Lose It! · B2C · calorie tracking app
Give users a $10 gift card when a friend they refer upgrades to premium
Roughly broke even but didn't scale; exposed users had lower LTV; killed after a year
Mixedreferral-program
What they did
Referral program during a push for premium subscriptions: the referrer received a $10 gift card when the referred person upgraded to premium, effectively a $10 cost per premium subscription. Run on a third-party system with little internal support for experimentation. Treatment vs control compared on LTV.
What happened
Economics roughly worked (breaking even) but volume never scaled; incrementality was unclear and users exposed to the treatment had lower LTV. Killed after about a year as not worth the effort.
- Effort
- About a year
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Achieving Mission & Profit with Freemium — Erin Webster-Shaller and Paul Apollo, Lose It!“So the referral program was set up so that you got a $10 gift card if the person you referred upgraded to premium.”
“It was fine. It was making money. It was breaking even, but it wasn't really driving this massive influx of premium users that we were hoping for.”
“It's really hard to know what's incremental, and how much are you paying for stuff you would've gotten anyway. And the issue we were having, too, was people who were exposed to the treatment for this particular referral program had lower LTV than people who weren't.”
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