Parakeet Chat · B2C · AI chatbot for people in prison
Give users about a month of free credits when someone they bring in starts paying
Founder says it helped; no numbers
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
In their words
I Made $1.5M From An App You’ve Never Heard Of
Jordan Rejaud… with my project, and they just showed it to other people. And then those people showed it to other people, because if you create a good product and it resonates with people, people will be your zealots, right? They'll be your cultists. Like, I've heard this expression, "Apple doesn't have customers, they have cult members." And that's- it's kind of an exaggeration, but it's true. Lots of people who like these products want to talk about it.
Jordan RejaudSo, it's all word of mouth, honestly. [laughs] I know people want like a cooler answer, but no, it's just all word of mouth. I did build an internal recruitment system where if one of our customers would recruit another customer, and the other person signed up and started paying for the product, the first person would get like a month or so of free credits. So that helped. The way you want to think about growth in entrepreneurship is as a scientist. So just be willing to experiment, be willing to fail, come with a strategy, it's probably terrible, but you'll get data back and then you will be able to reiterate on that.
Pat WallsOkay, I 100% agree with that. I want to change topics and actually talk about this app. Can you explain what is the actual app that you've built that makes $300,000 a year?
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More from this episode
- Show the first version to a few people inside and let them spread it200 users in the first month; all growth since is word of mouth, $1.5M lifetime
- Bill families outside $15-20 a month for the service their relative in prison usesJust over $300K revenue in 2025
- Serve people in prison through the prison email system they already useTried by ~30K people, about 20% of the US federal prison population
Tags: free-credits, paid-conversion-trigger