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Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app

Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longer

Tile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription

Workedpartnershipsretentionupsell-expansion

What they did

Buying a Pet GPS or Tile tracker leads people to sign up for Life360; Pet GPS requires a subscription, so device sales double as subscriber acquisition. Devices are not a loss leader but pricing indexes toward reaching more users rather than maximizing device margin. Tiles extend use cases (e.g. in a young child's backpack before they have a phone).

What happened

Data shows people with Tiles retain better overall than those without.
Stage
scale

In their words

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

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David BarnardAnd then now the pet product that was released not too long ago. How do you think about incorporating those physical products both as a kind of top of funnel but then also as a way to increase the LTV of a user? And then later on another thing to increase the retention by getting them to track their pet and things like that? You kind of layer on a lot of those physical products can fill a lot of roles. How do you think about those?

Giordano ContestabileYeah, absolutely. I would say it's all of that. So in Italy, there is a top of funnel effect, right? You buy a Pet GPS, which is a pet tracker. Or you buy a Tile, which is our Bluetooth line of Bluetooth trackers, and then you sign up to Life360 and become a user. In some cases, like with Pet GPS, you need to be a subscriber to use it and that's in Italy, user acquisition and subscriber acquisition, which is always a good thing.

Giordano ContestabileSometimes we bundle some offers in the apps. When you subscribe, we say, "Hey, do you want a free Tile?" Or things like that, that with certain users that helps converting. But then there is a retention consideration. We know from data that people with Tiles retain better overall than people without Tiles. Simply because the base is they have the same use case and they layer Tile on top of it and so it becomes more useful.

Giordano ContestabileAnd also there is a matter, as you mentioned, of prolonging the usage cycle, I will say, of the app. So people use their trackers on younger kids, for example. Maybe younger kids don't have a phone and you can put a Tile in the backpack and have some peace of mind. You use the Pet GPS even when your kids go to college, your dog is still there so you're going to still using it.

David BarnardYeah. It's tough to balance that though. Yeah. It's like how much profit? Because the lower you can get the price, the more you can bring that top of funnel in through the devices, but then yeah, you have to fight both sides. So it makes sense. It's a tough balance.

Giordano ContestabileI will say that we will always index toward trying to reach more users with the devices and bring more users in the ecosystem versus trying to maximize the margins of the devices.

David BarnardWe've been talking a bit about how important the app is to a family. How are you thinking about the growth of that? As you think about use cases and stuff. Not asking you to share future roadmap plans or anything like that, but I know you've kind of been slowly evolving it away from just being a tracking app to having other uses.

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Tags: hardware, trackers, ecosystem, device-pricing