Mixcloud has two subscription plans.
One is Pro and the other is Premium.
TLDR is that Pro is the plan for creators and Premium is for listeners.
As our app has grown over the years and become the main space where listeners… well, listen. We looked at ways to push premium from mobile. We were granted access for Apples new ELE(External link entitlement) which in a nutshell meant we could link out from the app to our website and avoid giving 30% away to Apple.
This was a really exciting project to kickoff as we were about to build something relatively new. “New” in the sense that there weren’t many examples of products doing this at the time, and even less writing about best practices.
This began as a real race to find examples in the wild of products who had been granted this access. The first product in our space was Netflix which helped as a good starting point to see what felt good / bad about the experience before sketching.This Figjam served as a space to keep our thoughts in one area. This became our reference point when we began to map out the journeys.
Once we had ironed out the experience. I moved on to the user flows. What helped me massively in this experience was using Protopie at the time to prototype. As you can embed live links it helped create an "as real as possible" experience.
How did we know this was a good use of our time? I was fortunate enough to be part of the discovery work of this project. Speaking to a mix of free & paying premium users with a JTBD framework style interview process uncovered that listening offline was an obvious need. One that wasn’t previously being met.
Below are some screencaps from the research analysis I shared with the team.
The first few set backs came from the ever changing design constraints of what we could / couldn’t build. Meaning, the documents didn’t exactly meet the few examples out in the wild. So, we were hit with a few rejections when submitting to the app store.
We created a premium upsell page in app. The challenge was to create a one size fits all page.Meaning: We weren't able to create variants of this page. It could only be one link out from the app so it had to be copy that felt natural no matter which page you were coming from.
Once we finally got approved, people were converting. This was the news we had waited so patiently for. We were now able to turn up the dial and upsell from other areas. The first area was during onboarding.
As more and more users made their way to the premium page, we wanted to put some hypothesis to the test. There were several studies occuring at the same time during this work and it felt like a good time to align.
There were a lot of findings that a lot of our customers cared more about our fair licensing models vs the features itself. So we created an A/B experiment to test which page converted better. We made dynamic components that we displayed to different users.
A: Support Led
B: Feature Led
The winner: Feature Led
The last piece of work during the premium efforts was selfishly the player. It felt like it had been months of user feedback with player issues that I was itching to get a look at it.
During our premium research, we found the main job that premium was offering was offline listening. We planned to get the download action in front of our users at one tap.
Why was this the right time?
We had uncovered that the premium subscription flow was working. Which led to us displaying core actions to the user. Download being the most core.
This was a project I'll forever hold close to my heart. We doubled our premium customer base after this work during a shaky time in the companies lifespan. Forever thankful to my teammates who worked on this with me.