GTM Sauce

Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness

Offer a free app without the wearable so people can try before buying

A big chunk of acquisition, all word of mouth; barely promoted

Workedproduct-activationword-of-mouth

What they did

Hardware rules out a free trial, so the free app (no wearable; HRV scan via finger on the phone camera) lets people feel the product's quality first. It's barely promoted: a tiny section on the website. Everyone takes a PMF survey; wearable members score far higher than free users.

What happened

Free app ends up a really big chunk of acquisition; main way the hardware purchase is de-risked.
Stage
monetization

In their words

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

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David Barnard… do you think about de-risking that? Because a free trial is kind of the offload easy de-risk, but I've seen a lot of apps starting to try other things. For people who are convinced that it's a solution, giving a 20% discount if they don't take a free trial. So you don't do that, but it's that same kind of de-risking where once people are really convinced they're going to buy, they buy and you don't need that free trial to convince them to buy.

Luke Martin-FullerSo what we do have is I guess the free app as an opportunity. It's still there. There's still some amazing value in it. You just don't get a wearable, but that is a way for people to go have a play, understand what we're all about, feel the kind of quality of the product before they make a decision. And that ends up being a really big chunk of our acquisition. And we really don't push the free app at all. The free app is all still kind of word of mouth. There's a tiny section on our website that says, "You know, you can have this free app as well." And that's kind of on purpose because really, we see the value of our product.

Luke Martin-FullerAnd you see this in our metrics as well, like PMF scores, everyone that comes through does a PMF survey and the wearable membership is way out there. Whereas the free app is necessarily, there's no wearable, there's no real-time data. You can scan your HRV by putting your finger on your phone, but it's not life-changing for people. But what it does do is it gives you an impression of the kind of value you can experience if you were to go ahead …

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Tags: free-tier, no-free-trial, hardware