How to achieve sustainable growth and boost your app's long term success

Epic Web3 Weekly Newsletter

Hey, growth folks 👋

Each week we send you an email with helpful insights on product and career growth. We also share key takeaways from our videos with community experts.

👀 New case study

Mimo is a learn-to-code app for web development, with different programming languages. Last year they faced the following problem: their LTV was keeping stable while the CAC was increasing, so the ratio was eventually getting worse.

To reverse this situation and boost the app’s LTV, Ekaterina Shpadareva, Head of Growth and Marketing at Mimo, decided to take these actionable steps:

1. Address users’ doubts right on the paywalls. To help users get over a “trial anxiety”, Mimo redesigned its paywall with easy-to-understand timelines and regularly sent notifications about the trial’s expiration. As a result, it contributed to increasing the number of subscription upgrades that were directed from trials. 
   

2. Test subscriptions or trial durations. Mimo conducted the Van Westendorp price sensitivity survey to determine their users’ willingness to pay depending on a motive, platform, and geo. This technique helped them to uncover the best price for the product, and showed that they can significantly increase it for iOS users.
   

3. Decrease trialists churn. A lot of trial cancellations happen within the first 24 hours — to fight that, the company decided to leverage a personalized value proposition. They asked users to answer several questions and, based on their answers, Mimo brought a paywall with the personalized reasons to opt-in for a trial.
   

4. Retain subscribers. So their subscribers won’t drown in lots of content and leave the app, Mimo set up additional communication to remind them of the value that they were already paying for. For instance, they started announcing new features, conducting in-app events, and so on. 

🧑‍💻 Knock-knock-knockin' on *fake* doors. Community insights on one of the ways to test your MVP.

Wish it was that easy to run fake door tests…

Fake door testing (also known as painted-door testing) is an easy yet powerful method to validate new products, features, or services without wasting lots of resources.

However, there are still many concerns in the industry circles around it. Find out what experts say about validating your MVP before actually building it.

1/ Dwayne Samuels, CEO at Samelogic, brings a bunch of advantages of using painted door tests. In his opinion, you don’t only test product features early in the development process, but also receive real-time feedback from customers on your marketing & design ideas.

2/ Susan Stavitzski, Senior Product Manager at CarMax, also says ‘yay’ to setting up a fake door. In this article she explains how it helped her product team to recognize that they didn’t need a feature they were thinking of.

3/ Deborah Liu, CEO of Ancestry & ex-VP of Facebook Marketplace, shares principles for implementing painted door tests right. One of the keys is to learn from users treating them fairly, so they don’t feel exploited or being taken advantage of.

How Painted Doors Can Be a Powerful Tool in Testing and Decision Making

4/ Emma Travis, Senior Experimentation Strategist at Speero, believes that fake door tests are not tailored for short-term results. They reveal their value only if you’re not obsessed with quick wins and can play the long game. Have a look at the comment bar — you’ll find what other companies’ experts gained by using this pretotyping.

5/ Lars Behrendt, CEO at Granny&Smith innovation agency, draws an exciting analogy on such a pretotyping — it’s like building a hotel without having its concept yet. In fact, they literally helped to build a hotel without spending millions of dollars or years.

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Wrapping up here 👋 Thanks for reading and have a gorgeous week ahead!

Sending growth your way,

The Epic Web3 team