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9 tactics from Alex Prasad
How V1 Sports Doubled Revenue with Bold Bets — Alex Prasad, V1 Sports
Watch the full episode“It grew 80 90% in 12 months or something in terms of Revenue. There was just a lot of — you could just do the math right. You could go wow there's a lot of people that are using the heck out of this.”
Burning the Boats on Free Users Grew Revenue 80-90% in 12 Months
V1 Sports switched from freemium to free-trial-only, forcing even long-time free users (some had used features for nine years without paying) onto paid plans. The backlash in reviews was real, but revenue grew 80-90% in the following 12 months. The lesson: when users clearly get tremendous value from a product, they will pay — the risk of converting free users is almost always overstated.
“I'm having a fake conversation with a real person. So I'm having a conversation with this guy who was leaving me a one-star review saying I got this free for nine years and now I have to pay.”
War-Game the Uncomfortable Conversation Before Making the Aggressive Decision
Before making price changes or removing free access, Alex Prasad role-plays the entire customer conversation in his head — not just the angry review, but the full back-and-forth. If the company's side of that imagined conversation still feels reasonable, the decision is defensible. This mental habit of treating digital users like real people standing in front of you is his primary substitute for large-scale user research.
“What we found was that hundreds of people a week, maybe 10 to 15% of all the new registered users, wanted to find a coach. And believe it or not, even though we talked about coaches and the golfers, we didn't really facilitate that well — we were facilitating existing relationships, not building new ones.”
Asking Why Are You Here in Onboarding Revealed a Hidden Segment Worth 3x More
V1 Sports added a simple onboarding question — why are you here? — and discovered that 10-15% of users wanted to find an instructor, a flow the app had never supported. Those coach-seeking users were also significantly more likely to subscribe. A single question unlocked a hidden high-intent segment and pointed to the app's clearest differentiation: a two-sided marketplace connecting golfers with coaches.
“If you have fewer better customers you're going to spend less time trying to manage churn, spend less time just worrying about how tenuous your grasp is on these folks. What if the people that are really getting value out of it have to pay for the value?”
Fewer, Better Customers Beat a Crowd of Zombies Who Forgot They Subscribe
Alex Prasad argues that filling your subscriber base with low-intent users who barely remember the subscription is a liability, not an asset. Fewer customers who genuinely depend on the product generate more retention revenue, require less churn management, and give the team more confidence to invest in the product. The 80/20 principle — focus deeply on your real ICP — is his framework for building a subscription business that lasts.
“If you're so worried that a 10% price increase is going to run off all your customers, I would encourage you to think through why — and is it because you don't have conviction that your product is really solving one of these people's problems? If that's the case, the problem isn't the price increase, the problem is understanding those customers and delivering the value.”
Fear of a Price Increase Signals You Don't Believe Your Product Solves a Real Problem
When app founders hesitate to raise prices, Alex Prasad reframes the hesitation as a product-market fit diagnostic. True conviction in the product's value makes price elasticity a manageable concern. V1 Sports' subscription held firm through its transition precisely because 21-minute monthly sessions proved users were genuinely engaged — and engaged users pay.
“We get so obsessed with well that's not scalable — but how do we know? Because we don't even know where we're going yet. Test the idea purposefully in an experimental way. What a great problem: this manual thing is working and now we just have to make it scalable.”
Build the Manual Process First — Scalability Is a Great Problem to Have Later
Alex Prasad's operating principle is to build manual, bespoke processes first and only invest in scalability once a thing is proven to work. Rejecting ideas because the path to automation isn't immediately obvious is premature optimization that kills potential. Rome wasn't built in a day — and most overnight success stories are built on years of unscalable learning.
“When we try to communicate a nuanced message with three points, the first point is heard and the other two aren't. If you change the game on someone they're upset the cheese has moved. The fact that you did it to the 95th percentile versus the 55th percentile is likely lost because they're upset.”
Communicate a Change Once Clearly — Nuanced Messaging After Point One Is Ignored
V1 Sports learned that elaborate multi-point explanations around disruptive changes are wasted effort. When moving users from free to paid, customers focus entirely on the change — not the justification. Alex Prasad now makes the core message clear once and doesn't over-engineer the explanation, because over-massaging communication won't soften a decision that changes the rules.
“The revenue maximizing over the lifetime of the customer price may be artificially low versus if you were only selling one tier. Once you have expansion revenue opportunities it radically changes the way you think about that first step — I just want to get you in and start to interact and learn more about you.”
Entry Pricing Should Optimize for Lifetime Value, Not Maximum First-Transaction Revenue
V1 Sports learned from its B2B side that expansion revenue transforms the math of first-sale pricing. Charging the maximum upfront is rational only in one-shot transactions. In a repeat game — subscription apps — getting the user in at a fair price and expanding over time via higher tiers, add-ons, or B2B upsells yields more total revenue than a high entry point that spooks potential subscribers.
“I really believe that execution wins nine times out of ten. Even if your internal assessment is that your product is very similar or commoditized versus others, I do think you can have confidence that executing the competition is a path to some level of success.”
Even a Commoditized Core Product Can Win on Execution
V1 Sports acknowledged that its core video analysis technology was commoditized. Rather than scrambling to out-innovate, Alex Prasad doubled down on out-executing: faster support, cleaner UX, deeper coach marketplace. Commoditization sets a ceiling on defensible growth but not on day-to-day competitive advantage — and most founders haven't yet wrung out execution gains before chasing the next shiny object.