# Bigger Pockets ## Bigger Pockets — Q2 2025 --- [Website](https://www.biggerpockets.com/) Context: **Retention** was slipping and deals were **hard to find**: members had no easy way to surface offers that were relevant to them. My role: We **embedded interactive experiences directly in the feed**, so members could engage with potential property deals and discover markets they didn't know yet, and we carved a **freemium tier** out of the best features to lower the barrier to entry. Getting there took a lot of **A/B testing**: the volume of users on the platform let us map where their interest actually was and **where they dropped off**, so the approach came out of evidence rather than guesswork. I contributed to the design and to building several of the components, which kept the rollout fast and consistent. Impact: Giving the plans better visibility and cutting the friction to get started brought free-to-Pro conversion to **roughly one in three members**. Bigger Pockets has the largest real estate investing community online, and it had a retention problem: members came for the forum and never found the deals. We put the deals in the feed and carved out a freemium tier. **Free-to-Pro conversion went from about one in five to one in three.** - Before: A feed of forum posts. Deals lived in a separate tool most members never opened, and the only way in was a single Pro plan. - After: Interactive deal cards inside the feed, markets you can explore in place, and a free tier built from the features people actually used. The volume of the platform made this a measurement project as much as a design one. We could see in the funnel where members stopped: they read, they replied, they never crossed into the tools that make the subscription worth paying for. The gap between the community and the product was the whole problem.  The decision was to stop sending members somewhere else. Instead of a link to the deal finder, **the deal itself renders in the feed**: numbers, market, a quick calculator you can touch. Discovering a market you didn't know became a scroll, not a search. I designed the cards and built several of the components, so the design and the A/B variants came out of the same code.   --- Freemium came out of the same data. We looked at which features correlated with members staying, moved a slice of them into a free tier, and put the plan comparison where the drop-off was. **Twelve variants later**, the version that shipped was the one that showed the plans early and asked for the card late.   - Free-to-Pro conversion: 21% → 33% - Members interacting with a deal in the feed: 0 → 40% - Time to a first relevant deal: 6 min → < 1 min - A/B variants shipped to get there: — → 12 What I'd do differently: instrument the deal cards before shipping the first variant. We lost two weeks of learning because the first release measured clicks, not which numbers people actually expanded. --- All case studies: [https://www.exelobaiza.dev/work](https://www.exelobaiza.dev/work) (markdown mirror: [work.md](https://www.exelobaiza.dev/work.md)) ## Contact - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/exequiel-lobaiza/ - GitHub: https://github.com/exelobaiza