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Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app

Ship a 'just landed' alert, then partner with Uber to offer a ride on landing

Uber approached them; a broader Uber partnership is about to launch

Unknownpartnershipsfeature-development

What they did

A hackathon project became a landing notification: when you land, your circle is told. Uber saw it and proposed offering an Uber ride at that moment, which grew into a partnership with Uber's family product. Principle for ads/partnerships: 'do no harm' (non-intrusive, monitored via engagement and user metrics) and use location context (e.g. going to Costco) to give tailored offers instead of generic ads. Acquired ad company Nativo to extend targeting beyond the app.
Stage
scale

In their words

Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile

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Giordano ContestabileYeah. I mean, really good question. And I will say it took a long time for Life360 to get into the ad business. If you think the company has been around, I think 15 years or so, and only in the last two years, really we started working in ads.

Giordano ContestabileSo the baseline is do no harm, meaning make sure that the ads are not intrusive, not invasive, and they're not unwelcome by the audience. In Italy, you measure that in a qualitative and quantitative standpoint. Look at attention, look at engagement, and your total users, et cetera, et cetera. So that's kind of the baseline.

Giordano ContestabileBut then the one that I think is more interesting that we're building towards, is how do we use all the data that we have, all the knowledge that we have to actually provide value to users? So Uber will be an example. Uber started as a partnership on the lending notification product that we built and that's a product we built for users. We built it just because it was actually a Hackathon product project.

David BarnardOh, nice.

Giordano ContestabileAnd so we ship it. And so basically when you land, it inform people in your circle that you landed, right? It's a peace of mind feature that people love. And Uber approach us and say, "Oh, we saw this. What if then we could also ask you if you want to call Uber?"

David BarnardNice.

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Tags: uber, hackathon, contextual-offers, ads-monetization