Use CasesHealth & FitnessRunna
Walter Holohan
Chief Technology Officer
Runna co-founders Ben Parker and Dom Maskell first met in university and bonded over their shared love of running. While Ben, a professional running coach, was training then-consultant Dom for his first marathon, the two came up with the idea to create a tool that provided affordable personalized coaching plans for runners. They brought on Walter Holohan, now CTO of Runna, to launch an MVP of their coaching platform on the web. Users would fill in a few inputs on a web form about their running history and goals to then be emailed them a PDF of their plan.
Soon things really started taking off, allowing Runna to secured their first funding. Walter was able to come on full time as the tech lead, where his first priority was to build a mobile app.
“The plan was to build the app as a companion to the website: link out from the app to pay on the website. We were instantly rejected by the App Store, for obvious reasons in hindsight.”
The App Store rejection led Walter to start investigating solutions for implementing in-app purchases in a way that was compliant with the App Store: “We seriously considered an open source React Native library, but the more I looked into it, the more I uncovered. I could use this library to implement payments, but then what about the infrastructure behind it? What about the ongoing maintenance? Building it ourselves just wouldn’t be setting us up for long-term success.”
That’s when Walter discovered RevenueCat.
“RevenueCat was clearly the biggest and most trusted player in the market. The documentation was amazing. The React Native SDK was really well supported within the community, with lots of updates. The biggest benefit was how developer-friendly it is. We’re always a bit cautious signing up for another SaaS tool because we’ve been stung before. But with RevenueCat, the more successful we are, the more successful they are — the pricing model is mutually beneficial.”
Once Walter signed up for RevenueCat, Runna was able to add in-app purchases and get approved on the App Store within a week. “We were laughing because we couldn’t have imagined that it would be that quick to get in-app payments set up after that first rejection,” he recounts.
When the Runna app launched in March 2022, subscriptions took off running. Between December 2022 and December 2023, subscriptions grew 30x.
Now, Runna has raised over £8M in funding, and the engineering team has grown from 2 to 16 (and counting). And they have no plans to slow down, with an ambitious product roadmap slated for the next year.
“RevenueCat allows our developers to focus on delivering new features to our subscribers without having to worry about the complex world of subscriptions and in-app payments.”
Today, Walter’s team is focused on expanding the Runna platform to make it more adaptable and dynamic. They’re currently developing a machine learning model that adapts each user’s training plan in response to their stats, usage, and performance, and they plan to add integrations with a wide range of third-party wearables and fitness apps.
Runna’s growth, marketing, support, and analytics teams take full advantage of RevenueCat’s pre-built integrations.
“RevenueCat’s integrations are brilliant because we don’t have to worry about duplicating transaction events. We don’t have to worry about caching on our side and then resending to our tools. First-class integrations.”
Mobile marketing analytics and attribution platform AppsFlyer helps businesses like Runna transform insights into growth. Runna leverages RevenueCat’s integration with AppsFlyer to automatically sync subscription events like trial starts, subscriptions, and cancellations from iOS and Android.
“Through the use of AppsFlyer and RevenueCat, we’ve been able to identify a set of markets that were driving our CAC up considerably. Eliminating spending in these regions decreased our CAC by 8%. We also utilize RevenueCat events in AppsFlyer to ensure we’re optimizing our Apple Search Ads performance based on top converting keywords rather than optimizing for upper funnel events. This has improved our trial conversion rate on ASA for US campaigns by 56%.”
The product analytics platform Mixpanel helps Runna make data-driven product and marketing decisions. Runna uses RevenueCat’s integration with Mixpanel to send key lifecycle event data to Mixpanel and better understand how user behaviors correlate to customer value.
“We’ve been able to identify key traits of users with the highest trial conversion rate. We found that those who connect a calendar have a better retention rate. We’ve surfaced this to the business and are using calendar connections as a KPI of success. We’ll continue to analyze the impacts of other connections, like wearable devices. This way we can prioritize support for more wearable devices on the product roadmap.”
Identifying valuable user behaviors with the Mixpanel integration and transforming them into product improvements has led to a 5.7% increase in trial conversion rates for Runna.
RevenueCat’s integration with CRM tool Intercom sends real-time customer subscription events like trial expirations to the platform for use in lifecycle messaging.
“Our integration with Intercom helps our customer experience team effortlessly manage subscriptions. We also use it for win-back campaigns and a free trial transparency campaign. We like to notify our users with a push notification before their trial ends for a better customer experience and to avoid support volumes. This all contributes to our strong CSAT score of 93.6% over the last 4 weeks.”
RevenueCat’s Customers tool enables improved support with centralized, actionable access to cross-platform customer data. Support teams can debug issues and better support users with a customer-level view of cross-platform usage and purchase timelines. This cross-platform customer view can help support teams diagnose issues like trial fraud at a glance.
“We get a number of complaints from people who claim to have activated a free two-week trial but were immediately charged. A lot of the time it’s someone who created a new account in an attempt to claim a second free trial. With the RevenueCat Customers tool, we’re able to see when a user has been transferred from another user. Overall, it gives our support team great insight into the subscription journey for our customers.”
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