Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
Sell on the web so buyers can pay with HSA or FSA money
Adds payment options, better ad signals and no 30% app store fee
Workedpayments-checkoutweb-to-app
What they did
Hardware can't be sold through in-app purchase, so built a web payment flow. It allows HSA/FSA payments, sends better attribution signals back to ad platforms, and avoids the 30% IAP fee.
What happened
Guest lists HSA/FSA, attribution and fee savings as benefits.
- Stage
- monetization
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · $10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible“One is around being able to introduce new payment methods, in this case, HSA, FSA.”
“But there's also benefits around attribution, being able to send better signals back to the app platforms.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- 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: 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: 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