Phil Carter
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
More than 100 screens, I think it's easily more than 20 minutes to completely fill out their onboarding quiz. But in the case of Noom, and more broadly in categories like health and wellness or finance where you're making a very considered purchase, and part of the value promise is believing that this product is being tailored to your unique needs.
In that context, a longer onboarding quiz, if implemented correctly, can actually build user intent and excitement and confidence in the product over the course of that flow, leading to higher conversion rates at the end of it.
Yeah, I think that's right. Well, I would love to see that data too. My hypothesis, and this may be completely wrong, But my hypothesis is it's a bit bimodal, where you're going to have a good percentage of users drop off within the first 10 to 20 screens of Noom's onboarding experience. But once they've gotten far enough, they're probably sticking around for a reason.
And in Noom's case, Noom's whole value promise is, we are going to deeply understand you and your unique psychology to understand how to help you lose weight where many other solutions have failed. And I think a lot of... Noom users are users who have probably tried alternative solutions, and they just haven't worked.
And so when you think about it that way, okay, once you've gotten to whatever the screen is, screen 20, screen 30, you're probably not going to stop because you're pot invested to borrow a poker term. And you want to see it through because if this works, it is solving a really acute pain point in your life.
Yeah, well, so I think that at the highest level, strategic discounting can be really powerful, particularly for subscription businesses that have a single subscription tier. And they're trying to better align the pricing of one tier with... the curve of willingness to pay that varies across different users.
If you're smart about how you target specific users with discounts, then it can lead to higher subscriber conversion rates, and it can lead to significant improvements in subscription revenue growth. Having said that, I think the mistake that a lot of companies make is they treat it as a blunt instrument. It's like, we're just gonna throw out 50% discounts like they're candy.
It's like the Oprah meme of like, you get a discount, you get a discount, you get a discount. And more often than not, that's just gonna erode your brand. So to get into specific discounting strategies that I think work really well. One is what I call an activity-based discount.
So this is... If a user hasn't converted into a trial, or if you don't have a trial, if they haven't converted into a subscriber, within the first... Usually, it's 24 to 48 hours after installing your app. Because as we said before, 75% of trial starts happening the first day. Then you send them an email with a... Often, it's like a 15% to 30% discount.
And then here's one of the really clever tricks is that email will often lead to a web-based checkout flow, which means that you're avoiding the 15% to 30% app store fees. And so your net revenue as the business is neutral, but you're converting subscribers that otherwise wouldn't have converted because the price point was too high. So I think that's one strategy that can work really well.
A second one is specialized plans. So this would be things like family plans or student plans.
that modulate the average price per subscriber based off of either in the case of a family plan like you've got multiple users or in the case of a student they just have lower willingness or ability to pay so that could be a very effective strategy for certain products and then the last one which i think is a little bit more hit or miss but the last one would be seasonal promotions
And so this is one where, as somebody who worked in ed tech for almost 4 years, back to school is a really important time of year for education apps. New Year's is a really important time of year for health and fitness apps.
And so knowing the psychology of your user and meeting them where they are during critical times of the year that are differentially important for your business can be a powerful way of accelerating growth.
Yeah, it's a great question. To a degree, you are beholden to the natural user dynamics of your category. No amount of brilliant marketing or new product innovation is going to force students to use an education app in the middle of summer. It's just not going to happen.
Well, this gets to what, but there are things you can do within the confines of those constraints. One of the things you can do is from like an in-house operational standpoint, use summer as the time when you make bigger product investments. Because you know your students and teachers aren't around.
Things like putting the finishing touches on a huge product launch that you get ready for August and September back to school, or using that time to go back and clean up tech debt or improve the site speed and performance of your website and your mobile app. There are advantages to having a window like that where you're just naturally not getting as much usage frequency.
So that's one thing you can do. A second thing you can do, which doesn't apply to smaller companies, but if you are a company that has gotten large enough that you can expand internationally, that's a very natural way of offsetting some of these seasonal patterns, at least in some categories. As you expand internationally, you can offset some of the seasonality.
And so that was one of the biggest things I worked out at Quizlet was international expansion. And we did start to see some hedging on that seasonality as we got more users in Asia or in Latin America. Then I think the third thing you can do, but this is probably the hardest one, is you can start to expand your product offering in ways that aren't as sensitive to that seasonality.
When you think about Quizlet, Quizlet started as basically a digital flashcards app. When it first launched, that's what it was. You go to Quizlet, either you create your own digital flashcards or you consume somebody else's digital flashcards. Well, now, many years later, Quizlet is one of the largest online education platforms in the world.
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