Try a freemium version of an app where every free user costs money

David BarnardRight. This will be a much smaller audience, but I think even those who aren't in this situation would be curious and will learn something. What was that transition like and what was the time span from we're raising VC, we're going to be a billion dollar outcome to, okay, maybe we're not and let's not raise more and let's shift to a slower growth, profitable mindset?

Greg CohnYeah. So, we closed our angel round right after that first launch and we raised about a $2 million VC round within a year or so of that. That's the one I'm referring to. And it was with that that the job of a round from a classic point of view is to prove something or validate something. And so, we were trying to go out and use that really, you're buying time and you're buying time to validate a market and we were trying to figure out how big this market might be. After a period of time, we were starting to run low on that cash and we had tried a lot of experiments, including trying to make a freemium business out of Burner. Very much has a similar formula today as it did back then.

Greg CohnIt's evolved in a lot of meaningful ways, but at its core, it does one thing really well, which is download app, get phone number, and those phone numbers cost money. So, you can't just give it away to a million people and hope 1% of them convert after some number of months. You have to figure out a way to make that a... Well, you can do that with a lot of capital. So, we tested some things like that to see would it make sense to raise more capital and do more of that. There were some other ad supported competitors in the market emerging around the same time we did. And we were looking at those and trying to do the analytics on what they were doing.

Greg CohnAnd we saw potential to have a business that was a mile wide and an inch deep, but we weren't sure how it would get to be really valuable down that path. And what we were seeing in our business, we were from the beginning revenue driven, a premium app, like a good experience. We're investing a lot in the craft of what we were building and trying to use technology creatively to give people a good experience and then charge for it. And people were …