Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app
Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouth
Failed across the board; parents don't share inside apps
Failedproduct-viralityreferral-program
What they did
About 40% of users found Life360 through someone telling them (e.g. parents at school pickup or in school chats). The team built in-app ways to replicate that: share buttons, offers to gift a Silver subscription or get one yourself, and other variants.
What happened
No lift from any variant; parents are not viral in-app, and the viral kids are not the decision makers.
- Stage
- scale
- Effort
- A series of experiments over the past year
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile“And maybe we say, "Hey, you can gift a silver subscription, you can get yourself a silver subscription." Different things, right? Nothing, nothing, really failure across the board.”
“And the reason is people my age or families or older people are not viral. Parents are not viral.”
Related topics
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New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from Life360
All 23 Life360 tactics- Sell only grouped location data, not raw GPS feeds, to a data partnerAbout $20M+ a year from Placer.ai; still some bad press
- Give daily location sharing away free and charge for safety featuresGrew to 80M+ active users and ~$400M revenue; about 1 in 8 families pay
- Show banner ads to free users and check harm with a holdout groupHoldout showed no harm; banners drive little performance and CEO wants them gone
- Don't charge anything until you reach 10 million active usersFounder says charging early would have killed them; no direct numbers
- Block ads for young users and let staff report bad ads in SlackGuest says it's been okay; a few bad ads still slip in
- Chase every possible battery or location bug, even if most are false alarms80-90% of chases are false alarms; old battery bugs still hurt trust
More from this episode
- Life360: Keep 2 days of free location history even though cutting it doubled subscribersCutting to 6-12 hours doubled subs from that hook; not shipped to protect free users
- Life360: Show the top-price plan on the paywall only to people a model predicts will buy itDoubled new Platinum subscribers without losing a single Gold subscriber
- Life360: Let every team, even finance and HR, run growth experiments with AI toolsWork in progress; no numbers given
- Life360: Track test speed, win rate and average win, and count inconclusive tests as failures
- Life360: On day 2, nudge people to an unused feature using a family member's nameNo numbers; first-week activation strongly predicts users still around a year later
- Life360: Announce a pet feature with a cute animated dog that asks to be pettedCalled a huge success; many users made pet profiles; no numbers
- Life360: Add pet and aging-parent features so families keep using the app after kids leave
- Life360: Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longerTile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
- Life360: Offer a free Tile tracker to people who subscribeHelps conversion for certain users; no numbers
- Life360: Show one paywall screen during onboarding, even with a generous free planRemoving it would cut a significant share of new subscribers; no numbers
- Life360: Give every software feature a great free version; charge for costly services
- Life360: Ship a 'just landed' alert, then partner with Uber to offer a ride on landingUber approached them; a broader Uber partnership is about to launch