whole funnel there so many ways you can use AI but it needs to start with the problem that you're solving don't just throw AI in the app and so you can put AI in the keywords like yeah not a good idea or not suain I want to switch gears and talk more specifically about how developers can succeed on the Play Store I know that's what you and your team Focus so much on and the first thing I wanted to talk through is what you've been seeing so something you were telling me about is a on a global scale this is something I've been saying on the podcast for a while but then hearing it from you you actually have the global data and the user level data to be able to actually see how this is playing out but I've been saying for a long time you know Bas anecdotally people talk about subscription to fatigue and things like that and then I'm looking at the revenue cat data saying we see so many apps growing and like the pies growing and so I've kind of anecdotally saying it seems like more and more people are will willing to pay for digital goods and services and more and more people are willing to pay via subscriptions but it all kind of felt anecdotal but you see the data we see the data absolutely and you're spot on we're seeing subscriptions growth both in net overall but also in buyer numbers people are subscribing scale to lots of different apps and use cases you know I do think there is something to be said about making sure you're matching the value to the subscription you're offering so I think often when we hear subscription fatigue that could be maybe a incorrect way to say maybe there's the value is off or people don't feel like that's worth paying for and we are really investing and encouraging developers to think Beyond subscriptions if because many especially us developers tend to offer only subscriptions and we think that especially on Android where we've got such a broad range of users and different markets different device types it doesn't work for everybody kind of back to what we were talking about with installment payments and other forms of payments so we definitely don't think it's a yes end you know subscriptions are growing what a wonderful way to grow your business there's so many benefits to that and there are other ways you can reach users maybe even diverse users that you would not have reached otherwise if you can think beyond the monthly or the annual subscription in that white paper that we're going to link to in the show notes one of the things that really stood out to me to the point you just made is that in the white paper it show that us-based developers are more likely to lean on subscriptions but the developers in Asia in other parts of the world who actually understand their markets better better you see in the data and there's pie charts and things in this white paper showing that developers outside the US are actually kind of leading the way in diversifying the way to pay like in the US consumers are more willing to pay via subscription it is one of the biggest markets but it's interesting to see that developers in other countries actually know that's not always going to work yeah totally I mean that's what I love about play and Android in my job that you kind of learn from others there's so much that we think we know about how users want to pay or how apps should be built and then we just you know it gets turned on our head sometimes which is a really wonderful thing so yes you're spot on I think in what we found in Asia Pacific more users are interested in a diverse way to pay usually iip often a blend of subscriptions and iip whereas in the US it typically has been the case that people launch with subscriptions businesses and scale those maybe offer more plans but rarely will brunch out into IP in addition and the interesting thing is that the developers who are based out of Asia Pacific and who have been more willing to experiment with subscriptions in iip actually tend to find really good success in the US so you know it's a really little known fact that the US is one of the largest mid to entry level device markets for Android it's you know there's this mindset that the US is you know everyone's on a premium device but that's just not true so we do find that developers who are willing to experiment with either a hybrid of I and subscriptions or more iip will tend to actually do very well in the US there are more people with different devices different preferences who might not be willing to pay for an annual subscription but they might do a 7-Day pass or a standalone consumable for a specific product so yeah we do see this big Regional difference and I'm glad you mentioned the white paper very proud of the team our Consulting team that worked on that we have really wonderful researchers and Consultants who go deeper into these topics so I want to dive deeper into diversifying red ven streams and hybrid monetization but before we get there I did want to take a step back and talk about how different the Play Store is than iOS and I think too many people it's like they know it's different but there's still kind of a tendency to copy and paste their iOS strategy and think it's going to work on Android and this is part of it is the diversification of payments but the Play Store Works differently the people are different the devices are different the willingness to pay is different like there's some pretty big differences between the iOS market and the Android markeet and when you're on both platforms like a lot of developers who say they can't find success on Android some of that is maybe that they aren't spending enough time to really understand those differen any key things that you think developers should be thinking about yeah absolutely I mean this is a really big topic and something that we talk a lot about on the team how can we reduce those barriers to understanding an entry and help developers to build for play in a different way and I think one thing we've noticed in our data is there's so many devices on Android there's a huge spectrum of you've got the $2,000 device you made the latest s device from Samsung or a $200 device that somebody got and it works very well but it doesn't have the same spec as a very high-end device and the users who are on the more premium devices actually behave quite similarly to those on iOS or other premium skew heavy platforms so if you're only targeting those users then potentially the same behaviors will work with some swaps to the features but you know if you're really targeting a premium user there might be one skew that you build for that or you know you just generally keep your aperture a little more narrow but that will not get you the full benefit and the beauty of playing Android where you've got 2.5 billion people around the world and many for whom this is their first Computing device their only Computing device and their preferences are going to look different and so we absolutely do encourage anyone building for play on Android to think bigger and to think about the bigger diversity of users that you can reach so whether it's I think really it comes down to the full funnel thinking through how am I going to Target my message how am I going to offer different features and services and value that can really more broadly it doesn't mean that you have to offer too many bells and whistles you know like every single thing in the app but tailor that depending on device type on region and especially price points and different skews whether it's subscriptions or iip even just different plans um depending on the user and what your signals are telling yourself that they might want so I think that's really critical and we've seen that in our work that the developers who take that time and do that little bit of extra leg room to understand like oh this is a different platform it's more diverse 's more to do they reap a lot more rewards than those that don't so I want to dive deeper into a lot of things you mentioned and you mentioned specifically that and we've been talking about this like diversification of revenue streams and there's a lot of different ways that can happen and so one of the top things and not only are there a lot of ways that that can happen there's kind of stages to it as well yes and so for a small team thinking about all the different skew and we we'll get to that and talk more deeply about how to package all the different SK and stuffff but even for the early developers the lowest hanging fruit is to experiment with pricing and packaging and maybe even layering in some consumables how do you think about how developer should start the kind of baby steps to like expanding into the diversification of Revenue it's a great point because yeah if you're a subscription developer who has maybe one tier potentially two but kind of you've got like one plan a Premium plan and that's what you're working with jumping straight from that to like let me build a virtual currency ecosystem might be quite a bit to take on it's possible but not going to be easy your spot on that we definitely recommend the low hanging fruit of testing pricing and tiers is a good place to start and that's something that you know we often see for example especially in content heavy spaces so media entertainment books music that there is some anxiety to go outside of the boundaries of kind of this Premium plan a lot to do with the unit economics of the content that you might be providing as a developer a lot to do with just Norms of competitors but what we find is that if you can just think about what works for you it's not what your competitor is doing or what another industry is doing might not be the right fit to start to test to pick apart you know what might be a better Fit For A 7-Day pack like a starter pack for your app if you're a music app or an audio app maybe offering like a few podcasts as a consumable and if that works and people want more then maybe thinking through okay how might this fit into my broader Premium plan so absolutely agree that if you're early to this experimentation phase to start with pricing and plans and see what works and to be as open as you can to weekly subscriptions is something we see a lot of success with in some regions but not too many developers using it especially out of the US in addition to prepaid plants so it's not really a subscription but another way to Market a subscription to a user so that they don't feel that burden of I got to commit for a whole year to this product yeah we were talking about this earlier and it's the kind of thing that might actually work really well for AI apps because they do have such a high cost of goods is that instead of offering a 7-Day free trial maybe you offer a 7day pass that's two bucks and if there's a really low barrier to entry and the user sees a lot of value then you kind of get them in at this cheaper price and then if they do see a ton of value that's the on-ramp to the subscription rather than just offering a free trial which may end up being very expensive to deliver especially when your cost is high and so yeah thinking through some of these and that's a fairly low Hing free like it's not that hard to create a 7day pass and offer that instead of a 7day free trial like there's a lot of this kind of experimenting and pricing and packaging I did experiment my weather app just showing the monthly price as a default so in my app you just see one price and then there's a button to see all the plans so I did an experiment seeing the $4 a month plan does that increased conversion compared to seeing the $40 a year plan turns out 20% increase in paid subscribers by them just seeing four anchoring right they see $4 like oh that's cheap funny enough I ran the experiment through Revenue cat and I've been tracking the data and I'm going to actually lose money so even though I got a 20% increase in conversion those monthly subscribers are turning so I switched it back to the $40 plan because that is going to maximize Revenue but it was just super low hanging fruit experiment and to see that lower price point was really attractive and did leave to more users even though it didn't maximize LTV for me and those are kind of things that people should be experimen I love that I love that you took the time to look at the full analysis of the data how it impacted your LTV and we're open to just trying out new things I think that's exactly what we're encouraging um the ecosystem to do it's not so much to absolutely have as many tiers as possible and consumables and and a virtual coin currency of your own it's really getting into that habit that muscle of continuously experimenting try tracking what's working and what's not based on your goals again and if you are Global which I hope many of you are listening are because that's the beauty of mobile development being very aware that what works in one market or works for one set of users especially on Android is very likely to not work as well outside that group so just to be much more Nimble and test as much as you can yeah and your team has been thinking a lot about and sharing about and we talked about it kind of framework to think about these experiments through is maximizing the points along the demand curve like some people are willing to play a small amount but there's a lot of people willing to pay a small amount right and there's a small number of people who are willing to pay a lot right and kind of finding ways so as you're experimenting with these hybrid monetization and different pricing and maybe a paid trial instead of a free trial it's looking for ways to maximize all the points on that demand curve like meet people where they are for their willingness to pay right and a lot of us probably are leaving money on the table not experimenting on the high end of things it's like offering a super premium tier offering additional ways to pay yeah we've seen a lot in our data for example the majority of users who will purchase in an app including subscriptions and Beyond tend to wait over a year before they make their purchase that is a very common flow so which I was very surprising to us I think you know we had assumed like oh everyone's just going to wake up install their app and then immediately get convinced by the value proposition and purchase and I think what that Insight told us and it does differ a little bit by vertical and type of app use case but it's generally there's a big audience out there that won't be convinced in the first few days of your app that they're willing to pay but they will be one day and that data is exactly what we see so yeah exactly to your point picking up as many signals as you can through your own understanding of what your app offers your own audience analytics and then thinking through what might be the right offer for this user based on their pattern are they a merry coming in every now and then somebody who might be shopping around for different apps in this use case that you might have a different approach for that kind of user versus like you said somebody might be a power user really engaged and you might be leaving value on the table with them you're not offering them enough you maybe they're monthly subscriber but there's more that they're very willing to pay for so absolutely I think there's this mindset that I either have to get someone to pay or they're free and if I don't do that in the first couple of weeks then I'm missing out I've got a low conversion rate and I think we're seeing that that's kind of maybe the old mobile world and I think of the more sophisticated developers that we're seeing greater success are thinking much longer term and bigger picture in terms of the segments of Their audience and probably again stage you know an early stage app maybe does need to push really hard on that early mization and maybe they can't play that long game but then to see that that is an opportunity I was shocked when I saw those numbers that so many people do subscribe after a year so premium can be and is a very powerful strategy get the habituation show them some value and eventually bring them into the paying fold exactly exactly one of the things we've been talking about but haven't really gone super deep in is consumables like it some ways it's kind of the ultimate way to meet people along the demand curve and I feel like Tinder I've talked about this a lot as a great example of that is that those consumables really give the people who are want to pay more who are super engaged who can pay more the ability to pay more but that's probably not the best fit for app so how has your team seen consumables be used most effectively to kind of meet people at different points in that demand curve yeah and you're spot on the Tinder a lot of dating apps have seen great success with both iip and the hybrid model where if you're a subscriber you might even get unique access to certain consumables that are good fit for you you know we are seeing more it's funny you say that maybe some people would think that's not a fit for their business and I'm going to say something radical right now so bear with me I think it could be a fit for any one's business and I think there's something out there that is a good fit for consumable it's just about thinking through what's the right way for you to do it and when to your point on maturity that's not something we'd recommend to like if you're very early stage and you're a subscription model a year or two in that might not be the right time to think about adding a whole bunch of I AP and I'll give an example I think what we've seen out of a lot of developers in Korea and Japan that are in the web Novel Web tune or comic space so huge industry and actually it's really growing in the US we see a lot of Young Americans loving that kind of content and using using a lot of those apps on their phone and that industry used to be a little bit more subscription heavy and similar to many other content Industries kind of this model where you're subscribing and getting you know whatever it is your access for a monthly period or an annual period and what we found is that many web tunes and web novel developers are experimenting with their own virtual currencies with a hybrid of iip and subscriptions and seeing really good success especially when thinking through like you said earlier the high value users who might have a higher appetite for a certain IP there more they can offer there and they have that content and they can even be creative with what they Source from their own creators the artists so I think there's so many ways any business could approach iip it is something to think about when you're in a more mature stage if you're a subscriptions business because it it is complicated we're very bullish on learning from other Industries you know obviously gaming is by far the most IAP Centric industry I think there's a lot apps can learn from both obviously from gaming but also from dating from comics from web novels who and social also have been experimenting a lot more with iip because it can be a really good way to engage your valuable users and to offer them more chances to build that trust and that buy in with your app like you said earlier people want to pay we're seeing that propensity increase over time so giving them the options to do that in a way that works for them is a smart thing to do so speaking of gaming you a lot of people talk about gamification of apps and we have seen huge example dualingo is a great example of bringing a level of gamification into the app but you also mentioned like tipping and Coins and Collectibles and stuff like that actually met yesterday might ended up having him on the podcast he was a hoot to talk to the founder of Run pee the app where tells you when in a movie you can go pee where you're not going to miss a big plot twist or something and he actually said they moveed to fully tipping and he's making more money than ever and that people just love the app so much and he presents it in a very like you know help us create this content and he was saying they get surprisingly large tip and so point being with this whole conversation has been about like diversifying monetization and gamification tipping coins collectible like there's so many ways to do that so any lwh hanging fruit there that you think people should be exploring yeah we are seeing huge growth in tipping whether that's through a coin economy or just yeah some iip that you can offer at various price points and we're seeing it mostly in live streaming and social and to your point though we're seeing that expand we've noticed this trend where creater economy apps really started the most fast growing ones tended to be in video Creations some YouTube and Discord Tik Tok that kind of app and we're now seeing that model expand more and more into different areas in Industries for example there's this trend that we're seeing coming out of a lot of Greater China based apps called Drama shorts which is these short form videos they're definitely worth checking out some of these apps they're very fun to watch very engaging almost like the days of our LIF style like dramatic and a lot of their content and their monetization models are akin to to games you know a lot of iip a lot of time based things and on tipping you're absolutely right that we're seeing more developers experiment with tipping outside of the traditional social live streaming I mean it definitely is something to I think continue experimenting with it kind of depends on the problem you're trying to solve for the user back to like the problem and the value that they're going to get but absolutely that's something that we think has got a huge bright future we're seeing growth in these types of business models at a faster rate and that's part of the reason we announced also yesterday that we're increasing our price limits I think to like 99 99 because we know that there's demand and and some users are absolutely very into these creators and have a lot of love for them and the content they're making and want to tip so it is a really important space it's fast growing and I think Creator economies have this beautiful symbiosis where often it's creating a a space for these smaller creators we call them professional user generated content where you're not going to have your goal is not even necessarily to become the next whatever it might be you know major Studio major artist major Etc sometimes it is but sometimes it's not sometimes you do want to remain a kind of a professional state but in a smaller scale and this allows you to have a business and run that business not just for video creators but for all types of creators out there the last topic I wanted to bring up from the white paper and it was really cool again that yall shared a white paper and shared a bunch of data and I know the team's looking to share more and more data over time but you mentioned secondary product Market fit and the fact that apps that find solid secondary product Market fit have almost triple the minutes with their daily active users and almost double the daily active user to monthly active user ratio and you we saw this with col a great example again Pioneer big app in the space is that when they expanded from meditation into sleep stories it wasn't this dramatic like bolt on a whole another feature set but it was a very natural extension of the product but it was a very strong secondary product Market fit that kind of unlocked new growth for them I haven't talked to Comm and gotten any data on this or anything but from what we see broadly it seems like that created a new inflection point in their growth and I would imagine similarly they probably saw increased engagement more daily active users you know there's a trigger right we were talking about earlier it's like a trigger I need to go to sleep oh now I'm going to use calm to sleep whereas maybe meditation it's like oh I know I should meditate but I don't have time today and so that was a way to not only create secondary product Market fit but create this secondary trigger to bring people back in the app so what are you seeing be successful in this secondary product Market fit yeah I think absolutely I love that you know this is data that we so corroborated by what our instincts were were hopefully telling us that like if you I think what con did really well and John tend their CPO I think speaks about this really thoughtfully they're out to solve a set of user problems that actually have some common symptoms potentially where you know I'm not sleeping well maybe I have some anxiety I'm a new parent I'm not sleeping well cuz I have young kids they contined to to think very holistically about that instead of thinking you know another way to think about your product is I'm a live streaming app or I'm a meditation app and that can be a lot more restrictive and isn't actually what your users are coming to you for they're coming because they have a problem there's a great quote that Andy dun often uses I think it's attributed to Peter duer originally that the consumer rarely buys what you think you sell and I think it's a very accurate Trend that we see in the apps in the store that often the reason that somebody's coming to your app has a a multitude of ways you can solve for that problem and to not feel restricted to I'm only going to offer streaming video or I'm only going to offer a social text based interaction from a design perspective we're very supportive of clarity and like a clear user proposition and clear onboarding all of the above and I think con does that very well but yeah absolutely we do see that if you can solve that problem in multiple ways and offer more diversity of content on how to do that because not everyone's the same and some people might want to listen to something without video some people might want only video some people might want a transcript like if you can be more again to diversity of different users and different ways of interacting you can be big picture thinking about the problem you're solving we see a lot more success so yeah we see that across the board of every type of user behavior that if you offer more than one way to solve that problem you'll see better success yeah very cool well as we wrap up anything else you wanted to share with the sub Club listeners I'm so grateful that you had me on I'll just plug for a second that a lot of us on the team are huge fans of your podcast and we love listening to it and you often have a lot of the guests you have are people we work with and really love the insights that you share so thank you for the work you do I think it's rising the tide of the entire ecosystem and so happy about that I'll share that we publish content as much as we can we're trying to get more insights out there into the ecosystem so if you want to learn more about what we're up to especially a lot of the iio announcements check out our blog check out our X feed YouTube channel all of the above to find out the latest and yeah very excited for everyone to give feedback on the features we announced to IO the past couple of days and to test them out thanks so much for doing this this is so much fun thank you so much for having me David [Music] thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat. sub club.com to join our private community [Music]