Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app
On day 2, nudge people to an unused feature using a family member's name
No numbers; first-week activation strongly predicts users still around a year later
What they did
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile
David BarnardBut what are some of the ways that you are surfacing it in the app? The feature education, the tips, are you popping little banners? Is it in a feed? What are all the ways you're able to push those learnings into the app? And I think your situation's going to be a lot more relatable to most apps than the latter situation. So I'm excited to have this opportunity to ask you this question.
Giordano ContestabileI think there is kind of more mechanical aspect of it. For example, we know like every app, the first seven days of a user are the most important. We know there is a very, very high correlation between you joining the app, creating or joining a circle, inviting other people to it, or joining a circle. And then being around on day seven and you being around a year later.
Giordano ContestabileAnd so we know that if you're able to make understand the value of the app in the first week, we have a long-term users. And so in Italy from a product and lifecycle marketing perspective, we have a series of orchestrated steps like most apps, right? Some of them are in onboarding, some of them will be in mid-boarding.
Giordano ContestabileSo maybe on day two we see that you haven't used a feature, which maybe you have a look at location history, which is a very popular feature. So we say, "Hey, do you know that you can see that?" And we use customized, so if John is in your circle, we can say something like, "What was John up to yesterday?" Things like that. So you can do that for sure and that's kind of personalized and more and more we are also targeting on specific behavior.
Giordano ContestabileAnd then the other thing is that a lot of those things after a while become noise because users use a lot of apps, they don't read. As you said, nobody does. And so they tap, tap, tap, and they become noise. So more and more we want to and we need to come up with fun, unique things. So for example, we launched something called the pet profile. The pet profile is set up a profile for your dog or cat. There are a bunch of reasons for that.
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More from this episode
- Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribersCutting to 6-12 hours doubled subs from that hook; not shipped to protect free users
- Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy itDoubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
- Let every team, even finance and HR, run growth experiments with AI toolsWork in progress; no numbers given
- Track test speed, win rate and average win, and count inconclusive tests as failures
- Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Add pet and aging-parent features so families keep using the app after kids leave
- Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longerTile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
- Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
- Show one paywall screen during onboarding, even with a generous free planRemoving it would cut a significant share of new subscribers; no numbers
- Give every software feature a great free version; charge for costly services
- Ship a 'just landed' alert, then partner with Uber to offer a ride on landingUber approached them; a broader Uber partnership is about to launch
- Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps
Tags: mid-boarding, feature-education, personalization, first-week