Why App Stories?

App Stories was born from a shift happening at Purchasely. As we evolved from subscription infrastructure into a solution helping product and growth teams shape the entire in-app experience, we found ourselves having remarkable conversations with the people behind some of the world's most successful apps.

Conversations about experimentation, user behavior, onboarding, retention, pricing, personalization, and all the invisible decisions that turn products into daily habits.

This publication is our way of bringing those conversations to a wider audience. Every month, we sit down with the teams building the apps millions of people use every day to understand what they built, why they built it, and what the rest of the industry can take from their experience.

Doubling conversions with a font size, and other lessons from a leading VPN app

Most apps try to build habits around daily use. Hotspot Shield™ is building a product that works like a reflex, ready for the day someone needs it. A policy change in one country, a platform ban in another, a war, or simply a trip abroad: the moment a VPN becomes essential is rarely one you can predict.

What you can do is make sure that when it happens, people already know to reach for it, and already trust it to work and keep them safe. Because those trigger moments are unpredictable and global, the team behind the app has to move at the same speed as the world around it, shipping onboarding improvements, experiments, and fixes fast enough to be ready before the next headline breaks.

To understand how that philosophy shapes both product and team, we spoke with Vadym Loginov, Product Manager at Point Wild, working on Hotspot Shield™, one of the world's most downloaded VPN apps.

Why people reach for a VPN

Camille from Purchasely: How would you explain Hotspot Shield™ today to someone who's never used it?

Vadym Loginov: Using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) enables three main things:

1. Safe browsing: protecting your connection and making it harder for others to see or track what you do online, thanks to encrypted data protection.
2. Internet freedom: access to censored content in countries without full democratic access to information.
3. Streaming and content access: for example, getting around localized campus restrictions in the U.S. that limit what you can access, or watching French Netflix from Spain.

Where does the mobile app sit in Point Wild's broader business? Is it the main growth engine, or one piece of a bigger portfolio play?

V.L.: Point Wild operates a portfolio of cybersecurity solutions across B2B and B2C. We run multiple leading B2C VPN and AV (antivirus) brands, and Hotspot Shield™ is one of our most popular, with 5 million monthly active users.

What fundamental problem does a VPN app solve, and why do users "activate and leave"?

People usually use a VPN when something happens that makes privacy, security, or online access more important to them. It could be traveling, using public Wi-Fi, changes in the services they use, or simply becoming more aware of cybersecurity risks.

That's also why VPN usage is often contextual rather than daily. Our role is to help users understand when a VPN can be useful and make it easy to use at the right moment. So rather than forcing a daily habit, we focus on building awareness and trust, so people naturally know when to reach for a VPN.

Is "engagement" even the right goal for an app like a VPN, or is that a mindset borrowed from social apps that doesn't quite fit?

Engagement is very important for cybersecurity apps, because we're reacting to risk. The more educated and engaged users are, the more protected they are. The VPN market is growing, and it will keep growing in line with rising cybersecurity risks. So engagement is definitely one of our goals.

What does engagement actually look like for an app like yours, versus something like Instagram?

It's about building a habit. For example, whenever users are traveling or outside their secured home or office Wi-Fi, using the VPN for safe browsing and network activity is the habit we want to build.

What separates a user who sticks around for months from one who churns after a week?

In my opinion, the biggest differentiating factor is whether a user has a recurring reason to turn the VPN on. The people who stay for months typically have one. They connect to public Wi-Fi a lot, they live somewhere with access or content restrictions that limit what they can do online, or they travel. Or using a VPN has simply become part of how they go online every day, without thinking about it much.

Quick-churn users are typically those who had a one-off need, got protection for that moment and moved on, or who never reached the point where the VPN felt useful in their daily routine.

What does success look like for your team right now? What's your North Star?

How many users get connected every day, and how often they come back. That's what makes revenue grow, our ultimate objective, which we measure through the North Star of user numbers. To stay competitive, the team focuses on the velocity of its services.

When people need a VPN, it's for a specific reason. That means the only "marketing" we need is educating people about cybersecurity and cyber threats. We also measure success by making sure everything we do solves a customer's problem. If we solve the customer's problem, that's success.

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Where users drop off, and what changed

How did you identify churn and respond to it?

We have a large data foundation because we track events. We don't track personal user activity or personal data, given the nature of a VPN service. So we know what happens and when. For example: out of 100 users who land on the opt-in or onboarding screen, only 20% actually connect to the VPN. The question is what happened to the other 80%. That's where we dive into analytics and the funnel to understand user behavior: why they leave, and why they don't come back.

It's different from, say, a yoga app. A user goes looking for it, opens it, and has to go through maybe ten onboarding screens to get personalized lessons. There, the scope is broader and health-related, and a lot of things can cause churn: too many steps, too many personal questions the user doesn't want to answer.

With a VPN app, there's always a clear goal: the user wants to download the app and connect as fast as possible to be protected, or to access streaming or restricted content. So even with three or four onboarding screens, we need to be short and quick, ideally a one-tap connection, while still delivering the core value in that shorter path.

What did you assume about your users that turned out to be true, or not, when trying to reduce churn?

A simple example: we assumed a simpler onboarding might be more appealing to users, so we made onboarding shorter, and that helped us convert better. We used to have a multi-screen onboarding carousel, with a subscribe or skip button on the first screen. We tested it against a single onboarding screen explaining the same value all at once, and it increased trials and conversions without impacting cancellations.

Users already know why they're looking for a VPN, so we shouldn't walk them through every feature. The features matter, but users have likely already identified that your app has what they're looking for, and they can discover it in depth later, after enrollment.

We also know that the core demand driving a user's interest changes constantly depending on context: seasonality, the year, world events. It's important to observe what's driving user interest and adapt accordingly.

How do you decide what to build and deploy in such a fast-moving world?

We read user reviews and work closely with customer support to understand problems, and we try to deliver features that solve them. If users repeatedly request something and our discovery confirms the need is real, that validates investing in it. We're solving the broader VPN audience's problem rather than one user's problem, and that helps users trust that we hear their needs.

Even with a single complaint, customer support flags it, we ask for logs and usage details, and we talk with the user to understand and help. That builds an internal knowledge base. Once we see enough similar requests, we deliver the functionality. We don't see a request in a review and ship it immediately: it goes through internal validation first.

Given how privacy-conscious VPN users are, how far can you personalize or engage without it feeling invasive?

The main lesson is that personalization has to feel helpful, never intrusive. VPN users are naturally very sensitive about privacy, so we avoid anything that feels like we know too much about them.

We focus on context, helping users at the right moment based on relevant use cases. If the message is clearly useful, users respond well. If it isn't, it can quickly have the opposite effect.

So it doesn't feel invasive as long as what you're offering is genuinely helpful?

Exactly.

Experimenting at the speed of the news

Before Purchasely, how long did a pricing or paywall change take to go live, and who was involved?

Any change to the paywall went through three people in sequence: a product manager, then a designer, then a developer. That chain could take up to three working weeks, and that was for a single change, not a test.

Now it's the designer and the product manager, and it takes one to two days to design and launch a new A/B experiment. The developer is no longer in the loop for this kind of work.

What does your experimentation workflow look like today?

The main contributor to changes within Purchasely is our UI/UX designer. She runs the tests, working with the product team. We set the goals and do the prioritization and planning for the coming months together. She delivers the changes, and we decide together when to run a test and what to run. She comes to us with findings, showing where the data behaves as expected and where it's underperforming. She's the main contributor and executor of the tests, but all decisions are made together with the product team.

We also have an internal rule: whenever a test succeeds significantly, we share it with the technical team to keep everyone involved and informed. That way, the whole business unit shares one goal: keeping the business profitable and the product interesting and helpful for users.

What's an experiment that surprised you?

Most of our tests focus on the paywall and different placements across the app: the opt-in screen, premium reminders, reverse trial, and various in-app paywalls.

What surprised me most, and I'll phrase this carefully since I can't disclose exact figures, is that the font size of the key message on the opt-in screen matters. It directly affects how users notice and understand the offer. I never expected font size to matter more than the CTA copy itself ("Subscribe", "Continue", that kind of thing), which usually delivers more predictable results. Most experiments ignore font size, but Purchasely made this test possible, and it had a real impact: the conversion rate doubled.

Can you walk us through one more specific test?

We redesigned the opt-in layout on the paywall. The hypothesis was that the screen should speak to the reasons people actually download a VPN, rather than list features. So we cleaned up the design and rewrote the copy around real user concerns, with "Break Free, Browse Boldly" as the headline.

That new layout improved the conversion rate to purchase by 20%.

How do you personalize or target experiments across so many countries?

We only see the user's country. That's it, nothing more granular, given the nature of the product. When we see a spike tied to a worldwide event, it's usually concentrated in specific countries, and that lets us run experiments targeting those countries rather than all users, essentially based on geo-IP.

How do you use Purchasely data day to day?

We start by reviewing the purchase data from Purchasely's analytics, then we cross-check it with our own analytics and app store data. Speed matters, but learning speed matters more, and that's where Purchasely helps.

It's the starting point. If I'm running something big and see clear statistical significance in Purchasely's data, I use it directly to build LTV (lifetime value) analysis. If I need broader confirmation, for something sensitive like a price change, I run additional analysis. But about 80% of the time, we rely on the data provided by Purchasely.

How do you decide what to test next?

Iteration is important, but the real goal is to maximize learning speed, more than test volume. We look at where the biggest customer or business uncertainty is, define what we want to learn, and then choose the smallest test that can give us a reliable signal.

We use data, customer insights, and a jobs-to-be-done framework to understand whether an idea is actually helping users. Then we look beyond the immediate test result at downstream metrics like retention, renewals, and cancellations before deciding what to scale or test next.

We also balance optimization tests with discovery tests, so we're improving what already exists while continuously exploring better ways to solve the customer problem.

What comes next

Where do you see consumer security apps heading in the next three to five years?

I think consumer security will become more integrated, but VPN will remain the core of the experience. Companies like Google and Apple have already built privacy features into their ecosystems, but trust and user habit still matter a lot in this category.

The winners, in my view, will expand beyond VPN into broader security suites with ad blocking, malware detection, and privacy protection, while keeping the experience simple and focused around a product users already trust.

Instinctively, I'd guess people use VPNs to protect their data from big tech, so they wouldn't want their VPN to come from big tech either?

Exactly. Trust is a huge part of the VPN category. If someone uses a VPN because they're concerned about how their data is collected or used, they may naturally prefer an independent security provider over one of the large technology ecosystems they're trying to reduce their dependence on.

At the same time, demand for VPNs continues to be supported by tighter online restrictions and age-verification requirements in markets like the UK and Australia. So I think trust, privacy, and access will remain strong drivers of the category.

Key insights

1. A VPN habit is a reflex more than a daily habit. Hotspot Shield™ optimizes for people instinctively reaching for the app when it suddenly matters: when content gets blocked, when they travel, or when online access changes.
2. Less onboarding, more conversion. Cutting a multi-screen onboarding carousel down to a single screen increased trials and conversions without increasing cancellations. Users already know why they downloaded a VPN, and walking them through every feature gets in the way.
3. The smallest detail can outperform the obvious one. The team expected CTA copy to move the needle most. Changing the font size of the key message on the opt-in screen doubled the conversion rate instead.
4. Fast beats psychic. The team doesn't predict geopolitical events, content bans, or access restrictions. It reacts to them, targeting experiments by country and launching new A/B tests in one to two days when a spike in demand appears.
5. Purchasely data is the starting point about 80% of the time. For most decisions, statistical significance in Purchasely is enough to act on, and even to build LTV analysis from. Only sensitive calls like a price change get a second layer of analysis before scaling.

Case in point: L'Équipe's mobile app playbook

L'Équipe, France's leading sports media brand with 300K+ engaged app readers, used to test subscription ideas on web first, slowed by engineering dependencies. Once marketing could test directly in-app, paywalls, onboarding, and campaigns became testable in days.

The result: +50% subscription base, +70% subscription revenue, and +60% MRR growth since implementation.

Read how L'Équipe went from a two-year testing backlog to shipping experiments in about an hour

Tell us which story you want to read next

What other app-related story, personality, practice, or trend would you like to read about next? Write to us at appstories@purchasely.com. We're always happy to hear from you.