A/B testing sent Setapp on a choose-your-own-adventure no one could feel 100% confident about. We’d gotten far too caught up in tweaking user flow that we hadn’t stopped to consider what the users are flowing to. What is up to change is the product itself.
Retention and conversion are, in essence, unfixable. And our circular mistake in trying to repair these issues was trying to repair them in the first place. Our previously non-cohesive design led to a high bounce rate on the main site and a low overall retention, possibly attributed to confusing jumps in UX. This was the linchpin concept which drove our design thinking. Ethically, it gives Setapp members and the creators of the content they interact with a voice that is more or less equal. As with Medium and other like services, Setapp’s decision to spread a large cut of revenue among creators empowers creators to continue their craft. On Setapp, member payments go to the developers whose apps they use the most, or in other words, find the most useful. The blogging platform Medium is a great example of this, allocating members’ fees proportionally to the authors they read the most. In business, it means distributing funds appropriately - supporting the artists, because you only really thrive through symbiosis. In life, it means sharing your chocolate bar because you’d have liked theirs to be shared with you. At the core of business ethics lies the same tired-but-true message taught to children and oft forgotten in adulthood: The Golden Rule. Power of voice or why we want to share with youĮthics.
The SaaS-y giants get one big thing wrong. The big-league examples suffice to explain here. Netflix delivers content built for binging, because it’s not difficult to find what to watch next. Spotify knows the importance of fitting the song to the mood from a sea of millions. It’s anxiety-inducing to be faced with too many choices, and many SaaS companies are cashing in on the solution. It’s about having the tool around for the present task and knowing it won’t snap under pressure. Even so, not every app on the market is Apple-approved, so there are many developers whose masterpieces are neglected and who therefore must rely on other marketing channels.
We don’t blink an eye at discounted software bundles.īluntly, what the App Store’s got going for it is volume. The rest that may claim to be in competition are all anything but.
Our only competitor is Apple’s Mac App Store. Yet to realize the value of its redesign and understand why a company like Setapp might choose to shift the majority of its resources to rebuilding what’s already been squared away, these are essential considerations. Nor about its advantage over the competition.
This isn’t a case study on Setapp’s effectiveness as a service. What we could only learn after some product maturity was that users value app discovery almost as much as the apps themselves. We were delivering on what we perceived to be the value of our application, which was that it allowed users to stay productive by having every software tool they’d need. After pinching, squeezing screens and testing, teasing out colors, the first few iterations of Setapp functioned.