Product Lessons From a Profitable, $20M ARR Subscription App — Jesse Venticinque, Fitbod

David Barnard:

Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.

Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me today RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. Our guest today is Jesse Venticinque, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at FitBod. On the podcast, we talk with Jesse about the trap of building for existing subscribers, incentivizing word of mouth, and why paid marketing should be an accelerant, not the foundation of your growth strategy. Hey, Jesse. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today.

Jesse Venticinque:

David, thanks for having me.

David Barnard:

Jacob, always nice to chat with you.

Jacob Eiting:

As always here, excited, apps. Let's go.

David Barnard:

So Jesse, I am stoked to have you on the podcast. I often gush about our guests because I try and get people on whose apps I use or businesses I admire and things like that. I am a huge football fanboy, so you'll hear me gushing throughout the whole podcast, because I was looking for a weightlifting app earlier this year and just fell in love and have been using it weekly since. So, it's going to be fun chatting today. I did want to kick things off. So, as I was looking at FitBod, as a subscription nerd, I saw that you all have passed $20 million in ARR and are profitable and are venture backed. So, three interesting, not necessarily expected things to combine into one, so it must be quite a journey so far. So, tell us a little bit about founding FitBod and raising capital and getting to this point.

Jesse Venticinque:

Sure thing. Yeah, David, thanks for the support and the praise. Yeah, I think there's several factors that have allowed us to grow the business largely on our revenues alone. I think two of the most important ones, the first is a maniacal focus on product retention, on building something that people want. So, Alan, my co-founder and I, we spent the first several years just the two of us building product, listening to customers before hiring, before fundraising, before marketing, and really trying to leverage an engaged user base to spread the word. Once we did turn on paid advertising, the unit economics were pretty immediately scalable, I think particularly because of our strong conversion and retention or LTV, which enabled fundraising, enabled hiring.

The paid marketing really acts as an accelerant to our word of mouth viral loop. So, as we ramped our paid subscribers, our organic subs grew in line. Maybe lastly about product is around recurring revenue. So, our subscription like retention curve flattens out and we have users at 36 months, 48 months, even 60 months, that are still paying us. So, each new cohort of users we acquire adds to this stack of recurring revenue, which is fundamentally about product. I think the second reason, our goal with FitBod to challenge the fitness status quo mirrors our approach to company building. So, the fitness industry and brands, there's a lot of snake oil, a lot of shortcuts to success like the six-week plan or this new gadget to promise you the best shape of your life look perfect.

The truth is that physical fitness should be a lifelong practice and especially after we're in the best shape of our lives. As we age, it's even more critical to do this. This is a quip, but my fitness goal is to be a kickass 100-year-old. I want to kick a soccer ball like my great grandkid. So, we built a workout app with only one workout. It's your next one. In a sense, it's your lifelong workout. It meets you where you are.

So, similar to startups, especially in the past several years, the past 10 years, there's been this culture of using shortcuts to hit some idealized milestone like raising and spending money prior to product market fit. So, I think it was less sexy at the time. Now, it's a little more popular, the path we took, but it's almost like this fitness ideology results take time and work and we got to compound success.

David Barnard:

Yeah. That's such an incredible start to an app like this. I didn't realize that you all had spent so much time dialing in some level of product market fit before you raised. What did that very early journey look like? Did you launch the app and actually start getting users and did you have a little angel funding or was this a side project before you found the product market fit and then eventually raised some funding?

Jesse Venticinque:

My co-founder, Alan and I, my background's in product design. I'd worked as a freelancer for his previous startup, and FitBod did start out after that one wound down. We did start it as a side project and really solving a personal problem. I think we had a very unique approach to solving the problem, which we can get into a little bit later, but we put it into the app store and immediately saw a little bit of traction that I think just built on itself. We did have an early beta testing phase where we did make an important pivot from more of an advanced tracker to a recommended workout plan. I think ASO, app store optimization actually was pretty important in the beginning, being able to rank in Apple search results.

Alan more so is the engineer of the analytical approach and he really spent time trying to test keywords and ranking in those early days. So, I think a lot of early users found us that way. It was really interesting. It was when users were unilaterally emailing us and that email was growing over time of feedback and requests and praise. That was the first inkling of a product market fit.

David Barnard:

What was the actual tipping point then of now we're really onto something, we're going to raise some funding, start hiring, and this is a real business?

Jesse Venticinque:

It was probably when we first monetized, which was still maybe a year and a half before we closed our first seed round. This was 2016 as consumer SaaS or subscription was early and it was surprising to us at least that someone would pay a subscription for a utilitarian product that wasn't necessarily a content based. So, it's like, "Okay, people are paying us for this thing." Then looking up and realizing, "Hey, our unique approach leveraging AI and ML to produce these customized strength training prescription, it seems very scalable. It's a large problem out there and we have this unique tech." So that was how we gained confidence.

Jacob Eiting:

I'm guess I'm asking for the founders in this situation, and it's a common dilemma. It's like, well, can I get this thing off the ground? Do I need to bring on outside capital? Because the truth is you bring on outside capital, you got to unload outside capital. It puts you on this trajectory, which there are variations to that path, but it starts to narrow your potential future options. What was the big impetus for you guys? It was like, "Hey, we want to be able to go faster," or was it hey, we want this to be venture scale? What was the decision making and was it even a decision? Was this we're going to do this and now we are able to, or what was your thought process?

Jesse Venticinque:

There was a question of whether to run this as a small business or raise funding. As you mentioned, when you raise from investors, the game changes quite a bit. The early product market fit and just the prospect of being able to scale a very underrated form of exercise. I think strength training is the secret hiding in plain sight and it really could make a really dramatic impact. I think it's what the world needs in a sense. If you think about it more broadly, maybe with healthcare and freedom from pain, being able to move about the world, I think there's coming some fundamental ideas there that we got really excited about. I think we found a great initial partner in Jason Calacanis to lead that seed round and get it going.

Jacob Eiting:

That's the guy with the podcast?

Jesse Venticinque:

That's right. Yup, the podcast.

David Barnard:

So with money in the bank and a profitable company, you mentioned that paid marketing has been a factor in growth and that because you have really good fundamental numbers, that was an accelerant. Was there pressure to just go raise $50 million and blow it up with as much paid marketing as possible? How did you navigate that landscape? I imagine venture capitalists were just wanting to throw money at you in that phase of funding.

Jacob Eiting:

All founders are required to say yes, whether or not it's true or not.

Jesse Venticinque:

When we launched in 2015, fitness tech wasn't as popular as it was today. I think MyFitnessPal was probably the most successful outcome at $500 million. But now look at the landscape in the last couple years, it's gotten very popular. So, we were in an underdog industry at the beginning. Alan and I internally, we recognized the downside potentially and we basically found investors who aligned with that. So, Jason has always run against the grain of the grow at all costs.

Our subsequent rounds, they've largely been made up of startup operators who have aligned with our models. So, for example, the co-founders of Calm, the meditation app who famously beat Headspace by staying lean and another investor is an operator at Notion who I think one time described revenue per headcount as a great metric.

Jacob Eiting:

That's I think often overlooked, especially in the frenzy of fundraising, is that alignment between your investors and it's sometimes personality and background when you're talking about seed angel stage and also just structure of what their funds are designed to do, who did they raise money from and the expectations they set. I mean, do they have a thesis and is there something about what you're doing that goes beyond just the short-term returns? Not dwell too much on the venture capital side of things, but I think this is where some folks can end up in the horror stories you hear is when you take money and there's misalignment in how that money is deployed.

I mean there's a lack of trust and a lack of shared vision. It's worse than a bad marriage because it's really hard to unwind a venture capital deal. It takes a little bit of luck, but also just picking wisely, think about who you raise money from more even than who you hire. There's some advice out there that's like money is money and there's some truth to that, but I do think you can go a lot further and your life will be a lot better if you choose wisely and if you're blessed with a good product and leverage in the process. I mean the way you guys did it was right. Don't show up to your first pitch with a slide deck of what an app could look like and three test flight users. Show up with a basics of a flywheel.

I feel like with consumer and consumer subscription specifically, you almost need to be a stage ahead of where a B2B company would have to be, right? You guys have to be proving scalability. You need to have product market fit at the seed versus a B2B, it's at the A usually. You need to have scalability at A, which a B2B company typically won't have until the B or C. It's definitely harder. I'm sure we'll come back to it, but I think the concepts of community, we talk about this every time we get something out here with a successful app, there's some aspect of we had some magic substrate, some ether that allowed us to amplify our spend.

As a venture capitalist, when you hear that, you're like, "Ooh, you start here." Oh, I hear alpha, right? I hear return, I hear margin. So, I think that that makes the decision a lot easier. I think a consumer especially and just to continue to preach, but I definitely caution founders don't fundraise until you're at that stage. You're at that postpartum market fit. You got some scale and you know really want to go for it, but that's really cool.

David Barnard:

So that's where I actually wanted to go next is that. Of course, in hindsight, in 2023, you look like rock stars with a $20 million ARR profitable, couldn't be better positioned. As a customer, I'm thrilled to have heard that. I know this is going to be a product I can rely on for years to come and you're going to build toward not just an exit, but toward a great customer experience. So, all those things I'm excited about, but choosing not to just dump a pile of cash on the app meant you had to go other directions. So, other than the paid marketing you have done, what have those sources of traffic been for growth?

Jesse Venticinque:

So I mentioned the word of mouth and the viral growth loop, so that's critical and still actually I think a major growth driver today. So, we have a whole strategy set out to try to identify and focus on which step of that viral growth loop is the highest leverage to move a top level metric. If we do take word of mouth virality, that top level metric is the number of new subscribers that an existing subscriber will generate.

Our loop looks like a new user comes in, they become engaged with the product, they tell another user via word of mouth, or say they can share their fitness progress or results and that'll invite another user who becomes engaged. Product being foundational also comes into play here where word of mouth is enabled. When a product beats the expectations for a new user, they come up with some expectations and it totally blows them out of the water and that's what enables word of mouth.

David Barnard:

Were there specific ways that you worked as a product leader to identify those loops? I'm a little burned on the growth loop term. I mean sometimes for some apps, it really is magical thinking because it's just not the app that is going to get virality, but I think a lot of founders do themselves a disservice by not at least exploring ways that that could happen. So, I'd love to hear how FitBod identified and nurtured those growth loops.

Jesse Venticinque:

To your point, we're not a naturally social product. So, I think the viral growth loop is important. In other words, one just can't use paid UA, right? A law of the universe that the more you spend, it's going to get less efficient. Paid UA is like a funnel where the more you put it in the top, the more you might get out the bottom, but it's not necessarily a compounding loop. So, I think for us, virality is an important part of the growth story, but we probably need to add other growth loops as well. Content being another one, for example. It could be user generated or for example, our blog.

Our blog is something we've been investing in quite a bit and there's obviously scalable idea there. We produce content that will drive new users who will produce more revenue to invest in more content. So, I see it as several growth groups playing together. We're not a naturally viral product, so it's maybe unlikely for us to hit a viral coefficient where a new subscriber will invite more than one new subscriber.

Jacob Eiting:

But you don't need to. You're not NGL or one of these social apps that lives or dies by social virality or gas or one of the others, but the way that you were saying is that long-term retention and especially with your long view on it, which I think the retention curve of your subscribers will map the value curve derived. So, as long as users are continuously perceiving value that that cohort will not go to zero and that means usage and engagement. The thing you said that was really profound was about incentivizing virality or word of mouth through beating expectations. That's really fascinating. I haven't thought about it that way, but you're right.

If you come in and it ties into the investor argument about seeking alpha, when a user comes in and gets more than they expect, that's information that's inherently valuable to other humans looking to exploit value. It's like where can I find something where the perceived value is higher than the cost. I imagine you put that into the design of the app and the user experience from a sign-up in macro. How do I drive this user to a viral moment within their first month? I guess maybe a different way phrasing is like how do you balance that? I guess maybe they're not in conflict, but those features or those things that are purely focused on this long-term fitness journey versus well, I want it to be so good, you tell your friends.

Jesse Venticinque:

This segues into the idea of activation and the product hook. So, a product hook is this discreet repeatable action that user will take in a product. I think a lot of great consumer companies have this. There's Google search and hailing an Uber. We purposely designed our product hook, or at least we took inspiration from Nir Eyal, habit creation model. He had a 2012 book called Hooked. Basically, there's a trigger, an action, a reward, and an investment part of this habit creation loop. Let's say for FitBod, the trigger is some type of psychological uncertainty about what to do in the gym or how to strength train. The action is launching the app and we solve that problem with your next workout. We make the reward visible.

Meaning after you log a workout, we celebrate it with various achievements and signals of progress. Then the investment phase, a user will invest their time or money or data into the product. So, making that reward visible and shareable, which we've invested in quite a bit, I think, has been important for a virality and allowing our customers to show the value they're getting from the product. So, our customers will share their fitness progress out and a potential user will view that and understand the value or might think, "Hey, I could drive that value as well."

David Barnard:

There are some really fun things in the app that I've been really impressed with. It's fun, because when I use subscription apps now, I'm using it both as a user and delighted as a user with the user experience, but then also thinking about the subscription strategy. I love the way the sharing screens are designed and one of the cool things you all do in the sharing screen is show the total pounds lifted in a workout and it's so freaking impressive. I've never seen that before, but my last workout Monday with FitBod, I lifted 20,000 pounds or something. I mean I'm not especially strong.

I'm not benching 300 or anything like that, but it was a really impressive number and I wanted to share that. That's pretty cool. But then something else you all do too is that there's this almost constant banner of share six free workouts. Has that been a big driver of that referral thing where you normally get three free workouts, but if you share the link, your friend gets six free workouts? Has that driven a lot of users?

Jesse Venticinque:

It has. However, we haven't invested a ton into it, and that's an immediate strategy to put more in there. The referral six free workouts link there, we actually added it to be able to understand and measure this growth loop. So, the first step is to measure and identify which part of that to focus on. So, we built that feature and with all this steps instrumented. We can know what percent of subscribers view the referral feature and then what percent will send a referral, what percent of recipients will tap on it and redeem and convert. So, the next step here is to identify which part of the conversion funnel would produce the highest outcome.

So, it may be the case that we just need to increase the number of times a subscriber sees the referral page. Part of the highest leverage part of the funnel is having a referred user convert and some type of incentive there. So, now, a lot of word of mouth happens outside of the product and we can work on trying to incentivize more of it happening in the product, but just knowing where to invest our limited time and resources on which part of the funnel. This is true for the entire acquisition, activation, retention user lifecycle.

Jacob Eiting:

I mean it's interesting to know how many people do that referral motion, but yeah, more interestingly, it's probably linearly related to the amount of word of mouth period. It's very easy and obvious way to do a referral because word of mouth is extremely hard to track. You don't know. You can ask people, it's imperfect, you can whatever. But let's say you're trying to increase word of mouth, I would say you could look at the result. How many people are referring as a good proxy to your other K factor inputs? I think I suffered from this in the past when I was working on consumer apps was thinking, "I have to measure everything properly. If it's not instrumented, I can't trust anything."

The truth is it's getting perfect instrumentation is almost impossible and you should be good enough with some things that you can plausibly say are going to be related. You can work on things and look at the results of that proxy number and that can be good enough. So, I understand the struggle that referral programs are tricky, right? They're hard to balance and hard to track and they're tricky to set up. But even if that isn't a silver bullet in terms of that giving you a 2X K factor, it's like if nothing else it gives you data on... Still people call it the K factor, the 1.1 users per user or whatever. That's interesting.

David Barnard:

One of the things you've mentioned several times now is how important retention is to FitBod. So, I'd love to explore how you think about retention and how you measure retention. Then we can talk more about how you drive that retention.

Jesse Venticinque:

Going back to, Jacob, your comment, instrumenting is hard and retention is one of the most challenging things for a few reasons. So, we break it down into different levels of fidelity. So, at the highest level, we have subscription retention. Did a subscriber autorenew into the next period or not? With an annual plan, it takes a year to know that. I think with consumer SaaS, we see this. There's likely a cohort of inactive renewers, subscribers who are disengaged with the product but will renew anyway. So, say we want to increase subscription retention. If we reactivate those inactive renewers, it won't move the metric at all, right? Because they're already paying for it.

So, under this subscription retention, we look at cancellation retention. Did the subscriber hit the cancel button in the period or not? That can be measured on a monthly basis because a subscriber can cancel before their subscription period runs out. So, when are they hitting the cancel button? The last level before that, the most important, we have a workout retention metric which is synonymous with engagement, but a subscriber must log three plus workouts per month to survive to the following month. That's like the true retention we try to move and operate on to move the top level.

Jacob Eiting:

You just said most people do this at some level. You pick a number, say like, "Hey, folks doing three or more, we think that's a good healthy minimum level of engagement and you focus on that." You just pick that using your gut and informed decision, or what's the reason for that cutoff?

Jesse Venticinque:

Practically in the dashboard, you can change that number. I can look at one plus, two plus, three plus, four plus. But if we look at our ideal customer profile, the people who show the best conversion and retention in the app, it's something like two point something workouts a week actually.

Jacob Eiting:

Wow. But again, it goes back to this concept of low resolution metrics. You just pick some things that you think are somewhat sensitive to what matters, and then building a model of understanding exactly how those three workouts translate into paid subscription and then paid subscription retention is incredibly complicated, but you can imagine it probably helps. So, you drive that and you can plausibly drive the next metric or drive down the cancellation metric or drive up the retention metric, which is interesting. I mean the discussion around inactive subscribers is very interesting. I think as an industry for us, I mean it's not our problem, but it is something we benefit from. It's an interesting thing.

I think Apple's gotten more and they've lifted a lot of this for us, but it would be interesting for Apple to create even more incentive for us to notify user. If they started tracking activity in the apps and recommended people unsubscribe, that might be really interesting. I think the monthly emails are pretty good. They say, "Hey, you were subscribed to this." It's a good start, but it does create I think sometimes interesting incentive structures for us or people running apps in terms of if I send an email to this whole list, I might actually damage my subscription, which is I think probably morally what you want to do, but also, we're trying to run a business here and I don't know. It's a tricky thing, but again, I think it's focus on those usage. Drive up usage. If you didn't drive up usage and retention, the score will take care of itself on a lot of this stuff.

David Barnard:

But optionality is a job to be done. I have the option to work out. I have a great workout app for that next workout I'm going to do. It's tough because you're not directly providing value in those situations, but in some ways, you are. But what are some of the ways that FitBod works to increase those numbers? Do you have specific in-app or push or email campaigns around driving those workouts?

Jesse Venticinque:

The retention strategy is to focus on users who are becoming at risk or becoming dormant before they cancel. Typically, I think there's lower leverage in trying to revive churned users. The longer a user goes from using the product, it's probably harder to get them back. So, we're trying to pinpoint higher up in that funnel when a user is at risk of going dormant and try to use engagement tactics and interventions there. We have a model that predicts user engagement.

Going back, Jacob, to your comment, I think logging workouts we discovered is the best predictor of engagement. So, we want to focus there on that area. What else could we potentially focus on? Well, we could look at our super active engage users and build the features they're looking for. However, I think the bigger point of leverage that move that metric is to try to understand why people are going dormant and try to solve that problem. It goes back to the areas of focus.

Jacob Eiting:

It's probably a wider cohort too, right? You probably have a lot of folks that maybe don't attach or maybe only retain for a little while. There's just probably more surface area in terms of users in that cohort to attack your super hyper engaged users. You keep using the word leverage, which I think sometimes it gets overused, but I think actually in this case, alpha is also the word, right? It's like where in your app's individual model is going to be the most ROI? Talking about those different user bases is really fascinating, because sometimes I think the advice on product can be talked to your most deeply engaged users and build what they want. That's true to an extent, but maybe in consumer land where everybody's revenue is like capped, right?

You're going to retain them for a long time. In B2B, if I can take a 10K account, make it 100K account, make it 500K account, there's real leverage to use the word again and talk and really building, building, building for that user base. But in consumer SaaS, it's different. You're going to get $100 a year or whatever your number is from that user if they're way engaged. So, unfortunately, there's tragedy of the commons, where you do have to make sure you build features that are going to drive mass adoption, not just deeply engaged user adoption. What's an example of one of these tactics? You just say, "Hey, come back," or do you offer anything free? Or what maybe have you tried that's worked or not?

Jesse Venticinque:

When I say leverage, what I really mean is about focus, because I think just the critical driver for startup success is where we focus our limited time and resources. To answer that question, I'll actually point to what we're focused on right now and where the leverage is so to speak. So, I mentioned our retention is pretty solid. We're actually more focused on conversion and activation as a way to move short-term immediate business metrics. There's more leverage there in a sense that there's more users actually in the activation funnel that we could potentially convert.

So, out of say 10,000 subscribers, there's about 15,000 or 20,000 that make it pretty far in the trial funnel and don't convert. If we were able to convert that group, we could potentially double subscribers so to speak. So, we're not as focused on retention right now, right? We're more focused there and I can tell you a bit about how we go about trying to convert that group.

David Barnard:

I wanted to actually throw a hypothetical your way because I think this product thinking gets lost too often. I'm a FitBod Lifer at this point. I'm going to keep paying you. I mean maybe I'd find a different workout app at some point or whatever.

Jacob Eiting:

You were just paying for an app because you like it so much. I do that a lot. Even if I'm not using it, I'll just be like, "I want this to still be around," the optionality thing.

David Barnard:

But as a user, there's specific features I want. I think this is a trap a lot of especially consumer founders get into. I mean we face this at RevenueCat. When a customer says, "Oh, I really need this chart," and then it's like, "Oh, do we drop everything and build that chart or what's the broader strategy?" So let me throw a couple of features I personally want in FitBod. You tell me how you contextualize that into what's going to activate new users, what's going to keep existing users subscribed? I know you have this offense versus defense framework that you think through.

So, feature pitch, in my little home garage, I've got a TV that I'll ride my air bike and watch TV while I work out. I would love an Apple TV app. Jesse, build that for me. It's the next great FitBod feature. It's amazing. Now, where do you go from there as a product leader to contextualize that feature request and decide whether or not it's something worth focusing on?

Jesse Venticinque:

There's a few different levels of context. I'll try to be concise. I mean at the highest level, we're going to prioritize based on our vision and the steps we need to get there. So, we're aiming to enable 90% of adults to realize the value of physical fitness and in particular strength training. So, step one there is to establish product market fit in this core segment, and I'm going to call it the ideal customer profile or ICP. These are people who exhibit strong conversion and retention today. Now step two, which I think we're in now, is to try to scale and own the market for the ICP. Step three is to basically build for the non-ICP. So, at this point, we're taking the lens of we want to increase ICP acquisition, activation, and retention.

So, moving into offense versus defense is the next piece of context. This is a great framework developed by Ely Lerner at Reforge. You can Google offense verse defense and find a great blog post. I won't describe as much today. So, defense is about maintaining product market fit and preventing downside risk, competition, I don't know, tech debt and the steps to achieve the vision. Offense is about the immediate short term business metrics. In our offense right now, our focus is not preventing churn. It's not filling at the top of the funnel. It's about driving conversion.

So, what we're researching or we have been in the last year is to understand why the ICP is not converting via user research, deploying some tests. What is the most constraining problem for why the ICP is not converting? Is that because of the lack of an Apple TV app or whatever the problem that solution solves?

Jacob Eiting:

Well, when you say it that way.

David Barnard:

This is so key.

Jesse Venticinque:

I think there's a trap of thinking that let's listen to our super successful engaged customers as a clue for what the unsuccessful customers are missing, but that's not the case.

Jacob Eiting:

It's the airplanes with the bullet holes picture that you see all the time, right? If you talk to all the ones where they examine the airplanes coming back from France and they were like, "Oh, well, look at where they get shot." But actually, it's the inverse. You're talking to people who made it. Don't talk to them. They made it. David's already engaged. You're going to be happy with your app, David. I don't care anymore. That's not true, obviously, but yeah, I think the tragedy is those are so much harder conversations to have because that user is inherently gone. So, capturing them on the way out I think is a real challenge.

David Barnard:

So how do you have those conversations? So you take the Apple TV and that one maybe is too easy to just say, "Well, that's obviously a pretty niche thing for somebody to be in a home gym," and you probably have some data to just write that off the top of your head. But what does it look like to actually dig into that focus area of activation and not let your super users like me distract you from the things that are going to matter for activation.

Jesse Venticinque:

User research is critical. So, there's a quantitative approach where we'll try to compare this non-convert cohort against our successful subscribers and note any differences in their profile characteristics or the actions in the trial experience. But then there's the qualitative side where we can employ surveys, in-app email, A/B testing, user interviews. Now, with users who don't convert or those that churn, it's actually much harder to get ahold of them than the engaged users. The outreach safe to invite to a user interview needs to be very vanilla and authentic as possible and typically higher volume. Our process will identify a cohort and mix panel and say, "These are people that logged work out two or three of their trial period."

We export that CSV, go over to userinterviews.com who handles all the logistical steps of scheduling and payment. It's actually free if you provide your own users. Then we'll do these 30-minute interviews that are targeted on what we want to know. So, with these non-converters, I want to know what is the problem a user is trying to solve by downloading FitBod or trying that? And then what is the actual or perceived gap between the problem a user's trying to solve and our product solution? I mentioned perceived gap, because many times our product solution is a match for the user's problem, but they didn't discover it or don't realize it. That's a great problem to have. That's a framing feature.

Jacob Eiting:

Product marketing. It's telling the people what they need.

Jesse Venticinque:

Yeah, but getting to the real problem that a user is downloading our app for takes some investigation. So, a participant may describe several problems, and I'm trying to get to the most constraining one. Typically asking the five why's will help there. Here's this one last tactic. So, if a user describes a problem, I may pitch a feature solution or even have a mockup ready to go for their problem and basically ask, the fundamental question is, "Hey, non-convertor, if this feature existed today, would you buy the app for $79.99?" If they say no, it's a great clue that I haven't found the problem yet.

There's just one last trap in some of these concept tests where you're showing mockups to participants. A participant may describe the feature very well or understand what the problem solves and why it would work for other people, but it doesn't necessarily mean that that's a solution to their problem. So, I think it's a good tactic. I always try to fundamentally ask, "If this feature existed today, would you buy FitBod for $79.99?" That's like the fundamental thing I'm trying to get to, right?

Jacob Eiting:

I've seen userinterviews.com, but I hadn't thought about it in the consumer context. I think that's a terrific investment for folks. That's one of my favorite things about B2B since I made the jump, is it's much easier to get ahold of customers, right? Because I have thousands, not tens or hundreds of thousands. One thing in B2C, it was always hard to get folks either to come... Obviously, come in the office was hard, but just to get on a phone call or whatever with a random app, I think that's a weird experience for the random consumer.

So, I think definitely something worth investing in. I mean it sounds like having a product, that's a superpower that your company has. I would say even if you're a technical co-founding team or whatever, user interviews are something everybody can do. You should be doing, especially for the negative set like that. That's really fascinating. I'm going to do that.

David Barnard:

Is there a threshold of hearing this specific problem a certain number of times before you go attack it?

Jacob Eiting:

David's going to hire a botnet to ask for Apple TV apps.

David Barnard:

Yeah, so what's your thinking about the depth of the need and the number of people who have that need before you actually go build a feature?

Jesse Venticinque:

So I'm trying to identify a pattern in participants and I'll usually try to get to medium confidence. I have a medium confidence signal that there's a pattern here and then develop a hypothesis and then try to validate or invalidate that hypothesis the cheapest way possible. Now, this is in the context of offense and trying to move metrics immediately. The defense in building core values is a different approach. Let's say I discover a pattern in non-converters who say like, "Well, there is a specific workout format or exercise that I couldn't find, right?" I think, "Okay, I'm medium confidence pattern there." Maybe I would create an automated survey where the very first question is, "How do your three workouts go? Was there exercise or format you couldn't find?" I don't know.

Try to optimize for answering that question, but even better is to try to build a cheap intervention and solution. So, how about for this example, where would a user go in the app to try to address that problem? Try to find a workout format or exercise they couldn't find. Let's say I have some ideas about maybe two surfaces a user might go to try to solve that problem. Maybe there's some signal of maybe they couldn't find it, right? Then I try to intervene and ask, "Hey, is there a problem? Could you not find this? Yes or no?" That'll help me size the problem, right? Sizing is the important part here, so give me some signal there to take the next step.

David Barnard:

That's a really great approach. Like I said, I mean I think in consumer subscriptions, it's just too easy to get overly focused on your super users and try and pattern match against them. So, that product thinking, and you actually have a really great presentation we'll link in the show notes for anybody who's interested to go deeper in this about your product thinking and how you approach these things at FitBod. We do need to wrap up. So, Jesse, it was fantastic having you on the podcast. I know you're hiring. Are there any specific roles you wanted to call out before we wrap up?

Jesse Venticinque:

Yeah, hiring two product managers. I think this is a really exciting time to join, especially on the product team in that we have our core strategies and focus ready to roll. So, I'm looking for a lead PM for core experience. Now, I talked a lot about offense and activation today. Just to reiterate, defense core experience retention is fundamental and that needs to be a big focus of ours. So, looking for a core experience PM and then I'm also looking for a growth PM to actually work on the virality problem we talked about today.

David Barnard:

I actually have somebody in mind. I will make you an intro, Jesse.

Jesse Venticinque:

Nice, thanks.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah. Make sure you plant the Apple TV-

David Barnard:

With my friend.

Jacob Eiting:

Yeah, there's ways to make this happen, David. He's going to bounce. Jesse, if you don't get on that, I mean I know what the frustration. I know the frustration. That's fantastic. It sounds like a really great product org to work for. So, I think anybody should check it out if they're interested. It sounds like really cool. You've obviously created a product that's made at least one person extremely happy and that's evident here. It's clear to me now through the way you're describing your process why that is, right? So that's really fantastic. It sounds like a great opportunity.

David Barnard:

Jesse, thank you so much. It was great talking to you today.

Jesse Venticinque:

All right, see you next time.

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.