GTM Sauce

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

Workedasopaid-searchapple-search-ads

What they did

Little brand marketing: mainstream press (e.g. Vogue) brought downloads that neither converted nor retained. Instead they focus UA and store presence on existing intent: App Store and search engine queries like 'second phone number', 'temporary phone number', 'private phone number' and the Burner brand name, backed by a mature UA program with many creative variants. Competitors bid on the Burner keyword to cannibalize brand searches.

What happened

Several million downloads per year of a high-intent audience, which also gives a large surface for paywall/onboarding tests.
Stage
growth

In their words

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

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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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Tags: app-store, google, intent-harvesting, brand-keywords, no-brand-marketing