Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra

“So charging for the product is a way to already figure out who that ICP is.”

“it's net revenue after refunds per exposed user. And then here's the kicker on a matured cohort.”

“we tested a hard paywall, where we basically removed the X dismiss button. So people had to start a trial in order to proceed.”

“if you dismissed it, we gave people an offer of X percent off that they could not X out of. So they would have to start a trial.”

“So if you X out of the paywall, you're taken to the speech assessment, you'll be able to speak, you'll still see the assessment results.”

“with an annual plan, we get the cash upfront from users, after their seven-day free trial. So we know right away from a particular channel, it drove this many subscribers, this is how much we spend, and then we know exactly how effective that marketing was.”

“Let's just put this in colleges because college students are great adopters.”

“Our philosophy from the beginning is we're not going after this huge base of learners, who are at basic level. We are actually intentionally ignoring them.”

“we send out automated invites to users and we pick a variety of different people. Sometimes it's subscribers who have been with us for two or three years, sometimes it's people who just started trial a week ago and converted or didn't convert”

“we've created this super user group and we hold weekly or so calls with them”

“if we give them just a three-question mini-survey in an email, where they don't even have to click on anything, they can just respond in an email. They'll be more likely to answer that.”

“Our team had this idea that if we could build a tool that could predict where a person was from just based on 10 seconds of them speaking, it could have this kind of viral potential.”

“we recently added this really cool feature, where it doesn't just tell you the country where your accent is from, but it also goes down to the city level. And once we implemented that, it had another viral boost”

“Another thing that we did is that we showed people a snippet of the sample of the full results that they would get in the app.”

“There was this trend that was going around with people crying on TikTok, when the app gave them low scores.”

“the biggest pain point that we're hearing from a lot of people at this last mile of fluency is their accent, and it seems like such a differentiated and spiky pain point that we can create a product and scale a product initially that focuses on that wedge”

“And part of how we do that is by hiring people who are this founder types, who want to have that huge impact”

“For the first time in my life, I'm actually shipping PRs myself, which is crazy.”

“I had this idea that if we got Hollywood speech coaches to work with us, that it would be especially differentiated and very cool”

“So you've got your whole scanner UI, where you're scanning your Pokemon card and it says 35 scans left, and then you scan one, and then 34 scans left”