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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
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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More from this episode
- Test a throwaway phone number by posting it in real Craigslist adsFlood of calls and 10-100x the response of the old app; confirmed a real problem
- 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
- 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: premium-tier, surveys, caller-id