50M Downloads Without Spending on Marketing

By Patrick Casey

Originally posted June 21st 2018

Life360 Co-Founder and CEO Chris Hulls (L) and Chief Business Officer Itamar Novick (R) show off the app

Interested in learning more? Reach out to Chris and the rest of the Life360 team on Twitter at @Life360

An Interview with Chris Hulls

When Chris Hulls launched Life360 in 2008, the smartphone revolution was still in its infancy. Few families had entirely adopted smartphones, and for many people, the idea of using an app for location sharing felt like science fiction.

Chris’ vision for Life360 as a location-based family networking app was prescient, but in the early years, it was far from obvious.

In this interview, Chris tells us how Life360 stuck to its vision while constantly adapting with a fast-moving market.

Can you tell us about your background and Life360s founding?

I decided to start Life360 after Hurricane Katrina, when I saw that the right technology wasn’t available to help families through disasters.

I come from a somewhat non-traditional background for a technology founder. Before Life360, I served in the military and worked for about a year at Goldman Sachs. After a health scare, I decided to start working on Life360 full-time.

Although we initially focused on disasters, we quickly realized that the opportunity was far larger.

Very few technology companies were geared toward serving families. Also, many of the ones that did exist were too narrowly focused on helping Type-A parents organize busy schedules.

What we realized by talking to families, though, was that almost all parents care deeply about peace of mind and chaos control. They want to keep their family members safe and get them where they need to be every day — but most don’t need a new scheduling app.

After you identified what needs you would fill for families, how did you reach product market fit?

We felt that we had product market fit from Day One. Location sharing was always core to the app, and our power users loved this.

In the early days, though, product market fit had very little to do with our growth — and that was probably very abnormal!

We had built a great product, but for most of the public, location sharing by cell phone was still a strange concept in 2008. Most people weren’t aware of it, so they didn’t seek it out.

That meant that our biggest challenge was to get a critical mass of initial downloads.

This wouldn’t be easy. We had very little money, our product wasn’t viral in the traditional sense, and it was still fairly uncommon for the parents and children in a household to all own smartphones.

Where we shined as a company was in figuring out how to hack our way to growth using the app stores, which were new.

The app stores were uncharted territory for everyone — and we figured out how to take advantage of this. Our early growth was really all about hacking the app stores to dominate search and chart rankings.

For example, there was essentially no search volume at that time for “family location,” “family mapping,” or even “family safety.” So we used Google Keyword Planner to test every term we could think of related to peace of mind for families. The results were surprising — “Sex offender” was the most searched term in this category — by 40 times!

We never intended to focus on crime, but this finding led us to incorporate some crime and safety features into the app. For a long time, Life360 was the highest-ranked app for most crime-related keywords. That earned us many millions of downloads.

If there’s a lesson in that story, though, it’s not to try to replicate what we did.

The app stores presented us with a moment-in-time opportunity. These opportunities are always available somewhere, and successful startups need to find them — because this is one place where they have a massive advantage over slow, process-driven businesses.

Even as we found opportunities like this to supercharge growth, though, we remained committed to our vision of building a platform focused on location-sharing.

As Life360 has grown and evolved, have the metrics that you use to track the app’s health changed, too?

There are some tried and true metrics that everyone in the app business should track. For example, you need to understand the top of the funnel, how users are activating, and how they are retaining.

Taken in isolation, though, most metrics can be misleading or even massaged. I’m careful to encourage our team to think holistically rather than getting too tied to any specific metric.

Data myopia can be a major problem. It’s even more dangerous than it used to be, because most founders have embraced the idea that they should be heavily data-driven.

This is one way that I think the Lean Startup Methodology may actually be doing more harm than good for at least some founders.

The methodology itself is solid, but its strictest adherents can fall into the trap of thinking that data can take the place of vision or insight.

If we had always deferred to our data when setting Life360’s early direction, we probably never would have stuck to our aspiration of building a mobile-first service that provides families peace of mind in relevant and innovative ways.

Originally published at launchcapital.com.