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As Dream by WOMBO attracted a large consumer audience, Talha Atta worked on the product decisions behind subscriptions, onboarding, paywalls, advertising, and free-versus-paid benefits. The challenge was turning widespread interest in generative AI into a product people would continue using and find valuable enough to pay for.
A viral consumer product can attract millions of people without answering the harder questions about what happens once they arrive. Downloads show interest, but they do not reveal whether users understand the product, continue using it, or eventually pay for it. Talha Atta encountered those questions directly while working on Dream by WOMBO, where rapid consumer adoption created a new set of product and business challenges. His work increasingly focused on what happened after acquisition and how the company could build a sustainable commercial model around the experience.
Atta, former Head of Product at WOMBO, joined the company in 2022. During his tenure, WOMBO reported more than 200 million cumulative downloads across its applications, while Dream received Google Play’s Best App recognition in the United States in 2022. Those company-level achievements established the scale of the environment in which Atta was working. His responsibilities included product direction, growth, monetization, and coordinating priorities with engineering and other teams responsible for delivering the experience.
One of the central challenges was converting consumer interest into a sustainable subscription product. Atta worked on decisions involving subscription pricing, onboarding, paywalls, ad placement, free-versus-paid benefits, and the experiments engineering teams needed to prioritize. Increasing revenue at one point in the experience could create friction somewhere else, so the team had to evaluate monetization in the context of how people actually used Dream.
“Downloads tell you that people were interested enough to try the product,” Atta says. “Monetization forces a different question. What is valuable enough that somebody will keep using it and eventually pay for it?”
Dream tested different subscription structures, including weekly and annual plans, while the team examined behavior across the conversion funnel. Atta looked at measures including install-to-trial, trial-to-paid conversion, and renewal to understand where users were progressing and where they were leaving. Geography complicated those decisions because a subscription structure that performed well in one market could produce a different response elsewhere. Atta’s work required connecting those patterns with decisions about how the product was packaged and presented.
A subscription-funnel optimization in spring 2023 showed how relatively small changes could affect commercial results. Atta helped lead the work alongside engineering, beginning in April with changes that included removing the account-creation requirement before purchase, repositioning premium offers during onboarding, and testing alternative paywall designs. Atta says the combined onboarding and paywall optimizations increased sales by 25 percent by the end of May 2023.
Onboarding was closely connected to the monetization work. If users did not understand what they could create or encountered friction before reaching a successful generation, changing the paywall would not address the underlying problem. Atta worked on onboarding changes, clearer explanations of premium benefits, and better handling of failed generations. The goal was to help users reach the point where they understood the experience and the additional value attached to paid features.
Advertising introduced another tradeoff. Ads could help support free usage, but their timing and placement could also interfere with creation and sharing. Atta worked through decisions about where and how often advertising could appear without unnecessarily disrupting the behavior the product was designed to encourage. Atta says Dream’s advertising revenue increased by approximately 240 percent between January and February 2023.
“You can monetize too early or too aggressively and hurt the thing that made the product appealing,” Atta says. “The work is finding where the user sees enough value that the commercial decision feels connected to the experience.”
That process depended on experimentation. A subscription product creates several points where users can leave, including before starting a trial, before converting to a paid plan, or after deciding the benefits do not justify renewal. Atta says a March 2023 snapshot showed roughly 36 percent drop-off between premium-page authentication prompts and new active subscriptions, helping identify where friction was affecting the funnel. His role included helping determine which hypothesis deserved testing, what engineering work was required, and how the resulting behavior should influence the next product decision.
The same discipline applied to premium benefits. A paid tier needed to offer enough additional value to justify the cost without making the free experience so limited that new users never discovered why the product was useful. Atta worked within that balance while the team continued developing Dream and responding to user behavior. Atta says iOS premium conversion increased from 3 percent to 7.8 percent, while Android premium conversion rose from 1.53 percent to 2.5 percent.
Atta’s work connected consumer behavior with practical decisions about pricing, onboarding, advertising, and premium features. Dream already had widespread attention, so the next challenge was determining which users were finding recurring value and what changes could strengthen that relationship. Conversion and renewal provided different information from downloads because they reflected decisions users made after experiencing the product.
Dream’s scale made those decisions consequential. Small changes to onboarding, pricing, advertising, or subscription structure could affect a large consumer audience, while each experiment required engineering resources and clear priorities. Atta’s contribution was helping connect those decisions across product, growth, monetization, and implementation as WOMBO worked to turn broad consumer adoption into a business that could sustain the experience.
For Atta, that period at Dream showed how quickly the challenge changes once an AI product finds an audience. Attracting users creates opportunity, but it also introduces questions about what they value, what they will pay for, and which parts of the experience will bring them back. His work on Dream focused on answering those questions through product decisions and measurable experimentation instead of relying on the size of the download count alone.