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PLAYBOOK$2.5M · Helium · 29 Jan 2025 · 4 MIN
No-Code Paywall Optimization – No Engineers Required
Helium lets PMs and marketers iterate on mobile paywalls without touching code – turning the highest-drop conversion point into a fast experiment loop.
HELIUMtryhelium.com ↗
KEY METRIC$2.5M
LATEST ROUND$2M 24.01.2025
TOTAL RAISED$2.5M · 2 rounds
OPPORTUNITY SNAPSHOTbuild adjacent
ENTRY ANGLES
No-code editors for conversion-critical app screens (paywalls, upsells, onboarding) · Live experimentation tools for product/marketing teams without engineering involvement · Modular pre-built block systems for multi-step flows and interactive forms
VERTICALS
SaaS products with subscription modelsMobile and web applicationsConversion-focused digital services
CAPABILITIES
No-code visual editor technology, A/B testing and experimentation infrastructure, Pre-built UI component libraries and templates
HELIUM FOUNDER
“improve mobile app paywall pages at the speed of thought.”
01 /The Concept
The steepest drop in conversion rates inside mobile apps happens, counterintuitively, at the very last step – when a user just needs to pay for something they've already decided they want. You'd think this would be the easy part. They're warm, they've made their choice – and yet.
That means development teams have to put dedicated effort into optimizing paywall screens. But how do you do it faster and with less overhead?
Enter Helium – a platform that, in its founders' words, lets teams "improve mobile app paywall pages at the speed of thought."
Paywall pages can be created and edited in a visual editor with no code – meaning marketers and product managers can own paywall optimization without pulling in engineers, which dramatically speeds up the cycle and cuts the cost. Deploying updates doesn't require submitting a new app version to the store; new designs load dynamically into the existing app the moment they're published on the platform. And because there's no build cycle, A/B testing becomes genuinely frictionless: show the new paywall to a slice of users, measure conversion against the control group, and roll out the winner – or keep iterating.
Helium was [covered previously](/review/chto-meshaet-emu-zaplatit) when it was going through Y Combinator last year. The product appears largely unchanged since then, but Helium has now raised a new $2M round.
02 /Why It Matters
By coincidence, PrettyDamnQuick ([related review](/review/esli-ne-hochesh-terjat-uzhe-gotovyh-pokupatelej)) raised $25M this month – solving a conceptually identical problem, but for e-commerce. In online retail, conversion also crashes at the last step: the checkout page.
PrettyDamnQuick's insight is that showing all customers the same checkout experience is a mistake. Frequent buyers should see loyalty incentives. Local buyers should see same-day delivery options. International buyers need to see delivery times and costs to their country upfront. Mobile shoppers need a simplified layout optimized for a small screen. And so on.
The platform lets teams build multiple checkout variants for different buyer segments and experiment freely – again in a visual editor, no engineering required.
It's worth noting that Helium's Y Combinator page also mentions a SmartSelect feature, where the AI automatically surfaces the best-converting paywall design for each individual user based on their history and segment. The main product site doesn't mention this prominently, but it's a preview of where the category is heading.
PrettyDamnQuick frames its market around $270B – the annual value of abandoned shopping carts in online retail. The equivalent figure for abandoned in-app payments is unknown, but you can get a rough sense of scale from the payments that do happen: in-app purchases totaled nearly $200B in 2024 and are projected to approach $700B by 2033. The gap between purchases made and purchases abandoned is probably comparable to the e-commerce cart abandonment problem – which makes it very much worth solving.
03 /Opportunities
The technology behind Helium and PrettyDamnQuick is, on the surface, surprisingly simple. That doesn't stop either from finding real demand and raising money.
The core insight of both platforms is that marketers and product managers can assemble the most conversion-critical screens of a product in a simple editor and run live experiments – without involving engineers, without staging environments, in real time.
Heyflow ([related review](/review/starye-posadochnye-stranicy-umerli)), which raised $22M, follows the same logic: a platform that lets non-technical teams build interactive multi-step forms to improve lead capture and drive conversion to key actions.
Carried to its logical extreme, the principle suggests that any digital product or app could eventually be treated as a modular system – where product and marketing teams define the flow and appearance of key screens by assembling them from pre-built blocks, experimenting across user segments, without waiting on engineers. Possibly with the help of AI assistants.
The direction: build no-code editors and experimentation tools for the conversion-critical moments in apps and services. Subscription upsells, onboarding gates, feature unlock flows – each is a distinct conversion event that today gets treated as an engineering task. The question worth asking is which of those moments in your product is currently owned by engineers when it could be owned by product and marketing.
In-app purchases 2024~$200B
Projected 2033$700B
Raised$2M
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