Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribers

Giordano ContestabileWell, yeah. So adding friction to the free experience, we try not to. In Italy, in some cases you have to. For example, we have a paywall in onboarding like every other app. Sure, it does add one screen of friction, but not having that, we're aware of will cut off a significant amount of other new subscribers.

Giordano ContestabileWe have a feature that is a location history where you can look at for the last two days for free users where people in your circle were. Today's is more than enough for a lot of use cases. Usually people want to see what people were in the last day or so.

Giordano ContestabileWe did some testing in the past, if you cut it down to six hours or even 12 hours, we doubled the amount of subscribers from the hook. So it will be a sizable win. A lot of company will take that, but we haven't because it does make the feature significantly less appealing for free users. And it does make it less useful and in some cases it can make people less safe.

Giordano ContestabileSo we decided not to do it. And we paid for it on short-term bottom line, but we think it long-term is going to be the right thing to do for a business.

Giordano ContestabileYeah. So this is not from this year but from last year, but still pretty recent. Well, one I mentioned to you really, which is when we experimented with taking away value from... That's actually earlier than that. And that's actually funny. So then I tell you something else, but I tell you this one because it's funny.

Giordano ContestabileI was like six months into the job and I do this experiment and I saw the numbers. And I was like, the number were very big in terms of revenue upside. And so I ran back to the exec team and like, "We're going to be rich." And instead of telling me, "Oh, this is great, et cetera, et cetera." I basically got yelled at. And so that was my education into how things are done on Life360.

David BarnardWhen I had Chris on the podcast, Chris Hulls, the former CEO, who's now the chairman and still super involved, he talked about the freemium bill of rights. That inside Life360, there is core things that you should never touch. So I'm assuming it was one of those core things and you were going to take it away from free users?