GTM Sauce

Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness

Sell on the web so buyers can pay with HSA or FSA money

Adds payment options, better ad signals and no 30% app store fee

Workedpayments-checkoutweb-to-app

What they did

Hardware can't be sold through in-app purchase, so built a web payment flow. It allows HSA/FSA payments, sends better attribution signals back to ad platforms, and avoids the 30% IAP fee.

What happened

Guest lists HSA/FSA, attribution and fee savings as benefits.
Stage
monetization

In their words

$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible

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David Barnard… of the app store fees and stuff like that. For y'all as a hardware attached product, you don't have to have IAP in the app at all. So it's kind of like some folks don't even fully have this option. But how do you think about the web and have you thought about sending people to the app? How do you think about the store fees? And then I know on the web, it even gives you additional opportunity with HSA and FSA payments and things like that.

Luke Martin-FullerFor sure. I mean, for us, it was clear early on that we would have to sell via the web because you can't sell hardware via in-app payments, you literally can't do it. So we had to build out a web payment flow. But as you say, I think there's a few key tactical advantages. One is around being able to introduce new payment methods, in this case, HSA, FSA. But for other companies that aren't us, there are other things that might be of value, be that localized payment methods or some of these buy now, pay later offerings that you can get via Stripe. But there's also benefits around attribution, being able to send better signals back to the app platforms. And then of course, there's that 30% fee that you do have to pay if you're using IAP. So it was actually just, we didn't have an option, but it's something that we've been able to experience some other benefits for as well.

David BarnardYeah. Thinking through this and what we just talked about, I do think it makes a lot of sense for your business. My advice has generally been, pick up the low-hanging fruit you can pick up in the app directly and use Apple's in-app purchase because consumers generally like it. It's easy. And for all your comments on payment options and things like that, yes, you can't do HSA, FSA through your Apple account, but Apple and Google both work hard …

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Tags: hsa-fsa, web-checkout, no-iap