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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile
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.
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
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
- On day 2, nudge people to an unused feature using a family member's nameNo numbers; first-week activation strongly predicts users still around a year later
- 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
- 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: hardware, trackers, ecosystem, device-pricing