Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Use paywall tools so the product team can launch tests without engineers
From 1-2 paywall tests a month to several times that; about 1 in 4-5 wins
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- mature
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
David BarnardYeah. All right. What was your biggest win of the past year?
Greg CohnBiggest win in the past year, I mean, aside from launching premium full stop was definitely adding technology to increase our paywall testing speed. We're always a very test-driven company, but we were shipping one or two paywall tests a month and we're able to do a multiple of that today. And it's very interesting because the velocity is now on the product team, not gated by the engineering team. And probably the speed to results is mostly gated by analytics now and maturing of data, as opposed to how fast can we ship features or excuse me, tests. But it's still true that we don't always know the ones that are going to win. There's one winner for every four or five that we do.
David BarnardYeah, yeah. Paywall velocity. It's been a big topic over the last couple of years. And I just like Sarah. I mean, we've seen a lot of apps do really well. You just wouldn't think that moment would have as big of impact as it does, but it does forever...
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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
- 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
- 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: paywall-testing, test-velocity, no-code-paywalls