Hay House

Hay House Unlimited Audio: Generating more than $1 million in gross revenue

Founded by author Louise L. Hay in 1984, Hay House is a publisher known for producing content about New Thought. They describe themselves as a “mind-body-spirit and transformational undertaking”. Hay House has published books by over 100 authors and has an international presence in 40 countries. So far, they have sold millions of books and generated over $100M in annual revenue.

Project introduction

Recent times have seen Hay House branch out to formats like audiobooks, podcasts, and radio shows. However, they distributed this content across multiple platforms, which hampered their versatility. At the time, their website lived on Magento. They were pulling content from their website to offer on mobile phones. This created the additional problem of syncing the phone’s user data with what was stored on Magento. These problems affected consumers’ user experience, which is when Hay House approached Mutual Mobile to build subscription-based audio apps.

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Challenge

Unifying content published across platforms

Looking at the sheer volume of content Hay House had to offer, they decided to develop a single channel for it all. They would own and operate this channel, liberating themselves from the burden of coordinating with multiple platforms. Mutual Mobile partnered with Hay House to work on helping them acquire more customers and increase revenue by building a subscription-based audio app.

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Approach

Building a powerful, user-friendly platform with AWS

Mutual Mobile started work on this project in 2019 and set out to define the criteria for a successful MVP. We compiled and documented the requirements for each feature, which provided us with greater granularity in our documentation. Then we got to work by:

Leveraging AWS for the backend

We built the Hay House app from scratch and deployed AWS’s Elastic BeanStalk, Route 53, CloudFront, and S3 to support the audiobooks and podcasts in the mobile apps.

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Building smarter systems

Hay House wanted to recommend audiobooks to users based on their past listening experiences, for which we developed a Smart Algorithm. In addition, we roped in AWS Secret Manager to manage API keys for different environments in one location.

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Managing the database

Since Hay House had a considerable number of users, we used a scalable and secure database incorporated and maintained by AWS Aurora. Aurora provided scalability and efficiency, while the employment of DynamoDB ensured that Hay House paid only for what it used.

“Mutual Mobile delivered an intuitive platform that received positive feedback from its more than 24,000 active users. The product is on track to generate more than $1 million in gross revenue.” - Carrie Wellbaum, Associate Director at Hay House.

Outcome

Ease of use, massive revenue generation, and effortless maintenance

There were some exciting outcomes that we helped achieve while working with Hay House on their Unlimited Audio app, which included:

Ease of use and accessibility‍

Hay House’s audience falls in the demographic of 35-60 year-olds. Even with such a large age group, the new app—Hay House Unlimited Audio, was praised across the board for its ease of use and accessibility, which led to an average rating of 4.5 across the App Store and Play Store.

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Helped generate massive revenue

Hay House Unlimited Audio, with its subscription model, became a massive success and generated gross revenue of at least $1 million.

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Effortless scalability and maintenance

Mutual Mobile’s thinking behind incorporating AWS’s DynamoDB, Aurora, and Elastic BeanStalk paid off as DynamoDB helped reduce latency by 20%, Aurora helped reduce database costs by at least 34%, and Elastic BeanStalk allowed for seamless scalability of up to 1 million users without any disruptions.

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