Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
Test new features with an early-access group, then explain changes with results
Kept a failed feature away from most users; eases resistance to change
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- product
In their words
$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible
David BarnardYeah. That's really cool though. So you only rolled it out in your early access community. And so that fail didn't actually make it to the broader community and you didn't get that kind of negative sentiment across your entire customer community.
Luke Martin-FullerFor sure. We're really deliberate about rollout. And I think maybe you spoke about the kind of brain fog and the change resistance. We have to be really careful with how we consider rolling things out and often come to our community with some data about why we're doing this thing. We're making this change because we've seen in early access that it's delivered 20% improvement in X, and it is X percent easier for people with colorblindness. And this is an important way to kind of bring people along for the journey because a lot of people that rely on a tool every day, they just don't want it to change. They're like, stop adding stuff. So early access hub is a really great way of us being able to get around that particular issue.
David BarnardLast question. Growth would be easier if?
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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
- 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
- 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: early-access, change-management, rollout