Content
Waterspeed grows revenue 30% by powering in-app purchases with Glassfy
The background
This article will dive into how Waterspeed used Glassfy to build and grow in-app purchases, leading to a 30% increase in revenue.
Building in-app purchases is complicated and time consuming, even more so if you are trying to sell across multiple app stores and web — which if you want to maximize your revenue — this is the gold standard. Building a reliable implementation takes domain expertise, custom built front end experiences and managing a backend that somehow brings all the stores usage data into one digestible way — or at least you hope so… and that is just the beginning.
Waterspeed ended up doing what a lot of apps do, try to build in-app purchases on their own. They quickly came to realize the massive overhead and experience it takes to do this. Day in and day out having to maintain custom scripts, app store data issues, version release, building monetization features, and a lack of understanding user behaviors was cumbersome. Waterspeed had the constant pressure that they were not spending their time actually learning and driving revenue, simply just maintaining pace — so they set out to find for two things…
- A platform to build and maintain in-app purchase functionality
- Tooling that drives monetization from user onboarding to retention
We went through what most engineering teams go through, building in-app purchases and subscription management in-house. Our need was that we don’t have the size or expertise in-house to manage this. Ultimately we needed something to help us drive monetization decisions.
Implementation
Waterspeeds implementation was similar to most, shockingly easy but equally eye-opening. Within a couple of days the Waterspeed app was live with various purchase options and paywalls. The team could now shift their focus to learning user behaviors, building and testing various paywalls, and seeing which user events led to the the biggest potential impact. All from one tool.
During the evaluation we couldn’t find an offering that matched Glassfy. We could tell no matter what size or complexity our app will become, Glassfy was going to directly impact our ability to generate more revenue.
Waterspeed tapped into two specific areas of our Growth tooling to achieve the revenue growth they had:
- Paywalls — Having paywalls natively in Glassfy has allowed them to build highly customizable and realtime monetization moments for the right users, at the right time. This was important for them as it allowed in a reliable way to display the most relevant paywalls to each user without managing scripts or other tools while also getting this data back natively inside the same tool to measure success.
- Real-time user event triggers — Harnessing Glassfy to power their real-time notifications based on events such as ‘Cancellations’. Using Glassfy with Heroku and nod-red, they trigger various notifications to users based on different stages of the user journey. This allows for the most relevant and real-time communication with a user to ensure maximum potential to monetize and retain (or recover) users.
Tip: When sending the real-time user events triggers, you can both trigger an email as well as send a silent notification to the app which would then trigger a behavior in the app once the user goes back . An example of this: A user cancels their plan, this behavior triggers an email in their inbox but also you trigger a specific paywall or message when the user goes back to the app the next time.
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The outcome
We accelerated revenue growth 30% after implementing Glassfy and now better understand the monetization experience of our users
The leadership team at Waterspeed are now able to focus their energy on scaling their revenue in a meaningful way without juggling too many tools. Their use case isn’t different from many others, if this sounds similar to something you’re going through or you’re looking for a result like theirs, reach out to us, we would be happy to help!
About the App
Waterspeed is a first of its kind water sport fitness app that helps you improve your water sports performance by tracking and collecting key stats such as speed, angle, pace, distance and heart rate, while providing wind and tide forecasts.
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