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
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
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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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
- 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
- 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: subscription-launch, unlimited-plan, bundle, monthly-annual