Announcing the Winners of the 2024 Shippie Awards!

This year at RevenueCat’s App Growth Annual in San Francisco, we celebrated 9 amazing apps that have gone above and beyond in shipping subscription app growth. Last week, Charlie shared the 3 Shippies that were handed out to the amazing developers that built and shipped their apps during our global ‘Ship-a-ton’ hackathon, but there were more golden cat statues to hand out.

I’m thrilled to announce the winners of the six remaining Shippie categories:

• Smooth Sailor, for the best onboarding experience,
• Port of Entry, for the most effective use of paywalls,
• Life Preserver, for the best churn reduction initiative,
• Treasure Chest, for the best overall monetization strategy,
• Anchor’s Away, for the best new subscription app launch, and
• Lone Skipper, for the best new subscription built by a solo developer

Here’s a rundown of who took home the trophies and why we felt they deserved them.

The Pump: Best Onboarding Experience (Smooth Sailor Award)

Let’s start with the app that got everyone talking: The Pump. The Pump is Arnold Schwarzenegger’s workout app, tying in to his Pump Club community and newsletter. From the moment you onboard, you’re greeted with something unexpected—a mock FaceTime call from Arnold himself. I remember calling my wife over when I first tried it out. And while my kids didn’t quite get why I was so hyped about hearing from The Terminator, they still thought it was cool.

In a world where ‘influencer apps’ are becoming mainstream but often lack quality, it bucks the trend. The Pump understands Arnold’s appeal and infuses his insights and personality into the entire experience. Beyond the star power, the onboarding experience actually sets users up for real transformation, from fitness to mental health, and it works. It’s this unique combo of fun and impact that made The Pump the obvious choice for Smooth Sailor.

Check out The Pump yourself on iOS here or here on Google Play

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Lose It!: Most Effective Use of Paywalls (Port of Entry Award)

Next up, Lose It! took home the award for the most effective use of paywalls, and they earned it. During the high-motivation January period, which – for most health and wellness apps – is the best ‘top-of-funnel’ period of the year, they implemented a genius “sales ladder” to drive up conversions. Discounts gradually increased from 50% to 75% over the first week of user engagement, which – they knew – is the primary window of opportunity to make conversion happen.

Throw in a countdown timer for that extra push, and you get a 32% increase in bookings per user. At Lose It!’s scale (a fixture in the top 10 highest grossing Health & Fitness apps), initiatives that drive these types of improvements are few and far between. Lose It! showed us how a thoughtful, time-sensitive paywall design can seriously move the needle on revenue.

Check out Lose It! yourself on iOS here or here on Google Play

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HER: Best Churn Reduction Initiative (Life Preserver Award)

HER is a popular dating app for queer women, lesbian, bi, nonbinary, trans, and gender nonconforming folks. Like most dating apps, when HER successfully connected users to romantic partners, a share of those users would find themselves in long term relationships and actually churned. To combat this phenomena, the team wasn’t just interested in keeping around users who were actively dating—they wanted to re-engage the ones who weren’t.

By leveraging personalized push notifications that went beyond the typical “come back to the app” messaging, but rather invited users to ‘find a friend’ in a number of context-aware push notifications, HER boosted their weekly active users by 2-3%. When you’re working with a large user base, those small percentages are game changers. HER showed us that keeping users connected to the community, even when they’re taking a break from dating, is a brilliant way to reduce churn.

Check out HER yourself on iOS here or here on Google Play

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Zumba: Best New App Launch (Anchor’s Away Award)

Zumba may be a 20+ year-old brand, but with their new app, they’ve proven they can still keep things fresh. Zumba’s on-demand app makes it easy to dance anywhere, anytime—whether you’re a longtime Zumba fan or a newbie. With smart integration to devices like smartwatches, users can track their moves while grooving to their favorite rhythms, and the team took a few pages out of Yu-kai Chou’s Octalysis playbook (see his App Growth Annual talk here), and introduced smart gamification through mechanics like collectable badges.

Health and Fitness is a notoriously competitive app category, and it’s not always a given that a big legacy brand ‘gets’ mobile. By blending a legacy brand with modern tech, Zumba successfully launched an app that kept users coming back for more. Over the coming months, we expect to see Zumba leap up the category leaderboards, earning them the Anchor’s Away award.

Check out Zumba yourself on iOS here or here on Google Play

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Galatea by Inkitt: Best Monetization Strategy (Treasure Chest Award)

Galatea isn’t just another reading app—it’s a masterclass in monetization, and a compelling example of maximising value capture, as explained recently by Phil Carter during his App Growth Annual keynote (full video here). Combining subscriptions and in-app purchases allowed the team to optimize across multiple levers in parallel, lowering the floor for low intent users, while raising the ceiling for users with high engagement and high willingness to pay.

Through constant A/B testing, Galatea optimizes everything from paywall timing to pricing per chapter. Their approach turns casual readers into loyal subscribers, with more than 15 million users getting hooked on their immersive stories. Their clever mix of dynamic pricing and personalized user journeys proved that blending creativity with data can drive serious revenue, making them the deserving winners of the Treasure Chest award.

Find Galatea on iOS here or here on Google Play

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Shotsy: Best New App by a Solo Developer (Lone Skipper Award)

Finally, we have Shotsy, a one-woman success story. Created by Aja Beckett, Shotsy has quickly grown to 12,000 active users and over 2,600 paying customers in just 10 weeks, all through organic word-of-mouth. It’s also an app closely developer for and with a community, after Aja joined a Reddit community for others also using GLP-1 medications (like AJA herself).

Aja’s app helps users track GLP-1 medications with ease, and the rave reviews keep rolling in. Shotsy is a perfect example of what happens when a solo developer nails product-market fit. It’s this rapid growth and impact that earned Aja the Lone Skipper award.

Find Shotsy on iOS here

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Each of these apps took home one of the first batch of Shippie statues (created by Society Awards, who – among other things – design and manufacture the Emmy’s, Golden Globes, and YouTube Creator Awards), as well as a spot on 155 billboards throughout the city of San Francisco.

Together with the 3 amazing Ship-a-ton winners, these six apps remind us what’s possible when innovation, dedication, and user focus collide. We couldn’t be more excited to celebrate them as our inaugural Shippie winners. Congratulations to all the winners, and prepare for more Shippies in 2025!