# How Flighty Grew by Obsessing Over Product, Not Ad Campaigns — Ryan Jones

Channel: Launched by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulKpAAv5GJ4
Duration: 25 min
Language: English
Words: 5083
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/ulKpAAv5GJ4

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[0:00] The three of us are very product focused and if we would have spent that time on the product, we would have gotten basically more growth or free growth. When you take us out of product, you're kind of taking us out of what our realm of expertise is and we just need to stay at the stuff that we're great at. Welcome back to Launched. I'm Charlie Chapman and I'm super pumped to be back in the game and kicking off this new era of regular every other week conversations with inspiring app creators. Now brought to you by Revikat. To start things off, I sat down with Ryan Jones,

[0:31] the founder of the excellent flight tracking app, Flighty, for a live show at Revenue's App Growth annual conference a couple of weeks ago. It was such a fun way to revisit an app that we already talked about and hear how it's continued to grow more than 4 years after I last talked to Ryan on this show about its launch. So, I hope you enjoy this chat and I'll see you again in 2

[0:50] weeks. All right, we got these fancy couches. It's revenue cap money changes the show. Deep couch. It's a very deep couch. Congrats on the acquisition. Yes. Yes. Thank you very That's what all this is for is I was just fishing for that. Uh so for the people in the audience that don't already know what Flighty is, I'm going to let you give the elevator pitch. The worst the worst thing. Um one way to describe it is have you ever been stuck at an airport or at an

[1:18] uh catching your flight and you have no idea what's going on? Is it delayed? Why is it delayed? What's going on in this airport? Why are the lines so long? We try to answer all those questions. Uh, another way to say it is that we try to give people confidence when they're flying. It's a very

[1:33] opaque situation where a lot of times the airlines don't exactly want to tell you what's going on. So, we provide as much information as fast as we can and try to be or we are extremely accurate about it. One of the main things people come to flight for is getting delays and gate changes faster than the airlines. That's kind of the short thing you'll hear people say, but of course, a founder would never reduce their product just to the core feature. So I have to tell you about everything else. I I think the other core feature that I think a significant amount of people using it, this is to them one of the bigger deals is also the flight tracking piece of that. Do you

[2:05] want to talk about really quickly like what it can do as far as the historical data for flights? When you say flight tracking, you're meaning the like log. Yeah, log. Sorry. Yeah. So we call it passport. It was one of the surprises to me. You know, Marcus, who's the super nerd flyer on our team, the designer has been saying since the beginning like this is going to be big. this is going to be big. And I was kind of like, I don't know, man. People just care about right now. Is my flight on time? Why is it delayed? How do I get out of this situation? He was totally right. Well,

[2:33] let me describe it. So, as you fly, we will automatically log and archive your flights for you into basically a flight diary. And there's been products that have done this kind of stuff before, but it's typically separate from the actual flight tracking. So you would go to the airline or to another app, track the actual flight, and then afterwards go open something else that's basically web spreadsheety looking and enter the data. So it was pretty targeted towards being super nerdy about that kind of stuff. And we really made that into one product where you just do the flying and then we'll log everything for you and create um it's a digital passport that we

[3:09] took forever making. But that was one of the keys is when we were starting to make it, we were like it has to be something that's so cool that when you show someone else or when you post it online, you don't feel guilty about that cuz just like I'm just showing off this cool thing. And it turns out that that that I think has been a huge unlock for us. and that the passport itself is if it's not our number one growth driver, it's top three. It's a huge moment for us every year. Yeah. Well, and we'll get into that here in a second, but uh agreed. Uh the passport even even here,

[3:40] I've already had moments where multiple of us have pulled it out and like showcased our our alltime flights and you can see all the the lines going across. It's it's definitely pretty cool. Yeah, we get we get really cool photos. A lot of people when I meet them, they'll say, "Oh, so much of your users must be consultants and investment bankers." And that's what I kind of thought too. And it turns out that it those people aren't that huge of a user base. As best I can tell, it's because they fly the same route every week, all week. And it's just like they know that route. They don't really know the kind of larger flying multiple airlines, dealing with multiple

[4:15] unknown situations. One of the people that I did not expect, one of the audiences I did not expect, and in hindsight, this is very dumb, was pilots and flight attendants and crew. And they're probably 25 20% of the user base. And they just have absolutely insane passports, I have to imagine. And they'll send us photos of like four or five of them on the plane comparing their passports and showing the total numbers. It's really cool. Do you know off the top of your head what like the biggest number of flights you've seen is? Yeah, I do. Yeah. We have one guy who has been with us since the beginning and I don't know a ton about him uh but he's decided

[4:48] that he wants to be the fastest person to ever achieve United 1k which takes around 4 million miles and so he's doing like 1.1 million miles a year which is I think something like 35 days in the air every year. Unreal. That's got to be a lot of like what is it New York to Singapore?

[5:06] He basically looks for cheap flights between the US and Asia and just flies back and forth. That's uh that's a life decision. Yeah. Uh so one of the things that's come up a lot uh today that I've been talking with people about is acquisition, user acquisition. Uh and something talking with you in the past, talking with you even this week that uh I've sort of learned about Flighty is you don't necessarily follow all the typical advice. I shouldn't say you don't follow it. you've not found success in the typical advice for how you scale an app up. So I guess the first big thing is how are you finding your users? Good question. Uh we have to go back a little bit. So

[5:51] I'm very product and app and design focused and so are my original launch founders and we have like you've alluded to tried multiple times to say well I mean it's getting pretty big. everyone says we should do Facebook ads or everyone says we should worry about how do we acquire new customers and you know as a small team so we we go out and we hire the best contractor or best consultant we can for that specific thing work with them and kind of do our best in that arena and what's happened the three times that we've tried it is it takes a significant amount of our attention away

[6:28] from building product and building features and then at the end of the day it's like uh okay well it kind of breaks even. So to my point of view as like a CEO founder, it's like okay, we just spent whatever it is half of our time for 2 months to do a thing that breaks even. We could

[6:46] have been spending that time on the thing that for us we kind of I feel like we have an advantage. The three of us are very product focused. And if we would have spent that time on the product, we would have gotten basically more growth or free growth if you want to put it that point of view. So we've never really unlocked that. The best I can figure is if that's what your thing is and you're great at it, you're great at Tik Tok user acquisition, you're great at Nikita style gray hat stuff, like go ahead. But for us, when you take us out of product, you're kind of taking us out

[7:21] of what our realm of expertise is and we just need to stay at the stuff that we're great at. How is product driving growth then? Like traditionally, at least uh from the indie perspective, I feel like the thing I'm always hearing from the bigger apps is like you adding feature XYZ isn't actually going to move the needle. Like it's important for retention, but for growth, you need to find

[7:42] users somehow. So, how is adding a new feature to your app getting new users in the door? Yeah. And you know, this is different for everyone. So, as always, think about it for your product uh not mine. But what we've found is in a high level there's the whole growth loop concept and we're looking for things that we can do in flighty that help the user and whatever problem they're facing at that moment helps flighty to grow and then if we can help someone else to kind of come into the ecosystem and it's very difficult to find these things it takes a long time and trying a lot

[8:20] of things the things that have worked for us. The very first one was we have a live sharing feature. So if you're using the app, you can send your mom, your partner, whoever a link and it'll have the top experience of flighty for free with the flight status and when it's going to land and everything like that. No nonsense like email put in your email to get it or you have to download the app to get it. Just making that super fluid. And the hypothesis was, you know, the third time that you send your partner that that they'll download the app and just get it. And we, you know, do a good

[8:53] job in there of calling out the CTA of like to get alerts download. That's the kind of stuff we're good at figuring out. And it's a very difficult balance of how far do you push on the good for flighty versus good for users versus good for acquisition. And finding that is is hard. Yeah. And like that specific example is one where it's it's all of the above, right? When you see it in hindsight, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Like all good product decisions, it looks really obvious in hindsight. Correct. I I can say like from personal experience probably people here have had the same thing. I have family members who actively whenever they fly I'm like

[9:29] you put your flight in flighty right and it's like I'm constantly reminding them because I care about and you know I live in St. Louis Missouri we have 90 flights to get to any location uh connecting and so I want to know like did she make that connection? Did she make this? Is her flight delayed? And I get that as a flighty user but I'm constantly pushing her on it to the point where now she's used to it. she wants it and then she wants it whenever, you know, my sister flies for her. Uh, and so it kind of does create these sort of organic social interactions that aren't super

[10:00] trackable for you cuz that's happening over texts. I don't know if this how other people do it, but I think about it as one to many sharing and onetoone sharing. And originally I felt like as a founder like okay, we need we need something that's really good one to one and we need something that's really good one to many. And the onetoone we kind of I feel like figured that out pretty quick of one of the ways that I try to think about it is what are use cases what are things that people are already doing that we can either make easier or draft behind them. You kind of think about it

[10:33] like a plane or a car or something like clearing the airspace in front of you and how do you kind of accelerate that for them? And for onetoone it's what time are you landing? Is your flight on time? All those kind of questions. How can we answer that for you? Well, we can give you a link that you can share with anyone and it's super frictionless. And then so that one I feel like we

[10:50] hit on pretty quick. The passport actually turned out to be our one to many which I did not expect. So we originally tried I want to say this like 20 22. We basically tried a more literal Spotify wrapped kind of interpretation of so we made five different little stories in the 16x9 or 2x1 whatever it is. And one of them was a graph of your flights the last 5 years and one of them was total number of delays like looking out a window. Very artistic. And for some reason it just didn't really catch on. We saw some people sharing it but it didn't have that it factor I guess. Was it a

[11:28] like Spotify raft? Was it like the end of the year we're going to do this event kind of thing? Yeah. Yeah. It was early December here's your kind of stats for the year right. And then the next year, like I said, we thought that framework like what's something that's so cool that you kind of have to share it and if you do, you don't feel guilty about because there's this weird flight thing of, oh, you flew a lot. Is that great for the environment and why did you do that so much? And are you bragging the fact that you can travel so much? Um, so we really wanted to have a dynamic of

[11:57] it's just cool. So, like I wanted to share it and it took us a while, but we figured out the Marcus came up with a great idea of making it a literal passport and it it's gone crazy. Um, yeah. And if if you haven't used it before, it's like you open it up and it it has the sort of holographic display. Took so long to design a holographic. The design is is crazy. And then it has all your flights with the lines going everywhere. It's a really quick way to, you know, either show off how much you've flown or to like show off how bad your direct flight access is. Yeah. But then the other

[12:32] thing with Passport is yes, you have this sharable picture that's really cool, but if you scroll up, there's a whole bunch of stats. Ton. Yeah. Do you find that the stats themselves are also shared or is that like a different thing altogether? Yeah. So 22, we tried the Spotify wrapped literal thing I was talking about. didn't catch, but we knew there was something there. So 23, we tried and we did the passport thing. And one of the things that we haven't mentioned yet, but there was on the original one a black light button. You could tap the button and it would turn it as if it was a black light effect like at passport at border control. That was like I said,

[13:09] we're product people. Like these are the things we think of. So let's lean into what we're great at. And we had a great time doing that. And that that was a huge part of it. Then the next year we so we added a delay report which will show here's the total hours you were delayed all year and you were 40% on time and then for the kind of AV geeks here's the type of plane model you fly on the most here's some of the super metal nerd stats and they've they've done well but it just gets completely dwarfed by passport including the stuff you talked about where you can scroll

[13:39] down and see stats. So when you say passport, you mean the literal image, correct? People, they're hitting. You have like a share button. They're not screenshotting it, right? And they're sharing that on social media and you're seeing that. It's Yeah. So we don't have a ton of analytics. We really do a lot of It's all anonymous, too, and it's all very privacy respected. But one of the things that gets obiscated is the most popular way to share, quote unquote, is to save it to your photos. Yeah. And it we think that's people just wanting to have the more like I can keep this forever version, but then we see it on Instagram and Twitter and everything a ton, but

[14:11] we get a lot of conversations with people sharing it in group chats and stuff like that. Yeah, that makes sense. Outside of product, the other kind of classic user acquisition conversation is is ASO. I have to imagine that's still a really important part of of what makes Flighty work. Yeah. So we, you know, you talked about user acquisition and I said we've kind of tried marketing and it's turned out to not be our kind of core thing. The one thing we do do is uh app store so optimization or ASA. I'm really proud of our screenshots and I started to see people kind of copy the

[14:44] similarish format. So we put a lot of time into making the screenshots great and getting those getting the exact words. I think we were joking about this before. Screenshots are the worst. It's so hard to boil down your whole product into like four words and know that that's the only thing that like 95% first three screenshots that's all they get to see. Yeah, it's and it takes so long to make them look good, but it's you have to spend the effort on it. You do a lot of AB testing with the with the tools in in App Store Connect. We've done a little again because we're so product

[15:19] focused. The times that we do do AB testing, it has to be a clear win. Otherwise, we're like, "No, we're going with what we think is the best." So we we've stuck with what we had for like three years now. But you kind of mentioned ASA that that's the only thing that we do in terms of marketing. Like we don't do any paid marketing stuff, but I guess unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it. I would say have to. Well, we kind of do have to pay for your own word. Like you have to pay for the word flighty in the app store ads. Maddening. That's probably 20 or 30% of our

[15:48] new users is come through app store search ads. Wow. Um, or the word pretty much for the word. No, not just flighty pro everything. Flighty flight tracker, flight track, flight status. Don't go bid on these. Yeah. Yeah. We'll bleep that out. We should. It's painful uh to to see that check every month. But at least the way I approach it is u we have someone on the team as a specialist in it.

[16:12] That's another guess learning. People that have talked about ASA and you've explored it before. I tried it myself being like, "Oh, I'm a founder. I can figure anything out. Like, let's do this. and just got crushed. Just, you know, threw money down a black hole. Uh it is a very, in my experience, very specialist need you have to have. There's so many kind of dials that are invisible that you just don't even know they're there. Yeah. Basically, if you're doing the if you're doing the basic version of ASA, you're probably losing money. Well, yeah. The You mean the literal like basic version? The tab. Yeah. Yes. That that is been my experience as well. Yeah. I would yeah

[16:49] that I would never ever do that. Um especially if you're doing your own like earned media in some way because if if somebody sees like an article or a feature by Apple or something not in the app store then they go search for your name. Of course it's the the basic implementation is going to create an ad for your name and they're going to click that one because it's first and now you're

[17:10] giving Apple money for that acquisition even though it was completely earned by your own media. That's Yeah, we won't get into the apps. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. Follow my Twitter to see those thoughts. So, okay. So, speaking of uh the great Apple in the sky that we we adore, the other thing that Flighty definitely seems to be getting a lot of is love from Apple marketing, especially once the live activities came out. Felt like from that moment forward, right, you're in keynotes all the time, in advertising, stuff like that. Does that move the needle for you? Uh, and including like features in the app store and stuff. The short answer is not

[17:53] really. At the beginning it did. So maybe 2022, 2023. And I don't think or 21 maybe. It's not it's not really our fault or Apple's fault. How often do people, you know, open the app store and look for new apps? Like it just doesn't happen anymore. It's not really a pattern. They're going there to solve a problem. Yeah. It's it's like Google basically like I need this thing now. We do see it and you know we still as product people we want to be there with the new features on day one. Um I feel like you know we had the discussion of should we really worry about this that much like should

[18:30] we just ship what we need to ship on our timeline? Do we really need to be ready with iOS 26 on day one? And ultimately, a lot of times when we get in situations of should we do this or should we do that and it and it becomes a little bit of internal like I don't know we could go either way. Recently what we've fallen back on is well if we were users of flighty what would we want and it's well we would want flighty to have it on day one so let's go do it. So that's kind of become a heristic lately for us as kind of the business starts to become a thing you need to pay attention

[19:01] to feed. Yeah that makes sense. Yeah, I have to guess like the live activities in particular. Yes, there was features that came along with that, but also it seems like it set like an industry standard and that had to move the needle in some ways. That's true. Yeah, that's fair. It did. That's just I guess dumb luck. You know, Apple announced that and they talked about how like it's just going to change everything and I think it it's such a live thing. It's, you know, it's in the name, but it really doesn't make sense for anything that's not live. So, it's kind of just sports scores, Uber, and flight tracking. Yeah. And we kind of just were there,

[19:39] you know, not to diminish it, but like we put a lot of time into the launch of it, and we were included in the launch video of it as an example. So, like they knew it was going to be a thing, and it just is a a perfect feature for flighty for you can go do your other stuff in Twitter,

[19:54] your email or wherever, and your how long until you have to be at the plane is right there on top. I've heard family members use the term dynamic island because of flighty and and the follow on like like I said the industry very much followed you on what we hear now is lock screen widget that's what people call it cuz people are more well I guess that's true whenever yeah well it was whenever people upgrade their phone to one that has the the island thing they'll be like I love that specific hardware feature and I was like I'm surprised that anybody that's not an iOS developer

[20:24] cares at all about this but it's specifically for sports scores in flight tracking. Yeah, we definitely saw a bump in revenue that stayed as a bump in revenue because of it. And you know, to toot our own horn a little bit, I guess saw a lot of the airlines follow in terms of what we kind of defined in terms of the user interaction and how the design look. That's awesome. So, uh, normally this show is an hour and a half, but really it's however long, uh, I can convince the person to keep talking to me. But unfortunately, this is an expensive room in an expensive space,

[20:58] and I have been told that I'm not allowed to sit here for an hour and a half. So, we are going to have to to wrap this up. But Ryan is awesome, and uh obviously you can see he's fun to talk to. So, like I'm I'm just giving everybody else uh the option to come up to you and ask questions, please. Yeah. Um but before before we end it, I do want to uh to let you kind of tease us for what's what's the future of flighting. Good one. Uh, if you've been paying too too close of attention to us, it's been a slow four, five, 6 months. We've been doing a lot of stuff behind

[21:30] the scenes. I feel like 2 years ago, we got to that we have everything that pro flyers would need. And it's actually a really wide product when you think through all the different scenarios, diversions, cancellations, oh, the plane taxied away from the gate, but then came back to the exact same gate. Like there's a lot of a lot of people experienced that literally during this trip cuz of all the storms. Hopefully Flighty worked great through it. If it didn't, let me know. We'll try to make it better. But one of the things with flight tracking is you don't get second chances. Like if that goes wrong or I tell you the wrong delay time or whatever,

[22:08] it's like delete, I'm out. Um, so it took us a long time to really get to that 1.0 is not the right word, but you know what I mean. Like has all the features. 5 years later 1.0. I get what you mean though. It's It's like the version that you were imagining when you first released this in 2019. Yeah. And we we've talked a little bit a couple weeks ago about how it seems like there's copycats coming out and I see them too and then what happens from my point of view cuz I see them when they disappear. But basically people think that it's oh it's a free data feed and look how

[22:44] easy it is because Flighty is so simple which all the designers in the room are laughing because they know simple means very very difficult. Basically those apps so far have appeared and then kind of withered away and disappeared but before we launched was a year and a half. So it's it took a lot of effort behind the scenes and a lot of small stuff that you have to handle. We're one of those apps where you can't it's very hard to have an MVP like it has to have a certain level of features. So to answer your actual question, we been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes

[23:16] and I think what you'll see us do next year, we of course have a couple releases this year, but if we focus on next year, it's a lot of the stuff that of the four things we have coming next year, I think one of them is something you've seen done before. A lot of other stuff is stuff that we now have the foundation to do and it's stuff we've dreamed of and haven't been really done before. So, we kind of get get to go back to the industry first kind of exclusive features things and see if everybody else can continue to keep up. Oh, man. Okay. Well, that is very

[23:47] exciting as a as a flighty user. Uh so, I'm looking forward to that. Thank you so much for doing this. Uh this is super fun and uh thank you all for being a great audience. Um thanks. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. You can find more Launched at launchedfm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm @_chucky on Twitter or Charlie Mchapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to Refcat for making this episode and all future episodes of launched possible. I'll see you all again in 2 weeks. [Music]

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