GTM Sauce

NGL · B2C · anonymous messaging app

Charge power users $1-$7 a week, priced by country wealth; keep the rest free

Multi-eight-figure yearly revenue from a small share of users

Workedpricingpaywall

What they did

Keep the app free for most users. Sell a weekly subscription priced per region by GDP per capita, always a low impulse buy ($1-$7). Paid features: hints about who sent a message (phone type, rough location), who viewed your profile, and extra 'link games'. Relies on huge volume.

What happened

Multi-eight-figure annual revenue though only a very small percentage of downloads pay.
Stage
scale

In their words

Hunter Isaacson - Meet The Guy Who Solved Growing Apps

Play from 6:09
5:54

HostThat's interesting. Yeah, so it really became a habit and part of people's core day-to-day, but then, also, you got that real estate, which is the link-in-bio. This is consumer social. Like, people are interacting with each other, but you guys are also monetized. So, can you talk about the the the revenue side of things?

6:09

Hunter IsaacsonYeah, for sure. I mean, the revenue itself is very well. It's a multi-eight-figure-a-year business. I think the the revenue is primarily, it's just derived through weekly subscription. In different countries, it's priced differently depending on the region and depending on the GDP per capita of that country. So, it's always like a low impulse buy, you know, anywhere between $1 and $7, so it's pretty cheap. And I'd say a very small percentage of our downloads

6:36

Hunter Isaacsonactually monetized. It's primarily used as a free product. It's really only for like power users that want, you know, to see more insights about who's sending them their messages, or viewing their profile, or they want to, you know, post different, you know, we call them different link games that we have. But it's primarily a free product. It's just because of the volume of users, we've been able to generate significant revenue just by taking a very small percentage of those users and moving them to paid.

7:03

HostI feel like there's two types of consumer startups. There's like pure consumer social, like Facebook, Instagram, and they monetize with ads, cuz they have billions of users. And then, there's single-player utility apps. A lot of the AI apps that you see these days, like GPT wrappers. But then, you guys are kind of in the middle, where you're you're consumer social, but you're also monetized. I'm curious, like, so you started in 2021. So, you've …

Get tactics like this every Monday

New tactics from the week's founder interviews, each linked to where it was said.

More from this episode

Tags: weekly-plan, regional-pricing, freemium, power-users