S02E16 – The Facilitator
Good morning 👋
The new & improved radar is looking great. I can’t wait to get it into users’ hands! But, I probably won’t as early as I’d like because, surprisingly, this ended up being the more straightforward task for the update.
As suggested in last week’s letter, I’ve been evaluating ways to enable this radar update without a significant financial hit due to the increased expenses. To help, I reluctantly decided that I’ll need to introduce a new & more expensive than Pro subscription tier. The hestitation was mainly because I think it may leave a bad taste to add this tier so soon after launching Pro. That said, this initial reluctance has been used as a motivator to be creative and think of ways to make existing subscribers not feel short-changed and to actually add value to their existing subscriptions in the process. Here’s how I plan to:
1) No functionality from any existing subscription tier will be removed
2) Actually the opposite – Plus users’ radar will effectively be what Pro users have access to today, whereas Pro users will now get premium maps data (but not all), such as hourly updates from a richer data source
3) All existing subscribers can upgrade and pay the difference in the subscription fee for the first year
4) I’ll explain clearly and transparently why this new subscription tier exists
Basically, this new most premium subscription tier exists to enable a better radar for all users. Similar in idea to the justification behind the Tesla roadmap with the more expensive models necessary to facilitate the more affordable, higher volume car.
What comes next is the re-design of the subscription screen to accommodate the changes. This has possibly been the toughest design work I’ve had to do, probably ever, and is why I expect there to be delays to the radar going live. I’ll go into this more next week.
As always, have a great Sunday!
Best,
Bardi