Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
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
Workedpaid-socialweb-to-app
What they did
Only paid channel is Meta, with UGC creative, sending traffic to a web funnel. One metric governs spend: 'marketing cash ROI' (basically same-day ROAS) kept positive, helped by the annual/monthly mix and by not scaling spend too fast. No lifecycle email, paywall tests, geo expansion, Google Ads, TikTok or SEO.
What happened
Grew $1M to $10M subscription ARR in two years while cash-flow positive throughout; ~50% of acquisition via paid, rest word of mouth.
- Stage
- growth
This shipped together with other changes, so the result can't be credited to this alone.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · $10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible“And then in terms of paid, it's all been Meta. And on that channel, it's UGC that's worked really well for us.”
“So we think about what we call marketing cash ROI, but it's basically ROAS.”
“Thinking about making sure that you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out that day, will keep you a really efficient growth machine.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Visible: Put up a site with a 3D mock-up and a waitlist before building anything5,000 waitlist signups in about a week
- 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: Let users opt in to share anonymized data with university researchersPapers in Nature and with Mount Sinai; builds trust when buyers research; no revenue number
- 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: 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