Sunflower · B2C · addiction recovery app
Lower your prices when your users have little money
Lower prices made more money; no numbers given
What they did
What happened
In their words
Koby Conrad - I speedran an ai app from 0 to $1m/yr in 10 months
Koby… the other like major learning is that you want to have a enough variety of uh subscription options. So like there's some people that want weekly, and there's some people that want monthly, and there's some people that want annual. So it's kind of like an optimization game of, how do you like pro- provide those options in a way that like doesn't hurt anyone, but like allows everyone to like self-select into like the thing that they want the most?
KobyThe next thing is that you need to understand how price-sensitive your users are. Um our people are very price-sensitive, they're people struggling with addiction, and that means that often they don't have a ton of money. Our users uh we we've made a lot of gains by actually lowering our price than like increasing our price, which is like really cool. It felt good to be able to reduce our price and make more money.
KobyAnd then the final like major learning, I think, that we've had most recently is there's uh trial anxiety. And trial anxiety is like way more of a factor than you probably think it is. And by giving people like, "Hey, we're going to remind you about your trial, like it's going to be great," that actually is like really, really impactful. We had like a plus 56% like revenue bump by adding in trial reminders. It was It was insane.
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More from this episode
- Hire the biggest creator in your niche as a salaried team member with equity50-100K link clicks a month from one creator; founder calls it the core of go-to-market
- Get the best-known expert in your field to be the face of the companyGiven as an example of the approach working; no numbers
- Ask conferences what they'd give you for double their top sponsor packageFounder says it beats small test buys: better treatment and brand effect; no numbers
- Launch a bare-bones first version with three features, then keep improving itUgly v1 grew into the current product; no early numbers given
- Start free like Duolingo, then add a monthly paywall once AI costs pile upFree model failed: investors wanted revenue and AI costs hit hundreds of thousands
- Add a yearly plan and pre-select it on the paywallAdding annual brought some annual revenue; defaulting to it brought 'a lot more'
- Default to paying now, with a toggle to switch on the free trialMade more money than the default-annual paywall; no numbers
- Before the paywall, promise to remind people before their free trial ends+48% revenue, +70% annual revenue, +46% trial conversions, +30% trial starts
- Build everything around the one simple thing users do every dayTimer is the most important feature; AI chat alone had poor retention
- Let the in-app AI coach follow up on its own and reply in the community4M+ messages handled in a year; users say it saved their lives
- Pitch investors with revenue growth and a future vision, not user countsFirst user-focused deck failed; the revenue-and-future deck raised post-YC
- Put in your own money, then ask people you made rich to invest$100K of own money plus ~$350K from his network after years of no funding
Tags: price-decrease, price-sensitive-audience