Roast My Paywall: Live! — Episode 3: New Year, New Paywall
Roast My Paywall: Live! is back for its first edition of the new year to help your paywall hit the gym.
Welcome to the third episode of “Roast My Paywall: Live!” – where we kick off 2024 with a candid, insightful, and often humorous look at the world of in-app paywalls. Join RevenueCat’s David Barnard and Jacob Eiting, along with special guest Jake Mor from Superwall, as they dissect and analyze various community-submitted paywalls.
In this episode, we dive into a series of intriguing case studies, covering apps like V1 Golf, FarOut Guides, Deep Dive, MoneyFest, SwiftSole, Weight Loss Tracking Buddy, TouchRetouch, Nihongo, and Prehab. Our panel offers their unique perspectives, critiques design choices, and suggests improvements to enhance user experience and conversion rates.
- 02:40 V1 Golf: Discover why you should show screenshots of the great features the user will be missing out on if they don’t subscribe to a premium subscription.
- 10:11 FarOut Guides: Learn why more content apps should look into using a mixed monetization model, offering lots of one-off in-app purchases to illustrate the great value offered by a premium subscription unlocking everything.
- 20:08 Deep Dive: A fascinating look into the positive effects of injecting personality into design and copy — showing that the people who made the app love the subject means a lot.
- 28:04 Moneyfest: An illustration into some of the mistakes many indie developers make when designing their own paywall and writing their own copy (for example, don’t make apologies for asking the user to pay to use the app!).
- 36:50 SwiftSole: If you’re stuck for ideas of what image to use at the top of your paywall, find out why including a phone mockup showing your app can be surprisingly effective.
- 43:00 Weight Loss Tracking Buddy: An issue that we see on at least one paywall in every roast is that there are accessibility issues affecting readability of text, usually caused by poor contrast between text and background.
- 45:24 TouchRetouch: If the proposition and use case of your app can be clearly demonstrated in a video, then you don’t necessarily need a long scrolling paywall that we often see. A good video, with a clear headline and CTA can be enough.
- 48:26 Nihongo: Giving people a long list of the features that they’ll be getting in premium vs free can be useful context for comparison shoppers, but actually showing screenshots of the cool stuff a subscription buys you will likely be more effective.
- 51:34 Prehab: When writing your headlines, think about whether what you’re saying gets to the heart of the proposition and whether they work out of context. No words are better than meaningless words.
All of these paywalls, plus many more, were submitted in the Sub Club community. Join Sub Club.
