Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Capture people already searching for a second phone number instead of running brand ads
Several million downloads a year of high-intent users; press-driven users didn't convert
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner
David BarnardI love Burner.
Greg CohnThank you. I like to say it passes the F1 car. You can imagine it, but if somebody gave us $10 million and we ran a Superbowl ad, that's not necessarily a very targeted audience for us. And when we have had some breakout mainstream press, every now and again, we've been covered in Vogue or something and people come download the app, but those people don't convert and they don't retain. So, the thing that's been true is we've been pretty focused on... There's a lot of natural intent that already exists for our app for Burner. People go into the app store, people go on to search engines and search for second phone number, temporary phone number, private phone number, Burner app by brand.
Greg CohnAnd we're very good at finding that and harvesting that in terms of getting people to download the app. And then so we're working with a pretty high intent audience, and that gives us a lot of surface area to test different paywalls and different things at that onboarding funnel, right? So, that's, I think, incredibly important. And for a long time has been the biggest single factor in our retention, which is like, well, what did we sell them into is the biggest determinant of what their trajectory is as a customer. And what we've been building on is our ability then to retain them and give customers more value, stickier features, things that address maybe things they had less intent about as they came in, right?
Greg CohnSo, I mean, there are any number of features we've launched, but I'll mention one that was a surprise to me. In our premium tier, we have the ability if someone calls you on your Burner and you don't recognize the phone number to do a lookup through the telephony system and make a pretty good guess of who that is, who that caller is. And that feature has been very popular. It's funny because when people get Burners, they think we're selling their …
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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
- 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: app-store, google, intent-harvesting, brand-keywords, no-brand-marketing