Hello, everyone and welcome to the web payments for subscription apps webinar hosted by revenue cat. Typically in this situation, I would say let’s do a little chit chat to wait for folks to join, but certainly 115 people in climbing on board. So let’s just get rolling. There’s so much to talk about. I will, let alone for a few minutes by way of introduction. So we will have quite a few more people joining us. But first, I just wanted to do quick introductions. It’s actually occurred. I don’t know if everybody’s view is going to be like mine, but so but is actually had is the CEO and founder of expert. Everybody’s bios was on the landing page. You can read them in more detail. But Zach really is going to be bringing the founder operational experience. Yeah, he’s been working on web payments for the last year and has a ton of insight. As I say all the time, I really appreciate how open Zach is he. He shares the nitty gritty. He he actually has a dashboard where you can look at his financials of his app out in public. So I really appreciate how much he shares in the industry. And then, of course, Thomas Pettit. I didn’t do the French pronunciation. I’m a boorish American, but Thomas is a longtime friend of revenue cat, has been working as a consultant in the subscription out space for years and cut his teeth in the space at 8:00 fit. And I love how Thomas brings the consultant perspective where when you’re working on a single app and you see something, something succeed, it’s easy to get a lot of confirmation bias and think, you know why it worked and tell everybody that they should do the same. And this is how it worked. But when you’re a consultant, you try that same technique that you thought was so amazing and you tried on a different app and it falls completely flat. And so it’s really great to get the perspective from somebody who works on multiple apps that they understand. So you get better context on why things work, not just that they did work. So looking forward to Thomas’s perspective on things. And then of course, Jens, he’s head of product here at revenue cat. He doesn’t talk about it a lot, but he did actually spend a few years consulting between working at fit with Thomas actually and then now joining revenue cat. So he also has some of that perspective of working with multiple apps. But then now inside revenue cat with dollars in subscription app payments under management, we internally have a ton of insight and since Jens joined where payments have been a very big topic so he more than anybody at revenue and probably more than most people in the world has spent the last few months diving into web payments and the very deep nitty gritty side of things. So I’m excited to have his perspective on some of the tactics and operational and boring details that you actually need to know, even though they’re boring. So with that, we’re going to dive in, if you would, hold your questions to the end. I’m a terrible host at trying to track the chat while also engaging with folks and keeping the conversation on track. So if you have any major questions, hold them to the end. We are going to have a Q&A afterward. Now I’ve already been talking way too much, but bear with me another just 3 to five minutes if I can pull it off. I do want to give a super quick overview of the topic before we dive in. So, you know, the reason we’re here talking today is, is that where payments are a hot topic and there are hot topic primarily because of the app stores commission. So Google recently dropped their commission to 15% across the board for subscriptions. And of course, there’s rumors Apple may follow suit, but even at 15%, that seems pretty steep. You know, early on in the app store, it felt more fair as apps depended heavily for discovery and other things. But as the world has changed around Apple and Google, they have not necessarily changed or adapted to the new realities of the world. And, you know, there’s a lot of apps there out there where the app stores are really just a friction point in their user acquisition funnel. And it’s not providing some of the things, the discovery and other things that a 30% fee would be justified. And then on the other side, the app stores, as I said, as a Black box, they really put a wall between you and your customer. And so, you know, having credit card information, having email, having that kind of information, you know, Apple does wall off developers from that. Now, consumers do love aspects of that. So there’s a lot to debate on all that. We’re not going to get into it today. But of course, most recently in the news, it’s the Apple injunction after the Apple the epic lawsuit. And so I think that’s why most of y’all are here and thinking a lot more about this. And just real quick, I mean, we could debate an hour on this topic, but I do think it’s important to point out that the injunction, I think, was misinterpreted by a lot of folks in the industry. It seems, you know, our interpretation Jen’s actually wrote a great post on the revenue cap blog that the judge was very specifically shooting down one sentence in Apple’s guidelines, and that was the anti steering provision that prevented developers from inside the app linking to or talking about payments available outside of the app. And so that being our interpretation and the interpretation of a lot of people in the industry who are really, you know, close to the situation, you know, that means it’s very unlikely that any time soon anyway, unless regulators get involved, will we be able to actually collect credit card payments inside the app? But if the injunction stays in place, we will at least be able to mention of App Store payments and link out to Safari for those payments. Again, lots of debate there about exactly how it’ll be interpreted about exactly how Apple will interpret it and whatnot. But we’re going to kind of put that aside for now. But I will say, you know, Apple did file an appeal to stay the injunction. So November 16th, big date. We’re going to be watching it closely. The judge will hear Apple’s request to say the injunction. So all the things we’ve been talking about for the last two months about this, you know, exciting changes from the injunction might not even come to fruition in the short term and could end up in a long, drawn out legal battle. But aside from the legal action now, we have regulators closing in from all sides. So Apple did make concessions to close an investigation from the Japan fair Trade Commission. And again, that one is very narrow. So essentially developers can now collect contact data inside an app and then use that contact information outside of the app to mention where payments to their customers. And I think that one is also a lot more narrow than some people assume developers have already been doing this. So it’s really a pretty small concession from Apple. It’s very hard for them to enforce you collecting an email inside the app and then sending an email. You know, they have no visibility into that. So it really ultimately is a small concession, but actually a fairly large concession in that now we do as developers have clear guidelines from Apple that we can collect contact information and then send folks to the web for a win back campaign or a discount or whatnot. So that’s already happened and it’s going to be going into effect soon. Apple is actively changing rules on that. South Korea passed a law that bans major App Store operators from forcing software developers to use their payment systems. Apple amusingly told South Korea, we are already in compliance with that. So that’s going to be a fascinating one to watch, to see how. South Korea responds. The us, EU and Dutch regulators all have antitrust investigations open investigating Apple for their App Store practices. All things we’ll be following closely but aren’t going to dive into today. And the point of bringing all that up is to say there’s a ton going on in the industry around web payments. And again, that’s why I think, you know, so many folks registered for this webinar and why we’re going to talk about all this. But no matter what happens with any of this, you can ask the app developer already collect payments outside of the App Store. And many have you know, Zach has been ramping up his web payments over the last year. And it’s become more and more clear that whether or not it happens in one fell swoop through, you know, a huge regulation in the u.s., where then Apple and Google just say, well, we’ll just have in the floodgates world wide worldwide. You know, that seems unlikely, but it may happen in one fell swoop like that. But even if it doesn’t happen in one big motion, it’s become more and more clear that it’s going to happen piecemeal, that developers are going to have more and more flexibility to accept web payments and to talk to their customers about web payments. So today we want to talk about how to do that. And you know, again, Jacob, our CTO, did a webinar and will link to the replay whenever we get the replay of this out where they talk more high level about all of these things and debate some of the interpretations of the injunction and whatnot. But today I wanted to dive into kind of operationalizing and the tactics of actually doing it, actually making more money. So I’ve been talking a lot, but the first thing I wanted to talk to the panel about finally is to start with the antithetical. A lot of people assume weapons are an obvious easy win. Oh, Wow. Instead of paying Apple 30%, I can just pay stripe 2.5% This is easy. You know, I’ll just spin up a website and, you know, start collecting credit cards and it sounds fantastic. But there are challenges and it’s not quite as easy. And there’s a lot of ins and outs that you have to consider. So I want to start with the challenges, the pitfalls, the things to watch out for as you start thinking about web payments. And then we can shift to the opportunity of what payments and then go even deeper in the tactics of actually doing it. So I want to hand off to Thomas. Thomas, you’ve been fairly outspoken about where payments not being a panacea. You’ve certainly influenced my thinking on this topic. So, yeah, why don’t you kind of kick off the discussion of the antithetical. The challenge is with I know you’ve worked with as a consultant, multiple apps that have used web payments that have ramped up web payments. You’ve kind of seen firsthand some of the challenges and what’s not working. So so tell us about those challenges and what you’ve seen. Thanks fantastic. Sin in place now, and I’m not necessarily against the charging through the way. I’m a bit of a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde thing going on here. I say it’s not as easy as people think. And very often because, hey, let’s jump on the web so that we don’t pay the 30% Personally, I think there’s a lot of reason to charge into web in some circumstances. But the focus on the 30% is actually the wrong reason for it. There’s like a lot of other benefits and there’s hidden costs. So starting there, R&D, he didn’t cost. First, like the kind of various things happening of a lot of apps didn’t wait for this injunction or the change to happen to actually charge people on the web. Because if the first point of touch is on the web before people even download the app that’s actually legit, you have nothing to see with Apple. You can upload people on the web charge to there and eventually get the full experience of the product in the app. I don’t think that would be infringing at any point. Obviously, if they discover your product within the app, then you would enter like this infringement. Although I know a lot of apps that have been sending emails and didn’t have any problem with that and talking about this funnel where you actually acquire people outside of the App Store. There’s a lot of friction there. Like moving from a web environment to the app environment always create a lot of frictions, like outside of the pure payment that maybe a little LED second chance settled a bit more, but the payment itself. There’s lots of friction for this user, like due to the experience is not great. Typically, let’s say you make them, you don’t build them there, but then you send them to the app. Deferred discipline breaks. People forget the password. Like login is actually not such an easy experience. In many case, even though you implement magic links, those are about to get popular, partially broken at some point because of private relay and so on. So actually the use is not that great when you do this journey. There are a bunch of reasons to do it from like a marketing perspective, an acquisition perspective, focusing just on the and maybe will get back on the spot. Just focusing on the web part of on the I mean, on payment power, like, OK, it’s 3% and 30%, but the conversion is not the same at all. I mean, Apple has this trust with customer and this convenience of payment is absolutely magical. If they have to enter the credit card and even if you have something like the credit card is stored in the browser or something like I’m going to think twice before putting my card onto you. I have this funny anecdote that I said before that at some point I did charge and credit card within an app a long time ago, which is infringing, don’t do it. And the drop in conversion was exactly compensating the gap in the fee. They were so incredible to see like that. It was so close like as if it was made this way. I don’t think it was made this way on by design, but it was unbelievable. But the. So my answer my short answer is basically friction. Friction for the user in switching from the web and to the app, friction into payment itself, friction and trust, like in who is this company then? I have subscriptions all over the place instead of even if most users still didn’t find out where the settings is, where was all the payments like? So I see I see a lot of frictions basically for developer and for user. And I think that’s a big caveat. I see a lot of reasons to do what payment, but not necessarily for the fee for other reasons. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And Zach, so you’ve been actually implementing this yourself with very fresh knowledge and experience of this situation. So we’ll get to what works later on and kind of where you have found success. But I’d love for you to just talk through and it’s always fun. I love talking about failure because you just learn so much from the experiments that break. And in some ways I really do think you almost learn more from the broken experiments than the successful ones. So so, yeah, I’d love to hear what, what you really struggled with in and what things didn’t work as you’ve been ramping up lab payments. Yeah, sure. Yeah Thanks. Thanks again to David for having me and great to be here. Yeah, I mean, I think. The friction piece that Thomas pointed out is very real. Right and it’s important to set correct expectations when implementing this. Right it’s not a replacement for in-app purchasing, meaning it’s more of a supplement. It’s a tool that can be used to offer additional. Additional experiences that aren’t possible with in-app purchases. I think that was like one of the main benefits of it. Like, for example, from a customer support point of view, you can just refund customers on the spot when they pay through stripe. You don’t have to deal with Apple. So in that case, it enables this experience. It’s not possible. But yeah, a lot of the difficulty we ran into was with the user experience, kind of along the lines of what Thomas was saying, right? Like you, you hit this web page, you sign up, you put your credit card in, and then some of those people don’t have iPhones. Like somehow they just ended up on our landing page and they had an Android and they paid and they can’t use the app. Right so there’s that issue or there’s that issue where they just decided not to download the app after they put in their payment information, which I’m sure everybody can relate to. Like sometimes you just change your mind and you have to have some sort of infrastructure to deal with that, like an account system, a web dashboard where they can log in. There are just so many small issues like that. And all these things that popped up that were unexpected, like how many credit cards just got declined? Like a lot of people put in, I don’t know if they’re putting in like the Apple cash back card or some visa debit card or something like some sort of payment method that just won’t actually get approved once their trial expires. So that was like a major problem, right? Like we were saying, oh, it looks like 75% of people are going to convert from their trials and then 25% of them or 30% of them will just get their credit card declined. And then it tries. Tries Yeah. Did you did you have any problems with chargebacks as well? I did. Did you ever. I know. I think with stripe, it’s like if you cross that threshold, you start running into trouble with Stripe. Did you ever get anywhere near that or have any issues with chargebacks? Yeah Yeah. Our chargeback rate was pretty high because I think. Yeah I mean, when you just think about it from the user point of view, it’s kind of a bizarre flow like let me sign up on your website to pay and then it’s the app is the product. So zooming out, I think one takeaway that I’ve learned is that if you have a web app also, it it makes more sense, right? Like if there is a version of your product that works on the web, then the flow makes more sense for sure. Yeah that’s a great insight. And to your earlier point, you know, if somebody somehow ended up there and doesn’t even have an iPhone, that’s where some of those chargebacks probably came in as well, is that, you know, people will just jump right to chargeback instead of contacting support. And so when you do have a direct credit card relationship with somebody, it’s a different sort of relationship. And then working with Apple and Apple issuing refunds and dealing with chargebacks and all that kind of stuff. Did you did you do much with reach tries and kind of start building out a dining experience? And what was your experience with renewals? I know you haven’t been doing it long enough to get a ton of annual renewals, but on the monthly and weekly renewals, did you have to start building out a Dunning flow? We we actually only offered the annual plan. So that’s mostly what I can speak to. Maybe someone else has insights on that. But yeah, I mean, it’s funny when you said the chargeback thing and the customer support, I just almost cracked up a little bit because yeah, it’s like if you just emailed us, I would have refunded you on the spot but instead decided to go to dispute. Yeah, we’ve does that. What was your question. Oh it was around renewals, but I guess you haven’t been doing it long enough to have much of a cohort that it’s gone through the full annual cycle. Maybe I’ll jump in there because I did some see some renewals on the web and I was chatting with a very large up with 10 million subscriptions on the web that has the same thing is that for a number of reasons, one being Apple doing Apple thing, but also how you build this people, the renewal rate tend to actually be higher in my experience, which may or may not be true for every single case. But we had higher LTV from these users on tend to renew higher maybe because they don’t get a nudge on their renewal. So kind of a lot of problems on the first charge and maybe the second one. But then it was like a bit forever in and we had I remember when we put this in place like kind of we were like from the unit economics. This is going to be a stretch because we didn’t factor that actually the whole funnel was going to be different. And here I think this is something to consider that not only after the payment, like kind of the renewal rates are going to be different, the refund rates are going to be different. But also even before the payment, none of the conversion like it’s really an end to end flow where from the amount you pay for click for an Apple web to the conversion on that page, to the refunds, to the renewal, it’s kind of have to look at it in separation. You can’t really compare, oh, on that step, I’ve got 10% more refund than that one. It’s really like an end to end flow that is entirely different. That was there. There are pieces and it’s really hard to compare them at the end of the day. I mean, I’m looking at Dollar in, dollar out, but you can’t really pull anything. And typically when we said, OK, our average LTV is x is $50 or whatever, and we look at our numbers like, oh, this is not profitable to acquire, we use it there and suddenly we realize actually this usually an average of 70 and it was, but you can imagine that it took us over a year to really to have that realization like it’s not something we discovered at the beginning. And so like comparing numbers between these two things is, is really tricky and porting what, you know, from one to the other can lead to pretty big, pretty big mistakes, I would say. Yeah and that’s a really just a take on that point specifically. We actually had the founder of all trails on the podcast, the sub club podcast, and that episode is going to be out soon. We didn’t get to this on the podcast, but I was talking to him separately and he’s a pretty open book on what all trails is doing, but we’re talking about some promotions that all trails ran, sending folks to the web. And just an incredible difference it made from a financial standpoint that the conversion rates were even higher than inside the app, that they more than made up for that 30% You know, it’s just way more economically impactful to send folks to the web. But then as we talk through it more and more, they were really sending their absolute highest content users to the web flow. You know, it wasn’t the kind of low intent users that you were trying to capture. So when you’re doing these kind of experiments and even when you look at your numbers and you say, oh, my web renewals are way higher than my in-app renewals, you also have to then look at all those up funnel and down funnel metrics on was I actually sending my absolute highest intent users there? Then of course, the renewals are going to be higher and then that needs to be factored into weighing the decision on who to push to the web and then whether or not it really is actually as much of a difference financially if you’re actually pushing your high intent users, that would actually stay subscribed on the App Store as well. But yeah, and you were trying to jump in. I just wanted to get that point in and I definitely want to hear your perspective on all this. Yeah, absolutely. I actually want to also follow up on Thomas’s point with respect to the renewal rates because, you know, of course, revenue cap, we see data across a lot of subscription apps. And, you know, this was one of the questions that was kind of burning for me as well to understand data across a number of apps then. And we do see that renewal rates tend to be higher for web subscriptions across basically all that’s of course, they’re going to be outliers. But you know that that’s a pretty common picture. And I think, you know, from my perspective, one very likely explanation is that it’s somewhat balanced out. You know, the higher friction in the beginning when starting web subscription means you’re filtering out the lowest intent to use those. Right the ones that we’re kind of on the fence about the subscription to begin with. They’re going to give up if they have to enter the credit card. So that just kind of means that renewal rates are going to be driven higher for everyone, for everyone else. So, yeah, I mean, I completely agree with Thomas there that you need to take the whole funnel into account. Yeah I mean otherwise it can also share a couple of well it’s still on the, on the antithetical even though it’s kind of already entered the discussion. Just a couple of other wrinkles to add there. I guess the one elephant in the room really that hasn’t been mentioned yet is taxes. So, you know, the platforms really do a great job there of collecting, tax collecting and remitting taxes for you in lots and lots of different geos. And, you know, that’s well, if you’re like a small indie app developer, probably nobody’s going to tell you you’re going to just be under a kind of threshold of significance. But as soon as you make substantial amounts of money, you’ll that’s going to be a major burden to think about, calculate and actually remit taxes everywhere then, you know, and, you know, just in relation with that, just all other sorts of localization, you know, like if you’re on the respective stores with just one click, you’re available in a large number of local currencies with kind of local payment methods that they could expand and expand and expand. And of course, like with something like, like strive for web payments, you also have some set of that. But, you know, it’s definitely not as broad as with Google or Apple. Yeah and one thing I was hoping you would bring up yens, but I’ll go ahead and drop the bomb. I actually heard just this week that and these the kind of details you don’t know until you dig really deep into payments is that Apple Pay has kind of been touted as this solution to reducing friction that, oh, they can still just pay with their face. Other credit cards are even going to be on file. You know, just implement Apple Pay via stripe. And I learned just this week that Apple Pay the way Apple Pay works, the payment is actually tied to the device. So there’s a device level token associated with Apple Pay that actually expires or is revoked once somebody updates their device. So if somebody goes from iPhone 12 to iPhone 13 and they actually and this is way I understand, I probably still need to do a little more research. Actually, Jens is probably going to have to do that as we work on our solutions it revenue cut. But the way I understand it currently is, is that if somebody signed up for your subscription on their iPhone 12 and then they upgraded to the iPhone 13, that Apple Pay token actually gets revoked. And so your annual renewal, your monthly renewal will actually churn out and you’ll have to get them to sign up again and pay again. So for folks who see that as a panacea to friction in their payments, whether intentionally or not, Apple seems to have made that a source of involuntary churn. It seems to me it’s one of those things where it’s an unintended consequence of the kind of security profile of the way Apple designed Apple Pay. But it’s going to be interesting to see and you know, I’ll be tweeting and updating if I was wrong on any of this, but that those kind of little wrinkles are the things that you just don’t know until you’ve been doing this a while. But so we’ve been talking about all the bad stuff. The bad stuff exists. The bad stuff exists everywhere. Building an app is hard. Everything’s hard. But that doesn’t mean there’s not incredible opportunity. So let’s talk about the opportunity of web payments, because for your high internet users, you can save a lot of money pushing them off to the web. There are opportunities to use promotional and discounts and incentives to get. Folks on the web. And there is potential for those folks to renew at a higher rate. So, Zach, I’d love to hear in this last year, as you’ve been ramping up payments on the web, what do you feel like has been the most successful? What’s the opportunity? What should other developers be thinking about in this space? The thing that instantly came to my mind when he said that was an affiliate program, which is just not really possible with Apple payments. So we were able to launch that on top of stripe using some this thing called first promoter, where essentially everybody in the app was able to join this program and they did the whole system managed pay outs and all of that. And you just got a link that you could share with people. Redirects to our web page and then they just got a cut and that there’s all these knobs. You can turn how much, what they get is recurring or not. And that just when you’re working with stripe, you have all of these other tools that you can then suddenly use that aren’t possible with Apple. So an affiliate program is something we’re continuing to explore like for sure could be a major driver of growth as it has been for Uber and you know, basically every big company with that. And I think also just the customer support experience to be able to just refund people cancel their subscription on. Yeah or if we want to send them a unique link that says that’s just a product, that’s a discount or something like that. You just get maximum flexibility. And then, yeah, a lot of the benefits, the financial benefits come with the retention. Some of the retention stuff that’s been spoken up, right? Like these customers, based on the data I have so far, it seems like they’re going to renew at a much higher rate. Yeah, it’s hard to get them in the funnel, but once they’re there, they have the credit card. The bank approved the charge and they don’t update their device. It seems like you’ll continue to make money from them for a long time. And another really cool thing is in the app, you can build an experience where they just tap, cancel, and it just cancels their subscription right away. Right so we have that we can detect. Are they a stripe user or not? If so, when they press Cancel instead of redirecting them to manage subscription, just cancel it. Just so fricking cool to have as a user. Yeah I mean, I think across the board it’s just like a great tool to have. Like it’s not the solution, it’s not going to replace in-app purchases, but it’s nice to have it in your toolbox so you can continue to build these other experiences with it. You know, send emails that link to special pricing and all of those other opportunities. I know one of your kind of motivations for working on web payments was app tracking transparency. What’s the opportunity there? And have you have you seen that play out the way you hoped and expected, where you’re able to collect better attribution data and better calculate your return on ad spend? Yeah Yeah. I mean, that’s like one of the coolest pieces. Like when you do a Facebook ad to a web page, you can add your URL parameters. So essentially we would get they came from this ad, they came from this campaign. They collected this time like we would get everything that nowadays is not possible with app ads. And there were some funky stuff to work out with sending the correct billing data back to Facebook. Right? because that’s like how the whole optimization works. Like they send a user to this page and they get the post back event that says that user purchase. Therefore, we want to find more users like them. Right so there are some weird things with that. And the server and server API with Facebook that still working through. But yeah, just having perfect insight into who is downloading app and where they’re coming from is a major advantage. But again, with the friction piece, you’re not going to be like we were not able to scale campaigns the way web based campaigns, the way we were app based campaigns and we were this is again something you run in parallel, like you try to run web based checkouts, but you also try to do app as because it’s almost like an app and they’re like a low hanging fruit to some extent. But yeah, I think that just speaking of this, it’s just our demands are so low. Like, just tell me where the user takes them. That’s all I want to know. Why does Apple have to make it so hard? Like just why don’t app links have URL parameters that would solve everything? That’s like a whole different webinar of how, you know, ad measurement is, yes, a form of tracking and the ADA enabled all sorts of creepy stuff. But at a fundamental level, knowing whether somebody converted from an ad is not some big evil, creepy tracking. And yet, you know, an ad network is supposed to do that, but it does a very poor job of it, so we’ll have to have a whole other webinar. Yeah, but Thomas, it looks like you’ve got some, some thoughts. Yeah, because I we’re currently on that topic. I love your opinion on what you’ve learned from the cutbacks and renewal failing. And so I’m on the acquisition and it’s true that for the last six months, the attention towards, oh, I’m going to acquire people on the web because the tracking is let’s say, less broken than it is right down on iOS 14.5 is definitely a huge motivation. But I could see apps that I’ve been doing this from day one. And I think here to the huge example is Noom that never really did much acquisition towards its app, which is the product. And now a lot of people are rushing into basically copying all they learned for this last four or five years that they were really pioneer in the space. There are other apps that did that. Bubble is very famous for that. I was thinking about another one come did a lot of experimentation around that. But it’s true that today like I can see the request have moved from the 30% I said is that I want to track my user, which means I want to measure properly. I think here there are some real reason and it’s true that in some cases like it really change. It comes with big challenges as well. Like I said, like and I wrap it up saying here, you want to supplement. It’s not an awe thing. It’s not like, oh, I was all app and I’m moving all acquisitions to the web Allah Noom is let’s. Go for the pockets of efficiency here and there. You can unlock new channels like, for example, Pinterest doesn’t have an app ads product anymore since this iOS 14 update, but it’s a very relevant audience for a bunch of people. And having this kind of web funnel, even if you don’t charge, they go just to sign up or something. I’ll brand and Taboola works really well for a bunch of subscription apps. Blinkist is their long life. Some is their Lore. Like there’s a lot of apps that use this channel that don’t really have all of the direct to store wouldn’t work and I think you’re like a big motivator is to have both. So that you expand the possibilities. The audience that you can acquire on the mobile web are usually slightly different than you get on social feed and gaming apps that are advertising. And for me, one of the big motivation, like one of the main reason was initially to access this audience that don’t really get elsewhere. This is not entirely true anymore. But the moment I started doing web acquisition for apps was because we had this late user to limit that tracking user ID. I were 20% to 30% of users before this iOS 14 update, and those would not see the app ads on the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram feed and Twitter and so on. I was like, what? I’ve got a 1/3 of my audience that never see my ads. I want to reach them out. And so it was really to expand the possibilities that we can do in marketing, but it was never to replace it. I want the best of both worlds. And I think this is really the spirit here. So it also raised complexity because like, yeah, you need to deal with refund. There’s lots of support, you need to deal with this. A lot of things, even on the marketing side, usually the skills to acquire to women on the app are slightly different, but the same people who are really good at both. So it raised the complexity a lot, but it raised the potential and the opportunity a lot if you’re able to do that and maybe it’s not for if you’re really small, focus on the one that works best for you, scale it and then you’ll go. But if you’re already on a more advanced stage, I mean, going all in on just one of these two routes, in my opinion, is a mistake. You’re missing out on a lot of things, whether you’re 100% on one side or the other. It’s both a mistake if you have the resources to do both in pilot. And for me, yeah, the audience expansion and the possibility of channel was a huge motivator, much more than the percentage of fee and so on. Yeah, that’s great. As before we move on to tactics, Jens, I’d love to get your perspective on the opportunity of web payments for developers. Yeah I mean, I think like most of the stuff has been said already, I think from my perspective, I mean, both the reach point and the flexibility point together, I just mean, you know, you just can do more. Right I mean, like the in-app payments are limited in a focused way that makes them very effective at doing one thing and doing one thing extremely well. That’s kind of converting people who are in the app, but. Anything that’s around that. Right? and that’s like especially on the flexibility point. I mean, of course, as I mentioned, affiliates. But you can think about so many programs, something like that, things like bulk subscriptions, like just in general pricing, you know how to do pricing, the structure of pricing structure, structure of discounts and stuff like that. Of course, like on the stores, if the possibilities there have expanded over time. But on the web, you can basically do whatever you want, right? Like anything that’s kind of mathematically possible in terms of charging you can charge, right? So lots of, you know, lots, lots more flexibility. So so I think, you know, that plus the added reach that Thomas spoke about. I think those to me other of the two biggest arguments that remain regardless of, you know, how the 30% versus 3% kind of balances out after all the conversion, you know, increased friction on the web has been taken into account. Yeah, I’ll kind of open this question. I don’t know if either of the three of you want to jump in, but it seems like the lowest hanging fruit for web payments is when tax and promotional is, you know, somebody signs up with an email, they don’t subscribe within the first. They don’t start a free trial within the first seven days. And then you send them an email, you know, a week later saying, hey, you know, I just got this from I mean, headspace. It was, you know, 50% off our annual plan because I had, you know, my subscription lapsed. I hadn’t renewed it in a while. So any of you or all of you want to chime in on whether or not that is kind of the lowest hanging fruit and the biggest opportunity and kind of the first place developers should start? There is definitely a big difference. Yeah, it’s different, big one. But it’s not easy as it seems. They’re like doing CRM properly is complex and by that time you already churn a lot of people. The rich is not the same, but it’s true that what remains are usually more engage and you have more possibility to convert them on the web. And it’s really incremental revenue. I agree. It’s definitely an action that can yield. Big result is just I don’t want people to picture it as being the fruit is not so low is what I’m saying. It’s a nice juicy fruit, but it’s not so easy to pick that would I experience with win backs and promotion. Olivia you concurred. And this. Yeah well, well, Thanks for that because I would go on for the next few months preaching that being the low hanging fruit. And it’s good to know it’s not as low hanging fruit as it sounds. And this is the problem with all this, right? It’s like I could not having implemented it myself, not worked, having worked with multiple apps on it, that was something that seemed evident to me. But Zach, it seemed like you had something you want to share as well on that front. Yeah, I think one thing I would point out is the nuance between the different levels of implementing this, right? So like level one low hanging fruit is you just build the simplest, dumbest checkout page and a little portal where somebody can manage their subscriptions such that you can then send out your win back emails, do all of that kind of stuff, affiliate what have you. And that is very much a fixed cost, right? You just filled it out for a month and then you have it. You can change the straight product. You can do whatever you want with it from that point forward. Another approach, though, is like if you’re trying to make it work for paid ads, it’s going to be a constant cycle of iteration and improvement and refining. And try this, try that out. And that one is a lot more work, and that it will be difficult to get that to work for the paid ads flywheel. But I think having once you’re at a certain level of scale where you have to go for resources and you can devote a month or two to just building this out, it can be a great thing to have, I think just in your back pocket. And yeah, you just need to build it. If I don’t do it right, then you can keep using it. If you want. The next engagement. I think there’s a lot of tension and then it’s not build it once and cash out. Maybe, maybe you build it decently, but like there’s lots of work of iterating on segmenting the people. When do I send them to the discounted option or maybe doesn’t need to be discounted. And Dak said, man, it’s -50%, but that other actually could be sold, could be absolute something, and you could build it simple and get a low hanging fruit. But actually, if you want to dig in that direction, it goes pretty far, but it requires also higher efforts. Yeah so we’ll try again. And to wrap up the opportunity topic with you to this year and topic. So I mean, I think from my perspective, how low hanging fruit. It is depends a lot on what is your existing of subscriber base, kind of where in the lifecycle are you? Also what are you doing today? Right you know, to what extent are you already offering discounts in the app, for example? But you can also, of course, do. So if you have a large existing subscriber base and have never done anything about discounts and win backs, that that’s definitely going to be a low hanging fruit, even if you like, do it really poorly because it’s basically free money, right? I mean, it’s a little bit of initial investment and then, you know, you’ll just reap some benefits there, even if you have very low open rates, low conversion rates, but know it’s free money that you should just take. Right but I mean, I completely agree with Thomas if you want to do it right or if you want to really think about it more holistically in terms of the customer lifecycle, when is the right time to offer them the first discount and stuff like that? Right I mean, there’s definitely a lot of iteration that goes into that. But I mean, I think they I would also completely agree that it’s good to have in your arsenal, if you want to do CRM and kind of lifecycle campaigns correctly, if you have in your arsenal the ability to offer discounts in the app but also outside of the apps via the web, because that just gives you the maximum flexibility. Yeah sounds like flexibility is the key. And it sounds like we’re not going to ditch in-app payments any time soon, especially since that’s likely not going to be allowed by Apple or Google anytime soon. But I do want to move on to tactics in operationalizing web payments. And I want to kick this off with Jens. So you’ve spent the last couple of months since the Apple injunction doing a deep dive on building out a simple solution for revenue customers to take advantage of web payments without having to do a lot of the kind of heavy lifting that we were just talking about. And in doing so, you’ve had to uncover a lot of those challenges. The you know, what do I do about user authentication? How do I manage entitlements? You know, there’s a lot of complexity behind the scenes that you’ve had to as head of product and kind of defining the spec for this internally, you’ve had to sort it all out. And I feel like a revenue cap. We’ve done a great job over the years of teaching people how to do the stuff we do because ultimately, you know, our win is more doing it for folks. But if you’re going to want to build it anyway, then let’s help you build it. So I think with that perspective, I’d love to hear your thoughts around how you would actually build this out. And then, of course, you talk a little about, you know, what we’re building to make it even easier. And one thing should go without mentioning. But, you know, we do already have a great stripe integration, which is part of what Zack used to help smooth out the entitlements and identity and things like that. So revenue already does work with Stripe. We’re just working toward making that even easier. So with that, I’ll hand it back to you. And of course, I mean, I think like you already mentioned, the biggest topics. I mean, of course, the very big one is basically if you make a purchase inside the app, it’s clear that this purchase belongs to you and it’s even going to be stored on your application account so you can restore it even after you uninstall and reinstall the app. And that same thing, of course, cannot be said for a subscription that you make on the web. So essentially you need some means of authentication, some means of transferring the purchase that was made on the web to the app. Right and of course, like if you already have an account system, then you’re just going to use the same account system. Of course, that means building some way of accessing that account system from a flow that in which you then also make the subscription purchase on the web. So, you know, essentially you might mean just building out that authentication system twice, once on the web and once in the app and then linking that, of course, like if you don’t have an account system now, you know, like many kind of more casual apps might not it might not even have a, an account system, then you need to build something that allows that right. And of course, that’s what kind of where Thomas’s comment about the magic links earlier came in. So so that I think is kind of one of the biggest topics, you know, other than that, you know, this is, of course, the complexities that we mentioned earlier about web payments in general, you know, administrating price points and making sure that incorrectly taxes thinking about that or everything that relates to that. And then, of course, you know, some solutions that you can use already today like Stripe checkout that basically provide a kind of hosted, Hosted Payment form that does most of know, how this payment for me to look at what is the data that you need to collect in order to get to process this transaction? You know that that’s kind of already being done. So you can do that today. And then kind of build everything around that regarding kind of authentication and stuff like that. So if you’re a revenue customer today, you can use that or otherwise. If you are if you’re on subscription back end, you can do that as well. Of course, then you’ll have to make sure that essentially whatever master subscription status system you use that not adequately reflects not only the Apple or Google subscription, but also the stripe subscription. So that I think it’s like maybe the general frame of what needs to be done. And of course, like it gets much more complex. The more you kind of step in, the more complexities you find. So I’ll just kind of very quickly talk about what we’re working on at a revenue card. So essentially the idea is that because we already have an account system in kind of quotation marks, so we have our account identifiers that we link subscription information to is basically providing a way for our customers. You create this kind of, you know, create a paywall, also host a paywall that we would host for a given user and they linked to that. And then the subscription that is made, they will automatically be linked to the user. So, you know, this could kind of have you could kind of see multiple different scenarios. You know, if we’re talking about epic versus Apple injunction scenario in which actually you can link app from the App to this paywall, you know, you could basically from the revenue SDK get a link to the paywall, send the user there. They would make a purchase, a subscription there without having to log in because, you know, it’s a link that is generated that is tied to the user in the app. And, you know, when they at the end of the subscription tap back into the app there, the subscription automatically gets reflected. So that’s kind of the core idea. But this has also other use cases with this Personalize link. can also then send emails. So push notifications that send to the send the user to this paywall. And what’s the trying to cover the web subscription. Sorry, the web acquisition use case as well. Of course in that case, you do need to build a log in sign up, you know, on the web and then link the link, the subscription to that signed up account. So yeah, and the interesting thing here is especially for the kind of first cases where you don’t acquire somebody on the web, but you you sent this, for example, by a push notification or even from, from inside the app is that you don’t have to have a login system because again, the link is just personalized to the account and that can be an anonymous account because we automatically create a unique identifier. And of course, like along with just this paywall, there’s also going to be, you know, management facilities, management page, cancellation page, stuff like that. And yeah, I mean, in the end, the idea is that you would be able to manage all of that also from inside the revenue account dashboard. So you can set up, you know, one of the products that we wrote be selling that stuff like that and kind of manage, manage all of that regardless of whether you’re selling in the app or on the web, basically from kind of a single pane of glass and the Replicat dashboard. Yeah, I’m really looking forward to that. I’m actually working on a big update to my own little side project weather app, and it’s just me and my cousin who’s a developer, and there’s no way we would do the heavy lifting to build out a web purchase experience. So I’m personally actually pretty excited about this, this product we’re working on internally. It’s kind of fun to I mean, I talk about it a lot, you know, working on my own apps, but then also being inside revenue. It’s exciting to kind of put on my developer hat, some days and some minutes and then take that off and put my revenue back on. But zac, you have a bigger team than I do and make a lot more money than I do and on your apps. So, you know, step us through your experience building this out and maybe any kind of holes Younes left in his description of it, you know, having built that out and, you know, had to dedicate a sprint to and a lot of engineering resources to, to building that. I wish it was only one sprint. It was quite a few. But yeah, I think Jens kind of hit that head on and now hit the nail on the head there. Like one of our issues was we didn’t have the account system and hashtag expert. So what we ended up doing is you sign up and pay on the website. You don’t enter a password, you just get a code and you put your email in. So like you get emailed the code and then you also see the code after you pay and then when you open the app, it would also like the website. The website would copy that code to your clipboard. When you open the app, we would automatically check for the code and then it was almost like a password, like magic Link Type thing. Now we have an account system, so it’s a bit easier. Yeah and then you trying to think what else? I think one of I’m just thinking back to that tax thing, which he also mentioned. So essentially, like we got this up and running, we built up the whole essentially a carbon copy of the app onboarding on the website. So it’s not like you hit the link to sign up and then it’s just like pay be like, what do you need hashtags for? What kind of account are you? What categories of hashtags are you interested in? So it feels like you’re kind of getting set up, you’re investing some time, and then after you’re about to your accounts ready, then it’s just enter your credit card to start. So that is something that I’ve tried that I a bunch of other apps like that. I have tried to. And it seems that when you add additional steps that where it’s not annoying but it’s just like you’re kind of investing something, conversion rates tend to be higher. Another thing. So what would. Yeah so we essentially changed our website, our landing page on the website to direct to there when you type sign up. So instead of the download link going to the app, it would first go to this web onboarding. You sign up, you pay and then yeah, I mean with Stripe it is super easy with revenue cap for sure. Immediately though, like once we set this live, we were doing, you know, ten, 10 grand plus per month. And I just started having some questions about the whole tax situation. So I talked to some people called. Yeah, look, there’s basically all these different levels of subscription outside of revenue caps, subscription, billing, infrastructure, right? So like Stripe is a lot more. Like bare bones. Then people think like I was honestly shocked that they didn’t handle taxes at first, and now they don’t handle taxes. They just help you calculate taxes, to my knowledge, which means you still need to figure like, first of all, lots of averages don’t charge taxes at all. And from my understanding, obviously, talk to a lawyer, accountant is you need to and sometimes like there’s even certain counties in America have specific taxes and that well compliance OK maybe you don’t need to do. But at least by state you need to do certain things. And every state has different taxes and then every country has different taxes and countries have provinces and all of that. So it gets very, very complicated super quickly if you want to be compliant. So what they recommend is to use like I started looking at recurring and charge me which are these one layer on top of web subscriptions, one layer on top of stripe in that they stripe is just one gateway. So they support stripe, they support Paypal, they support Amazon, pay all of them. And again, what I found is that they don’t handle taxes for you. They referred out to another partner like an Apple era. Right so there is a Apple area is not the one that stripe acquired. I think they do all that tax remittance and tax collecting, but it is expensive and it is a lot of work and there’s a neutropenia and a contract at the same time. So that’s when we landed on panel for now. And panel is essentially Apple. But for the web, meaning they are actually billing the customer on their statement. You see panel they get a receipt from it and it says panel at the bottom, but their fee is 5% versus 30% So you still get all the benefits. And then they also, because they’re charging so much money through credit cards, they have higher success rates. They don’t get denied by banks as much and they pay out a little bit more frequently, meaning like every two weeks instead of 45 days after the end of the month, 30 to 40 days. Yeah so that’s kind of where we’re at right now. We’re like, we did stripe, it works. And now we’re like moving a panel because of all the compliance issues. Yeah I mean, I think eventually stripe will probably have a system that works. And does the whole thing for you. I mean, you guys. Well, Yeah. So I saw folks mentioned in the comments stripe tax. So stripe has been making big moves in this area. They now do much more sophisticated calculations on the tax that you need to collect and can actually incorporate that into the debts directly in. They acquired a company calculation that it’s not but remittance right because you still have to sign up for every single state register this company and. Right and that’s what I was going to say is that it’s clear they’re moving down this path. So, you know, it’s unclear. And I don’t know that we’ve talked to stripe and whether they’ve talked to anybody about exact, you know, roadmap. So it’s unclear whether it’ll be, you know, six months or years before they do this. But it’s clear stripe is marching down that path and slowly but surely making it easier and easier for developers to not just calculate and collect the taxes, but then next step remit them. Thomas I wanted to give you a chance to kind of wrap up this side of the comments, and then I do want to we’re hitting the top of the hour, but I want to leave some time for Q&A. If any of you panelists that cool. I’m happy to say. I think Jen and Zack Thomas right up and down heads, we I think we call that tactics and we talk about low hanging fruit before. And I just wanted to draw up like if you’re going to take that direction, maybe you want to limit the scope at first, whether it’s for acquisition or CRM. And so on, limited to a geographical scope to even only the US is already a lot of states don’t open this like up to all your 200 countries you have India have this is just madness so do it locally at first until you figure out a bunch of things because we heard it’s not simple. There’s a lot of things to do, like it ahead of building and then after dealing with tax and a lot of things. So I think really limiting the scope of that while you’re building it is a really safe advice. And then you’ll see later with the extra complication of adding a bunch of currency, the currency exchange thing to tax actually multiply. So that would be my that would be my tactical tip to close it. Excellent all right. Well, we could talk for hours more about all this. Thank you, panelists, for all the incredible insight. I feel like I learned a ton today. And I’ve been pretty deep into all of this, very deep within a lot of folks. So Thanks for teaching me. So let’s move on to q and a, it looks like we already have a few questions. If you want to just drop them in the chat, I’ll try and do a good job of tracking down. So the first one does revenue have a PayPal integration any other payment processing than stripe. Yeah, it’s Yeah. No, but we have a few things in the pipeline, but I don’t want to kind of commit to any, any like dates or exact kind of when, by, when and what we’ll have what. But next year, I think you can expect some more additional payment methods other than stripe and the respective stores. Yup I’m excited for that as well. I see too many discussions internally. 2022 is going to be a fun year on a lot of fronts. I think a lot of this is going to come. We’re going to get a lot more clarity on all this regulation. And as things start to change, I think 2022 is going to be a really big year on this front and I think we’re definitely preparing inside revenue cap for 2022. That to be a big shift in the industry. Let’s see, Chris asks for I’ll ask can you officially link to an alternative payment system in your app? Yes, I take that one. No, you just write that on it. And that’s pretty much it. I mean, with the narrow exception of free to apps, which is the other question that I will also just answer. So to understand what a recap is, you need to look in the App Store review guidelines and I’ll just read out the respective section 313a similar email our use it to access previously purchased content or content subscriptions specifically magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music and video read apps may offer account creation for free to use and account management functionality for existing customers. So, you know, this was the Japan free Trade Commission or however it was called, I think, agreement where they essentially Apple was forced to allow them to link out to two managed subscriptions outside of the app. And now Apple offers a single link in the case of 3, 2 apps or allows. And again, that’s a pretty narrow definition. It basically means things like Kindle, spotify, fire, Netflix. That’s kind of the if I may 2nd that we always had an issue. And I know because I work for that one that they’re paying really high fees like royalties or licensing fees, which is very different to most of the rest of the app store, where gaming operates at 100% margin, so they can pay 30% The particular business I was operating in were paying licenses of 70% of whatever we’re selling, which basically means that we were selling at a loss because if we had to give 30% to apple, then this is it, 70% to the content owner, 30% to Apple. And that was gone. And basically we could never sell on the store. And I guess Apple made this exception. So that some of the content typically music, news, video could actually operate on the App Store. But when you look at it, the big ones like spotify, Netflix and so on, they say, no, I’m not, I’m not, I’m not even taking that. But it’s a very particular categories and I guess most apps don’t fall into this because of the licensing. Yep this is where it is so frustrating. Yeah I’ve, I’ve been a proponent on Twitter and we’ve had discussions on the, on the podcast about Apple and Google lowering their fees. And, you know, Google going to 15% starts to kind of open the door where, you know, if you have a 70% licence, at least now you have theoretically 15% gross margins, which is not good, but at least it’s like closing in on possible working things out. And then Google in that announcement, when they dropped to 15%, they actually also announced a 10% fee as low as 10% fee for presumably for the Spotify type apps. The Kindle type apps. Yeah and this is another front, I think too, to really keep an eye on in 2022 as regulators close in and other things is that this as the fee drops, then it starts becoming easier and easier to justify the App Store payments and not worry quite as much. And you know, for me, it’s always been a bigger concern of the apps that don’t get built because the business model just can’t work at 30% You know, creator apps have been a hot topic this year. You know, when somebody is creating content and you know, an exception follows and Twitter plays well 30% of the time and it’s actually creator. Yeah, say that again. If you give 100% of the proceeds, then they pay any commission actually that they didn’t create. If you pay 100%, you have to pay 100% use of Twitter. You only make any money. Very few people use it. Yeah that to do it for WeChat or something. I can’t remember the exact case, but in the case of Twitter for like they don’t pay any tax because they don’t make any money on this. But then you have to give all of the proceeds to the creators. That’s the condition. Oh, good. Rye rye, but I don’t think Twitter is doing that right. They’re paying the 30% They’re taking a car and then they’re paying the creator. Anyway, there’s just know, it’s like it’s like the IRS these days. You know, Apple has so many layers of rules. Google has so many layers of rules. And then you have to actually, like, follow like actual legal, tax things. And each country has different rules and how it’s just going to be such a mess. I mean, you know, that’s where, you know, back in the early days of the App Store when I founded my company, I just put it app on as a paid app. And I didn’t have to think about it, worry about taxes, regulations, like anything. It was such a simple prospect and now, you know, things have gotten much more complex. I want to keep going with the question. So Paul asked. Box subscriptions have an app with a subscription that unlocks the content through in-app purchases. I want to have a secondary option where I invoice a company who wants to pay for bulk subscriptions for their staff. I want the staff to then be able to log in or ideally enter a code to unlock content. Is that against Apple or Google’s rules? Before we talk rules, Zach, have you done any book licensing? No no. Now I am not an oil and I’m not modern and kind of Apple rules lawyer. But in general. I think there’s a little bit of a gray area there. Basically, Apple allows multi-platform apps. So if you are multi-platform app and you allow users to access their subscription that they’ve bought on a different platform, that’s fine by kind of the rules. So in general, my guess would be that this falls under this. But I personally, I don’t have any experience with that. You know, if there’s ever any issues with that. So, you know, in general, having kind of an account system that links links the account to just a kind of a purchase that was made on a different platform. In this case, a bulk purchase doesn’t seem like it would be an issue. But, you know, again, like app review can be. Yes, Yes. Yes I read it. We did. We did talk to the founder of rice science. And they have done this kind of bulk purchasing. And, I mean, it’s similar to how Slack and a lot of other folks operate on the App Store where they fall under that. Some of the unwritten rules around if your business is on the web, you can submit an app that has some level of functionality. And then people can pay on the web and not even have to use in-app purchase. But for rise, they do use in-app purchase and then they kind of hack together a simple purchasing options on their back end where you can pay via stripe for a company. And that’s something is frustrating that Apple doesn’t better support kind of small business use cases, they do have mobile device management where you can bulk purchase licenses but but I’ve been pining for and bugging Apple about creating kind of a if you squint the family sharing program kind of looks like it could be a small business purchase program where a coffee shop that has 20 employees could purchase apps distribution to a scheduling app and do it right on the App Store instead of on the web. And again, these are those kind of things where it’s hard to build out these more sophisticated website experiences for bulk purchasing and everything. So we didn’t fully answer your question, but hopefully it just gives you some ideas there. Let’s see, I’m pretty far behind. But Dan asked, do you have any stats on conversion rate for Stripe on the mobile web and is the drop still crazy? I’ll toss out one to you first, Thomas. And sorry, would using Apple Pay you any sense or just kind of version rate drop off? Yeah, I mean, using Google and Apple pay. So so here. I mentioned earlier, I think they’re saying stripe with Apple or Google on the mobile wave. Initially, the ones I was using were not integrating Apple Pay and I chatted with the dobro told me, yeah, it’s day and night. Like basically we’re chasing people who have we’re only one Safari user with that. We only want people with Apple Pay. Otherwise our friend is not profitable. And it was really like a massive, massive difference. Now that you’ve dropped the bomb about Apple pay, not renewing with the device change. I wonder how they calculated the ATV of those. So I don’t know. But it’s clear that when you’ve got the convenience of not entering the credit card, the conversion rate is massively higher. We’re not talking about a small increment. It’s really, really big. Like, yeah, I don’t want to mention two numbers because this is not even one of my clients. Somebody would tell me a bit in secret on the side, but it was really impressive. Think, think. Doubled the conversion like it was really big compared to entering your credit card, which is it’s almost an app on the web in a way like because the convenience is there. So it’s as if it was a bit an app on the web, but it doesn’t solve all the problems either. It certainly makes them easier. But the adoption is not what is not what it is yet, especially like with Google Pay. The adoption is just not there to make it work. Zach, you you’ve got that implemented or. Yeah Apple put. Yeah Apple Pay comes out of the box with Stripe checkout. But the big issue is Apple Pay doesn’t work with Facebook ads, so it helps with people who don’t come through the marketing funnel. But what I’ve heard, and I haven’t confirmed this myself, but when I was starting to work with panel, one thing they told me was that having the PayPal gateway vastly increases the funnel conversion by like a lot and like something like I want to say 30 to 40%, but don’t quote me on that. Of users checkout you think PayPal. So imagine what happens when you have people on Amazon. I think that’s another big one. It’s like those are fundamentally different from Apple pay because that will be just a way to get a credit card. Whereas PayPal it’s actually it’s very controversial how an Amazon page using like that. Yeah, I think it was very similar here and there. But I also noticed that I was reviewing like a few flaws. This one that I noticed that in some case I think it’s for the better me apps but I need to double check. Actually the paper option was the preselected one and I paying some of it in another manner was have to make one more click to get there. And I know this guy’s test a lot. So I guess if it was like this is the kind of had better result this way, I mean, it wasn’t random. The company behind is heavy on testing. Maybe I was in an AP test, I don’t know, but it was pretty obvious in the case and I don’t think it was a test because I’ve seen it on several other apps. But again, like. When you do those when you do those tests, do you do do you run the exact same tests again through a, an IP address in the US using like a relay. Yeah so, so like what I’m saying is like you could have been in a, in a country like local software space where they thought that the people was going to be actually run them a bit. And she wanted my opinion on two elections around what they’re doing. So she ran the tests. I’m not exactly sure of what was our IP situation there, but it’s possible it varies by country. I’m just I’m just raising the point again that here there’s a lot of flexibility to do stuff, but a lot of Oh did it dropped. Oh we’re all on our own then. Yeah, a lot of don’t assume PayPal is going to work everywhere is what I’m saying now and we as the host look at that. Yes he is the new host. You’re the new host, Thomas. I guess you should be. Because you’re from. I don’t know. I haven’t kept track of the question. The other question didn’t really follow all of it, but I might. Yes that I saw Dan was very active. So Thanks for that, Dan. I’m going to try to see if it’s available for later for reread. And Corey has a good question. What a simple but key requirement when creating your first website. Sign out, sign up or check out. It’s a good one. You want to take that one chance? Because I’m the one that. Not exactly. I think. SSL I would add there. But I think the key is accounting for the customer support cases or else. It becomes a mess very quickly. Right of course, you need the checkout to work with the code based log in or account system. But at the end of the day, if you don’t have that good management portal, if you don’t have customer support trained with how to handle web subscription users and the app itself doesn’t have a good f IQ, that explains it. Then you’re going to have high dispute rates. And it can be. That’s kind of what I saw in the beginning when we first launched was just very messy and led to a lot of really poor. I mean, I think like I would kind of actually give a variant of what Thomas said earlier, making sure that you really narrow it down. And, you know, I would even say not just narrow it down in terms of like, you know, geography and whatnot, but also the use case. And then, you know, thinking about what all of the use cases that I might want to use this for, but when you really created for the first time, optimize it for that one for that one use case. Right I mean, like, as you mentioned earlier, Zach, you know, when you acquire people on the web, you don’t just land them on the payroll. Right? you want them to have some kind of flow where it looks like kind of a natural progression and kind of, you know, progressive commitment to the app before you get them to pay. Right with if you want this, you know, to just be like a, you know, it’s an email that you land them on a discount page. You know, you don’t need that, but then you maybe need something that’s a little bit more attractive, kind of all in one in terms of convincing people that this is an all that this valuable discount. Right so kind of, I think thinking about what is the use case, the first use case that I’m optimizing for and then and then building towards that rather than just trying to build the one thing that fits all use cases, you know, and then in the end building one that, that doesn’t fit any or not even finishing because it just gets too quiet. Maybe that use case is your existing like retained user because you just have to build them. Maybe because the question I see the question men should sign up and check out. Maybe if you start digging into that, truth be told, maybe just do the sign up first, you know, and to figure it out and then add the payment only later, which comes with a lot more issues than, I mean, just items not as simple as group, but so the key requirement is to not try to do it at all. It was that this is the key requirement. I guess we agree on that. I think Morgan had a good question here in general for recently profitable apps, the startups that exist on both Apple App Store and Google Play store, which you always recommend implementing web payments to have in your back pocket. Or is there certain size of business that reach first before we do so? Should we continue to optimize App Store payments first before adding web payments, promotional offers, introductory offers, etc.? I mean, maybe Thomas has a good question for you. A relatively high effort, high impact investment. And if you’re is small and you haven’t like iterated like crazy yet on the app, don’t launch yourself into that. It’s going to like I think we’re almost have been a bit negative today but showing the complexity behind. And I think if you haven’t like I don’t know a size and resources are a relative things like if you’ve got experience in that or I don’t know somehow your backlog is empty. Yeah sure do it but I would definitely wait you hear what David say when he was or still there in say I was so happy that just I have to implement just one payment and never think about that. You’ve got so many other topics you need to deal with from how do I retain my user, how do I acquire them and mean the payment comes a bit last. I think there is definitely a size under which it doesn’t really make any sense to start digging that it’s just too complex to do with a small team of I mean, one digit team. I would do it. Definitely not. Yeah that’s such a great point, though. Like looking at your team because so many app teams are not optimized to build web based stuff. So for us, I have iOS developers and like at the time we didn’t have a backend developer. It was just like we were using cloud. So we had like very little backend work to do in the first place. So yeah, if you have a full stack developer who just is great at building web pages and in a weekend can throw together something then Yeah. But if you’re going to have to start making hires, then you have to run a more in-depth cost benefit analysis of, OK, is this or where we want it? We need to learn how to build the web apps, how to ship web apps, how to test and build that way, and all the environments for it like it. I think looking at your organization is a good step. And we’re going to be able to wrap it up on that. Oh, there’s the man is back. Stop talking about David. Talking Corey. Yeah my, my, my home internet just completely dropped. And either Demi or Chrome really didn’t do a great job recovering. I had to like clear browser history tethered to my iPhone and then it said it was like two people joining anyway. We were just we were just wrapping up. So you can say the closing remarks, additional questions. We we wrapping up. All right. Well, Thank you. I think. Thank you, everyone, for joining us here today. And Thank you, Thomas, Zack and Younes for sharing as popular as this was, I think we’ll have to do another one, maybe either late this year or early next year. And then we do have for those of you who don’t follow the Supper Club podcast, we’re going to be doing some episodes dedicated to this, especially in light of the 6 on the 16th a hearing, there could be some really big news around the injunction being stayed or not stayed. When news drops around any regulatory issues, we’ll be doing follow up podcasts. Webinars, of course, all four of us are on Twitter chatting about all this kind of stuff. So a lot to continue talking about in the coming days. And you can count on us individually, revenue, tech generally and sub club as well to guide these things. So Yeah. Thank you all. Thanks thanks, Thomas again. By
