GTM Sauce

Burner · B2C · second phone number app

When someone deletes their number, offer them a new one

Retains some users into a second number; 20-30% of new subs are returning users

Workedretentionproduct-activation

What they did

Burning a number is a playful moment (a match sound and flame animation, originally so fun it caused accidental burns and support tickets). They use that moment to suggest getting a new number for the next need, and try to give short-term 'tourists' a good experience so they return later.

What happened

Retains a certain number of people into a second number; returning subscribers are 20-30% of new subscriptions.
Stage
growth

In their words

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

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Greg Cohn… search, they had a great experience. They left and they came back again when they used it again. And so, we are trying to give those people good experiences and maybe do an increasingly good job educating them on why... A good example of this is, so at the end of the lifecycle of a Burner phone number, the user can burn the number, right? And so, we've increasingly explored what to do at that moment. It's really a fun moment in the app, right?

Greg CohnIn the early days, you'd hit the button and it would do this match sound and this flame visualization. And then people liked doing it so much that they kept accidentally burning their numbers and there was a lot of support volume. But using that as a way to say, "Well, you may be done with this transaction, but maybe you want a new number." And so, we do retain a certain number of people into a second shot there. And ultimately, it's about understanding those users, right? But what's been crazy, and we're well over 10 years into this company and there's still, the expression is the juice is worth the squeeze, right?

Greg CohnThere's still these optimizations that have meaningful... We're not talking about tiny bits of basis point types of little optimizations on whether we underline or what color blue we're using, right? This is a meaningful shift of users when we introduce a new plan. We recently tested making the free trial optional instead of default, and that was a very positive test for us, interestingly. This is a good example of something that was a little bit …

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Tags: win-back, end-of-lifecycle, delight