I redesigned the onboarding and paywall in my app — and in a single week I earned more than in the previous six months combined - Indie Hackers

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Six months ago I started building an app for learning foreign words. Let me say upfront: before this, I had only ever worked for a salary. Which means I always thought like a developer and an executor.

The more code I write, the more features I ship, the fewer bugs there are — the more I earn.

But this approach doesn't work at all when you want to make money on your own product. And it took me six months to understand that.

The MVP already had a paid subscription, but there was a catch

When I launched the MVP, I decided to bolt on a paid subscription right away, so that literally from the very start I could see not just interest in the product, but people's willingness to pay their own money for it.

I did, of course, add the option to subscribe. But since the product was still very bare-bones, I hid it away on the settings page. In other words, most of the users who downloaded the app didn't even suspect it had a paid version.

Naturally, there were almost no purchases. Except for one "pity" subscription — to support a beginner founder.

I can guess why I did it that way back then. I was a little ashamed of the app. In my head I already saw the future result I wanted to reach. But it was still a long way off. And users only saw what was there in the moment: bugs, a plain interface, a bare minimum of features.

So, to smooth over the impression somehow, I decided to bury the paid subscription as deep as possible. So that as few people as possible would see it. And only the most motivated and loyal users would manage to dig it up.

If you understand how your app works and why it's needed, that doesn't mean users understand it too

The first versions had, naturally, no onboarding at all. I didn't even know what that was. Back then, in my understanding, onboarding meant tooltips shown one after another: click here, then click here, and so on.

When I started attracting my first users, similar comments began showing up in the feedback:

It's completely unclear where to start when you land on the main screen.

So I finally decided to make some kind of explanation. But not to increase sales — just to explain in a couple of words what the app is for and what it does.

It was a few static slides where the user just had to press the "Next" button.

And I dared to add a paywall on the last step after the onboarding. But, naturally, nobody paid for anything from that paywall. Because the paywall itself had no trial, and there was a "Continue for free" button.

Then it became obvious to me why there were no payments. The user had simply read about the features but hadn't actually used the app in any way. He didn't understand whether he needed it or not. Who's going to pay for that? And on top of it, anyone will click the "Continue for free" button rather than the "Pay money" button.

A mobile app lives or dies by its onboarding and paywall

After that, all this time I kept trying to improve the app: I added new features, fixed bugs, improved how the neural networks worked. I barely thought about sales, onboarding, or the paywall screen.

At some point I happened to meet, at the gym, the owner of a large mobile app that makes $400,000 a month. An app for counting calories and building personalized workouts.

I downloaded that app and was surprised: it had around 20 onboarding steps, after which came a payment screen offering a 3-day trial.

At first this felt counterintuitive to me. I had literally spent up to 10 minutes of my time on the onboarding. You'd think that this would, on the contrary, lose a lot of customers who simply never make it to the end.

But then everything fell into place.

A long, personalized onboarding is literally the foundation for mobile apps. It's simple: a person who has already spent their time is more likely to start a trial. Otherwise they'd have to admit they wasted those 10–15 minutes.

But, of course, what matters isn't just the number of screens, but also what they consist of.

Now for the meat. How I reworked the onboarding in my product

Once the product became more or less stable, I spent a couple of weeks digging deep into the onboarding and paywall. I literally did only that, and during this time I didn't build any new features into the product.

In the end I got a set of screens like this — 19 steps in total.

All onboarding steps and the paywall in VibeLing

Now in order: what was done and why. Every screen matters and affects the conversion to subscription at the very end.

Briefly explaining the app

Information about the VibeLing app

The very first slides are very light. Here we just tell the user in a couple of words what the app is and what it's for.

Because far from all users download the app deliberately. Someone might have just tapped "Download" without looking, and only after the...