Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Demo the unreleased app to people at SXSW and collect a waitlist
New York Times interview and a panel slot; $50K revenue on launch day
Workedpr-launchevents
What they did
At SXSW 2012 they showed the unfinished app to friends via TestFlight (not yet in the App Store). When a New York Times interview came up, they set up a 'war room' in the hotel, built a launch page and collected waitlist names; also landed a panel. At launch it was covered by GigaOm and hit the top of Hacker News.
What happened
NYT interview, panel, waitlist; launch coverage led to ~$50K revenue on day one.
- Stage
- launch
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner“We ended up with the New York Times interview and we ran back to our room, and we set up a war room and set up a launch page. We were capturing waiting lists, names, and we were on a panel.”
“It was I think GigaOm that covered us and we were on Hacker News as a top story.”
Related topics
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More from Burner
All 18 Burner tacticsMore 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: 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
- Ad Hoc Labs: Buy small apps that fit your users' needs and sell them inside your main app