Life360 · B2C · family location and safety app
Sell trackers at low margins to pull people into the app and keep them longer
Tile owners retain better than non-owners; Pet GPS requires a subscription
Workedpartnershipsretentionupsell-expansion
What they did
Buying a Pet GPS or Tile tracker leads people to sign up for Life360; Pet GPS requires a subscription, so device sales double as subscriber acquisition. Devices are not a loss leader but pricing indexes toward reaching more users rather than maximizing device margin. Tiles extend use cases (e.g. in a young child's backpack before they have a phone).
What happened
Data shows people with Tiles retain better overall than those without.
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Freemium at Scale: Why Life360 Protects its Free Users – Giordano Contestabile“In some cases, like with Pet GPS, you need to be a subscriber to use it and that's in Italy, user acquisition and subscriber acquisition, which is always a good thing.”
“We know from data that people with Tiles retain better overall than people without Tiles.”
“we will always index toward trying to reach more users with the devices and bring more users in the ecosystem versus trying to maximize the margins of the devices”
Related topics
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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: 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
- Life360: Add in-app share buttons and gifted subscriptions to copy parents' word of mouthFailed across the board; parents don't share inside apps