BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app
Remove the close button so users must start a trial to continue
Trial starts rose, but refunds rose by more; net loss
What they did
What happened
- Stage
- growth
- Effort
- A/B test run long enough for refund data to mature
In their words
Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra
Anada Lakra… to be able to action it. And the idea of just sitting there on something that could be really promising for an extra month, depending on X number of months, depending on how much ... Again, users you need to validate and get to statistical significance. That part is hard of just sitting on that and being patient. And it also means you can't iterate as fast, you can implement those learnings as fast. So I get it and I was that impatient person.
Anada LakraI'll give you two examples actually. When it comes to the paywall, we tested a hard paywall, where we basically removed the X dismiss button. So people had to start a trial in order to proceed. And then we also tested a version, where there was still a dismiss button on the main paywall, but then if you dismissed it, we gave people an offer of X percent off that they could not X out of. So they would have to start a trial. If they hadn't started at the baseline price, they would have to start it at the lower price. Again, it's a trial, it's not a payment, so they still can't cancel it.
Anada LakraBut both of those look so promising on the trial numbers and it makes sense. People have already put in all that time in the onboarding flow. They actually want to see what this app is all about. And we're like, "Great. This is great. Why are we sitting on this? Why shouldn't just we put this in front of everyone?" And the answer came down to the refunds and the refunds spiked by way more than the gain in STAR trials. And again, it took us a while to get to that data, but once the data came in, I think it was very clear that that was not the right thing to do.
Anada LakraAgain, I feel like I've been a broken record already about this, but I think my takeaway from this is that just the mechanical clever things don't actually work and you'll pay the price for those things. And the only thing that actually works is ... Once you have something that generally makes sense when it comes to the paywalls, just work on the product.
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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
- 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
- Get everyone, even the non-technical CEO, shipping code with ClaudeRoughly doubled team productivity, per the founder; her biggest win of the year
- 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: hard-paywall, refunds, ab-test