Success Story: Setapp Delivers Their Subscription-Based Service around the Globe with Crowdin CASE STUDY

CASE STUDY

Setapp is a subscription-based service for Mac applications created by MacPaw Inc. in 2016. It provides access to a growing collection of Mac software from different developers for a fixed monthly fee. MacPaw company already had an experience of localization with their other product CleanMyMac. That was localized into 3 languages and the experience proved to be successful as the company received a substantial rise in the user attraction and retention rates.

The launch language for Setapp was English and now the app is available in 5 languages. Localized product showed an average 35% rise in the signup rates, and an average 65% rise in the engagement rates for such locales as Brazil, Germany, France, and Spain. The company plans to continue localizing their product with Crowdin into Italian in the nearest future and even more languages later.

The Challenge
As a new product on the market Setapp was first launched in English as the target market during the launch period was the USA. After receiving a successful track record there, the company decided to expand the target markets to several new locales speaking languages other than English. The task was to analyze which countries would be the best ones to choose next.

The other task was to choose a localization strategy to manage the whole process efficiently. As Setapp product doesn’t consist only of a Mac app but also includes a user account, a website, and a lot of marketing materials that also needed translation the company needed a solution that would allow them to manage all those materials smoothly. In addition, desktop and website teams worked separately and needed to stay independent. At the same time, all the materials had to be easily accessed and supervised as the project manager had to manage the whole process and make sure all the work is done in time and the translations are of good quality.

The Solution
To choose the countries and languages to target company used Google Analytics Audience reports for setapp.com. They wanted to see which countries would it be the most cost-effective to target. Analysis showed that the countries sorted both by traffic and by the number of paid users coincided. So, the top 10 countries appeared to be the following:

United States
United Kingdom
Germany
France
Australia
Canada
China
Brazil
Netherlands
Italy
Based on the company’s previous experience the decision was made to target 3 countries at first. So, the choice was made to target the following countries and languages: Germany (German), France (French), and Brazil (Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese) as they showed the best results according to the Google Analytics. Although China showed higher traffic and conversion rates than Brazil, the company decided to localize Setapp into Chinese not sooner than they will have a local partner there.

Crowdin has all the needed tools (and even more) that we needed to get the job done for Setapp.

Bogdan Grechanovsky, Project Manager, Setapp
The main reason to localize Setapp with Crowdin was the fact that they could easily set up a project and start working. The first thing to do was to set up integrations for seamless source and translated files sync. The frontend team set up integration with GitHub, the desktop team set up integration with Crowdin CLI, and some other files were added manually. Once the integrations were set up the process became automated and all the teams could easily provide their resources for translation without worrying about having to constantly add new strings to the project. Translations are also automatically added as pull requests to the chosen repositories, so there’s no need to upload translations and add them to the repository manually.

Currently, Setapp is developing at a fast pace and changes are rolling out nearly every day. That is why having translation problem to be solved quickly is a must for the company.

A wide range of customizable options, support of different file formats, and the ability for several teams to work in parallel within Crowdin allowed to configure the process the way it suited all the people working on this project including developers, translators, and managers.

It has to be mentioned, that the team behind Crowdin has always been very helpful and our feedback was always heard. To tell you the truth, however, Crowdin is moving forward at a really fast pace and we’re usually the ones learning about the new features they offer, not ask for them :)

Pavlo Pedenko, Product Manager, Setapp
The Result
After releasing the localized versions of the product Setapp noticed dramatic improvements in all the measured metrics that included conversion funnel and business KPI rates. For example, the analysis showed an average 15% increase in the numbers of paid customers for each language as compared to the English version of the product offered to the same geography.

The company plans to localize Setapp into Italian and thus target Italy next. Considering the Chinese market company believes that it isn’t likely to adopt the subscription model yet. Judging from the numbers only, it seems that they should go for Chinese without a second thought, but based on their experience, it’s better to provide more marketing and technical adaptations, before launching to China efficiently.

Crowdin does get the job done! No matter the type or scale of your product.

Yaroslav Stepanenko, Product Marketing Manager, Setapp