How we rehabbed Cozi’s subscription business

What was the project?

I joined OurFamilyWizard (OFW), an app that helps parents manage child custody schedules and co-parenting information from separate homes, in 2020. OFW was launched in 2001 and is the market leader for co-parenting software. OFW had built a great business, but its signup form was in need of some updating.

After rehabbing the signup flow and subscription pricing, OFW had doubled revenue from 2020 to 2022 and we were looking for our next. OFW acquired Cozi, a freemium family organizer app, in 2022 and we got to work on rehabbing it’s subscription business.

Why was it awesome?

Below are the experiments we ran with screenshots:

  • Subscription awareness
    • We learned only ~30% of monthly active free accounts view an upsell so we added an upsell to display every day to drive more awareness
    • Refreshing the in-app upsell design and copy to resulted in 7% conversion lift
  • Monetization
    • Displaying the price as monthly paid annually resulted in a 24% conversion lift
    • The $29.99 annual price point hadn’t been changed in several years so we tested both a $3.25/mo ($39/annual) and $3.50/mo ($42/annual). The $3.25/mo ($39/annual) resulted in a 10% billings lift so we rolled that out

What challenges did we encounter and what did we learn?

OFW acquired Cozi from Dotdash Meredith, who is a digital and print publisher. DotDash Meredith ran the business like a publisher where views were the most important monetization metric and the subscription was an afterthought. As a result, DotDash Meredith had given a lot of value away in the free plan to drive free adoption. The Cozi team that joined OFW was hesitant, rightfully so, to create more friction for free accounts with subscription awareness, paywalls, etc. OFW bought Cozi to scale its subscription business so the biggest challenge was the cultural shift of prioritizing views to prioritizing subscription growth.

Once we got alignment on prioritizing subscription growth and got a Growth team up and running, we ran the experiments above and are seeing ~30% yoy growth of trailing 28 day new subscription billings.