Burner · B2C · second phone number app
Drop the $1.99 download price once there is money to cover free users
Unknownpricing
What they did
After closing the angel round, Burner removed the paid download and became free to download, after working out the conversion math; launched on Android within the next 6-8 months.
- Stage
- early
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last – Greg Cohn, Burner“The thing we wanted to do was take the paid download off, right? Became a free download. We figured out the conversion math”
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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: 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