Cultivating Organic Growth with Viral Loops — Guillem Ros Salvador, Hevy

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 Revenue Cat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust Revenue Cat 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 Barnard, and with me today, Revenue Cat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Guillem Ros, co-founder and CEO at Heavy, a workout planning and tracking app. Prior to founding Heavy Guillem, launched several startups, built a bunch of apps, and then worked as a product manager at Fitness App 8Fit. On the podcast, we talk with Guillem about how Heavy got traction early on, growing without paid marketing, and why you might not want to raise your price even if customers are willing to pay it. Hey, Gui, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Thanks for having me. Been a long time coming. I've been listening to your podcast for a while now.

David Barnard:

Oh, thanks, man. And Jacob, always nice to chat with you.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I'm super excited to be chatting with Gui, today. We've been going back and forth. I mean, you've been a Revenue Cat user for at least three years, I think.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

I don't know. I was looking today.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

But one of our early users, and have always been really good at giving us good feedback and helping us develop the product, and I think you have a good sense of the industry and stuff. So, I'm excited to dig in on the story and learn what you guys have been up to.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, sounds good.

David Barnard:

All right, so Gui, you have this fantastic Twitter thread. We're going to link to it. We could spend 45 minutes just talking through this thread, but it's such a cool story how you got started in apps. So, I just wanted to ask, where did you get started? And then, what led up to building Heavy, which we're going to talk about today?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So, I think the first main thing was that I was around 16 years old, and I just wanted to build something. And the first thing that came to mind was building physical products, but building physical products as a 16-year-old, it's pretty inaccessible and super expensive. So, I was like, "Hey, these apps are a new thing. Maybe I can start playing around with that." So, yeah, just started with building some games on Objective-C, moved over to some game builders, building some more complex games and stuff. And, yeah, after a few years of actually being pretty deep in the hyper casual mobile app gaming industry, building tons of app games, I'd reached the point where I didn't have the success that I wanted. None of the apps that I was making were working out. I think maybe after five years of building apps, I had maybe made $200 or $300 in total, maybe over 10 or 15 games.

David Barnard:

I'll tell you, it's great to have done that while you were in high school, college, living with your parents and stuff.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah.

David Barnard:

I had a few of those total bombs, but I had kids to raise.

Jacob Eiting:

That's why you don't tell anybody your revenue.

David Barnard:

Yeah. But it's such a great learning experience. I mean, every one of those failures you learn so much from.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, it really is. And I built a couple non-gaming apps during that time, as well. But I think it got to a point where I was like, "Okay, I'm really invested in this industry. This is what I want to do, but I haven't had that success yet. So, maybe something's missing in my skillset." So, that's when I went to work at a startup called 8Fit Fitness app, and that's where I put all these different experiences that I had had before altogether. Just being a indie game developer, or just indie developer period, sometimes questions your skillset because you're designing a little bit, you're marketing a little bit, you're coding, you're conceptualizing ideas and monetization and this and that. So, for me, it was weird because I didn't know how I would fit into a real company, but being a product manager made sense because that's what you do. You're touching a bit of everything and-

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

... doing design.

Jacob Eiting:

Did somebody tell you that, "oh, you sound like a product manager?" Did you take some job test score thing like you do in high school-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No. No, I didn't.

Jacob Eiting:

... to tell you what your skills are?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No. Actually, what I did was I applied to around 70 jobs, and I kept track of everything in an Excel sheet, and I was applying to online marketing manager, junior intern for whatever. But where I had the most responses was in being a product manager. So, I was like, "Okay, maybe this is something that fits into me." I started reading more into it.

Jacob Eiting:

[inaudible 00:04:54] Driven Career Development is what that is, I think.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

And I was like, "Okay, this really fits."

David Barnard:

It's an indie hack right there. If you're struggling with your indie apps, and you can afford to go take a junior level PM job to get that-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

... context to bringing it all together, building the great product, user interviews, a lot of the skills you don't necessarily build if you're focused on engineering and just building the apps yourself. So, then, I mean the story goes, I'm going to skip ahead a little bit, but then you got laid off at 8Fit, which I'm sure at the time just felt crushing. But you got right back up on your feet. So, what happened after that?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, there's a big layoff at the company, and I was like, "Okay, it's now or never. I want to build something again." It had been around a year and a half since I had built something up again. So, I got together with now my co-founder, Desmond. He also worked at 8Fit, and the idea behind Heavy, and the pain point that I had, was back in university days, I was actually doing a lot of triathlons. And it was really fun to do triathlons because you're in this little team, and you're always training together. And after training, everyone will upload their activities to Strava, and you'll compete on different segments.

And it was a combination of community, tracking, and competition. And when I moved out to Berlin to work for 8Fit, I wasn't doing triathlon anymore, but I started going to the gym. And anyone that's gone to the gym will tell you that it can be a pretty solitary experience. So, I was missing that community feel from those triathlon days. And we just got to thinking, "Okay, maybe we can take that Strava vibe and apply it to weightlifting." And David, I know you're a big Fitbod fan. I was listening to the podcast the other day.

Jacob Eiting:

He says he is the biggest fan of every app we have.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But yeah, in the beginning, social doesn't feel like it makes that much sense as a new user. But then, you get into it, and you're like, "Whoa, I can start seeing my friends workouts. I can see my brother's workouts, and we can compete with each other." And it actually becomes a pretty important retention driver because, not only do you invest so much into the product with your own data and tracking and analytics, but also with the community that you form on the app.

Jacob Eiting:

Did you have the social aspect as part of your thesis from the very beginning?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Or was that something that you developed?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Definitely from the beginning

David Barnard:

You had this idea, Strava for weightlifting, and you knew it was going to be social heavy. What was the MVP? How did you get to 1.0? I mean, imagine having worked at 8Fit and probably having the bar set super high. Sometimes, getting to that 1.0 people will grind for years thinking, "Oh, it's got to be actually Strava, but for weightlifters versus getting a 1.0 out." But you got a 1.0 out pretty quick. So, how'd you draw those lines in the sand to actually shift?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So, thankfully, I have an amazing co-founder, which will shoot down and just cull a lot of the ideas and crazy plans that I have. I initially went out and did a big exploration on what the app could look like as my idea of an MVP. We sat down together, and we're like, "Okay, now what is the real MVP? Let's cut this, let's cut this, let's cut this." And it turns out that I had features designed back in the day, four years ago now, four and a half years ago, that still haven't been built to this day. So, it was a great exercise of getting rid of the non-essential stuff. And at the end of the day, you have to build something super lean, especially it was just two of us. We wanted to bootstrap from the beginning. So, it just made sense to keep it simple.

David Barnard:

How did you decide what to cut and what not to cut? What were the things that went into that decision making process? Because that's so hard.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

I mean, it's honestly one of the hardest things in any product building. We do that at Revenue Cat. What feature are we going to build next? And then, what's most important?

Jacob Eiting:

We also have that list I made in 2017 that we still haven't built yet. That was going to be part of the MVP.

David Barnard:

I still have that list from 2019, when I joined. I was like, "Oh yeah, Dave, we're going to do this and we're going to do that."

Jacob Eiting:

If only building could work at the speed of thinking. Am I right?

David Barnard:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, follow me on LinkedIn.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, maybe not with AI.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah.

David Barnard:

So, what was the thinking behind which features to cut, which features to keep, and what was going to actually be meaningful for that 1.0 to be successful?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So, from the very beginning, we had three pillars, which was tracking, analytics, and social. And we had to build an MVP of each of those three pillars. We wanted each to be valuable enough during the first few months of development. So, some apps just do tracking. Some apps just do analytics, like a whoop or something. Some apps are just social. And trying to put all those three things together, we had to be pretty aggressive in what we excluded from the MVP.

David Barnard:

So then you get to 1.0, you launch the app, and millions of people download it, and it's super successful on day one. You get all sorts of press. I mean, honestly, when I was prepping for this podcast, I was thinking, if you had told me in 2019, when you launched, that somebody was launching another weightlifting app, I'd have been like, "Oh geez, there's no way. It's so competitive. The fitness category is played out. I would never have thought to launch a fitness app in 2019." So, I imagine it was a bit of a struggle. Tell me about those early days with the 1.0.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, I think similar to a lot of app devs that build a decent product, users just start trickling in in the app store. There's this build it and they'll come. Of course, it's not true, but true on the app store.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, if you have a little bit of quality, right? A unit, a single atom of utility, right?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

That will be true.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Exactly. But, yeah, so users started trickling in. We saw good retention, good feedback, and we were off to the races. So, we launched around July 2019, and, to our surprise, what happened in February 2020? COVID.

David Barnard:

Right.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. We're trying so hard during those first initial months to get in touch with Apple, get a feature, get a little boost, and we got Apps We Love featured, which, for us, was our first biggest feature by Apple. I think it was someday in March, and the day after we were Apps We love featured in the US, the entire US shut down, the whole world shut down, all the gyms closed, and this momentum that we had going into 2020 just got completely shut down by COVID.

Jacob Eiting:

So, it was actually a headwind. I would've assumed the opposite because, I think, so many people were bored, and weightlifting is a thing, but I guess most folks don't have an at-home setup, right? Most-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

... folks have to go to a facility of some kind.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Exactly. A lot of our users go to the gym. Yeah, we didn't have the luck that a lot of at-home workout apps had back in the day. So, it was a big block for, I'd say, maybe around a year. 2020 and maybe the beginning of 2021 was pretty rough with COVID.

Jacob Eiting:

You guys didn't do anything to adapt the app for the circumstances?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No, no. What we thought is, right now, no one's going to be building gym apps because COVID is not allowing anyone to go to the gym.

Jacob Eiting:

If it was a dumb idea before, now nobody's going to do it.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. There's no guarantee that gyms are even going to come back to its full potential as they were before, right? But we just had the thinking of COVID will pass at some point. We'll come out the other end, and when we do come out, we'll just be better prepared than other competitors who maybe pivoted and wanted to do at-home workouts or something.

David Barnard:

I did want to step back. So, you said you built it and people came. Were there specific keywords that you know started ranking for? Was there word of mouth? We glossed over that a little bit, but this is the real sticking point for so many apps is that they launch, and just nobody finds them. So, did you do ASO? Did you know, "These are the keywords I think we can rank for, and they're reasonably popular?" Were you getting 10 downloads a day? Were you getting like a hundred? And did that grow? I really want to dig into this early you built it and they came because it's just not the case for so many indie apps.

Jacob Eiting:

You guys were doing some growth stuff. Were you running ASA and things like that in the early, early days?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No, during the early, early days, my ASO levels were very, very basic. We were just targeting the keywords that everyone else was targeting. And I feel like that's a good 80% approach for a lot of apps. Just do what everyone else is doing.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

At least in the very beginning, just getting off the ground.

Jacob Eiting:

You'll at least beat all the people that aren't doing anything, right?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, we just started like that and yeah, we were getting five, 10 downloads a day, and it slowly started growing.

Jacob Eiting:

See, I think that's interesting to actually talk about the numbers of downloads. To start in the single digits-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Oh, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... or double digits-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... which sounds like nothing. But it is nothing, if you talk in comparisons to a scaled app where you're getting hundreds and thousands a day. But in those early, early days when really all you need is a couple of warm bodies to try the app to come back. It's all you need.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

You just need a little bit of that spark.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

One, to keep you going. I think that's probably a good lesson. This happened for Revenue Cat, certainly, in the first six months to a year. And in B2B, especially in developer oriented frameworks and stuff like that, it is famine, right? Nothing for weeks, and then you get one hit, but that's all you need.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Consumer, you 10 or a hundred X that, but still you really can, you talk about bootstrapping, that's really what it is, just meal to meal. If you can get five in today, maybe try to get 10 in tomorrow, and 12 in the next day, and you just live to fight each day, and extract what you can from those five or 10. Being probably primarily at that scale, you're not going to make meaningful revenue. Maybe you will, but mostly you're going to get insights, you're going to get understanding, you're going to get customers, you're going to get word of mouth.

But, yeah, I think there's probably a lot of apps that could have been great if founders and the developers had not gotten self-conscious about how bad their downloads were in the early days, if they really believed in their thesis. Now, there's good counter arguments to that, too. I think there's this tremendous sunk cost fallacy or opportunity cost story. Sometimes, you'll see people focus on an idea for way too long. It never gets traction. When did you know that you maybe had something? You started with a trickle. Was it months that you started to see things go continuously? Or was there ever a moment where maybe you and your founder were like, "Okay, I think this is real?"

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, I think that moment was, and this answers David's question before, as well, it was when we started realizing that little communities were forming on the app of people that we had no idea who they were. So, we have the suggested users cell in the app, and sometimes you'd see a new user who you would never seen and you'd click on them and start seeing, "Whoa, they're following three people and they have three followers? That's a little group." And then, you'd click into those followers, and then discover that they were all following each other. And we're like, "It's not our friends and family anymore. People are forming these little communities, and little almost influencers are forming inside the app." With the super rudimentary algorithm we had for suggesting users, good users would go to the top of that suggestion.

Jacob Eiting:

You would actually elevate users who are highly active and things like this-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

... so folks could see things.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

Even if they didn't have a network coming into the app, or they weren't recommended into the app by somebody. Interesting.

David Barnard:

And having that social component probably was a nice flywheel. Yeah, you started out this first few months, 5, 10, 12 downloads, but then those 5, 12, 10 downloads start turning into you get 1.2 users for every download, and then you're getting 1.3 users for every download, and people are inviting more friends. And having that social component is a pretty incredible flywheel to start building.

Jacob Eiting:

That K-factor, how many downloads you get per download, each download begets one download, that's runaway growth, right? But that can be really, really hard to measure in the early days because it's probably a power law distribution where most users recommend nobody. And then, you'll have a handful of power users who spread the word of mouth crazy, right?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. And not even in the early days. Even now, it's really hard to measure that K-factor.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, because there's K-factor amongst all downloads. There's K-factor amongst some limited set. I remember people used to focus on it a ton. I think it's also really tough to tell when a user is downstream of a recommendation from another user. There can be tracking and things maybe, but a lot of the time, somebody bumps into somebody at the gym or somebody sees the app and says, "What are you using?" And then, they may never send a link, or they may never become friends in the app and things like this. But I can see how as a "this is real" moment, seeing those molecules of social graphs start to form where you've got cohesive units and stuff like that. Did you reach out to those users and talk to them? Have you made that a part of your practice to-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No.

Jacob Eiting:

... get on the phone with people if you can?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No. We used to do it back in the day, but, no. It's not something that we've done too often. We try to take in as much feedback as possible. We ask for feedback all the time inside the app, and we're always in contact with users by email, and that seems to be a great way to just gather feedback. But, yeah, I wish I had baked that into my routine.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's not too late.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, it's not.

Jacob Eiting:

You can make a call today. I'm on the phone with a customer right now. See? You see how I did that?

David Barnard:

So, you were bootstrapping. At what point did this become a full-time job or pay the bills? Were you just living on ramen and actually working full-time on this? Or were you taking consulting gigs? At what point did it actually start making enough revenue to provide a living for you and your co-founder?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

It probably took us around a year, year and a half since we launched Heavy Pro, the subscription part, which was, I think, nine months since we started working on the app.

David Barnard:

Wow.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So-

David Barnard:

Two years. More than two years total.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, probably a year and a half or something since we started working on it, we started becoming ramen profitable. But, I have to say that, when I got laid off for my job, Germany is fantastic, and there were unemployment benefits that could be taken advantage of. And while there was no revenue coming in, that was extremely helpful. It's an order of magnitude harder to take something off the ground if you don't have the ability to think long-term and without constant pressure on top of you that you just have to make ends meet and just pay for your bills at the end of the month. Thankfully, that was taken care of by unemployment, and that just allows you to think without optimizing for short-term gains. And that comfort can be living at home, as well, which I also did afterwards because unemployment ran out, and we still weren't making enough money. I moved back home, and just to be able to be calm and be able to think long-term.

Jacob Eiting:

This is something Sam Altman's talked about a lot, or used to in the day, which is talking about someone's personal burn rate as a measure of their ability to take opportunities. And there's ways you can scale that up and scale that down. Some, as we get later in life, they just happen usually due to scale up through if you're having kids or whatever. And I think it's, in some ways, why entrepreneurs, start-up entrepreneurs, skew young because they often have fewer responsibilities tied to them. But, yeah, I mean, it's totally true. I think it's one of the reasons so many people raise money, right? It's not always because you're thinking about, "Oh, this is a billion dollar exit, and I'm a good fit for venture capital." It's because you want to hold onto one boat before you grab another, and raising money can be a good way to do that.

Revenue Cat, we had a gap, but that was, again, my wife and I had saved a lot of money that we burned for this nine months when I was not working or not getting paid, and then we eventually raised. But I think it's also something that gets overlooked, and it's a shame. And it's why I think that long-term thinking thing, I don't think of enough people think about it in terms of how do I structure. We're talking about the very early beginnings of building something. How do I structure my life in order to allow me to have a solid crack at this? Because if your personal runway had run out sooner, and you had a half success, but not something you could live on, you might have just, not wanted to give up, but mentally that can start to really weigh, and you can start to looking across the fence.

Is the grass greener? Should I go just get a gig where that they're going to pay me 10K a month, and I'm going to be comfortable and stuff like that? And yeah, it's tough. I call it the killing zone when an app is between zero and $10,000 in revenue, basically. There's just a million ways you can die in that period. Quoty fingers "die." The app, whatever, doesn't take off, founders run out of money, all this stuff, but then you cross that ramen profitable, being another term. Once you get past that, then it's, well, okay, it may not be exploding, but you've got something, right? And you can start to now reinvest, and the numbers are big enough now that things start to move. But that's a pretty long run. I don't think all founders would've grounded out that long.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, I think that's a super pivotal moment, as well, because you transition from being super stressed about money and just trying to make ends meet and burning savings to, "Oh, okay. Now, if it just stays here, if I'm just ramen profitable, and I can just coast now, that allows me to start thinking bigger picture again. I can start thinking longer term."

David Barnard:

Yeah, it was really cool in that Twitter thread that, I think, when you were 16 or sometime really young, you had this piece of cardboard-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Oh, yeah.

David Barnard:

... that was a thermometer. Oh, you still have it?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Well, it's going to be super messy, but there it's okay.

David Barnard:

Okay. For those of you listening on the podcast, he pans over-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Oh, no.

David Barnard:

... and shows this cardboard thermometer he made that goes from zero to a million downloads.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

It's over there. It's blurry.

David Barnard:

So, what's really cool is that you ground and ground and ground on Heavy, and I believe it was in December, you hit a million downloads. But what's so cool is that that's been accelerating. I believe you hit another milestone. Did you hit it in May as expected?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. Yeah. We just hit 2 million users yesterday. Or two days ago.

David Barnard:

Wow.

Jacob Eiting:

So, let's add that up. So, you took, what, three years to get to one?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

And then five months to get to two?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

I believe they call that a hockey stick. But it's amazing how many systems are like this, right? If you can get out of that long, it feels flat, it feels super slow. But once you can get out of there, I'm sure that wasn't just great product, right? You've had to do something. Did you introduce a growth tactic in the last year? What has caused the acceleration in your mind?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Frankly, I think just the compounding of all the product energy that we've put into it over the past few years. And then, the big jump happened in New Year's. So, everyone knows that, for fitness apps, they just really grow during New Year's resolutions. And, yeah, we've been seeing that over the past few years, and it just elevates you in comparison to where you were last year. And I think you're able to sustain that with a good product. Otherwise, you would just crumble down.

David Barnard:

I imagine part of what's been happening is that as the app has built to that million downloads, you've been teaching the algorithms that you're actually a really great result because people come to your app, they spend money, they retain, and the app stores, both Apple and Google, are getting more and more sophisticated about how the algorithms use those longer term signals for putting you higher in search results. So, I imagine that that's been part of that slow compounding.

Jacob Eiting:

I hope that's true, David.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

I really hope that's true. That's what I was going to say.

Jacob Eiting:

Apple says they're doing it, but Google, maybe. I mean, they have all the signals. They have anonymized usage data, they have revenue data, they have all that stuff. There's no reason they shouldn't rank searches that way, right?

David Barnard:

But then, the other thing is, one of the more important things for ranking downloads, I talked to Ariel and McKayley about this a couple podcasts ago, is ratings. And so, when you're a really good app, and you're optimizing for people to rate the app, even if they aren't doing those deeper product signals, which there are hints that they are, but ratings is actually a good proxy for that. So, when you're getting more and more ratings, it's building up that ASO. I wanted to switch gears and start talking pricing. So, in the fitness app category, your app is dirt cheap. And so, I wanted to talk through the thinking behind that, any experimentation you've done. So, for those listening at home, the app is $3 a month, $24 a year, or $75 lifetime unlock. And that $75 lifetime unlock is about what most fitness apps charge annually. So, yeah, I'd love to dig into your thinking on pricing, and how that's been going for you

Jacob Eiting:

You eat ramen, David, and then you can undercut all your competitors on margin. That's how capitalism works. It's brilliant.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, there were a couple of apps when we started that had around similar pricing, maybe like 50% more expensive than us, but still cheap. And, to be honest, in the beginning, we were like, "We don't feel comfortable charging more than them because we just started the subscription. We just started the app. We don't feel like we're providing enough value for it to be more expensive than our competitors." So, it started like that, and then it transitioned into, "Hey, wait a minute, we're building a better app than our competitors. It's social, and it's cheaper. It's a no-brainer for people to switch over from competitors to us." And yeah, we've just left it like that for the past few years. It's definitely not the most optimized way to set up pricing for the app, but we have to balance something else, which is our main growth engine, which is social.

If we're constantly experimenting with pricing $25 a year, 50, 70, a hundred, 150, that user trust, especially because it's a social network and people talk, starts eroding over time. So, we don't want to, one, betray users trust, although pricing experiments doesn't necessarily have to do that. But going too far into that direction, I think definitely will. At the end of the day, we want to optimize for people telling their friends about it, and we think that people are more likely to tell their friends about it if it's an absolute steal. And it's an absolute no-brainer. "Yeah, the free version is great. There's so many free features. The paid version is pretty affordable." So, it just becomes a easier sell when people tell their friends about it.

Jacob Eiting:

It also goes into when you buy an app, you're paying for their acquisition model in a lot of cases-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

That, as well. I hate that.

Jacob Eiting:

... right? So, apps that have to clear $80, and actually Nico, a friend of the pod, Revenue Cat investor, was just on the 20VC podcast, Harry Stebbings' podcast, talking about this. That first year renewal and that first year LTV as being such an important for profitable acquisition models and scaling, but as a bootstrapped deal, where you guys don't necessarily have to play that game in order to prove out a growth rate and prove out all these things, you're doing the right thing. Like you said, it's unoptimized, it's only locally in terms of maximum extraction. You're not thinking about all the other things that go into what makes you guys a challenger in the space. If you were charging the same as, I don't know, Fitbod, or whoever your next biggest competitor is, you wouldn't have an opportunity.

You have to create an opportunity for you. You have to zig when they zag. And pricing can be a way, and I think that's important, too. We have tools for this now, and I'm always hammering on pricing as a big lever, but you can't factor every single thing in. You can't factor in broader marketing strategy. Like I said, just look at all of the objections in your product, and you're able to say there's actually probably four things there. Can it be cheaper, can it be better, and can it be more well known, or something like this. But the fourth is can we operate in a way that lets us do all of those things so the customers get all the things they want. The company has to suffer, but it just probably means you have a different operating model in the backend. You're not necessarily pouring into super expensive acquisition and things like this. So, in terms of organic versus inorganic, are you pushing inorganic installs at all? Is that something that you've tried? Or is it, for you, mostly about the organic?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So, we've probably spent under 15K in ads ever.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. Which is probably your competitor's daily budget for ads.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Which is basically nothing. And a lot of it was just credit that we've gotten by collaborating.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay, sure. So, no. The answer is no. You haven't spent anything on acquisition, which is even better because then all of your velocity is free and clear and above water-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... which is incredible.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. We have this really long vision with Heavy, we really think that, given enough years, we can get to a hundred million users. We're at 2 million now. Hopefully, it doesn't take us 50 years.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, you'll be at three in a month by keep carrying this trajectory out.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

I think if you look at super successful, there's really successful products and companies, and then there's the massive unicorns that have gone viral. The Facebooks, the Twitters, the Stravas. A lot of those, I don't think they ever spent any money on acquisition. It was just purely social and building a great product. And that's what we're trying to go for. Maybe not getting billions of users. I don't think the market is big enough, but this pricing allows us to build this social growth engine that could lead us there. I don't think that we'd be able to grow to a hundred million users by jacking up the prices to 75 bucks, and then all of a sudden starting to spend money on Facebook ads.

Jacob Eiting:

The comparison you make, you mentioned Facebook as a comparable growth machine. When Facebook was growing, they were not paying to acquire users. I think about Microsoft, as well, as a company. I'm sure in their enterprise segment's later stage they were, but in the early days, they raised a very small amount of venture capital and were basically profitable the entire time. And you're like, "Oh yeah, and they're a giant business and still are," right? The same with Google, too. Maybe not even thinking about their ads product, but just thinking about the core product.

They didn't have to acquire users. They didn't have to pay to acquire users. It was just all through. And yeah, I do agree that if you can do it without having to pay to acquire users, obviously, that's ideal. I don't think that's not a path for anybody, but I do think that there are some advantages if you can figure out how to grow without this. And then, it becomes one of the tools you can potentially use later on, and every dollar you spend in inorganic acquisition is going to go a lot further than it would if you were purely starting from that model.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. And this is not to say that this isn't something that we're looking into, and that could be really beneficial for us. It's just that, so far, paid acquisition we haven't been able to crack yet.

David Barnard:

But you're not not spending on marketing. I noticed that you had an open position for, I believe it was, a social media marketer, and I saw that that position has been closed.

Jacob Eiting:

Also, you guys have amazing content on your website. Your blog is really rich and good.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Oh, awesome. Thanks.

Jacob Eiting:

Stuff like that.

David Barnard:

What's that person doing? So, you're not not spending money on marketing, you're just not spending money on the typical paid user acquisition where it's like 15K a month on whatever. But you are spending on marketing through building stuff yourself. So, what are they working on?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, just because we've grown up to this point without doing a lot of the traditional marketing. We've gone in an extreme with product development and with marketing. We also have things to learn from the other side. Pricing experimentation, funnel experimentation, more paid advertising. So, yeah, I think that's the role of the new head of marketing that just joined us to start experimenting with a lot of these channels and seeing how paid could potentially accelerate the growth that we're seeing.

Jacob Eiting:

It's always much easier with a product that has some measure of product market fit, too. That's when marketing works. The worst you can do is bring in a marketer when your product isn't really that figured out or doesn't have some proof of that flywheel or some basic thing. And then, that person can have a really hard time being successful because they can only go so far as the product will let them.

David Barnard:

Yeah, I'm super excited for you, man. Getting to this stage with so much product market fit with that social word of mouth component with good ASO search traffic, and things like that, that now it can be an accelerant. So, sounds like with this new hire, you are going to take the business to that next level and figure out at least the low hanging fruit. You may not have to switch your model to, "I paid $80 to acquire a user, so I have to do an $80 annual that converts in seven days," or whatever. But you'll be able to figure out that low hanging fruit that's going to work.

Jacob Eiting:

So, when did you decide to start hiring other people? It's an accelerant, but it's also a liability potentially, right? It can be a good thing and a bad thing. When did you guys make your first hire? And what was the decision like bringing somebody else in?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, no. So, we're 10 people right now, actually.

Jacob Eiting:

Wow.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

So, yeah, we're still a small team, but it's a really good team size because communication hasn't broken down yet. We're still able to bounce ideas back and forth about too much management or bureaucracy. The pipeline is really fluid.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, the number of connections hasn't exploded yet-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... which happens around 15, 20 people. There's more connections than you can possibly conceive-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... once you get past that 12, 15 people.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. So, we started hiring maybe around two and a half years ago. We started with support, then a dev, then we just went from there, another dev, designer, marketer. We could have stayed just me and Desmond. We could have just tried to go the indie route and just make it extremely profitable and zero costs.

Jacob Eiting:

Now, you're somebody's boss, right? It goes from being just having fun with your friend doing computer programs-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

... and then the next thing you know, now you've got payroll and healthcare and all these responsibilities that aren't as fun. No offense to anybody on the call that's an employee of mine, but it's a different game. It changes the game. But it didn't seem like that deterred you guys.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

It was definitely something that we had long conversations about because I think I was more on the side of keeping it super lean and profitable, and Desmond had more of this excitement towards building a team and scaling the human side of Heavy. Nothing is permanent, no decision is permanent, or most. So, we just gave it a try, and we realized that we were just able to amplify our vision for Heavy so much more. And something that neither of us expected is that, when it was just me and Des, we had so many arguments with product and tech and direction and whatever back in the day when it was just the two of us.

Jacob Eiting:

And now you have a common enemy.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

And now, those discussions have gone down so much. We rarely have discussions anymore just because the main thing that made us get into arguments was I was doing product, and he was doing tech. So, I would come up with a bunch of crazy ideas and then he'd be, "All right. Slow down cowboy. This is crazy." And then, there would be conflict there. And then the other side of, "Okay, I want it done this way." And he's like, "Okay, this is the only way we can do it because of technical constraints." But now that that's gone, we're both thinking what's the best thing for the product? And since it's not us that we're giving work to each other and we're creating this conflict, now we can just think a lot more big picture, we can be more relaxed, and I think it's been really good for our co-founder relationship, to be honest.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's really tough. Miguel and I have experienced a similar thing. When the person you're talking to is also the person that potentially has to implement the stupid idea you're telling them right there, it's really hard to disconnect those two things. I don't think this ever stops. I think it's why having a team and sometimes good managers to buffer and filter and refine things can be really good. And also, I mean, you should leave the open for the fact that you guys are now in year three or four. I think also there's a lot of storming in co-founder relationships in those first couple years. And then, if it's anything like my co-founder relationship, you just learn the stuff you fight about, and you just avoid it.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

This is just a thing we will always disagree and fight about, and it doesn't produce anything useful for the company, so we'll just avoid it because it's not something I want to get into today. But that's really great. I mean, I think it's a big leap to bring in other people. It's a big leap to become a boss and start building a company, not just a product. I think the way you articulated it there is something. I asked the question because I've talked to a lot of founders and folks at that precipice of, "We were just ramen profitable, but now if I hire somebody we won't be anymore." And they're like, "Oh, do I just give it away?"

You had the experience, which I had personally, and I think a lot of folks actually do, when you hire the right folks is that like, "Oh, suddenly I can walk chew gum at the same time. I can be doing this thing that's important to me, and I can be looking at the next thing." And if you have room to run, which it sounds like you guys do, and a vision to work on, that's the reason people grow companies, right? It's because more people can do things. Now, you'll get through all these fun phase transitions and stuff like that, but-

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, we're going to have another club about that.

Jacob Eiting:

... if you're thoughtful about it, they're navigable. Yeah, give me a call. I can tell you what not to do. At least they're all navigable.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

If you go back to having that vision and that idea of what you want to build and why, then everything else is downstream of that.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

I think, as well, it becomes a no-brainer to start hiring people when the ambition you have outpaces your pace of development. So, if you just keep wanting more and more and more, and you can't fill up all those ambition expectations, then you're forced to hire. Otherwise, it's just going to take you forever, and we don't live a million years.

David Barnard:

And I know you've shared download numbers, don't share revenue numbers, but at least it's directionally interesting that you've been able to hire 10 people. So, it sounds like you've done really well.

Jacob Eiting:

Well out of the killing zone, right? It's really great to see you guys going from this side project to a thing to now, better or worse, you have a real business.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah. All on Revenue Cat, huh?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. How about that?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

Yeah, I'm just here for the journey to be supportive to SaaS, and whatever else I can do.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Well, that is a great place to wrap up. It was so fun having you on the podcast, Gui. I'm going to share, so theheavyapp.com and your LinkedIn and Twitter. I looked at your careers page. You're not currently hiring, but I'll go ahead and link to that in case you open up any roles. Anything else you wanted to shout out as we wrap up?

Guillem Ros Salvador:

No, just thanks for having me on. It was super fun. Thanks for building an amazing platform for us to grow our business on. It's definitely made us running our business a lot easier.

Jacob Eiting:

No, I hope we played a very, very small part in that. I like to think most of that was internal, but I appreciate it.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

You did.

David Barnard:

All right. Thanks, Gui.

Guillem Ros Salvador:

See you guys.

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.