Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
Start with a free app and 100 waitlist users in a Facebook group
Free app grew to ~50K users by word of mouth before any wearable
Workedvalidationfeature-developmentcommunity
What they did
Instead of building the wearable first, built a free app. Took 100 people from the waitlist ('Founding 100'), ran a Facebook group with them and got on calls constantly. Learned users juggled 3-4 apps (symptom tracking, community, research) and combined them into one experience.
What happened
Grew to about 50,000 users all through word of mouth on an app without a wearable; built the iteration muscle.
- Stage
- Pre-launch (pre-revenue)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · $10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible“We worked with a group of 100 people initially from that wait list. We called them the Founding 100. And we were in a Facebook group with them. We were jumping on calls with them all the time.”
“I think we grew to about 50,000 users all through word of mouth in those early days on an app that didn't even have a wearable, which is what we promised.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- 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
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- 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
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- 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