Blake Anderson

Shameless plug.

Yeah. Shameless plug. Super wall. Absolutely amazing. I'm not affiliated. I just, I love the platform. I think that pretty much everybody should be using Superwall. I don't use Revenue Cat. I only use Superwall. Now, with regards to how I think about paywalls, I think it really depends. So what's amazing about Superwall is it makes split testing incredibly easy. They provide you with all the data.

But I think that across the industry, a lot of people tend to optimize for like number of users multiplied by profit per user. I am of an alternative thesis. I believe that you should optimize for like number of users raised to the N where N is greater than one multiplied by profit per user. I will take at least at a just pure conversion basis.

I will accept a lower LTV on a per download basis in exchange for more people being able to use the platform. Now there are a number of reasons for this, but I think one of the, Um, most obvious, if you want to ignore all like the moral, like, oh, I want more people to use the product, more people get value of it.

If you want to completely set that aside, um, which I don't, but if you were to set that aside, the benefit here is that you can more quickly dominate the market. And as a result, um, increase word of mouth, which is pretty much impossible to measure, uh, for most applications. It's easy to measure like if you're just seeding a thousand users onto your product and then letting it grow organically.

But when you're constantly running ads, you don't know if people are coming, specifically like organic, you have no idea where people are coming from. And so I like to prioritize allowing as many people to use it as possible. Now, moving forward, how do I think about paywalling in itself, like within the application?

Super Bowl is amazing once again, because it enables you to test it at different points and you can assess the relative effects, the conversion basis, how many people are seeing it, that sort of thing. The most standard practice in the industry right now is to take people through some onboarding flow and then hit them with a paywall at the end. It's just like,

you make so much more doing that than pretty much any other paywall strategy.

And then at the end it's like, there's a paywall notifications and put your personal information so we can customize the application for you. And then you get hit with the paywall. Um, I've done this for my applications for the most part. Um, I do not necessarily think that it's great practice, but it is efficient practice, if that makes sense. I don't think that it's morally great.

I don't feel good about it.

Yeah, it's good.

Yeah, I don't know. I'd like to believe that.

Yeah, I mean, so, yeah, I don't even – I don't think that it moves the needle much. Like I don't think that it's that good or bad. I like to believe that with what I'm doing with the money at the very bottom of the funnel, like what I'm using it for with what I'm currently building kind of offsets, not a big deal.

Like I said, I think that this industry as a whole doesn't really move the needle very much, but it is, you know, The way that I generally think about these things is like capitalism is good in my belief and therefore increasing market efficiency in, uh, generally just taking the market in a quicker manner to its inevitable end state.

Um, and so, yeah, I guess that's kind of how I like offload the responsibility.

So. I think that this is one of the biggest applications on the app store. Duolingo. Duolingo is an amazing application. Like it's built out so well. Now that said, if you can acquire even just a couple percent of the market share by integrating new AI functionality quicker than them, you build a massive product.

And that's where I would, uh, say that a good idea is a language AI or language tutoring application. Uh, Obviously the chat GPT voice to voice model is currently pretty expensive. My inclination is that that will significantly decrease in cost over time or other models will come out of similar functionality with decreased cost.

So by building a language tutoring application where you are just always up to date with the newest AI functionality and you build the UI around around sort of dynamic learning. Like as we know, Duolingo generally has more static modules that you go through, A, B, C. You build a language learning application that updates dynamically.

I think that there's a lot of value there, a lot of value to be created as well as a lot of value to be captured. People who want to learn languages are generally pretty high intent. So I think that that'd be a pretty awesome one to build.

Yeah, this is exactly what people said to me when we were building CalAI. People are like, dude, my fitness pal is so big. They're going to build in this space. And my answer was, well, they won't work as hard as us. Their incentives internally are not aligned to the point where they will be able to iterate and progress as quickly as us. So here's what I mean by that.