BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app
Ask unhappy users three questions by email they can answer by replying
Offsets the happy-user bias in interviews; no numbers
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- scale
In their words
Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra
Anada Lakra… to get more feedback and you're going to get more people to jump on calls who are happy users because they're like, "Oh, my gosh. My favorite product reached out to me for my feedback. I want to book this call." And people who did not have a good experience are going to be less likely to jump on those calls. So it's really important to keep that in mind and to be aware of the bias in the feedback and the features that people are also asking for.
Anada LakraA lot of the time people who did not have a good experience or did not feel like the product met what they were looking for, those people might not want to jump on a call, but if we give them just a three-question mini-survey in an email, where they don't even have to click on anything, they can just respond in an email. They'll be more likely to answer that. Or when someone goes to cancel their subscription or their trial, having a mini-flow there that asks them what actually went wrong. I think just being aware of that bias and making sure that you're not overly indexing on making those happy people happier, which is important, but that could also lead you toward making this super niche, super technical product. And you also want to create a product that has ... Especially as it grows, wider and wider appeal.
David BarnardSuch great advice. Gosh, there's so many things I want to talk about. We don't have a ton of time left, but maybe we can speed run some of the virality and growth things y'all have done because you've gotten some really cool growth wins and some viral moments and things like that. What would you say were the maybe top three most impactful lessons on the growth side or top three viral moments?
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- Judge paywall tests on revenue after refunds, waiting 3+ weeks past trial startCaught two trial-start 'wins' that lost money once refunds came in
- Remove the close button so users must start a trial to continueTrial starts rose, but refunds rose by more; net loss
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- Show the ~$150 annual plan first so ad spend pays back when trials endCash lands 7 days after install, so each channel's ROI is known at once; no numbers
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- Add city-level results to the free accent tool to spark a new viral waveProduced another viral boost; no numbers
- Show a sample of the full in-app results to push web users to the appFounder says it boosts web-to-app conversion; no numbers
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- Hire self-driven founder types and hold just one team meeting a week, on Mondays~$10M ARR with 10 people; founder credits hiring first
- Get everyone, even the non-technical CEO, shipping code with ClaudeRoughly doubled team productivity, per the founder; her biggest win of the year
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- Show a countdown of free scans left before the paywall appears
Tags: survey, unhappy-users, feedback-bias, cancel-survey