Savvy Navvy · navigation app for boats
Sell a two-year plan at about 30% off to get cash up front
Biggest win of the year; ad spend now paid back as soon as it's spent
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- 2025-2026, ~$3.5M B2C ARR
In their words
Why He Crowdfunded Millions Instead of Raising VC — Jelte Liebrand, Savvy Navvy
David BarnardBut there are a few things that I did want to wrap up. I want to wrap up with the three questions that I now ask every guest, and that is because these are just so fun. I've had so much fun asking these. What is the most impactful experiment or change of the past year, your biggest win of the past year?
Jelte LiebrandTwo-year subscriptions. So we now, obviously, in the US, there's abilities to not necessarily use the App Store for payment. Forget the whole debate whether or not that is a good thing and 30% this and whatever else, that's a side story. But what it has allowed us to do is actually provide different type of subscriptions, and one of which is a two-year subscription. If you're a boater and you've got a boat, you're going to likely have that for a number of years. And so, if we can provide you with a two-year plan at a discount, that is much more favorable for you. The benefit for us isn't actually, "Ooh, that's that's more money," it's more money up front, and what that does is really helping on the marketing side with the CAC payback. All of a sudden, even though we're giving a discount, but ultimately, over the span of two years, we're probably getting about the same revenue out of this person, but we're getting it now.
Jelte LiebrandAnd so, that's had a huge impact on what we're then able to do on the marketing side and the spend that we can have because we get that back immediately as we spend it. So I think that's definitely one of the biggest wins these last 12 months.
David BarnardYeah. That's so cool. What level of discount have you found successful for that? You're not doing two years for the price of one, but are you doing two years for the price of one and a half, two years at 25% discount? What does that look like?
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More from this episode
- Raise money from your own users through equity crowdfunding instead of VCFirst round 3x oversubscribed in 6 days; ~£1M rounds since; 2,500 investors
- Tell crowd investors the good, the bad and the ugly in every updateWon Seedrs Entrepreneur of the Year, voted by investors; enabled repeat rounds
- Walk the docks with a clipboard and ask every boater what bugs themShowed the problem went far beyond ocean racers; founder says it convinced him
- Put your app in one standout boat maker's dashboard, then announce itMany more manufacturers came asking than expected; now a B2B business
- Include 12 months of the app with new boats, paid for by the boat makerFounder says it feeds a consumer-to-manufacturer flywheel; no numbers
- Give boating instructors the app free and build the teaching tools they ask forInstructors send students to it first; founder says no numbers
- Skip sign-up entirely and create a hidden anonymous account insteadLooked great in the test, fell apart at full rollout; support grief erased gains
- Offer a free tier in the US but charge from day one elsewhere
- Stop all email marketing
Tags: web, multi-year-plan, cac-payback, web-checkout, upfront-cash, discount