The Flo Health app helps women track and improve their health through data science and AI. With 167 million installs and 38 million monthly active users, it’s the number one female health app worldwide.

However, the team at Flo Health had their sights set higher: to become a one-stop shop for the health of women over the course of their entire lifetimes and to double the app’s user base in the process. To achieve that goal, the company first needed to address its approach to registering new users.

“Registration isn’t only about user acquisition for us — it’s about creating a channel such as email that allows us to provide personalized insights to users,” Roman Bugaev, Flo Health’s CTO, explains. “But we had a significant drop in completed sign-ups during the registration process which  didn't allow us to amplify email as a potentially promising channel. And the reason for that is that our authentication UX wasn't that smooth.”

Strong Competition Requires Flo Health to Prioritize Resources

With high competition in the health and fitness domain, quickly delivering improvements to the user experience is a must for Flo's ongoing success. “The health app market is very competitive so we need to run fast just to compete with other top applications. But if we want to grow, we need to run even faster,” Bugaev explains.

As a result, Flo Health couldn't afford to get bogged down developing functionality like authentication and authorization, which is essential for any application, but not a core product. Similar to their delegation of cloud infrastructure to AWS, the team at Flo Health decided to purchase a solution, rather than redesign their in-house identity systems. “Every app needs authentication that’s secure, stable, and fast. But authentication is kind of a solved problem already, and we realized we just needed to take the best solution from the market rather than reinvent the wheel,” Bugaev says.

Modern Identity Implemented for Millions of Users in Less Than 1 Month

Flo Health enlisted Auth0’s help to implement modern identity features that make user registration and logins simple and secure. “We knew that Auth0 was used by big enterprises both internally and externally, and one of our goals was to bring enterprise-level security to our B2C users,” Bugaev explains. “But it wasn’t just about security — privacy is very important to us, and we liked that Auth0 was HIPAA-compliant and has certifications from organizations like ISO.”

Less than a month after reaching out to Auth0, Flo Health enabled social logins, launching the option for their users to sign in with Apple, which allows users to sign in to the Flo app without revealing their name. “We were able to put our first use case in production in less than one month because with Auth0, everything was done by design,” says Alex Chervony, Software Engineer at Flo Health.

Additionally, users of the Flo app are safeguarded thanks to Brute Force Protection which can block suspicious IP addresses. The feature is triggered when multiple failed login attempts for the same user originate from the same IP address.

12.5x New User Growth Thanks to Social Logins

After launching social logins, Flo Health saw new-user sign-ups increase from 6% to 75%, and there was a significant reduction in churn during onboarding. “Before we integrated Auth0, registration was optional. Now, registration during onboarding is mandatory, and there is almost no churn during this process,” Chervony says.

Working with Auth0 has also allowed Flo Health to focus on improving the insights they provide to their users instead of managing authentication. “Some of the features we’ve created recently include a 3D baby model inside the app and advanced chatbots that help women understand why their cycle is irregular or regular,” Bugaev says. “Right now, we are shipping 10 production releases per day.”

In the future, Flo Health is excited about how Auth0’s platform will help the company provide health resources to more women through enterprise partnerships. “One of the reasons why we decided to go with Auth0 is that they support SAML integration for B2B2C cases, which is on our road map,” Bugaev explains. “Auth0 has the best-in-class solution here, which doesn't require a trade-off between user experience and security.”