From Consultancy to $10M in ARR — Vince Mayfield, TalkingParents

The app was initially free with Google AdSense, and the team treated the court system as the customer. Realizing courts are a hard-to-sell regulated channel and that parents were the ones who would pay, they switched focus to the parents and a subscription model to fund feature development.

Courts were treated as a channel/influencer rather than the customer. Co-founder Stephen Nixon, a former attorney, flew around the country to talk with judges and clerks of court, who then order co-parents onto the app. Part of ~$1M spent on revamping and marketing before monetization.

Core messaging stayed free on the web. The mobile apps (with notifications the web lacked) became the paid incentive, at $4.99/month. The free web version still satisfies court orders.

Starting early and continuing, the team surveyed customers (simple SurveyMonkey surveys written by two engineers and a lawyer): what do you want, what would you pay for, which features do you like, how can this be better. Answers decided which features went into each tier and each price increase.

Raised the subscription from $4.99 to $9.99/month for all subscribers, bundling Accountable Calling (phone calls recorded, transcribed and added to the court record) plus deeper discounts on printed records. Messaging: yes, prices are rising, but here are features you asked for. A free web version remained available for anyone who didn't want to pay. The team had planned for losing at least half.

At the end of 2022 added a $24.99/month tier on top of $9.99, adding recorded, transcribed video calling. Because video storage is expensive, each tier includes a bundle of minutes/time sized to cover costs. Higher tiers also get cheaper printed records and lower fees on Accountable Payments (tracked child support/alimony payments).

Subscriptions apply to one parent only. A $9.99 parent gets calling; video requires $24.99, so a parent may want to upgrade to video-chat with their child when the other parent has it. Premium users can still communicate with free users. Considering letting one co-parent pay for the other, which is complicated by App Store rules and control concerns.

Free users keep an unalterable record; when they go to court they buy a copy: digital, downloadable PDF (many courts won't accept it), or a printed, bound copy with an affidavit shipped to them. Paid tiers get deeper discounts on printed records, which cost significant labor.

A new B2C-experienced director of marketing pushed for real instrumentation of the customer journey (not over-instrumented). Adjust was dropped as too install-centric, since TalkingParents' real conversion point is matching with a co-parent. Firebase added, then a bake-off between Segment (engineers liked it; marketers didn't want to build UIs in Tableau/Power BI) and Bloomreach, a customer data platform chosen for first-party data. Anyone who visits the site or a landing page once is tracked over time across social, advertising and community touchpoints to conversion.

'Coffee & Co-parenting': periodic webinars with experts such as Dr. Ramani, negotiator/counselor Mark Pearson and influencer Caroline Kelly, who also take over TalkingParents' social media or blog and interact with customers, so customers get more than the app. Engagement is tracked in Bloomreach alongside social and ads.

For the last year and a half, the marketing team meets weekly with the customer experience team and they reply to every App Store and Google Play review with a human response, even complaints unrelated to the app. Replies are written for future readers, not just the reviewer. Support is email-only for now; phone support for higher tiers is being considered. Support staff are hired for empathy.

The first audio transcription vendor, a startup chosen for being cheap and easy to integrate, charged per channel transcribed and had transcription problems and disconnections at scale. Switched to AssemblyAI, which charges for dual-channel audio and also supports multiple languages. Lesson: check unit economics and effect on cost of goods before choosing a vendor, and design integrations so vendors can be swapped.

For recorded calling (the flagship feature, needing masked locations and phone numbers and stream muxing), chose a startup over Twilio to help them grow, and underestimated long-term video storage costs. The vendor could not scale, so they re-engineered onto Twilio. Similarly, building subscription management in-house was 'a debacle' with every Apple/Google change, until they adopted RevenueCat. Integrations were designed to be swappable, which made switches possible.

Bit-Wizards, a custom software consultancy, co-founded TalkingParents and used professional services to support the app while rebuilding it. From 2009 to 2015 they rebuilt the web app and 'dabbled'; when services revenue got lean, Vince told his co-founder he couldn't keep paying him a salary, forcing monetization to become a priority.