Message every paying early adopter yourself and make them your beta testers

Joseph ChoiRight. So instead of just like, "Hey, you're going to have fun like ranking up with your friends," it's like, "Hey, you're actually going to become a better runner," because you're appealing to the like competitive runner um in your marketing. So in the onboarding, you're trying to like align with that same user.

Caleb DeanExactly. And something that was super valuable for us is so, as you know, we had those Stripe payments. So we called them early adopters, and we had all their emails, so I personally or like I personally reached out to them all saying like, "Hey, like thanks for subscribing. Here, you can follow us on Instagram. Here's my personal email if you have any questions." But then that meant we had like 50 to 80 like S-tier users who were really excited for our product, which we could ask for feedback.

Caleb DeanSo that's another thing that we actually did was we leveraged our our Instagram and the fact that we were marketing whilst building the product to kind of help us refine like what's actually important and like where we should put our priorities. So like I used Instagram polls, because like we had a few videos go viral. We probably had like 2,000 followers, but these followers were super engaged, so I would create like these stories just asking …

Caleb Dean… or I think I asked another one which was like super valuable, where like, "Do you want to track in the app? Do you want to track using the watch? Do you want to track using Strava?" Because we didn't know what the best approach was. "Do you want to do them all?" And getting that feedback was super, super valuable, and that went a stage further with our early adopters, because, one, they had paid money, so they had already committed to the idea.

Caleb DeanBut I like built connections with probably 20 different users. Like I got their phone numbers on WhatsApp. I was send- sending them the TestFlight links, so like they were legit like our bug testers. That sort of like process was like invaluable.

Joseph ChoiYeah. If someone pays $5 for a landing page that has like two sentences on it, like they're probably like very interested and they're and pretty bought in, even if it's only $5. Like that's a very strong signal. Those people are going to be willing to give you feedback and be really excited. That sounds like that early iteration process led to like a stronger product, too. Did you like improve I guess it's hard to to know retention from just the …