Life360 · B2C · family location sharing app
Don't charge anything until you reach 10 million active users
Founder says charging early would have killed them; no direct numbers
Workedpricingpositioning-niche
What they did
Set a somewhat arbitrary rule to ignore monetization until 10 million active users, later than most companies, because location was expected to become a commodity (carriers, later Find My). Era also had no in-app purchase or push notifications.
What happened
Guest believes they would have been 'dead in the water' charging early; now has room to grow because they never went into aggressive harvest mode.
- Stage
- early
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Freemium Done Right: Lessons From a Multi-Billion-Dollar App — Chris Hulls, Life360“And so our view was roughly like, let's not even worry about monetization until we hit 10 million active users. We probably pushed it later than most people, and that was somewhat arbitrary”
“We would be dead in the water if we tried to charge for our product early on.”
Related topics
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
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: 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
- Life360: Chase every possible battery or location bug, even if most are false alarms80-90% of chases are false alarms; old battery bugs still hurt trust