GTM Sauce

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

Workedpaid-socialweb-to-app

What they did

Only paid channel is Meta, with UGC creative, sending traffic to a web funnel. One metric governs spend: 'marketing cash ROI' (basically same-day ROAS) kept positive, helped by the annual/monthly mix and by not scaling spend too fast. No lifecycle email, paywall tests, geo expansion, Google Ads, TikTok or SEO.

What happened

Grew $1M to $10M subscription ARR in two years while cash-flow positive throughout; ~50% of acquisition via paid, rest word of mouth.
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

Play the episode

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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Tags: meta, ugc, roas, single-channel, cash-flow-positive, day-zero-roas