Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
Let users opt in to share anonymized data with university researchers
Papers in Nature and with Mount Sinai; builds trust when buyers research; no revenue number
Workedpartnershipspositioning-niche
What they did
One of the first free-app features: opt-in anonymized data sharing with researchers. Required informed-consent flows (who, how long, what purpose), ethics committee sign-off via a partner academic institution, and anonymization pipes delivering data in batches or real time. Started by asking researchers for product advice while building the MVP; the first study came from a researcher asking to use the data. Partners include Mount Sinai and Imperial College London.
What happened
Published papers (Nature, Mount Sinai, Imperial College London on symptoms and menstrual cycle); prospects researching Visible find them and trust it. Moves no revenue number immediately.
- Stage
- free app onward
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · $10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible“Even in our free app, one of the first features we built was an opportunity for people to opt in, to share their data on an anonymized basis with researchers.”
“You have to go out and get kind of ethics committee sign-off. You have to work with an academic institution that has the capability to go and get that sign-off”
“I think one of the researchers we'd spoken to said, "Hey, if you've got all of this data, I would love to do a study on it."”
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More from this episode
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- Visible: Start with a free app and 100 waitlist users in a Facebook groupFree app grew to ~50K users by word of mouth before any wearable
- Visible: Send 100 free wearables to users and iterate before charging anyoneCharged only after over a year; then $1M to $10M ARR in two years
- Visible: Buy Polar's heart-rate sensors retail, then wholesale, then co-design a custom bandReal-time data other wearables couldn't give; guest calls it a productive partnership
- Visible: Sell the band at cost (~$80) and charge $20 a month for the appLowers the barrier to buy; host thought $80 looked too cheap to be good
- Visible: 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
- Visible: Recruit members to film ad videos; pay a flat cash fee per video usedMain source of Meta ad creative; run by a team of two
- Visible: Test each member video with a small ad budget; scale only the winnersOnly 1-2 videos a week ever get scaled spend
- Visible: Hire a chronic-illness creator you paid for a video as social media managerKickstarted outreach to the right creators; founder says it helped, no numbers
- Visible: Use a web quiz that tells poor-fit visitors the product isn't for themSame quiz since launch; guest says it protects retention; untested
- Visible: Sell on the web so buyers can pay with HSA or FSA moneyAdds payment options, better ad signals and no 30% app store fee
- Visible: Offer a free app without the wearable so people can try before buyingA big chunk of acquisition, all word of mouth; barely promoted
- Visible: Move the web funnel off a flaky no-code tool so you can test itGuest's biggest win of the year; test results still to come
- Visible: Launch an AI feature that explains your health data in plain languageEarly-access users hated it; back to the drawing board
- Visible: Test new features with an early-access group, then explain changes with resultsKept a failed feature away from most users; eases resistance to change
- Visible: Stay cash-flow positive to $7M revenue, then raise a small, quiet Series ARaised at ~$7M revenue from an aligned investor; funds data science and product