Unveiling The Future Of Mobile App Monetization

We built Nami to help app developers succeed in the modern App Economy.

According to AppAnnie, fewer than 3,000 apps are making more than one million dollars a year via paid downloads, in-app purchases, or subscriptions. That means far too many apps succumb to selling their users’ data or showing annoying ads.

"The mobile app industry is struggling to build a healthy paid customer base. We want to give app publishers the tools they need to win." - Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder Nami ML

We think there has to be a better way. It starts with embracing subscriptions. After all, the best churn insurance is a healthy customer base. Paying customers pay for a reason— because they value what an app has to offer.

As app publishers transition to subscriptions, there’s something missing…

A Missing Solution: The Mobile Paywall

App publishers have plenty of tools at their disposal but nothing to help them manage their mobile app’s paywall. The vast majority of apps prompt their users for the sale via screens that are custom built. Custom screens are only a part of the problem, though. Also hard coded is the business logic governing when a user should be prompted to upgrade.

This means that for the vast majority of apps require an app update to change any aspect of the paywall from marketing copy, promotional artwork, business rules, and even the very products that are being offered for sale. As a consequence, product teams are unable to experiment or evolve their sales strategy efficiently.

We believe there’s a huge opportunity to level up apps of all kinds with a much better point of sale experience. A better experience that’s flexible, beautiful, focused on the user, and yes…revenue producing.

Introducing the Nami

Nami provides app publishers for the first time a way to manage their mobile app paywalls via a cloud-based platform. Gone are the days of hard coded sales screens that require app updates to make changes, let alone experiment. Once a developer installs Nami, product teams take control of all aspects of the point of sale offering the flexibility and control that’s been sorely missing.

You can update marketing copy, what products are for sale, and even the look and feel of the paywall. How are changes impacting your app? See what’s working or not by monitoring paywall performance trends. Nami doesn’t just support one paywall. Now your app can have many paywalls and that creates an opportunity…

In Tune With The Customer Journey

Multiple paywalls mean that for the first time you can nurture your user towards conversion using creative, content, timing, and positioning that is aligned to the customer journey stage. For example, why not offer a ‘welcome’ paywall that’s most appropriate when the user is just starting out with your app? How about a paywall that is invoked when the user explicitly taps to learn more about your paid products?

Each of these scenarios is made possible with Nami campaigns. Campaigns goes even further. Say you want to offer your users a promotion. Nami supports flash sales so you can temporarily suspend your business as usual campaign, and temporarily run a  sale.

“Nami makes it easier than ever to generate mobile app subscription revenue by giving publishers more flexibility and control.” - Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder & CEO Nami ML

We Didn’t Stop There: Harnessing On-Device Intelligence

Machine learning is providing organizations with new ways to unlock business value. At Nami, we’re using ML in various parts of the platform to help us deliver a great experience for our customers. The iOS and Android ecosystems now provide the technology underpinnings to run machine learning models on-device, which facilitates strong user privacy and performance.

One way we’re using on-device intelligence is with a display time optimization feature. Rather than bombard users with an up-sell at every turn, you can now show your paywall only when it’s an opportune time. Nami uses an on-device machine learning model to score a user’s propensity to purchase. That score gets used to show the paywall only when the user is more likely to buy.

“On-device intelligence allows Nami to help our customers optimize revenue using machine learning while also protecting user privacy.” - Alejandro Cantarero, CTO Nami ML

Connect To Your Users Through Great Design

Design is such a crucial element to the success or failure of modern mobile apps. As Apple regularly points out, design is not just how something looks but also how it works. For app paywalls,  developers end up spending too much time integrating and testing with the underlying transaction engine (e.g. Apple’s StoreKit), leaving little time to focus on design.

Nami gives app publishers the opportunity to elevate their mobile paywall experience. Built-in layouts offer a library of common user experience patterns that can be married to beautiful user interface elements and artwork. These themes can be customized, allowing your creative teams to provide artwork that is consistent with your own brand guidelines.

If you’re a development or design agency, please reach out as we’d love to work with you to grow the library of off-the-shelf themes available for our customers. In addition to what’s offered out of the box, we’re happy to work with your creative team or agency to craft a custom paywall design language for your mobile app.

We couldn’t be more excited to bring Nami into the world. The platform is available to select iOS app publishers starting today. If you’re interested, please reach out and we’ll be in touch.

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We couldn’t be more excited to bring Nami into the world. The platform is available to select iOS app publishers starting today. If you’re interested, please reach out and we’ll be in touch.

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