BoldVoice · B2C · accent coaching app
Market to international college students first
Weak fit: lower willingness to pay and less urgency; moved to professionals
Failedpositioning-nichemarket-selection
What they did
Early on targeted international students at colleges, borrowing the campus playbook of dating apps/Facebook. Students improve naturally among native speakers, have lower ability/willingness to pay and haven't yet felt the career cost.
What happened
Students still use the app, but they were not the best ICP; focus shifted to working professionals.
- Stage
- early
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra“Let's just put this in colleges because college students are great adopters.”
“The second thing is the willingness to pay and the ability to pay for college students is of course, lower.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
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- BoldVoice: Judge paywall tests on revenue after refunds, waiting 3+ weeks past trial startCaught two trial-start 'wins' that lost money once refunds came in
- BoldVoice: Remove the close button so users must start a trial to continueTrial starts rose, but refunds rose by more; net loss
- BoldVoice: When users close the paywall, show a discount trial they can't closeTrial starts rose, but refunds rose by more; net loss
- BoldVoice: Let people who close the paywall use day one free, then ask for a trialFounder calls it a good middle ground; no numbers
- BoldVoice: 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
- BoldVoice: Sell to working professionals with good English, and skip beginners entirelyFounder credits this focus for ~$10M ARR; no split by segment
- BoldVoice: Auto-invite users to 15-minute calls booked with whoever on the team is freeEvery employee, engineers included, does 2+ user calls a week
- BoldVoice: Have engineers demo unreleased features to power users on weekly callsFounder says it validates complex features before shipping; no numbers
- BoldVoice: Ask unhappy users three questions by email they can answer by replyingOffsets the happy-user bias in interviews; no numbers
- BoldVoice: 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
- BoldVoice: Add city-level results to the free accent tool to spark a new viral waveProduced another viral boost; no numbers
- BoldVoice: 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
- BoldVoice: 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
- BoldVoice: Grow from accent training into overall spoken-English fluency after raising a Series A
- BoldVoice: Hire self-driven founder types and hold just one team meeting a week, on Mondays~$10M ARR with 10 people; founder credits hiring first
- BoldVoice: Get everyone, even the non-technical CEO, shipping code with ClaudeRoughly doubled team productivity, per the founder; her biggest win of the year
- BoldVoice: 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