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

While Wrangle (a network-dependent social calling app) struggled, the team spun its temporary-number 'Burner' feature into a standalone prototype. To test it they posted Craigslist ads (selling tickets, fake giveaways of flat-screen TVs) with a Burner number, measuring the inbound volume; they also showed it to friends and watched whether people said 'I want this' rather than 'my sister would like this'.

At SXSW 2012 they showed the unfinished app to friends via TestFlight (not yet in the App Store). When a New York Times interview came up, they set up a 'war room' in the hotel, built a launch page and collected waitlist names; also landed a panel. At launch it was covered by GigaOm and hit the top of Hacker News.

Because each phone number cost money on Twilio (on the founder's credit card), Burner launched as a $1.99 paid download including a free number for about seven days. Users then bought consumable credit packs (3, 8, 15 or 25 credits) to extend or add numbers. Prices were set so that if a user used every text and call minute allocated, the company broke exactly even on Twilio costs after Apple's cut; any unused allowance (breakage) was profit.

After closing the angel round, Burner removed the paid download and became free to download, after working out the conversion math; launched on Android within the next 6-8 months.

With VC money they tested making Burner freemium, alongside studying ad-supported competitors. Because every phone number costs money, giving numbers away to a million users and hoping 1% convert months later only works with a lot of capital. They saw a 'mile wide, inch deep' path and chose to stay revenue-driven and premium.

When the VC cash was running low and the Series A was due, they judged they lacked the metrics (not 200% year-over-year growth). With insider (Founder Collective) support they converted to a breakeven business and have kept growing from profits. Greg advises most one- or two-founder consumer apps not to raise VC; use friends-and-family money (e.g. $20K for test ads) and accelerator SAFEs/notes that don't lock you into the VC path.

When App Store subscriptions arrived, they built a plan for the segment that wanted to keep their Burner number long term. Negotiated supplier contracts so it could be 'all you can eat': unlimited texts, voice minutes and picture messages (MMS, which they were first to ship commercially via aggregators). Launched with just monthly and annual options, then studied monthly vs annual take rate and monthly retention via cohorts.

After subscriptions launched, they slowly de-emphasized consumable credits, assuming long-intent users would retain and short-intent users would simply churn early. Credits now mostly serve as top-ups for existing subscribers (~8-10% of revenue).

Little brand marketing: mainstream press (e.g. Vogue) brought downloads that neither converted nor retained. Instead they focus UA and store presence on existing intent: App Store and search engine queries like 'second phone number', 'temporary phone number', 'private phone number' and the Burner brand name, backed by a mature UA program with many creative variants. Competitors bid on the Burner keyword to cannibalize brand searches.

Premium-tier feature: when an unknown number calls your Burner, look it up through the telephony system and guess who the caller is. It came from a bucket of features tested (with surveys beforehand); the founder did not expect it to win. Other premium features: AI voicemail classifier, custom icons, higher-quality video messaging.

Rather than predicting who is a 'tourist' (a weekend of Marketplace selling) versus a 'local' (a long-term second line), Burner offers standard and premium tiers, one-line and three-line, monthly and annual (8 SKUs) plus credit top-ups, and lets users self-select. Premium bundles features that matter only to long-term users (caller lookup, AI voicemail, custom icons, better video messages, VPN).

Picked up from app-growth community talk about radio buttons on trial paywalls. Instead of defaulting everyone into a free trial, the paywall lets users choose: those who want to lock in their number can buy immediately, the unsure can take the trial. Run as an A/B test; trial treatments are 3-day and 7-day.

Burning a number is a playful moment (a match sound and flame animation, originally so fun it caused accidental burns and support tickets). They use that moment to suggest getting a new number for the next need, and try to give short-term 'tourists' a good experience so they return later.

Launched Q1 2025: a VPN built with a white-label provider, integrated into the Burner app and premium SKU, with desktop apps for Mac and Windows. Chosen over a separate app because Burner already gets several million high-intent downloads a year who are easier to offer it to. Integration was still expensive and slow; in hindsight they would have done it more nimbly.

Ad Hoc Labs built Firewall (robocall blocking) and Dialed (business phone numbers) as standalone apps with full launches and hardening, competing against incumbents like RoboKiller. Firewall was sherlocked when Apple shipped Silence Unknown Callers and never reached Android.

Added technology so paywall tests are shipped by the product team rather than gated on engineering. Velocity went from one or two paywall tests a month to a multiple of that; the bottleneck is now analytics and data maturity. Plan to extend to onboarding and win-back/cancellation flows.

Cohort LTV is the 'true north' for picking experiment winners, but they can't wait for cohorts to mature, so they project from day-8 and day-30 signals. Users are bucketed into 3-day or 7-day trial treatments. Premium subs are optimized for long retention; lower-intent users are treated differently. Built client, server and marketing analytics from day one.

In talks to acquire apps adjacent to Burner's privacy/communications brand, either as features inside Burner or standalone apps accelerated by Burner's funnel. Explicitly not an app farm: 'much easier for us to add five million in revenue to our app than it would be to take 500K app and turn into a $5 million app'. Goal is bundle-driven LTV and reaching a broader audience with a higher CAC target.