Sub Club Podcast: Growing Your App to 1M Paid Subscribers - Ron Schneidermann, AllTrails App

0:00[Music] hey you're listening to the sub club podcast a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing subscription app businesses we'll share insider secrets from the top subscription apps on the app stores let's get into the show our guest today is ron snyderman ceo at all trails the ultimate guide for outdoor adventures all trails was early to the consumer subscription space launching a three dollar a month premium

0:29cheer way back in 2012. ron joined as cmo and ceo in 2015 and then took over as ceo in 2019 helping to grow all trails to over one million subscribers and tens of millions of active users worldwide on the podcast we talked with ron about the magic of consumer subscriptions experimenting with freemium strategies and how private equity isn't always as bad as you've been led to believe hey ron welcome to the podcast thanks for having me yeah really looking forward to the chat today um i wanted to just kick it off and most people know it know what all trails is and it's a fantastic brand

1:09and that it kind of tells you what it is right there on the tin but what's your what's your pitch i mean we're in 2021 post pandemic what's the uh give us the short version of uh what is all trails what what does it mean yeah so all trolls is a it's a free app and website that helps you find trails all over the globe so you can spend more time enjoying the outdoors and spending time in nature that's awesome that's a very nice mission that's way more like beautiful than helping developers make more money both important most important but i can smell that like that's like it smells

1:44like piney and i like it yeah it smells like the colorado forest i haven't been hiking forever and and uh doing all the research to uh how to chat with you today was like oh man i need to go hiking more i hear there's a great app for that [Laughter] so so i i did want to also ask uh kind of about your your journey to to all trails so you um got there fairly early and then um grew in and they're now ceo but just tell me uh off the bat what led you to all trails way back in 2015 when it was just six people

2:20yeah um i guess to answer that i'm gonna go a little bit further back in time yeah um my first job right after college was at accenture at a global management consulting firm and you know it was great it was great uh good jumping off point learned a ton i didn't know anything going into that job and you know you get the rubber stamp and it opens doors and stuff but by the end of my let's see third year there i kind of had that the realization i don't know maybe epiphany is a little too strong aboard but i i just kind of realized like i can't

2:52i can't take a job just for money again you know like the amount of time and energy that i was putting into it and the lack of work-life balance it really made me rethink what who do i want to be who does working wrong want to be um and so i i i was able to parlay that accenture job into a biz dev roll over a hot wire an online travel company and that was really where it opened my eyes like oh my god i am so much happier and i am honestly so much better when i'm working at something that i'm just personally passionate about and that

3:28that guiding principle has really held through throughout my career trajectory you know from from hotwire i went into my own startup in the ski space i love to ski um so i did that for nine years that was a ton of fun and then i was over at yelp doing growth for a bit you know i love finding like non-chain restaurants and supporting mom-and-pop businesses and stuff and i live in yelp so that was great and then when the opportunity for ultra was presented itself it was just kind of a no-brainer like i am of course i'm gonna take this of course and one i'll say this too one little

4:02addendum one of the things i learned along the way too is i am not a zero to one guy like that is not when i am at my best that just causes me stress and anxiety and just you know figuring out like how to keep the lights on for another day um and so again like knowing kind of that sense of self knowing like all right like i'm best at b2c i'm best using you know i'm at my best when i'm using products i i personally want to use and like talking about and i like hyper growth and i think that's probably my my sweet spot so

4:32it starts kind of aligned when uh when all trails showed up yeah and then how did that go from you joined the company as cmo right and then what was a progression inside the company to eventually taking over as ceo yeah so i joined as cmo and ceo um i don't know why i really wanted to to have both like i didn't want to just be cmo in a vacuum but not have any ownership or agency over kind of team composition and strategy and stuff so i thought that it was really really important and when you're a six-person company you know it's pretty easy to grab titles it's not like i did too

5:07yeah i was gonna ask like i mean it's it's not like you see this a lot where it's like a six person company and they have like five c levels and you're like okay yeah sure like like my title for example but like i'm kind of curious like you know you like your background you founded a company like you were like a real cx whatever right like it's not like it was fake so how did how did that how did you go as like an executive like choosing your next thing to like like that had to be a hell of a pitch to get you to like join a tiny little

5:35like team like that you know i think i i i spent a lot of time thinking through again like i don't know i to be perfectly honest i was i was a little bit bored at the end of my tenure at yelp i love yelp it's a great company but it was just it was too big for me and so i spent a lot of time thinking through what's next again that whole question like zero to one do i need do i do i need to start something myself or what so the the smallness didn't bother me i actually really like the smallness because it's almost like

6:01it's almost like a cheat code like i got to do a startup like basically from scratch but i didn't have to do it from scratch and then they had they had a kernel of something at that they did they did and you know it was actually to to give my predecessor credit it was it was actually more than that like they had they had solid product market fit from a monetization perspective and then what really got me across the line was their product channel fit and i feel like that's often overlooked and that's something you kind of pick up in time like it's not just like is this

6:31a product people are willing to pay money for but just straight up how are you going to get this out to market and can you can you do it in a way that is you know viable and scalable and and ultimately you know going to be more efficient than you know it's kind of like net out right like the whole ltd attacking and everything that right yeah it's it's something more efficient than paying for every single install right exactly and so you know it felt like there was good bones you know maybe it was like a fixer-upper kind of house but it had good bones like it had it had

7:02the foundation in place i had and i could see you know back in 2015 um the product sucked it did it sucked uh and and what was shocking after i came was how bad the data was i didn't realize that when i was kind of doing my own diligence um but it was all i mean like analytics on the internally what the company knew about itself or you mean like the the the trail data the trail data like the trailer that we were showing you know that's that's such high consequence um and so that was like a hard pivot uh within a couple months like all right

7:34this is a you know all hands on deck thing to we're not doing anything else until we figure this out um but again it just it felt like there was a diamond in the rough in this one and you know i've been here six years now and i i can say like unequivocally this is the highlight of my career maybe i just got lucky i don't know but um man like yeah this has been a really really great run so far i was just gonna ask about the that channel and and monetization fit i mean i guess this was maybe i'm jumping ahead in our agenda

8:06here but um but yeah they were already charging a subscription before you got there right in in terms of like monetization um and maybe like describe that model a little bit and and how that has changed yeah i had never done a subscription business before coming here so this was my first subscription business and all i mean that you you guys already know this i'm sure your listeners already know this too but um subscription businesses are magical oh my goodness compared to like e-commerce so you're trying to re-win you know the transaction every single time i was looking at hotwire just now when you mentioned it i was just

8:43thinking about like how many of those there were at that era right like and still are like when you go to book a hotel on google and they're like oh here's 15 different sites you can actually like book it through it's like oh it's so tough same with lyftopia yeah liftoff ski startup it was the same thing right um you know but with a much smaller niche and segment and then and then yelp is you know they're they're kind of the media model and then trying to you know kind of pivot more towards like b2b and subscriptions for businesses and value-added services and stuff um and

9:15coming here doing a consumer subscription business uh an annual subscription uh the auto renews it's like an annuity like it just builds up every single year like obviously like you can't take retention for granted and i'm sure we'll talk about that but you know just if you're able to kind of you know do a pretty good job on on the retention side and just see this thing build up and just raise the tide every single year that i've been here and have it just it's that much more momentum that just gets like brought into each new fiscal year for us it's just it's incredible it is

9:45incredible the leverage that it offers so that was cool that was definitely one of those good bones you're talking about right yeah yeah and that's what i was going to ask so you say the bones were good um you know all trails had launched their subscription in 2012 so about three years before you joined what was the state of that and that that's really early in the kind of consumer subscription software space super early was there a lot of pushback was like how was traction chargebacks and things like that was the bones were there but were there some serious doubts or questions in your mind as to how this subscription

10:26app space was going to play out yeah i mean so can i can share a secret with you guys i honestly didn't know that our subscription business lost in 2012 until you guys showed me the research that you did leading up to this i had always thought that uh it launched with our apps we launched our apps in i think early 2015. i joined in in september 2015 um and i just lumped everything together just in that you know yeah it's yeah prehistory yeah like uh so i i had always thought that it that we had launched it when our apps launched but i guess we were on the cutting edge the

11:02bleeding edge of the subscription space here so so but that then i'm then i'm quick to assume that you know if you launched a subscription 2012 was on the web if you didn't have apps until 20 2015 right yeah which i mean my experience i guess i've been on all child's website but like my vast majority of experience has been on the web right because i'm like oh sorry on the on the phone because i'm going for a hike and i'm like i need a map and like boom there's all trails right which i guess is that channel fit you're talking about yeah and that's been that's been

11:28one of the cool things when i started so a couple couple i guess data points um just to show like sort of that snapshot in time of 2015. um we probably had 20 000 uh subscribers at that point maybe a million cumulative registered users since 2010 when we first launched and maybe 20 000 active paying subs and in january of this year we put out a press release we don't normally do that but it was two pretty cool milestones we had cracked 25 million registered users and a million paying subs at the start of this year so you know again like the the the unlock has been really cool and and very very

12:07powerful um but the other thing like you said like this was you know a web driven subscription business at first when i when i first started here uh probably 70 of our of our web traffic was desktop desktop to mobile 70 30 and obviously that's inverted wow since then and then mo the the the mobile apps the native apps are by far the best form factor for what we're trying to do like you said jake like take it with you on the go the navigation the gps stuff everything baked in there um and so that's become really the workhorses of subscription business and and of our

12:40overall uh utc file as well yeah i mean it's so helpful um you guys have good seo when you search a trail it comes up on all trails right but that's i would imagine like this stage probably mostly like demand gen for the app exactly no that's exactly it right so our legacy seo this is again one of the beauties of being around for 11 years and counting we have this amazing legacy seo and that's that was that product channel fit that brought me here was the the sales pitch was he just showed me google analytics and he's just like look look at all of this free traffic just

13:12like hyper local very valuable data right high intensity if you if you're the winner that's a great real estate to have i know and and so what we've been doing obviously as um sort of consumer behavior has changed and got mobile first is um we're able to parlay all of that mobile first seo traffic into incremental organic app installs and that's a huge driver of our business we get millions and millions of incremental app installs that we don't pay a dime for every month yeah and going back to your point like yeah not having to push the ball up the hill completely is a bit you know

13:49you think about a compounding annuity analogy as you made right like the cost of that compounding really you know if you net out the whole asset right like that's going to be a big part of it it's like how much does it cost to push that that that that flywheel up a little bit it's a moat for our business too you know you're around long enough and you're doing something good you're going to see a ton of competitors start flooding into the space which is great is validation of what we're doing but the that product market fit product channel fit conundrum is is real it's real and you

14:20know you see really great products you know beautifully designed products that just crank can't crack the code on either of those and then they kind of you know wither on the blind right like see it all the time no that was actually my next question is that in those early days and you already said when you joined and and when y'all launched the apps in 2015 they were crap so take me to how did you go from this crap app and what experimentation what pain what suffering did it do there's some there's some old there's some like old guard at all trails that are gonna listen to this and be like our apps crap

14:59they were great but what did it take and what was the approach to to find you you had some level of product market fit but then to actually build a great product around those early signs there there were a couple of philosophical things that we decided immediately one was around funding do we want to go take funding um and try and do this faster do we want to do this kind of organically and my predecessor had done a small seed round i think he raised 3 million bucks in 2012 um and we were still kind of drafting off of that and then there was a little

15:33bit of subscription revenue and then a whole bunch of just you know classic entrepreneur head on the swivel stuff like let's throw a bunch of up on the wall like let's see what we can do so there's you know a media play and programmatic ads and whatever right just trying to buy time more than anything right like keep the servers running a little bit longer but we decided we very intentionally decided not to take funding we wanted to control our own destiny and part of it to be clear part of it was the the handshake agreement with the original founder um was to grow it and

16:05sell it he wanted us to to sell it and so um so then if that was kind of the the mandate i was like why would we even just you know deal with the the opportunity costs and the headache of going out and trying to raise funds um that's a pain in the ass so you know it was like let's just let's put our heads down especially especially for a consumer subscription company in 2015 oh my god right yeah ben kind of ben party to that it's not it's it wasn't easy let's put it that way i tried doing it in 2005 by the way anyways um but so we decided to put our

16:38heads down and just say super scrappy super scrappy super lean and so um it just came down to like relentless prioritization and essentially what we ended up doing was triaging sort of a different funnel metric each quarter right so one quarter is like we gotta tackle bounce rate all right now we gotta tackle sign up rate now we've gotta tackle pro conversion rate now we gotta tackle retention and we just kind of spent cycles um through 2016 and through 2017 just each each quarter just like laser focus in on that one metric and do what we can and then move um and it worked because by the end of 2017

17:14we actually achieved profitability which was cool uh which was really really great you know like we wanted i'm again when you've been around the block long enough you talked to enough entrepreneurs you've seen you've seen enough um there's so many examples of people going and getting too much funding too soon and then they develop bad habits right in here never heard of that so you know but so you see it right like that you get the unsustainable growth channels again the product channel fit question like how are you actually going to bring this to market and how are you going to do it when that vc money dries

17:49up like is this actually how you're going to 5x that vc money right right is this sustainable or you're just connecting yourself to the next round of fun you put yourself in a dead man's corner right where you're not your market's not big enough whatever and you end up killing an otherwise like really great business totally and i you know i've seen that i've seen that um i really didn't want to do that here it felt like because so much of our growth was coming through seo it felt like obviously there was an opportunity which we later unlocked on the aso side of things it felt like

18:20even beyond both of those though it's just like word of mouth and pr and viral loops and network effects and product market fit is a broad thing right like yeah growth kind of if you have a really good product and it serves a niche like growth just starts to starts to go and especially organic growth right like that was really the big key i was like do we need to be like one of these d2c companies and just raise millions of dollars for instagram ads or can we can we do something that's more sustainable uh for the long haul and that that was one of the bets the other big bet that

18:50we placed was um from a brand positioning perspective so my you know when i came in the app was definitely geared towards like the the through hikers and search and rescue and and the hardcore like you know backcountry folks and the the challenge with with that segment is that there's always these you know really esoteric and extreme product requirements that they want because they're they're edge cases they're by definition all edge cases and in this space in particular a lot of them are kind of living the you know the van life life um you know trying to live as as frugally as possible uh and so they don't want to really pay you any

19:32money either it's like this isn't a good growth segment we gotta we gotta read this one and so uh i've told this story a lot you know this straw man to this day still is is my wife where like she likes going outside with me you know she's always down to go on a hike um you know spend time outside we have three kids totally trying to raise them on the trail um we have a dog who loves being on the trail and but but if i'm not there you know she's she's not going out there right so it's like okay okay maybe here's the play like what what if we use

20:04technology to kind of tear down the barriers for entry like instill confidence whether through like product functionality or content but really make it so that someone like my wife and the hundreds of millions of people around the globe like her who who know that they feel better when they time spent in nature they're just a little scared to do it like can we help augment that can we help supplement that and i think that's going to be the unlock and that was the big bet that was the other big bet that we placed in 2015 and you know and just to summarize it's like to kind of not

20:33ignore these like extreme users that are on the on the edges you'll serve them but maybe not in the way that they would want but like let's focus on you know this larger segment i mean i think that's a thing even some good found advice that's good for founders sometimes doesn't always apply to like b2c stuff sometimes where it's like yeah like listen to your most vocal users often there's something there but like with an ounce of like moderation because yeah they can lead you in really strange places and think about the network they'll think about the like user maybe you're not talking to or the

21:05next you're saying next hundred million users that you have to get um and that's potentially a much bigger surface area right and that doesn't mean you're gonna abandon those core users like they might grumble a little bit and they might not be totally served by your use case and like that's maybe just life um but but you know you've now potentially like if you think about you know the mission of just getting people outdoors like you've achieved that much better by going for this much larger market segment right yeah and they're not mutually exclusive it's just which one are we prioritizing which one are we preferencing and

21:36how are we you know what kind of language are we are we using lingo or not right are we making this accessible for everybody or not for imagery right are we doing like you know alex honold like dangling one handed off or just or just a picture of the end the end cap at an rei right like yeah yeah or or just like you know a family like smiling and having fun out in nature together you know like all right it doesn't cater to the core but they're not necessarily going to like walk away because they see that stuff either right i mean that comes to

22:09channel fit as well right like not your products fit and your who your products oriented for and that like b2c you kind of you can't divorce the two like you can't have totally independent marketing and channel channels for the product and stuff which maybe you could get away with a little bit in b2b um but but uh but they but they don't necessarily have to be like completely like linked you know you can kind of serve both niches on the on the product side to your point yeah and and speaking of getting more folks out in the mission of all trails i'd love to hear about your freemium strategy

22:41because that's a huge part of it like what early on what was your approach and then how did that evolve over time as far as what features you do give away for free to kind of reach the broadest audience possible and then what things you pay wall to actually get paid yeah and i'd like to highlight how ron when we asked you to describe all trails you put free in the name which i'm sure was very intentional right you said it is a free app right it is not a premium app i mean it is a premium app but but highlight the free so yeah with that framing well

23:11what tell us about your free app there's this is a this is a an ongoing like not not debate but um it's an open question always and we're constantly like asking our employees and our board like let's challenge our assumptions here just because we did something a certain way last year doesn't mean we need to do it this way like let's constantly reevaluate this uh for us there's sort of three main buckets we have free unauthenticated users and then we have free registered users so kind of that registration wall is like the first key funnel uh metric and then there's um pro subscribers right so we have two two kind of core

23:51um success metrics one is registration rate and one is pro conversion rate and then what goes in front and behind of the paywall and the reg wall the registration wall is constantly in flux constantly plus we actually just did this really fun workshop a couple weeks ago internally here it's like the history of all trails pro and just showing kind of which features started when i you know again in 2015 like what was the pro feature set how much of those we actually ended up pulling in front of the red wall and new features that we put back behind the paywall so i feel like we're constantly

24:26in a state of experimentation here um we've been we've been experimenting with that since day one we've been uh experimenting with pricing also on day one uh and they're still i don't feel like we've cracked the code at all at all when i when i first started here all chose pro was 50 bucks a year and i i spent the first like two months just trying to get as much like uh obviously all the quant data that i could get my hands on but as much qualitative data as i could get to so reading every app store review every reddit thread every you know blog posts

24:58just talking to customers all of it and aside from everyone telling us that our data sucked and you know we we got them lost or we got them tickets from the park ranger for telling them to bring a dog when it's not that funny whatever it was the other piece of feedback that we got was like 50 bucks like it's way too much um and so we immediately started testing pricing and and we tested it at 30 bucks a year and we tested at 15 bucks a year too kind of all right if we really just take that price down is uh the incremental um purchase rate uh going to

25:31offset you know the change in that revenue per transaction um they were about a wash which is really interesting from a net revenue perspective 15 bucks a year versus 30 bucks year was was basically flat but we went with 30 because it gave us more maneuverability we could do more um for the folks who were like price sensitive do do discounting intro offers whatever at 15 we really couldn't go any low lower so it's just like this is it for everybody all the time um but even that we're revisiting now and thinking through like all right maybe are there are there different tiers we've never done monthly before so what

26:06is what is a world in which there's a monthly price i don't i don't love it i mean again annual is magic like why mess with a good thing but there is a cohort of users especially outside of the u.s where that's a pretty high i mean i live in the midwest like i would i only need your app from from april to november like i really don't need to pay all year for the the two weeks in october where you have nice weather yeah well right but but i mean i think there's the counter argument there of the simplicity it's like yeah sure but like

26:33whatever your value is this is the price i really i've seen that effect before on the price experimentation you just end up with the same area under the curve like no matter how you move it and some apps are like that some apps are not um but i do think it's really fascinating the wisdom of crowds right and just how like they know like the the the masses have priced and valued your product right and they're just like showing that like it's very efficient right no matter where it goes um then you can come down to like yeah some of those it's almost a good place to be

27:03because then yeah you have that like opera you can choose where you want it to price you can basically you're freed from the like fiduciary duty of like maximum extraction and you can like like just focus on like okay what's gonna what's right for us for some of those goals on company growth and stuff like that it was right for the mission and then like also give yourself some like tactical opportunities in terms of discounting and and and other stuff like this and then positioning as well like what is it like i think that's almost as important as like how do you see right how do you see all trails like how do

27:32you see it as like what's the value of perception like a 30 sku and a 50 and a 15 those are very different right those are you know i think about consumer goods on those scales that's like each one of those things has like a different like feel to it right totally and then on top of it though our business is driven by ugc right we have this this classic ugc flywheel and so obviously we know our pro users are more engaged but a ton of engagement comes from our free users as well and so you can't kind of uh turn the screws on them too hard without

28:02like really fundamentally damaging the business what kind of user generated content is it like pictures and updated and stuff or what what's the yeah ratings reviews photos recordings um you know there and then there's this also this virtuous cycle that we have this beautiful relationship we have with our users where they they help us create as well as curate our trail content so that's the thing with trail content just to go down this rabbit hole for a sec trail content is super fluid like it's not like streets that are that are relatively static you know with trails you get you get flooding you get fires you get

28:38maintenance you get development um downed trees whatever like they're constantly in a state of flux and it's really really hard to stay on top of it we can't do it alone and so we have there's no it's not like it's not like roads where there's like a national database right of like uniform data yeah no not at all right so we do there is it's called all trails we have this like really beautiful symbiotic relationship with our with our users you know and and it's kind of like we both get value from each other and we're both very transparent about like the relationship like you guys help us

29:12and you help the community right and we'll package it we'll keep improving and investing in the product experience and everything else and again like this is where it seems to be working but this is when we're talking about like the the choke points in the funnel that that reg wall and the pro conversion wall this is the thing that's top of mind over all of it yeah that's great um i did want to move on and talk about in 2018 all trails raised uh 75 million led by spectrum equity and so so i'm curious about that about that story so i know you know the plan

29:46was to sell and then you've shared on other podcasts that uh part of that was the founder taking taking some money kind of his exit event um but i'm really curious just from like a company building perspective i think so many founders and entrepreneurs think oh if i can just get more money if i can just you know hire more people everything's going to be easier but i imagine that's not the full story so i'd love to hear about the raise but then also kind of how that changed the company and changed the trajectory yeah so like i said earlier right the handshaker agreement was to grow and

30:22sell it so we knew going in exactly what the deal was um and once we hit profitability in 2017 it kind of felt like all right it's probably next year's probably our year and we got an inbound from one of the big tech companies early you know probably end of q1 of 2018 and so i was like all right game on right this is it we'll go get a bank um we'll run a formal process here and we started going through it we started going through it this was actually it was fun right like i got to put together sort of like all right here's our top

30:51100 strategic partnerships broken out by category broken up by vertical here's like the you know the accretive value here is you know the investment credit it was like a really fun thought exercise and you know we're talking to online travel companies and real estate companies and obviously like the retailers and just so many different types of companies out there and we ran a process and it was it was fun but and as we were going through it um well a couple things happened one is our our business really took off like it was a breakout trajectory year four so that always helps anytime you you meet with

31:23someone you share your plan and then you come back a month later and it's like hey actually we're out performing outpacing so your price just went up uh so that was i mean that was great like a great position to be in i've never had leverage like that and the other the other thing was like we could walk away at any point if we if we didn't like it yeah i'd done a lot of fundraising before and that i've never had a position of leverage like that so that was cool but as we were going through the process and talking to these different strategic acquirers the other thing that kept

31:50jumping out was like i don't i don't want to just go be middle management at some big company that i already like have chosen not to work out anyways because this doesn't align with what i want to do with my time and so you know we're kind of going through is like is this really is this it is this the only path um and we were talking to our bankers about and they're like you know there's a a huge ecosystem of financial investors that are really excited about this consumer subscription space um let's let's do a spike there and so we started talking to some of the different

32:23financial firms out there and that's where it got really really interesting um you know i think i i think we all probably have preconceptions about like private equity groups like like a shutter when you see i know right the dim the light dimmed here when you said that i know because a lot of the classic ones they're just they're in your shorts about like your bottom line expenses and micromanaging and telling you to cut costs and that's that's the that's the uh the stereotype at least totally right um but there's this whole class of growth equity shops out there and and we we sort of plugged

32:56into it and i would squarely put spectrum equity in that one and the first time we talked to them it was so clear they're like you guys aren't thinking big enough it's like what i love that okay like let's talk growth you know like you guys need to be thinking global right and it was just like there was so much alignment around this this opportunity in front of us and instead of like pulling the rip cord and just kind of being absorbed and integrated into something else it's like how about like we really make a make a run at this and so the more we talk to them the more

33:27he's like yes hell yes and it wasn't just from like um a funding perspective you know because if it was just that like again then you just do an auction and you see whoever's the highest bidder but we really wanted like i needed a partner i wanted a value-added partner there i wanted someone who could bring in um you know a sense of community not have to reinvent the wheel all the time that's always nice when you can plug into our portfolio of similar companies and just pick their brain all right like how did you guys do yeah i mean that's an under that's an underappreciated aspect of raising

33:59versus like going at your own it's like the network like it's i think feces oversell it but maybe founders undervalue it right like it does it does help it does it really does um and so yeah we kind of went yeah i feel incredibly fortunate that we were able to partner up with spectrum equity and so dave it's your question it's like it for us it was this huge unlock it was this huge unlike like we have another partner um we're gonna be more formal um with our board structure and you know the the sort of like metrics which is great like we needed to level up

34:33um in our corporate diligence and everything um and and they've been a they've been a partner and we've grown the board we've added more expertise and again like the the portfolio being being sister companies with like headspace and the not worldwide and survey monkey whatever like these cool companies that i respect and be able to you know hit up the ceo and be like okay how did you guys deal with this because like you said like there are a ton of challenges that come when you're going through that you know that that slope of the curve at that point right like the true hyper growth curve something like all right you know

35:06we can't fall back on on money as an excuse you know like it's purely an execution play and how do we do more faster and that's honestly like that's my i think one of the coolest things i can say about my board the the single biggest piece of feedback i get from them where they're just like yelling at me all the time and a great way it's like you got do more faster why aren't you doing more faster right like that is the mantra here because everyone sees this opportunity it's ours it's ours to go take right but we got to execute and do it as fast as we can yeah

35:33that's that's i mean i'll say as somebody recently constructing a board like that was sort of my because as a founder and as a ceo like you're always you're just you're you're at you should be at the limits if you're doing your job right like you should be kind of feeling at least like thinking you know what your limits are and what the company's limits are and it's nice even if there isn't anything more you can do it's nice to have some people who like ostensibly are aligned with you to be like are you sure there's not more right like is there anything like are you doing

35:58like could could you change this like could you go go faster potentially and sometimes the answer is no but it does always kind of you leave those board meetings going like like maybe there is like maybe there is some way we could do this like better or faster right yeah and then you build a team right and that leads back to like the team growth and this you know this is our third year in a row of doubling head count hopefully next year we'll be our fourth in a row and all of the leverage i'm a big believer like two things are the lifeblood for companies

36:23like ours one is culture and the other is momentum and you can't if you lose either of them you're right like you cannot take your eye off of either of those as a ceo as a founder whatever it is um and so like building both you know they got to go hand in hand um or you can sacrifice culture as you're doing the internal hyper growth you better have an exit strategy right like that it's not going to last very long because you'll never get it back that's exactly yeah right but but generating momentum through like value-added hires and raising the bar bringing you know bringing in a plus i love being the

36:56dumbest person in the room that's my favorite thing at all just walking in there it's like all right i'm going to learn something someone's going to teach me something cool um and building a team like that so it sounds like the biggest unlock for y'all taking the money was just the ability to hire faster hire better folks offer better pay um but was there anything else that you feel like taking funding helped unlock for all trails did you were you able to spend did you start spending more on on user acquisition or ramping anything else up kind of ask a clarifying question without like you sharing your

37:29term sheet or whatever but like like these these deals can be very different than like a venture deal right where like almost always all of it hits the books and it's dilutive uh meaning that the company gets the money but this was like kind of a buyout for the founder as an alternative to a sale it's like did you guys structure it so some hit the books and not or was it all to the founders or how did whatever you're comfortable sharing we hardly took any primary capital in 2018 i didn't i didn't want it i didn't want it like i liked our organic trajectory i didn't want to

38:00no and obviously i've gotten into spectrum a lot better they're not built from the cna but you take money from the vc and the expectations like the success metric is to spend it as as hard and aggressive as possible because they're incentivized to keep you hooked you know on the next round um and i wanted to you know accelerate more like on the product development side of things but i didn't want to get stuck in a a growth model that's dependent on unsustainable paid acquisition right so um almost the entire deal with secondary capital um which was great which was was great and for the financially illiterate

38:35i.e me like 18 months ago primary would be the company gets the money secondary would be somebody who's already a shareholder gets the money exactly the people on the the cap table um so it's buying out the founder buying out the original investors like really cleaning it out it was a new chat a new book altogether at that point and you know start sort of starting together i think you know to the question earlier in terms of like the other value ads like i really can't stress enough just the the strategic value ad that i was able to get like again because as a founder or as a ceo

39:05or as an exec you're kind of stuck in your own head a lot and you can talk to other founders but you know there's this like culture especially in silicon valley

39:20i didn't you didn't have to put air quotes around culture there but like i could hear the aircraft you know and very few people are like really open and transparent um about the challenges and what have you and so being able to go in um and have this board that i trust that i feel like we're all aligned i've had boards you know especially vc backboards where you get like a different uh you know venture capitalists from every round that you do like you have a lot of misaligned incentives you have a lot of sharp elbows in a room yeah as you can see there's a lot of you know

39:48these are all competitors in a lot of cases hopefully you pick well and you have people that are professionals but like you can totally end up in a situation where you have frenemies right yeah you're watching your back at your own board that's a horrible way to live whereas with this one it was so clean it was like we we're owned by a spectrum this is great i work at on their behalf this is great we've got the two of them there's me and then and then but to their credit they're like let's bring on two more operators and so you know they didn't care about like well we have to

40:15have 51 plus of the seats they're just like no let's just surround ourselves with really awesome people and so we got you know we got the former ceo of ancestry um who you know they know a thing or two about um subscription businesses and then we got the ceo of robin hood and obviously like they know a thing or two about hyper growth and everything else and again like so it's almost like it's this team you know it's like this dream team we're just collectively like they're helping me chart stuff like see things i wouldn't have been able to see on my own whatever the pattern matches

40:45yeah but i mean i think it's it's it's a good story in the sense that like you know i think i think we think two terminally sometimes about companies right like it's like they're born they are grown and then they get sold and then they die usually like nine times out of ten right like it's it's not often that an inter like a sale goes well and the integration goes well some spectrum of results right but this is a result where i think you guys have a company that's too important to let die right like if you had sold i don't know what you know your fangs or whoever was like i'm sure

41:15i could see any number of massive tech company wanting this to be a part of their data set or part of their like social like aspects or whatever it's just i can see it plugging into a lot of things but you know to get google's exciting acquisition today not saying you guys were talking to google or not but as an example like their exciting acquisition today is tomorrow's like you know happy trails blog post right yeah that's actually a good name for the uh the shutting down all trails blog posts but uh but you know and this is a this is a path where you know

41:44people who are passionate about the mission the employees and the users like can kind of you know get that exit that people are looking for but without like jeopardizing this thing that's important and like maybe this is very hippy right but like i think there is some aspect of companies that's beyond like the capital value and beyond like even like the culture but like actually achieving the mission and and making that change in the world or providing that service that's that's that's more important than you know hyper growth or whatever and look i mean we should get into talking about now like post round but it sounds like you guys are in hyper

42:19growth anyway right so it's not like it's it's this false dichotomy of right like either you're like raising from venture and you're like going at it really hard or like you're a lifestyle business or you know whatever and it's just like such a maybe whereas maybe us like lampooning this straw man of a false narrative is like most of the talking about those two like that is the the the totality of the false dichotomy as us talking about it but i really think this is a great example of like one of those like interesting you know outcomes and and stories so yeah tell us about yeah

42:50what's happening now i appreciate you sharing that specifically because even in researching it i listened to a couple of your other interviews i still assumed that that there was a pretty big primary chunk that went into the balance sheet of the company and then accelerated it from there so it's an even more interesting story to me that that raise was mostly secondary so from the three million dollar seed way back in whatever it was 2012 2013 it really has been a almost bootstrapped company and becoming what it is today on such little capital is really incredible and it really kind of speaks to consumer subscription space

43:35and and and how you can operate and go big without spending a ton of money if you do it right if you don't if you don't just plug into instagram and blow five million dollars of vc money acquiring the wrong users if you actually talk to them and build a good product and everything else um but i did want to jump in go ahead i'll just say on top not only that at the first board meeting that we had with spectrum uh i walked in and i said hey you know this is great high five super stoked uh we're also i i think we should donate one percent

44:11of our revenue to environmental causes um i know you guys just shelled out a whole lot of money but would that be okay and to their credit they're like yeah let's do it let's do it and you know one of the first things he did post transaction was signing up for one percent for the planet you know like there there's totally a different path here i i didn't realize it and i think it's cool for people i don't know i i wish i heard this earlier in my career like there are like you said like there's not a dichotomy like there's so many different ways to do this i think we end up

44:39fetishizing almost or like putting on a pedestal this whole like massive dc round kind of stuff you know and there's a time and a place for it for sure but like that's not the success metric in and of itself like more often not especially for earlier companies it's the death knell and so i think that uh i'm always you know i get i get hit up by people you know for whatever all the time i'm talking about this kind of stuff and i was like dude if you can bootstrap it if you can control your own destiny like do it you know find right partners that are

45:06going to unlock growth and everything else but like don't fall don't fall victim to that like just that story that you think is like the classic silicon valley startup story which is you go you raise a big round and you have an it never works it never works that way who would do that too man before we run out of time i do want to know so you're talking about like doubling and so i'm guessing like the pandemic like we've seen across the ecosystem has been really especially i can imagine there's two aspects to it right like one your digital service and then secondly like you're very good compatible with

45:36like uh uh social distancing so did you like think you would be having this conversation for whatever four years after the spectrum deal like doubling every headcount every year because that's typically not what private equity company rate growth rates look like i know no it was i mean so i'll preface this by saying we were incredibly fortunate during coven and sometimes you just get lucky sometimes you get like there's a ton of great companies out there that just like how to pull sales reps out of the field or weren't equipped for like the supply chain issues or whatever it was right like we like you we're a digital first company

46:13um we already we had a somewhat distributed workforce so we're already like using zoom and slack and going fully remote like we saw no no drop in productivity now granted like when when the world shut down mid-march that was a little bit scary um but we knew it would be temporary you know how long no one really knew but by by mid-april we were going to our board and saying like look like i know things look a little bleak right now like the machine has fully ground to a halt but we think actually like this is going to be an insane accelerant once things open back up there's nothing to do like you

46:48said it lends itself perfectly to social distancing you know people who can't travel anymore like all right we're going to explore our local city about that you know like we'll scratch that it's that way i got three kids and you know school is canceled and obviously you know summer camp forgetting it's like what are we going to do what are we going to do with these kids and it's like we're going to run them ragged on the trail you know everyone just going on the trail we're running a rag there's a good there's a good ad campaign in there just like totally right sleeping kids in the back of a subaru

47:15forester and it's like running out on the trail exactly so i mean that you know we made we did make a big strategic decision um to get in front of it and and start hiring like crazy um and just make you know make a play make a play and then again like sometimes you get lucky um you know that worked that works all these companies around us um that we were never able to like really po trump or whatever something like we're able to go grab their talent like not just from people who are like oh but people who are actively working there who are just

47:44like i don't want to do this with my life anymore uh i like spending time outside i the number of people the number of inbound applicants that like write in their cover letter i was looking at which apps i used the most and i just started applying to those jobs you know i think that there really is is like really great and i applaud it and i love it and i hope it never stops people like taking more agency and control over their career and not just like reactively you know just doing whatever life throws you the gi i mean the geographic unlock of remote i think is a big part of that

48:13right suddenly like you're you can just literally go on your phone and pretty probably today nine times out of ten you're gonna be able to work for that company depending on your like uh you know locale or like time zone but uh it wasn't that way two years ago right not at all not at all exactly so a lot changed a lot has changed uh in this time and so you know with all of that with with the big excellent they were seeing on the on the usability side through 2020 um you know there was uh i think david you had asked this like pre pre-show um

48:43you know there's two big questions hanging over our business as we went into 2021 one is are the registered users who we got last year during code are they going to convert to pro like our conversion to pro happens over time is we look at a lot of stuff through a cohorted basis and it just like it goes up and to the right it'll take years for some users to cross the line to pro but it's great it just keeps going up so are the folks who who signed up when there was nothing else to do are they ever going to convert to pro or not and

49:12then the other big question is all the folks who converted to pro in the height of the pandemic in 2020 once the world opens up like are they gonna retain or are we gonna have this huge you know the bottom drop out from under us and so these were two questions kind of like hanging over our heads as we headed into sort of we have a seasonal business it follows the sun pretty much um so as we headed into like may june july of this year thankfully thankfully that the answer for both was a resounding yes um the folks who signed up last year are converting at a higher rate than normal

49:47um and then the folks who subscribed are retaining at higher rates than normal too and i think it's kind of more of a testament to like how the like zeitgeist has changed a little bit post-pandemic and again people are like being outside just makes people feel good like it's that simple it's not very complicated you just feel you feel better when you spend time outside and people are just incorporating it into their regular routines now yeah it's it's interesting how often with you know for positives and negatives like sometimes i think you came up three cherries right you got like like it just it just really lined up and

50:21then it's continued because yeah you say like a lot of you just talking about the hiring thing too like a lot of habits change during during covet and i don't think anything will necessarily go back right especially if people have found a new happier maximum right um for their lives and if you know you guys are part of that that's great um and that seems like i don't know we don't have total good analytic uh quantitative data on this but it does seem doesn't seem like the whole boost from last year totally collapsed um this year like it seems like it just was like an accelerant and i think there's other

50:52industries would sort of back that up yep well we're coming up on time is there anything else i should have asked you oh this was fun guys i guess you guys are you guys are probably hiring right we're hiring like crazy right now yeah absolutely so if you use all trails yeah there you go any particular roles you want to shout out i mean we're always starving for great engineering talent android ios front-end back-end devops security all of it all of it pms product designers mapping designers customer support the entire every department is hiring right now well it sounds like a really fun company to work for i'll put we'll

51:31put links to your job page and and to your personal linkedin and a few other places in the show notes but this is really fun chatting with you today ron thank you so much for taking the time my pleasure guys thanks for having me this was fun to make sure you never miss an episode subscribe to the show and your favorite podcast player thanks so much for listening until next time [Music]