GTM Sauce

Rise Science · B2C · sleep and energy app

Rebuild the app's onboarding as a web funnel

Didn't work in two tries, 'not even close'; project parked

Failedweb-to-apponboarding

What they did

In early 2022, after ATT/IDFA disrupted app marketing, rebuilt the app onboarding on web; tried again ~6 months later. A third attempt (2024) started from the assumption the funnel should look like the app and mainly save Apple fees, which advisors quickly showed was wrong.

What happened

Could not get it to work 'not even close'; team initially blamed reliance on health data and phone integrations and parked web
Stage
post-launch, scaling paid acquisition
Effort
Two builds about six months apart in 2022

In their words

Why Web Onboarding Should Sell The Problem, Instead Of The Solution – Leon Sasson, Rise Science

Play the episode

Leon Sasson… around end of '21, early 2022 when the whole IDFA, ATT, scan period of time that it kind of wrecked everything for everyone. So it was a time of people really, and us too, freaking out about, "All right, what's the future? Is mobile marketing dead?" Because for a few months, it was totally dead. And the obvious first order thing to do was, like, "All right, let's do web funnels." And that was early 2022. So you sort of tried that a few times.

Leon SassonAnd back then, I would say there were some large players in the space doing it. It was more e-commerce, but you still had some... Maybe Noom was the biggest web funnel at the time, I believe so. I'll start with everything that wasn't working. So we did that for a while, and we were like, "All right, we need to figure out web." And I was pretty naive, "Hey, let's rebuild our app onboarding in web." That's kind of, "All right, let's do that." We did that, didn't quite work. Did that again maybe six months later, we just couldn't get it to work, not even close.

Leon SassonAnd we kind of gave up, and we sort of scratched it as, "Hey, our app relies too much on healthcare data, and all these cool features that are deep integrations on your phone. So maybe that's why it doesn't work on web, because we don't have your healthcare data, and we don't have all these sort of deep integrations with your wearables, and your sleep schedule and all of that." So we sort of parked that project, and also at that point, all the …

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: web-funnel, att