79: Flighty – Ryan Jones

Ryan Jones:

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

Charlie Chapman:

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 RevenueCat. 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 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. It's RevenueCat money changes this show, deep couch. It's a very deep couch.

Ryan Jones:

Congrats on the acquisition.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, yes. Thank you. That's what all this is for is 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.

Ryan Jones:

Oh, 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 four is getting delays and gate changes faster than the airlines.

That's 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.

Charlie Chapman:

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 what it can do as far as the historical data for flights?

Ryan Jones:

When you say flight tracking, you're meaning the log?

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, log, sorry.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, so we call it Passport. It was one of the surprises to me. Marcus, who's the super nerd flyer on our team, the designer has been saying since the beginning, "This is going to be big, this is going to be big." And I was like, "Yeah, 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 track.

And 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-y 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 will 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 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.

Charlie Chapman:

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 and showcased our all time flights and you can see all the lines going across. It's definitely pretty cool.

Ryan Jones:

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 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 a larger flying multiple airlines dealing with multiple unknown situations.

One of the people that I did not expect, one of the audiences 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.

Charlie Chapman:

I have to imagine.

Ryan Jones:

And they'll send us photos of four or five of them on the plane comparing their passports and showing the total numbers. It's really cool.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you know off the top of your head what the biggest number of flights you've seen is?

Ryan Jones:

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 four million miles. And so, he's doing 1.1 million miles a year, which is I think something like 35 days in the air every year.

Charlie Chapman:

Unreal. That's got to be a lot of, what is it, New York to Singapore?

Ryan Jones:

He basically looks for cheap flights between the US and Asia and just flies back and forth.

Charlie Chapman:

That's a life decision.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

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 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?

Ryan Jones:

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?" And as a small team, so we go out and we hire the best contractor or best consultant we can for that specific thing, work with them and 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, "Ah, okay, well it breaks even." So, to my point of view as 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've spent that time on the product, we would've gotten basically more growth or free growth if you want to put it that point of view."

So, we've never really unlocked 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, go ahead. But for us, when you take us out of product, you're taking us out of what our realm of expertise is and we just need to stay at the stuff that we're great at.

Charlie Chapman:

How is product driving growth then? Traditionally, at least from the indie perspective, I feel like the thing I'm always hearing from the bigger apps is you adding feature X, Y, Z 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?

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, 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 and we're looking for things that we can do in Flighty that help the user in whatever problem they're facing at that moment, helps Flighty to grow and then if we can, help someone else to come into the ecosystem. And it's very difficult to find these things and it takes a long time in 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, putting your email to get it or you have to download the app to get it. Just making that super fluid. And the hypothesis was the third time that you send your partner that they'll download the app and just get it. And we 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 hard.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And that specific example is one where it's all of the above, right?

Ryan Jones:

When you see it in hindsight, it's like, "Oh yeah, that makes sense."

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, all good product decisions. It looks really obvious in hindsight.

Ryan Jones:

Correct.

Charlie Chapman:

I can say 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 I live in St. Louis, Missouri, we have 90 flights to get to any location connecting. And so, I want to know 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 my sister flies for her. And so, it does create these organic social interactions that aren't super trackable for you because that's happening over texts.

Ryan Jones:

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 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 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 think about it like a plane or a car or something clearing the airspace in front of you and how do you 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 is like 2022. We basically tried a more literal Spotify wrapped interpretation of... so we made five different little stories in the 16 by nine or two by one, 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 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.

Charlie Chapman:

Was it like a Spotify wrapped? Was it like the end of the year we're going to do this event kind of thing?

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, yeah. It was early December, here's your stats for the year. And then the next year, like I said, we thought that framework, what's something that's so cool that you have to share it and if you do, you don't feel guilty about it? B2 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, I wanted to share it and it took us a while, but Marcus came up with a great idea of making it a literal passport and it's gone crazy.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. And if you haven't used it before, you open it up and it has the holographic display.

Ryan Jones:

Took so long to design a holograph.

Charlie Chapman:

The design is crazy and then it has all your flights with the lines going everywhere. It's a really quick way to either show off how much you've flown, or to show off how bad your direct flight access is. But then the other thing with passport is yes, you have this shareable picture that's really cool, but if you scroll up, there's a whole bunch of stats.

Ryan Jones:

A ton, yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you find that the stats themselves are also shared, or is that a different thing altogether?

Ryan Jones:

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 blacklight button. You could tap the button and it would turn it as if it was a blacklight effect like at passport at border control. And that was like I said, we're product people, 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 was a huge part of it.

Then the next year, 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 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.

Charlie Chapman:

So, when you say passport, you mean the literal image?

Ryan Jones:

Correct.

Charlie Chapman:

People they're hitting, you have a share button, they're not screenshotting it?

Ryan Jones:

Right.

Charlie Chapman:

And they're sharing that on social media and you're seeing that action?

Ryan Jones:

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" is to save it to your photos, and we think that's people just wanting to have the more, 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.

Charlie Chapman:

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.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, so you talked about user acquisition and I said we've tried marketing and it's turned out to not be our 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 copy the similar-ish format. So, we've 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 four words.

Charlie Chapman:

And know that that's the only thing that like 95% of people...

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, first three screenshots, that's all they get to see. And they takes so long to make them look good, but you have to spend the effort on it.

Charlie Chapman:

Do you do a lot of A/B testing with the tools in App Store Connect?

Ryan Jones:

We've done a little. Again because 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 three years now. But you 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 do have to pay for your own word. You have to pay for the word Flighty in the App Stores which is-

Charlie Chapman:

Ads, the App Store ads.

Ryan Jones:

... maddening, that's probably 20% or 30% of our new users has come through App Store search ads.

Charlie Chapman:

Wow. For the word pretty much for the...

Ryan Jones:

No, not just Flighty, for everything, Flighty, Flight Tracker, Flight Track, Flight Status. Don't go bid on these.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, we'll bleep that out in the recording. We show that.

Ryan Jones:

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. Let's do this." And just got crushed, just threw money down a black hole. It is a very, in my experience, very specialist need you have to have. There's so many dials that are invisible that you just don't even know they're there. Basically, if you're doing the basic version of ASA, you're probably losing money.

Charlie Chapman:

Well, yeah. You mean the literal basic...

Ryan Jones:

The tab. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

Yes, that has been my experience as well. 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 and they're going to click that one first, and now you're giving Apple money for that acquisition, even though it was completely earned by your own media.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, we won't get into the App Store.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Good point, good point.

Ryan Jones:

Follow my Twitter to see those thoughts.

Charlie Chapman:

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, it 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?

Ryan Jones:

The short answer is not really. At the beginning, it did. So, maybe 2022, 2023 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? It just doesn't happen anymore. It's not really a pattern.

Charlie Chapman:

They're going there to solve a problem.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, it's like Google basically I need this thing now. We do see it and 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 becomes a little bit of an internal, 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 well, we would want Flighty to have it on day one, so let's go do it.

So, that's become heuristic lately for us as the business starts to become a thing you need to pay attention to feed to piece.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. And I have to guess 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.

Ryan Jones:

That's true. Yeah, that's fair. It did. That's just, I guess dumb luck. Apple announced that and they talked about how it's just going to change everything, and I think it is such a live thing, it's in the name, but it really doesn't make sense for anything that's not live. So, it's just sports scores, Uber and flight tracking, and we just were there, 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 for 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.

Charlie Chapman:

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.

Ryan Jones:

What you hear now is lock screen widget, that's what people call it because people are more...

Charlie Chapman:

Well, I guess that's true. Yeah. Well, it was whenever people upgrade their phone, 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.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, we definitely saw a bump in revenue that stayed as a bump in revenue because of it. And to toot our own horn a little bit, I guess saw a lot of the airlines follow in terms of what we just defined in terms of the user interaction and how the design look.

Charlie Chapman:

That's awesome. So, 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 and an expensive space and I have 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.

Ryan Jones:

Please.

Charlie Chapman:

Yeah. But before we end it, I do want to let you tease us for what's the future of Flighty?

Ryan Jones:

Mm-hmm, 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, inversions, cancellations, oh, the plane taxied away from the gate, but then came back to the exact same gate. There's a lot...

Charlie Chapman:

A lot of people experience that literally during this trip because of all the storms.

Ryan Jones:

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. 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.

Charlie Chapman:

Five years later, 1.0.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

I get what you mean though. It's like the version that you were imagining when you first released this in 2019.

Ryan Jones:

Yeah, and we've talked a little bit a couple of 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 Flighty 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 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 it's very hard to have an MVP, like 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 the 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 get to go back to the industry first, exclusive features, things and see if everybody else can continue to keep up.

Charlie Chapman:

Oh, man. Okay. Well, that is very exciting 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.

Ryan Jones:

Thanks. Yeah.

Charlie Chapman:

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.