Loóna · B2C · interactive sleep stories app
Sell through a web onboarding funnel instead of only the app stores
Part of growth to almost $6M ARR; infrastructure proved costly
Mixedweb-to-apponboarding
What they did
Loóna explored web acquisition and web onboardings when few apps did it (Noom was the trailblazer) and with no sleep/meditation player to copy, so the team worked out from scratch the onboarding's goal, length and friction points. Building the payment and funnel infrastructure was far more expensive than expected; the usual pitch was bypassing App Store and Google Play commissions.
What happened
Loóna scaled to almost $6M ARR; Mike says nobody warned how expensive the infrastructure would be.
- Stage
- Growth (early to growth)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · What 80M users taught Flo about A/B testing — Mike Charniatsou“So, we had to do and to learn everything from scratch, you know, like what's the goal of this onboarding, how long should it be, what are the friction points?”
“But nobody told us how expensive it would be, you know, to build this thing, because you need the infrastructure”
Related topics
Get tactics like this every Monday
New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.
More from this episode
- Flo: Give your best-performing ad angle its own onboarding path that continues the ad's storyBecame a great revenue driver; no numbers given
- Flo: Hold a weekly sync where marketing and product share every change they makeSource of experiment ideas like the ad-angle onboarding path; no numbers
- Flo: Re-check test wins 3, 6 and 12 months after rolloutFinds that not all reported conversion wins became business wins; no numbers
- Flo: Keep the core app free and offer paid extras when users' needs change40% of subscriptions start more than 6 months after install
- Flo: Judge free-trial tests on an early event that predicts who will payLets the team make early calls; no numbers given
- Flo: Add an onboarding question that tells users which stage they're in, never 'sorry, we couldn't tell'Lost ~10% twice; the evidence-based rewrite won 23%, confirmed by a blackout test
- Flo: Remove a step that just won to check the win was realRemoving the 23%-winning step lost, confirming the uplift
- Flo: Copy another app's winning paywall pixel for pixelDidn't work, despite a 10% uplift reported by the other teams
- Flo: Promise a reminder before the free trial ends on your paywallDidn't work at either of two apps
- Flo: Add a free-trial on/off switch to your paywallWorked for other teams, apparently not here; barely described
- Flo: Introduce your most popular feature during onboardingHurt conversion; biggest fail of the year
- BoldVoice: Remove the X button to make your paywall hardConversion looked great, but refunds spiked and it drained revenue