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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- monetization
In their words
$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible
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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- Buy Polar's heart-rate sensors retail, then wholesale, then co-design a custom bandReal-time data other wearables couldn't give; guest calls it a productive partnership
- Sell the band at cost (~$80) and charge $20 a month for the appLowers the barrier to buy; host thought $80 looked too cheap to be good
- Run only Meta ads with customer videos, and earn back each dollar the same day$1M to $10M ARR in two years, cash-flow positive; ~50% of customers from paid
- Recruit members to film ad videos; pay a flat cash fee per video usedMain source of Meta ad creative; run by a team of two
- Test each member video with a small ad budget; scale only the winnersOnly 1-2 videos a week ever get scaled spend
- Hire a chronic-illness creator you paid for a video as social media managerKickstarted outreach to the right creators; founder says it helped, no numbers
- Use a web quiz that tells poor-fit visitors the product isn't for themSame quiz since launch; guest says it protects retention; untested
- Offer a free app without the wearable so people can try before buyingA big chunk of acquisition, all word of mouth; barely promoted
- Move the web funnel off a flaky no-code tool so you can test itGuest's biggest win of the year; test results still to come
- Launch an AI feature that explains your health data in plain languageEarly-access users hated it; back to the drawing board
- Test new features with an early-access group, then explain changes with resultsKept a failed feature away from most users; eases resistance to change
- Stay cash-flow positive to $7M revenue, then raise a small, quiet Series ARaised at ~$7M revenue from an aligned investor; funds data science and product
Tags: hsa-fsa, web-checkout, no-iap