How Laughly Achieves 90% Open-to-Convert Rate from First Plays for its Comedy Streaming App
Laughly is an app dedicated to streaming stand-up comedy. With the largest collection of comedy and representing over 700 comedians around the world, Laughly aims to be the leading platform for talented comedians to show their content, build a following, and gain exposure.
“Think of us as the Spotify for Stand-up,” said Dave Scott, founder and CEO of Laughly. “The app was built by a group of comedy lovers who wanted to create a one-stop shop for listening to great comedy — old and new.”
The original goal for the Laughly team was to build a platform to distribute comedy to a wider audience. Once Laughly was built, the team has quickly run into a new set of challenges: sustainable mobile growth.
Despite winning at the Techcrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield competition, SxSW Accelerator and a dozen of other awards, Scott and team searched hard for tools that can drive sustainable growth without driving user acquisition cost through the roof — according to Fisku DSP, average user acquisition costs hit $6.00 on iOS and $2.00 on Android in March 2017.
The search completed when the Laughly team found Branch. Using Branch’s mobile deep linking platform, they have built powerful features to convert app downloads to an active user base by encouraging social sharing among friends to drive organic growth — a crucial strategy for Laughly because of the virality nature of comedy content.
“Branch allows us to fulfill the promise of bringing the comedy lover directly to the comedian and jokes they want to hear,” said Scott.
Through the social sharing feature, Laughly has seen that over 90% of app opens convert to first-play users. In addition, their users are super sticky: an active user from Laughly’s 250,000 user base consumes 51 minutes per session, according to numbers shared in the Fast Company story.
How did they do that?
Laughly has built a sharing mechanism using Branch links. The sharing mechanism allows app users to easily share a piece of content from the app — be it a joke, an album, or a comedian — with their friends through SMS, social media posts, or emails with an optimal user experience.
When a link is shared and clicked, the flow happens two ways.
If the user clicking on the link doesn’t have the app, the link will recognize that and take them to the App Store to download the app. Once downloaded, the app will open and show the same piece of content shared via the text or social link instead of a generic app homepage, providing a very smooth content viewing experience.
If the user already has the app installed, the link will recognize that as well and open the same content directly in the app. Either option improves user experience and typically sees 1.9x increase in retention.
In fact content sharing is one of Branch’s most popular features to drive app growth and engagement. It is and will always remain a free feature for app developers. Learn how other companies like Dubsmash and Gogobot have enabled content sharing and found success with this feature.
Last but not least, when asked about how they’ve originally heard about Branch, the team shared that it is through our Mobile Growth Community. If you don’t know about it already, Branch runs the largest mobile growth community with over 20,000 members around 55 locations worldwide and hosts meetups regularly. It’s a platform for app developers and marketers to share challenges, solutions and best practices while growing an app. We highly encourage you to check out the upcoming events and come attend one! To learn more about the community, attend an event, or apply to be a speaker, visit the Mobile Growth meetup page.
