Exploring what younger app users will pay for

The question

A consumer app company earns from paid features and subscriptions, and had worked with us before to understand its younger users.

The next question was money: what younger users find worth paying for in an app, how they decide, and which ways of paying suit them, in the UK, France and Germany. Each answer would point to different choices about which features to charge for and how to package them.

Our approach

We began with how younger users handle money and the apps they already pay for, because what people say about paying makes more sense once you know how they budget.

Desk research, widened with an AI agent we built for the work, gave us hypotheses to test fairly in one-to-one interviews, in person and online, and in conversations with pairs of friends. The company’s team could watch the interviews live, and each theme was set beside the company’s earlier research in North America to see what belonged to these markets.

What the team came away with

There was a topline first, then a final report with a film of the interviews and a toolkit for the product team.

The toolkit opens on a map of the ways into paying and lets a reader go from any part of it to the detail, with examples from apps in other categories as inspiration. A debrief took the company’s core team through the work.

The product team could now test an idea for a paid feature against how younger users think about money, and see which parts of the picture were shared with North America and which were particular to these markets.