Supabase · B2B · database for developers
Ship a new feature every single day
Became the default database for most major website builders
What they did
What happened
In their words
How a Single Paywall Experiment Generated $50M – Jeff Morris, Chapter One, Ex-Tinder
David Barnard… but we can have a discussion around these. It's kind of a loose thing I've started putting here at the end of the podcast. The questions are more focused on operators. So I'll ask this in a different way for you, but the question is generally, what's your biggest win of the year? So for you, maybe it's a portfolio company, a biggest win a portfolio company had, or just something you think people could learn from that you saw in the past year?
Jeff MorrisYeah, I think for us on the investment side, we were pre-seed investors in Superbase, which I think the company's done an incredible job of really leaning into what's happening in AI and becoming the database of record for most major website builders. They've done so by being extremely developer... The speed at which they ship features, they ship a new feature every single day. And so I think they set the bar for what product velocity should look like and just appears like they won't slow down. Personally, I think the thing I've loved doing is I've gone back to even as a VC designing new products. And so we have a incubation, which we'll be able to share next year, which has been a ton of fun to work on because it's been back in the Figma files and getting really deep in product design, which as an investor helps me stay sharp.
Jeff MorrisI don't know how I could do this job and not still build things and create things. And then we have another product that we're releasing in the next couple of weeks, which is more like a venture scale product, but it's just something that we're having a lot of fun building. So I think the lesson for me is all my energy that I get is through building things and building products and investing, but I really need to build things to be happy as an …
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More from this episode
- Put a toggle in the top bar that opens a new paid tierAbout $50M in revenue from one small A/B test
- Limit free swipes per day and charge for moreStopped mass-swiping and auto-swipers; turned into a strong revenue driver (no numbers)
- Give each paid feature its own paywall and check its sales every morningShowed 2-3 features drive most new subs; weak ones were made free
- Offer several paid tiers, from cheap starter to big spenders at $50K a yearGuest's biggest revenue unlock at Tinder; no numbers given
- Set different prices by country, starting with fast-growing markets like India
- Polish the paywall like a core feature, e.g. add a gold shimmerGuest says it showed users they cared; no numbers
- Ask for payment only after a user gets a match and starts chatting
- Build engagement and retention first; push monetization only years laterReached 30-40M monthly users before revenue became a focus in years 4-5
- Create a revenue team with its own iOS and Android engineersGrew from 6 engineers in 2016 to 40+
- Give the first flight free with every pro feature, then lock some
- Make free users pay before they can fix their buggy first buildFrustrated users complained publicly on Twitter
Tags: shipping-cadence, product-velocity