Navigating App Growth Through Strategic Partnerships and Media Wins — Adam Allore, Wavve Boating

David Barnard:

Hello, I'm your host David Barnard and with me today, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Adam Allore, the founder and CEO of Wavve Boating. Wavve provides a better marine navigation experience that is easy, collaborative and fun. On the podcast, we talk with Adam about landing PR for a niche app, negotiating strategic partnerships and how pretending to have an app helped validate that he should actually build one.

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

Adam Allore:

Thanks so much for having me. A huge fan of the show so it's an honor to be here.

David Barnard:

Hi Jacob. Nice to see you on a Friday morning,

Jacob Eiting:

David, it's my dream. We get to talk about apps, we get to talk about boats, we get to talk about strategic partnerships. I'm thrilled. Let's go.

David Barnard:

Yeah. I do want to dig into strategic partnerships. I think it's something more apps should seek out and I think you've got a lot of really great lessons that other apps can learn from in that respect. But before we get there, I think it'll help to have a little bit of context around what Wavve Boating is. So tell us the story. How did you get started with Wavve Boating and what is it?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, sure thing. So I went to school for mechanical engineering and to pay for that education, I worked at marinas. And while there, I kind of realized people really struggled with reading nautical charts and it's a fairly crucial point to be able to have a good day on the water, kind of knowing where you're going and not ultimately running aground.

So fast-forward five, six, seven years, I'm working as an engineer climbing the corporate ladder there and I really didn't have a lot of opportunity to be creative. So I had this side project in my head which was I'm going to rethink how a nautical chart looks.

The traditional nautical chart, the way it's designed is so that it's easy to mark with a pencil and it reduces ink when printed. So the thought was like, okay, in a digital age, let's reevaluate how this thing looks and I want to make it custom to me as a boater and to my vessel. And the initial concept was where you go on a personal watercraft or a jet ski, which only draws six inches into the water versus a sailboat that draws six feet into the water, those vessels have very different places where they can go, especially when they're in close to shore. I wanted to build a map that would just show me where I could go in blue and where I couldn't go in red. In a sense, kind of like dumbing down the experience. [inaudible 00:02:30].

Jacob Eiting:

So you don't have to know how to read a topographic submarine map, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. Just try and keep it as simple as possible. And so my goal initially was I want to build a map that I would use. So I was using some free GIS mapping software. I got a sample of nautical digital data from Canadian Hydrographic Services, a Canadian company here, and just started messing around and built a map that I was excited by and that I would actually use out on the water.

So completed this project, was excited, was proud of what we had, and then coincidentally, two weeks later I learned that there's a boat show in the area. And this is when my life started to go down more an entrepreneurial avenue where I was like, you know what? What the heck. I'm going to get a booth at this show and I'm going to see if anyone else likes my map essentially.

So I took this map, I hosted it on a webpage and added it to the home screen on a couple iPads. So it looked like it was an app, but it was just totally a dynamic map on a webpage and went to this show and was like, oh, right, you got to have a company name, right? So what do we name this company? Well, Wavve with two Vs. Asking why? Well, the domain name for wave with one V was taken, so I went for the double Vs and away we went.

And went to this boat show, had a booth, had a couple iPads there, had this map. And it was one of those weird experiences where things go better than you expected. I was just getting tons of positive feedback of people seeing this map of this area saying, "Hey, I really like this. I want to use this." And then I was also seeing people starting to get a little attraction at the booth here, going into the app stores and trying to find Wavve with two Vs and coming up with nothing and being like, "Where's your app? I can't see this."

And I was like, "Oh, okay, give me your emails. We're in beta. Give me your emails. I'll let you know when this thing gets released." And that was the point for me to realize that I had something and I was going to pursue something. I was still working full-time as an engineer at that point and the quantity emails that we got was one thing, but seeing people light up and get excited by that map and the experience that I built, that was what gave me that confidence to quit my job and pursue this thing full time and make this beta a reality that I was telling people about.

Jacob Eiting:

How much did it cost the booth? Do you remember?

Adam Allore:

All in all, probably less than a thousand dollars.

Jacob Eiting:

That's good. That's not bad.

David Barnard:

A fake app that you built side hustle with the GIS and a thousand dollar booth. More entrepreneurs should be that scrappy to go validate your idea with a fake iPad app.

Jacob Eiting:

Are you just unshameable? I think a lot of people would get afraid of that because they'd be like, oh, I don't want to be caught, right? I don't want to seem like I'm something I'm not and stuff like this. And then I think other people are just like, I don't care what other people think and they'll try things.

Adam Allore:

There was tons of imposter syndrome going on at the time.

Jacob Eiting:

Fairly, because you literally were an imposter at that point so I think that's probably an okay diagnosis.

Adam Allore:

Remove the syndrome part. I was an imposter.

Jacob Eiting:

It almost makes it easier. Then it's not really a syndrome. Then it's just truth.

Adam Allore:

Yeah. Yeah.

David Barnard:

I've just seen so many people, like I have this app idea, and then they go hire a contractor or they spend six months building it themselves, so by the time they get any market validation, they're either months and months of their own time or they're even-

Jacob Eiting:

Five or six figures in the hole.

David Barnard:

Yeah, $50,000 upside down before they even get any level of market validation, and for you, a thousand bucks-

Jacob Eiting:

Literally, you could just draw pictures.

David Barnard:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

A lot of people that listen to this podcast probably are the app person in somebody's life, so you've gotten the pitch. "Hey, I got an app idea. I just need somebody to build it." And I'm like, "Well, have you literally drawn it out and asked people would you use this? Have you done any interviews? Have you built it with a spreadsheet?" That's my favorite when people pitch me something. I'm like, "You know this would work with just a spreadsheet and you could operate it out of email? You should try that first and see if people care."

Or in your case, just like a picture and see if there's any response whatsoever. I mean this is, I don't know, I guess part of the show's thing, but I think it causes a ton of failure to start for people, because people won't go just like what is the bare minimum investment?

David Barnard:

Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

And a thousand dollars, that's even kind of pricey, but if you're thinking about launching on something, just heads up, a thousand dollars going out of your pocket's going to be something you have to get used to when you're trying to build a business, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. And I'm kind of weighing at this point a career change. Do I leave my comfortable engineering position there to go full risk? So for a thousand bucks, it seemed worthwhile at the time.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Even if it had been a negative result, it also would've been worthwhile at the time because you wouldn't have ruined your life trying to build an app nobody cares about.

Adam Allore:

That's true. Yeah, exactly. Right on.

David Barnard:

You get this initial excitement at the boat show. You've got emails of people, but you've got no beta to actually send them, which you promise them. What's the next step in the journey to actually build that beta and start actually building an app?

Adam Allore:

Yeah. So I knew I wanted to build something first. My approach wasn't run out for investment at this point. It was get to the next level. Seeing that excitement in people's eyes, that's great, that's one thing. Would people open up their wallets and give a credit card number was sort of the next thing that I ultimately wanted to validate.

So my thinking was, okay, I've got the skillsets that I can work on these maps, I can build the maps. Mobile dev is where I'm lacking and I'm going to start with an iOS app. So I found a local contractor to essentially build that wrapper so that we could put these maps on an iOS device and I could get some early traction with that. So worked closely with this contractor, was just self-funding this aspect of it, paying for that development to get something out in the store as quickly as possible. And admittedly, it was bad, it was very bad. It had the map. People liked the map, but everything around it was bare, bare minimum. But it was, I think in hindsight, enough to draw an attention from early adopters, which is what I needed at that point.

David Barnard:

And that's the key I think a lot of folks miss too, is in the idea of an MVP, the minimal viable product, you had the viable par., it was the map. People loved the map. The map was the true value prop. And so rather than focusing on the fluff, you got that valuable part out and people cared.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, I mean in fact it's the right way to do it, because if one, there's the investment aspect, right? It probably costs you 10 times as much to make it two times better or something like that in terms of having a good experience or getting app store awards or whatever your benchmark is. But the worst part is that that I think actually hides signal because if you can get people excited about a crappy app, it's not going to be scalable because it's crappy because it's got problems, but if you can get people actually using it despite all... And that's the hidden secret of launching an MVP. One half's about it is moving fast. The other half is you really shouldn't work on something unless it's got such a pull from the market that you're going to get people using it despite the problems, because that really tells you there's a need.

If you build a really pretty app, you might load people into the app for those reasons and it's just not going to be that sticky, because honestly, that stuff is pretty replicable. Making a decent app experience, you can spend money and create that. Having a unique product insight, that's more rare. That's where your margin's going to come from and you should test that in that first MVP. And if you get anything, then it's signal. That's kind of a continuation of what you did with the boat show, right? It's like what's the minimum I can spend to get some validation and then do that again. And then I'm going to guess the next stage was to do that again.

Adam Allore:

Yeah, and just keep going. And then from there it was starting to prove people would actually pay for this solution. And I'll step back a little bit as much as recognizing that the map was so important, the early MVP, we did add in other feature sets and functionalities and just realized that those weren't ringing true with people. There was an emergency response functionality to it that I thought was, oh, this is going to be amazing. Everyone's going to love it. This is why this thing's going to skyrocket. But it just kind of came back to like, "No, we just like the map." I was like, "Okay, all right, so I'll focus on that." But then yeah, naturally the next thing was then how do we get some traction with this? To build it and they will come unfortunately isn't really true, at least in my experience. You kind of have to drum up some excitement and get some people coming in and downloading it, so that was sort of the next thing.

Jacob Eiting:

It's not a completely clear market you're coming into, right? There are other nautical chart apps and things like that.

Adam Allore:

Yep.

Jacob Eiting:

And even with a different take, you're going to have to find some wedge and figure out how to steal market share essentially.

David Barnard:

So yeah, what was that wedge for you? You had those emails, but I imagine that was tens to low hundreds of emails by the time you got to launch, so that's not enough to really... It's enough to get some validation but not enough to really kickstart a real business, so what was that first step to start getting real traction?

Adam Allore:

Yeah. We really took an engineering mind testing approach from there, kind of a shotgun to marketing. So tried everything that was available on paid acquisition at the time. Facebook ads, let's try a little bit there. Let's try a little Google search, run a test. I think I was doing five hundred, a thousand dollar maximum spend test. Apple search ads was just, actually been out for maybe a year or two. That one was actually one of the wins out of all the tests there. I remember looking back now. I think we were getting downloads for fifty cents or a dollar.

Jacob Eiting:

The good old days.

Adam Allore:

Ask my wife for a loan or something and just put it all there.

David Barnard:

Because you were still doing all this out of your own pocket, right?

Adam Allore:

Yep. Still self-funding. And I had the luxury of I'd worked as an engineer for seven years prior to that, so I had some savings to give this some breathing room. And then tested other things too, like going around to marinas with my drone to take aerial footage to see if they put up a poster. This was one of the failed attempts. We realized that to find people to find a time to then come and take photo of their marina to then print out a poster for them to then put it up to then get the amount of activation on, it just did not make any sense but it was one of those things you got to try and fail.

And then one of the things that was particularly successful was actually getting some PR hits on the app itself. What I was kind of realizing, especially that there's some advantages being in the marine space is one, it wasn't particularly inundated with mobile solutions and a lot of the articles in the marine space were kind of the same old story. Mercury Marine has got a new outboard with 15 more horsepower. Same story we've heard for the past 50 years. So I thought there's a cool angle here.

Mobile solution, I haven't really touched on it, but there's a Waze feature set, like community element to the app itself. People are sharing points of interest, a very popular.

Jacob Eiting:

This is unique I think from other products in the market, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. Exactly. So that was kind of a community element. It was exciting. And so what I did with the journalists was recognized they have a very difficult job I think, especially today when there's just so much pressure for them to create content. So my thought was like how can I make their life easier? And so what I did was first, get a huge list of journalists who were writing in the marine space and then basically wrote the article for them, had all the image ready to go. So this if they wanted it was drag-and-drop, ready to go, here's your piece of content that you needed to execute today. Done. Some would still want to do an interview and actually create their own content, and obviously, we would absolutely facilitate that, but that was one of those strategies that was helpful to start getting some credibility and people publishing and writing about Wavve.

David Barnard:

That's really cool. I think a lot of people underestimate that aspect of making it easy on a journalist to tell your story, but the other part, you didn't really dive into it, but the storytelling part, what was the story you were telling? Because I think that's a huge part of getting press is like you said, somebody in the marine space are having to write the next story of this outboard has 15 more horsepower. That's just boring but it's what's going on in the industry. How did you tell a story that was compelling enough to get those picked up?

Adam Allore:

I think it was just kind of circling back on the problems that I was seeing when I was working at a marina and recognizing that anyone writing in the marine space, that would sort of resonate with them. So one of the aspects of the application was the community aspect and I think that added the exciting part to it. So the story there was sort of this, here's this application that can allow anyone to boat a local wherever they go. So in Wavve Boating, people are marking points of interest, mooring locations, beach locations, fishing locations.

Jacob Eiting:

That's super helpful. By the way, there's a trailer at this boat ramp under the water that somebody left. You know what I mean? There's always weird things you don't know. You go to a lake you've never been to before that only somebody who's been there a lot probably knows, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. And that's kind of unique with the marine space. There's so much knowledge, but it's in people's heads. And quickly challenging one of the hypothesis there was like would people actually share that if they were given that opportunity? That wasn't a known when we started the application was like, I had this thought that people would share, but you don't know. We weren't paying them, we weren't really incentivizing them, but sure enough, people do share. They can help if they can and that's really exciting. So that community aspect of it I think was the exciting story part. It also was a little less technical than diving into the mapping aspects of it.

Jacob Eiting:

It's easier to write about than...

Adam Allore:

Yeah, yeah. And so really sort of focusing on that part of the solution was what was getting picked up.

Jacob Eiting:

I think that it highlights, we try press stuff here. It's all about us pitching, like you said, it made their job easy, right? Come up with a story that's compelling and don't be too shillish, right? Don't just be like show my product. I got more horsepower or whatever. And there's a ton of these in these niche... Anywhere there's a high-spend niche, aviation has these, boating has these, any sort of sports activity, there's trade that people get. They go out. I get several for random organizations I'm a part of and things like this. And I imagine it's probably in terms of you compare in tech, broad tech publications, which really aren't even that niche anymore. They're just publications compared to something that's not tech, but it's specifically for your customers, that's a really high ROI place probably in terms of how much it costs to actually address that. Also, people selling boat motors, they've got manufacturing margins. You've got software margins, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

You can afford probably when it comes to spending into those things and things like that, you have margin advantage to reaching that audience, which is the nice part about building apps, right?

Adam Allore:

Absolutely.

David Barnard:

So skipping ahead a bit, some influential people started picking up on that press. So tell me about Sea-Doo and them reaching out to you after seeing some press around Wavve.

Adam Allore:

Yeah, and I think that ties into one of the main learnings from that press at reach was initially when I kicked it off, I thought it would be a main push from straight user acquisition and it did add value. I probably at the time thought it was going to make this big hockey stick growth once we get this one article published. That wasn't the case, but it obviously-

Jacob Eiting:

You can't really help that, you know?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, exactly. First time founder here at this company, so always leading with optimism. What I did see come out of that, aside from yes, some user acquisition, was this is how we were getting recognized within the space and getting some outreach. And so this big break happened here where Bombardier Recreational Products, the largest manufacturer in personal watercraft, Sea-Doo, reached out and wanted to talk about an integration.

And so the story that I've heard from them is that we got a PR hit in province of Quebec. Bombardier Recreational Products is based in Montreal, and I guess their chief engineer had used the app that weekend and liked it, liked the map again and thought it would be a good fit for their target market. And they were looking at doing essentially a CarPlay, Android Auto-like solution for some future models of Sea-Doo, so creating an integration where an app could actually run on their units or a rider connects their phone and then it renders versions of the application on an LCD screen just ahead of the handlebars. So BRP reaches out and says, "Hey, we would love you to be the nav solution on this platform." I'm still running this company out of the basement of the house that I'm renting.

Jacob Eiting:

That's when you CC your assistant that doesn't exist, right?

David Barnard:

Let me reach out to my assistant and schedule a call.

Adam Allore:

I'm both excited and terrified for anyone from BRB to listen to this podcast, but that's old.

Jacob Eiting:

It's all inked already, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, exactly. This is just a fun story. So extremely excited by that outreach, and so at the time, yeah, the pitch was, "Hey, we want you to use our software development kit to make this integration possible." Technically what we had to do was the interface is controlled by, kind of like your TV remote, like a four-way controller with a okay button in the middle, so you had to rethink how the app works with that sort of human machine interface, which had its own set of challenges related to it. So we had to integrate onto that. And of course they wanted it for iOS and Android. Didn't have an Android app at this point in time.

Jacob Eiting:

Is it actually using CarPlay or is it, it's its own-

Adam Allore:

No, it's their own solution.

David Barnard:

So tell me about negotiating this. Step me through the process, because I think there's an opportunity for a lot of apps to make their own way with partnerships, not just get press and wait for somebody to reach out to you but actually reach out to folks and try and do things like this. But okay, you reach out to this huge behemoth in the field or they reach out to you, but now you got to step through how do we arrange this financially? Do I bring lawyers on? Tell me that step-by-step process of how you went from them having some level of interest to then actually inking a deal.

Adam Allore:

The biggest thing that was overarching in the whole negotiation process that I learned was for BRP looking at us, we are a risk. I think for any big company to say, hey, I want to partner with you, and I would imagine for a lot of people in the app space who's listening, you're going to be probably considered as a risk for these organizations. So my goal throughout that entire process was just to mitigate that risk as much as possible. Someone had stuck their neck out and was being a cheerleader to...

Jacob Eiting:

You have a champion. It's just like an [inaudible 00:20:58] deal.

Adam Allore:

Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

Somebody internally has to be your champion or it's just never going to happen.

Adam Allore:

And so I wanted to support that person and I wanted to de-risk us as much as possible. So it really was just some basic one-on-one stuff, like being extremely responsive, over-delivering whatever was asked of us, making sure everything was timely just as we were going through that process so that they're feeling a little more relaxed.

Jacob Eiting:

They feel like you're on it, right? Subtle language, the body language of reliability, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah. So I think that was one of the biggest things for sure with that. I think also I recognized the importance of that partnership for us as a company at that point in time. Again, as I highlighted, we were early, early days. I was in the basement of the house we were renting, knowing that landing this partnership would just add a ton of credibility for the business. User acquisition aside, it was going to help put the company on the map. And that has a lot of value that like, can you put a dollar value to that?

Jacob Eiting:

There's a lot of like, if this doesn't happen, we die scenarios in early startups. So it's like how do you put a dollar value on that, right? An ROI versus this versus not, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah. So I just took an approach, not trying to be particularly greedy with anything, making sure we could commit to something that I feel could be executed on. That being said, after signing the contract of here's what we're going to build and when to do it, there was some minor panic attacks of like, okay, now this needs to be done.

Jacob Eiting:

Actually deliver.

Adam Allore:

Yeah. But yeah, I think de-risking, not being greedy, recognizing the value, building a relationship. When things came from more of a legal standpoint, I was bringing in a guy I went to school with who...

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. I was going to say, you got to have cheap legal somewhere or you'll get buried.

Adam Allore:

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. That's when you're tapping your friends on the shoulder, and he was really instrumental in terms of walking me through what does this legalese mean? What do I have to be concerned about? And so thankfully that partnership was fairly smooth. I think Bombardier Recreational Products came from a very collaborative mindset and they were excited to work with us and we were able to sort of facilitate that and ultimately deliver on that partnership.

David Barnard:

For what you can share, what was the structure of the arrangement?

Adam Allore:

The way it works there is a rider on the Sea-Doo itself. It still has to get a subscription to our service to be able to use it on their Sea-Doo.

David Barnard:

So they're not paying you per usage?

Adam Allore:

No. So the consumers there now, we've since then have generated a discounted type offering for anyone who buys a Sea-Doo. My pitch was like, they're buying a $20,000 Sea-Doo. Let's give them a $45 app and let's facilitate that. That was the main thing there. And then they also helped a bit with some of the integration costs upfront. So that helped actually bring in a little bit of essentially first investment into the company.

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, yeah. I think sometimes people don't think about these deals as creatively as they can be built. I've heard lots of different ones, and it depends on the stage you're at and things like this. But yeah, sometimes it can be a strategic investment for equity or sometimes it can just be like, hey, we'll help offset the cost of development along with this.

I think your point about not being greedy is really important, just being self-aware about who stands to gain from what here. You don't want to be taken advantage of, obviously. You don't want to be run over, but being very flexible, especially if it's something you're experimenting with, I think there's deals that, I mean as a founder, I think you can just kind of smell, like I don't think this is going to be worth the squeeze and you should be careful just because some company you look up to is trying to talk to you about that. We've had that here where I think the biggest one for us is people always wanting to partner and buy data sets and stuff from us. Those are really big companies. And we have a moral obligation not to do that, but you're like, who got in touch with us? They want to partner? You almost want to be like, how much? And then you're like, no. It's like, no. We just said that we can't do that.

But I think it is possible as a small company to get starstruck talking to big companies and then you can end up, so there's a balance there. But yeah, you got to be flexible. And assume it's not your last contract potentially with them and potentially with the next partner and stuff like that. It reminds me very much of how we were doing our very first contracts with customers here. It's like, well, legal. I just read contracts. It's in English. Use a good template. They want to change something. I'm like, eh, it's probably harmless. Is this going to be what kills us? There's a limit to that obviously. But again, if your company's worth nothing, what's the risk to signing a contract? You probably don't have any personal liability. If you're coming at it in good faith and using your head, things tend to work out. But yeah, you really do just got to make it happen. You got to figure it out.

David Barnard:

And where'd you go from there? So you signed the contract with Sea-Doo and they pay you something, but you're still in your basement. Did you raise money at that point and build a team around you to deliver this integration or how did that go?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Wait, was there anybody working with you when you were going through this deal or was it just you?

Adam Allore:

There was one other, the iOS contractor. Yeah, yeah. And my [inaudible 00:25:37].

Jacob Eiting:

You go to meet the team. I have this moment. We were pitching a company that was like 300 people at RevenueCat, like very early days. It was like 2018. Miguel and I went and it was me and Miguel and 10 other people in the room and it was like, oof. And then they asked how many people on our team and I lied and said five even though it was like only two.

Adam Allore:

What is a reasonable sounding number?

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, Exactly. I was like, but you think five makes them feel any better?

Adam Allore:

When you're two, I guess it does.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's others. That's what I should have said. There's others.

Adam Allore:

Jim is sick today. Sorry he couldn't make it.

Jacob Eiting:

Sorry, I had to share that story. It was just funny.

Adam Allore:

No, totally relatable. And that was the position I was in ultimately. Like I said, there was totally like a, oh my goodness, panic moment, but excitement at the same time. So the advantage I had now at this point was the iOS application was in the store. I had proven that people would actually pay for it and then I had a contract with BRP to do something really cool.

So with that, I was able to go out to the local angel network here to raise some capital and it wasn't anything crazy, less than half a million dollars, but that was enough to get things going, build up a bit more of a team, get the Android application, deliver on BRP and grow and go from there.

David Barnard:

And then since partnering with BRP, Sea-Doo, you've had other partnerships. So let's talk through that next partnership with Freedom Boat Club. And this was another, they reached out to you. So tell me the story of that.

Adam Allore:

Yeah, this is another fun one. So Freedom Boat Club is an alternative to owning a vessel. So you pay a monthly due to a club and you can take their boats from groups of locations. What had happened was one of their team members at their largest club in Tampa Bay had read about us in one of the largest marine industry magazines and was like, "This is really cool, I'm going to reach out." And so that was like, okay, great opportunity. I wanted to get in touch with Freedom Boat Club. Side note, the guy who reached out to us is now actually on our team as our director of marketing, so this can also work as a talent acquisition tool.

Jacob Eiting:

Everything's a talent acquisition tool. This podcast is a talent acquisition tool, depending on the timeframe, you know?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, yeah. So multiple benefits going on. So with them, again, what I wanted to do is come from the mindset of well, how can we help? And I think that's another main point is come from a position of how can you help first and then go from there and does your solution support that? And then in some cases there may be a thing where it's like, I really don't think we can help you as well as another solution possibly could and then you carry on from there.

But with Freedom, they wanted to prevent their members from running a ground and having the best time on the water and the vessels are their assets, so they're incentivized to keep them in the water. Okay, excellent. Let's provide licenses to this solution to all of your members and cut down on incident rates and maximize their time on the water so they continue to be a Freedom Boat Club member.

And so that was essentially the deal that we set up with them and was my first foray into, I guess more direct B2B sales where we were then selling licenses to Wavve directly to the club so that their members could use it. So from the member's perspective, it was like they were getting a free app. From the club's perspective, it was a much cheaper solution than outfitting the vessels with multi-thousand dollar chart plotters, which are the pre-app solution to...

Jacob Eiting:

Right. Yeah, yeah. It's actually saving money for them. It's not just some tack-on, I think. I mean we've heard lots of customers. There's a lot of companies doing these B2B side motions, and it has some challenges contractually, like building the deals. It's a very different motion than building an app. In terms of go-to-market motion, it's just a very different beast, but ultimately, yeah, you're right. It's like selling a per seat license thing.

How much pain was there in making the flows and stuff work? Did you guys have to invest a lot there? Was it the first time you'd done that, in terms of making sure their members have access and things like that?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, it was an extra challenge. So I think architecturally, I think we ended up going with a deep linking solution so that we could actually get them past our traditional paywall.

Jacob Eiting:

Okay. Make it as simple as possible?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. And that was one of the things I learned there was at least with these early partnerships, you can kind of go nuts thinking about how people could gamify it and everything else like that. [inaudible 00:29:43] robust [inaudible 00:29:43] solution.

Jacob Eiting:

People hate being stolen from. It makes people crazy. You know what I mean? You're going to create all this crazy Rube Goldberg machine of authentication and whatever when it's just figure out a way to make sure that all the people that are actually paying have the best experience possible and acceptable spillage maybe, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly. And then my thought was, well, if that's a problem, we'll make sure we've got mechanisms for self-policing after the fact and we can go in and clean things up, but let's make sure we make it as easy for people to get activated. And that was probably one of the biggest learnings there was in this process we were talking about this sort of activation type and everything else like that. The biggest thing was it's most important just to make it super easy for that person to actually use this application. That was the biggest hurdle there. It's like there's a behavior change that we have to create for these members, which is here's this new app they've never heard about that's now offered to them as a club. How do you actually get them to click on that email and do that activation and remind them?

Jacob Eiting:

Educate them, get them to install it.

Adam Allore:

Exactly. What's the value?

Jacob Eiting:

Know they even have access to it, right?

Adam Allore:

That's the biggest challenge than any of the technical aspects of it.

David Barnard:

And were you getting paid per activation so you were incentivized to activate them versus getting paid a flat fee per 250 members in the club and you would get a fee on all 250 or only the ones that would activate?

Adam Allore:

We've done experimentation with both. For that particular one, it was based on a per activation rate.

David Barnard:

Gotcha.

Jacob Eiting:

It's smart. You guys are going to know more how to get people to open an app and things like that. But yeah, I think that's, you talk about renewals. Are these partners going to renew on this? I think they're going to want to see data. They're going to want to know are customers actually, and so this is classic B2B sales. You don't want to sell a deal. You put a lot of work into a deal. If it churns after it's first period, that's a waste. You probably just spent that first period of the deal making back all your investment costs to get the deal going. If you're lucky, you have only have a one-year payback period. It's really important to think about that in the structure of the deal. Think about how in this deal can we structure it that we're incentivized to make it successful and they're incentivized as well to make it successful. Because organizations are big. You lose track of stuff.

I think that's been my biggest learning with partnerships. We've tried a few on and off and unless there are champions on both sides, highly motivated. And for you guys, it's a growth channel. It's never been a huge growth channel for us, or at least when I was, in the early days when somebody would approach me, I'd just be like, ah, I'd have to put a lot of energy into this and I think it does not rise above the other opportunities I have. So it's almost as important to know when not to do them because they can pull you in if you're not ready to commit.

Adam Allore:

I can totally relate to that, and we got burned by that too. There's a couple successes there, but there's definitely been some lessons learned. I don't know I'd call them failures, but one of the examples was this was foraying with a partnership with a boat rental company, and they wanted some web-based solution to manage their members that were using the application as well.

And at the time I was like, okay, I've had a couple wins here. I'm going to continue down this avenue again. And then at the end of the day, what ended up sort of happening was I just felt like we ended up becoming almost like a really cheap dev-op company solution for them where we're building a custom solution for them. And I'm proud of what we built. They're happy and that's great, but then I built something for a addressable market of one and maybe I actually could have gone and taken that solution and maybe sold it to other boat rental companies, but then I don't know that business. That's a different business, and as I think you're highlighting, Jacob, there's a million and three things to do every day. You got to be careful. It can absolutely be a distraction. And that happened to us where it was like I wonder how much straight consumer app product development we might've lost during that period of time?

Jacob Eiting:

Right. Yeah. The counterfactual, whatever you didn't do because you were doing that instead.

Adam Allore:

Yeah. And we're a small team growing. There's trade-offs.

Jacob Eiting:

It's hard to say no to anybody to that point, right? You're just trying to scrap. I always say anybody who caress about my stupid app, meaning RevenueCat in this case, anybody who cares about RevenueCat, I want to talk to and I want to make happy. Partnerships can be a classic trap there where you end up... Same with investors too. It's really easy I think to be flattered sometimes as a founder just because you're used to everybody ignoring you, so it could be a bit of a trap.

Adam Allore:

Answer an email.

Jacob Eiting:

Right. But like you said too, it's the... I think with, especially in niches, I think if you're building a mass consumer product, unless you're going to do a partnership with Pepsi or something insane, then that's going to be very hard to pull off at a small scale. We've seen it work with some other. I mean we talked to, I don't know if Alex and Greg talked about this on the podcast or not. They make an app for plant owners, plant parents. They've done some partnerships with plant sellers and things like this that has had some success, which outside of niches, you never would've talked about this 10 years ago. It's just kind of the state of maturation, penetration, willingness for consumers to try these things. And it's a strategy I think a lot of people should be considering.

David Barnard:

Yeah. Alex did share that on the podcast and then I've followed up with him since and they've continued to expand those and are rolling out even bigger partnerships. And it's been a huge success and a huge driver for them of user acquisition, getting these little QR codes put in every plant that's sold at these nurseries.

Adam Allore:

Very cool.

David Barnard:

And now they've rolled that into bigger and bigger plant sellers. So I'm curious for you how these partnerships have worked out from an actual user acquisition standpoint. Has it really driven user acquisition and helped drive revenue or has it been more about that recognition and press and other things that have driven it from a end around?

Adam Allore:

I think honestly a bit of both. So straight user acquisition, probably we're looking at 25% of our total user acquisition is coming through our partnering facilitation. Now, we also know that a lot of people who are coming from our organic channels, i.e. untracked I guess is what you would probably call it, have also heard about us from these other things as well.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. It's the virality and the influence of those users. And then probably some who just aren't tracked properly, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly, yeah. There's that knock on value that's kind of hard to establish. And especially I think with marine space and with boating, there's a natural viral element to it. [inaudible 00:35:38]

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. That's a niche element advantage too, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah.

Jacob Eiting:

If you have a smaller, more dense niche of hobbyists, there's a better K-factor or whatever in virality, I think, than in the general population.

Adam Allore:

Yeah. So there's been a direct and positive benefit and it's clearly part of our continued user acquisition strategy, and then the other hard to measure benefit is absolutely the credibility piece. When we're looking at other potential partnerships, people aren't familiar with us. They know about Bombardier Recreational Products, they know about Freedom Boat Club, they know about some of our other partnerships that we work in the boat education and licensing spaces. So there's certainly credibility there that can open those doors. And maybe it's not a partnership, but it's maybe just some other sort of thing that's getting facilitated.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. It is very interesting, I think, how you took it from the press stuff and used that to trade up into partnerships and then trade those up into bigger partnerships. And it's a whole game aside from just different growth mechanisms, but in building something, you're always taking what you have and leveraging it into the next thing.

It's like that GIF with the little domino into the bigger, bigger domino. That's leverage. That's a perfect illustration of how to take advantage of leverage. And so it's good to have a balanced approach and be like, we don't just look at the dollars and cents of a partnership. It's the dollars and cents of it. But then there's also the priceless aspect of it of what does this create for us? And I feel like as a founder, you kind of know. You kind of know when you did a partnership or something and it was like it doesn't really seem like this moved the needle for us, versus one where you're bringing it up, it's coming up, people [inaudible 00:37:02] mention it to you. It may not be perfectly measurable, but you're like, I feel like this did something.

Adam Allore:

Worth the time and worth-

Jacob Eiting:

And I think that's okay.

Adam Allore:

Totally.

Jacob Eiting:

We don't have to have perfect attribution to these things.

David Barnard:

Have you leveraged those partnerships in social proof? So I was actually surprised not to see any mention of the Sea-Doo partnership in your app store screenshots or anything like that. Do you feel like those kind of partnerships help with consumers to see that, oh, you're a real app with these big partnerships and stuff?

Adam Allore:

I think first off, one, there's probably a bit of a missed opportunity for us to actually have that on our product pages.

Jacob Eiting:

You got to go back and get logo rights in that deal.

Adam Allore:

Yeah. That's true.

Jacob Eiting:

I made that mistake too in the early days.

Adam Allore:

Yeah, yeah. That's where legal gets back involved. So I think there's definitely value there. Where I kind of saw this interesting flywheel happen is then you land the partnership and then there becomes another press release, right?

Jacob Eiting:

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Adam Allore:

And then you just got to get back into the loop again.

Jacob Eiting:

And their press team is motivated to share it too, right?

Adam Allore:

Exactly.

Jacob Eiting:

It's like something they can put on their social, which ideally is bigger than your social, right?

Adam Allore:

Yeah. And so then there's this other, harder, untangible benefit of that partnership, spinning your PR again to then hopefully facilitate another opportunity.

David Barnard:

We do need to wrap up, but any other top lessons? Anything you would advise other app founders in thinking about how to leverage strategic partnerships in their business?

Adam Allore:

Yeah, I think just consider how you can help. Start with that. What's the advantage of them working with you and how can you make a difference in their business at the end of the day? And even thinking of it from a P&L standpoint, it needs to be something that they see real value or it's part of maybe their brand mission at the time. Try to de-risk the situation as much as possible. Over-deliver. Be timely. Don't be greedy. And then just make sure you can deliver on it, and have fun and go from there.

David Barnard:

And as we're wrapping up, anything else you wanted to share with our esteemed audience here?

Adam Allore:

Always looking to work with awesome people. I know we didn't talk too much about team stuff, but all of this is so much easier if you're working with good people and it takes a while.

Jacob Eiting:

Boats and apps. Don't tempt me. It's right in my current wheelhouse, so...

Adam Allore:

Perfect. So yeah, don't be shy, reach out. I love chatting with various people in this space. Start there. And then certainly interested in any sort of partnerships with other applications in the outdoor space. That'd be a fun one. So if that's you, please reach out.

David Barnard:

Yeah, that's another kind of under-leveraged opportunity as well, like partnering with other apps in the space or other bigger apps who have ad inventory that they're not making good use of. Affiliates. We talked with CardPointers about finding influencers in the space. There's just a lot of opportunities to partner with folks and get attention through that. So yeah, reach out to Adam and thanks so much for joining us on the podcast, Adam. This was a lot of fun.

Adam Allore:

Thanks so much for having me.