Visible · B2C · wearable for pacing chronic illness
Test new features with an early-access group, then explain changes with results
Kept a failed feature away from most users; eases resistance to change
Workedfeature-developmentretention
What they did
New features ship first to an 'early access hub'. When rolling out broadly, tell the community why with data from early access (e.g. 'X% improvement', 'easier for people with colorblindness'), because users who rely on the tool daily resist change.
What happened
Failed AI feature never reached the whole user base.
- Stage
- product
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · $10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible“We have to be really careful with how we consider rolling things out and often come to our community with some data about why we're doing this thing.”
“So early access hub is a really great way of us being able to get around that particular issue.”
Related topics
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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
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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: 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: 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