Hi there,
Welcome to the 87th edition of Heartcore Consumer Insights. Curated with 🖤 every two weeks by the Heartcore Team.
If you missed the past newsletters, you can catch up here. Now, let’s dive in!
Marketing is More Than Growth - Reforge
People commonly conflate marketing with the scope of growth marketing because, for many early-stage startups, growth is survival.
Marketing leaders need to develop expertise across three different domains.
Brand marketing shares the story of why your organization exists with meaningful, emotional connection points. Product marketing shares what your organization is doing to deliver that brand promise. Growth marketing is how you reach customers to acquire and retain them.
These three domains are the inputs to any marketing strategy. Marketers become marketing leaders by understanding how each domain informs and affects the others, and building a strategy where the three work in concert together.
For example: in 2015, FanDuel - a company offering daily fantasy sports tournaments with real money cash prizes - had prioritized new audience expansion after finding an initial market fit with high-stakes gamers. The team had success in the past with ads featuring customer testimonials about winning large cash prizes, so they continued this messaging. The major investment worked, bringing in large swaths of new customers (5x YoY). Yet, as customers onboarded, they quickly churned. Turns out, new customers had been drawn in by the brand promise that anyone had a shot to win big money, but the product hadn’t evolved enough to deliver on that promise. The product was still built for more sophisticated customers who were spending hours analyzing and building their lineups for each contest.
Learnings: Growth marketing channels distribute your brand to potential or existing customers, which means the growth marketing strategy and brand marketing strategy need to be in lockstep. Before pouring in millions to acquire new users via paid media, FanDuel likely would have had a better return on investment by first focusing on product marketing and brand marketing.
Marketing teams that are too siloed by domain often have a hard time pulling these seemingly disparate pieces together. Those that successfully integrate will have less brittle strategies.
Mobile paywall analysis - David Bernard (Developer Advocate @RevenueCat)
Paywalls don’t matter nearly as much as most people think. Look at the paywalls from the top-grossing subscription apps on the App Store.
Paywalls are an opportunity to help convince people of the value & blunt risk, but they can’t do the heavy lifting. If someone lands on your paywall with low intent, rearranging the deck chairs with A/B tests isn’t going to optimize your way to a great subscription business.
And even if you can growth hack your way to a positive A/B test (yay, this “Continue” button increased trial starts by 10% over a “Subscribe” button), you may just be shifting your problems down funnel (high churn!).
The highest leverage points often happen before people even hit your paywall. What expectation & intent are your ads/icon/app name/screenshots/etc creating? How are you demonstrating value in the onboarding and other flows before potential subscribers even hit the paywall?
While scaling from $10M in ARR to $100M in ARR Calm used the same simple paywall that a bunch of apps copy to this day. Was it magical? Is it worth copying?
Not really. But you know what was magical and worth copying? Crafting the experience people have before landing on your paywall. “Unlock Lebron James pre-game meditation.” - “Let Matthew McConaughey read you to sleep.”
So before you obsess over your paywall spend some quality time obsessing over your onboarding and the experiences that lead potential customers to that paywall.
4 strategies for setting marketplace take rates
Go-to-Market in Web3: New Mindsets, Tactics, Metrics
GOAT: The Journey of a Sneaker-head
Yuga Labs pitch deck
Drive To Survive - the most effective content campaign in history
The 2 PM Digital Commerce Presentation
The future of Neobanks
The Transformation of Commerce
The Unbundling of OpenSea
🇪🇺 Notable European early-stage Consumer rounds
Motto, a France-based startup offering electric bikes through subscription, raises $4.4M with Cassius/Founders Future - link
Blidz, a Finland-based social shopping app, raises $6.6M with General Catalyst - link
Circular.io, a Spain-based tech talent recruitment startup, raises $10M with Point9/Kibo/LocalGlobe - link
Vira Health, a UK-based personalized digital health clinic for women going through menopause, raises $12M with Octopus/Optum - link
Glorify, a UK-based social prayer app for Christians raises $40M with SoftBank/a16z - link
🇺🇸 Notable US early-stage Consumer rounds
Loveseat, a US-based returned home goods marketplace, raises $7M with Bessemer - link
Protégé, a US-based platform offering 1-1 personalized feedback from experts in their field, raises $8.5M with Sequoia/TQ Ventures - link
Tender Food, a US-based cultured and plant-based meat company raises $12M with Lowercarbon - link
Milo, a US-based cross-border crypto mortgage startup, raises $17M with M13/QED - link
Magic Eden, a US-based leading NFT marketplace on Solana, raises $27M with Sequoia/Greylock/Electric - link
🔭 Notable later stage Consumer rounds
KoRo, a Germany-based leading brand for healthy food, raises $55M with HV Capital/Partech/Five Seasons - link
Hydrow, a US-based startup developing a connected indoor rowing machine, raises $55M with L Catterton - link
Nothing, a UK-based electronics consumer hardware company, raises $70M with EQT - link
Branch, a US-based payment platform for contract workers, raises $75M with Addition/General Atlantic - link
Lunar, a Denmark-based digital bank offering a mobile-based banking app, raises $77M with Tencent/Kinnevik - link
Tibber, a Norway-based digital electricity supplier offering solutions to minimize customers’ consumption and costs, raises $100M with Summa Equity - link
Policygenius, a US-based online insurtech specialized in providing life, home, and auto insurance, raises $125M with KKR/Norwest/AXA - link
Lendable, a UK-based P2P lending platform, raises $210M with Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan - link
Roofstock, a US-based online marketplace for investing in leased single-family rental homes, raises $240M with SoftBank/Khosla/SVB - link
Yuga Labs, a US-based studio behind Board Apes NFTs, raises $450M with a16z/Lightspeed/GV - link
Doctolib, a France-based booking platform connecting doctors with patients, raises $549M with Eurazeo/BPI/General Atlantic - link
Getir, a Turkey-based on-demand delivery app, raises $425M with Mubadala/.Sequoia/Tiger/Alpha Wave - link
🍭 Notable Consumer Exits
Epic Games acquires Bandcamp for an undisclosed amount. Bandcamp is a US-based online music store and a promotion platform for independent artists - link
Heartcore Consumer Insights is a weekly newsletter covering notable consumer rounds and exits and top content in the B2C space.