Flighty · B2C · flight tracking app
Give the first flight free with every pro feature, then lock some
What they did
In their words
How a Single Paywall Experiment Generated $50M – Jeff Morris, Chapter One, Ex-Tinder
Jeff Morris… whatever it is because it's such a high utility product. If you're building something that's more social or less clear on what problem it's solving, then you might have a harder time asking the user to do that. If you can't raise venture dollars, then you should be confident you're building a product that people will pay for and you should ask people to pay for it and see what the response is. And I'm a big fan of monetizing early in that sense.
David BarnardYeah. And Flighty is an interesting example. It may have been that you used it at a time when it was a more of a hard paywall, but he was actually recently on the Launched podcast, which is kind of a sister podcast to this and they have been experimenting... And he was actually on Ben Thompson's podcast talking about this and he has experimented his way. And maybe this is one of those kind of examples too of like, over time you do kind of find that right fit, but he has a really interesting model where now the first flight is completely free with all the pro features. And then if I remember correctly, some premium features then get locked after the first flight. And so he had to really experiment into this hybrid thing. And so maybe that goes to our point, there's not like a set rule.
David BarnardYou need to experiment and be willing to experiment and not just follow the patterns, but figure out what's right for your app, is that he experimented his way into this weird kind of freemium where he does-
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More from this episode
- Put a toggle in the top bar that opens a new paid tierAbout $50M in revenue from one small A/B test
- Limit free swipes per day and charge for moreStopped mass-swiping and auto-swipers; turned into a strong revenue driver (no numbers)
- Give each paid feature its own paywall and check its sales every morningShowed 2-3 features drive most new subs; weak ones were made free
- Offer several paid tiers, from cheap starter to big spenders at $50K a yearGuest's biggest revenue unlock at Tinder; no numbers given
- Set different prices by country, starting with fast-growing markets like India
- Polish the paywall like a core feature, e.g. add a gold shimmerGuest says it showed users they cared; no numbers
- Ask for payment only after a user gets a match and starts chatting
- Build engagement and retention first; push monetization only years laterReached 30-40M monthly users before revenue became a focus in years 4-5
- Create a revenue team with its own iOS and Android engineersGrew from 6 engineers in 2016 to 40+
- Make free users pay before they can fix their buggy first buildFrustrated users complained publicly on Twitter
- Ship a new feature every single dayBecame the default database for most major website builders
Tags: hybrid-freemium, usage-limited-trial, first-use-free