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Burner · B2C · second phone number app

Add a monthly and annual plan with unlimited texts, calls and photos

Biggest single jump in revenue in company history; subscriptions now 90%+ of revenue

Workedpricingpaywall

What they did

When App Store subscriptions arrived, they built a plan for the segment that wanted to keep their Burner number long term. Negotiated supplier contracts so it could be 'all you can eat': unlimited texts, voice minutes and picture messages (MMS, which they were first to ship commercially via aggregators). Launched with just monthly and annual options, then studied monthly vs annual take rate and monthly retention via cohorts.

What happened

One of the biggest single step functions in revenue growth; the business is now over 90% subscription revenue.
Stage
growth

In their words

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

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David BarnardOh, that'd be fun.

Greg Cohn... for people to reach out if they want to. But the last one I'll give up is the one I almost never use, right? It's the one that's on long-term things like that. And so, when we went out with the first subscription offering, it was really driven around meeting a segment of our user's needs who wanted to keep their number for longer, and we wanted to make that a fully featured thing. So, there was a lot of backstage work to get MMS, which at that time wasn't something that was supported by the carriers through aggregators like Twilio. Google Voice didn't have it, and so nobody had it. We were, I think, the first to get it out there commercially, and we rolled it into our first subscription offering.

Greg CohnSo, it was a pretty big moment, and it was a huge success for us. So, that was one of the biggest single step functions in our revenue growth in our history was the day we launched subscriptions, and it was also our first unlimited all you can eat. You can have an unlimited number of texts and voice minutes and photo messages, so it wasn't counted. And that involved contractual negotiation and other things with our suppliers, right? It got a little bit complex to build as a product, but then was really successful as a SKU bundle. And then immediately, we started to say, "Okay, well, what percentage of people are taking the monthly and the annual? What's the retention of monthly?"

Greg CohnAnd completely changed the game in terms of cohort math. I would say today we know as much or more about subscription cohort math as anybody. And that's a really important dimension of our business and growth. But at that time, that was just the beginning of learning about all of that. That was, I think our first subscription offering, we had monthly and annual, that's it. And now today we have monthly one line, monthly three line, annual of both …

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Tags: subscription-launch, unlimited-plan, bundle, monthly-annual