BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app
Auto-invite users to 15-minute calls booked with whoever on the team is free
Every employee, engineers included, does 2+ user calls a week
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… we talk about, but a muscle that we keep fresh because I think the user base is always also going to change and their expectations are going to change. You're going to bring in naturally newer people as you expand. So it's really important to not just have this ... Do a bunch of user interviews at the beginning and then be like, "Okay, that's our user." And then just not evolve that understanding. So the things that we've implemented is ...
Anada LakraFor example, we send out automated invites to users and we pick a variety of different people. Sometimes it's subscribers who have been with us for two or three years, sometimes it's people who just started trial a week ago and converted or didn't convert, and we ask them to jump on a call with our team for 15 minutes and share their feedback. And that invite automatically invites the people on the team who have availability in their calendar. So what that creates is that basically every single person on the team, myself, my co-founder, our engineers, our growth people, everyone is in at least two user interviews a week. So we're actively talking to people for at least 15 minutes twice a week. That's just one example.
Anada LakraAnother example is we've created this super user group and we hold weekly or so calls with them, and that's a great opportunity for ... This is the people who already engage with the app a lot, to figure out, how do we make these experiences better for them? And where that's been really impactful is to actually have our engineers demo new features that we're working on and get feedback from those users on those features, so that they're a part of …
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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
- 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: user-interviews, automation, customer-research, calendar-routing