How Skyeng launches new apps 10x faster with Qonversion

Skyeng is a fast-growing EdTech company in Europe. More than 150,000 people learn English through its web-based and mobile applications from more than 15,000 teachers. 

The Challenge

In 2021, Skyeng decided to introduce a new product into its mobile application: a subscription-based self-study program for people to learn on their own. To prove the idea, the project management team needed to develop an MVP and substantiate its business value. 

The team had to complete the following tasks: 

• Implement in-app subscriptions on both Apple and Google platforms. 
• Accurately track crucial business metrics and optimize user acquisition funnel.
• Complete the tasks above with minimum developers’ time investments. It was crucial to constantly make a choice between urgent and important as engineering workload is always stretched thin.

The Solution

Since the company had already experimented with subscription-based products, the product management team decided to keep the infrastructure in-house. The main challenge this poised was gathering the accurate analytics data, as the company did not have the server-side receipt validation. 

“A simple dashboard displaying daily revenue requires a week of backend development to put together. When we started experimenting with pricing, we’d get inaccurate information in our dashboards, and we would make poorly calculated decisions as a result. We realized that there were things we hadn’t considered in the development process, and a high quality solution required significant team resources and costly expertise,” says Vladimir Nazarov, product manager, Skyeng.

The product marketing team ended up turning to Qonversion and installed the Qonversion’s SDK to track subscription data accurately. The observer mode implementation of Qonversion took just several minutes. 

The Result 

“The best part is that Qonversion is a low code solution. We implemented just 2 lines of code, set up the necessary integrations, and got a high quality subscriptions analytics,” says Max Troshin, developer, Skyeng. 

Along with analytics access, Qonversion helped Skyeng figure out the best pricing and scale user acquisition effectively:

• A 3x decrease in refunds. “After a few months of product launch we saw a significant amount of refunds. We were not able to track refunds accurately with App Store’s analytics, as the data there is inconsistent. Qonversion allowed us to accurately measure the refund rate thanks to server-side receipt validation. The initial refund rate was ~15%, twice higher than we expected. Qonversion analytics allowed Skyeng to identify all of the refunds and make the appropriate business decisions including lowering the subscription price. After the changes refunds stand at around 5%,” says Vladimir Nazarov, product manager, Skyeng . 
• Ad campaigns optimization. As a large international brand, Skyeng operates with large advertising budgets. They’ve started sending the data about in-app subscriptions events to MMPs using Qonversion. That allowed the team to accurately measure revenue from different campaigns including collaborations with bloggers and set up upsell and cross-sell processes for people who use only basic app features. 
• Experimenting with promotional campaigns. Without Qonversion, the team wasn’t able to test promotional campaigns effectively, as the existing analytics didn’t allow them to see subscribtion and renewal conversion rates. Filtering by product in Qonversion’s real-time dashboards allowed the company to measure corresponding results.

Implementing subscription with Qonversion in several hours

After evaluating the flexibility and comprehensiveness of this solution, the Skyeng product team decided to use Qonversion for the launch of its new application.

This time, in order to save engineering resources, the team went all-in and swapped the whole subscription infrastructure to Qonversion.

“I’ve had experience with three applications where we spent several months on subscriptions implementation. Qonversion lets us implement subscriptions in 1 day instead. The best part of it is that we get a complete solution entirely out of the box, and we can now focus on improving our app, and optimizing the product funnel,” says Vladimir Nazarov, product manager, Skyeng.

The value of Qonversion 

In the end of the day, Skyeng emphasized the core value of Qonversion as a tool that has helped team to save weeks or even months of engineering team time on subscriptions implementation and management with Qonversion SDKs, and shortened the time to monetization on the app store. The other thing is that the team is finally able to manage corporate marketing budgets more effectively while accurately measuring effectiveness of marketing spends and doing much faster experimental iterations – from once per month to few times per week.