It's 10pm, Do You Know Where Your Kids Are? (This App Does)

Chris Hulls doesn’t like it when people call his company’s app, Life360, a tracking app. The cofounder and CEO prefers the term “location sharing.” The free app is designed to show families where each member is on a map–with his or her consent. Users opt in to get alerts when individuals have come and gone from home or work, including estimated arrival time.
Creepy as this may sound, the free app has managed to catch on over the past three years, with more than 100 million users and 45 million families–half outside of the U.S.–and is adding 2 million new families per month. It’s being used for arranging family dinners, knowing when a spouse leaves work and picking up kids from soccer practice. Because Life360 is bigger among the likes of soccer moms in Kansas than it is among techies in the Bay Area, the app is sometimes labeled the “Red State App.”
“Our goal has always been to be the hub for the family,” says Hulls in the startup’s San Francisco headquarters–which, incidentally, were Twitter’s first offices. “Location is really a means to an end, not an end in itself. Facebook became a massive company by winning the social network. LinkedIn did something similar with the professional network.”
To be a viable business Life360 needs to be more than just a family social network. Its only revenue now is a premium service that gives users access to an around-the-clock crisis hotline and roadside assistance. It has more than 50,000 users paying $5 a month or $50 a year. Soon the company intends to launch improved messaging and shared family calendars and to-do lists–all using maps as the starting point. Your spouse, for example, could put milk on a grocery list, and the app, detecting you are pulling into a supermarket, reminds you to buy milk.
The amount of valuable data Life360 is amassing makes it an attractive partner for companies such as BMW and smart-home-product makers Nest, SmartThings and Ring. These are pretty small integrations and net Life360 no money for now. In the Nest thermostat integration, for example, Life360 tells a device when family members are home so that Google-owned Nest can gather better data about occupancy. Next year Life360 will open up its data for any developer to access, with permission from users.
But potentially more lucrative deals are in the works with players such as ADT and Telecom Italia, Europe’s fifth-largest telecom. With Telecom Italia every phone sold through the carrier will come with Life360 loaded on it, introducing its premium service to millions of new customers. Many more telecom partnerships are on the way, says Hulls.
Life360 next year will add a feature enabling people to arm and disarm their ADT security systems automatically as family members come and go. ADT hopes this will solve the big problem of people forgetting to arm their systems. Life360 will also start selling ADT service through its app and earn a portion of ADT’s monthly service revenue for each system it sells. This past spring ADT invested $25 million in Life360 as part of a $50 million round that valued the startup at more than $200 million.
“Our users are much more valuable than Snapchat users,” says Life360′s other cofounder, Alex Haro, referring to the fact that the spending power of the average Snapchatting teenager is dwarfed by the spending power of the family unit. “If we do sustain the network and we do grow huge, it won’t be easy to monetize, but it won’t be the problem that kills the company.”
Life360 has been around longer than most app startups. Founded in 2008, it began as a way of connecting families during emergencies. The two cofounders thought they could do better than the federal government’s response to Hurricane Katrina: a downloadable PDF from ready.gov for writing down emergency contacts. For the first two years, as the company tested out various Web-based family networking products, the cofounders lived off $300 a month. At one point Hulls was even living out of a family friend’s closet in a converted barn in Berkeley. Life360 managed to attract only 5,000 users in its first year of existence.
It wasn’t until 2011 that things started coming together. That’s when Apple allowed phone apps to track a user’s location and smartphone penetration started taking off. The startup saw a surge of downloads just after Christmas 2011, and growth has doubled every year since. Amassing users remains the primary goal for now. With the recent $50 million round, Life360 says it has enough cash to carry it through two more years. The money also affords the company the luxury of declining distribution deals that go against its values. In Saudi Arabia, for example, a telecom firm wanted the app to veil the location of male users but keep close tabs on females. Life360 turned it down.
In the past year the company has had to beat back acquisition offers from several big players. Hulls sees an opportunity to own the family network and wants to go public in a few years. But Amazon and Google are planning on releasing their own family-focused products in the near future. Facebook already has Connect With Friends, and Apple introduced a location sharer in its recent iOS update.
“I am deathly afraid of competition,” says Hulls. “We’re ahead of 99.9% of mobile apps, but in any network business you’re either a giant or you’re not. We need to become one of those giants before someone else does.”