When Alanna Harvey and Cristian Villamarin noticed how quickly Cristian’s younger brother was getting hooked on social media and smartphones, they were inspired to build something that would help people manage their time.
Fast forward a couple of years later, and Alanna and Cristian are the co-founders of Flipd, a digital wellness platform for Gen Z. Whether it’s preventing distractions during exam prep or providing tools for mindfulness, Flipd helps people improve their productivity, happiness, and well-being.
In the education space, back to school in Q3 and Q1 are key moments to reach students. For Flipd, this is a critical time to drive revenue while students are looking for the tools they need to succeed.
However, like any app founder that wants to invest in growth at the right moment, Flipd’s co-founders needed cash. Flipd needed to re-invest its app store earnings into growing the business quickly, but the app stores’ payout terms made it impossible for the team to access their earnings quickly enough.
Braavo’s funding has allowed us to move so much faster and improve all of our metrics across the board. Access to weekly cash flow opened up opportunities we didn’t even consider possible. We have a much greater understanding of how we’re performing and what is moving the needle in a positive direction. Observe, measure, repeat, and keep iterating.
After an initial call with Braavo’s business development team and a strategy call with Braavo’s co-founder, Flipd decided to move forward with Braavo. 48 hours later, Flipd had funding in the bank.
Initially, Flipd got set up with Accelerate to get its funds paid out faster. This enabled Alanna and Cristian to invest revenue back into growth, and experience greater predictability (and peace of mind) around its business.
Flipd next wanted to improve retention and the quality of its existing users. While other app publishers typically use Extend for paid user acquisition, Braavo partnered with Flipd to support its multi-purpose growth strategy. With Extend funding in hand, they were able to invest in retargeting, optimizing free-to-paid user conversion, and increasing LTV.
I really appreciated the level of openness and clarity from the Braavo team and software platform. It is a completely different conversation from working with traditional financial institutions or venture capital. Braavo looks at your company as it is today, understands your business, and works with you to get to the next level.
In less than a year with Braavo, Flipd’s MoM subscriber growth increased dramatically, with +236% new subscriptions sold and +650% subscription revenue growth. New user growth also skyrocketed, to the tune of +143% new user growth. Additionally, Flipd achieved its first 1M users milestone.
With better performance tracking, the team now had greater clarity around which features and UX enhancements were leading to improved conversions, and what to focus on next. As growth became more predictable, Alanna and Cristian realized they needed to improve the app’s pricing model, and transitioned from a monthly subscription to an annual subscription. The team credits these changes with achieving a higher revenue per user versus Q1. Alanna and Cristian set new revenue goals, launched paid advertising for the first time, and achieved profitability within a few months. To date, they’re on track to make 4x last year’s revenue.
With no need to raise dilutive funding, Alanna and Cristian have retained control over their business. Instead of losing months to pitching and fundraising, they’ve defined what success means for their app. Most importantly, they’ve stayed focused on the company vision: building a platform that ultimately helps people achieve greater happiness and presence for all of life’s moments.
