79: Flighty – Ryan Jones

The three of us are very product focused and if we would have spent that time on the product We would have gotten basically more growth or free growth. When you take us out of product, you're kind of taking us out of what our realm of expertise is. And we just need to stay at the stuff that we're great at. Welcome back to Launched.

I'm Charlie Chapman, and I'm super pumped to be back in the game and kicking off this new era of regular every other week conversations with inspiring app creators. Now brought to you by Revenacat.

To start things off, I sat down with Ryan Jones, the founder of the excellent flight tracking app, Flighty, for a live show at RevenueCat's App Growth Annual Conference a couple of weeks ago. It was such a fun way to revisit an app that we already talked about and hear how it's continued to grow more than 40%.

four years after I last talked to Ryan on this show about its launch. So I hope you enjoy this chat and I'll see you again in two weeks. All right, we got these fancy couches. Revenue cap money changes the show. Deep couch. It's a very deep couch. Congrats on the acquisition. Yes, yes. Thank you. That's what all this is for. I was just fishing for that. So for the people in the audience that don't already know what Flighty is, I'm going to let you give the elevator pitch.

The worst, the worst thing. One way to describe it is, have you ever been stuck at an airport or catching your flight and you have no idea what's going on? Is it delayed? Why is it delayed? What's going on in this airport? Why are the lines so long?

We try to answer all those questions. Another way to say it is that we try to give people confidence when they're flying. It's a very opaque situation where a lot of times the airlines don't exactly want to tell you what's going on. So we provide as much information as fast as we can and try to be...

or we are extremely accurate about it one of the main things people come to flighty for is getting delays and gate changes faster than the airlines that's kind of the short thing you'll hear people say but of course a founder would never reduce their product just to the core feature so i have to tell you about everything else i i think the other core feature that i think a significant amount of people using it this is to them one of the bigger deals is also the flight tracking piece of that

do you want to talk about really quickly like what it can do as far as the historical data for flights when you say flight tracking you're meaning the like log the yeah log sorry yeah so we call it passport

It was one of the surprises to me. You know, Marcus, who's the super nerd flyer on our team, the designer, has been saying since the beginning, like, this is going to be big, this is going to be big. And I was kind of like, I don't know, man, people just care about...

Right now, is my flight on time? Why is it delayed? How do I get out of this situation? He was totally right. Well, let me describe it. So as you fly, we will automatically log and archive your flights for you into basically a flight diary. And there's been products that have done this kind of stuff before, but it's typically separate from the actual flight tracking. So you would go to the airline or to another app, track the actual flight, and then afterwards go open something else that's...

Basically web spreadsheet looking and enter the data. So it was pretty targeted towards being super nerdy about that kind of stuff and we really Made that into one product where you just do the flying and then we'll log everything for you and create it's a digital passport that we took forever making but that was one of the keys is when we were starting to make it we were like it has to be something that's so cool that when you show someone else or when you post it online

you don't feel guilty about that it's just like i'm just showing off this cool thing and it turns out that that that i think has been a huge unlock for us and that the passport itself is If it's not our number one growth driver, it's top three. It's a huge moment for us every year. Yeah. And we'll get into that here in a second. But agreed. The Passport, even here, I've already had moments where multiple of us have pulled it out in like...

showcased our all-time flights and you can see all the lines going across. It's definitely pretty cool. Yeah, we get really cool photos. A lot of people, when I meet them, they'll say, oh, so much of your users must be consultants and investment bankers. And that's what I kind of thought too. And it turns out that those people aren't that huge of a user base. As best I can tell, it's because they fly.

the same route every week, all week. And it's just like, they know that route. They don't really know the kind of larger flying multiple airlines dealing with multiple unknown situations. One of the people that I did not expect, one of the audiences that I did not expect, and in hindsight, this is... Very dumb was pilots and flight attendants and crew and they're probably 25 20% of the user base

and they just have absolutely insane passports. I have to imagine. And they'll send us photos of like four or five of them on the plane comparing their passports and showing the total numbers. It's really cool. Do you know off the top of your head what like the biggest number of flights you've seen is?

Yeah, I do, yeah. We have one guy who has been with us since the beginning, and I don't know a ton about him, but he's decided that he wants to be the fastest person to ever achieve United 1K, which takes around 4 million miles. And so he's doing like 1.1 million miles a year, which is, I think, something like 35 days in the air every year.

Unreal. That's got to be a lot of like, what is it, New York to Singapore? He basically looks for cheap flights between the US and Asia and just flies back and forth. That's a life decision. So one of the things that's come up a lot today that I've been talking with people about is acquisition, user acquisition. And something talking with you in the past, talking with you even this week, that I've sort of learned about Flighty is

You don't necessarily follow all the typical advice. I shouldn't say you don't follow it. You've not found success in the typical advice for how you scale an app up. So I guess the first big thing is... How are you finding your users? Good question. We have to go back a little bit. So I'm very product and app and design focused. And so are my original launch founders. And we...

Like you've alluded to, tried multiple times to say, well, I mean, it's getting pretty big. Everyone says we should do Facebook ads or everyone says we should worry about how do we acquire new customers. you know as a small team so we we go out and we hire the best contractor or best consultant we can for that specific thing work with them and kind of do our best in that arena and what's happened the three times that we've tried it is

It takes a significant amount of our attention away from building product and building features. And then at the end of the day, it's like, okay, well, it kind of breaks even. To my point of view as like a CEO founder, it's like okay We just spent whatever it is half of our time for two months to do a thing that breaks even We could have been spending that time on the thing that for us

I feel like we have an advantage. The three of us are very product-focused. And if we would have spent that time on the product, we would have gotten basically more growth or free growth, if you want to put it that point of view. So we've never really... unlock that. And the best I can figure is if that's what your thing is and you're great at it, you're great at TikTok user acquisition, you're great at...

Nikita style gray hat stuff, like go ahead. But for us, when you take us out of product, you're kind of taking us out of what our realm of expertise is. And we just need to stay at the stuff that we're great at. How is product driving growth then? Like traditionally, at least from the indie perspective, I feel like the thing I'm always hearing from the bigger apps is like...

you adding feature XYZ isn't actually going to move the needle. It's important for retention, but for growth, you need to find users somehow. So how is adding a new feature to your app getting new users in the door? Yeah, you know, this is different for everyone. So as always, think about it for your product, not mine. But what we've found is in a high level, there's the whole growth loop concept.

looking for things that we can do in Flighty that help the user and whatever problem they're facing at that moment helps Flighty to grow. if we can help someone else to kind of come into the ecosystem. And it's very difficult to find these things. It takes a long time and trying a lot of things. The things that have worked for us. The very first one was we have a live sharing feature. So if you're using the app, you can send your mom, your partner, whoever, a link.

and it'll have the top experience of flighty for free with the flight status and when it's going to land and everything like that no nonsense like email put in your email to get it or you have to download the app to get it just making that super fluid and the hypothesis was

you know the third time that you send your partner that that they'll download the app and just get it and we you know do a good job in there of calling out the cta of like to get alerts download that's the kind of stuff we're good at figuring out and it's a very difficult balance of how far do you push on the good for flighty versus good for users versus good for acquisition and finding that is is hard

Yeah, and like that specific example is one where it's all of the above, right? When you see it in hindsight, it's like, oh, yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, like all good product decisions. It's really obvious in hindsight. Correct. I can say like from personal experience, probably people here have had the same thing.

I have family members who actively, whenever they fly, I'm like, you put your flight in flighty, right? And it's like, I'm constantly reminding them because I care about, and you know, I live in St. Louis, Missouri. We have

90 flights to get to any location connecting. And so I want to know, like, did she make that connection? Did she make this? Is her flight delayed? And I get that as a flighty user, but I'm constantly pushing her on it to the point where now she's used to it. She wants it. And then she wants it whenever.

You know, my sister flies for her. And so it kind of does create these sort of organic social interactions that aren't super trackable for you because that's happening over texts. I don't know if that's how other people do it, but I...

think about it as one-to-many sharing and one-to-one sharing. And originally I felt like as a founder, like, okay, we need, we need something that's really good one-to-one and we need something that's really good one-to-many. And the one-to-one we... kind of I feel like figured that out pretty quick of one of the ways that I try to think about it is what are use cases what are things that people are already doing that we can either make easier or draft behind them you kind of think about it like

plane or a car or something like clearing the airspace in front of you and how do you kind of accelerate that for them and for one-to-one it's what time are you landing is your flight on time all those kind of questions how can we answer that for you well we can give you a link that you can share with anyone and

it's super frictionless and then so that one i feel like we hit on pretty quick the passport actually turned out to be our one-to-many which i did not expect so we originally tried i want to say this like 20 22.

We basically tried a more literal Spotify-wrapped kind of interpretation. So we made five different little stories in the 16x9 or 2x1, whatever it is. And one of them was... a graph of your flights the last five years and one of them was total number of delays like looking out a window very artistic and for some reason it just didn't really catch on we saw some people sharing it but it didn't have that

it factor i guess was it a like spotify raft was it like the end of the year we're going to do this event kind of thing yeah yeah it was early december here's your kind of stats for the year right and then the next year like i said we thought that framework like what's something that's so cool that you kind of have to share it and if you do you don't feel guilty about because there's this weird flight thing of

oh you flew a lot is that great for the environment and why did you do that so much and are you bragging the fact that you can travel so much so we really wanted to have a dynamic of it's just cool so like i wanted to share it and it took us A while, but we figured out the Marcus came up with a great idea of making it a literal passport and it's gone crazy. And if you haven't used it before, it's like you open it up and it.

It has the sort of holographic display. Took so long to design a holographic. The design is crazy. And then it has all your flights with the lines going everywhere. It's a really quick way to, you know. either show off how much you've flown or to like show off how bad your direct flight access is yeah but then the other thing with passport is yes you have this shareable picture that's really cool right but if you scroll up

There's a whole bunch of stats. A ton, yeah. Do you find that the stats themselves are also shared? Or is that like a different thing altogether? Yeah, so 22, we tried the Spotify wrapped literal thing I was talking about. Didn't catch.

But we knew there was something there. So 23, we tried and we did the passport thing. And one of the things that we haven't mentioned yet, but there was... on the original one a black light button you could tap the button and it would turn it as if it was a black light effect like at passport at border control that was

like i said we're product people like these are the things we think of so let's lean into what we're great at and we had a great time doing that and that that was a huge part of it then the next year we so we added a delay report which will show here's the total hours you were delayed all year and you were 40% on time. And then for the kind of AV geeks, here's the type of plane model you fly on the most. Here's some of the super metal nerd stats.

And they've done well, but it just gets completely dwarfed by Passport, including the stuff you talked about where you can scroll down and see stats. So when you say Passport, you mean the literal image. Correct. People, they're hitting, you have like a share button. They're not screenshotting it. Right. And they're sharing that on social media and you're seeing that. Yeah. So we don't have a ton of analytics. We really do a lot of...

It's all anonymous too, and it's all very privacy respected. But one of the things that gets obfuscated is the most popular way to share, quote unquote, is to save it to your photos. Yeah. And we think that's people just wanting to have the more like, I can keep this forever version. But then we see it on Instagram and Twitter and everything a ton. But we get a lot of conversations with people sharing it in group chats and stuff like that. Yeah, that makes sense. Outside of...

product, the other kind of classic user acquisition conversation is ASO. I have to imagine that's still a really important part of what makes Flighty work. Yeah, so we, you know, you talked about user acquisition and I said we've kind of tried marketing and it's turned out to not be our kind of core thing. The one thing we do do is App Store, so optimization or ASA.

I'm really proud of our screenshots, and I start to see people kind of copy the similar-ish format. So we put a lot of time into making the screenshots great and getting the exact words. I think we were joking about this before. Screenshots are the worst. It's so hard to boil down your whole product into like four words. And know that that's...

the only thing that like 95% of people... First three screenshots, that's all they get to see. And it takes so long to make them look good, but you have to spend the effort on it. Do you do a lot of A-B testing with the tools in App Store Connect?

We've done a little, again, because we're so product-focused. The times that we do do A-B testing, it has to be a clear win. Otherwise, we're like, no, we're going with what we think is the best. So we've stuck with what we've had for like three years now.

But you kind of mentioned ASA. That's the only thing that we do in terms of marketing. We don't do any paid marketing stuff. But I guess unfortunately or fortunately, however you want to look at it, I would say have to. Well, we kind of do have to. pay for your own word like you have to pay for the word flighty and the app store ads maddening that's probably 20 or 30 of our new users has come through app store search ads wow

For the word, pretty much for the word. No, not just flighty. For everything. Flighty, flight tracker, flight track, flight status. Don't go bid on these. Yeah, we'll bleep that out in the recording. We should know that. It's painful to see that check every month, but at least the way I approach it is we have someone on the team who's a specialist in it. That's another guest learning.

People that have talked about ASA and you've explored it before, I tried it myself being like, oh, I'm a founder. I can figure anything out. Like, let's do this. And just got crushed. just you know threw money down a black hole uh it is a very in my experience very specialist need you have to have there's so many kind of dials that are invisible that you just don't even know they're there yeah basically if you're doing the

If you're doing the basic version of ASA, you're probably losing money. Well, yeah. You mean the literal basic version? The tab, yeah. Yes, that has been my experience as well. Yeah, I would... Yeah, I would never, ever do that, especially if you're doing your own earned media in some way. Because if somebody sees an article or a feature by Apple or something, not in the App Store, then they go search for your name.

Of course, the basic implementation is going to create an ad for your name. They're going to click that one because it's first. And now you're giving Apple money for that acquisition, even though it was completely earned by your own media. That's... Yeah, we won't get into the episode. Yeah, yeah, good point, good point. Follow my Twitter to see those thoughts. So, okay, so speaking of the great apple in the sky that we adore, the other thing that flighty...

definitely seems to be getting a lot of is love from Apple marketing. Especially once the live activities came out. Felt like from that moment forward, you're in keynotes all the time, in advertising, stuff like that. Does that move the needle for you, including features in the App Store and stuff? The short answer is not really. At the beginning, it did.

So maybe 2022, 2023. And I don't think, or 21, maybe. It's not really our fault or Apple's fault. How often do people you know open the app store and look for new apps? just doesn't happen anymore it's not really a pattern they're going there to solve a problem yeah it's like google basically like i need this thing now yeah we do see it and you know we still

As product people, we want to be there with the new features on day one. I feel like we had the discussion of, should we really worry about this that much? Should we just ship what we need to ship on our timeline? Do we really need to be ready with... ios 26 on day one and ultimately a lot of times when we get in situations of should we do this or should we do that and it and it becomes a little bit of internal like i don't know we could go either way recently what we've fallen back on is

well, if we were users of Flighty, what would we want? And it's, well, we would want Flighty to have it on day one, so let's go do it. So that's kind of become heuristic lately for us as kind of the business starts to become a thing you need to... Pay attention to feedback. Yeah, that makes sense. And I have to guess, like, the live activities in particular, yes, there was features that came along with that. But also, it seems like it set an industry standard, and that had to move the needle.

in some ways. That's true. Yeah, that's fair. It did. That's just, I guess, dumb luck. You know, Apple announced that and they talked about how, like, it's just going to change everything. And I think it's such a... live thing it's you know it's in the name but it really doesn't make sense for anything that's not live so it's kind of just sports scores uber and flight tracking yeah and we kind of just were there you know

Not to diminish it, but we put a lot of time into the launch of it, and we were included in the launch video of it as an example. So they knew it was going to be a thing, and it just is a perfect feature for Flighty. You can go do your other stuff in Twitter or your email or wherever, and how long until you have to be at the plane is right there on top. I've heard family members use the term dynamic island because of...

flighty. And the follow-on, like I said, the industry very much followed you on that. What you hear now is lock screen widget. That's what people call it because people are more... Well, I guess that's true. Whenever, yeah, well, it was whenever people upgrade their phone to one that has the island thing, they'll be like... I love that specific hardware feature. And I was like, I'm surprised that anybody that's not an iOS developer cares at all about this. But...

It's specifically for sports scores and flight track. Yeah, we definitely saw a bump in revenue that stayed as a bump in revenue because of it. And, you know, to toot our own horn a little bit, I guess, saw a lot of the airlines follow in terms of what we kind of... defined in terms of the user interaction and how the design look that's awesome so uh normally this show is an hour and a half but really it's however long i can convince the person to keep talking to me but

Unfortunately, this is an expensive room in an expensive space. And I've been told that I'm not allowed to sit here for an hour and a half. So we are going to have to wrap this up. But... Ryan is awesome. And obviously, you can see he's fun to talk to. So I'm just giving everybody else the option to come up to you and ask questions. Please. Yeah. But before we end it, I do want to... to let you kind of tease us for what's the future of flighting. Good one.

If you've been paying too close of attention to us, it's been a slow four, five, six months. We've been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I feel like two years ago, we got to that. We have everything that...

pro flyers would need. It's actually a really wide product when you think through all the different scenarios, diversions, cancellations. Oh, the plane... taxied away from the gate but then came back to the exact same gate like there's a lot of people experience that literally during this trip because of all the storms hopefully flighty worked great through it if it didn't let me know we'll try to make it better but one of the things with flight tracking is

you don't get second chances. Like if that goes wrong or I tell you the wrong delay time or whatever, it's like delete, I'm out. So it took us a long time to really get to that. 1.0 is not the right word, but you know what I mean? It has all the features. Five years later, 1.0. I get what you mean, though. It's like the version that you were imagining when you first released this in 2019. Yeah, and we...

We've talked a little bit a couple weeks ago about how it seems like there's copycats coming out. And I see them too. And then what happens from my point of view, because I see them when they disappear. But basically, people think that it's... oh, it's a free data feed, and look how easy it is because Flytee is so simple, which all the designers in the room are laughing because they know simple means very, very difficult. Basically, those...

Apps so far have appeared and then kind of withered away and disappeared. But before we launched was a year and a half. So it took a lot of effort behind the scenes and a lot of small stuff that you have to handle. We're one of those apps where you can't... it's very hard to have an MVP. It has to have a certain level of features. So to answer your actual question, we've been doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes. And I think what you'll see us do next year...

We, of course, have a couple releases this year, but if we focus on next year, it's a lot of the stuff that... Of the four things we have coming next year, I think one of them is something you've seen done before. A lot of other stuff is stuff that...

we now have the foundation to do and it's stuff we've dreamed of and haven't been really done before so we kind of get to go back to the industry first kind of exclusive features things and see if everybody else can continue to keep up oh man okay well that is very excited as a as a flighty user. So I'm looking forward to that. Thank you so much for doing this. This is super fun. And thank you all for being a great audience. Thanks. Yeah.

Thank you so much for listening. You can find more launched at launchedfm.com and you can find me on pretty much all the social medias. I'm at underscore Chucky C on Twitter or Charlie M. Chapman pretty much everywhere else. And of course, huge thanks to RevenueCat for making this episode and all future episodes of Launched possible. I'll see you all again in two weeks.