GTM Sauce

Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness

Sell the band at cost (~$80) and charge $20 a month for the app

Lowers the barrier to buy; host thought $80 looked too cheap to be good

Workedpricing

What they did

No margin on hardware: armband ~$80 (wholesale cost). Membership $20/month or $14.99/month on an annual plan. Told openly to users that the value is in the app. Chosen over Oura's model (expensive device, cheap subscription) and WHOOP's (hardware folded into a pricier membership), closer to Tractive's.

What happened

Maps price to where value is delivered and lowers barrier to entry; guest open to testing a premium device.
Stage
monetization

In their words

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

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David Barnard… with the Skylight team about, is the choice of whether to make a lot of profit on the sale of the hardware and the subscription, make profit on the hardware, give the software away for free. I mean, it's kind of this eternal debate. And I know in the rise of hardware attached subscriptions, it's been a huge topic of conversation. Why should I pay for this hardware and then have to keep paying or whatever? So how did you navigate all of that?

Luke Martin-FullerFor sure. I mean, we've taken a pretty clear line on this, and it's one that we're really open about with our potential users and our members, which is that we don't make any money on the hardware that we sell. The way we deliver value is by building an amazing app experience that pulls that data, interprets it, gives you the insights you need and the tools you need to better manage your illness. So what that looks like for us is roughly 80 bucks for the band. And then it's either $20 a month or 14.99 if you're taking on an annual subscription. And that works really well for us because it maps, I guess, to where we are delivering the value and we can be honest about the fact that we don't make any money by selling hardware. Lowers the barrier to entry as well.

David BarnardI was kind of surprised at the $80 price, to be honest. And I wasn't first approaching this as a customer, so I think the customer would probably have a very different experience. But when I saw the $80 price, my immediate thought was like, "How could this be any good at $80?" And then it wasn't until talking to you more later, it's like, "Oh, because they're not actually... That's not the retail price." That's the wholesale actual cost of the …

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Tags: hardware-at-cost, annual-plan, hardware-subscription