Life360 · B2C · family location sharing app
Chase every possible battery or location bug, even if most are false alarms
80-90% of chases are false alarms; old battery bugs still hurt trust
Mixedretentionteam-process
What they did
Define what can't break (location accuracy, battery drain, life-safety features) versus what can. Killing a user's battery is a one-way door: users remember even after the fix. Suspected regressions are 'guilty till proven innocent' and always investigated. Guest admits the company swung too far into program management process around this.
What happened
Most investigations are false alarms; users still remember a few old battery bugs; the process has slowed shipping.
- Stage
- scale
Related topics
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More from Life360
All 23 Life360 tactics- Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribersCutting to 6-12 hours doubled subs from that hook; not shipped to protect free users
- Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy itDoubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
- Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longerTile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
- Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps
- Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
More from this episode
- Life360: Give daily location sharing away free and charge for safety featuresGrew to 80M+ active users and ~$400M revenue; about 1 in 8 families pay
- Life360: Don't charge anything until you reach 10 million active usersFounder says charging early would have killed them; no direct numbers
- Life360: Write down which free features can never be taken awayToo new to judge; founder says ask again in a year
- Life360: Test new ideas with a fake button shown to about 100 people
- Life360: Show banner ads to free users and check harm with a holdout groupHoldout showed no harm; banners drive little performance and CEO wants them gone
- Life360: Offer a one-tap Uber ride when a user lands at an airportFounder says it adds value to users; no numbers
- Life360: Sell only grouped location data, not raw GPS feeds, to a data partnerAbout $20M+ a year from Placer.ai; still some bad press
- Life360: Match good drivers with cheaper car insurance using their driving dataPlanned; could double revenue at 1/8 of paid-user performance
- Life360: Block ads for young users and let staff report bad ads in SlackGuest says it's been okay; a few bad ads still slip in