Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Offer 8 plans so short-term and long-term users pick what fits
What they did
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
David Barnard… need to sell a bunch of stuff on Facebook Marketplace, but what you're really trying to find is those locals who are going to be around for a long time and live there and stay in your product. So, it sounds like you're actually cohorting by those kind of intents, where you have a tourist cohort and a local cohort and then you're presenting different paywalls and different options and different pricing based on that. Is that what I'm hearing?
Greg CohnWell, I would say to date, we've mostly done that by presenting different SKUs and different bundles and letting people self-select.
David BarnardGot it.
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
- 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
- Add caller lookup for unknown numbers to the premium planVery popular and a driver of premium upsells; founder didn't expect it to win
- 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: tiers, self-selection, tourists-vs-locals, multi-line