Freemium Done Right: Lessons From a Multi-Billion-Dollar App — Chris Hulls, Life360

David Barnard:

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me today RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Chris Hulls, founder and CEO of Life360. On the podcast we talk with Chris about how to do freemium the right way, drafting a customer bill of rights to guide product decisions, and why blindly following A-B test results can lead to short-term gains but undermine your business long-term.

Hey, Chris, thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Chris Hulls:

Thanks for having me.

David Barnard:

And Jacob, always nice to have you with me today.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm super excited to talk to the founder of Life360. I was at a Easter party on Sunday and I literally saw somebody using Life360 and I was like, "There's Life360." And here we are.

Chris Hulls:

Was it a mom?

Jacob Eiting:

It was a youth, like somebody maybe 21 years old. I was like, "It's still happening."

Chris Hulls:

That is happening more and more. We were not complaining.

David Barnard:

As we were talking before the podcast, Life360 is kind of one of the slept-on giants of the subscription app industry. It's not mentioned in the same breath as a Strava, a Duolingo, and some of those, but it is an incredible company, and I just checked this morning, you're on the NASDAQ and Australian Stock Exchange with a 1.8 billion USD market cap. Huge successful story in the subscription app space. So I did want to kick off, you've been on a lot of other podcasts and given the full story. I listened to multiple of those. We can put links in the show notes if people want to hear the whole founding story and all that. But I wanted to get the summary of it and then we could dive deeper into the nuts and bolts of building a great subscription app business like you have. So what was the founding story?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, I'll get the very quick version and hit on a few things that are more specific to subscription. So very quickly, the early idea was Hurricane Katrina, help families reconnect after big emergencies. I had that idea in college, so about 20 years ago. I've been doing the company for 18. We've had our one and only pivot in the early days, was to what we're doing now, which was something much bigger. Facebook was getting big for friends, LinkedIn was getting big for professionals. We thought, "Let's go after families."

That part of our pitch is very cliche, but our take was different than everyone else, which was based on our belief that mobile would become ubiquitous, which obviously has, but it was actually controversial way back then. People didn't think teens would be using smartphones. That was the number one reason VCs passed on our seed round. I think it looked like a productivity tool, but our insight was that location was so central to many communications and safety is something you'd pay for, but actually tying it to freemium business models, we figured out that daily communication utility, good free engagement platform paired with safety that people pay for, and that really was our secret monetization sauce. If you go on either end, you can have problems. So we're now up to over 80 million active users, 400 million-ish revenue, growing very quickly, international's taking off, and about 600 employees.

Jacob Eiting:

So that was in 2008 or so? When did the first app come out?

Chris Hulls:

2008, I think. Maybe launched 2009 or something. We were a launch app on Android.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. Which David's point of you being like a sleeper giant. Do you think that's part of the reason, is that you've kind of been... Like, iOS has fine friends baked in and if you're a full iOS family, that might be your tool of choice?

Chris Hulls:

We actually do better in iOS every region, surprisingly.

Jacob Eiting:

Really? I mean, maybe not that surprising to me, but I think the tech press tends to have still an iOS bias, right? If it's not Apple, they tend to overlook things, and I always wondered if that was...

Chris Hulls:

I think that's it. I think we are an example of being in an unanointed category from a VC standpoint. Now that we're public, it's kind of a different ball game, but I think for whatever reason VCs just assumed our category was not a real one and it was a feature, not a platform. And I still sometimes wonder why we are kind of still, relatively speaking, so under the radar. I don't really mind because we have almost no competition, which is weird.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, I also, not to get too much about stock, but you guys have one of these rare stocks that's kind of not looked totally battered over the last decade or five years or so, and I always feel like the over-focused on companies, like they tend to just swing around with the whims of the market.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. I mean, we've swung, but we never were overvalued, so it's more frustrated. We were trading at like 1x revenue at the peak of the doldrums for no good reason, maybe 2x revenue, whatever it was. But it was weird. But people overlook companies that are not in hot verticals. I think location now is finally becoming a thing that people are not creeped out by, but I think people were almost, "Only bad parents and bad families use location sharing. It's creepy." I think that was more... Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, right, just like the concept of spying on your kids. I mean, I think about it now. I have a 6-year-old and I'm like, "I'm going to chip her. I'm going to know where she's at until she's 17 and 360 days years old." You know what I mean?

Chris Hulls:

But it's not actually that invasive, honestly. If you use it properly, you can give your kids more freedom and not worry. The real helicopter parents are the ones that are following them around and interfering with their activities. We're sort of just saying, "Go have fun," and we're actually a way to give kids more freedom if used appropriately. And we have a big enough user base. Some parents do go over the top, and I feel bad about that.

Jacob Eiting:

You also exist in an interesting place that RevenueCat does too, which is like because Apple's Find Friends is so verticalized and has no interoperability, it creates an opportunity for a business like Life360 to become a platform because it's not locked into these phones, right? There's a lot of conversations now about antitrust and these platform being locked down. Sometimes the lockdown actually creates opportunities for companies to overcome that lockdown, which is your case.

Chris Hulls:

I feel good about that for our long-term, specifically in Europe, but surprisingly we do way better in these iOS-heavy regions, and actually, to tie it back to your earlier point, I think most of the world has not woken up to location sharing. It's many years behind, and I think it was fine. Even the Find My launch five years after we were out, it really helped us because it reduced the stigma that was there. So as of now, we actually see the inverse where someone's using Find My, they've got over the hump that this is a real need, and then we're just so much better for our vertical that it doesn't hurt us. That could change. We want to be sensitive and not drink our own Kool-Aid. Apple could get better, they are getting better, they're waking up to location. But yeah, historically I think it's actually interesting for smaller startups that Apple in your space with a mediocre product can actually be a good thing.

Jacob Eiting:

It's so much easier to be like, "It's Find My but better," right? I can't imagine how you guys pitched before that, be like, "Oh, it's a panopticon for your family. We know where they are." You know what I mean?

Chris Hulls:

It was kind of hard, honestly, because people did not understand. It was just for anyone under, I'm 41, so I'm kind of on that tipping point, but anyone under 30 probably doesn't realize just what the attitudes to location were when it came out.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean, I'm 37 and I remember when you didn't even have a phone to know where people were. You know what I mean? If you weren't at your home at the landline, you were unfindable, you know? And that changed in a decade. It's crazy.

Chris Hulls:

And people said cell phones were invasive because you're always going to be findable.

Jacob Eiting:

And relatively they were, right? Like you went from unfindable to now I could call you at any time, and it's more the relatives that freak people out, but I don't think anybody who uses these location technologies within their family can say they're not valuable and life-enhancing and stuff.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. Life is a double-edged sword with most technologies, but you can't put the toothpaste pack in the tube and...

Jacob Eiting:

Right. People are going to use it.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. You're not going to get people off the internet, and we have Luddites and Mennonites and Amish who've all made decisions not to embrace technology, and that's genuinely okay, you do you, but we can't stop AI as an example. It's wishful thinking. So you can get on a whole other tangent there, but it's like we're creating an AI race because we know if we stop, the other guy will do it, and so it's just going to keep going. So I think that's just a general theme of life.

David Barnard:

Well, you've hit on like five different topics I want to go deeper on, but the first one I wanted to go a little deeper on was you mentioned the freemium product, and I think this is something that a lot of folks get wrong and struggle with. If you want to become a big app, you pretty much have to be freemium. You have to have some experience that's going to retain users who don't pay, and then to build a great recurring subscription business, you've got to have features that people are willing to pay for. But getting the balance just right where you don't ostracize the free users, they still have a really fantastic experience, but then you have paid features that actually attract people to spend, so how have you thought about this and how have you structured the freemium over time? And then has that evolved?

Chris Hulls:

It's one of the things that we locked in on early on and just haven't really deviated at all and now we're 18 years into this thing. But ignore our early couple years. We're just trying to figure things out, and we didn't know what we were doing, and the industry was nascent. But what we realized was, to your point, we will only succeed as a business if we're freemium. I'm not a purist at all in that regard, but our belief was that location was going to be huge. All the carriers were offering competing products, and back in the day, also the younger entrepreneurs probably would be surprised like AT&T and Verizon, if they had a product, there's a threat to you, and how could we compete with these giants? And so we felt like the only way you can do that was giving away a better product for free, and that is what over the top... Meaning just going directly to the app stores, not the carriers. I don't know if people still use that terminology.

Jacob Eiting:

I haven't heard that in a while.

David Barnard:

We're all dating ourselves.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, we kind of felt like we had to. And so our view is roughly like, "Let's not even worry about monetization until we hit 10 million active users." We probably pushed it later than most people, and that was somewhat arbitrary, but also in the early days of subscription, it was way harder to get people to sign up, and there was no in-app purchase, there weren't even push notifications. So it was a different era, but the general view was, for a product like ours, which we correctly identified would actually be a commodity, Find My came out later, like locations everywhere, we would be dead in the water if we tried to or charge for our product early on.

Now we actually probably could. There is some conversation like, "When do we go to harvest mode?" I would not be the right CEO for that because I'm sort of a product purist, but we can talk about a little bit later, but I think once you have someone on a subscription, you can actually really, really squeeze them if you want to. We haven't done that. We're trying to build a product and brand and platform that people love, which means you want to keep a pretty big-

Jacob Eiting:

It's a viral product, right?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, we need people to love us and we need to feel like a really good deal. And we've been fortunate. Our user base is so big now we have a lot more flexibility. But going back to the original question, our founding story was around safety and Hurricane Katrina, but we very quickly realized out of sight, out of mind. And so you talk about these things that people would want, "Oh, will you use that? We pay for it," people say yes, but they wouldn't.

So the thing we've realized with location, that was like a 10-time-a-day use case, and people actually will pay for safety, but they need to be reminded of it and can't forget about it. So we basically locked it on this strategy of free location, pay for safety, and it was the combo of the thing that engages you, keeps you top of mind, brings you back again, and then peace of mind that people pay for. And they're not BS peace of mind, like stuff people actually use, and we do limit some of the free features like location, history, and all that, but the general theme, more challenging to get bigger, the core has to give real value to our customers. Not kind of fake value, like real, real value forever for free, period. And we actually recently just wrote a bill of rights for our free user because it's so easy to chip into that, especially because we have the premium platform and then you're never going to know if you pushed it too far with data.

Jacob Eiting:

And you have 600 employees, and you've got like a mandate from public markets to increase revenue, and it's easy to be extractive versus value creative, right?

Chris Hulls:

Like the bigger you get, the more specialized people get, and it's just very hard to keep that focus and... And it's a bit religious because people push on me like, "Well, we did this thing. Look at the retention. It's fine. See, you're not being data-driven." Smart people might disagree, but for what we're trying to do, there's a gestalt effect and at some point you've taken this away, you've taken that away, you've taken that away, and I don't think we would ever just fall off a cliff. I think we would just see that people are using Find My more, and the prior strategy of just being a whole lot better is not quite working, and people aren't raving about us because they're just feeling chipped away at.

Jacob Eiting:

Nobody runs a holdout group long enough to see the cumulative effect of that.

Chris Hulls:

Well, I don't think you can hold out the holdout group long enough because, I would agree, any one feature, you run the holdout group and it doesn't do anything.

Jacob Eiting:

You need to hold out for half a decade. You know what I mean?

Chris Hulls:

And with 20 features in a bucket, and it's coming over time. So it's almost impossible. So we made a free user bill of rights. That's a recent thing. I'm curious if it will work.

Jacob Eiting:

Is it for internal purposes only or are you sharing it with customers too?

Chris Hulls:

It's not secret, but it's internal. So it's kind of like, "Hey, this is our constitution, period. Do not argue with the constitution." Sorry, that sounds too... We can always revisit it. It's not...

Jacob Eiting:

Sure. Well, you can.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, I'm trying not to be that tough. So it's more like this is just the lifeblood of who we are, this is a thing that unless it's going to formally change at the kind of exact level, got to believe the religion.

Jacob Eiting:

I think a lot of product people in the trenches are not all that religious, to use the word again, about what they think, but if you give them some guardrails and say like, "Hey, this is what we want to do," helps to harmonize a bigger, broader strategy,

Chris Hulls:

Ask me in a year if it worked. I don't know.

Jacob Eiting:

Can you give an example of what some of the rights are on the bill?

Chris Hulls:

One is, this is probably the most important, we've basically had the core map, location history, and place alerts, they must be free. Doesn't mean we can't move the paywall a bit, but real value there, no deceptive tactics around... and dark patterns is another one. I could probably pull it up. But the real anchor is all just around like the free is lifeblood to who we are. These are the things that differentiate us from Apple, and don't touch them. We don't trick our customers. We're very transparent. When we do changes, we're going to notify people, not spring it on them because it's... If you're A-B testing an early app, whatever, but we're trying to build this bigger thing. You can't jerk people around in the same way.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, and I mean, you think of how Apple manages product historically, it's a very coherent vision about how they interact with their customers and market and bring things. I have a similar version. I've never made it public to the team, I probably should, but I have a doc of hot dogs, like they're the Costco hot dog story, like you'll never change the price.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, the $1.49. Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like doesn't matter if we're losing margin or not, it doesn't matter. It's always going to be $1.49. And so I have a list of those. I have a list of things that we will never touch, kind of for me and Miguel more than anything, but I think it's important to write those down or otherwise. Yeah, you're right, it's like the...

Chris Hulls:

Even you write them down though, it's very, very hard, because I don't think the purity is a bit of a religious belief.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Well, somebody has to enforce it to some degree, right? Somebody has to be like, "Wait, did this violate..." I assume you don't have a court system within Life360, so somebody has to be monitoring.

Chris Hulls:

No. I think the bigger thing though is what do we exude as a company. It's definitely easier for small startups to be user-centric, then you get bigger, the pressures get bigger and bigger. Little off-topic, but one thing I think young entrepreneurs might not realize when they think about product managers or product, they think about people who are probably craftsmen who build stuff is companies get bigger product managers, they often aren't builders at all. They're kind of like aligning on strategy, they might be more processed people. So it's been interesting that later-stage companies, product managers might not even be able to build a darn thing. It doesn't mean they're bad, but the craft changes.

Jacob Eiting:

They're certainly going to bring a different set of personal values, right, to the process of building stuff?

David Barnard:

Something you touched on there is something I've actually been talking a lot more about privately and a few times even on the podcast is that these dark patterns, as you said, tricking users, any one tactic in isolation could maybe be justified, "Oh, the call to action button, it doesn't say subscribe, it says continue," and it's like, I mean, that's kind of an industry standard thing now, it's like people get it, they still have to go through the Apple flow. Or the price. I've been seeing more and more apps put the price further and further away from the call to action button.

And those are really subtle. It's like any one of those, it's like that's not a dark pattern, that's not really tricking users. But when you start stacking up a lot of these growth hacks one after the other after the other, I think people are underestimating what it feels like to the people going through the app, and to your point earlier, you don't see that in the data because you still get the convert. You don't see that in the short term. Like you were saying, you need to do a five-year holdout to really understand how users feel about your brand and product.

Chris Hulls:

Theoretically you could do the holdout. Practically you couldn't because again, you're changing 30 different things, and so you could say we're going to keep the app from 2025 and renew a version, we don't change at all to the version of 2030, but then what about all the improvements there? So you're never going to be able to tease it out. And so it's not about being data-driven. I actually think you're being more data-driven to acknowledge the limits of data. And so many people think they're being data-driven by looking at first-order data.

Jacob Eiting:

Even with a flimsy understanding of significance sometimes, right? They'll be like, "Oh, it's a tenth of a point, and the significance calculator says it's Six Sigma," or whatever, and you're just like, "Well, let's think about it."

Chris Hulls:

We actually haven't had that problem in terms of looking at data for whatever reason. One of my pet peeves... I'm actually going to send this interview too. I'm glad we're doing this because it's kind of all my thoughts that I can send to our team and just they can get my head a little bit-

Jacob Eiting:

We're doing internal comms for the Life360 team.

Chris Hulls:

Yes, exactly. This will actually be a bit of internal comms. I hate when we do tests based on percent of user base. I hate it.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, like just on a subset of the user base you mean?

Chris Hulls:

No, instead of N, we do percent. We're testing this with 50% of people, 10% of people, 2% of people. And I say for our size base, you can round us to a hundred million. And then people say, "Well, we need 20% to get physical significance." Well, that's 20 million people. So are you saying a company that doesn't have 2,000 people, they just literally can't test? I still see this happen again and again and again and again, and I think what it does do is actually it stops people from doing smart tests, because if you want to do like a painted-door test, painted door, for people who don't know, is like it's basically fake, you click it and it breaks or you have made some graceful failure, you should be able to do that to a hundred people or 10 people. And they say, "Well, then we're not going to get enough predictive power," but I'm kind of okay in a painted door that you get like 70% certainty.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Well, you get enough predictive power if it's a powerful enough change. You know what I mean? A hundred people with a big change, you'll see it.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, exactly. Or enough to be like if we're just doing a painted door, then we'll do the real test, but this idea that we need... People need to really understand what they're testing and when. So sure, if we're trying to change some header and some text, low-risk rollout to everyone and you're kind of okay kind of picking up a 0.1% thing, but if you're trying to try something really new or build a lot, do the painted door to a hundred people, but don't tell me we're going to do it 1%, because then you're showing it to almost a million people.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, the percent is getting much bigger, right?

Chris Hulls:

But I think people just assume 1% small, 50's big. And there are times you want to do, like if you're doing a rollout, we do do like 1, 5, 10, 50 because that's more server traffic.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, because you're on your way to a hundred, right?

Chris Hulls:

Yes, exactly. If we're on our way... But that is a rollout, not a test. And again, if it's like email, headline, copy, sure, do the percents because it really doesn't matter. But what are you testing? Why? What's the right methodology? Think critically, think first principles. Don't just follow a playbook. But I guarantee I'll show this internally and then we'll go back to say, "We need to test 1% and..."

Jacob Eiting:

Got to put in the bill of rights, no percents.

Chris Hulls:

No percents, yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Do you do a lot of qualitative? Let's say you run a test on a hundred people, fake-door test. Do you then try to get those folks on the phone? Is that part of your process?

Chris Hulls:

As we've grown, trying to let more individual teams do their thing. I probably spoke to users less than most would suggest. I'm not saying in a good way. I probably should have done more of that. I think I have naturally been gifted at sort of putting myself in someone else's shoes, and I literally close my eyes and I try to think like, "If I'm..." I do it literally, like, "How am I going to react to this thing? What am I going to do?" Not me, but the customer and-

Jacob Eiting:

The Rick Rubin method, right? You just close your eyes. The famous producer who just doesn't play any instruments, doesn't really do anything. He just kind of feels it and knows what to do. Every great consumer founder I've worked with has always had a really both emotionally empathetic ability, but then also they're very analytical about that. You know what I mean? They can put themselves mechanically into the mindset of many different people.

And when I was working consumer, I sometimes found there's so many voices that individual conversations can sometimes be misleading because there's a lot of variants and behaviors and it's very unlikely that you personally are all that close in characteristic to the person that you're selling to, and sometimes I think that connection can be... Start a B2B company, then you're forced to be in the room with people all the time. It's actually been a benefit because it's a little bit easier, but I was in the same place as you when I was in consumer. I think it's still good. And also, I don't know if you all do surveys and stuff like that, talking about like extending beyond just pure A-B test, like statistical significance on a binomial experiment. Just sending a survey to those a hundred people that hit the broken door and see if you get any responses.

Chris Hulls:

I think they're all good and you just need to know why, and you don't do it just because, and you're really thoughtful about it, and you don't overly saying, "This is the way." Other than our bill of rights. Don't argue with that one. But jokes aside, we have to say, "These are the things that just who we are, but we're being very self-aware of it. These are the artifacts of religious faith because we believe they're core to who we are, and these are the things we test, and this is how we think about it."

David Barnard:

With those free users, how do you think about monetizing them, and what has been the path of monetizing them? I know most recently you have been working on an in-house ad network, but have you shown ads this whole time or-

Chris Hulls:

Ads are new. We have some really ugly banners in the home screen that make me want to... I genuinely have a physical reaction every time I see them.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, you just got to subscribe, Chris, then they go away.

David Barnard:

But ads are part of the user experience, the free user experience. I removed ads from my side project app because the user experience of them were so bad and I went to a hard paywall, because it really is part of the user experience.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. So going back to the fuzziness of data, the team do the holdout group and showed that the ads didn't hurt anything at all. I think that data was actually valid, but do that 20 times, you don't know, but we decided the upside was worth it, and we are trying to start this new business, and that over time we can evolve. The ad product is something that customers actually love or don't even realize it's an ad. So the banners we have, they're horrible, I hate them, I've challenged the team like, "Can we find in a year... Can we not have ugly banners?" but really pushing every day, like show that you care about the customer, show you want these gone. We've done some really cool ones, like when you land at an airport in Adelaide, "Hey, David, welcome to SFO. Do you need Uber?" One tap.

Jacob Eiting:

Did you do that deal directly with Uber?

Chris Hulls:

We did, yeah. We have another one we're announcing which is very similar where it's actually good for the customer, and people probably know it's an ad, but it's not interrupting the workflow, and if you actually want to interact with the ad, it's adding value. I think the company that did that the best, nothing to do with subscription, but Credit Karma and credit card ads.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, you don't even know it's an ad, right? You're just using their website.

Chris Hulls:

Well I think maybe you do, but for people who don't know, Credit Karma is basically you give all your very personal sensitive information, including your social, they match you with credit card offers, and, "Your credit score is X, you live here, you want points, you want travel, whatever. This is the best cashback." They just match you with cards. It's a hundred percent lead gen. Everything they match you with is an actual ad, but to the customer, you are actually getting matched with the product and service that's good for you. And so I think that's very different than spamming someone and all that. Going back to bill of rights, we've said we will not... That's actually in our bill of rights. I've forgotten all our point. It was tied with advertising. We will not get in the way of the job to be done with an ad.

Jacob Eiting:

Sure. No full-screen interstitial, 30 seconds to close. Yeah.

What are the ads that upset you so much then? It's not the Uber at the airport ones. Those seem...

Chris Hulls:

No, that one's great. I genuinely think I can look someone in the eye with a straight face and say, "I actually think that's giving you value, because if you just do that one tap, it's not hurting you at all." So we just have these banners. It just more that banners are only good for brand impressions. They don't really drive performance, so-

Jacob Eiting:

And you don't get to control probably using an ad exchange or something, like what brands get pulled in.

Chris Hulls:

We are doing that, but we have our own ad unit that does force people to do a little bit to make it look there. That was one of those just somewhat arbitrary lines we did as well.

Jacob Eiting:

By the way, these are all things you only get to do when you have as many users as Life360, right? Like if you're a random app, you don't have the leverage to do this.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, exactly, you would not be able to. No, you don't have that choice.

David Barnard:

So you never just installed Google AdMob and just let Google serve...

Chris Hulls:

I think we did, but we put our own ad unit, and we did some testing around it, and it's just we're using it. At some point we could actually allow more of that, but the performance is actually capped, like put the product hat back on and try to think about what's actually good for users. And the holy grail for us, like the Credit Karma equivalent, is insurance products for driving, because we know how you drive. And people are like, "Who wants to give your data to insurance company?" First off, most people don't care about sharing data as much as... That's like this very kind of like tech bubble press group. Most consumers think that Amazon and Google are recording everything you say and doing already and they say don't like it, but it's like it's lost cause.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, it's a lost cause to them, and not that I think they ever really cared. They actually, I think, enjoy complaining about it, from my perception.

Chris Hulls:

I think that just, well, things people say they care about, they're not lying, but what do people actually take action on? We want to be straight with our users, but if we were like, I think people think this is an inherently bad thing without thinking about it, but imagine if like, "Hey, Jacob, you are in the top 5% of drivers. You absolutely should give your insurance data to insurance companies. You'll be saving money. And here, we can help you." And if we're like, "David, you're in the bottom 10%, you should never ever give your..."

Jacob Eiting:

Maybe stop driving.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. Or, "Hey, you had a DUI. We're going to match you with a DUI specialist." I don't know. That's actually a thing, the hard-to-insure people. That's a use, like we're actually helping you with your data, and it's going to be an ad, but think how good that is. It's not us being sneaky or whatever. Truly, if you're a top driver, why should you be paying to subsidize all the bad ones? That will not feel like an ad when that happens, but it will be. It'll be a lead gen experience.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, very similar to Credit Karma, right? Except for instead of the finance data you're taking in location and transport data.

Chris Hulls:

Believe it or not, Credit Karma is now moving into that same lineup because they can see. So if you use the Credit Karma app, you can do that with the driving now.

Jacob Eiting:

And for some insurance profile stuff too, yeah.

Chris Hulls:

They're doing the exact same thing, and it's not bad for customers, it's good for customers. And so we eventually want to get there, and only about one in eight of our families are paid, so if we get equivalent performance, or sorry, if we get one-eighth performance of monetizing free users, we've essentially doubled our revenue and then we get the virtuous flywheel of more to spend on marketing, more to spend on R&D, and then just put more daylight between us and our competitors.

Jacob Eiting:

And you said this is fairly recent. When did you all start playing with the ads as a revenue generation thing?

Chris Hulls:

About a year ago.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. Wow. So post after publicly listing and all of that. The only revenue before that was all subscriptions, like in-app?

Chris Hulls:

Essentially. There some other, but more or less.

Jacob Eiting:

Significant revenue, I guess. That's interesting because like... Would you say 17 years? So 16 years, no ads?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. We did have some stuff. We were trying to move in the insurance space with Allstate, but it was sort of... So we did have a sliver of the product, these ugly ads, and we still haven't got it to where we wanted. But in terms of the traditional ads, it's only been about a bit over a year.

David Barnard:

And you have another vector that you have to think about as a family-focused app, that kids and teens are going to be in this app. How do you think about keeping that whole experience, including the ads, family-friendly?

Chris Hulls:

We don't serve ads to people under a certain age and we eliminate huge categories. We still had a few that have crept in, but we have a team that looks at it and we have a public Slack channel or public-in-the-company Slack channel for reporting ads, and it's been okay. Really challenge the team to get rid of the dumb banners. And a lot of what we also want to do is we did use to monetize by selling data. We never had a single instance of misuse as far as we can tell, but that kind of got the target on it from press and regulators, so we stopped selling raw data, but basically all that was doing, it was helping people target ads. I personally like targeted ads. I think it's a good thing. I kind of joke that the only time I don't like them is if my wife's using the computer, I get a yoga pants ad.

Jacob Eiting:

That's not from location. I think that's usually just IP address and NAT stuff than it is, yeah.

Chris Hulls:

Targeted ads are good. I'd rather relevant ads, and I actually kind of like if I search for a certain product and I'm not ready to buy, I know for the next week I'm going to get their 10 competitors. And so we wanted to empower location-based advertising and so we would do these contracts with third parties where they would get de-identified, which is different than anonymized data feeds where it's like raw, like the GPS points. We try to filter out sensitive locations, but people would say, "Well, in theory, someone could, I guess, hack the data or breach your contract and..."

Jacob Eiting:

From the third party, you mean?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. And then find out who you are and do bad things. And in theory, that was true, but it's very normal to let third parties have your data, like Google. You guys, as an example, like you have percents.

Jacob Eiting:

It's a good example of how it's more the feeling of it and the spirit of it than it is the literal what's being shared. I knew like Foursquare's SDK used to monetize that way as well. There's a lot of companies that would monetize that way. Was the decision just like it wasn't worth the PR and the explaining and all that stuff for the revenue, or what was the decision to stop doing it?

Chris Hulls:

So we were able to pivot a bit and then think longer term, which actually comes back to the ads piece, where our users never cared, but we didn't want to keep getting a wave of bad press and regulators and FTC and all that. All the ones we work with were fine, but it was just constant scrutiny that we didn't need, and our view is that we could move into doing bigger things in ways that would not spark that ire. So we have one partnership with a company that does aggregated data, and aggregated is very different than even de-identified. I'm getting a little esoteric in the words, but like...

Jacob Eiting:

No, it's good for this audience. They're good, they're good.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. But to kind of go down those, it's complete raw data with names, which is always been a no-no. There's de-identified, which is raw data but no names or emails. There's anonymized, which is scrambled in a way where in theory you truly can't find anything, period, period, period. And there's aggregated, which is even further, which is we're kind of lumping you together with a whole bunch of stuff.

So we now have a partnership where we do sell our aggregated data for insights through a company called Placer.ai. I think we get like 20 something million a year from them. And it's basically if you are a, I'm going to give one use case, you're a retailer, I want to know where people came from, they came to my store, what roads did they drive on, where do they live, we do it aggregated. So it is by a census block. So 72% of people come from this census block, and whatever come from this one, but there's no raw GPS line, all that. And we still had the press take swipes at us. 

David Barnard:

This is actually something that frustrates me about the way Apple operates. Their privacy stuff is very ivory tower. It's like there can't be any possible way for one bit of data to leak in our ad tracking, you know, SKI network and things like that are so ivory tower design versus like the practicality of a needle in the haystack is not worth Facebook building, a whole infrastructure around finding a needle here and a needle there that might happen to leak.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Meanwhile, actually incentivizing more privacy violating systems outside of Apple, right? By being so limiting.

Chris Hulls:

If we're truly worried about data, like I think we are kind of moving to the singularity and the hive mind and all that, you should be really scared that these giants are the ones that have all of it with complete control, and don't you want the rebel alliance of smaller companies all using it and sharing it? So there's a very weird and arbitrary distinctions, like somehow if it's all within your bucket, it's completely fine, but the second you do a hook to somebody else, you're somehow being super dangerous and risky. To be fair to the other side, I think there is some truth that in every new industry a wild west emerges. And so I actually remember the first time. I met with a number two guy at Disney in like 2011 or '12. And we were just young at the time. We were very, very small. We built this really cool tool where you actually went right to Disney and like, "Look, here's a person. Watch, look. Here's where they live," and we watch the lines. But it was before there's any regulation at all, and we weren't even thinking about the downstream implications, like, "Well, look, here's the guy going to the house, and this is where he live." But we're just new. So I do think that some regulation makes sense, but oftentimes it happens too early and it just really often favors the giants. And we're at the point it actually kind of helps us because we can have all the lawyers and... Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

Deal with it, right? 600 people, lots of lawyers. You can figure it out, right? Navigate it. Yeah, it's true. These are really interesting. Because I think there's a lot of... I don't know. It's funny you mentioned the selling the data story, because I thought about this problem for us, and actually, I didn't written any bill of rights, but this is something I wrote down early, is we're never going to do that, not because I'm all that moral about it, but because I knew it would probably be a press issue and I just didn't want to make it a temptation. Like we could still, I could probably find double our revenue tomorrow if we started selling all of the RevenueCat stuff, but I don't want my customers to have to think about that, and we're just never going to do it, you know?

Chris Hulls:

Okay. There's no right or or wrong answer. What we have said is we will always be transparent and that any data product we have, I'll use it myself. And I have. I never opted out. And I actually opt in into cross-app tracking. I like being targeted with ads.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm always like, "Allow. Please."

Chris Hulls:

And I'm not like a big deal or anything, but I have certain more people after me than the average person just from the user base of millions. I get all sorts of weird, crazy death threats and things, and I genuinely do, but I'm not worried about my data being out there because the crazy dude is not going to be buying data. I just don't-

Jacob Eiting:

It takes a lot of agency. It's easy to send a tweet. It's a lot harder to actually hunt somebody down.

Chris Hulls:

What individual without millions of dollars could find a way to buy raw data and then... I just don't even know how you'd go about that. I'd have to set up a fake company, first off, to buy it, then I'd have to commit fraud, then I'd have to become a data engineer, which I am not, or find some...

Jacob Eiting:

I find myself having these conversations often internally too, not related to this exact question, but around, I don't know, maybe it's a contract we're signing and it's like, "The lawyers say we can't sign this thing," and it's like, "Can we just line up the conditional probabilities that would have to all fire for this to go wrong?"

Chris Hulls:

Anyway, I’m pro data. I think we should be allowed and open to do more.

Jacob Eiting:

If we didn't have as, as liberal. And not necessarily personal data, but like let's say like copyrighted data for instance. And like we would not have the world of LLMs that we've invented or been able to put together in the last few years if we didn't have a society where like information was pretty. And then there's obviously, there's questions about the exact legalities, but like I think we could all argue it's probably a net good thing that this thing was created being like LLMs and AI and if we had strangled it, we might not have ever... There's this really, I forget where I heard of it, somebody got Llama 3 running on like a Windows 3.1 machine, which implies we could have had this since the '90s. Do you know what I mean? In theory. But in theory, I mean, if you can run the model forward pass, you could train it. You just need more computers than probably existed at the time. You could have maybe just guessed weights until you found the right one. But anyway, yeah, I don't know. They're interesting ethical questions and I think something our users are thinking about. And RevenueCat too, we're quite aware of the... We've always been focused on subscriptions, and it sounds like you too. That's probably best if somebody will pay for your product, like that's the best way to make money. It's because it's very aligned.

Chris Hulls:

I don't know. Not exactly pushing on that. I'd be careful about saying best and it's like, "What are you trying to do? What's best for you?" Because I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all, and even some of the more growth hack you come. I think a very valid subscription strategy too is not exactly freemium, but it's basically give people a teaser and there's been your implicit premium. So it's not a one-size-fits-all thing. So for us it made a lot of sense because we had a very, very, very natural engagement platform with the upsell. But what if we didn't? And-

Jacob Eiting:

Right, yeah. I guess it's conditioned on that there's enough people who will pay, right? It's better that your app exists and is profitable and is sustainable than it is that you use one specific monetization method over another, right?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, exactly. What are you trying to do? What are the specific unique attributes about your model? Because I think at some point, if we get this insurance thing working that I'm excited about, maybe we get rid of the subscription model altogether and we give everything away for free because if we can be the next Allstate or State Farm... Give it all away for free.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Erode your own margins before somebody else does, right?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, or just cement our reach, and that is actually something we've talked about, but it's sort of different stages of the company, you'll shift your strategy, and we couldn't have monetized the data or done insurance early on because we didn't have the user base first, because it only works when you have a big user base, and you have to fund yourself. And so this evolved, and we're 18 years in and it's still evolving.

Jacob Eiting:

So I was going to ask just off of that like... Yeah. I mean, these are kind of problems you only get the privilege to think about when you've been in it for this long, and I have to think there's not too many... It's hard to find CEOs even in breakout successes and stuff that goes 17 years and it sounds like you still got energy and ideas and stuff. What has it been like committing to this project for as long as it has, and what keeps you still energized and excited to dream about becoming an insurance company, for example?

Chris Hulls:

In the early days, really just someone kind of lockjaw, don't quit, and very persistent. Money was a big factor for me. Honestly didn't grow up with a lot of it. We weren't broke, but stability and locking that in. And yeah, as my wealth level has increased and put money out of the company. And it's hard to keep it going. Very few people, whether you love or hate Elon Musk or Steve Jobs or whatever, it was never about the money for them, or it was just about this deep, deep, deep drive to, maybe it's to win, maybe it's make the world a better place, maybe it's just to build stuff. I actually don't have that. So this is not my forever-and-only thing, and I kind of fell into it, but I have a lot of loyalty to our team, to our investors, and so I've always said until I really feel like I'm not needed, I'll stay, and I have been trying to actually get less operational these days and try to focus on the stuff that I'm more passionate about and do less of the things that kind of wear me out.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. But even if you're not leaving, that's the thing you need as a CEO to be doing all the time, right? You always need to be layering or leveraging repeatedly, because then it gives you the time to have the crazy stupid ideas and things, time to spend time on that stuff.

Chris Hulls:

It gets harder and harder as you get bigger. Look at like... I remember for a long time Facebook was buying up a lot of seed and series A startups that didn't quite break out on their own. The idea is that you're going to get these very entrepreneurial high-agency people to start new product lines at Facebook. Does any break out work?

Jacob Eiting:

Instagram maybe would be the one I'd say.

Chris Hulls:

Well, they bought Instagram, but that was a 1.1 billion acquisition, but...

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, yeah, yeah. They paid for more than just the team.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, and just letting them, giving them a budget to build new products. And I don't think any actually made it in their own right. I think they got some really good talent into other parts of Facebook. But it's very, very hard for companies to do new things as they get bigger. It's almost a law of nature. And it's frustrating how much you slow down, but it's also, hey, the only reason we're here is because of these laws of nature, because in a weird theoretical sense, shouldn't the big guys just suck up every piece of opportunity? They have lots of money and momentum and users. But it's just not how the world works.

Jacob Eiting:

What do you do to fight those laws in nature internally? Like bills of rights, things like that? I like to just go and blow things up sometimes. I'm an order of magnitude smaller.

Chris Hulls:

I am not a natural kind of graceful leader. I kind of just smash stuff a lot. And I know there, in theory, is a better way, like I think the best way to lead is clearly be the inspirational person, be really collected and have the master plan, execute, make people feel good. Clearly that's the best, and I think it does exist, and some CEOs, I think, are like that. I look up to people like Reed Hastings and all that, like good human being, composed, thoughtful, not overly erratic. I think the second best, though, is just sheer brute force and just get shit done. Elon's probably the extreme example of that.

David Barnard:

You're making a value judgment there though. Why do you think it's not the best? I mean, so many things just can't get built with that mentality.

Chris Hulls:

Because I think it wears out the person doing it and it wears out the people around them. And so I think... I'll go to the third best and we come back. The third best is I think where big companies fail, which is just bureaucracy, where they think they're doing it, they're doing the surveys, they're making sure everyone's heard, but then you get this thing where any one person can say no, but you need 12 people to say yes, and then you just grind to a halt. So I have been very much a leader in the number two category, and I'm trying to get better at moving up the chain. And this is a sort of an abstract framework. I'm not necessarily because it's like no one's in one bucket or the other, but willingness to pick fights is a lot of the reason I'm still here.

Jacob Eiting:

You must enjoy it a little bit.

Chris Hulls:

Not internally. I don't.

Jacob Eiting:

Love the results, I guess, at least, right?

Chris Hulls:

I think people really misinterpret that about me. I don't like conflict. The only time I like conflict is when I feel like someone's like I can truly put you in a bad person bucket. So like when people sue us, like patent troll, I just like...

Jacob Eiting:

When you're righteous. Yeah. Then it's really fun.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, I can let out my righteous anger, whatever that means. But no, I actually deeply, deeply dislike conflict, and I have to have all sorts of strategies to get around it. Reflexively I'm tough, so it's like I'm not cowering, but it takes my energy versus gives it. And I hate firing people with a passion. My strategy on that is if someone's not working, like an exec, I will tell the board it's not working and then I'll be like, "I'm telling you now," to put myself in an uncomfortable position. So when you ask me in a month, "Is it fixed or is it not?" I'm going to have a shitty conversation either way. I've either fixed the problem or I'm going to look really bad to our board that I'm not making tough decisions. So I think you can manage your own psychology by putting yourself between a rock and a hard place intentionally.

Jacob Eiting:

The point about sort of process, death by process, I think applies at a lot of levels. I think we kind of touched on it with the experimentation conversation as well. It's like I think sometimes you can, to a fault, ignore the intuitive and the obvious and sort of the common sense in lieu of like, "Oh, we have to do it the right way because there's too much at stake," or whatever, and it turns out that, especially for compounding businesses like Life360 or RevenueCat or ones that have brands and repeatable motions, it's very unlikely you're going to do one wrong action that's going to... Maybe you could in a position as a CEO, but even then, if you did something so off the rails, the board would take care of it and the company would be back on the next day. I think people fall into a trap of that, is like, "Hey, it's so easy for me to mess up that I should just avoid that at all costs," right?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah, we haven't solved that one fully because we do have a few things, like we have life safety-related features that really can't break. We have to be the best at location, and part of what we do is doing it without killing a battery. So part of one of our challenge is like I actually think killing someone's battery is it's a one-way door, not a two-way door. And so we're not like a social network. And they'll never, even if you fix the bug, they will forever feel like you're killing the battery, and we still have that from a few handfuls of battery bugs.

Jacob Eiting:

Well, just think about that from a product mission perspective, like somebody's really unsafe if their phone's dead. You know what I mean? They can't even call 911.

Chris Hulls:

So it has been a hard one for us where we still have some fear, I think, to ship. So we are saying, "These are the things that can't break. These are the things that can't..." Even going back to tests, like painted door, "Do it to hundred people. Don't worry about craftsmanship. Don't be stupid." But it's very hard to have nuanced communication at scale. And so that's why I think you do get these process, like we really do need to be fanatical about location and battery not breaking for us.

Jacob Eiting:

And that needs to be a big problem. When somebody breaks or regresses that, like that has to be like the people feel it.

Chris Hulls:

We call it guilty till proven innocent, like jump in, like we're going to chase ghosts 80, 90% of the time, but the one time we catch something, it's probably going to the ER, right?

Jacob Eiting:

It's like us and uptime, right? Anything for us that's reliability-related. I don't care if it's a one in a hundred that it's a thing. We have to chase it or I won't be able to sleep.

David Barnard:

The time I've seen Jacob the grumpiest are around outages and issues that... But those are our can't-break situations.

Jacob Eiting:

If I started the game over, I don't know if I'd do a critical infrastructure company. I might make different choices.

Chris Hulls:

But I think it's similar. Going back to the size of scale, like the average employee is not going to have that same passion around it because there's a bystander effect and the person that can't be the bystander is the CEO and the founders, but then you get the processes to try to acknowledge the reality that people aren't going to have the same passion as you and then you get the processes that just expand and expand and expand. And so we definitely have gone through that, with like because we got bigger, we needed a scalable way of not breaking location. I think we've flipped way too heavy towards too much focus on program management and things. It's just a very, very hard trade-off.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. And I imagine every probably incremental hundred employees, you have to revisit these things. They just keep cropping up or...

Chris Hulls:

It's deja vu every day. I think that's just part of it. I think that never ends.

Jacob Eiting:

I see it when I look at like Tobi at Shopify, like it seems like he's still fighting some of the same demons that I feel like I'm fighting now and probably you're fighting too at three different scales. I mean, I think when we talk about just doing stuff, like for people making apps, just try stuff, just do stuff. Don't let your fears of breaking things or fears of... Whatever. Throw it to a hundred people. Forget about craftsmanship. Just get it out there. And applies to corporate process, it applies to product management. Just sort of entropy can be a really very useful thing to insert into systems.

Chris Hulls:

But sometimes that can be taken the other way, and I see that too, which is one of my things I see. I think that's good advice for founders, but just, "Oh, get it out there, get learnings," but you still need to have a strong intention about what you're trying to do. So for us, like big North Star vision, build things in chunks, but we had a feature that failed last year and it was a bummer because I think the team was just looking at two-week horizons, and there's sort of a North Star where they're trying to go, but I think we just got in our own way around testing too much.

And so there's a lot of nuance in this, and I think some people are naturally good at it. I think founders usually, the ones that get funding and all that, like if you've made it to even series A, you probably have some level of outlier gift there, not like 0.001-percenter outlier, but you're pretty good because you were able to have that intuition around what people want and how to build things. But the average person who's come up through a different track, they just don't have those skills in the same way. They have other skills. Like I don't think I would've been promoted up through the chain.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh God no. For me, that was the highest I was ever going to get.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. So I think I would've probably had to have been on the super IC path or start my own thing because I think I would've... I think that people think there's this linear path from IC to CEO or whatever, but the skill sets chunk very, very differently.

Jacob Eiting:

It's kind of their channels, right? Like they don't all terminate in the same place. You know what I mean?

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. And what makes you good, the next one's completely orthogonal. So I think you can be a good CEO and a bad manager. I'm legitimately not a very good manager.

Jacob Eiting:

Don't tell anybody, but yeah, same boat. Same boat. Yeah. I mean, it goes to the point there would be a lot more than... There's only like, I looked this up today because I was doing some research, but there's only like 3,000 or so companies listed publicly, at least on the NASDAQ. There'd be a lot more than 3,000 if everybody was good at this, right? Or everybody had this skill and it was easy. So it's just the way of it. But I don't know, I think these, talk about just nuance and just applying a combination of the data, your intuition, input from customers, like you kind of just have to take it all in and feel like when you set up orgs and you specialize and stuff, it kind of goes in the opposite direction of that. You know what I mean? Or you have to create really good information flow, or culture probably is the right word, or religion, whatever, to induce that.

Chris Hulls:

I don't think anyone's fully solved it. You can look at a few companies, but it's very, especially for consumer product-focused ones, very, very, very few are able to maintain craftsmanship at scale or craftsmanship plus rapid innovation. The trade-offs are tough. Or stability and speed, like it's easy to be stable if you're not doing anything.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. See, I always feel like I'm not sure those are completely... You know what I mean? Like there's no physical reason, but there seems to be strong correlation that they don't often align.

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. I do think the ultimate cliche answer to all this is just hire really good people and be ruthless about that, and also very hard to do. It's gotten a lot easier because we've had this market downturn and now with AI, everything's a bit easier so you can run leaner. But if I go back to some of the VC advice from, we started in a very different era, it all holds true today and the vast majority of it is just team, team, team, team, team.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Which culture is one of these things that helps that. You know, without you in every single interview closing.

Chris Hulls:

Sure. But it is so hard. I think it sounds easy, but it's not. It's probably the hardest part.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, the people, yeah. Always has been. Miguel says that, my co-founder says that all the time. He's like, "Computers are easy. It's the people that are hard." Product's easy to some degree too. I guess product's more people, but...

Chris Hulls:

Yeah. Then when do you want homogeneity versus diversity of things? And I'm not talking in an identity sense. I'm more saying the people who really want to do A-B tests and iterate are usually not the really craftsman-oriented people who have vision around it, and they're both important skills and you need both, but then that makes it harder to have that, especially early on, you don't have a central theme around who you are.

Jacob Eiting:

Creates a lot of tension too, right? Like when people have somewhat different values. But hope is the point of mission, right? Like if we can all agree we're on the same mission, then it can be resolved. And the tension's good, right? I feel the tension in art and most things can actually improve the outcome to some degree, but...

Chris Hulls:

In theory, but if you kind of go back to the early PayPal guys, they're like, "We want everyone who thinks the same way and acts the same way," because especially early on, it was not the time and place to have differing views. It was like we're all thinking the same way on a mission.

David Barnard:

It was super fun to be a fly on the wall listening to two CEOs, and I think a lot of our audience will be interested to know because they're either working for someone like you or aspire to be an executive at a larger company or grow to your size. So I think getting those kind of insights and getting into your head a little bit is super interesting. I was fascinated. But I will say, I want you to introduce me to somebody else on your team who can go talk about the 10 other topics we have signed up for today.

Chris Hulls:

I'm sure we have lots, and going back to the different functions, we have some very good people who are very focused on optimizing subscriptions and they're not necessarily would even claim to be the people that would be the big product thinkers, but when you're at the scale we have, hundreds of millions of revenue, small improvements and doing things the right way really, really do matter, and even kind of flows that I don't even, I've looked at that, how do you cancel save flows and like if someone's about to churn. It's not really about the vision, but these are real levers to help, and how do you make sure someone's credit card goes bad? What do you do, and how do you have a nice way of reminding someone what they're losing? It's very, very different, the vision side, but very important.

David Barnard:

Awesome. Well, as we wrap up, anything you wanted to share? We're going to share a link to the crews page, but maybe listening to this podcast, somebody's not going to jump right into applying to a VP direct report.

Jacob Eiting:

No, that means that the right people will. That's the whole point, David.

David Barnard:

No, that's true.

Chris Hulls:

I'm getting less operational these days, so you don't have to deal with me as much as you would have in the past. Our COO, Lauren, has been taking on so much for me, and she's amazing. If someone does want to join, we're growing very quickly. We are very focused on just having the best team. We've been under the radar for a very long time, but now that we're in this world where it's not the go-go days where... We're almost like a defensive growth stock, we grow very predictively, we're very profitable, very limited marketing budgets. And we also have been very focused on the free user, so we have a lot of room to grow because we have not been one of those companies that have come to the aggressive harvest mode prematurely, which is probably some of the stuff we could talk about in another conversation.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's one of the things that I wanted to get to, and again, we'll just have to have a different conversation with somebody else on the team, but you have a huge vision and you're already expanding into new verticals. So most people, myself included, think about Life360 as like keep tab on my kids, and my son's on Android now, so I've been meaning to install it because I can't get a track on his location now that he's off the Find My ecosystem. But you have a very big vision and you're expanding into elder care. Like you said, there's just so much opportunity, so even though you're already at a $2 billion valuation-ish, there's massive headroom. So it's like-

Jacob Eiting:

Come for the family location sharing, stay for the world domination, you know?

Chris Hulls:

Something like that. Jokes aside, we want to be the super app for families, and it's the closest network we all have, and from the time you have little kids to aging parents, there are a lot of needs that we think we can solve, and the Trojan horse that I think people are only realizing, like location in and of itself is a boring commodity, but we have an app that I think parents are going to meet 22 times a day. So we have so many touch points and we have this data that really opens up a lot and how we're excited about the next chapter.

David Barnard:

Yeah, fascinating company. Well, thanks so much for joining us and for opening up so much about how you think about things. So thanks.

Chris Hulls:

Thank you for having me.

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.