Ad Hoc Labs · B2C · privacy app studio
Buy small apps that fit your users' needs and sell them inside your main app
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What they did
In talks to acquire apps adjacent to Burner's privacy/communications brand, either as features inside Burner or standalone apps accelerated by Burner's funnel. Explicitly not an app farm: 'much easier for us to add five million in revenue to our app than it would be to take 500K app and turn into a $5 million app'. Goal is bundle-driven LTV and reaching a broader audience with a higher CAC target.
- Stage
- Scale (mature)
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner“So, yeah, we've been in a certain number of conversations to acquire apps.”
“Whereas having multiple multimillion-dollar apps that are complimentary to one another, it's much easier for us to add five million in revenue to our app than it would be to take 500K app and turn into a $5 million app.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- Burner: Demo the unreleased app to people at SXSW and collect a waitlistNew York Times interview and a panel slot; $50K revenue on launch day
- Burner: Charge $1.99 upfront and price credit packs to cover phone costsAbout $50K revenue on launch day
- Burner: Drop the $1.99 download price once there is money to cover free users
- Burner: Try a freemium version of an app where every free user costs moneyDidn't scale without lots of capital; stayed a premium, paid-first app
- Ad Hoc Labs: Skip the next VC round and run the app at breakeven insteadBreakeven or profitable for 6-8 years, grew past $10M a year
- Burner: Add a monthly and annual plan with unlimited texts, calls and photosBiggest single jump in revenue in company history; subscriptions now 90%+ of revenue
- Burner: Phase out one-off credits so everyone goes through a subscriptionFairly high churn from short-term users; founder now thinks credits might have fit them better
- Burner: Capture people already searching for a second phone number instead of running brand adsSeveral million downloads a year of high-intent users; press-driven users didn't convert
- Burner: Add caller lookup for unknown numbers to the premium planVery popular and a driver of premium upsells; founder didn't expect it to win
- Burner: Offer 8 plans so short-term and long-term users pick what fits
- Burner: Let people choose on the paywall whether to take a free trialVery positive A/B test result; no numbers given
- Burner: When someone deletes their number, offer them a new oneRetains some users into a second number; 20-30% of new subs are returning users
- Burner: Add a white-label VPN inside the main app's premium planDrove a lot of premium-tier growth, but cost more to build than it should have
- Firewall: Launch separate robocall-blocking and business-number appsNeither got real traction; one was killed by an Apple feature
- Burner: Use paywall tools so the product team can launch tests without engineersFrom 1-2 paywall tests a month to several times that; about 1 in 4-5 wins
- Burner: Judge paywall tests by projected customer lifetime value from day-8 and day-30 data