Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Test a throwaway phone number by posting it in real Craigslist ads
Flood of calls and 10-100x the response of the old app; confirmed a real problem
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- pre-launch
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
David BarnardI enjoy my podcast when I have a long drive.
Greg CohnFor sure, it's fun. And also in the era of mobile phones, if you're in the car and you've got an hour to kill, you're driving to the airport or something, you start calling people, you're just getting their voicemail, they're all screening you. You don't know whether to leave a message. They start calling you back. It's a messy problem, but it really wasn't a problem that people were going to look for an app to solve or looking for an extraneous tool for. And when we pivoted into the Burner standalone app where we had built that feature and that feature was generating positive results. And then we were doing stuff like testing it by selling tickets on Craigslist.
Greg CohnAnd we were posting fake ads for giving away flat screen TVs and things like that. We just get a ton of traffic. And what that did was it quickly validated the problem, right? And so...
David BarnardStarted to feel pull from the market instead of having to push yourself into the market.
Greg CohnThat's exactly right. And it was like a 10X to 100X level of response from even just friends we were showing this to. So, in that actual stage, we went down to South by Southwest here in Austin, 2012, and it wasn't hardened and ready. It wasn't in the app store or anything like that, but we were showing it to friends on test flight and people... 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. It was just like, it happened really fast.
Greg CohnAnd for us, it was a real sign that there was something here that was actually meaningful, an authentic problem that we're solving for people. And as much as has happened since then, there's a lot of evolution we can get into around our product and around how we've thought about growth and things like that, that fundamental piece has really only deepened, right? Having only one phone number associated with your mobile phone is even more of a …
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More from this episode
- Demo the unreleased app to people at SXSW and collect a waitlistNew York Times interview and a panel slot; $50K revenue on launch day
- Charge $1.99 upfront and price credit packs to cover phone costsAbout $50K revenue on launch day
- Drop the $1.99 download price once there is money to cover free users
- Try a freemium version of an app where every free user costs moneyDidn't scale without lots of capital; stayed a premium, paid-first app
- Skip the next VC round and run the app at breakeven insteadBreakeven or profitable for 6-8 years, grew past $10M a year
- Add a monthly and annual plan with unlimited texts, calls and photosBiggest single jump in revenue in company history; subscriptions now 90%+ of revenue
- Phase out one-off credits so everyone goes through a subscriptionFairly high churn from short-term users; founder now thinks credits might have fit them better
- Capture people already searching for a second phone number instead of running brand adsSeveral million downloads a year of high-intent users; press-driven users didn't convert
- Add caller lookup for unknown numbers to the premium planVery popular and a driver of premium upsells; founder didn't expect it to win
- Offer 8 plans so short-term and long-term users pick what fits
- Let people choose on the paywall whether to take a free trialVery positive A/B test result; no numbers given
- When someone deletes their number, offer them a new oneRetains some users into a second number; 20-30% of new subs are returning users
- Add a white-label VPN inside the main app's premium planDrove a lot of premium-tier growth, but cost more to build than it should have
- Launch separate robocall-blocking and business-number appsNeither got real traction; one was killed by an Apple feature
- Use paywall tools so the product team can launch tests without engineersFrom 1-2 paywall tests a month to several times that; about 1 in 4-5 wins
- Judge paywall tests by projected customer lifetime value from day-8 and day-30 data
- Buy small apps that fit your users' needs and sell them inside your main app
Tags: craigslist, fake-door, pivot, demand-test