Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner

“And then we were doing stuff like testing it by selling tickets on Craigslist. And we were posting fake ads for giving away flat screen TVs and things like that. We just get a ton of traffic.”

“We ended up with the New York Times interview and we ran back to our room, and we set up a war room and set up a launch page. We were capturing waiting lists, names, and we were on a panel.”

“You could buy three, eight, 15 or 25 credits for different price points and then different configurations of phone numbers to extend them.”

“The thing we wanted to do was take the paid download off, right? Became a free download. We figured out the conversion math”

“After a period of time, we were starting to run low on that cash and we had tried a lot of experiments, including trying to make a freemium business out of Burner.”

“It was clear we didn't have the metrics for it, right? And so, that's the ultimate test of whether you should raise VC today is at the end of that cycle, where you have the numbers to go raise a subsequent round and we didn't get there.”

“So, that was one of the biggest single step functions in our revenue growth in our history was the day we launched subscriptions, and it was also our first unlimited all you can eat.”

“But we did slowly deprecate credits on the back of launching subscriptions because our mindset at least originally was, well, we should move all of our users through a subscription model and the ones who have longer term intent will retain and the ones who don't will leave early. And so, as a consequence of that, we have reasonably high churn.”

“People go into the app store, people go on to search engines and search for second phone number, temporary phone number, private phone number, Burner app by brand. And we're very good at finding that and harvesting that in terms of getting people to download the app.”

“In our premium tier, we have the ability if someone calls you on your Burner and you don't recognize the phone number to do a lookup through the telephony system and make a pretty good guess of who that is, who that caller is. And that feature has been very popular.”

“Well, I would say to date, we've mostly done that by presenting different SKUs and different bundles and letting people self-select.”

“We recently tested making the free trial optional instead of default, and that was a very positive test for us, interestingly.”

“But using that as a way to say, "Well, you may be done with this transaction, but maybe you want a new number." And so, we do retain a certain number of people into a second shot there.”

“So, that particular product we did with a partnership and it's a white label partnership as a provider.”

“We have Burner, it's our flagship app, but we also launched an app called Firewall and an app called Dialed to respectively do robocall blocking and business phone numbers. And neither one of those has worked at scale for us.”

“Biggest win in the past year, I mean, aside from launching premium full stop was definitely adding technology to increase our paywall testing speed.”

“So, balancing those things, really cohort LTV is probably the true north, but within that, you can't wait for those metrics to mature. So, you have to project based on things that are happening at day eight or day 30.”

“So, yeah, we've been in a certain number of conversations to acquire apps.”