Visible

Visible built a product that retained before running any growth experiments. Visible grew from $1M to $10M subscription ARR in exactly two years, reaching over 300,000 users on one paid channel (Meta), and stayed cash flow positive. It had no lifecycle email, paywall tests, funnel experiments, new geographies, AdWords, TikTok or SEO.

Luke Martin-Fuller says the machine has not been dialed in and there is a lot to be done there, so the untouched levers are upside. No retention, churn, conversion or LTV figures are given, and the ARR comes from only the US and UK. "Unless you've got something of value that is going to be retaining people and helping them, then there's no point investing in all of that experimentation."

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One cash metric, same-day marketing ROI, kept spend efficient. Visible's single acquisition metric is marketing cash ROI, essentially ROAS: put a dollar in and get a dollar out that day. Roughly half of acquisition comes through paid and the rest through word of mouth.

The metric depends on the blend of annual and monthly plans, how much is spent and how fast spend is scaled. "Making sure that you put a dollar in, you get a dollar out that day will keep you a really efficient growth machine."

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Rebuilding a fragile no-code funnel in-house unlocked testing. The web funnel ran on a no-code tool so flaky the team feared touching it, and the same quiz had been unchanged since October 2023. Rebuilding it in-house with an internal dashboard lets a new hire run experiments and variants.

The rebuild was named the biggest win of the year. "We were like, if we touch that, it's going to fall over."

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A weekend site with a mockup drew 5,000 waitlist signups in a week. Visible put up a site with a 3D wearable mockup made by a Fiverr designer and the line "pacing made simple", sending signups to a Typeform asking if people would come along for the journey. It got 5,000 signups in about a week for a product that didn't exist.

The idea came from co-founder Harry, who got long COVID in 2020 and found a Whoop tracked his energy but celebrated 10,000 steps, while pushing harder worsened his symptoms. Building a wearable was out of reach on funds and time, so they started with a free app.

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A Founding 100 group showed one app could replace several. The team kept 100 waitlist users in a Facebook group and on frequent calls, and learned they juggled three or four apps for symptoms, community and research, none fit for purpose. Merging those into one experience grew the free app to about 50,000 users by word of mouth.

Revenue only began over a year after launch, in October 2023, with a team of five.

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The free app acts as the free trial that hardware can't have. A free app lets people feel the product's quality before buying the band. Visible barely promotes it, with a tiny section on the website, yet it drives a big chunk of acquisition through word of mouth.

PMF survey scores for the wearable membership are far higher than for the free app, which keeps the paid product the clear upgrade. "It gives you an impression of the kind of value you can experience if you were to go ahead and buy the wearables."

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Visible positions itself modestly: not a treatment, not a cure. Chronic illness patients have seen years of ear seeds, supplements and courses with one big secret, so one suspected Visible was a cheap factory knockoff. Visible says it only helps people implement pacing, the management strategy NICE and the CDC recommend.

Wary buyers now use AI tools to check whether a company is real and backed by science. Nearly half the team, and investors from the first angel to the Series A lead, have lived experience of these illnesses.

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Published research from opt-in anonymized data proves legitimacy. Visible built opt-in data sharing in its free app, leading to papers including one in Nature showing HRV and heart rate can predict future symptom events, plus work with Mount Sinai and Imperial College London on symptoms and the menstrual cycle.

Doing it properly took informed consent flows saying who gets data, for how long and why, ethics sign-off through an academic partner, and anonymization pipelines. It moves no revenue immediately but cannot be cloned over a weekend, and Visible believes it holds the largest dataset ever for this group.

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Ask researchers for advice early and let them pull the first study. Visible talked to researchers for advice before it had anything to ask. Its first study came when a researcher saw the data and asked to study it.

Luke doubts cold outreach would work and stresses being part of the conversation in your niche. "The earliest study that we did was actually more pull rather than push."

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Existing wearables couldn't give real-time alerts for people with brain fog. The first must-have feature was a notification when heart rate crosses a threshold, impossible on 99% of devices because they sample every 5 to 10 minutes. Aggregators like Terra also forced a second app open and delayed syncing.

Visible tried existing devices first. Heart rate sensors are commoditized across Garmin, Apple Watch, Oura and Whoop but come from different stock, so real-time accuracy is uneven.

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Partnering with Polar beat building sensors from scratch. Visible bought Polar heart rate sensors and used the open SDK to prove the concept, then bought wholesale and later co-developed a new version with better battery life, easier charging and accelerometer data.

Polar has built heart rate monitors since 1977. "We could never compete with that."

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Hardware bolts a whole e-commerce business onto a subscription app. Hardware adds inventory planning, financing, fulfillment, boxes and refunds, and the Bluetooth, sync, background and firmware work is an order of magnitude harder than pulling from an API.

Free trial best practices don't apply, so Visible learns from e-commerce companies with strong product pages and technical specs. The cost of this hardware and fulfilment side is never shown.

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New features go to an early access group before everyone. Visible ships to an early access hub, then brings the wider community along with data on the change, such as a 20% improvement in a metric. A natural-language data feature was hated in early access and never shipped wider.

People who rely on the tool daily, especially with brain fog, resist change. "People were like, we hate this."

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The band sells at cost so the subscription carries the value. Visible sells its band for about $80 with no margin, then charges $20 a month or $14.99 a month on annual. This lowers the barrier to entry and puts price where value is delivered.

It weighed Oura (high upfront price, low subscription) and Whoop (hardware folded into a pricier membership) and chose a Tractive-like model of low barrier, earning on the service. "We don't make any money on the hardware that we sell."

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Selling on the web added HSA, FSA and better ad attribution. Hardware can't be sold through in-app purchases, so Visible built a web payment flow. That gave it HSA and FSA payments, better attribution signals to ad platforms and no 30% store fee.

Other options include localized payment methods or buy now pay later via Stripe.

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A pre-purchase quiz screens buyers and tells some they're not a fit. Before paying, visitors answer questions about their situation and learn what they're getting into. Median time from landing on the site to purchase is 10 days.

Selling to the wrong people might lift conversion but hurts retention, reviews and product signals. "Our product isn't for everyone and it would be inconsistent with what we're trying to do in the world to just make people buy it."

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Members are paid a flat cash fee for every ad video used. Visible invites members through a monthly digest to a Slack group, asks for an audition tape, then sends a weekly brief. Any video used earns a flat cash fee, whether it scales or gets $10 of spend.

Real stories let viewers recognize themselves, and this plus a creator program, run by a team of two, feeds the only paid channel. "That's cold hard cash. That's not credits or a kind of discount on a future purchase."

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Test videos on tiny budgets and scale only the winners. Community videos run on Meta with very small budgets, and only one or two a week ever get scaled spend.

An untried idea is members posting unbriefed videos to small organic TikToks, where one in a hundred might go viral.

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Hire creators and social staff from the community itself. Visible's social media manager was first approached to make a video, then hired. Staff with lived experience know which creators to approach and what messages resonate.

Influencers are paid by reach or impressions, while community members get a flat fee per video.

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Raise only what you need, from investors who buy the mission. Visible raised $50,000 to cover a year of founder rent, then a little more for a team of five, and reached about $7M revenue cash flow positive before a small, unannounced Series A.

Big raises create pressure to spend and deliver an enormous outcome, and backers must stay "through thick and thin". The raise wasn't announced because members don't care and a press article could surface for people searching for a solution.

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