Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers and grow revenue across iOS, Android and the web. You can learn
more at RevenueCat.com. Let's get into the show. So without further ado, I want to introduce Ramit. He has helped lead the Microsoft app teams there. So the first thing I wanted to get to and you can tell us a little bit about your role at Microsoft. But I keep getting people asking me Microsoft. They're like enterprise.
Why are you speaking to Microsoft at an app event? Tell us a little bit about what you do, but then also how the apps inside Microsoft are kind of a start-up inside this massive company. Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, David. Hi, everyone. London is awesome, by the way. I'm a growth lead. I'm part of product management at Microsoft 365 consumer business. So basically our word Excel PowerPoint apps and there's also the Microsoft 365 app. So my current role
is very focused on leading our apps on the Mac platform. I mean, Mac App Store is a big part of it. We also have a direct channel. And then I support iOS and Android. It's basically our mobile apps as well. And we sell Microsoft 365 personal and family, which is sort of our consumer subscriptions. And then we also sell co-pilot pro. And we have a fairly large business on App Store. So like straight up in App purchase and business on App Store. And we are very
much like you guys when it comes to just growing our apps. And essentially, yes, Microsoft is an enterprise company in a lot of ways, but we are also a very big consumer company. Our app presence is actually pretty good. So yeah, if you look at a sensor tower at a day, a Microsoft apps are some of the leaders in monetization on the app store. Some of
the biggest apps, some of the biggest performing apps. And before talking to you, I kind of always thought of it like a lot of the questions I got this morning about why I was talking to Microsoft. Do you think of it as like, Oh, it's an afterthought it's something Microsoft does because they have to. But the more you and I have gotten to know each other and talk through how Microsoft thinks about it, it's pretty cool. How you are able to operate as
a startup and how much growth and monetization you are seeing on the app stores. It's not an afterthought. It's actually like a huge line of business. Yeah. And it's a big part of the strategy. So for our consumer business, apps stores are very important. And we actually have a pretty decent amount of people and money that we spend on all the things that are somewhat covered in this conference like ASO, MMP. We have a paid ad strategy. We have
a ASO strategy. We have teams that are doing optimization on the funnel. So at all parts, activation, monetization and acquisition and renewal, optimization and so on. I like to say we have an equivalent of say revenue, cat and braze and some app companies inside. Obviously, we work with a lot of vendors as well. So we have a pretty decent strategy around
that. Awesome. So I wanted to dive into ASO because I think, again, even though it's Microsoft, I think we all have a lot to learn from the strategies that you and your teams have employed there at Microsoft. Well, before we go, I know you needed to make a small disclaimer. Yes. Yes. So all opinions are my own and do not represent Microsoft's official stance. So that is a disclaimer that I am always opposed to me. Yeah, of course. And that's
the thing. I'm Microsoft. It's such a big company. There's so many things going on. It makes sense that we're going to talk about some of the things you've learned and stuff, but it's not official Microsoft strategy. But on ASO, I think a lot of people in this room, again, people I talk to this morning think, oh, Microsoft can just own any keyword and like, oh, it's just all brand search. Like people just go and search word.
As you and I have discussed that's not actually the case. So tell me a little bit about what kind of ASO work Microsoft does to find the right audiences on the app stores. Okay. So I mean, just like most other app companies, we have a ASO vendor and we work with them on a number of things. And so if you look at it broadly, there's the brand optimization which we can get because our apps are named Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel, etc. So like
our brand is very much in the title itself most of the time. So for the keyword optimization piece, we do competitive keywords. So if you look at app stores, a lot of times we are not the number one productivity app. So there are other apps that are on Mac on iOS, also on Android. There are a number of productivity apps that keep going up and down in the chart. So we have a competitive strategy with keywords. The app stores are kind of a great equalizer.
Yeah. It is a democratic place. Right. So it's not that you are Microsoft. So you can just show up there and it's not an exclusive to Microsoft channel. Right. So like App Store really democratizes everyone. Like just how Paramount Pictures and a YouTube influencer at the same stage when it comes to YouTube, like in terms of eyeballs, it's the same thing with App Store. Like a new app can pretty much get the top spot. We have a competitive strategy. So we
always for the most part know who are the top competitors. And sometimes actually when it comes to App Store, it's not even some of the names that you would think. Like I mean, sure there are the big ones like Google, Canva, etc. But there are a lot of smaller competitors, smaller apps like productivity apps that are also at the top spot. So we do have a strategy to get some of that keyword. So competitive is a smaller part, but actually jobs to be done
is a bigger part of the strategy. So we have like generic and non generic keywords. So essentially keywords like notes, resumes. We have a lot of like user research around what are our apps used for because our apps are very general. We try to focus on jobs to be done like resume creation is a job to be done, note taking is a job to be done slide creation of presentation decks. Excel has budgeting as a big one in voice creation. So those are
some of the jobs to be done that we know. So we try to optimize for some of those keywords because somebody may be looking for in voice and may not excel because not everybody is like a business owner looking for a quick bookstip of solutions. Sometimes you just need something very simple and excel can do the job. So those are the kind of things that we keep doing and there's no like constant set. We are always so every month we have an
update and our paid ASA also kind of guides us. And also there is this whole thing that once you are ranked, say top three in a keyword, we can remove that keyword and get new keywords in. If you are seeing that we are consistently ranked for like say a year or so we can then you know slowly take that keyword out and put like an AI or a copilot. Because we also have like newer features and newer things coming in like AI is a big one. So we tried to rank for that and things like that.
Yeah, I think even for smaller and mid size apps, ASO is super competitive. So Microsoft does have an advantage. But I mean, you heard it here like on the app stores, you were competing with the biggest company in the world, you know, multi-trillion dollar company in ASO. And so the same strategy is a rommet at Microsoft is employing is what we all and I have apps
on the app store as well personally in addition to working in revenue cat. And so it's the same kind of strategies we should all be employ thinking through the jobs to be done. And you were talking about app store search ads and I want to touch briefly on how you look at the profitability of specific keywords and then how that helps inform your strategy because I think that's something, you know, all app companies should be thinking about.
I mean, there's no one answer because at any given point of time, we are running multiple campaigns. So like say, if we are getting certain keyword that is really sticky, we can always bring it back. But very basic like ASO 101, like the keyword bank is very small. Like it's 100 characters and then you have, I mean, yes, you can stuff a few things in the description, but it also has to make sense. So there is that aspect that description has to be clean.
It has to reflect Microsoft. We are not a junk app that we will write anything in the app store. Right. So we have to make sure that everything that is external facing is like making a lot of sense. And it's not just keyword optimization. It's not just a bunch of keywords stuck together. So there has to be some flow and logic to it. But yeah, if we do find from ASA, we find some things that are high performing, we can obviously bring it back
to our general ASO, like organic or we can just bid more there. And there's also the whole MMP angle there with ASO, like trying to really make sense that if this is the keyword that is only driving monthly active usage, or is it driving real subscription? Because we have very strict CPI limits, like cost per install limits that we want to kind of go after. Yeah, I think that's a mistake a lot of folks make in their ASA strategy is going after keywords
that are easy to rank for. And so like Microsoft, because they ask you to download it so much, you could probably rank for something like swimming. But it's like, that's fine. But that's not going to drive business value. And so your ASO strategy shouldn't just be about ranking, but it should be about using apps or search ads and other tools to understand the profitability of the specific keywords and being way more focused on your approach instead of just
those scatter shot. Do you see any differences between iOS and Android on that front? Are there any differences there? Yeah, I mean, there's the 8020 rule sort of a thing like Android has a very large install base, but we constantly have seen. And so Microsoft apps are available. I believe in six plus app stores. So in China, we have a number of app stores that the apps are available in. There are also pre-installed deals, but still Android monetizes way less than iOS does.
So there's a 8020 sort of a thing. I mean, it's not exactly 8020 somewhere like that that Android and Applech is there when you still lags pretty significantly to iOS. And it becomes specially interesting from like a LTV to Mao perspective that for an Android user, for example, if you have to run a paid ads, our CPI limits are like 50 times less in some cases than iOS CPI limits,
right? Because basically it's like you can drive installs to Android and you can keep getting like more and more monthly active usage, but the percentage that converts to paying users is like super low. So you have to be so careful with Android both with cost per install like what you pay from a paid ad, but also sometimes in terms of your organic strategies. So for example, if you have like an engagement platform that you are paying by data points, right? By data points or by usage or
by MAU. You have to be really careful because your Android campaigns might start costing you more in terms of COGS because the LTV because essentially if we are selling a consumer product our LTVs are not like in thousands of dollars, they're in hundreds of dollars. So we are just operating like any other consumer SaaS startup in that sense that we are making sure that our LTV to CAC ratios are kind of in range so that we don't overspend on in-app engagement or on ads.
It's not that we are Microsoft, so we'll just like go and train money, right? So all the same restrictions apply and it ultimately comes to the LTV CAC ratio. Yeah. So I mean, I could ask us all the time, you know, we've got millions of active users on Android, but it's just not monetizing. How do we improve monetization? Like I can now tell them, I talked to Ramit from
Microsoft and it's the same thing. It's just like Android does not monetize as well as iOS and like understanding that reality can help you inform the Android strategy, but then also Android, I think we're going to see a lot of evolution. I'm actually going to be talking to the Google Play partnerships team on a forthcoming episode where we talk about some of the experiments that people are starting to find success with on Android, but it's good to hear from like a prioritization
standpoint that yeah, you can put a ton of work into it and Microsoft has and has all the resources, but it's just a different platform and it just monetizes differently and understanding that helps inform strategy of how you invest, how many data points you collect, how you spend on tooling for Android versus iOS. So it's super helpful to know. Another thing I wanted to dive into was monetization and A, B testing and if there's any particular tests or anything that you think are
especially interesting on subscription monetization. Yeah. So before I get into that, I'll finish the Android versus iOS. Like I'll just conclude it by saying that I think Android is a very promising platform. It's just that maybe developers need to think more than just straight up expensive subscriptions. Yeah. Like because a lot of the subscriptions are very North America based. I think some of the price points may need to go down. Some new business models may need to be there. Like there
has to be much more thought that has to go into monetize that platform. It's a harder platform to crack. It's it's just copy. Yeah. iOS. Yeah. Exactly. It's just a harder platform to crack and there has to be more Android specific strategies that need to get applied. I'm not saying it's not a promising platform. I think we think it's a promising platform, but there's just more to be done
there. So now moving on to A, B testing. So yeah, a lot of our teams do A, B testing on mobile Microsoft 365 apps like Word Excel PowerPoint as well as the 365 app and other apps that we have in the family. We keep doing a number of experiments and some of the things that have really worked
just like very plain bare bones ideas that have worked. I think CTS like if you have a free trial make sure the CTS is it's a free trial like try free for one month something like that because this one thing that we have observed is that CTA has to really communicate the free value if it's
available so that it's just more comfortable to press that button. So basically like you have a free trial wording up on the top, but then you have say something that says buy now for example people are just not comfortable because a lot of times you know because of how there is like a lot of this one click buy type of things that have happened in the recent past like people are very apprehensive of pressing the buttons right because they're like oh I'll just touch this and
money will be charged. So if you have a free trial if you have a more comforting motion like definitely make sure to have that on the CTA then another thing we have found a lot of success with is cards and gifs so instead of like lines of text using some kind of cards with gifs and what would be in the gift? Yeah, I pronounce it GIFs. Yeah, GIFs, GIFs, GIFs, yeah, fifthed of it's are a what's in the gifs like an animation and demonstrating the value almost like a little
video kind of yeah, sometimes that or sometimes just illustrations. So for a Microsoft 365 subscription some of the more important things if you open any of our apps some of our more important things are like there is the premium apps that you get on desktop and then there's the one DB one drive storage that you get and then there is access to AI features that you get. So those things like you can write them down or you can actually have like illustrations showing that you are getting
you know one DB one drive for each of your family members. So you'll have like six people showing and you see that one DB one drive is going to all six of them. So if you can show them more visually it helps in converting better. So that's more of a sort of a paywall optimization type of a thing. Yeah, no, that's a great tip and I mean I've been hearing that more. I actually I've been experimenting with a video on my paywall in my weather app and it's seeing really good
results from exactly what you're saying. It's like yeah, people just don't read so you can feel the great like copyright you want. But it's like you got to show them. Yeah. And then the age of TikTok and reels and everything else like what better way to show them than with animated video illustrations or other ways to like really capture their attention and then communicate that value in a way that they probably won't read even if you write it very cleverly. So yeah,
that's a great tip. Another thing you had mentioned was experimenting with just the ordering of subscriptions. Yeah. Yeah. So this was a very interesting experiment where we had our family and personal. So family is slightly more expensive. It's like $9.99 and personal is a six dollar 99 subscription in the US and other region prices are different. But so we just reordered them. So we made family as a default subscription. So a person used to be the default and then we reordered
it and then we did one more change. So actually two separate A, B, T, S, one more change where we started showing monthly equivalent price. So like if it's $99 for the year, then we just show something like $8 or something like a monthly equivalent price. So both of those were very successful. So monthly equivalent price when people can see, oh, is this going to cost me $8? Even if they have
to be built for the whole year, it's good. Like a VV saw success there and the second one was yes, this reordering where it was very interesting that when we reordered, both started selling more and
the one that went below the personal one, it actually started selling a lot more. So I think from a psychological perspective, when we were backtracking, maybe there was this whole idea that people saw this default subscription, which was more expensive and they're like, no, no, no, this is more expensive, but let me get this other one, which is cheaper, but it kind of increased their purchase and time somehow. Now the question in that increase, sometimes this is
very psychological. Like sometimes when you see an expensive thing, like you walk into, say, like a Louis Vuitton store, you see a lot of these expensive things and then you end up buying a tie from there because you know, it's cheaper thing, but you still bought something from Louis Vuitton, right? So it's kind of like that where you see this more expensive option up on the top and then you end up buying the cheaper one because you still bought something and you still unlogged and
you still have a premium experience. So something like that. I didn't plan this, but we ended up talking about pretty much the top four things that I recommend people experiment with underpay walls because like, yeah, you can test like colors and change the color of the CTA button and all
that kind of stuff. But like the highest impact or price testing and including in that, the pricing and packaging, like I did a test in my weather app of defaulting to only showing the $4 a month subscription versus showing the $40 a year subscription and I had a 20% increase in conversion to paying by them just seeing that $4 and so by experimenting with the packaging, saw a 20% lift in conversion to paying and then the other things we talked about, you know, experimenting with video
and stuff. So these are some of the lowest hanging fruit, not just for any app here in the audience, anybody listening on the subplot podcast, but it applies to Microsoft as well, like the biggest companies in the world, like this is where the leverages points are on your paywall. So that's where you should be experimenting. So we are at time, but I did want to give you an opportunity or anything you wanted to share as we wrap up. Maybe go and download the Microsoft 365 apps and give us great
reviews and actually, you know, if you like them, of course. Yeah, and I think everyone here should go download the apps, you know, before talking to Ramay, I thought, oh, Microsoft, they're just, you know, boring enterprise company, but the more I've talked to Ramay, the more I've realized, like they're doing really innovative stuff and like working hard at optimization and working on
onboarding and paywall testing and packaging testing. And so, you know, when you're doing research on like best practices in the industry, the apps, Ramay works on are actually fantastic examples of the type of growth experiments and the type of onboarding and the type of things that you want to do in your own app. Yeah, and let us know what you think and I'm available on LinkedIn. So I'm happy to help out anybody. Awesome. And then as we wrap up, most of you probably know I'm with
Revenue Cat, I'm the growth advocate. We're a subscription management and optimization platform, you know, help simplify billing across iOS, Android and the web and normalize all the crazy intricacies between iOS and Android. So you can run your CRM campaigns based on the same token instead of having to do different ones for the different platforms and really help subscription apps. I mean, our mission
as a company is to help developers make more money. And so we build the tools to do that. I do, I weekly interviews with top industry folks to help subscription apps grow. So check out the podcast on Apple podcast, Spotify or wherever you're listening to your podcasts. Thanks again so much for your time and for sharing your knowledge and we'll have to do some more collaboration in the future. Yeah, absolutely. And thank you so much, David, for having me and thank you everyone for joining.
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