GTM Sauce

Burner · B2C · second phone number app

Add caller lookup for unknown numbers to the premium plan

Very popular and a driver of premium upsells; founder didn't expect it to win

Workedupsell-expansionfeature-development

What they did

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.

What happened

Very popular and a driver of upsell to premium.
Stage
growth

In their words

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

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Greg Cohn… funnel, right? So, that's, I think, incredibly important. And for a long time has been the biggest single factor in our retention, which is like, well, what did we sell them into is the biggest determinant of what their trajectory is as a customer. And what we've been building on is our ability then to retain them and give customers more value, stickier features, things that address maybe things they had less intent about as they came in, right?

Greg CohnSo, I mean, there are any number of features we've launched, but I'll mention one that was a surprise to me. 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. It's funny because when people get Burners, they think we're selling their numbers sometimes. We get these comments like, "Oh, I started getting all these telemarketing calls."

David BarnardWe're not the one selling.

David BarnardBut that's the whole point of getting a Burner, as soon as you give your phone number out once, it's...

Greg CohnIt's out. And then people realize when they use this lookup feature, "Oh, actually this is somebody calling me." So, that's been really popular and a driver of upsell. And that was really an experiment, right? It was in a bucket of features that we tested out. I think we had done some surveys and that one surveyed, but I didn't really necessarily intuitively believe that that was going to be a winner feature for us. And so, you don't always know.

David BarnardYeah. So, how do you think about in these experimentation from pricing to paywalls to onboarding, what are your north star metrics and how do those shift either even experiment by experiment or year by year? You mentioned earlier, you do have a lot of churn from the people who are just like, "Oh, Facebook Marketplace, I just need it for this weekend. I'm going to sell five things on Facebook Marketplace," and then they turn out. So, how do you …

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Tags: premium-tier, surveys, caller-id