Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
This shipped together with other changes, so the result can't be credited to this alone.
In their words
$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible
David BarnardYou mentioned in the mix of all that, that you've only tried one paid channel. What channel was that? And let's talk about what you've done on that channel.
Luke Martin-FullerFor sure. So we've monetized primarily through a web to app funnel. And then in terms of paid, it's all been Meta. And on that channel, it's UGC that's worked really well for us. So we run a couple of programs. One is called Creator Collaborative, and that's working with existing creators in the chronic illness space to create awareness and visibility of what we offer. And then there's community voices, which is people in our community, our members that can share videos with us and be rewarded and make a very fair rate for sharing a video, sharing their true and honest experience using Visible. Maybe a couple of the practical insights that they've gained from it. And then we'll use that as material for paid. But even within our broader acquisition picture, only 50%-ish. I mean, attributions are really tough as you know, but only 50%-ish come through paid channels. …
Luke Martin-FullerSo we've been able to keep that pretty steady. And what I would say maybe about all of this is that we've been able to build a really efficient business, one that is cashflow positive, all the way through that growth journey. And that's in part having a pretty maniacal focus. Well, a focus generally, but a focus in the case of acquisition on one metric. So we think about what we call marketing cash ROI, but it's basically ROAS. So if we can keep that positive, and that's in part, blend between annuals and monthlies in large part that. But it's also about how much you're spending, how quickly you're trying to scale that spend. Thinking about making sure that you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out that day, will keep you a really efficient growth machine. And that's what we've done throughout.
David BarnardYeah. I'd love to hear more about your user stories program. I mean, I don't know how much is public, how much you want to share on the podcast, but I mean these are hard things to stand [inaudible 00:44:22]. But if you have a great community who really loves your app, it does seem like a really great opportunity to use them as part of your paid marketing. So how did you build that? And then what are some of the logistics of that that you can …
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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
- 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
- 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: meta, ugc, roas, single-channel, cash-flow-positive, day-zero-roas