Kamo Asatryan spent a lot of time working with his clients on finding ways to build new, first-time user experiences to help them close a deal. In fact, he was spending so much time that he decided to start a whole service built around that.
Enter Primer, a service for companies that helps them provide custom, first-time user experiences in apps in order to help convert them into users that’s launching today. Companies are able to generate a custom on-boarding experience, such as one specific to users downloading an app through Facebook or coming in from a promotion.
“In working with [our clients] we discovered the biggest bottleneck to growth has been changing and optimizing the first time user experience of mobile apps,” Asatryan said. “It’s taken our whole team plus the teams at companies to do releases and change things, that costs lots and lots of money. In our experience during growth on the web this has been much easier.”
Companies are given a dashboard that enables them to quickly build and assign custom first-time user experiences to those different buckets of new users. The whole process takes around 10 to 15 minutes, he said.
Once a download occurs, Primer can get a rough match of who the person is when they open the app based on the information they have, such as the rough time window when they went from the promotion to the app. It then builds a page based on information pulled from a file that’s custom built for that new user.
This was a popular way to help figure out the best way to convert new users on the Web, but it isn’t something that’s evolved into a best practice for native applications yet, Asatryan said. Part of that reason is it takes a while to build new first-time user experiences and test them, which is what Primer is trying to automate.
“We thought, ok, we need to enable people to make drastic changes to their first time experience because it has such a huge impact — and without that basically every day companies are not doing it they’re missing out of activations,” Asatryan said. “Between anywhere from 50 to 60% of users drop off before activating right after install. It’s happening because people are not able to change this experience, and again we thought, one thing that really made us think we absolutely have to do this, is when we were talking to clients about it. We do this stuff on the web all the time.”
Asatryan says he’s been working in growth for about eight years, coming previously from Lolapps and then working with a consulting agency called Sendbridge on these kinds of problems. There wasn’t necessarily a light bulb moment, but when he and Sendbridge found themselves going through the same process for the sixth or seventh time, they decided to build a service around it, he said. He and his team have been working on Primer for about a year before launching today.
While Primer is based on building custom, first-time user experiences, it isn’t necessarily the only service capable of determining the best experience for converting new users. A/B testing startups could also find ways to do something similar. But the goal is to give companies greater flexibility to quickly alter their first-time app experiences as their marketing and promotional plans change over time, Asatryan said.
“[Companies are] used to having the flexibility on the Web, and suddenly it’s gone as soon as they come out with a mobile app,” He said. “For us, not only do we think it’s obvious to us from doing this work over and over again, but we think it’s obvious to everyone else who actually has a website.”