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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- monetization
In their words
$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible
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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More from this episode
- Put up a site with a 3D mock-up and a waitlist before building anything5,000 waitlist signups in about a week
- Start with a free app and 100 waitlist users in a Facebook groupFree app grew to ~50K users by word of mouth before any wearable
- Send 100 free wearables to users and iterate before charging anyoneCharged only after over a year; then $1M to $10M ARR in two years
- Let users opt in to share anonymized data with university researchersPapers in Nature and with Mount Sinai; builds trust when buyers research; no revenue number
- 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
- Sell on the web so buyers can pay with HSA or FSA moneyAdds payment options, better ad signals and no 30% app store fee
- 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: free-tier, no-free-trial, hardware