Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Add a monthly and annual plan with unlimited texts, calls and photos
Biggest single jump in revenue in company history; subscriptions now 90%+ of revenue
Workedpricingpaywall
What they did
When App Store subscriptions arrived, they built a plan for the segment that wanted to keep their Burner number long term. Negotiated supplier contracts so it could be 'all you can eat': unlimited texts, voice minutes and picture messages (MMS, which they were first to ship commercially via aggregators). Launched with just monthly and annual options, then studied monthly vs annual take rate and monthly retention via cohorts.
What happened
One of the biggest single step functions in revenue growth; the business is now over 90% subscription revenue.
- Stage
- growth
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner“So, that was one of the biggest single step functions in our revenue growth in our history was the day we launched subscriptions, and it was also our first unlimited all you can eat.”
“And so, when we went out with the first subscription offering, it was really driven around meeting a segment of our user's needs who wanted to keep their number for longer”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Burner: Test a throwaway phone number by posting it in real Craigslist adsFlood of calls and 10-100x the response of the old app; confirmed a real problem
- 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: 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
- Ad Hoc Labs: Buy small apps that fit your users' needs and sell them inside your main app