# Growth, Revenue, and Marketing Strategies for Your App — Lisa Kennelly, Fishbrain

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rxuZb-mZlRI
Duration: 48 min
Language: English
Words: 10966
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/rxuZb-mZlRI

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[0:01] [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 hello i'm your host david bernard and with me as always revenue cat ceo jacob biden our guest today is lisa canelli chief marketing officer at fishbrain the number one app for people who love fishing at fishbrain lisa manages a team of 20 people and is responsible for everything from brand positioning and product marketing to business development and e-commerce lisa also mentors startup founders on marketing and strategy

[0:44] on the podcast we talked with lisa about marketing an app with no revenue the challenges of adding new revenue streams and the importance of brand marketing in a post idfa world hey lisa welcome to the podcast hey thanks for having me yeah so great great to have you i've been wanting to chat with you so before we dive into fishbrain um where you're at now uh i did want to talk about clue the startup you were at before fishbrain um you joined in 2013 and spent four years uh with a funded startup that was just growth growth growth you know primarily focused on growth um and then as you've shared before you

[1:24] know toward the end of 2018 you had to figure out monetization and and decided to introduce a subscription so i'd love to yeah just hear about that experience it's such a a unique perspective going from that that growth growth growth to then introducing us and positioning you know from your perspective from marketing positioning this subscription product yeah absolutely so clue is a female health startup um and which is basically in other words a way of saying it's an app to know when your period is coming um and the product did a lot of things over time but that's basically what the core user proposition was right and um

[2:00] when i joined a clue in 2013 and even still now that was an incredibly crowded space in the app store so even then i remember there were 200 period trapping apps in the app store so it was really just like a land grab at the time and just like take market share and that was fine that was clear from our investors from the company and i remember people would ask me at the time so like how do you make money and be like we'll figure that out later we'll figure that out later um and that was okay because it was like you just you did need to claim

[2:27] that market share and really uh you know set yourself apart and and actually brand was a big part of that which maybe we can talk about later um so it was like definitely grow grow grow and then eventually was like okay we need to really start thinking about what is the revenue model here and we've been thinking about it it wasn't that we weren't but we did have a bunch of different options but it was more like we have to get enough of the market and then we'll be able to monetize so then um when we looked at a couple different other models but one of them

[2:52] was subscription and we tested out a few things kind of like also the um wikipedia donation model to see if that was something people were receptive to um and then we ended up you know one of the initial ones i think was we tested maybe something that was like a dollar a month um and then you know a more monthly quarterly annual so different kinds of models we also played a lot uh which was interesting was with the naming of it so thinking of it as like a membership versus like a subscription because there's this whole thing around like female health and sort of supporting community and using your data for good

[3:21] and you know it's something you want to pay for because you're helping the community you're helping this data get better so it was definitely an interesting challenge to really shift that way of thinking from like growth into into more revenue yeah that's a um if you're if you're outside of the venture-backed world it seems very strange right like if you don't have capital to burn but if you think if so assuming you do have capital to burn you have cash that you don't that isn't doing anything else converting that into a num a a number of users it's another valuable asset right and then of course

[3:50] later you monetize right which is a little bit different definitely a different playbook from like the uh bootstrap that's really not a strategy available if you're bootstrapping exactly and i think we were also at help we were able to grow really fast for quite a while like we were really able to tap into some sort of we took advantage for example of being you know on facebook um through facebook ads like very early incredibly cheap incredibly easy we just basically market to like women of a certain age and the downloads like poured in um and like we were very early with influencer marketing right but that

[4:22] was pretty early on and it was like if you could get a bunch of female influencers to talk about using a period tracking app they would just go download it so the focus on growth made sense because it was pretty easy and then it was like okay now in retrospect like it would have i think it would have been smarter to or i wish we had thought about monetizing earlier or maybe run some tests earlier right so it's sort of like getting that audience a little bit more ready to do that and so they didn't actually launch the subscription until after you had left but you were talking about like the

[4:49] dollar a month and other stuff so i assume you were a part of kind of the the testing how did was it surveys did you actually introduced a subscription but but have it kind of uh a b tested or how did you figure out the pricing before you actually launched the subscription product yeah i think it was a bit of some surveys it was a bit of surveys it was a bit of sort of looking at some of those other models like we said you know sort of it's the wikipedia model of sort of like you want to donate because you believe in supporting this cause and that seemed

[5:17] like it was very aligned to our values so those were some i mean you know and then it was a little bit of trial and error so and i say we didn't launch it like fully until after i left we were running some tests before then and thinking a lot of brand new brand and branding was so big so core to that product in that space it's uh it's interesting to think about paid acquisition without the like necessary cac calculation or like the cac ltb ratio right i mean did you use like um did you use like cac to engagement ratios or something like this to make sure you weren't just buying

[5:47] like totally junk leads absolutely absolutely yeah absolutely and sort of looking at sort of what was the yeah the average sort of like customer acquisition cost from these different channels and sort of looking at how that translated into monthly active users you know absolutely right um because that's the interesting thing especially the peer tracking app a monthly active use case is actually a pretty good one in that context of course you'd like it to be more but like it actually when you're looking sometimes you look at like monthly active users is sort of not such a good you know thing to look at for your business in that case like it kind

[6:18] of was but of course then you want it to be more often you know you want people to be more you know engaged all the time what were the specific kpis was was monthly active users kind of the the north star oh gosh no it's been four years you know we did want it to actually be a daily active use case we wanted it to be something where you wake up every day and you just like log how you're feeling no matter what so more of a really a health tracker like moving from being a period tracker to a health tracker that was where we were trying to go that's

[6:44] always interesting when you have a product that um sort of by its nature encourages a limited amount of use right i think dating apps is a good like a different totally different angle but same thing where like the goal of the product is to not need the product in this case it's like the core use of the product kind of like limits it to a certain amount and we i've i've worked on products in the past two where sometimes you feel it does feel a bit unnatural even maybe like weird to try and push that usage a bit more like then feels and feels right like oh why do i need it this mao to be

[7:15] a dao right like does it need to be every day but the upside is like the bottom line the business benefits the more a user uses it right which is um which i it maybe isn't always like the nice thing about subscriptions and recurring like certainly in like a world where users are exchanging and buying daily like amazon habitual buying experiences games things like this dow is like so important but for subscriptions it might be good enough right like as long as somebody's engaged in their data and they're coming back on a monthly basis i mean i don't know it's just another another point of why i like

[7:49] subscriptions over most monetization models it's like take some of that pressure off right yeah i mean i actually just as another example i um have a good relationship with the cmo of untappd which is the beer social network right i like to speak to other social networks and different verticals and we have a similar conversation is that they have a weekly use case and they if you're having much more frequent of a use case with untapped which is a beer drinking app then maybe you have a problem so like social drinking is a weekly thing and that's okay um you're not a subscription model either but like

[8:18] it's it's an interesting point to think about it's something we should talk more about in in you know when we're designing metrics and north stars and things for our apps is like really thinking through like what is it that we're encouraging here and then like and not just think about ourselves as like turn this into an ethics and technology podcast but like not just think about it very narrowly in terms of like how do we drive our kpis as a business but what does this actually translate into for our end users and that's a great example i didn't think about that right and put some guardrails on it but anyway one

[8:47] more divergent on this is i think i may have shared this on the podcast before but i i love vizco as an app and to me what's so cool about visco is that it encourages me to use the app when there's a photo i care about so i don't take a photo i care about every day but when i take a photo i care about i automatically drop it into visco and make it better and and so it's like this value-based use case that's like doesn't have a set frequency like it may be twice a month if i'm on vacation it may be like 100 photos in a month but like the value

[9:21] is so clear i think they should be charging more than 20 bucks a year and i've never thought about canceling the subscription even though i may go some entire months without using the app so like you know that whole monthly active user thing for me it would i would look like a terrible user but like i'm like a huge fan of the app and use it every time let me ask you let me ask you about that the transition and like obviously if you were growing free users for such a long time you had to have pretty much i mean by definition you gave away the core value prop right

[9:52] how did you make that like you talk about adding a community and stuff like this like how did you think about from maybe from a product perspective like what did you layer in to like create an additional incentive you mentioned the wikipedia model which i guess would be like you get nothing right you get good feelings right did that work did you end up having did you end up having to enhance features or remove did you end up having to remove things that were in the free offering um it looks like i mean like again there's a lot of stuff that's happened after i've left but this

[10:17] was part of something we were thinking about which was actually the content and putting the content behind the payload a lot of premium content because another big driver for growth at clue was building out content on the web because an opportunity we saw and like i've done content marketing since i started there but what i brought in somebody who had been a head of content actually worked at the new yorker and when she saw this opportunity is that there's no webmd for female health we have the space to take this market share we can command all this seo value right so we started building out this amazing content team

[10:45] which was all of this like scientifically validated analyzed by scientists and researchers content that was on the web and it was all for free and it was like wait a minute this is driving seo traffic but are we converting it and then like okay we should probably put that behind the paywall right so that ultimately is something that is it is pay walled within within the product now that is a big part of it and then also i think it's it's wikipedia thing wasn't so much just like you're donating out of goodwill it is you're contributing to science research which again there is no huge body of female health research it

[11:12] doesn't exist for a long time research was only done on men and like if you're talking about you know menstruation and stuff that doesn't really work so like that was another thing and we had a lot of research partnerships which was something we did highlight in the branding and in the product so those are some of the things we tried so do we want to do we want to move 180 degrees to about the most different app you possibly can that's exactly what i did so i did four music then i went into fishing which was totally different slightly maybe i mean i don't know not

[11:39] to generalize but probably a slightly different core demo i would have a little bit a little bit so yeah give us give us the elevator pitch on on fishbrain like i've i've followed the app as an early revenue cat customer and i actually i grew up fishing as well so i probably talk about fish brain in pitches and random stuff more than any other app just because thank you it's one of these these niches that you didn't know exists and you're shockingly huge right and it's obvious once you explain it so anyway i'll i won't exactly so that's so that's the pitch so i don't need to explain it to you david

[12:09] but what i usually say is did you know fishing is the world's most popular hobby uh and that's in terms of money spent on it and so even if you don't fish yourself i guarantee there's someone in your life you know who is obsessed with fishing that's amazing it's such a it's such an elitist blind spot right like the capital centers of the world like nobody in the phi day in sf is like you know bringing their fishing pole to work to hit the docks right it's like you know it tends to be working class it tends to be out of the city centers i grew up in the rural

[12:36] states and david as well and like yeah it's ubiquitous like you know everybody i did it my dad did it i learned from my grandfather like everybody in my life we used to my whole it would be a big social event too like my whole family we would go to canada like that would be our vacation we would go fishing for a week in canada right like uh so yeah that's one of my fascinations with the product and the company and the brand uh has always just been that like how that you just can these niches can be overlooked by traditional especially traditional capital and traditional like

[13:09] funding models and things like this i i love that your pitch included that it's the number one hobby by money spent because that's actually something i wanted to dive into is that in a lot of these niches that are that are underserved people spend a ton of money like one of my favorite examples is is uh weightlifting uh we had jake moore on the podcast he has an outfit to say ai and you know sixty dollars a session for a personal trainer at 60 a month or more for a a gym membership and then he's pitching a 60 a year app that makes all of those things like way better

[13:44] potentially even replaces aspects of the personal trainer so you're working in fishing which people are spending tens of thousands of dollars on boats thousands of dollars on trips and guides and tackle and fishing poles and like it is an expensive hobby so i'd love to to hear kind of how fish brain thinks about their position in that chain and even like the subscription price in this hobby where so much money is spent yeah absolutely it is it is quite interesting and like something we tested um recently actually is um we use some positioning rod it's like having a fish finder but on your smartphone because a

[14:24] fish finder costs like 300 right some of these are super expensive and so we've tried to sort of tried to do that to and justify like the cost of this i mean i think we we probably could be a little more aggressive on like pushing our pricing than we are it's something where we're evaluating and working on because i do think like how do people think about fish brain in the context of all their other fishing equipment and tools and and usage and i think that's something that i think we could crack even better because i um i just heard a story from one of um the

[14:52] guys on my team who's based in florida and he was up hunting in like in florida and he ran into an older you know guy um who had a hunting app and the guy pulled it out and was like oh here's all i keep on my hunting spots you know it's so great and um and my colleague was like oh well you should get fish brains the same for fishing and then i said well i don't use apps music but you just

[15:16] for hunting so like that's been really interesting it's like okay like the entire way we communicate ourselves to this audience which like you know makes me question i think sort of the underlying sort of like digital not literacy but sort of digital adoption of the average american consumer right you know you think of the average like amazon ordering netflix watching smartphone having person millennial gen wire right like for us it's actually a bit older even actually i would say because our markets use a bit older um you know how much do i market to them like as an app do they think of us as similar to like their

[15:51] netflix subscription do they a similar to like their other fishing gear so so i so i don't actually have the answer to it but it's something we're thinking about a lot is like where does our product fit in the sphere of tools they they use um because we also think a lot about like fishermen started as a social network right like that was the thing and it was you know when you're going back to thinking about who's what's this niche that's out there it started as the idea like there are all these niches and facebook and instagram these are super broad but very shallow and there's a

[16:19] need for people to go you know more narrow and deep with the stuff they care about right and you see that now we were kind of early to it but there's a lot of vertical social out there now so vertical social was kind of how we started but now we've realized where we're at now is like utility is really what how you grow and that's like top of the funnel what people think about they don't think oh i want a fishing social network they think i want a tool to know where to go fishing and know what to use for phishing so like yeah you can see it it's like are we a

[16:45] tool are we social network are we an app are we actually a platform which is where we're going towards all of those things i think will impact our pricing strategy i mean calling it vertical social probably is well uh vertical any single category because i think when i i've used fishbrain i haven't gone fishing with it but i've been i've had a subscription i've it's been really interesting living in a rural area because i'm like keeping track of it when the weather's nice because people are catching them you notifications it's really interesting but to think of an app narrowly in those terms i'm not even sure it's really appropriate more

[17:14] right like you are you a utility are you social are you everything you're just like the the software touch point you're the software companion piece for this part of somebody's life right and you live with them and you carry around your pocket and stuff like that it's nice but the hard thing is how do you market that right like a lot of angles absolutely and some of the vertical social i think also comes back from just like fundraising how do you position yourself like so what are you sure to an investor you know and sometimes so it's a little bit interesting like i think actually because i'm in charge of pr for us and

[17:43] how we talk about ourselves in pr to the different pr related audiences versus like consumer acquisitions sometimes like pretty far apart sure i don't know if that's good or not or if it just like is what it is i mean you're talking to the capital class or whoever your target is with the pr right versus like the average fish brain user which is probably closer to the average human being right it's a very different like it's a very different use uh very different messaging your your anecdote with the the hunter gentle person uh reminded me of uh when at my dad i tried to get my dad to

[18:15] download the nascar app and it's a he's a huge nascar fan he watched every race everything like that like like every he's a huge fan and so i was like hey you should try the app it's really cool you can listen to radio on it you have all this telemetry it's a really great like side car experience for uh for nascar fans and he's like oh i don't pay for abs and i was like dude i was like like do you know what my livelihood is right like he knows but he's still like am i just my dad's in his 50s it's not like you know he's he's he's literally like i

[18:45] think he's in that corset he has a netflix subscription he buys everything on amazon he's very like net literate but like when it comes to apps there still is this like hesitation or like i mean it's only 10 years old right like he's he's had the internet for 20 some years now uh but the but apps for a much shorter period of time and then much less so like something like fishbrain that's so data enabled and engrossing and all you know something that's like a very different use case from oh i go on amazon to order x you're thinking about an app that's a companion that's like a

[19:14] utility and a social network and with you all the time so yeah i can't i'm not what has what has what have you experienced that's worked well like are there any like surprising angles and things like this that for fish brain specifically that you that you were surprised resonated in terms of how we position it yeah i don't know sometimes there's like an aha moment with sorry if i put you on the spot and there's not a good one i mean i have lots of things i can i mean i think it's something that um i think right now so like this uh like like everyone else in

[19:44] that app space we're thinking about what we call distribution diversity right like where do we get users from because we have been quite reliant on you know paid marketing through facebook and google like everyone else because like why not we can find all the anglers there like it makes sense um but we are looking more to how we can you know where can we can reach our target customer in different places and i think there's this quite interesting thing like if these people aren't really thinking of like apps as something i use but they have a need for this tool or this service you know are they even going to

[20:15] be on digital platforms in the first place so maybe there's this whole like section of the community who we haven't reached potentially yet so we are looking a lot at like uh you know what are those different places we can find people so i guess like an example that kind of was like we did um a bunch of radio ads this past year which is the first time we've done that and we did them on like espn and a lot of like and like serious and like a lot of sports stuff and like very hard to measure the impact right like we didn't have a good way to sort

[20:40] of measure how much did but anecdotally every single uh i'll be honest every single man of a certain age that i've spoken to from the united states in the last six months who is even remotely interested in like this industry has heard that that ad 50 times so like okay how does that uh like how what was that process like was that a big transition for you as a marketing organization to go from like idfa like just ltv performance buying and was that like a whole new shift for with the radio or had you been playing in brand advertising before or what was that like yeah so we we'd in um early

[21:17] 2020 we did some of it and it was really helpful because we wanted to because fishing is super seasonal right you know you talked to ron from altrials who i also spoke to after hearing your podcast because i thought it was so great and there's a seasonal business like us um and so like we where our target market is mostly us so that's like generally the fishing season is like april to october more or less april to september um with some variations of course so we in theory want to do most of our awareness push kind of in q1 so we kind of get that awareness and then you turn

[21:46] it into more of the sort of conversion focused stuff after so in 2020 we were able to do that because we kind of had the budget in the plan and then covet hit and then we totally benefited which is a whole side story but like uh come back to that um but then so like in 2021 so early this year um we do sort of our funding status we didn't really have the budget to do that and that was sort of like a bummer because then we saw like but you know we it won't convert right now but trust us it'll work later but it was like oh

[22:13] we have to show growth right now so then that was some of the trade off but we were able to actually sort of like okay a little bit later in the season we wanted to start doing that push on the radio and some billboards even too actually so that was so like we had done awareness but it was more purely digital awareness and this was kind of the first time doing that level of like out of home um so we're planning to do more of it because like this is the other thing with fishing fishing is so outdoors like so much of it you know you're going to a

[22:38] tackle shop to buy stuff like you're going out somewhere to go fishing you know like you could do a lot of it online but at some point you got to go offline and so i think that is a big opportunity for us to to do more of that i've heard a ton of uh uh sorry just on the radio thing it seems like a ton of apps in this at that scale like the fish brains of the world and bicker and that and that that level have been do i've heard so many consumer subscription app advertise advertisements on the radio specifically xm and and other like uh big buy radio

[23:08] ads uh it's been really weird especially i've heard some other of our customers like i'm like in the i'm like out about on the radio and i hear an ad and uh yeah i've been really curious about the like i guess like you just don't know you don't know what the measurement value is or whatever it's it's sort of anecdotal right which is tricky and we've looked into like you know get using some of the awareness budget to actually pay for like tracking service or an agency to like evaluate that because like money is down from somewhere but i don't know it's been a little bit unclear on

[23:37] like what will it measure but it is something we need to do if we want to keep doing we would like to find some way to measure it with that kind of awareness marketing how do how do you think about internally allocating team and budget and you know a lot of apps don't think about brand until to kind of later in the journey because they are so focused on just the performance marketing so you know somebody who both a clue and now with fishbrain thinks about the brand more broadly you know how do you balance those things yeah we um it's it's more or less like 10

[24:12] of the sort of performance acquisition budget we think about is going towards awareness activities ish um and then of course 10 of the budget is also going towards our commerce business which we can also talk about so it's interesting when you start to have to divide up that acquisition budget into a bunch of different chunks um but that's that's something we sort of tried to do with again like that this money is an investment because if we get that awareness and branding stuff out now it's going to make the customer acquisition cost for the performance of you know cheaper later and you just have to trust us and when i say you i'm

[24:41] talking to like finance or the other stakeholders or the investors or whatever who just want to see like i give facebook a dollar and a user pops out so um i'm not really being fair to finance or investor people i'm generalizing really broadly sure um so it's a little bit of internal i would say like education and like sort of trust us and like when we've shown it worked then you can do it more but i mean i think it's something again going on going in sort of the measurement and like now that there's been so much like with you know idf everything now there's a lot more understanding of like wow we

[25:10] really need to do activities elsewhere and like maybe people are more open to doing awareness activities um but again of course like the more we can then push it to some kind of measurable conversion metric the better so like i don't know how we do if we're doing an awareness thing that's really outdoors and out of home but there's a qr code attached and we see how many times that get activated like that's something yeah i mean i think about the way we do a lot we don't do a lot we do some performance-based marketing but like a lot of what we do is kind of just like

[25:40] the podcast like how many downloads how many new users we get from the podcast i have no idea right this is really hard to say like we ask people who listen to bias but we get good anecdotals right like i think even that anecdote of saying like oh i talked to you know people in the us they've heard of us right like that is not nothing right and like maybe that's not good enough to put on a slide and like to pitch like some growth capital investment or something like this but uh but dang it almost should be because like i do think that i do i do

[26:06] think that this might be good right you were saying it's like now now as as as marketers you have the a little bit now that the grip of oh we have this perfectly analytical engine for user acquisition which it never really was now it's kind of really obvious that it's not um kind of gives you some freedom to do other things which i think is good because like yeah it gets the person who's not going to get targeted by a facebook ad right like they're just never on facebook and stuff like that like there are people not on facebook surprises yeah and when you think about this the brand

[26:37] marketing and awareness marketing how do you how do you think of aligning it with the performance marketing like is there a certain kind of angle you pitch in in the radio ads that that kind of aligns with that the the performance marketing push like like what do the ads say i was curious kind of like tactically yeah sure how you think about that absolutely i mean so like i'm in charge of like brand for fish brain right and like you know i have a journalism background and communities background so like i can i probably shouldn't be doing super operational but like i can't do it and i often do because it's a startup

[27:09] right we're still startup even if we're 125 people um so actually when we did those ads i worked with our um someone from our performance team who was like you know doing the media buying and coordinating that stuff and she came to me and said okay here's the script we're gonna do with the radio can you know read this together and we like collaborated together like what are the key talking points we want to hit how do we make sure it stays on brand so it really was a collaboration between you know me and brand and her and performance you know and part of when we

[27:33] were doing some more ideation too that was also sort of a cross-team thing of like maybe somebody in business development who's really talking to people in the us a lot and somebody from our social media team and we sort of collaborate together on a concept so it's definitely not just like within that respect i think actually we did a pretty good job of not being too siloed um but like on a general basis it is i think that is a challenge of getting quite siloed between performance and brand yeah you want to feel like it's a single we've had this with revenue cat where we've had agencies doing performance ads

[28:02] for us and then like it feels like oh that's a different company right just because like we're not there watching it every day and i'm not approving personal copy and even our internal people aren't necessarily like approving every single like thing they try um and you can sometimes end up with with with things out of whack but i guess it's the benefit of building a marketing team in-house like you have more resources to control that and i think it's important and that was going to be my next question then is then how do you coordinate as kind of brand representative with the performance team because i've often heard that some of

[28:32] the ugliest ads some of the like goofiest ads some of the most like ugly worst ads can sometimes perform the best like how do you work with the performance team to kind of keep that brand messaging quality up even when maybe the worst looking stuff is going to perform how do you think about that side of things yeah so i mean i'm fortunate that i have been able to build up in-house an incredible marketing design team and the marketing design team works across sort of brand and then commerce and performance so they kind of conserve all needs and like they are uh have very high quality standards but

[29:08] are also very collaborative so i think that helps a lot right is that it's not like distinct design teams right i mean the messaging is one thing but the messaging i think we're also pretty aligned on um so it's having like very clear brand guidelines you know making sure everyone knows about them and if people go off brand they get shamed on slack and gone after like we don't mess with the logo um so i think i mean like that but that is something actually this is something when i think back about like how i scaled the marketing team right when i joined and i was like kind of the first

[29:35] marketing hire one of the first and you know brought in my my lead performance person and very very quickly we were like we need designers we need our own design team we need designers to execute this stuff because the product designers are too busy and this isn't their area of expertise so like that was kind of a really key hire which was quite hard to find um and ultimately what are they doing was uh getting a couple people from an agency who then i immediately poached from the agency and they've been full-time for the last three years so um but i think that's kind of an

[30:03] underrated aspect of building a performance team is having like really killer designers who understand what you're doing and are like owners and guardians of your brand yeah i mean david you you know this david david lives on the marketing team here and like so much of what you guys do is producing you know it comes down to a photoshop file right like there has to be some asset at the end of it you know sometimes it's audio but often there's there's it's funny at least this is the conversation we're kind of having internally right now about design because we have product design and then we're trying to figure out like how do

[30:31] we how do we service brand design marketing design like all these other use cases which are equally important and yeah and different so um but that's interesting that that was very seems like very early in building out your team was was to focus on the design aspect yeah it was really i mean i remember asking coming in pretty early at fishbrand and being like hey product designers and you can make me some ads and they like looked at me like i was speaking foreign like what are you even talking about so i mean not that they couldn't do i mean of course they could but yeah it

[30:59] was like you need people who really it's a big mental shift right like in product design you're you're doing uis and you're doing a lot of ux work usually and like you're working with engineers and all this stuff and it's like what you wish to make a picture just like a simple picture right like it's it's a big mental shift yeah but i mean also just another thought on this like actually as now as the team's gotten bigger and we've scaled social media too something we realized was key for us to unlock scaling our social media like outside of fish brain right fitbit is a self-social but like we're very active

[31:27] on instagram it's a huge place where we do awareness acquisition and um i had one social media guy full time and he was like really getting burned out because he was having to do all the creativity all the copy all this stuff and so i think with like you know an intern there but also like a junior designer who's super focused on social media and creating content for that very explicit channel has made a huge impact so uh yeah i mean i'm a big believer in investing in design resources to support marketing needs because i think it actually is really worth worth the investment yeah i wanted to change gearshare a

[31:57] little bit and talk about the fish brain marketplace and and i i think a lot of apps that are currently very focused on subscriptions are gonna start looking for additional kind of revenue models and it's really and again like fish brain has been so early to a lot of things um y'all are early to kind of making that shift so uh tell me about the fish brain marketplace and then i'm really curious like how you think about that revenue internally uh you know i mean even like calculating an ltb when when your free users might see ads and participate in the marketplace do you push the subscription

[32:37] you know i mean there's so many it just is more complicated but also so many more opportunities as well on the monetization front yeah so right so phil fishman started out as like i said as a social network you started out it was all free um and then using the sort of information the data from the social network of where people were catching fish then we were able to add the sort of data layer of here's where to go to catch fish that was what was behind the paywall primarily right so that was the next thing the subscription sort of evolution but it was always decision

[33:05] that and as you guys know if you go fishing you use a lot of gear it just made sense to be like i can see where to go fishing okay i should see what people are using to catch this and then one more click i could buy it so easy right um so but adding the sort of marketplace the commerce revenue stream was always part of the plan so that was something we did about three years ago um and yeah wow what a learning curve that has been because um it's um it turns out that like that has not been the user's expectation when they come to

[33:33] fish brain is like throwing a shop in there all of those 13 million registered users they don't all of a sudden just start buying just because you put a shop in their face which in retrospect makes sense but like it's been much more of a challenge to sort of match that to our customer and find where it integrates both into the app experience as well as like how we market ourselves um it's been a lot of fun and i've been working really intensely with commerce for the last about year or so because now it's it's really quite heavily again marketing and how do you communicate that and what is the value

[34:02] of it but so for example like most of our commerce revenue comes from the web and not and much less from the app um which is something like you know we believe really in social commerce and social commerce is vision because again like this should be the ideal version is like i'm going through the app and i see what somebody caught and here's what all my friends are bought and i'm gonna buy this because they bought it and we're all fishing together like you can see the vision beautifully but executing on that is is quite challenging um so yeah it's been i mean i think it's

[34:31] been quite um it it has pushed us in a lot of different ways and i think a lot of like the interest we get from outside investment is in the potential of the marketplace um and you know where the opportunity is for that to grow alongside the subscription revenue in terms of how we think about ltv right now we actually think about them separately um and personally that's because like just with the data it's been we've had to do it manually it's been too hard we want to get to it closer but also um the actual the ltv on the marketplace like shoppers is generally kind of not so much higher

[35:01] than their single purchase because we don't have as many repeat customers as we want so that's sort of like let's work on the repeat customers and that's going to um you know support on the ltv but i mean if we do start look at like uh you know the the ltv of our sort of subscriber customers the pro subscribers on the fishman subscription who also buy like it's higher so like they're definitely if you're pro you're also spending more money on the shop so like okay there is something there that is and we do bundle it a little bit if you're pro you get free shipping above

[35:30] 10 and you get pro deals and that kind of thing um so there's definitely like something there but i think we really think we that's like the big next thing to crack i mean who's cracked social commerce anyway i don't know that anyone really has it and then on the free users do they see ads separately from the marketplace or are you using the kind of uh free non-subscriber users to to more drive the marketplace shopping currently no so we don't think so it's like if you you will see ads for the marketplace no matter what you are which was interesting because this came up during

[36:02] black friday was like they were pro users like ipay pro why am i seeing these ads for this job um so that's that's been something um we're actually thinking about testing ads for our free users just generally like more native ads or rewarded ads and other kinds of thing because yeah i mean there are free users who buy from the shop but generally free users are not so inclined to buy anything so you kind of might as well make money off of them from from ads yeah so currently you don't have like a third-party ad network in the app that are that are shown to those for users

[36:32] and we're testing that we've been testing that a little bit in the last few months yeah we haven't rolled it out fully yet but it's something we're exploring now yeah i think it highlights the the challenges of any business like layering on second business models right or like bringing there's there's complications and not in in the unification like as you're mentioning like bringing two different ltvs together but then i think there's also complications in business dna just like becoming a commerce company and understanding how that is right versus like a content and a social media company um and so i always and i but i think fish brain's at the right

[37:05] scale to be really tackling that i think i would caution like early stage founders to like really push that off like get build your core value prop build your free user base like really nail that before you start to frankly experiment right like it's experimentation even at that scale yeah yeah and i i did a lot of like you know trying to benchmark like look at looking are there other apps who have been a social network that was a subscription that then layered commerce on top of it there are not very many who've done that which is like maybe because it's hard i mean um it's really interesting like i i

[37:37] look or we look at vivino a lot if you know vivino the wine app where are you scanning right and i've had to call with their chief product officer before um and it's quite similar kind of interesting because it's sort of it's a utility it's a really cool thing and they were like cool people are using this to look what wine to buy we'll just make all the wines buyable and it'll be great and it was like obviously not how it worked he was very candid about that like that was not actually their point of purchase for wines within the app so they had to really sort of build out

[38:03] that use case to that community i mean they're doing super well so they have figured it out to a degree but like it's another example of like even when you think this is the user journey they're buying something i'm going to make it even easier for them to buy maybe maybe that's not actually where they're buying it so yeah there's there's something deep i don't have it i have to like take a walk on it to really like uh solidify my thoughts but there is something about usability or like just like when a user reaches for a tool and their expectations right and like can two

[38:32] different very different modes even if they're in the same space like wine and you know wine tracking and wine wine buying and and fishing and equipment buying even if they're very close like there might be enough of a mental shift in how we like use versus consume or use versus expand that it makes it a little bit of what's the word uh mental friction or uh just like like cognitive load sorry cognitive load there i kind of making that switch which yeah i can i can imagine i think about it with revenue cat like okay what do we layer on like what can we add to revenue

[39:02] cap that's like expansions to our business model and every time i think about it my head spins i'm like okay now i have to think about now now my users have to think like oh do i get this package in that package even doing our pricing change this year it's so intense because you're making so many assumptions about perceived value and then you're trying to model out how it's going to like work and like it's very complicated right sometimes life is just simpler if you focus on your core but you know that doesn't last forever right so yeah and speaking of that being complicated how do you in marketing

[39:33] think about i mean you know are there different kind of personas that are the the free user versus the subscribe versus the you know uh somebody's spending more on the marketplace and how do you think marketing and brand positioning of like who are the users that are that are are our best target and then how do you balance that against the community where you want engagement and activity but that's not necessarily the same person who's going to pay so like you know it seems like there's a lot to balance and thinking through how to position and market this yeah absolutely i mean we definitely we try to do you

[40:09] know pretty regular market research and really like segment those personas and like that's it maybe they all look the same it's all like you know men 35 to 50 but like within that right it's it's you know in terms of where where they sort of learn about things and like obviously on the on the web ecommerce is quite driven by like google shopping and sort of search optimization so like they're searching for deals or maybe they're searching for specific product and like what does that mean yeah versus somebody who's no i'm downloading the app because i want to be part of that community i mean i think we

[40:37] are a big enough community and if you do look at other social networks there's space for different niches within the community right so like we have lots of you know groups within the community and you can follow you want to follow so like i do think that under the umbrella of fishing can find your find your people within it um but then like yeah i mean that whole i mean that user journey customized right from the ad you see all the way through the funnel that like even if you have a bunch of different needs are we addressing it in each way like that i think is quite and and then layer on top

[41:06] of that right and if you guys know fishing fishing in florida is very different from fishing in like seattle where i'm from like my dad is a fl my dad is a fly fisher yeah who goes after trout and it's very different from somebody you know in ohio or somebody and there's a big culture war here if you were a person who learned to fish with only like a bobber and a like bait and just hanging bait versus somebody who actually casts fish like my dad taught me to cast fish and i'd meet people who are like what kind of fishing pole is that they've never seen it right

[41:34] i was just like yeah amazing i can imagine that that probably that is all across do you on the marketing team i imagine generally you talk to customers but like do you have like a regular cadence of customer conversations and things like this on the marketing side to like understand your persona better because i imagine you guys are in the nordics like in your marketing to americans like it's gonna be an interesting cultural divide and everything so i mean there's problem there's a reason that i am american working like that i was hired and being american was the only reason but it definitely helped um that was

[42:06] actually true like clue the mirror uh the us was a big market for us so like that's definitely that's sort of what i bring um i mean it's something that we address in a few ways i think we're always pushing to be closer to our community you know talk to like we have a big pool of users we can just dm them in the app it's not that hard to find them um so i pushed for that a lot with with with the team um you know we're also building up our hires in the us which is one nice thing about expanding to be more remote you

[42:31] know so we've got like the biz dev team they're in the us and we've like we looked at i mean hiring people who are into fishing makes a huge difference right like hiring people who are a target customer you shouldn't just hire your target customer when it comes to marketing and business it's actually pretty helpful especially for us because we have that gap um so we are looking to expand i think that is a challenge of like not being located where our customer is that's something we definitely have to overcome yeah it's it's in b2b it's like one and our customers don't or our listeners don't care about this and b2b

[43:03] it's so much easier to get on customer calls because like you start very close like i'm a computer person computer stuff usually my customers are computer people make computer stuff like we can start with pretty like a company common ground i think when i was working in consumer it's much harder it's like you know this it's just a bigger gap to bridge like to meet with somebody so but i think that's even more of a reason to do it right because like you can only really presume to know so much about what your customers care about um from a product perspective and then also a marketing perspective yeah i mean

[43:33] something we do um periodically is we bring um we will get like one of our amazing customers you know we'll get somebody who's like you know a guy from rural mississippi who loves fish brain and he will we'll bring him virtually to our company all hands which of course we call all finns because you have to right so and he will call in and just take questions from the team for 20 minutes and that in itself is like a really great when he's like super done and just like you know then you really get that right there because it's easy for like one marketing person to do and then i take

[44:04] some notes and share but like in front of the whole company getting some to do that that's that's pretty powerful i hope they get some good swag that sounds intense we have a lot of we have a lot of good swag do you all go to like the big like boat expos and fishing expo like do you all do some of those like in-person things and and kind of meet your customers face-to-face in those kind of places i would we should do more of them and obviously coven's made it a little tricky um but we do you know go to the big there's a big um

[44:32] more industry you know fishing conference in in orlando every year so we go to that and then you know i speak we speak more like industry once i would say we've done it more on the sort of b2b actually level and less on the consumer but that i think is i mean that's the thing like what i when i look at sort of again going to distribution diversity and thinking about how do we reach people i would love to like host our own sort of low-key fishing tournaments all over the united states that are run by like our community you know more kind of like the yelp model

[44:58] almost the real throwback i don't know if people use yelp as an example anymore but like what they used to do um i think that's what we could definitely do more of do you all sponsor fishing tournaments and and get involved in in those kind of things we've done it a bit and it's something again we're going to do more this year in the next year right it's like there's like sponsored budget for that there's a this is a great thing about the death of idfa like like suddenly there's so much more creativity and options and like growing an app no longer is this just like facebook mark this like facebook ad

[45:30] spend like spreadsheet driven slog like now you can actually be creative you can go into places that's gonna put you in touch with your users that's one of the reasons i've loved moving into b2b from b2c is like you just get so much more customer face time you can do things we can go to events like we can do podcasts like we do stuff that's like more human and it's a little more and along with the performance stuff as well um but but yeah it just feels like yeah with all the all the people that use it all of the events and like grassroots stuff that happens around the

[45:59] world like i can just imagine it's there's there's probably more opportunities than you have time to like attack a lot of them we're trying to i'll give you one more example which i which i think is like another one we'll see how it pays off but for example as you know in the us if you want to go fishing you need a fishing license usually right and who sells the fishing licenses all the different states and so originally we were like oh can we sell fishing licenses no because like that's takes five year cycles and it's like crazy old software and like no no way okay but how do we plug into that sort

[46:27] of user journey of buying a phishing license by working with those licensed providers so that's like another sort of b2b partnership we're looking to you can buy a license at walmart yeah why not exactly and so it's like you know we're not going to sell licenses maybe we're the place where you store your license you know we have a licensed wallet within the app right you can imagine you can see a world where states liberalize and like they start letting like new you know like i it's not crazy right it's not crazy and that's why that's why it's so exciting to be building in this time

[46:55] i don't know in this time of being able to build software for niches that are bigger than you think have been underserved by software and now software companies are coming in and this like mobile first angle to like meet these use cases i just love it anyway i will continue to talk about fishbrain is like my favorite example of a subscription driven app for the rest of time because it blew my mind when i discovered it when we started working with y'all and like uh it's still to this day it's like my favorite example to use so well thank you i think that's a great place to wrap up

[47:25] uh we're going to link to of course your linkedin and twitter and um fishbrain on instagram and whatnot but there anything else you want to share hiring or anything else you want to pitch as we wrap up unfortunately we're not hiring a ton right now but um if you know someone who fishes or who's into fishing please tell them about brain because it's not you but i guarantee if someone in your life who does so please tell them awesome it was so great chatting with you lisa and i see your daughter is smoking the lights off we went over it's uh it's our bag all right thanks again

[47:58] 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]

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