BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app
Get everyone, even the non-technical CEO, shipping code with Claude
Roughly doubled team productivity, per the founder; her biggest win of the year
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 building. We have one team-wide company meeting on Mondays, where we just all have an opportunity to sync and everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. But other than that, it's really heads down time and again, talk to users. So being also focused on who the user is, super impactful and having everyone work to solve that user's problem, instead of just building and writing code. So I think a big part of it is thanks to that.
Anada LakraAnd now of course, also with the latest AI tooling that we have now with Claude, everyone in the company is using Claude. For the first time in my life, I'm actually shipping PRs myself, which is crazy. I'm not a technical person, and I'm not here to claim that now I'm the highest producer of code in the company. I'm definitely the lowest, but just the amount of ownership and freedom and just agency that everyone gets, and that's just amplified with the fact that this tooling allows us to build even faster.
Anada LakraAnother example is our designer. He has done an incredible job, not just building things on Figma, but translating them to prototypes and even getting them to almost 80%, when it comes to ... Then the engineers taking it over and coding it. So we've also optimized the workflows, so that we can get things iterated on and shipped even faster.
David BarnardAnd so it's just such a cool kind of summation of your approach to all of this. So it was a great place to end on. But I do want to ask, the three questions I asked every guest now at the end. What's the most impactful experiment or change, your biggest win over the last year?
Anada LakraMaybe what I already shared around the adoption of these automations and coding tools to make everyone even more of a builder than they were and make people be twice, if not more productive and increasing that velocity.
David BarnardIt's almost a trope now in 2026, but golly, even just in ... I thought I was a heavy AI user, but just in the past few weeks, I've completely changed how I work with computer use. It's just getting good enough, where it can just do stuff. So I just send it out on task, like it's an assistant updating spreadsheets and fixing this. It's pretty incredible. So if you think you're super AI native and fluent, keep trying. I feel like every two or three …
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More from this episode
- Charge $10 a month with a 7-day free trial from launch dayFounder says it filtered out non-buyers and freed time for the product; no numbers
- 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
- When users close the paywall, show a discount trial they can't closeTrial starts rose, but refunds rose by more; net loss
- Let people who close the paywall use day one free, then ask for a trialFounder calls it a good middle ground; no numbers
- 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
- Market to international college students firstWeak fit: lower willingness to pay and less urgency; moved to professionals
- Sell to working professionals with good English, and skip beginners entirelyFounder credits this focus for ~$10M ARR; no split by segment
- Auto-invite users to 15-minute calls booked with whoever on the team is freeEvery employee, engineers included, does 2+ user calls a week
- Have engineers demo unreleased features to power users on weekly callsFounder says it validates complex features before shipping; no numbers
- Ask unhappy users three questions by email they can answer by replyingOffsets the happy-user bias in interviews; no numbers
- Build a free web tool that guesses where you're from after 10 seconds of speech~100K people in Korea tried it the day after one investor posted it
- 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
- Ride a TikTok trend of people crying over their low app scoresOne creator got ~300M views in a few months, no ads; lower intent than paid
- Grow from accent training into overall spoken-English fluency after raising a Series A
- Hire self-driven founder types and hold just one team meeting a week, on Mondays~$10M ARR with 10 people; founder credits hiring first
- Recruit a Hollywood accent coach and run a manual email pilot with 12 usersLed to a ~$500K term sheet and YC; the coach still works with them
- Show a countdown of free scans left before the paywall appears
Tags: ai-coding, everyone-ships, design-to-code, automation