$10M ARR Without Ever Testing A Paywall — Luke Martin-Fuller, Visible

David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.
Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard. My guest today is Luke Martin-Fuller, co-founder of Visible, the wearable activity tracker for illness, not fitness. Over 300,000 people use a platform to pace their energy. On the podcast, I talk with Luke about hitting $10 million in ARR without ever testing a paywall, paying their own customers to help make video ads, and why you might want to turn away some potential customers. Hey, Luke, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Hey, David. Thank you so much for having me.

David Barnard:
Super excited to talk to you about Visible today. As we'll get into it, it kind of hits home a lot for me as a product, and so it's been really fun getting to know you as we prep for the podcast. And I don't always go into the founding story, but I think for this kind of product, for this kind of story, it is super materially relevant. Folks who really understand the needs of an audience tend to build very different products than people who are just kind of, think it's an interesting market to explore. And so yeah, I'd love to hear from you about what got you into the health and wellness space and specifically to build Visible.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. Yeah, happy to. I guess going all the way back, my background's probably pretty unusual for a consumer app founder. I'm a recovering lawyer. I studied law at university and then went off to become a lawyer at a big law firm. But I realized pretty quickly that that wasn't for me. And what I wanted to do instead was build technology, specifically consumer apps. So I went off to become a product manager at a fintech company here in London. And it was while I was working there that I met my colleague at the time, Harry, who pretty soon after our meeting became super unwell. It was 2020 and he had a kind of mild COVID infection, but didn't really get better. And he was really struggling to make sense of this. And he'd taken some time off of work. We were in touch and he was trying everything he could to figure out what was up with him.
And he went off and bought a wearable device. And in his case, he bought a WHOOP. And he realized that that was super powerful. He was seeing insights in his data that kind of correlated with changes in his energy and in his cognitive function. So Harry had, in particular, had a lot of brain fog, which is very common for people with complex chronic illnesses. But he was using this tool, this product that was designed for fitness. It was entirely the wrong product for him. It was kind of celebrating 10,000 steps and saying, "You go, go on a run." And actually, he was finding that doing those things, doing what you might think is an intuitive thing, just trying to get back to a normal level of activity, push yourself harder to get better, that wasn't working for him and in fact, was leading to his symptoms getting worse.
So it was through this that he discovered something called pacing, which is essentially keeping an eye on your energy and figuring out how you can best use it, but within what's your range of capability, we call your energy envelope. And over time, if you can stay within that energy envelope, you can achieve more without your symptoms getting worse. And this is, turns out is the only kind of recommended management strategy. It's the only thing that NICE and the CDC recommend, but it is really hard to do without data. And it was his WHOOP that he was using to get there, even though it was a square peg for a round hole.

David Barnard:
Yeah. And the WHOOP is like, "Go exercise more. You weren't active enough today. You didn't have enough steps."

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Exactly. Exactly. He called me up one day and said, "We should build a WHOOP for people with chronic illnesses. There's hundreds of millions of people." So we kind of went away one weekend and put up a website and I think we had 5,000 people sign up to a waitlist for a product that didn't exist yet in about a week. So we knew there was something and that's when we went off and started working on Visible.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Man, that's incredible. And just to dig a little deeper there, I already said it, but I really do think the best products are built from people who genuinely care. And you and I were joking before the podcast, I feel like there's been this surgence of religious apps recently of people seeing religious apps doing really well and thinking it's an interesting market.
And I mean, I'm sure people who aren't religious can build a decent app and can make some money, but if your whole thing is like, "Oh, this is some gullible audience that I'm going to take advantage of and make a quick buck." Yeah, maybe you can make a quick buck, but you're probably not going to build a great product that really speaks to the audience.
So back to your story. You had this 5,000-person waiting list, huge sign that there's potential in this market. What was that next step to then actually build a product for that market? And what did you even promise? What was the hook that got 5,000 people to sign up on the website?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
I think we went off and created, I think we maybe paid someone on Fiverr to create a 3D mock-up of a wearable. And I think the site just said pretty much what the hero on our website says now, which is "Pacing, made simple." It was a product promise, but there was not much behind it. And we were honest about that. We went through to a Typeform and said, "If we built this product, would you be interested in coming along for the journey with us?"
And people were incredibly excited about that. But two of us, we had experience building mobile apps. We certainly didn't have the funds or the time to go out and build a wearable. So we did what we knew best, which was starting by building a free app. And that was incredibly powerful. I think we learned a lot from starting small. We worked with a group of 100 people initially from that wait list. We called them the Founding 100.
And we were in a Facebook group with them. We were jumping on calls with them all the time. We learned a few things about our particular use case, which is that people were using three or four different apps. They were tracking their symptoms in one place. They were finding community in another, they were finding research somewhere else. All of those apps were not fit for purpose.
And we thought, "If we can build something into one experience, we can deliver a heap of value to people that have been massively underserved and overlooked." And we were able to build something that people liked and grew. I think we grew to about 50,000 users all through word of mouth in those early days on an app that didn't even have a wearable, which is what we promised. So that was amazing and it really kind of helped us build the muscle of the iterating towards something that people wanted to use.

David Barnard:
Were you bootstrapping that whole time? And were you working full-time and doing this on the side? How did that work?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah. So I had said to Harry that I'm really excited to work on this, but living here in London, being in my 20s, I was like, "Well, you know, I need to be able to pay my rent."

David Barnard:
Yeah.

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

David Barnard:
Wow. So you built this out for a whole year before you started charging for it.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
100%. Yep. Yeah.

David Barnard:
Wow. All right. I want to get back to the charging and we'll get into some of the grandfathering people in and all the stuff that you did once you did start charging. But before we get to that, I did want to talk for a bit about trust. And I actually told you this when we were talking about recording this podcast is that when I first saw Visible and I first saw this wearable, I've suffered from chronic illness for more than a decade now, and I have spent way more money than I'd ever want to admit, and all sorts of different snake oil. And so to be honest, my flags went up. I assumed you had just done a cheap knockoff. It looked like it was potentially just some knockoff from a Chinese factory that they spin it off.
But that's not at all what was going on here. And the more I dug into it, the more I understood. So let's just talk a little bit, and I think this can really apply to folks more broadly. This is very specific, like health and fitness and chronic illness. There are a lot of people who prey on that community, but I think that it's just kind of a universal truth that if you can build trust in a product and build authentically, like we were talking about even caring about it yourself and everything else, I think it really is so important to product building. So I wanted to spend a little bit of time talking through how you think about that.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Well, I think the core of that is building a genuinely amazing product that helps people and that they're willing to tell other people about and kind of build that trust organically through word of mouth. If that isn't the basis of what you're building, then there's something wrong. And I suspect in our space in particular, there are, as you say, people that will sell anything, from ear seeds to supplements to courses telling you that there's the one big secret that'll make you better. None of those things are true. None of those things are evidence-based. None of them have a kind of deep-rooted conviction about building something without over-promising the outcomes you're going to get. And I think we've worked really hard on positioning our product as what it is. It's not a treatment, it's not a cure. It helps you implement a management strategy.

David Barnard:
And to that point, I feel like especially in the age of AI, but even before, people who are wary about these things have way more resources to dig deep and figure out, is this real? I mean, I think I set Claude Cowork on it like, "Hey, is this a real company? Is this a real product? Is this backed by science? Is this just BS?" And so, that kind of trust building is so important.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. And it's so important that people do that research on their own. But I think for us in our case, actually, research in a different sense has been a huge lever. So we have invested in science since the moment we were out there. Even in our free app, one of the first features we built was an opportunity for people to opt in, to share their data on an anonymized basis with researchers. And at the time, this was really important because so little research was happening, especially around long COVID, which was one of the key illnesses we helped with when we started. And we were able to hand off data which has gone to be published in some of the best kind of research publications there are. I mean, we've had papers published in Nature about how you can use HIV and heart rate to predict future symptom events, which is just incredible.
We've done work with Mount Sinai, with Imperial College London, a paper that we published about the interaction between symptoms and the menstrual cycle. And I think as much as this is really accretive to the mission, and the mission really is all about making visible illness visible both to you, but to your doctor and those around you, and then to the research community at large, it's super consistent with what we're here for. It also goes to this point around people doing their research, understanding if we're legit and figuring out that, "Wow, these guys have actually helped move the science forward. They have done a service for the community, and I can see that in some of these really high signal research papers." So it's been a really lovely loop for us to lean into. We're kind of giving back and getting more from having done that work.

David Barnard:
Yeah, I feel like more apps should explore this. So I do want to ask, what was that process like reaching out to researchers, partnering with them, working through those kind of things? Because there are so many health and fitness apps that really could be sharing anonymized data that could help move things forward. And I mean, screen time apps, I mean, there's tons, sleep apps. There's just so many ways that you could tie research into it if it was the right product. So give me a quick overview. I mean, this won't apply to everybody, but I think it'd be interesting for some people to hear what that takes.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I think it's really hard and it's not something that moves a revenue number at least immediately. So it's kind of difficult for some teams, I imagine, to justify. But as I say, it was just so core to what we're here for and our mission statement that we had to do it. But why is it hard? So I guess you have to build out new flows. Informed consent is a really important thing. So you have to tell people who you're sharing the data with, for how long and for what purposes. So those are new journeys in the app. You have to go out and get kind of ethics committee sign-off. You have to work with an academic institution that has the capability to go and get that sign-off and create all of the documentation that goes around research.
And then you have to build the mechanisms, the piping to anonymize data, to completely wipe it of any identifying factors while retaining the core stuff, and then get that into researchers' hands in batches or in real time, whatever's needed. And none of that is clearly without cost or head scratching or complexity. But it's really worthwhile, especially when we knew then, and we certainly know now that we're sitting on the largest dataset that has ever existed for a group of people that have had a chronic underinvestment in research. And it was kind of incumbent on us to do that. And it's a kind of nice side effect almost that that helps to build the trust, that helps to help us reach more people that we can help. A lot of help there, David, but yeah.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Did you just cold email researchers or how do you actually...? I mean, because we talk about things on the podcast like cold outreach to influencers and things like that, and that's always really hard, but I imagine getting in touch with and getting the attention of those kind of people who can help bring trust. So again, for the average app, it might not be a research institute, but you need to find people in that relevant niche that can kind of add that layer of trust and help you build trust, even if it's not with research, it's just with the right review or the right kind of framing or some product feedback or something like that. So how did you actually make the connections?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
So I guess from the earliest days, even when we were building our free app MVP, we were in touch with researchers. We're building this tool. We'd love to get your insight onto how we can make the most valuable thing. And that was an easy in, right? You're looking for advice and help from someone before you've got an ask for them. And actually in the earliest study that we did, I think was actually more pull rather than push. I think one of the researchers we'd spoken to said, "Hey, if you've got all of this data, I would love to do a study on it."
And that kind of was a bit of an unlock where we were like, "Yeah, of course you can. Of course you can. Obviously we need consent from people and we need to figure out how to get it to you, but we're going to work on that because it feels like an important thing." So yeah, I just think in whatever space you're in, whether it's fitness or sleep or screen time, you're probably already chatting to the right people who would love to get their hands on some anonymized data to publish some amazing insights. So I don't know whether cold outreach would work, but certainly just being part of the community and part of the conversation, it will really help with getting that off of the ground.

David Barnard:
But what about investors and getting other people who maybe don't understand what it's like to be interested and invested in the app?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
This has always been a challenge, right? The need is huge, as you know, because you have experienced some of these issues yourself, but the vast majority of the population hasn't. Everyone knows someone, but there's so much kind of stigma about the reality of living with a complex chronic health condition that even if you know someone, you probably don't know the full story. So trying to let people in to just how widespread, how hugely affecting, and frankly, how underserved and overlooked these illnesses have been is a real challenge. It's also a challenge in our space in particular because the science has been so poor and under-invested in that no one can actually put a number to these things. No, it's very difficult. First side of a pitch deck, you should be able to say, "There are this many people. We'll do a total addressable market where we've done it bottoms up and figured out just how many people," but that science, that data isn't there.

David Barnard:
I mean, even saying long COVID, I mean, some people maybe even turned off the podcast when you first said long COVID because that is debated online. And I mean, this is one of the challenges, and I faced this in having a chronic illness the last 15 years is the standard medical advice, the studies, and so many other things are built around the healthy. And like you said, it's so underfunded. So there's not necessarily research. It's not like quote unquote "settled science" or whatever. Yeah. So how do you navigate all that uncertainty?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
A persistent challenge that this community has had has been being disbelieved. The unfortunate reality is that doctors understandably want to help with things that they can test for where there is a blood test that says, "Hey, here's what's wrong and I can give you this pill and it will make you better." That's what the entire Western medical system is built around.
But in the case of many of the people that we help, the symptoms are often very wide-ranging and there is no single test that will give the answer you need. So the conclusion that a lot of medicine has reached is that, "Hey, this must just all be in your head. Why don't you just think a little bit differently and you'll feel heaps better?" Now, I don't buy that.
And I think anyone that knows someone or anyone that has experienced these issues recognizes it as a real kind of biomedical cause, but it's very difficult to convince at least an establishment which has trended itself towards that conclusion. But even more broadly, as you say, the stigma's still there. The stigma affects how people view this even as an opportunity to help people at scale, including investors.

David Barnard:
Was your first angel, have some of the investors since then been folks who've experienced this personally or had personal experience with it? Or have you been able to present it in a way...? And again, I think these are similar challenges, right? If you're going out and investing and you've got a golf app and you're pitching an investor who's never golfed, maybe it's just not a good fit. But if you really want that investor or they really want to invest, how do you bridge the knowledge gap and the empathy gap?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the truth is that a lot of the people that have come in and backed us, but also nearly half of our team are people with lived experience of these issues. They really understand what's going on here and therefore, didn't need this explaining to them. That's true from our earliest angel investor, all the way through to the people that came in and led our Series A. There were people that had either experienced these things themselves or had a close connection to them. And I think that is important.
Like you say in a golf app, you want people to be brought into the change you're delivering in the world. And we want also to work with investors and colleagues that understand and are motivated to deliver that change. So I think I'd recommend anyone that's going out to raise money doesn't choose the investor that doesn't really buy the thing that you're trying to build, but maybe is interested in the commercial opportunity. These people need to be with you through thick and thin. And having a core belief in what you're trying to do in the world is super crucial.

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

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Agreed.

David Barnard:
So I wanted to kind of change topics here and move on to the hardware thing. So we haven't had a lot of hardware attached subscription apps on the podcast, but I think it's something that will continue to grow. And I think it's an interesting kind of avenue to explore. So we had Skylight on in the spring and then funny enough, just two weeks ago, my wife went out and bought a Skylight. And I'm getting to experience the subscription attached hardware with her and she absolutely loves it. And so, I think this is something with WHOOP and Oura and Skylight and Eight Sleep Pod and it has been a really big industry growing segment of the industry. But yeah, I wanted to talk through some aspects of how you decided you needed to do it and then the challenges of actually doing it.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I mean, we knew from the outset that we wanted to use wearable data to help people better manage their illness. And we were pretty open actually to how we might achieve that. The easier path was obviously integrating with the devices that people already have on their wrists. The sensors are effectively commoditized, whether it's in a Garmin watch or an Apple Watch or an existing kind of subscription product like an Oura or a WHOOP. These sensors are around. The issue we had was that we knew to give the experience, to provide the experience that we wanted to deliver, we needed access to real-time data.
One of the earliest kind of features that we just knew we had to build was as simple as notifying someone when their heart rate reaches a certain threshold. And that is not possible with 99% of devices, either because of the frequency they sample at. So a lot of existing fitness-oriented hardware will maybe sample your heart rate every five or 10 minutes unless you set it into workout mode, in which case it might sample slightly more frequently. But then there's also a thing around the accuracy of real-time data. Different sensors come from different stock and they don't always match one another.
So we did try initially. We went out, tried to use some of the API aggregators and came into this problem where... Well, actually there's a few problems with that for our particular use case. So there's some amazing companies out there like Terra is a good example, who will ingest data from every app you can imagine. WHOOP, Garmin, Fitbit, and they'll bring all of that data into their cloud service. And as an app developer, you can pull that data down, which is great if you're trying to do maybe what you were describing before where you've got an onboarding.
I think RISE Science do a good job of this. You've got existing kind of data. Let's just grab it from your other app and that can help you personalize the experience. But that didn't work for us because for one thing, you've got to have two apps open. Now if you're living with limited energy and brain fog, the idea that I've got to think about having my Garmin app open, which by the way, is telling me all sorts of stuff about how I need to go and exercise more, and then just wait for that data half an hour or half a day later to sink into my visible app, that's a really poor experience.
But then there was also something about us wanting to build the equivalent product. People that are really trying to optimize their fitness can go and buy the device that is dedicated for them. They can go ahead and buy that device. We wanted to build something that worked with very little compromise for people living with chronic illness. We thought that was what they deserved. And coming across that early roadblock about frequency and accuracy of data was just evidence to us that we need to do this properly. We need to deliver hardware to people. It's a hard job and it's a different kind of business.

David Barnard:
Hearing you talk through that, my mind is just racing of all the opportunities, especially now with AI making it easier to filter data and to make associations and things like that. It does seem like we're going to see, especially in health and wellness, but also in other segments, golf. Yeah, I don't know why I brought that up earlier, but it's actually a good example. There are a lot of hardware devices in golf already and there's probably opportunity to build a lot more and use the sensors on the device you already have and things like that.
So hardware is just such a fascinating opportunity in my mind. And so, it's really fun talking through all of this with you. So you realized early on you would end up needing your own hardware. I know that you partnered with Polar, but talk me through how you ended up making that decision and how that partnership came to be because they're massive company. How did you approach them to partner with the product and white label it versus having to build your own or white labeling like I thought it was, just some off-the-shelf crappy Chinese wearable that was 10 bucks or something?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, for sure. So I mean ,the answer there is in the earliest days, we just bought a heap of heart rate sensors from Polar. We knew that they were the best accuracy. These guys had been building heart rate monitors and wearables since 1977. They had a bit of experience about how to do it and we could never compete with that, if we wanted to, as a small team, deliver something of value to people. So we just bought some and shipped them out and integrated. They have a kind of open SDK and that was enough for us to prove out the concept. And then we were able to get a call in, chat to them and explain to them what we were building.
And we started buying that initial device, which was an armband sensor kind of wholesale through them. And we were able to pass on those savings to our members. And then it was only after a year or so where we kind of sat down with them and said, "Hey, if we were to continue working together, could we do a few of these other things? We need to improve the battery life. We'd like to make it easier to charge. We would love to include some accelerometer data because we know that that's going to be really valuable to our members." And we worked with them and they worked with a few other customers to figure out what a kind of build on that offering would be. And it's been a really productive partnership.

David Barnard:
Fascinating that a company that's been around 40 plus years is getting product insights from a startup, trying to help build a better product for your customer. You're not just white labeling, not trying to go out on your own, but partnering with a giant that's been doing it for so long, but also so deep in it yourself that you're actually helping them build better products. So I think it's incredible and just kind of a testament to how you're really trying to help and do things different, that the hardware is custom-built to help solve these problems. And so I think, again, I think there's a ton of opportunity in hardware, but it's hard.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, it really is.

David Barnard:
I think we talked about that on Skylight.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
It is. I think for anyone that kind of thinks, "Hey, these hardware enabled subscription businesses seem to be doing great [inaudible 00:29:18]. Why don't we just ship some hardware?" I think don't underestimate the complexity of doing that. So I guess, you bolt on what is essentially an entire e-commerce business to what otherwise could just be a subscription app business as everything from planning out your inventory, financing it, doing fulfillment.

David Barnard:
Firmware.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
100%. Yeah. I mean, beyond even the practical physical stuff, like putting the stuff in the boxes and making the boxes and sourcing the boxes and processing the refunds. I guess in any hardware enabled subscription product, getting the data either to or from that piece of hardware is a real challenge as well. We've had to figure out some of the stuff that the big players have had years to figure out, be that working with Bluetooth, syncing frequencies, background operation of the app, as you say, firmware updates, all of this stuff is like an order of magnitude more complex than just putting something from an API. So I'd say, yeah, between the physical stuff and the technical stuff, it's definitely the harder part, but it's one we absolutely don't regret going down because it's enabled us to build something of value.

David Barnard:
Well, and speaking of hard things, and again, it's something I talked with the Skylight team about, is the choice of whether to make a lot of profit on the sale of the hardware and the subscription, make profit on the hardware, give the software away for free. I mean, it's kind of this eternal debate. And I know in the rise of hardware attached subscriptions, it's been a huge topic of conversation. Why should I pay for this hardware and then have to keep paying or whatever? So how did you navigate all of that?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I mean, we've taken a pretty clear line on this, and it's one that we're really open about with our potential users and our members, which is that we don't make any money on the hardware that we sell. The way we deliver value is by building an amazing app experience that pulls that data, interprets it, gives you the insights you need and the tools you need to better manage your illness. So what that looks like for us is roughly 80 bucks for the band. And then it's either $20 a month or 14.99 if you're taking on an annual subscription. And that works really well for us because it maps, I guess, to where we are delivering the value and we can be honest about the fact that we don't make any money by selling hardware. Lowers the barrier to entry as well.

David Barnard:
I was kind of surprised at the $80 price, to be honest. And I wasn't first approaching this as a customer, so I think the customer would probably have a very different experience. But when I saw the $80 price, my immediate thought was like, "How could this be any good at $80?" And then it wasn't until talking to you more later, it's like, "Oh, because they're not actually... That's not the retail price." That's the wholesale actual cost of the hardware, not hardware plus 80% margins or 50% margins or whatever you would normally mark that kind of thing up.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. And I think there's experimentation to do around this. I mean, that's good feedback, David. If you're looking at that and thinking, "That's super cheap," there's always scope to revisit this and think about where the value sits. But yeah, broadly, I think there are three different models that we saw that we could take inspiration from when it comes to pricing the hardware versus the subscription. And I think there's examples of companies in each. So Oura have thought about this a lot. So they charge a lot of money upfront for their ring and then they'll charge a really low, relatively low subscription.
I actually think it's six pounds in the UK, but maybe it's six or seven dollars in the US. And I guess the way that they've thought about that is, it kind of maps to the value you're getting. Early on, you're getting this piece of hardware and then the insights become less interesting and powerful, and maybe you get a bit bored of their experience over time and you think, "Oh. Why am I paying 20 bucks for this?" They've managed that with the arc of a lot of upfront cost and then a much lower recurring cost.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Interesting note there too. Quick to interrupt, but it's also like jewelry.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

David Barnard:
In some ways, I think they can get away with it. And they actually just released the version four ceramic or there was something they released recently where I saw it online and I was like, "Wow, that's pretty as jewelry." So it is interesting even from that kind of standpoint is you have to think about the hardware being something... Is it something people are caring about the specifics of the hardware? The Skylight, my wife actually bought her Skylight at Target. So apparently, Skylight did a deal with Target and it's got this brass frame. It's branded with the Magnolia, which is a brand my wife was already familiar with. And so those kind of things even go into it, like jewelry and something that's going to sit on your kitchen counter, which is where our Skylight is sitting. So it's interesting even that level of how you think about pricing the hardware.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. Yeah. I mean, desirable items can be priced in desirable ways. I think there's some interesting stuff with Oura as well. The ceramic ring that you just mentioned, I think it's in part maybe an anchoring thing like, "Hey, you can buy this one that's really expensive." And suddenly that makes the other one feel a little bit more affordable, even though by any measure, it's a really expensive device. So there's definitely some thought that goes into this, thought that we haven't been able to do. We were just pretty pure about this like, "Hey, we don't believe that we're delivering value in this piece of hardware. It's everything that comes after where you get the value." And that's how we priced.

David Barnard:
So next experiment for you is the deluxe version of the hardware that's more a fashion item that you can make a profit on. And then it's like the people who are budget sensitive and just want the help can get the normal device. And then the people who want it as a fashion accessory and have the money, can upgrade. And the functionality is exactly the same, but it's more a fashion item. So there you go.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I like it. I'll add it to the backlog.

David Barnard:
Yeah.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah. So I was saying there are three models. Oura is definitely one of them, and they've done a lot of thinking about that. The second I guess is WHOOP, which is they don't talk about the hardware costing anything whatsoever. They just price it all into this kind of rolling membership, which is more expensive, [inaudible 00:35:40] more expensive than Visible, but it really centers the kind of member experience. Has its own downside. I mean, in many ways it's a little bit of a fast because you're paying upfront anyway for what is notionally a 12 or 24-month commitment. And then the third is I guess closer to Tractive, amazing company, really, really impressive company. They build their dog kind of GPS trackers. And they've chosen something a little bit more like us, which is, hey, lower the barrier to entry and make your money doing what you do best, which is delivering a kind of ongoing service. And that's kind of where we've landed.

David Barnard:
I think those kind of three pillars, I hadn't worked in this space and thought about it at that level, but it makes a ton of sense that there's three different ways to really approach it. And fascinating, and again, I think very customer aligned that you've chosen to do the latter, where the hardware and the upfront cost, even if you're committing for a year, that upfront cost is much lower and easier barrier of entry to get people in. I do want to dig next into the business and some of the numbers because I know y'all have been scaling really well and because a product is so great and because you are actually helping people and the word of mouth is driving that because it is actually helping people, you've been able to scale up rather quickly. So yeah, I'd love to hear the timeline of how things went. So you were a free app and then what did it look like to start charging?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, so we moved from our free app offering and started testing again. We did the same thing with 100 users. We sent out 100 wearables and iterated until we thought we had something of value and that was all for free. So it was October '23, we started monetizing. So it took us a little while to grow to a meaningful revenue. And then once we hit one million in subscription ARR, we grew to 10 million in exactly two years. So we're able to grow very quickly. But what I would say is that the machine has not been dialed in. There is a lot to be done there. I think we've focused kind of deliberately on building a great product first and thinking about the growth machine later.
I mean, it might be a little bit surprising for your audience, but we've only ever grown with one channel. We've never sent a lifecycle email. We haven't done any experimentation on our web funnel, which I know we'll talk about. We haven't tested any paywalls. We haven't expanded in our geographies. Yeah, we've not added AdWords or TikTok or SEO or AEO. So it's a pretty nascent kind of growth machine that has kind of supported us to get there. But yeah, the thinking really was that unless you've got something of value, that it's going to be retaining people and helping them, then there's no point investing in all of that experimentation. That's kind of changing now.

David Barnard:
I think we've got our YouTube thumbnail maybe. 10 million at ARR without ever testing a paywall. It is very counterintuitive to your point, to this audience specifically, that you wouldn't have done that yet. But I think it really speaks to what we've been talking about throughout this whole podcast is that you're not out here trying to make a quick buck. You're really trying to help people. And you had that early word of mouth because it is a community that's underserved. And so that growth, it really speaks to the product actually delivering.
And I think people kind of get things a little backward often, is that their conversion sucks, their LTVs are terrible, they can't get ads to work or whatever. And they think the solution is in optimizing conversion, improving their onboarding or whatever. And yeah, you can milk a lot of revenue out of onboarding changes, but if the product doesn't deliver, they're just going to churn. And you're not building a great business. A colleague of mine calls them paywall wrappers.
If the product isn't real, you just got 60 pages of onboarding that hype somebody up, they subscribe, and then they get zero value and don't retain. You're just a paywall wrapper. And that's just the complete antithesis of what you're doing there at Visible. So I mean, it's genuinely incredible that you hit 10 million in ARR without ever sending a lifecycle email, zero experimentation. It sounds like you haven't done even price testing. You're only available in two markets, right? You're only available in the US and the UK.
So yeah, very different path than I think a lot of people are taking, but the kind of path that's going to take you to becoming a much larger, more interesting, more durable business over the long haul. Nobody listening to this episode is going to be able to just whip out a clone. You don't have years of research. And when people search and find research papers and the kind of research I did that kind of confirmed to me that it was worth even having you on the podcast, it's like you can't just spin that up with an LLM over a weekend.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure, for sure. I mean, to be fair, that is another advantage of the hardware-enabled model as well. This stuff is so tough to get right that I think if you were to try and one shot vibe code an app to sync real-time data, you'd find pretty quickly that that's tough. But you're right. That's a risk, I guess, for a lot of companies and we're not immune to it, right? We've done so much thinking. It's working with so many users, built an experience and algorithms and insights that are of genuine value. But there are people that will stand up. Might be people listening to this podcast now thinking, "Hey, I can just kind of clone that thing." And that what they won't have, as you say, is the proprietary thinking, the algorithms, the insights, the research and the trust that will lead to building a durable business. So honestly hope they don't try because they won't get that far.

David Barnard:
You mentioned in the mix of all that, that you've only tried one paid channel. What channel was that? And let's talk about what you've done on that channel.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. So we've monetized primarily through a web to app funnel. And then in terms of paid, it's all been Meta. And on that channel, it's UGC that's worked really well for us. So we run a couple of programs. One is called Creator Collaborative, and that's working with existing creators in the chronic illness space to create awareness and visibility of what we offer. And then there's community voices, which is people in our community, our members that can share videos with us and be rewarded and make a very fair rate for sharing a video, sharing their true and honest experience using Visible. Maybe a couple of the practical insights that they've gained from it. And then we'll use that as material for paid. But even within our broader acquisition picture, only 50%-ish. I mean, attributions are really tough as you know, but only 50%-ish come through paid channels. The rest come through word of mouth.
So we've been able to keep that pretty steady. And what I would say maybe about all of this is that we've been able to build a really efficient business, one that is cashflow positive, all the way through that growth journey. And that's in part having a pretty maniacal focus. Well, a focus generally, but a focus in the case of acquisition on one metric. So we think about what we call marketing cash ROI, but it's basically ROAS. So if we can keep that positive, and that's in part, blend between annuals and monthlies in large part that. But it's also about how much you're spending, how quickly you're trying to scale that spend. Thinking about making sure that you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out that day, will keep you a really efficient growth machine. And that's what we've done throughout.

David Barnard:
Yeah. I'd love to hear more about your user stories program. I mean, I don't know how much is public, how much you want to share on the podcast, but I mean these are hard things to stand [inaudible 00:44:22]. But if you have a great community who really loves your app, it does seem like a really great opportunity to use them as part of your paid marketing. So how did you build that? And then what are some of the logistics of that that you can share?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, so I'm quite sure there's a lot more we can do here. I think others have thought about this really deliberately and maybe stood it up in a world where they had Claude Cowork out of the gate and they could have briefs spitting out and sending to people automatically. We did all of this before December 2025 when the stuff was available. So it involved, we have a monthly digest and update to our members. And every now and then we'll say, "Hey, if you wanted to make videos about your experience with Visible, why don't you join our Slack channel?" And we've got a Slack group. And then people would submit an audition tape. And then once they're into Slack, we give a brief every week and people will have the opportunity to share a video with us. And if we use it, then they'll get paid some money. And that's cold hard cash. That's not credits or a discount on a future purchase. But that's been a really great way for us to get real stories from real people who people can recognize themselves in, out there spreading the word.

David Barnard:
That's really cool. I actually had not heard of anybody doing anything like this before. I'm sure nothing's new under the sun. Somebody surely had done it somewhere. I just hadn't heard about it. Is it almost a kind of weekly theme? You and your team think through what would potentially help get attention, go viral or whatever. And then you have multiple creators creating essentially the same video or different videos on that same topic. And then that's just kind of like... And we talk a lot about it on the podcast and I've talked to a lot of folks privately too, just about what the grind of creative is. And so now you kind of have this army of people who really care and actually use the product. So yeah, talk me through a little bit more about exactly how that works and how you think about the briefs, and then even the fact that you're maybe releasing multiple videos very similarly at the same time.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I mean, I'll pick up first on something you said there around virality, and I think that's maybe where we've missed a trick when it comes to taking this approach of getting real content from real members. I think what we do is we get those videos and we'll test them on paid, very small budgets and see where the signal is and we'll scale up the one that seems to be working. And I think that addresses your questions about how you have so many videos of a similar type going out at the same time. Truly only one or two maybe in a week will ever get any scaled spend.
But the thing that a lot of people have started doing now that I think is a really interesting thing for us to explore is getting those things out on small, organic TikToks. So people will just post their videos even if they're not approved or signed off or briefed by us. And then one of those in every 100 might go viral. And I think that's a repeatable strategy that others have used successfully and it's something that I'd be really keen for us to explore. But at the moment, it's more about going and testing those things with a small budget and it's scaling the ones that work.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's fascinating. Tell me more about the influencer programs. So the folks that are already influencers in the chronic illness space, how did you build that out and how do you reach out to those creators or do they reach out to you as you've kind of gotten more visible? Visible.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Pardon the pun. Yeah, I mean we were super lucky here. So our social media manager, Gemma, is for one thing, an amazing human. But she's also someone like much of our team that lives with chronic illness and she's an influencer in her own right. So she already had, I guess, an understanding of what it was like to be creating content in this space and knew a lot of the names and the people that we should reach out to. So that was a great kickstart. We actually started working with Gemma because we'd reached out to her and said, "Hey, would you like to make a video for us?" And we just enjoyed working with her so much that we're like, "Hey, would you like a job?"
So that was a really helpful lean-in. But also I think it's about, I guess, our marketing team being, like you said earlier, broadly a group of people that really understand this space, live with the conditions or have close friends and family who do and therefore, can reach the right people with the right messages because they're not doing this, trying to build from people that they don't understand. It's really coming as a team from a perspective of deep understanding that allows you to create the insights and create the videos, create the content that might scale.

David Barnard:
So how does that work with the influencers on exactly how you compensate them? Are you paying per impression, per post? What have you found work there?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. So it's different between the two programs. So with influencers, we might negotiate depending on their size, that might be about reach or it might be about impressions. It depends, I guess, on the particular influencer. But it's much simpler in our community voices group where if we use your video, it doesn't matter if it is a slam dunk, the one that really, really scales or it's the one that maybe gets $10 of spend and never sees the light again. It's just a flat fee for each video that we go ahead and use.

David Barnard:
Got you. Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, there's so many ways to build out these creative machines. And again, it's just been such a hot topic the past few years of how do you get enough creatives to test? And running both the internal customer program and the influencer program sounds like it's a great way to just have that content machine without necessarily having to have a massive team dedicated to just constantly grinding out new content. What does the actual team who runs that look like? How many people do you have managing those programs and then managing the spend for the ads that actually do get some traction?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
It's a team of two. We're pretty lean.

David Barnard:
Wow. Oh, my gosh.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
We're pretty lean. I guess, like with everything we do, focus is important. And I think we found signal in this and then have been able to kind of have a team that are just really great at it. So that's the way it works for us.

David Barnard:
So we've been talking about all the content and the paid marketing, but we hadn't talked much. You kind of alluded to it earlier, but that you send most traffic or all traffic to the web. What does that look like?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, so again, it's not an area we've tested very much and I think there's a heap of optimization to be done. But yeah, all of our traffic currently just goes to the landing page. And we've had one quiz that I think went up when we went live in October of '23 and it hasn't changed since, but it's a classic web funnel and I think it does a couple of things well. So it helps understand a bit more about you and whether you are a fit. And the truth is that our product isn't for everyone. And it would be inconsistent with what we're trying to do in the world to just make people buy it. We have to ask some questions about your experience and whether or not pacing in particular, but also Visible as a product is the right fit for you.

David Barnard:
I want to interrupt there and just say, another kind of counterintuitive thing that a lot of people in this podcast can be like, "What the heck are you talking about, David?" But I genuinely think more people should do this kind of qualification. And again, if you're just trying to get your app to 40K in MRR and flip it and make a quick buck, go ahead and stop listening. This isn't that podcast episode for you. But if you're trying to build an enduring business and you're thinking about the long term, qualifying your customers, it's so counterintuitive, but you just build such a better business by not stringing along the people who might pay you, but then not actually get any value. You're going to get worse reviews. Yes, you may be able to juice conversion, but you're going to kill retention. You get wrong product signals about the app. I mean, there's just so many layers to having the wrong people pay you doesn't make for a great business in the long run.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. For sure. And I think a web quiz is a great mechanism for that. You're literally asking questions to someone and you can explain and make sure they fully understand what it is that they're getting themselves into, which yeah, I mean, don't get me wrong, there is opportunity. For example, landing everyone on the landing page rather than directly into the quiz is probably not best practice and that's something that will change. But yeah, this all speaks to the opportunity that there is there, whether it's around web quiz optimization, spinning out new quizzes. In our case, maybe for different conditions or different goals that you might have. This is something that other apps have done to great success and it's something that we should definitely do. But yeah, it's not been our focus until now. So while we're thinking about this and why I was really keen to chat to you, David, is that we're hiring for a role to kind of own all of this stuff, all of these levers that sit untouched. It's going to be a super exciting opportunity for the right person to come in and run with.

David Barnard:
Nice. I usually save this to the end, but since you brought it up, we'll do the pitch here. So if you're listening to this podcast and you got all the way through, that means you care and are aligned with what Luke is trying to do here with Visible. And what a great company to go join. Pull a few levers and look like an absolute rockstar hero because there's so much low-hanging fruit to do. So we'll include a link to the job post in the description and everything. Because yeah, again, I mean I've been kind of gushy on this podcast because I'm so aligned, having suffered from a chronic illness for as long as I have.
But it seems like you're a really great company, really trying to make something great in the world. And then your numbers reflect it. I mean, 10 million in ARR with a single channel without even trying very hard, with no optimization hardly at all, you've really got something here. And I think for the right person, it's just going to be an incredible team to join, an incredible opportunity to join at this stage with so much low-hanging fruit. So very long pitch, but-

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Thank you. You sold it for me, David.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Yeah, hopefully this lands you at least a few good resumes. But I did want to keep talking through web as a channel as well in that a lot of people are moving to the web now away from app because of the app store fees and stuff like that. For y'all as a hardware attached product, you don't have to have IAP in the app at all. So it's kind of like some folks don't even fully have this option. But how do you think about the web and have you thought about sending people to the app? How do you think about the store fees? And then I know on the web, it even gives you additional opportunity with HSA and FSA payments and things like that.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I mean, for us, it was clear early on that we would have to sell via the web because you can't sell hardware via in-app payments, you literally can't do it. So we had to build out a web payment flow. But as you say, I think there's a few key tactical advantages. One is around being able to introduce new payment methods, in this case, HSA, FSA. But for other companies that aren't us, there are other things that might be of value, be that localized payment methods or some of these buy now, pay later offerings that you can get via Stripe. But there's also benefits around attribution, being able to send better signals back to the app platforms. And then of course, there's that 30% fee that you do have to pay if you're using IAP. So it was actually just, we didn't have an option, but it's something that we've been able to experience some other benefits for as well.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Thinking through this and what we just talked about, I do think it makes a lot of sense for your business. My advice has generally been, pick up the low-hanging fruit you can pick up in the app directly and use Apple's in-app purchase because consumers generally like it. It's easy. And for all your comments on payment options and things like that, yes, you can't do HSA, FSA through your Apple account, but Apple and Google both work hard globally to accept as many forms of payment as they can and it just simplifies so many things.
So my advice has been, pick up the low-hanging fruit in the app. But what we were just talking about before this is for your business, you don't necessarily want the low-hanging fruit. You want somebody who's more kind of committed and into it for the long run and you want to have that kind of the quiz leading into it before payment and things like that. And so the web just gives you so much more flexibility and it kind of forces that level of buy-in that you wouldn't necessarily get from the kind of casual person landing in.
And I've talked to a few people about this. I forget which episode recently we talked about it, but somebody who downloads an app to solve a problem is just a really different mindset than somebody who sees an ad that presents a problem and you need to kind of nurture them along that this combination of hardware and product is the solution. And it's just a very different mindset being on the web kind of researching something versus being in an app onboarding funnel trying to get to a end goal state.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. And I guess, I mean, you see some of this in our data as well. This is high consideration stuff. So median time from someone landing on our website to making a purchase is 10 days. So people are going off and doing their research. As you say, they're maybe setting off an agent to figure out, is this the tool for me? And that's kind of what we want. We don't want to sell something to someone that won't have much use for it. But I guess there's also a truth in the fact that you can't do a lot of the things that you can do in the app anyway. So free trials, for instance, there's a lot of best practice around trial length, having trial opt-in on the paywall, all of these things.
It's not possible when you're selling a hardware product. You can't sell something for free. So it's a slightly different world. And this is what I meant earlier when I spoke about having an e-commerce business on top of a subscription business. Really, the things that we might look to learn from other really kind of benchmark companies out there might actually be people that have amazing product pages. They are explaining the technical specs of a device in a really good way rather than maybe what's best practice in apps.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Also fascinating. And you brought up an interesting point there about not having a free trial and a hardware product. How do you think about de-risking that? Because a free trial is kind of the offload easy de-risk, but I've seen a lot of apps starting to try other things. For people who are convinced that it's a solution, giving a 20% discount if they don't take a free trial. So you don't do that, but it's that same kind of de-risking where once people are really convinced they're going to buy, they buy and you don't need that free trial to convince them to buy.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
So what we do have is I guess the free app as an opportunity. It's still there. There's still some amazing value in it. You just don't get a wearable, but that is a way for people to go have a play, understand what we're all about, feel the kind of quality of the product before they make a decision. And that ends up being a really big chunk of our acquisition. And we really don't push the free app at all. The free app is all still kind of word of mouth. There's a tiny section on our website that says, "You know, you can have this free app as well." And that's kind of on purpose because really, we see the value of our product.
And you see this in our metrics as well, like PMF scores, everyone that comes through does a PMF survey and the wearable membership is way out there. Whereas the free app is necessarily, there's no wearable, there's no real-time data. You can scan your HRV by putting your finger on your phone, but it's not life-changing for people. But what it does do is it gives you an impression of the kind of value you can experience if you were to go ahead and buy the wearables. That's probably the key way in which we de-risk this decision.

David Barnard:
One thing I wanted to touch on, because we do need to wrap up here pretty soon, but I wanted to make sure we touch on this before we wrapped, is the kind of fundraising journey because I thought it was really interesting. So you took the angel seed very early just to kind of get things going. What funding and how have you thought about it since then?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, so I think there are broadly two parts, right? There's the bootstrappers who are like, "Hey, I'm going to go do whatever I can to avoid getting into the trap of VC." And there are some people who go ahead and raise heaps of money. Again, unlike other companies, we kind of taken this middle ground. We raised some money pre-seed, pre-product to just build a small team to deliver something. And then we grew to, I think, seven million in revenue cashflow positive before we decided to take some more money on.
So we did a very small by industry standard Series A at the beginning of the year from a super aligned investor, someone that understood what we were all about. And we decided not to publicize that. And that was in large part because our members don't care if we're raising money. It doesn't matter. And I think it so often is a signal of, or something the founders fall into trap off. They are in that kind of VC half of the... If you're in the bootstrappers half, you're on LinkedIn talking about how great it is bootstrapping.
If you're in the VC part, you're celebrating just how many millions you've raised. We don't view that as a proxy for success. It's absolutely not what we want to go out there and celebrate. In this case, we raised some money because it would enable us to do some cool stuff, especially when it comes to data science, especially when it comes to the core product team that we wanted to do that we were otherwise kind of, we couldn't invest in quite so heavily when we were trying to stay cashflow positive every month.
And that was the right decision for us. But yeah, it wasn't necessarily the path we had to take. And I'm proud that we still think deeply about building a sustainable business that's here for the long term because that's what our community needs. They don't need some flash in the pan product that will disappear after 24 months. And we haven't been building the business that way and we won't be.

David Barnard:
Yeah, yeah. That makes a ton of sense. And then I love that you didn't even announce the fundraising. And I was thinking about this because I saw that you didn't do that. And for a company like Visible, I do think it makes a ton of sense because when people go search Visible, they're searching for a solution and seeing some random TechCrunch article or something like that, if that got picked up in SEO and you have no control over how they frame things and anything like that, it's just such a different audience.
If you're like revenue cap, B2B SaaS, us raising, being a part of Y Combinator, raising from YC Continuity, getting mentioned in TechCrunch, that actually builds trust with the community because like, "Wow, they're a real company, they have money to grow," and things like that. But that's just such a different audience. So I think it's really cool that you were self-aware enough to not make a big splash about it in part for just the community doesn't care and that's who we care about.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Yeah, exactly right. I think it makes sense for B2B companies, but I can't see why it would ever make sense for a consumer company, unless it's maybe like a fintech kind of stocks and shares trading thing where there might be some kind of synergies between the audience that you're building for and the audience of TechCrunch articles. But for us, it didn't make any sense at all.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Well, and then even to your whole point about raising only what you need and not raising too much and building for sustainability versus... I mean, in today's day and age and the fact that you are using AI and you're in health and health tech is blowing up, you probably could have gone and raised 50 million or $100 million with the kind of traction you're seeing and the kind of TAM that you have. And then even in the future expanding beyond just the illness community to more general health and fitness.
It's like I could write that pitch for you and probably land 50 or $100 million with the kind of team and traction and everything and the partnerships and the hardware and everything else. But that's not the path you want to be on because you raise 50, you raise a 100, and all of a sudden, you have to deliver a $10 billion outcome or you get sold off for parts or whatever. And so even just being thoughtful about how much you raise, who you raised from, just kind of speaks to what you're building there.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. I think Godspeeds the companies that do that, but you're right. I think it leads to the kind of decisions that aren't necessarily in the long-term interest of a company. If you're raising that kind of money, you're expected to spend it. And I think that can be a trap for a lot of founders, and it was one that we were keen to avoid.

David Barnard:
Absolutely. All right. Well, as we wrap up, I want to ask you the three questions I have asked every guest now. What is the most impactful experiment, change or something you did in the last year, your biggest win of the last year?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. So I think our biggest win is, we had a kind of no-code thing that we built our web funnel on. And I mean, one of the reasons why we weren't able to test anything was because it was on this super flaky tool. We were like, "If we touch that, it's going to fall over, so let's just leave it." So we've rebuilt all of that in-house now and we've got our own amazing internal dashboard where our new hire that comes in can come and conduct some amazing experiments and different variants and things that will hopefully unlock an even better performance through that funnel. So that was cool. No longer being constrained by that tool and that editor.

David Barnard:
That's awesome. All right, the next question, what's the worst experiment or change that you made in the past year, your biggest fail?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
So our biggest fail would be, it's on the core product side, so actually a feature that we built. We tried to launch a product, a feature that would help you make sense of some of your data in natural language. We figured that this was a great way to get with the trend of AI and people experiencing things in natural language. And our first cut of that really did not work. We shipped, as we do with a lot of features, it went out in our early access hub and people were like, "We hate this." So that was a really good learning. And it was super naive. So we've gone back to the drawing board on that. We still got conviction that helping people make sense of their data in a kind of conversational or a natural language way is like, there's so much we can do, but our first cut was a fail.

David Barnard:
Yeah. That's really cool though. So you only rolled it out in your early access community. And so that fail didn't actually make it to the broader community and you didn't get that kind of negative sentiment across your entire customer community.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. We're really deliberate about rollout. And I think maybe you spoke about the kind of brain fog and the change resistance. We have to be really careful with how we consider rolling things out and often come to our community with some data about why we're doing this thing. We're making this change because we've seen in early access that it's delivered 20% improvement in X, and it is X percent easier for people with colorblindness. And this is an important way to kind of bring people along for the journey because a lot of people that rely on a tool every day, they just don't want it to change. They're like, stop adding stuff. So early access hub is a really great way of us being able to get around that particular issue.

David Barnard:
Last question. Growth would be easier if?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
So for us, that would be if Visible was available on insurance. That is something we're really dead set on achieving. It's just an incredibly long road that requires a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of health economic evidence, conversations with payers in various states. We are not there yet, but it's absolutely where we're going. So we talk about being on a three-step thing, build an amazing consumer app for hundreds of thousands of people. Use that app to build out evidence and research that you can use to become regulated and get reimbursed. And the third stage is being available on insurance. But I think it might take us another few years.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that's a very ambitious goal and hard to achieve, but it sounds like you're well on your way to being able to make the pitch. I mean, you already have research, got partnerships with the leader in the industry for hardware, so you're on the path.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
For sure. That's my hope anyway.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Well, we already pitched the role, but anything else you wanted to shout out as we wrap up?

Luke Martin-Fuller:
I think just if you're interested in what we're building, the problem we're solving, maybe have your own experience, I'd just love to hear from you. We're always looking to hire smart people, especially if you're interested in growth and product and you're listening to this podcast, reach out. LinkedIn's the best place to find me.

David Barnard:
Awesome. Luke, thank you so much for joining me. This was a very different conversation than we typically have in the Sub Club Podcast. I actually would love feedback from folks if you enjoyed this and would love a little more kind of off the wall, different perspectives. And I told Luke before the podcast, it's like, because I'm so invested in the chronic illness community myself, having suffered from a chronic illness for so long, that I didn't want to turn it into a health and wellness podcast, that we did want to stay somewhat focused on subscription app best practices and whatnot. So hopefully we bridge the gap well enough, but I would love feedback as well on whether you enjoyed the episode or not, especially if you got all the way through it. So Luke, thank you so much for joining me. This was a blast.

Luke Martin-Fuller:
Thank you very much, David.

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