Why some companies should celebrate churn
Why I'm skeptical of my favorite fasting app's premium plan.
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Zero Plus: Monetizing a Habit Tracker
Zero is one of my favorite apps - at its core, it’s a tracker to help you implement and manage an intermittent fasting habit. I started fasting a couple of years ago, first attempting 16 hours (e.g., if I ate dinner at 8 pm, I wouldn't eat the next day until noon).
Thankfully, my doctor told me my blood sugar is too low to go all-in on 16, and recommended cutting it to 14. This slight adjustment made it way more manageable, and Zero was instrumental in helping me track fasts in the early days.
Last week, Zero released a premium plan called Zero Plus:
As you can see, the new plan is clearly differentiated from the free plan. With Plus, you get a customized fasting protocol, premium content, and access to experts.
I’ve been waiting to see how Zero would monetize and was excited to see this update. While I support the concept and believe their differentiation makes sense, I do have some concerns and ideas for improvement.
First and foremost, I believe the biggest value-add on Plus is the ability to customize a fasting plan.
In most cases, creating a custom plan will be a one-off occurrence. I think about my own experience, and since consulting my doctor, I haven’t changed my fasting regimen at all. Perhaps I’m doing it wrong, but I have a feeling most people would approach it similarly.
Creating a custom plan, or matching a fasting protocol to your goals is essentially a desired outcome. My work-partner and brother-in-spirit, Wilson Sadowski wrote a great piece last year capturing the churn risk of outcome-driven services titled When and How to Celebrate Churn. In his piece, Wilson talks about the importance of having an adjacent product or service ready once your customer’s outcome is met.
In this case, that’s where Ask Zero comes in. Once subscribers create their custom fasting plan, they can consult Zero’s experts with ongoing questions along their fasting journey. In theory, this sounds great, but based on my experience, I’m skeptical many subscribers will take advantage of it.
Access to experts is also inherently reactive. Zero’s experts, like Peter Attia, aren’t going to reach out to you to ask about how your practice is going. Additionally, questions are limited to 250 characters, so there’s limited room for nuanced asks.
So what could Zero do to increase ongoing value?
I believe building a user-community would be more impactful than expert advice, and the two would be even more powerful if combined.
Community has become essential to health and wellness companies, and it seems like a prime opportunity for Zero to take the lead in fasting. There’s an active Intermittent Fasting sub-reddit with 665k members, validating the opportunity.
Zero has over 750,000 people using the app to track fasts, and if they’re helping people customize their fasting protocol, it will allow members to easily find other users with similar regimens. This visibility will create moments of serendipity where members can learn from each other and evolve their practices together.
Layer expert opinion on top of that community and you create endless opportunities for public learning rather than one-off private messages. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn this is on Zero’s radar, but either way - I would love to see it in action.