^{Today’s one idea / the quiz that makes them pay}

Hey everyone.

Last week I showed you my RevenueCat dashboard and its one lonely paying subscriber. He's still here. Trooper.

So this week I went the other direction. Instead of staring at my own flat MRR, I went looking at the apps that are actually printing money to find the thing they do that I don't.

Obviously, a lot. But one idea I like that is somewhat the other side of the argument to what I wrote about regarding onboarding, is this idea of a long-by-design questionnaire.

One app example in particular brought up some feelings of comparison and jealousy as I compared by growth dashboard to theirs. But I pushed it aside in pursuit of learning from some savvy kids who built a calorie tracking app called Cal AI.

Basically, scan a photo and it tracks your calories. Very simple, and the annoying part is they are killing it, but the app is not very good or accurate.

It's not their product that has made them so much money. Rarely is it that way anymore when product isn’t a moat. It’s their approach to intense experimenting on their paywalls, optimizing for conversion, and crucially, what comes before the paywall.

They launched by spending $2,000 on a social-media test to see if anyone cared about the problem→idea. People did. It made $28K its first month, then $115K the next, and went on to 15M+ downloads and $30M+ a year before MyFitnessPal bought the whole thing.

Kids these days man.

Breakout story, and everyone copied the obvious parts. The food-photo AI. The TikToks they did. Almost nobody copied the part that actually turned that attention into money though.

Before Cal AI ever shows you a price, it walks you through a long, personal onboarding quiz. Your goals. Your weight. Why you've failed before. By the time the paywall shows up, you've already handed over your secrets and saying no now feels like quitting on yourself.

Most people think that quiz is there to personalize the app. Mostly, it's there to get you to pay.

The move: make people invest before you ask them for money. A long, personalized onboarding quiz works as a commitment device—every question answered is a tiny "yes" that makes the final, paid "yes" feel like the obvious next step.

The quiz is the paywall's setup man.

Let’s break it down.
—Jaryd

^{Today’s partners / your support keeps this all free}

And the paywall your quiz eventually funnels into? Mine runs on RevenueCat—the gold-standard SDK between your app and the App Store. Beautiful paywalls in minutes, free under $2.5k MRR (so, free for me 😼). They handle the messy subscription plumbing, give you editable paywall templates, and let you A/B test offers and pricing without shipping a new build.

OpenAI and Notion use them. So do I, with my one subscriber. Genuinely, the easiest payment system I’ve used.

Start your app or grow your business → Start with RevenueCat

I've been starting to build more with with Rezonant lately—think of it as a vibe-delivery platform for product people. Obviously they’re a sponsor so that was my trigger to try it, but I’ve been legit impressed.

The move: install the Chrome extension, click around your product highlighting what you want changed (or just hit record and talk like I do), and it turns the mess into PRDs and tickets. Let it off the leash and its coding agent will build and ship them in parallel.

For a non-technical PM trying to ship something like, a quiz onboarding flow, it's a cheat code. Free to start. → Try Rezonant free

^{Why the idea works / A deeper review}

Here are 6 reasons why this play works.

The most crucial and constantly recurring element of persuasion you’ll find in any book on sales, influence, or handling hostage situations, if you happen to ever find yourself in one, is getting someone to say lots of small yeses before the actual big yes you.

The big yes is “ready to pay me now?”. The more small yeses you get before, the more obvious the need to say the big one becomes.

This is just commitment and consistency—people behave consistently with what they've already done. Twenty small yeses in a row, and the paywall is really just the twenty-first. You're not asking a stranger to pay. You're asking someone who's already opted in nineteen times.

It kills the cold ask.

Each yes takes a second or two. The key is questions that are easy to answer and don’t create paralysis friction, but still drive time investment.

The minutes you spend answering make the result feel earned and personal. Walking away now feels like wasting your own work which is a much stronger pull than a discount ever is.

The quiz-funnel crowd (Noom, BetterMe, Headway) often runs this on the web, before you ever install, which pre-sells the user, dodges app-store fees, and quietly fixes the attribution that Apple's privacy changes broke. The questionnaire isn't just psychology. It's plumbing.

And even running in app, it pulls the paywall up the experience instead of relying on the user to activate and experience the core value of your app. You should do that contextually too, but, if done right the paywall questionnaire can be killer for growth. Some more proof coming up.

A generic paywall converts worse than one that says "based on what you told us, here's your plan." The quiz is what hands you the personalization ammo. No quiz, no ammo.

In reflection, the apps that get me to pay essentially mirror back to me why I told them I need them. And like good mirroring (another persuasion tactic), it doesn’t matter if you know they’re doing it, it still just works.

Last week I said apps need to get uses to experience value in ideally under 30s. I said that value was ideally experiencing the product’s aha moment.

But, it could also be the activation moment of feeling understood. And that’s what a good questionnaire does.

This is the part I underrated. The quiz isn't only a paywall trick, it's your first shot at the aha. Albert Cheng, who's run growth at Duolingo and Grammarly, made the point that for some products the activation moment in onboarding is what carries a user for a very long time, more than any retention work you bolt on later. Get the quiz right and you're not just converting them. You're keeping them.

Consumer apps face the highest rates of sign ups, then deletions and dead users. Retention is a beast of a problem. The data you get here on people is gold for smart nudges, emails, in app personalization, and really any other tool at your disposal to get people to come back.

One flag, because the line can be thin and I’ve mentioned the word persuasion twice here now: a commitment device becomes a dark pattern the moment the questions are theater. If the answers genuinely shape the product, you're helping. If they're just there to guilt a credit card out of someone, users feel it, and they churn angry. Keep it real.

^{The field evidence / Which winning companies have done it}

The premise is “why do you want to lose weight?", and they have 32 screens that to you are about your goal, but to them, it about their goal. Getting you to pay.

32 screens feels nuts, but like I said, their onboarding isn't just questions. It's a psychological funnel engineered to maximize conversions. Every screen builds investment. The more you answer, the harder it is to quit. By the time you hit the paywall, you're not "buying a subscription", you're "unlocking the plan you just built."

Here are just 3 that deliver the final value after answering. I made a Figma here if you want to view them all.

And they didn't stop there, they ran something like 123 paywall experiments and lifted trial-to-paid ~31% in their first year. They treated the entire money funnel as a product, and the quiz is the front door. A few minutes of your goals becomes the reason you can't say no.

Ok, hells bells I take back 32 being long. 💀 113 screens.

But that’s 113 screens behind a $750M+ a year business, and despite it taking about 15 minutes to do get through, it doesn’t feel long. It converts through progressive commitment-building: sensitive questions are framed with context (like why they are asking you), expectations are set and repeated deliberately, and the paywall appears only after users have invested significant time and emotional energy.

They are the canonical version for their length. They use branching questions, emotional anchors, and little hits of social proof between steps, and all stacking commitment before a price ever appears. It's so well-built that the people at RevenueCat broke it down and called it a masterclass. By the time you see the cost, you've already written the case for buying.

Two more apps that built enormous businesses on the same bones: a web quiz that qualifies and converts you before you install. Different category (microlearning, fitness), identical move.

As Headway’s founder said, “Our onboarding has been a game-changer for app growth. We've coined an approach we call Empathy-Based Onboarding. The key insight is simple yet crucial: When users feel heard and accepted, they are more receptive to the product's value, which, in turn, drives conversion. Our interactive onboarding quiz resulted in a +81% conversion rate.”

Same questionnaire vibe, different industry, same ka-ching.

Basically, if your app benefits by understanding the user well, it can benefit from at least testing a quiz.

^{Action / What you can do with this}

TLDR: make them invest before you ask for money, and make the investing feel good.

RevenueCat's full teardown of Noom's funnel (all 113 screens of it) maps the mechanics. The stealable version, in six moves:

The one I'd steal hardest: Noom blocks you from entering an unhealthy goal weight — it'll eat a lost sale before it'll nudge someone toward harm. That's the whole line between commitment device and dark pattern.

The Little Moments onboarding is good right now. I’m getting people through to activate, but the entire paywall experience is leaving just one person as a paid customer. I wrote before that my payment strategy is to make it hard to pay me, but I also wrote that I might be wrong about that. Maybe I want to make it easier to get paid, and maybe a quiz will help with that.

So, here’s what I did yesterday while writing this

Before:

Splash → Sign Up → Photo permission → Capture first moment → Notification → Today screen

Now:

Splash → 5 question quiz → Mirror back → Sign Up → Photo permission → Capture first moment → Notifications → Dynamic Paywall

I ask five-question as an intro before the auth ask even (that’s what Cal and Noom and others do). Then I reflect it back, and only then show the offer, after showing I understand, and proving it with the quick moment capturing.

I also added an experiment in RevenueCat to test showing a trial, vs the current straight up paywall I have.

This took mer overall 10 minutes to plan, 5 minutes to build, 15 minutes to test, 6 minutes to build and submit to app store.

Here’s what it looks like now, mapped in Figma if you’re curious.

Still pending approval on the app store, but I’ve stolen the idea and let’s see how it plays out.

^{Closing notes / Check this out before you go}

See the full set of vetted tools I use all the time here

As I share ideas with you, I also put them to practice on my own personal apps. Here’s the main thing I’m working on right now

Little Moments — record a lifetime of memories, one little moment a day in under 60 seconds. Try it out and lmk what you think

My mate Bill Kerr is genuinely a beast. He’s a cold-email machine and that’s how be built Athyna to what it is today. He breaks down his “diabolical million emails per day plan” in a recent edition of OpenSourceCEO. Great read.