$10M ARR without ever testing a paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible

0:00It took us a little while to grow to a meaningful revenue and then once we hit 1 million in subscription AR, we grew to 10 million in exactly 2 years. So, we're able to grow very quickly. But what I would say is that the machine has not been dialed in. There is a lot to be done there. I think we focus kind of deliberately on building a great product first and thinking about the growth machine later. I mean, we've only ever kind of grown with one channel, so it's a pretty kind of nent growth machine

0:34that has supported us to get there. Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard. My guest today is Luke Martin Fuller, co-founder of Visible, the wearable activity tracker for illness, not fitness. Over 300,000 people use the platform to pace their energy. On [clears throat] the podcast, I talked with Luke about hitting $10 million in ARR without ever testing a payw wall, paying their own customers to help make video ads, and why you might want to turn away some potential customers. Hey Luke, thanks so much for joining me on

1:05the podcast today. Hey, David. Thank you so much for having me. Super excited to talk to you about Visible today. As we'll get into it, it kind of hits home a lot for me as a product. And so it's been really fun getting to know you as we prep for the podcast. And I don't always go into the founding story, but I think for this kind of product, for this kind of story, it is super materially relevant. You know, folks who really understand the needs of an audience tend to build very different products than people who are just kind of uh think it's an interesting market to explore. And so,

1:42yeah, I'd love to hear from you about, you know, what what got you into the health and wellness space and specifically to build visible. For sure. Yeah, happy to. I guess going all the way back, my my background is probably pretty unusual for a uh a consumer app founder. I'm I'm a recovering lawyer. I used to uh I studied law at university and then went off to become a lawyer at a big law firm. But I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't for me. And what I wanted to do instead was build technology, specifically consumer apps. So I went off to uh become a product manager at a

2:14fintech company here in London. And it was while I was working there that I met my colleague at the time, Harry, um who pretty soon after I was meeting became super unwell. It was 2020 and he um had a kind of mild COVID infection um but didn't really get better and he was really struggling to make sense of this and he'd taken some time off of work. we were in touch. Uh, and he was trying everything he could to figure out what was what was up with him and he went off and and bought a wearable device and in his case he bought a Whoop and he realized that that was super

2:55powerful. He was seeing insights in his data that kind of correlated with changes in his energy and in his like cognitive function. And so Harry had in particular had a lot of brain fog which is very common for people with um like complex chronic illnesses. Um but he was using this tool, this product that was designed for fitness. It was like entirely the wrong product for him. It was kind of celebrating 10,000 steps and

3:19saying you go, you know, go on a run. Um, and actually he was finding that doing those things, doing what you might think is an intuitive thing, like just trying to get back to a normal level of activity, push yourself harder, uh, to get better, that that wasn't working for him and in fact was leading to his symptoms getting worse. So, it was through this that he discovered something called pacing, which is essentially keeping an eye on your energy uh, and figuring out how you can best use it, but within what's, you know, your range of capability, we call your energy envelope. And over time, if

3:50you can stay within that energy envelope, you can achieve more without your symptoms getting worse. And this is turns out is the only kind of recommended management strategy. It's the only thing that NICE and the CDC recommend, but it is really hard to do without data. And it was his Whoop that he was using to um to get there even though it was a square peg for a round

4:10hole. Yeah. And the Whoop is like, you know, go exercise more. You didn't you weren't active enough today. You didn't have enough steps. Exactly. Exactly. So he was like he he called me up one day and said we should we should build like a a Whoop for people with chronic illnesses. There's like hundreds of millions of people. So we kind of went away one weekend and put up a website. And I think we had 5,000 people sign up to a wait list for a product that didn't exist yet in about a

4:37week. So we knew there was something. And that's when we went off and started working on Visible. Yeah, man. That's incredible. And and you know, just to dig a little deeper there, I already said it, but I really do think the best products are built from people who like genuinely care. Um, and you know, you and I were joking before the podcast. I feel like, you know, there's been this resurgence of like rel religious apps recently of like people seeing religious apps doing really well and like, you know, thinking it's an interesting market. And you know, I mean, I'm sure people who aren't religious can build a decent app and can

5:11make some money, but like if your whole thing is like, "Oh, this is like some like gullible audience that I'm going to take advantage of uh and make a quick buck." It's like you're you're Yeah, maybe you can make a quick buck, but you're probably not going to build a great product that like really speaks to

5:26the audience. So, back to your story. You had this 5,000 person waiting list. you know, huge sign that there's potential in this market. What was that next step to then actually build a product for that that market? And what what did you even promise? Like what was the hook that got 5,000 people to sign

5:45up on the website? I think we we went off and created I think we maybe paid someone on Fiverr to to create a um a 3D mockup of a wearable and I think the site just said pretty much what the kind of hero on our website says now, which is like pacing made simple. Um it was a product promise but there was not much behind it and we were honest about that. We went through to a type form and said if we built this product would you be interested in in kind of coming along for the journey with us and people were incredibly excited about that. But you know two of

6:15us uh we had experience building mobile apps. We certainly didn't um have the funds or the time to go out and build a wearable. So we did what we knew best which was starting by building a free app. Um, and that was incredibly powerful. I think we learned a lot from starting small. We wor with a group of uh 100 people initially from that weight

6:38list. We called them the founding 100. Um, and we were in a Facebook group with them. We were jumping on calls with them all the time. We we learned a few things about our particular um use case which is that people were using three or four different apps. They were tracking their symptoms in one place. They were finding community in another. they were finding research somewhere else. Uh, and all of those apps were not fit for purpose. And we thought if we can build something into one experience, we can deliver a heap of value to people that have been

7:05massively underserved and overlooked. And we were able to build something that people liked and grew. 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. Um, so that was amazing and really kind of helped us build the muscle of the iterating towards something that that people

7:24wanted to use. Were you bootstrapping that whole time and were you working full-time and doing this on the side? How did that work? Yeah. So, I had said to Harry that um I'm really excited to work on this, but you know, living here in London, being in my 20ies, I was like, we I need to be able to pay my rent. [laughter]

7:42Yeah. So, we said, um, hey, if we can raise $50,000, um, so that we can, you know, pay ourselves enough to pay our rent for 12 months, um, then, hey, I'll come and do this with you. So, that's what we did. We found an angel investor to give us a little bit of money and then we went off and and actually raised a little bit more quite quickly after that. Uh, which enabled us to grow a small team out. So, I think there were five of us by the time we started actually making some

8:09revenue, which was over a year later. Wow. So, you you built this out for a whole year before you started charging for it 100%. Yep. Wow. All right. I I want to get back to the charging and we'll get into like some of the grandfathering people in and all the stuff that you did once you did start charging. Uh but before we get to that, I I did want to to talk for a bit about trust. And I actually told you this [laughter] um when we were talking about starting the about recording this podcast is that when I first saw Visible and I first saw this like you know wearable you know

8:45I've suffered from chronic illness for more than a decade now and I have spent way more money than I'd ever want to admit on all sorts of different snake oil and so to be honest like my flags went up. I assumed you had just done like a cheap knockoff like it it looked like it was potentially just like some knockoff um from a Chinese factory that they spin it off and like um but but that's not at all what was going on here. And the more I dug into it, the more I understood. So let's just talk a little bit and I I think this can really

9:15apply to folks more broadly. Like this is very specific like health and fitness and chronic illness. like there's there are a lot of people who pray on that community, but I think there it's just kind of a universal trust truth that if you can build trust in a product and build authentically like we're talking about even having, you know, caring about it yourself and everything else. I think it really is so important to product building. So, I wanted to spend a little bit time of time, you know, talking through how you think about that. Well, I think the core of that is building a genuinely amazing product

9:46that helps people and that they're willing to tell other people about and kind of build that trust organically through word of mouth. If that isn't the basis of what you're building, then you know there's something wrong. And I I suspect, you know, in our space in particular, there are, as you say, people that will sell anything. You know, from ear seeds to supplements to courses like telling you that there's the one big secret that'll make you

10:08better. None of those things are true. None of those things are evidence-based. None of them have a um kind of deeprooted conviction about building something, you know, without overpromising the outcomes you're going to get. And I think we've worked really hard on positioning um our product as what it is. It's not a treatment. It's not a cure. It helps you implement a management strategy. And to that point, I feel like especially in the age of AI, but even before, you know, people who are weary about these things have way more resources to like, you know, dig deep and figure out like is this real? I

10:43mean, I I think I set Claude Co on it. Like, hey, is this like a real company? Is this a real product? Is, you know, is this backed by science? Is this just BS? And so that that kind of trust building is like so important. For sure. Well, and it's so important that people do that research on their own. But I think for for us in our case actually research in a different sense has been a huge lever. So we have invested in science since the moment we were kind of um out there even in our free app. One of the first features we built was an opportunity for people to

11:19opt in to share their data on an anonymized basis with researchers. And at the time this was really important cuz so so little research was happening especially around long COVID which was one of the key um illnesses we helped with uh when we started um and we were able to hand off data which has gone to be published in some of the best uh kind of research publications there are. I mean, we've had papers published in Nature about how you can use HRV and heart rate to predict future symptom events, which is just incredible. We've done work with um Mount Sinai with Imperial College London, a paper that we

11:58published about the interaction between symptoms and the menstrual cycle. And I think as much as this is really accretive to the mission and the mission really is all about making visible illness visible both to you but to your doctor and those around you and then to the research community at large. It's super consistent with what we're here for. It also goes to this point around people doing their research understanding if we're legit and figuring out that wow these guys have actually helped move the science forward. They have you know done a service for the community and I can see that in in some of these really high

12:29signal research papers. So, it's been a really lovely loop for us to lean into. We're kind of giving back and and getting more from from having done that work. Yeah, I feel like more apps should explore this. So, so I do want to ask like, you know, what what was that process like reaching out to resource researchers, partnering with them, you know, working through those kind of things because there are so many health and fitness apps that really could be sharing anonymized data that could help move things forward. And I mean, screen time apps, like there I mean, there's tons. Sleep apps, there there's just so

13:01many ways that that you could tie research into it if it was the right product. Um, so give me a quick overview. I mean, this won't apply to everybody, but I think it'd be interesting for some people to hear like what that takes. For sure. I think it's it's really hard and it's not something that moves a revenue number at least immediately. So it's kind of difficult for um for some teams I imagine to justify but as I say it was just so core to what we're here for and our mission statement that we we had to do it. But why is it hard? So I

13:31guess you have to you have to build out new flows. Informed consent is a really important thing. So you have to tell people who you're sharing their data with for how long and for what purposes. So those are new journeys in the app. You have to go out and get kind of ethics committee sign off. You have to work with a um an academic institution that has the capability to go and get that sign off and um create all of the documentation that goes around research and then you have to build the mechanisms the piping to anonymize data to completely wipe it of any identifying factors while retaining like the core of

14:04stuff and then you know get that into researchers hands uh in batches or in real time whatever's needed. Um, and none of that is clearly without uh cost or head scratching or complexity. Um, but it's it's really worthwhile especially when we we knew u then and we certainly know now that we're sitting on the largest data set that has ever existed for a group of people that have had a chronic underinvestment in research. Um, and it was kind of incumbent on us to do that. Um and it's a kind of nice um side effect almost that that helps to build the trust um that helps to help us reach more people

14:43that we can help. A lot of help there, David. But yeah. Yeah. Did you just like cold email researchers or or how do you actually I mean because we talk about things on the podcast like uh you know cold outreach to influencers and things like that and that's always really hard but I imagine like you know getting in touch with and getting the attention of those kind of people who can help bring trust. So, so again for the average app, it might not be a research institute, but you need to like find people in in that relevant niche that can kind of add add that layer of trust and help you build trust

15:16even if it's not with research, it's just with, you know, the right review or the right kind of framing or some product feedback or something like that. So, how did you actually like make the connections? So I guess from the earliest days even when we were building our kind of free app MVP we were in touch with researchers like we're building this tool we'd love to get your insight onto how we can make the most valuable thing and that was an easy in right you know you're you're looking for advice and and help from someone before you've got an ask for them and actually in the the earliest study that we did I

15:47think was actually more pull rather than push I think one of the researchers we' spoken to said hey if you've got all of this data I would love to do a study on it Um, and that kind of was a bit of an unlock where we were like, "Yeah, of course you can. Of course you can. We'll obviously we need consent from people and we need to figure out how to get it to you, but we're going to work on that

16:05cuz it feels like an important thing." Um, so yeah, I just think it in whatever space you're in, whether it's um, you know, fitness or sleep or screen time, um, you're probably already chatting to the right people who would love to get their hands on some anonymized data to publish some amazing insights. So, um I don't know whether cold outreach would work, but certainly just being part of the community and part of the conversation. Um it will really help

16:30with getting that off of the ground. But what about investors and and getting other people who maybe don't understand what it's like to be interested and invested in the app? This has always been a challenge, right? the the need is huge as you know cuz you have experienced some of these issues yourself but the vast majority of the population hasn't. Everyone um knows someone but there's so much kind of stigma about um the reality of living with a complex chronic health condition that even if you know someone you probably don't know the full story. So trying to let people in to just how how widespread how hugely affecting

17:14um and frankly how underserved and overlooked these illnesses have been is a a real challenge. It's also a challenge in our space in particular because the science has been so poor and underinvested in that no one can actually put a number to these things. No, it's very difficult. you know, first side of a pitch deck, you should be able to say, you know, there are this many people in this, you know, we'll do a total addressable market where we've done it bottoms up and figured out just how many people, but that that science,

17:44that data isn't there. I mean, even saying long co, I mean, some people maybe even turned off the podcast when you first said long co because like that is debated online. And I mean this is one of the challenges and I faced this in having a chronic illness the last 15 years is like the the standard medical advice, the studies and so many other things are are built around the healthy and like you said it's like so underfunded. So there's not necessarily research. It's not like you know quote unquote settled science or whatever. Um yeah. So h [laughter] how do you navigate all that uncertainty? A

18:21persistent challenge that this community has had has been being disbelieved. Um, you know, the unfortunate reality is that doctors understandably want to help with things that they can test for where there is a blood test that says, "Hey, here's what's wrong and I can give you this pill and it will make you better." That's what the entire western medical system is built around. But in the case of many of the people that we help, the symptoms are often very wide ranging and there is no single test that will give you the answer you need. So more broadly, as you say, the the stigma is still there. The stigma affects um how

18:59people view this even as a opportunity to help people at scale, including investors. Was your like first angel or have some of the investors since then been folks who've experienced this personally or have personal experience with it or have you been able to kind of present it in a way and and again I think these are these are similar challenges right if you're going out and investing and you've got a golf app and you're pitching an investor who's never golf like maybe it's just not a good fit uh but if you really want that investor or they really want to invest how do you like bridge the knowledge gap and the

19:33the empathy empathy gap. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the truth is that a lot of the people that have come in and backed us, but also nearly half of our team are people with lived experience of these issues. They really understand um what's going on here and and uh therefore didn't need this explaining to them. Um so that's true from our earliest fa uh earliest angel investor all the way through to the people that came in and led our series A. There were people that were had either experienced these things themselves or had a close connection to them. And I think that is important like you say in a golf app. You want people

20:07to be bought into the change you're delivering in the world. And we want also to work with investors and and colleagues that understand and are motivated uh to deliver that change. So I think I'd recommend anyone that's going out to raise money doesn't choose the investor that is um that doesn't really buy the uh the thing that you're trying to build. but um maybe is interested in the commercial opportunity. Uh these people need to be with you through thick and thin um and having a core belief in what you're trying to do in the world is like super

20:39crucial. Yeah. No, that's great. And and just good advice generally of finding folks and and fascinating that so many people on your team have that personal lived experience. And again, it's like back to my, you know, religious app analogy, you know, it's like you would at least want people on your team who have experience in that realm, but if everybody's just aligned on cashing in, it's it's a whole different business and a whole different uh mindset than it is like really, you know, building something for the long term, something you really want to help make a difference in the world. So, I think it's really cool how how that all

21:16came together for you with investors and employees and everything else. Agreed. So, I wanted to to kind of change topics here and move on to the the hardware thing. So, you know, we haven't had a lot of hardware uh attached subscription apps on the podcast. Um, but I think it's something that will continue to grow and I think it's an interesting kind of avenue to explore. So, like we had a skylight on in the spring and then funny enough, just like two weeks ago, my wife went out and bought a skylight and I'm getting to experience the uh subscription attached hardware um with her and she absolutely loves it. And so

21:58I think you know this is something you know with Whoop and Aura and Skylight and Eight Sleep Pod and like there's so it has been a really big um industry like growing segment of the industry. Um yeah I wanted to talk through some aspects of like how how you decided you needed to do it and then the challenges

22:21of actually doing it. For sure. I mean we knew from the outset that we wanted to use wearable data to help people better manage their illness and we were pretty open actually to how we might achieve that. Um the easier path was obviously integrating with the devices that people already have on their wrists. You know the sensors are effectively commoditized whether it's an a gin watch or an Apple watch um or an existing kind of subscription product like an aura or a whoop the these sensors are around. The issue we had was that we knew to give the um the experience to provide the experience that we wanted to deliver, we needed

22:56access to real- time data. One of the earliest kind of features that we just knew we had to build was as simple as notifying someone when their heart rate reaches a certain threshold. And that is not possible with 99% of devices either because of the frequency they sample at. So a lot of existing um kind of fitness oriented hardware will maybe sample your heart rate every 5 or 10 minutes unless you kind of set it into workout mode. Um in which case it might sample slightly more frequently. Um but then there's also a thing around the accuracy of of real-time data. Um you know different sensors are all you know come from

23:35different stock and they don't always um they don't always match one another. So we did try initially we went out um tried to use some of the API aggregators and came into this problem where actually there's a a few problems with with that for our particular use case. Um so there's some amazing companies out there like Terra is a good example who will ingest data from every app you can imagine whoop gin um Fitbit you know and they'll bring all that data into their kind of cloud service and you can as a app developer you can pull that data down which is great if you're trying to

24:08do maybe what you were describing before where you've got uh an onboarding I think you know um uh rise science do a good job of this so you've got existing kind of data like let's just grab it from your your other app and that can help you personalize the experience. Um, but that didn't work for us because for one thing, you've got to have two apps open. Now, if you're living with limited energy and brain fog, like the idea that I've got to kind of think about having my Garmin app open, which by the way is telling me all sorts of stuff about how I need to go and exercise more and then

24:37just wait for that data, you know, half an hour or half a day later to sync into my visible app. That's a really poor experience. But then there was also something about us wanting to build, you know, the equivalent product. Like people that are really trying to optimize their their fitness can go and buy the device that is dedicated for them. They can go ahead and buy that device. We wanted to build something that worked with very little compromise for people um living with chronic illness. We thought that was what they deserved. And coming across that early road block about frequency and accuracy of data was just evidence to us that we

25:11need to do this properly. we need to we need to deliver hardware to people. Um but that is a yeah it's a hard job and it's a different kind of business. Hearing you talk through that I just my mind is just racing of all the opportunities especially now you know with AI making it easier to filter data and to make associations and things like that like there it does seem like we're going to see especially in health and wellness but also in in other segments you know golf. Yeah, I don't know why I brought that up earlier, but it's actually a good example. Like there are

25:43a lot of hardware devices in golf already and there's probably opportunity to build a lot more and use the sensors on the device you already have and things like that. So I hardware is just such a fascinating um opportunity in my mind and so it's really fun kind of talking through all of this with you. Um so you know you realized early on you would you would end up needing your own hardware. Um I you know I I know that you partnered with Polar, but t talk me through like how you ended up making that decision and how that partnership came to be because you know massive company like

26:18how did you approach them to partner with the product and white label it versus like you know having to build your own or white labeling like I thought it was just you know some like off-the-shelf crappy Chinese you know wearable that that was like 10 bucks or something. Yeah, for sure. So I mean the answer there is in the earliest days we just bought a heap of um heart rate sensors from Polo. We knew that they were the best accuracy. These guys have been building heart rate monitors and

26:46wearables since 1977. They had a bit of experience about how to do it and we could never compete with that. You know if we wanted to um if we wanted to as a small team deliver something of value to to people. So we just bought some and shipped them out and and integrated. they have a kind of open SDK and that was enough for us to prove out the concept and then we were able to get a call in chat to them and

27:08explain to them what we were building. Um and we started buying that that initial device which was an armband sensor um kind of wholesale through them and we were able to pass on those savings to our our members. Um, and then it was only after a year or so where we kind of sat down with them and said, "Hey, if we were to continue working together, could we do a few of these other things like we need to improve the battery life, we'd like to make it easier to charge, we would love to include some accelerometer data cuz we know that that's going to be really

27:37valuable to our members." And we worked with them um and they worked with a few other customers um to figure out, you know, what a a kind of build on on that offering would be. And it's been a really productive partnership. fascinating that, you know, a company that's been around 40 plus years is getting product insights from a a startup like trying to to help build a better product for your customer. You're not just white labeling, not trying to go out on your own, but partnering with a giant that's been doing it for so long, but also like so deep in it yourself that you're you're actually

28:12like helping them build better products. So, I think it's incredible and just kind of a testament to how you're really trying to like help and and do things different that that um that the hardware is customuilt to help solve these problems. And so, I think, you know, again, I think there's a ton of opportunity in hardware. Um but it's it's hard. [laughter] Yeah, I think we talked about that on

28:35Skylight. It is. I think for anyone that kind of thinks, hey, these hardware enabled subscription businesses seem to be doing great guns. Like, why don't we just ship some hardware? I think um don't underestimate the complexity of doing that. So I mean I I mean I guess you bolt on what is essentially an entire e-commerce business to what otherwise could just be a subscription app business. That's everything from like planning out your inventory, financing it, you know, doing fulfillmentware 100%. Yeah. I mean beyond even like the practical physical stuff like putting the stuff in the boxes and making the boxes and sourcing the boxes [laughter] and like processing the refunds I guess

29:13in any hardware enabled subscription product like getting the data either to or from that piece of hardware is a real challenge as well like we've had to figure out some of the stuff that the big players have had years to figure out be that you know working with Bluetooth um you know syncing frequencies background operation of the app as you say firmware updates, all of this stuff is like an order of magnitude more complex than just pulling something from an API. So, I' I'd say yeah, between the physical stuff and the technical stuff, um it's definitely the harder path. Um but it's one we absolutely don't regret

29:49going down because it's enabled us to build something of value. Well, and speaking of hard things, and again, it's something I talked with the Skylight team about is the the choice of whether to make a lot of profit on the sale of the hardware and the subscription, uh, make profit on the hardware, give the software away for free. Yeah, I mean it's kind of this like eternal debate and I know you know uh in the rise of hardware attached subscriptions uh it's been a huge topic of conversation like why should I pay for this hardware and then have to keep paying or whatever. So

30:22how did you navigate all of that? For sure. I mean, we've taken a pretty like clear line on this, and it's one that we're really open about with with our potential users and our members, which is that we don't make any money on the hardware that we sell. The the way we deliver value is by building an amazing app experience that pulls that data, interprets it, gives you the insights you need and the tools you need to better um to, you know, better manage your illness. Um, so what that looks like for us is roughly 80 bucks for the band and then it's either $20 a month or

30:55um $14.99 if you're uh taking on an annual subscription. And that works really well for us because it maps, I guess, to where we're delivering the value and we can be honest about the fact that we don't make any money um by selling hardware. Uh lowers the barrier to entry as well. I was I was kind of surprised at the $80 price to be honest and and I I wasn't I wasn't first approaching this as a customer. So, I think the customer would probably have a very different experience. But when I saw the $80 price, my immediate thought was like, "How could this be any good at $80?" And

31:26then it wasn't until like talking to you more later, it's like, "Oh, because they're not actually like that's not the retail price. That's like the wholesale, you know, actual cost of the the the hardware, not hardware plus, you know, 80% margins or 50% margins or whatever you would normally mark that kind of thing up." For sure. And I think there's experimentation to do around this. I mean, that's good feedback, David, if you're looking at that and thinking that's super cheap. There's there's always scope to kind of revisit this and think about where the value sits. But yeah, broadly, I think there are there are three different models that we saw

31:58that we could take inspiration from when it comes to pricing the hardware versus the subscription. And I think there's examples of companies in each. So, Aura have thought about this a lot. So, they charge a lot of money up front for their ring. And then they'll charge a really low, relatively low subscription, uh, which I think it's6 in the UK, but maybe it's6 or 7 in the US. And I guess the way that they've thought about that is it kind of maps to the value you're getting. So you kind of early on you're getting this piece of hardware and then you know the insights become less

32:30interesting and powerful and maybe you get a bit, you know, bored of their experience over time and you think, oh, you know, why am I paying 20 bucks for this? they they've managed that with the the arc of a lot of upfront cost and then a much lower uh recurring cost. Yeah. Interesting note there too. Quick to interrupt, but um it's also like jewelry. [laughter]

32:51Yeah, for sure. Yeah. In some ways, I think they can get away with it. And and they actually just released um like the version 4 ceramic or there was something they released recently where I saw it online. I was like, "Wow, that's like, you know, pretty as jewelry." Uh so it is it is interesting even from that kind of standpoint is you have to think about the the the hardware being something you know is it something people are are caring about the specifics of the hardware like the skylight my wife

33:20actually bought her Skylight at Target. So apparently Skylight did a deal with Target and it's got this like brass frame. It's it's branded with like the magnolia which is like a brand my wife was already familiar with and so like you know those kind of things even even go into it like jewelry and like something that's going to sit on your kitchen counter which is where our skylight is sitting. Uh so it's interesting even that level of like how

33:46you think about uh pricing the hardware. For sure. Yeah. I mean the desirable items you know can be priced in desirable ways. Um I think Yeah. I mean there's some interesting stuff with Aura as well. The ceramic ring that you just mentioned, I think is in part maybe an anchoring thing like, hey, you can buy this one that's really expensive and suddenly that makes the other one feel a little bit more affordable even though by any measure it's a really expensive uh device. So I mean there's definitely some thought that goes into this thought that we haven't been able to do. We were just pretty pure about this like hey we

34:15don't believe that we're delivering value in this piece of hardware. It's everything that comes after where you get the value and that's how we priced. So ne next uh experiment for you is the deluxe version of the hardware that's more a fashion item that you can make a profit on and then it's like the people who are budget sensitive and just want the help can get the normal device and then the people who want it as a fashion accessory and have the money can upgrade and the functionality is exactly the

34:41same but it's like more a fashion item. So there you go. For sure. I like it. I'll add it to the backlog. [laughter] Yeah. So I was saying there are three models or is definitely one of them and they've done a lot of thinking about that. The second I guess is is Whoop which is they don't talk about the

34:57hardware costing anything whatsoever. They they just price it all into this kind of rolling membership which is more expensive um than more expensive than than Visible but you know it really centers the kind of member experience has its own downsides. I mean, in many ways, it's a um it's a little bit of a fast because you're paying up frontont anyway for what is a notionally a 12 or 24 month um commitment. Um and then the third is I guess closer to Tractive who the amazing company, really, really impressive company. They build their dog kind of GPS trackers and they've chosen something a little bit more like ours

35:35which is hey lower the barrier to entry and make um make your money doing what you do best which is delivering a kind of ongoing service and that's kind of where we've landed. I think those those kind of three pillars I had never I mean well I hadn't worked in this you know space and thought about it at that level but it makes a ton of sense that there's there's those three different ways to really approach it. um and and and fascinating and again I think very like customer aligned that you've chosen to do the ladder where the hardware and kind of the upfront cost even if you're

36:04you know committing for a year um that upfront cost is much lower and kind of easier barrier of entry to get people in. I did want to dig next into into kind of the the business and some of the numbers because I know you know y'all have been scaling really well and and because the product is so great and because you are actually helping people and the word of mouth is driving that because it is actually helping people uh you've been able to scale up rather quickly. So yeah, I'd love to hear kind

36:30of the the timeline of how things went. So you were a free app and then what did it look like to to start charging? Yeah. So we we moved from our free app offering and um started testing again. We did the same thing with 100 users. We sent out 100 wearables and iterated until we thought we had something of value and that was all all for free. So

36:51it's October 23 we started monetizing. So it took us a little while to um to grow to a meaningful revenue and then once we hit 1 million in uh subscription AR we grew to 10 million in exactly 2 years. So we're able to grow very quickly. Um but what I would say is that the um the machine has not been dialed in. There [laughter] is a lot to be done there. Um, I think we focus kind of deliberately on um building a great product first and thinking about the growth machine later. I mean, it might be a little bit uh surprising for your audience, but we've only ever kind of

37:36grown with one channel. Um, we've never sent a life cycle email. We haven't done any experimentation on our webunnel, which I know we'll talk about. you know, we haven't we haven't tested any pay walls. We haven't expanded in our geographies. Uh yeah, we've not added kind of AdWords or Tik Tok or SEO or AEO. Um so it's a pretty kind of nent um uh kind of growth machine that has um kind of supported us to get there. Um but yeah, the thinking really was that unless you've got something of value that is going to be retaining people and um and helping them, then there's no point investing in all of that

38:14experimentation. Um that's kind of changing now. I think I think we've got our YouTube thumbnail maybe 10 million at ARR without ever testing a payw wall. [laughter] It it is very counterintuitive to your point to to this audience specifically that that you wouldn't have done that yet. But I think it really speaks to what we've been talking about throughout this whole podcast is that, you know, you're not out here trying to make a quick buck. Like you're really trying to help people and you had that early word of mouth because it is something that's it is a community that's underserved and and so that growth it really speaks to like the

38:56product actually delivering. And I think people kind of get things a little backward often is that their like you their conversion sucks, their um LTBs are terrible, they can't get ads to work or whatever. And they think the solution is in like optimizing conversion, improving their onboarding or whatever. And yeah, you can like, you know, milk a lot of revenue out of onboarding changes, but if the product doesn't

39:22deliver, they're just going to churn. And you're not building a great business. you're just uh uh a colleague of mine calls them pay payw wall rappers. Like if if the product isn't real, you just got like 60 pages of onboarding that that hype somebody up, they subscribe and then they get zero value and don't retain. You're just a payw wall rapper and that's just just the complete antithesis of what you're doing. They're invisible. So it I mean it's genuinely incredible [laughter] that you hit 10 million in ARR without ever sending a life cycle email, zero

39:56experimentation. Sounds like you haven't done even price testing. You're only available in two markets, right? You're only available in the US and the UK. Um so yeah, very different path than I think a lot of people are taking, but the kind of path that's going to take you to becoming a much larger, more interesting, uh more

40:14durable business over the long haul. Like Nobody listening to this episode is going to be able to just like whip out a clone. [laughter] You don't have, you know, years of research. And when people search um and find research papers and like the kind of research I did that that kind of confirmed to me that it was worth even having you on the podcast, it's like that's you can't just, you know, spin

40:38that up with an LLM over a weekend. For sure. For sure. I mean, to be fair, that is another advantage of the hardware enabled model as well. like this stuff is so tough um to get right that I think if you were to try and oneshot Vibe Code uh an app to kind of sync real-time data, you'd find pretty quickly that that's tough. But you're right, you know, um it is a that's a risk, I guess, for a lot of um companies

41:00and is we're not immune to it, right? Like we've done so much thinking, spoken with so many users, built an experience and algorithms and insights that are of genuine value. But you know there are people that will stand up might be people listening to this podcast now thinking hey I can just kind of clone that thing. Um and that what they won't have as you say is the kind of the proprietary uh thinking the algorithms the insights the research and the trust that will lead to building a durable business. You mentioned in the mix of all that that you've only tried one uh paid channel. What what channel was

41:34that? And let's talk about like what you've done on that channel. For sure. So, we've um monetized primarily through a a web um kind of web to app funnel. Um and then in terms of paid, it's it's all been meta. Um and on that channel, it's UGC that's worked really well for us. So, we run a couple of programs. One is called creator collaborative and that's working with existing creators in the chronic illness space to create awareness and visibility of what we offer. Um and then there's community voices which is people in our community, our members that um can share videos with us and and be rewarded and

42:11um kind of uh you know make a a very fair rate for sharing a video, sharing their true and honest experience using Visible, maybe a couple of the practical insights that they've gained from it. And then we'll use that as uh as material for for paid. But even within our broader acquisition picture only 50%ish I mean attributions are really tough as you know but only 50%ish come through uh paid channels. The rest come through um word of mouth. So we've been able to keep that pretty steady. Um and what I would say maybe about all of this is that you know we've been able to build a really efficient business, one

42:46that is cash flow positive all the way through that growth journey. And that's in part having a pretty maniacal focus. Well, a focus generally, but a focus in in the case of acquisition on one metric. So we think um about what we call marketing cash ROI, but it's basically rorowass. So if we can keep that positive um and that's in part, you know, blend between annuals and monthlies. Um in large part that um but it's also about how much you're spending, how quickly you're trying to scale that spend. thinking about making sure that you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out that day will keep you a

43:21really efficient um growth machine. Um and that's what we've we've done throughout. Yeah. I'd love to hear more about your uh user stories program. I mean, I don't know, you know, how much is is public, how much you, you know, want to share on the podcast, but I mean, the these are hard things to to stand up. Um, but if you have a great community who really loves your app, it does seem like a really great opportunity to use them as part of your paid marketing. So, h how did how did you build that? And then what are some of the the logistics of

43:54that that you can share? Yeah. So, I'm I'm quite sure there's a lot more we can do here. I think others have thought about this um really deliberately and maybe stood it up in a in a world where they had you know clawed co-work out of the gate and they could um you know have briefs splitting out and sending to people kind of automatically. Uh we did all of this before December 2025 when the stuff was available. So it involved um kind of in we have a monthly digest and update to our our members and every now and then we'll say hey if you wanted to make videos about your experience

44:29with Visible why don't you join um our you know Slack channel and we've got a Slack group um and then people would submit an audition tape and then once they're into Slack we uh give a brief every week and people have the opportunity to share um a video with us and if we use it then they'll they'll get paid some money. Um, and that's

44:51been, you know, that's cold hard cash. That's not um, you know, credits or, you know, a kind of discount on a future purchase. But that's been a really great way for us to get real stories from real people who people can recognize themselves in out there. Um, kind of spreading the word. That's really cool. I I actually had not heard of anybody doing anything like this before. I'm sure, you know, nothing's new under the sun. Somebody surely had done it

45:17somewhere. I just hadn't heard about it. But so so you is it almost like a kind of weekly theme like you you and your team think through like you know what would potentially kind of help get attention, go viral or whatever and then you have multiple creators um creating the the essentially the same video or like different videos on that same topic and then and then that that's just kind of like and we talk a lot about on the podcast. And I've talked to a lot of folks privately too just about what the the grind of creative is. And so now you you kind of have this army of

45:54people who like really care and actually use the product. Um so yeah, talk me through a little bit more about exactly how that works and how you think about the briefs and and and then and then even the fact that you're maybe releasing multiple videos very similarly at the same time. For sure. Sure. I mean, I'll pick up first on something you said there around verality. And I think that's maybe where we've missed a trick when it comes to doing this um taking this approach of getting like real content from real members. Um I think what we do is we get those videos and we'll test them on paid

46:25like very small budgets and see where the signal is and we'll scale up the one that seems to be working. And I think that addresses your um questions about you know how you have so many videos of a similar type going out at the same time. truly only one or two maybe in a week will ever get any scaled spend. Um but the the thing that a lot of people have started doing now that I think is a really interesting thing for us to explore is you know getting those things out on small organic Tik Toks. So people will just post their videos even if they're not approved or kind of signed

46:57off or briefed by us. Um and then one of those in every hundred might go viral. And I think that's a a repeatable strategy that um others have used successfully and it's something that I'd be really keen for us to explore. But at the moment it's more about um going and testing those things with a small budget

47:13and scaling the ones that work. Yeah, that's fascinating. Um tell tell me more about the the influencer program. So, the folks that are already influencers in the chronic illness space, how did you build that out? And how do you reach out to those creators or do they reach out to you as you've kind of gotten more visible,

47:31[laughter] pardon the pun? Yeah. I mean, we were super uh lucky here. So, our social media manager, Gemma, is for one thing an amazing human, but she's also someone like much of our team that lives with uh chronic illness, and she's uh an influencer in her own right. So, she already had, I guess, an understanding of what it was like to be creating content in this space. Um, and knew a lot of the names and the people that we should reach out to. So, that was a great kickstart. Um, we actually started working with Gemma because we'd reached out to her and said, "Hey, like would you like to make

48:05a video for us?" And we just enjoyed working with her so much to be like, "Hey, would you like a job?" [laughter] So, that was a really helpful uh lean lean in. Um but also I think it's about I guess our marketing team um being like you said earlier um broadly a group of people that really understand this space live with the conditions or have close friends and family who do and therefore can reach the right people uh with the right messages because they're not doing this you know trying to build [clears throat] for from people that they don't understand. But it's really coming as a team from a perspective of

48:38deep understanding that allows you to create the insights and create the videos, create the the content that that might scale. So how does that work with the influencers on exactly how you compensate them? Are you paying per impression, per post? Uh what what have you found work there? For sure. So it's different between the two programs. So with influencers we might negotiate depending um on you know their size that it might be about reach or it might be about um impressions. It depends I guess on the particular influencer but it's much simpler in our community voices um group where you know if if we use your video it doesn't

49:14matter if it is a slam dunk the one that um really really scales or it's the one that like maybe gets $10 to spend and never see sees the light again. Uh it's just a kind of a flat fee. um for each video that we we go ahead and use. Gotcha. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, you know, there's so many ways to build out these, you know, creative machines. And again, it's just been such a hot topic the past few years of like how do you get enough creatives to test and running both the internal kind of customer program and the influencer program. Uh, yeah, sounds like it's a a

49:50great way to just have that content machine without necessarily having to have like a massive team dedicated to just constantly grinding out new content. What does the actual team who runs that look like? You know, how many people do you have, you know, kind of managing those programs and then managing the spend for the ads that

50:07actually do uh get some traction? It's a team of two. We're pretty lean. Wow. [laughter] We're really lean. I guess like with everything we do, like focus is important and I think we found Signal in this and then have been able to kind of have a team that are just really great at it. Um, so that's the way it

50:27works for us. So, we've been we've been talking about all the the content and the paid marketing. Uh, but we hadn't talked much. You kind of alluded to it earlier, but that uh you send most traffic or all traffic to the web. What does that look like? Yeah. So we again like it's not an area we've tested very much and I think there's a heap [laughter] of [sighs] a heap of optimization to be done but yeah all of our um traffic currently just goes to the landing page and we've had one quiz that I think went up when we went live in October of 23 and it hasn't

50:57changed since but it's a a classic um web funnel and I think it you know does a couple of things well so it helps understand a bit more about you and whether you're a fit and The truth is that our product isn't for everyone and it would be inconsistent with what we're trying to do in the world to make just make people buy it. Like we have to ask some questions about your experience and whether or not um pacing in particular, but also visible as a product is the right fit for you. I I want to interrupt there and just say another kind of counterintuitive thing

51:33that a lot of people on this podcast going to be like, "What the heck are you talking about, David?" But I I genuinely think more people should do this kind of qualification. And and again, if you're if you're, you know, just trying to, you know, get your app to 40k in MR and flip it and make a quick buck, you know, go ahead and stop listening. This isn't the podcast episode for you. But if you're trying to build like an enduring business and you're thinking about the long term, qualifying your customers, it's so counterintuitive, but it you just build such a better business by not stringing along the people who might pay

52:08you, but then not actually get any value. You're going to get worse reviews. Yes, you may be able to juice conversion, but you're going to kill retention. You you just got the you get wrong product signals about the app. Like I mean there's just so many layers to having the wrong people pay you doesn't make for a great business in the long

52:28run. For sure. For sure. And I think I mean a web quiz is a great mechanism for that. You're literally asking questions to someone and you can um you know explain and make sure they fully understand what it is that they're getting themselves into. um which yeah I mean there don't get me wrong there is opportunity for example landing everyone on the landing page rather than directly into the quiz is uh you know probably not best practice and that's something that will change um but yeah this this all speaks to kind of the opportunity that there is there um whether it's around um yeah web quiz optimization spinning out new

53:05quizzes in our case maybe for different conditions or different goals that you might have this is you know something that other apps have done in um to great success and it's something that we should definitely do. But yeah, it's it's not been our focus until now. So, it's while while we're thinking about this and why I was really keen to chat to you, David, is that we're hiring for a role um to kind of own all of this stuff, all of these levers that sit untouched. Um it's going to be a super exciting opportunity for the right

53:31person to come in and run with. Nice. I I usually save this to the end, but since you since you brought it up, we'll just do we'll do the pitch here. So, [laughter] if you're listening to this podcast and you got all the way through, that means like you care and are aligned with what Luke is trying to do here with Visible. And what a great company to go join. Pull a few levers and look like an absolute rockstar hero [laughter] because there's so much lowhanging fruit to do. So, we'll we'll include a link to the job post in the uh description and everything. Uh because yeah, I mean

54:06again I mean I've been kind of gushing on this podcast because I'm so aligned, you know, having having suffered from a chronic illness for as long as I have. Um but it just it seems like you're a really great company really trying to make something great in the world and then your numbers reflect it. I mean 10 million and ARR with a single channel without even trying very hard with no optimization hardly [laughter] at all like you know you you've really got something here and I think the for the right person it's just going to be an incredible uh team to join an incredible opportunity to join at this stage with

54:37so much lowhanging fruit. So uh very long pitch but [laughter] thank you you sold it for me David. Yeah uh yeah hopefully hopefully this lands you at least a few good resumes. Um but I did want to keep kind of talking through web as a channel as well in in that um you know a lot of people are moving to the web now away from app because of the app store fees and stuff like that for y'all as a hardware attached product you don't have to have AP in the app at all. So it's kind of like you know some folks don't even fully have this option u but how do you

55:14think about the web and and have you thought about sending people to the app? How do you think about the store fees? And then I know on the web it even gives you additional opportunity with like HSA and FSA payments and things like that. For sure. I mean for us it was it it was clear early on that we would have to sell via the web because you you can't

55:33sell hardware via inapp pations. Yeah. Inapp payments you literally can't do it. So we had to build out uh a kind of a web payment flow. Um but as you say I mean I think there's a a few kind of key tactical advantages. um one is around being able to introduce new payment methods in this case HSA FSA but for other companies that aren't us there are other things that might be of value be that you know localized payment methods or you know um some of these buy now pay later um uh offerings that you can get via Stripe um but there's also benefits around attribution being able to send

56:09better signals back to the app platforms um and then of course there's that 30% um u fee that uh you might have to you do have to pay if you're using IP. So, it was actually just we didn't have an option, but it's something that we've um been able to experience some other benefits for as well. Yeah. And you know, this thinking through this and what we just talked about it, I do think it makes a lot of sense for your business. You know, my advice has generally been, you know, pick up the lowhanging fruit you can pick up in the app directly and and use

56:45Apple's inapp purchase because consumers generally like it. It's easy. And you know, for all your comments on like payment options and things like that, yes, you can't do HSA, FSA through your Apple account, but you know, Apple and Google both work hard globally to accept as many forms of payments as they can. It just simplifies so many things. So, my advice has been like pick up the low hanging fruit in the app. But what we were just talking about before this is like for your business, you don't

57:11necessarily want the lowhanging fruit. Like you want somebody who's more kind of committed and into it for the long run. And you want to have that kind of like the quiz leading into it before payment and things like that. And so the web just gives you so much more flexibility and it kind of like forces that level of buyin that that you wouldn't necessarily get from from the kind of casual person, you know, landing in. And I've talked to a few people about this. I forget which episode recently we talked about it, but um the web like somebody who downloads an app to solve a problem is just a really

57:45different mindset than somebody who kind of, you know, sees an ad that presents a problem and you need to kind of nurture them along that that that this combination of hardware and product is the solution. and and it's just a very different mindset being on the web kind of researching something versus like being in an app onboarding funnel trying to get to a end goal state for sure and I guess I mean you see some of this in our data as well like this is high consideration stuff so median time from someone landing on our website to making a purchase is 10 days so people are

58:19going off and doing their research as you say they're maybe setting off an agent to figure out um you know is this the tool for me and that's kind what we want. [laughter] You know, we don't want to sell something to someone that won't have much use for it. But I guess there's also a truth in the fact that you can't do a lot of the things that you can do in the app anyway. So, you know, free trials for instance, you know, there's a lot a lot of best practice around, you know, trial length. Are you having, you know, trial optin on the payw wall? Are

58:48you all of these things? It's not possible when you're selling a hardware product. You can't sell something uh for free. Um, so there's a um, kind of uh, you know, it's a slightly different world and this is what I meant earlier when I I spoke about kind of having an e-commerce business on top of a subscription business really. The things that we might look to learn from other really um, kind of benchmark companies out there might actually be people that have amazing uh, product pages. you know, they are explaining like the technical um you know, specs of a a device in a really good way um rather

59:20than um maybe what's best practice in apps. Yeah. All also fascinating. And um you know, you brought up an interesting point there about not having a free trial and a hardware product. How do you think about d-risking that? Because a free trial is kind of the offload, easy derisk. Um, but I I've seen a lot of apps uh starting to try other things like for people who are convinced that it's a solution giving a 20% discount if they don't take a free trial. So, you don't you don't do that. But it's that same kind of um you know de-risking where it once people are really convinced they're going to buy, they buy

1:00:00and you don't need that free trial to convince them to buy. So, what we do have is I guess the free app as an opportunity. It's still there. You know, there's still some amazing value in it. you just don't get a wearable, but that is a a way for people to go have a play, understand what we're all about, figure feel the kind of quality of um the product before they make a decision. And that ends up being

1:00:21a really big chunk of our acquisition. And we really don't push the free app at all. The free app is all still kind of word of mouth. You know, there's a tiny section on our website that says, you know, you have this free app as well. And that's kind of on purpose because really we see the value of our product and you see this in our metrics as well, like you know, PMF scores. So, everyone that comes through does a a PMF survey and the the wearable membership is way out there. Whereas the free app is, you know, necessarily there's no wearable, there's no real-time data. You can scan

1:00:48your HRV by putting your finger on your phone, but like it's not life-changing for people. But what it does do is it gives you an impression of um the the kind of value you can experience if you were to go ahead and buy the the wearables. That's probably the key way in which we derisk this decision. One one thing I wanted to touch on because we we do need to to wrap up here pretty soon. Um, but I wanted to make sure we touch on this before we wrapped is the the kind of fundraising journey because I thought it was really interesting. So you you took the angel seed very early

1:01:20just to kind of like get things going. Um, what funding and how have you thought about it since then? Yeah, so I think there are broadly two two paths, right? There's the bootstrappers who um are like, "Hey, I'm going to go do whatever I can to avoid getting into kind of the the um the trap of VC." And there are some people go ahead and raise heaps of money. Again, unlike other companies, uh we kind of taken this middle ground. We raised some money uh preede pre-product to just

1:01:51build a small team to deliver something. Um and then we grew to I think seven million in revenue cash flow positive uh before we decided to take some more um money on. So we did a very small by industry standard series A at the beginning of the year from a super aligned investor, someone that understood what we were all about and we decided not to publicize that. And that was in large part because our members don't care if we're raising money. It doesn't matter. [laughter] And I think it so often is a a signal of um or something that founders fall into a trap of they are in that kind of VC

1:02:26half of the you know if you're in the bootstrappers half you're on LinkedIn talking about how great it is bootstrapping. If you're in the VC path you're celebrating just how many millions you've raised. Um we don't view that as a proxy for success. It's absolutely not um you know what we want to go out there and celebrate. In this case we we raised some money because it was it would enable us to do some cool stuff especially when it comes to data science. um especially when it comes to the the core product team that we wanted to do that we were otherwise um kind of we couldn't invest in quite so heavily

1:02:58um when we were kind of trying to stay cash fl positive every month and that was the right decision for us um but yeah it it wasn't necessarily the path we had to take and I'm proud that we still think deeply about building a sustainable business that's here for the long term because that's what our community needs. they don't need some flash in the pan uh product that will disappear after 24 months. Um, and we haven't been building the business that

1:03:23day that way and we we won't be. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I I love that you didn't even announce the fundraising. And I was thinking about this because I I you know saw that you didn't do that. And for for a company like Visible, I I do think it makes a ton of sense because when people go search Visible, they're they're searching for a solution and seeing some random like TechCrunch article or something like that. If if that got picked up in C in SEO and you have no control over how they frame things and anything like that that like it's just such a different audience. So

1:03:59like if you're like revenue cap B2B SAS you know us raising you know being a part of Y Combinator raising from YC continuity getting mentioned in Techrunch like that actually builds builds trust with the community because like wow like like they're a real company they have money to grow and things like that but that's just such a different audience. [laughter] So, I think it's really cool that you were, you know, self-aware enough to u to not make a big splash about it in in part for just like the community doesn't care and that like that's who we care

1:04:31about. Yeah, exactly. Right. I think it makes sense for B2B companies, but I can't see why it would ever make sense for a consumer company unless it's maybe a like a fintech kind of stocks and shares trading thing where yeah, there might be some kind of synergies between the audience that you're building for and the audience of TechCrunch articles. But

1:04:49for us it didn't make any sense at all. Yeah. Hey well and then even to your you know whole point about um you raising only what you need and not raising too much and like building for sustainability versus you know you I mean in in today's day and age and the fact that you are using AI and you're in health and health tech is blowing up you probably could have gone and raised 50 million or hundred million dollars with the kind of traction you're seeing and the kind of TAM that that you have and then even in the future expanding beyond just the illness community to to more

1:05:22general health and fitness. It's like, you know, I I can I could write that pitch for you and and you know, probably land 50 or $100 million with the kind of team and traction and everything that and the partnerships and the hardware and everything else. Uh but that's not the path you want to be on because you raise 50, you raise a hundred and all of a sudden like you got to you you have to deliver a $10 billion outcome or you get sold off for parts or whatever. Uh, and so even just being thoughtful about how much you raise, who you raise from, just kind of speaks to like what you're

1:05:52building there. For sure. I think gods be tossed the companies that do that. But you're right, like I think it leads to the kind of decisions that aren't necessarily in the long-term interest of of a company. Uh, like if you're raising those that kind of money, you're expected to spend it. Um, and I think that can be a trap for a lot of founders, and it was one

1:06:13that we were keen to avoid. Absolutely. All right. Well, as we wrap up, uh, I want to ask you the the three questions I I've asked every guest now. Um, what is the most impactful experiment change or something you did in the last year? Kind of your your biggest win of the last year. For sure. So, I think our biggest win is we had a kind of no code thing that we built our web funnel on. And I mean, one of the reasons why we weren't able to test anything was because it was on this super flaky tool. We were like, if we touch that, it's going to fall over. So,

1:06:44let's just leave it. Um, so we've rebuilt all of that inhouse now and we've kind of got our own um amazing um kind of internal dashboard where our new hire that comes in can come and uh kind of conduct some amazing um experiments and and different variants and things that will uh hopefully unlock um even

1:07:05better performance through that funnel. So that was cool. No longer being constrained by that uh that tool and that editor. That's awesome. [gasps] All right, the next question. What's the worst experiment or change that you made in the past year? Your biggest fail. Uh so our biggest fail would be um we it's on the core product side. So actually a feature that we built. We tried to uh launch a product a feature that would help you make sense of some of your data in natural language. Um we figured that this was a you know a great way to kind of get with the trend of uh

1:07:38AI and people experiencing things in natural language. And our first cut of that really did not work. um you know we shipped it as we do with a lot of features. It went out in our early access hub and people were like we hate this. [laughter] So that was a really good learning and it was super naive. Um so we gone back to the drawing board on that. We still got conviction that um helping people make sense of their data in a kind of conversational or a natural language way is like there's so much we

1:08:02can do. But our first cut uh was a fail. Yeah. That's really cool though because so you you only rolled it out in your early access community and and so that that fail didn't actually make it to the broader community and you didn't get that kind of negative sentiment across your entire customer community. For sure. We're really deliberate about roll out and I think maybe you spoke about the kind of brain fog and the change resistance. 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. you know, we're making

1:08:33this change because we've seen in early access that it's delivered 20% improvement in X and um it is, you know, X% easier for people with, you know, color blindness. And this is an important um way to kind of bring people along for the journey cuz a lot of people that rely on a tool every day,

1:08:52they just don't want it to change. They're like, stop adding stuff. [laughter] So, early access hub is a really great way of us uh being able to get around that particular issue. Last question. uh growth would be easier if so for us that would be if visible was available on insurance. Um that is something we're really um dead set on achieving. It's just an incredibly long road that requires a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of health economic evidence, you know, conversations with payers in various states. Um we are not there yet. Uh but it's it's absolutely where we're going. So we talk about

1:09:28being on a three-step thing. build an amazing consumer app for hundreds of thousands of people. Use that app to build out evidence and research that you can use to become regulated and get reimbured. And the third stage is being available on insurance. Uh but I think it might take us another few years. [gasps] Yeah, that's a a very ambitious goal and hard to achieve, but it sounds like you're you're well on your way to being able to make the make the pitch. I mean, you already have research. You're uh got partnerships with the the leader in the industry for hardware. So, um you're

1:10:03you're on the path. For sure. That's my hope anyway. Yeah. Well, we already pitched the uh role. Uh but anything else you wanted to shout out as we wrap up? I think just if you're interested in what we're building, the problem we're solving, maybe if you have your own experience, I just love to hear from you. We're always looking to hire smart people, especially if you're interested in growth and uh product and you're

1:10:26listening to this podcast, reach out. LinkedIn is the best place to find me. Awesome. Luke, thank you so much for joining me. This was a very different conversation than we typically have on the Sub Club podcast. Uh I I actually would love feedback from folks if you enjoyed this and would love a little more kind of off-the-wall different perspectives. And I I I told Luke before the podcast, it's like because I'm so invested in the uh chronic illness community myself, having having suffered from a chronic illness for so long, uh that that I didn't want to turn it into like a health and wellness [laughter] podcast that we did want to stay

1:11:00somewhat focused on, you know, subscription app best practices and whatnot. So hopefully we we uh brided the gap well enough, but I would love feedback as well on uh whether you enjoyed the episode or not, especially if you got all the way through it. So, uh, Luke, thank you so much for joining me. This was a blast.

1:11:15Thank you very much, David. Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.