Bootstrapping a Subscription App to 5M MAU and 2X+ Revenue Growth — Bruno Virlet, Genius Scan

Summary

Podcast Summary: Sub Club by RevenueCat

Episode: Bootstrapping a Subscription App to 5M MAU and 2X+ Revenue Growth — Bruno Virlet, Genius Scan
Hosts: David Barnard, Jacob Eiting
Guest: Bruno Virlet (Co-founder, The Grizzly Labs - Genius Scan)
Date: January 22, 2025

---

Overview

This episode features Bruno Virlet, co-founder of Genius Scan, a pioneering mobile document scanning app. David and Jacob explore the 15-year journey of Genius Scan, unpacking its early days, bootstrapped growth to 5M MAU, how customer-centric thinking and experimentation drove recent 2x–3x revenue growth, competing against hundreds of rivals (including Apple), and the philosophy of building a sustainable, happy business.

---

Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Accidental Origins of Genius Scan

[02:31 – 08:48]

• Genius Scan was born out of a failed idea to make an AR app that recognized paintings at museums.

• Challenges: Patent risks (SIFT technology), lack of feasible data transfer in early smartphones, and practical limitations for travelers.

• The “pivot” happened when, during development/testing, they realized the underlying tech worked great for scanning documents.

• The volcanic eruption in Iceland (Eyjafjallajökull) indirectly led Bruno to buy a MacBook and start iOS dev, fast-tracking the launch in June 2010.

  “We said, okay, maybe we will start doing a document scanning app and we’ll go back to the paintings later. And so 15 years later, we are still on the document scanning.”
  — Bruno ([06:00])

2. Early App Store Days: Monetization and Growth

[08:06 – 15:03]

• Genius Scan initially launched as a free app, rocketing up the App Store charts.

• Monetization experiments: Switching to paid dropped downloads to 12/day — so they reverted to free.

• Apple iAds provided significant early revenue and exposure.

• Freemium evolution: Introduced paid versions and in-app purchases/lifetime unlocks as features evolved.

• Learning: Early app monetization was tricky, but “happy accidents” like reverting to free enabled viral growth and long-term success.

  “If you would have been paid up front, we wouldn’t be here today, I think.”
  — Bruno ([11:49])

3. Transition from Side Project to Full-Time Business

[12:05 – 14:06]

• Both founders worked full-time jobs as they grew the app (Amazon, a YC startup).

• App revenue became substantial enough by 2014 for both to go full time without fundraising.

  “We didn’t want to be entrepreneurs … we were not predestined to be entrepreneurs, basically.”
  — Bruno ([12:05])

4. Competitive Landscape and the Myth of “Missing the Boat”

[14:06 – 18:19]

• Hosts reassure listeners that opportunity still exists: technological waves create new “boats” to catch, be it computer vision in 2010 or AI in 2025.

• Apple’s entry (native scanning in iOS) and rising competition created existential fear but ultimately did not dent Genius Scan’s growth.

  “Every time you recognize people being successful, it wasn’t obvious when they did it ... there’s always another boat.”
  — Jacob ([15:21])

5. Differentiation and Surviving Platform Competition

[18:27 – 21:24]

• Genius Scan’s edge: Speed, quality, export features, small business focus, and a trusted brand.

• Competes with Apple/Google’s built-in tools and cloud giants (Dropbox, Google Drive), but quality/extras keep users loyal.

• Bootstrapping brings flexibility — they’re not forced to chase winner-takes-all economics.

  “Being a reputable brand ... that’s probably a huge advantage that nobody can replicate. You can’t replicate that earnestness.”
  — Jacob ([22:00])

6. Philosophy of Bootstrapping: Growth, Profitability, and Life

[22:28 – 26:27]

• Bruno and his co-founder value life balance and freedom to spend time with family over chasing maximum ROI.

• Some rivals chase App Store rank by burning capital on ads, with razor-thin (or negative) profits.

• For Bruno, true success is profitability, independence, and fulfilling work, not relentless growth or exit.

  “It’s important to know why you are in business … it’s help us live the life we want, like in a way.”
  — Bruno ([23:43])

7. Transitioning to Subscription Revenue and Experimentation

[27:15 – 34:29]

• Switched to subscriptions in 2017 (with care to avoid backlash — offering cloud backup as a logical recurring service).

• Grandfathered old users, avoiding customer resentment.

• Consolidated multiple tiers, discovered pricing virtually inelastic — significant price increases did not reduce subscription volume.

• Experimentation continues: e.g. migrating most users to yearly Ultra plan, moving price from ~$10/year to $40/year with very little drop in conversions.

  “We noticed that demand curve is not elastic at all. People were ...100 purchase per day split between Plus and Ultra. Now it was Ultra.”
  — Bruno ([30:03])

8. Growing the Team (and Never Losing the Soul)

[32:55 – 39:11]

• Team = 10 employees as of 2025.

• Hires happen when there’s pain, not based on grand plans or growth targets.

• Bootstrapping allows hiring for sustainability and founder happiness, not headcount vanity.

  “It’s not like a venture-funded company where you make a business plan … It’s more like, we have so many things to do that we want to do.”
  — Bruno ([34:29])

9. Learning from Failures — Accidental A/B Tests & Conversion Mishaps

[40:29 – 46:12]

• UX Refactor Gone Wrong:
  Accidentally hid a paywall trigger (OCR feature) in a sub-menu. Conversion rates dropped ~10–20% for months before discovery.

• The Ad Banner Server Crash:
  Text/visual changes in paywall promo banners (caused by server fallback) doubled conversions; only discovered due to a server outage.

• Lesson: Small changes and measurement oversights can have massive impact; some revenue jumps or dips might not be seasonality or market-driven.

  “It was an accidental A/B test … The fallback banner was converting twice as much as the existing banner.”
  — Bruno ([45:21])

  “It blows my mind that just changing a text, changing an icon has such an effect on conversion.”
  — Bruno ([46:00])

10. Customer-Centric Philosophy

[54:20 – 59:02]

• Genius Scan’s core value: Build the app they want to use; make it easy for real humans to reach support (no “AI chatbots” as a barrier).

• Founders personally handle/review support tickets to empathize with users and spot pain points.

• Not obsessed with gaming conversion via dark patterns; e.g., no aggressive onboarding paywalls.

• Word-of-mouth is a core growth channel; cultivating goodwill is a “north star.”

  “We try to build the app we want to use … when you, you have a problem, you contact support and you get the answer you need.”
  — Bruno ([54:20])

  “If you AB test enough, you’re going to end up with a porn app or a gambling app.”
  — Thomas Petit (quoted by David, [49:07])

---

Notable Quotes & Moments

• On “Missing the Boat”:
  “By the time you recognize people being successful, those people—it wasn’t obvious when they did it. There’s always another boat.”
  — Jacob ([15:28])

• On Competition vs. Platform Owners:
  “They [Apple] cover the basic needs and when you want to go deeper you find a more specialized app ... Has it affected us? We never saw Apple release scanning and our growth slows. We’re still growing.”
  — Bruno ([18:57])

• On Staying Bootstrapped:
  “We want to be profitable … but we don’t have a need for ROI. We have kids, we want to spend time with them … that’s the freedom we have.”
  — Bruno ([23:26])

• On Experimentation:
  “What is surprising: demand curve is not elastic at all ...people will stick and are willing to pay a lot more than maybe we initially thought.”
  — Bruno ([30:03])

• On Customer Centricity:
  “I want to use my intuition. I’m ready to—You can prove me wrong … but at least let me use it. We are humans building companies.”
  — Bruno ([47:47])

---

Key Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:31] — Genius Scan’s accidental pivot from art scanning to documents
• [08:48] — Monetization lessons: free vs. paid, iAds, in-app purchases
• [14:06] — App Store waves: why it’s never “too late”
• [18:27] — Apple bakes scanning into iOS: competitive risk
• [27:15] — Subscriptions transition and pricing experiments
• [32:55] — Hiring and team scaling, bootstrapped style
• [40:29] — Famous fails: paywall blunders, accidental A/B test
• [54:20] — Radical customer centricity, hands-on support
• [58:45] — Avoiding dark patterns, fostering word-of-mouth

---

Takeaways for App Builders & Founders

• Opportunity is Persistent: Every technology wave creates “boats” that founders can catch.
• Bootstrapping Enables Freedom: Tune growth to your life goals; profitability and happiness can be greater than headcount or exit size.
• Customer Focus Wins: Genuine support and focus on user needs differentiate you from “growth hack” competitors and platform giants.
• Experiment Relentlessly: Small product or pricing changes can make a huge difference—but always measure and learn.
• Stay Human: Being in business for human reasons (fun, freedom, impact) is as valid as chasing “maximum leverage.”

---

Download Genius Scan and try for yourself. Bruno and the team would love your feedback.

---

(End of summary.)

Transcript

[A]

Welcome to the Sub Club podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in app purchases, manage customers and grow revenue across iOS, Android and the web. You can learn [e-mail] let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard and with me today, revenuecat CEO Jacob Biting. Our guest today is Bruno Verlet, co founder of the Grizzly Labs, makers of Genius Scan, one of the oldest and best scanning apps for smartphones. On the podcast, we talk with Bruno about putting customers ahead of metrics, why there's still massive opportunity to build successful apps, and how a server crash turned into an accidentally successful a B test. Hey Bruno, thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today.

[B]

Hey David, thanks for having me.

[A]

And Jacob, really nice chatting with you today as well.

[C]

Always, David, always. But I'm very excited to talk to Bruno because you were one of, I think the 15 people who signed up for Revenue CAT in 2017. Like, well, we launched in December. You poked around, we never made it happen for a while but like you were very, very, very, very, very early and somehow we've never talked directly before. But I always joke that the. I think about, probably a lot of people are like this, but I, I have always. The first 20 signups to revenue cap burned in my head because I looked at them in the database so many times. So I'm very excited to get the backstory today.

[B]

So yeah, you get some convincing. But you finally got me. Yeah.

[C]

You know, five years later. No more than that. Seven years later.

[A]

Well, speaking of a long time in the making, Genius Scan and your company has been a many year journey, almost 15 years in the making. So I did want to kind of go back to the founding because I think a lot of people will be interested to hear that whole story of how you got started, how you got that early product market fit and then how you grew that to what today is a really incredible business. You have 5 million MAU, 10 person team. Like that's, it's a fantastic success story for a bootstrapped app. But yeah, tell us the story.

[B]

Yeah, so zooscan is the main app that we develop as a mobile app development studio. And we started it like 15 years, almost 15 years ago. It will be 15 years in June actually. We didn't want To. I mean we didn't plan to start Genius Scan. So it was my co founder and myself. We were students at the University of Illinois and we were roommates. IPhone was quite new at that time. I mean, well, I guess iPhone was 2007. Yeah, well, I think it's 2007, the iPhone. But then the app store just opened publicly to third party apps in 2009. Right.

[A]

I think at the 2008. Eight.

[B]

2008. Okay. Yeah. So in 2009, basically, I mean I was like, oh, maybe you should make an app. It would be fun. I was more like in Linux development before, but my co founder was in. My roommate I guess at the time was in doing image processing research. And so we thought, what could we do with that? We brainstormed and we had this great idea was to make an app to scan paintings in museums. You would do. Go to the Louvre in France. You would scan a painting, I mean take, take a photo of a painting and, and you would get all the information about it, like who painted it.

[C]

Okay, so it was like augmented. Almost augmented reality.

[B]

Yeah, it was augmented reality like, you know, years before. It was something. So we started working on that after a while. I mean we had it kind of working. But then we had two problems. One was that we used a technology which was called Sift. It was like basically features that you embed in an image and key points that you can identify to recognize an image under any angle. I mean. Yeah, it was a. And the problem, the problem with this technology that there were some patents on it. I knew at the time we were just students in a dorm room, I guess, and we were like patents. We were going to be sued by Americans.

[C]

You know what this was in late 2000, so like 2008 and 9. So this was before like kind of the modern AI revolution and all this stuff. So this would have been like. They wouldn't even call it machine learning at the time. They would have called it like vision.

[B]

Yeah, it was computer vision. Yeah. And actually my roommate Guillaume was doing computer vision at the university.

[A]

So the kids don't have any idea how good they have it these days. So slap image recognition in like with.

[C]

One API call, throw more transformers at it. It'll figure it out eventually, you know. But yeah, CV was like a different ballgame.

[A]

So the power patent scared you and so.

[B]

Okay, yeah, I mean we were, I mean there were, there were alternatives. There were like, you know, open source alternatives. And then also there was another problem that at that time, like if you imagine someone going to The Louvre in Paris to scan pictures probably was a tourist, you know, coming from China or the US and at that time there were no, like a cellular. I mean, when you went abroad, like roaming fees were crazy high.

[C]

So when I went to Europe in 2010, I had no cell phone for three weeks. Right, right. Like I went to Internet cafes. Exactly.

[B]

So you would have to download the database in advance on your phone. It was like huge. There's a database of images to. I mean, even the. Because we only had signatures of the images. So it would be used, it would take. I mean, and so we were so like, I mean, who is going to do that? Like, but the thing is that when preparing this app, so the way Guillaume was doing it was like taking photos of Van Gogh painting on his desk all the time. And actually we were detecting the painting on his desk and we were like, okay. We couldn't detect any kind of document like that. And that's how we said, okay, maybe we will start doing a document scanning app and we'll go back to the paintings later. And so 15 years later, we are still on the document scanning. And that's how it started. And the funny story is that what triggered actually the start of the development was in. I think it's May 2009. So we had basically the tech, but it was in. Developed in Matlab on the computer. It was not like a mobile app. And in 2000, in May 2009, I was going back to France for a wedding and actually I got stuck in the Chicago airport because of the Icelandic volcano. You remember, like the. I don't remember the name. It's like I use the floor. And so I was actually, I had flown to Chicago and I got my ticket refunded by. By the airline. I don't know how, but it happened. And I was like, I saved the money of the trip to Paris and so I went to the Apple Store in Chicago, purchased a MacBook because I didn't have one at the time, and went back to Champagne, Illinois. And that's where I started. So I started developing the app and actually what's really strike me is that that was in May and in June 22, 2010, the app was launched on the App Store. So in basically the first version of the app was a month and a half maybe of development and it picked up really quickly. So I don't have the exact numbers in mind, but it was like we put it as a free app on the App Store and it just shut up the rankings.

[A]

Was it the first or one of.

[B]

The early scanning apps, I mean there was another one. Yeah, I think it was the first app or I mean like the first that was working quite well.

[C]

Yeah, this was like one of the non obvious, like life changing, I don't know, important utilities that a great camera and a good phone could do. Because I never, it never crossed my mind that like, oh, I don't need a scanner anymore. Like I can, I can get a good scan, good enough scan just with an app that knows what it's doing and a camera and so yeah, I can imagine being one of the first and like just locking that down.

[B]

Yeah, it was kind of magic because for users I think that works really well because it was like one of the first apps that kind of bridged the physical world and the digital world. It's almost like ar, right? You take a document and then we would warp it and present it to you. Very clean. So it was, I think it was fun to use. And the plan was to put it as a free app for a few days because that's what everyone, you know, this was like a launch offer. So we would do that and then after a few days we would just put it paid and then, you know, make some money. And, and so after a few days I put it as a paid app and immediately we went from like, I don't know, thousands of downloads a day to 12 downloads a day. I think it was 99 cents to be. To be.

[C]

Wow. Wow, that just shows. And this is 2010, so this is like. I think people forget how much debasement there was of apps in the early days of the App Store. Like there was a free fall from like being able to make money, like selling an app for, you know, $10 or $20 on the desktop to a race to the bottom. Happened very.

[B]

Yeah, that was a race to the bottom. Exactly. So, so basically we panicked and we put it back as a free app. We were like, we worry later. I mean we were just students, you know, we didn't have to make a living out of that.

[C]

Yeah, I mean a few thousand free users is better than $2 a day. You know what I mean?

[B]

Like after that we, we were lucky to be featured by Apple in the months after that. I think that was a summer I may remember incorrectly, but where I add lounge to the, you know, supposedly super high quality ads from Apple and they had like at the time, they are like a crazy high ecpms. I think you had like $10 ecpm.

[A]

So no, like 30 and $40. I launched with, I Had.

[C]

Were they just Apple just spending, just paying developers basically? No, no, no, no.

[A]

They set it up with brands so like massive brands like Disney and I.

[C]

Worked on the dang SDK.

[A]

You were inside Apple?

[B]

Yeah, yeah.

[C]

When I ads was coming out.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, I was, yeah, yeah. And it worked really well. So we were like, okay, that's interesting. We are starting to make some money with app. Even though it wasn't really the plan at the time. So we kept it free. And I think in December 2009 so we introduced a paid version of the app. So there was a free version and there was a paid upfront version the next year I think that in app purchases were introduced. So then we added in app purchases. So as a lifetime, you know that.

[C]

Was basically to remove the ads.

[B]

Yeah, and that was to remove the ads. And slowly we introduced like advanced features if you want to export to Dropbox quickly. So this was called Genius Scan Plus. That was a premium plan. Right.

[C]

That would have been fairly early like back in. I mean I guess if you were doing not as a subscription but as a. As a one time in app purchase.

[B]

I think it was as soon as, I mean we basically Apple announced it and then we announced in app purchases availability and we, we benefited from that.

[A]

Yeah, I wish I could go back in time and do a better freemium strategy for some of my old ads. I mean people don't even realize how good we have it these days with subscriptions and everything else. Because my apps, I had a free version. So one of my early apps was Gas Cubby. It tracks fuel economy and vehicle maintenance. It was actually quite successful. I sold it and did really well from it. But I had Gas Cubby Lite that was a free version that had limited features. And then when you hit the limit you got pushed to the paid upfront app. And so I mean man, back then it was just such like there were no kind of free trials and like the multiple SKUs and early days of the app Store. It's crazy how much better things have actually gotten on the monetization front. But I mean happy accident honestly because if you would have been paid up.

[B]

Front, we wouldn't be here today, I think. Yeah.

[C]

What was the story for you and your co founder from it becoming this side project? Sort of like curiosity to like hey, this is something worth working on. Like when did you make enough money that you could like not have to worry about a job?

[B]

We didn't want to be entrepreneurs. Like I mean originally it's like we wanted to make an app and we are not predestined to be entrepreneurs, basically. So when we did this app in 2010, and then we graduated in the summer, so. So Guillaume, my co founder, went back to France and he started working for a company in France and I stayed in the US And I went to Seattle. I started working on Amazon and then we kept working on it nights and weekends, and it kind of picked up. I mean, it kept growing, you know, slowly, but it kept growing with that work. I think we did. I don't remember when, but we started the Android version of the app. And after a while then I moved back to San Francisco actually to work for a YC company. And funny story also that they contacted me because they found the scanning app and they had scanning needs. So it was called 1000memories. And they were doing like a scanning of old photos, family photos, and I kept working on the side, you know, on genius scan. So after, after a while we were like, okay, we. We work for our data, but we also work on that. We really like. I mean, it means that we really like that we should go full time. And that went in 2014. We went full time on it. We had, you know, enough money to make a. To. To make a living out of it.

[C]

It was already making enough money that you didn't have to like, starve.

[B]

Yeah, that's. I mean, we can talk about that later. But basically to. We didn't have to raise funds. Right.

[C]

We just do it. Yeah. I think also too. Did. Did you find that once you had made the jump and like, once this was your main thing, did you find it? I mean, obviously you have more time to work on it, but I also feel like if it's your only source of income, you're a little more like, aggressive and motivated to like, make it work better and like grow it and things like that, if it's all you've got.

[B]

So I think when we started we had like some conf. I mean, we. We could live out of it. So we were not like, grinding to make a living. So I think if we were like, if it was just enough to live, maybe we would. What you described is, Is true in our case. Yes. I mean, we. It's. We were full time on it. We had the time to maybe explore some things that we couldn't have otherwise and then grow a team. Something we didn't want at the beginning. But.

[A]

All right, you know, for those listening and, and kind of maybe tuning out at this point, thinking, I don't have a time, mach back to 2009 and build a scanning app. I actually think today we're kind of seeing this new wave with, like, AI AR is coming. Like, what was unique, what's so interesting about this story is that there was a combination of multiple technologies that came along that you leveraged into a business, and it grew over time. So today there's all sorts of new stuff coming out with AI, with new sensors, with new. And so, like, there's been so many different points along the history of apps that new things have come out that create new opportunities to create new businesses. And sometimes it does take years and years and years to grow. You know, Indy's out there listening when, you know, it's like three years in and you haven't made that much progress. But then the fourth year, it's like, wow, I can actually go full time. Like, it happens. And I think it can still happen today.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

And even at the time, everyone was saying the gold rush was over. So maybe it's not the gold rush of the early App store days, but, you know, I think, like, subscriptions came, for instance, and they. They started a new, like, dimension for monetization themselves. So. So it's always like, you can always say it's too late, but maybe it's too late to do, you know, what was.

[C]

I mean, the thing is, is by the time you recognize people being successful, those people, it wasn't obvious when they did it. Right?

[B]

Yeah, we don't go compete with Microsoft.

[C]

Right, Right, exactly. Like, people that. You're looking at folks who are like, like, struggling to start right now, and you're looking at folks that are successful, like, oh, I missed the boat. It's like, well, you missed that boat. Right? There's always another boat. At least there has been for 1500 years. Like, we've been always, like, inventing another boat you can catch. But the. The root story of, like, recognizing an unfilled technological niche, building something, you guys took, like, you know, one path, which was like, slow burn, build it on the side, eventually have enough like that. There's many different versions of that you can do. But it all starts with, like, finding something that people don't have that they want. Right? Yeah.

[B]

And I mean. And you are giving us credit for that, right? Because to be honest, we started, like, it was like a serendipity. Right. When we started this scanning app, we had the needs because we were, you know, students in the U.S. we always, like, were moving around. We didn't have much stuff, so we would scan documents we had to register for, you know, Immigration stuff. So we always had documents to scan. So we kind of had an in. But like everyone. Yeah, I think also you must factor in like the luck factor to be sometimes the right place at the right time.

[C]

No, but the luck factor with us, you named the company after yourself. Clearly.

[B]

It was ironical, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

The luck factor is that you got right the first time. Like that's the luck. You know what I mean? Like, I think if. Well, actually you kind of didn't. It was the second time. It was the second time because the Mona Lisa scanning app never went anywhere. Right.

[A]

I like that whole idea of the catching the boat kind of thing. I mean, we see this in revenuecat data. We should do this, Jacob, do an analysis of apps founded in different, like different launch dates of apps. And I bet every single year we could find an indie, a big company, a mid sized company, a bootstrap company, a funded company. It's like in 2015, there's a cohort that launched and some became huge and some are indie success stories. In 2016, it's like there's boats leaving the harbor every.

[C]

Yeah, we have, we have now seven years of cohorts and with the exception of maybe the first year when they were very thin, cohorts of very few people. Like every cohort has somebody in it still alive, still thriving, still growing, still compounding. So that's the luck aspect of it. Like it might not always be you in that cohort. Right. But like it'll be somebody. Right. There's a boat to catch, you know.

[B]

Yeah. And also I think when you find these ideas like these people who jump on the boat, then you will find, you know, after this, but you will find a lot of, you know, there are boats trying other boats to copy what, you know, to do the same, like take the same wind and you know, like for us, like now there are many scanning apps and many of them are like, I think doing well. I don't know how profitable they are and they've been around for a while. So I think every idea then you can like replicate it to some extent after a while, maybe market is saturated and. And then you need to catch another, you know.

[C]

Yeah, it gets harder. But like, I mean that's a good, that's a good point to talk about because when, when did Apple like iOS has native scanning now, right?

[A]

Yeah. You not only have a ton of competitors and it's another kind of fun part of the story. You not only have like hundreds of scanning apps in the app store now, it's been like one of the more popular categories for people to go try and build an app. But not only that. Then Apple introduced scanning native and now you have AI and like it like seems so obvious. Like how do you think about competing and how have you thought about competing in this landscape where it's just like a thousand flowers are blooming. But you're one of those.

[B]

I mean we worried about, about it a lot early. I think when new scanning apps were launching or competitors were launching new features in the early years, we were like oh no, we are done. What are we going to do? You know and even worse like with yeah I think wwdc after like first it was fun and after a while you had like every, every year you had like this uneasy feeling of what are they going to announce that might, you know, affect us in a bad way. And scanning, like when they released like scanning. So they released the. You have scanning in Notes in the files app. I think we were like okay maybe. I mean how good is that for us? And you know what, everyone says that. I mean Apple covers like the basic needs and when you want to go deeper you will find a more specialized app. They will also, you know, make people aware that oh you can do scanning with your device. So has it affected us in a bad way? Like we never saw you know, Apple release scanning and our growth stores or we lose customers. I mean we have like anecdotes, you know, some people telling us oh I stopped choosing your app because or why would I use your app because I use scanning in notes. But I think in practice we are fairly confident now that our scanning is, is better. I'm biased but. But it has, I mean like the quality of the scanning, the you know, speed of it is actually better. And we offer also like a bunch of features. It's not only scanning, it's like you know, scanning, organizing your documents, exporting them. People are really like surprising how I mean important it is. That's too parts, you know, for people make it easy to export. For instance we have features like where you scan a document and it will auto export it to a specific folder in Dropbox depending on the document name.

[C]

Imagine there's a lot of like prosumers that use.

[B]

Exactly. Yeah, yeah. And could be like small, you know, small companies, they need like they want something a bit more advanced. They want something that scans well for instance in low light conditions which others don't do maybe as well. And a lot of small factors that when people do some research they will still like go to people like us. So now we are more like, I mean we are less worried about competition and we have like, you know, we have. Because we have the competition from other independent like companies, we have competition from the platform. So Apple and Google have introduce scanning but also every major like cloud storage. So Google Drive, Dropbox bugs, they all have a scanning module in the India. I mean we are still growing. So maybe we would grow more if they didn't exist. Maybe. Yeah.

[C]

Two observations is one, in this category there's a lot of charlatans, as David was kind of alluding to. There's a lot of people who just make the cheapest, fastest whatever, pump it with ads, do cross promo. It's actually a piece of junk. So I think you all being like one of the few reputable brands, it's probably you and Adobe, you know what I mean, who actually are like kind of a trustworthy brand in this. That's probably a huge advantage that nobody can replicate. You can't replicate that earnestness. Right. And that reality. So you're somewhat differentiated even if not by features even, but just by brand. But then also I think, and this kind of goes back to the bootstrap point that you guys are bootstrapped that you haven't taken capital. I think like it depends on your expectations for return on investment too, right? And that's up to you. If you and your co founder are the sole owners and you guys can kind of decide like what your expectations are, you can survive well in a, in a very competitive environment. Most businesses in the world are in extremely competitive environments and they're still great, you know, ways to spend your time and build things. It's when you need to win a winner takes all market, that competition becomes a problem. Right?

[B]

Yeah, it's like, like food delivery apps, you know, like in Europe, I don't know how it is in the US but they've been like, you know, killing each other, like buying each other. Some have a bankrupt and it's super competitive because they raised huge funds and they need to basically they need to take the market. And now there are like a few in France. You have Deliveroo, Uber Eats and that's it. Yeah, it has to be a monopoly given how much money has been pumped in it. Right. Otherwise it's not worth the return on investment. And in our case we, yeah, we see that very differently. We want a, you know, we want to be profitable, but we, I mean we invested time in it. Right. We exchanged time for money at the beginning, but otherwise we don't need. We, I mean we don't have a need for roi. And currently, you know, but me and my co founder, we have kids, we want to spend time with them. That's we have the freedom of doing that and to like really spend time with them. And we would have raised, you know, money or we would be super aggressive in our, you know, monetization. Maybe we wouldn't be able to.

[C]

You might end up like one of those charlatans I mentioned. Right, Exactly.

[B]

It's important to know why you are in business. I mean, what are you in business for? Right. And I know your, your motto is like, help developer make more money. But it's also like, you know, help.

[C]

Like only as much as you want to make, you know, and not a dollar more.

[B]

Exactly. I mean it's help us live the life we want, like in a way. Right? Yeah. Really, you have to think about what's success for you and maybe it's not just the most profitable. And about that as well, like I've been worried about like, I mean we, we have tr. I've tried to improve like ASO on the App Store and we are fairly, I mean, well ranked. So if you look for scanning, you will find us in five results. And I've looked at the, you know, with the one above us and I'm like, why are they above us? And I have tried to understand all the reasons why they could be on top of us. And, and I mean, there is no like reason I think due to our, the way we name the app or we have like a very good number of ratings per downloads, everything app figures, you know, recommend you do well. And, and there is one thing is like the download velocity, I think that's important. Like the more downloads you have, the more you raise in the rankings in the search results. But you know, it's kind of the, how do you say in French with a snake eating its own tail.

[C]

But chicken and egg problem.

[B]

Chicken and eggs. Yeah, the chicken and eggs problem. And because if we are not in the top results then. And I looked at the top ones, but then if you look at them, you see that most of them, they purchase app store ads. So in the end they are before us in the rankings. They are purchasing ads. But what's their profitability when you see their revenue numbers, enough figures, that doesn't deduct how much they pay for ads.

[C]

Yeah, they're probably running incredibly thin margins, maybe even negative margins because they're leveraged. They might be borrowing money maybe, I.

[B]

Don'T know, maybe not. But I'm Sure. They are not as profitable as they look on the ad figures revenue numbers. And so again, yeah, yeah, we have to look at. It's hard to. You have to know exactly where you are and if you are maybe not at the top one, maybe you are.

[C]

Doing well enough, you have more equity in your app than somebody else. Right. That may be above you in the rankings and the fact that you know it actually is profitable or more profitable and that increases the like value. And then there's. I think this is, this is. Gets a bit philosophical. But you know, we tend to talk about equity in an asset in terms of the dollars it would get at market. But then you were alluding to. There's more than just the dollars that we get at market is as to the value it is to you and your co founder and your team. It's like it's meaningful work. It's something to do. It's like a way to live. It's. It's all of these things and even.

[B]

The like the independence we have, like we really, because we have been approached a few times like by companies interested in, you know, first you start talking with them, but after a few times, like you say just no, I mean we like what we are doing. If, you know, if we were acquired, we would, you know, work two years for you and then what would we do? We would like this app is, I mean, super interesting to work on it. We have customers who love the app. When we add a new feature, we can see the effect. Like we have customers thanking us for it. It's like super rewarding.

[A]

You're starting to make it sound like you don't like money and that the app is just like this stagnant annuity that sits off any other.

[C]

Instead it's growing. David. It's not stagnant.

[A]

No, but that's what I was going to bring up. Is that part of the reason you actually approached me about coming on the podcast and, and is that over the last few years you've actually been doing a ton of experiments and actually trying to grow the app and have been very successful. Grown mrr almost 3x in the last couple of years. So I did want to like start digging into like now you're a subscription app. The story. A lot of people can't relate to all the early days of the App Store and stuff, but I think what a lot of people will be able to relate to IS3Xing revenue by experimenting with stuff. So I wanted to dig into that. So what are the things that you've done in the last couple of years that really move the needle on that.

[B]

It's interesting because we started using subscriptions I think when they were introduced in 2017. And at the time we didn't want to force subscription on our users because.

[C]

They, I feel like utilities, it was one of these things where it's like, is subscription going to fly? Are people going to pay for this?

[B]

And people didn't receive subscriptions. I mean, yeah, you could get a lot of backlash from your customers. Right. And so what we did is basically we added a subscription for a new service called Genius Cloud so to backup your documents in the cloud. And, and actually we kept the one time purchase for the premium features. And so this, basically the customer were paying for this backup and seek in the cloud, but they were buying storage and they were understanding that you buy storage there is a recurring fee. You know, it was more like a. And that wasn't, I mean we didn't get any backlash. And I think in 2020 we, what we did is that we switched, we started adding premium features to that subscription. We renamed it from like Genius Cloud to Genius Scan Ultra and we had two tiers of subscription. We also had the GScan plus tier. So that was the former legacy one time purchase became a subscription. And what we did, we grandfathered all our existing users. So the ones who have purchased it in 2010 for 99 cents, they still have it like the premium, most of.

[C]

The premium features today, trust me, taking something away from somebody, Even if it's 99 cents, almost never worth it.

[B]

Yeah, exactly. And, and, and they can go to the premium, more premium plan if they.

[C]

Want to give them paths to upgrade. You don't have to give them more stuff. I think you give them, you know, you can hold back features and stuff like that. But like I think I've seen folks like sometimes there are reasons to go back and raise prices but like typically it's just the, the backlash is just not worth it. That can cost you your whole business.

[B]

Especially if you're on a. I think it's still like a growing market, expanding market where you know you have more user coming. You don't have like a fixed user base. You don't have to nurture your existing user base. Right. And so at that time 2020 we had like two subsection tiers. We had gscan plus which was I think 99 cents a month and g scan ultra which was $3 a month and like you know, equivalent pricing for yearly after that that we started. We didn't make any Experiments at the time we just, you know, so two tiers went for lower end like purchaser and more premium purchasers. And after last year we started experimenting and what we did is that we removed the plus tier. So still we grant, I mean we everyone keep using it, right. And we kept the Ultra tier and that what we noticed is that demand curve is not elastic at all. Like people were like we had 100 purchase per day split between plus and Ultra. We still had 100 purchase per day but it was Ultra.

[C]

You're very far off of like where the main of elasticity. Right. That doesn't surprise me. Was it still 99 cents when you.

[B]

No, no, no, no. So now I mean.

[C]

Well, I mean yeah, the low tier was 99 cents. Yeah, I bet that was because I would have guessed that that's probably already on its own way underpriced. So you were probably preventing a bunch of users who would have paid more for that and happily paid for the Ultra. But they were just like this is good enough. And so by it make. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me but these are things you don't know that until you try it, you know that's going to make a difference.

[B]

What we did is like we are now we have the last year we had still like the Ultra subscription with a monthly and yearly subscription and both were exposed at the same level. And basically we buried the plus, the monthly subscription so you could still access it. But it was, you would have to go a bit further in the payroll. Same thing we had most people switched to the yearly. I mean everyone switched to the yearly subscription. Ultra subscription now is, was, I think was. It was 20ish 25 maybe in 2020 and now it's 4T.

[C]

I mean 40ish, like $4 a month. 3, $4 a month, right?

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Which I would bet, I don't know what your competitors are priced at, but I would bet that you guys are still probably comparatively low.

[B]

I mean it depends because I think most, lots of competitors do like stuff with weekly subscriptions, you know.

[C]

Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah. I was going to say that even that 99 cent price point that you guys were able to run for a while, I think that's doable for you because you weren't dependent on paid acquisition. You kind of had your own destiny and by doing that you preserved a tremendous amount of brand equity. You probably were, you know that that's what endeared you with the customers. And so even though like you maybe left $3 per month on the table on that you have to imagine like what you may, you probably also gained which is like a. Still a position, a fighting position against Adobe, you know, like $100 billion company. Yeah.

[B]

And also for us it was natural because we switched from. I think it was 9.99 one time purchase at the time we said we switched that to 999 a year. You know it's already like for us like if some people, people stick like a few years it's already you know, a great upgrade. Right. And so that's, that's where, where it came from and I think it's fine. I mean you have to easy to have regrets but we can keep experimenting on that and I think looking at the pricing, increasing it the part of the next experiments we want to run with, with revenue get. Yeah.

[C]

I mean if you're building new things and you're providing more value like keep messing around with it until you, you know, it'll always probably be worth it. I mean we're still looking at our pricing like every year, every other year. Especially on like, like our sold side. Like there's, it's more easy to experiment there. I wanted to like kind of jump back but like it's related to all this stuff. But when did you all like bring. Because you mentioned hiring people like that's kind of a big jump to go from you and your co founder to like now you're an employer. Right. When, when and why did you make that decision?

[B]

So in 2014 I, I moved back to France and we started working with Guillaume and I think in, in 2015 we started hiring first employee. And what prompted that? I think that. What was that we had too much on our plate. We were like doing so many things and we needed a new another iOS developer to help and we recruited him and, and that's still how we do things now is like when we feel like we feel a bit of pain, you know, we start hiring. It doesn't mean that we overwork but it's just like when during your day you are. I'm still developing and I, I don't, you know, I like for instance last year I was doing like a product and, and support and developments administrative work and I, I can't do all that if I want to still, you know, do some development. Then I have to offload product and support for instance to other people. And that's how for instance we hired like a support person three years ago, product manager. Like this year for instance.

[C]

It's interesting there's an implicit choice you made there that Maybe you didn't even think about, but you could have not hired somebody and just done less stuff, you know. But you did choose, you did choose to. Instead of taking the path of like dialing back and just being happy with what you had, you said like, no, okay, let's make an investment and like, let's take some risk.

[B]

And you say an investment. But we, yeah, it's not. Again, it's a bit different I think from venture funded companies where you, you know, you make a business plan, you say if I raise this much money, I will hire this many people in, you know, sales and developers. And that's the plan. Never goes as planned.

[C]

But yeah, I just stopped making plans. I made two of those and they were fantasy. So I just like, we're just not going to do that. We do what you do, I do what you do. Just be like what hurts the most and then we hire there still when.

[B]

You talk to other people, generally they want, I mean when you raise money, you need this plan because they want to know how it's going to be used. Right? And so that was also for us, it's not an invest. I mean that could be the other path. We could say, okay, we are going to invest in more people to grow. I mean, because we think that if we hire for instance, this iOS developer, I will do this feature and then we'll get more growth. And it's not really the reasoning. It's more like we have so many things to do that we want to do. It's not necessarily like they are growth driven. It's like just, I have too much on my plate. I need someone.

[C]

I'm slow walking you, Bruno, into realizing you're a cold hearted capitalist. I don't know if you realize what's happening, but we don't have to call it an investment. We can call whatever you want. I mean, there's a reality there that like, and I think this is, I mean Miguel and I went through a very similar transition. Like we went a different path. Once you raise money, it was like hire people, whatever. But I think it wasn't as clear to me, and hopefully you've seen this too, is like good people. You hire good people, they solve problems, right? And you can just do more things. And it's, there's like two big phase shifts in somebody building a thing. There's like, I'm building a thing, that's a project. Then there's the first jump which is like, okay, I'm building a thing, it's now my thing. It's now my main thing. And then that, that second transition which we're talking about now, which is like, okay, this is now a concern for other people that I'm going to bring into this thing. And like now it's a business that's a company and a business. I think beyond that, it's actually kind of more of the same. Right. It's like, okay, like there might be no bigger transition than those two. And I don't know, I think there's a lot of really successful indies that are kind of in that between those first two decision points where, you know, David, you've always kind of been maybe in between those two where you've like worked with contract, you kind of like strung it together and arguably maybe if like you had gotten some commitment and like, you know, there would have been benefits to that. Right, but it's, it's scary, right? It's a risk.

[A]

Yeah. And. Well, it was always a conscious choice on my part too though. I mean, I talked to VCs in like 2008, 2009, and I made that conscious choice was like, I didn't want to be on that treadmill and I didn't want the complexity of managing people. Like, to me, I chose the passion side of it was like, it was really fun building apps and I knew it was not going to be fun managing employees, making payroll, all those kind of things. And it was a very conscious choice of mine. And you know, looking back, I could have built a bigger business and in some ways maybe have been less stressed.

[C]

Like, yeah, it depends. It depends on who you hire.

[A]

I mean, it could have like flamed out or it could have like gone even better because, I mean, and you know what I figured out over time was like my model with contractors and everything else came with its own, like massive headaches and problems. And it was, there were many times along the journey I was like, I should have just hired somebody because this whole contractor, like working part time, you know, not working for months and it had its own mess. But yeah, I mean, there's choices along the way. I remember Jacob, we sat on the patio of the airbnb at the 2019 Revenuecat off site with 5 employees or however many we were like 7 people total at that time. And I remember having a conversation with you of like revenuecat could be this just amazing little cash generating business and the seven of us travel the world and surf and. And I remember that being like a decision point for you. It's like, you know, you'd only raise like one and A half million. There weren't like, massive expectations, you know.

[C]

Like, hopefully Jason doesn't listen to all these podcasts, because I was always fully intended on returning him his capital in.

[A]

Multiples, but there's, like, micro decisions all along.

[C]

And I'll tell you, I mean, not to. Not to make this about me, but, like, I think those decision points kind of never stop. Like, as you're scaling a business, Bruno, you're going through those now. It's like, every year, it's like, okay, do we double down or do we kind of just be happy with what we got? Do we take more risk? You know, it depends.

[B]

I feel like it depends on also, like, where you are in life. You know, where I'm with young kids, I don't maybe want, you know, to spend too much time working. I. You know, when I spend night and weekends doing work, I was, you know, 25. It's. I had the time to do that, and so it's different. But even, like, I think that, for instance, we have 10 employees now, and that's still, you know, we could be 20. But what you have to take in also in account that the nature of what you do will change then, as David said, you could. You would. I like doing some development, but we are 10 people. I can still do some development. If we are 20, it will be less and less development. I will be doing more, like, synchronizing people. Product management.

[C]

Yeah, people problems. I mean, it's just. And it depends on who you hire in the company culture and stuff like that.

[B]

But, yeah, I mean, we are very lucky that we are very little. I mean, we try to hire, like, very independent, like, people. And so we. We have very little management to do. We have a, you know, low turnover. So, yeah, it really depends on who you hire. And you have to be mindful of that, I guess, when you hire.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Which.

[C]

But. But even that itself, that's hard work, I think, for a lot of, like, technical people who are makers. Ask me how I know. But getting a team, right? It's very. It's technical, it's hard. It's like just hours. And then it's very emotionally taxing, too, because, like, inevitably, you'll make mistakes along the way. You'll have to, like, give people tough news. You'll have to give, you know, like, it just depends on what energizes you and what. You know, and that's. That's a decision that, you know, honestly, like, I'll say, like, when we made that first choice to go raise money and Kind of do this versus, versus stay in that first zone. Unless you've done it before. I don't think it really, you don't really understand what that's like and you probably have a taste of it now. But I think also it's nice that you have control over your destiny there and you can kind of decide at what pace do I want to like bring this on. And like, like I kind of, I'm forced to and in some degrees, right. Like I kind of have to. Sometimes life, if you have no choice, it's a little bit easier because you don't have to worry about it. But yeah, you can take it every day, you can take it day by day. And you know, when your kids are older or you maybe you have a little bit more time, like maybe it changes, like your mindset changes around it.

[B]

Right. And maybe there won't be any, any more documents to scan then.

[C]

Yeah, right. There you go.

[A]

There you go.

[C]

That's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe you should call those M and A people up just in case.

[A]

Well, we've been talking about like all the growth and the journey, but every journey has a bunch of fails. And when we were prepping for the podcast, you wrote down some really great fails. So I want to make sure we got to these. So tell me about some of the like massive screw ups you've made along the way and how you've recovered from them.

[C]

David's a little massive script. It's a little editorializing there.

[A]

Well, I mean he shared them with me there, some big ones.

[B]

They are mainly related to conversion, like to the paywall conversion. So it's very relevant to revenuecat, I guess. Basically we were always measuring like paywall, like how many times our paywall is displayed from what feature in the app. But in the app when you are trying to use some premium features, that's where we're going to show you the paywall. And it could be you try to export to Dropbox, that's paywall. Or you try to use text recognition OCR that's also behind the paywall. And so a few years ago we did an update where we redid the UX of a screen where you see your scanned documents. That was a really nice screen. I mean, much better, much nicer. And after a while I'm looking at analytics and I'm seeing that our paywall is actually displayed much less than it used to be. So I'm trying to investigate and I don't know, it's linked to this Refactoring of the screen. So I figured out that it was linked to this, caused by this change of the screen. And the reason why was that we had. One of the reasons people were opening the paywall for was because they tried to access the OCR of the document. And on the former screen we had a button and the scan document that you would tap and would show the OCR text. And after this refactoring, we had moved this button basically in a drawer and it was not directly visible. And the effect on the paywall displays was like maybe like 10, 20%, I don't know the exact number in mine.

[C]

Which is a direct 10, 20% to your sales. Right.

[B]

It was actually, I think also a high intent purchase.

[C]

So it was maybe one even higher more than the relative presentation.

[B]

So maybe it was like 10% less displays and 20%. And that's something I noticed after like months after.

[A]

So for months your revenue had gone down, but you couldn't quite figure like you thought maybe like the market was shifting.

[B]

Exactly. That's where it's hard. You have so many factors. You have seasonality, you know, it's Christmas, people are buying more phones so you get a big jump in maybe in purchases. But then in March, I think it happened in March, like maybe, you know, the Christmas time is over and people stop purchasing. Maybe it was that. It could be, yeah, market shifting. Maybe it could be ISO that has changed. And we are a small team. We don't have like a, you know, data person like looking at this data every day, which I guess if we had maybe now. No, no, but, but we are looking into, into. I mean, I mean we are looking at the metrics more regularly and we.

[C]

Try to like, I mean, you're the data person, right? I think it's just about making it easy for you to look at that stuff every day.

[B]

Yeah, exactly.

[A]

That's so crazy. Like one of the primary upsell features you accidentally like broke essentially. Did you put it back in that same place and then like, like everything.

[B]

Like came back that we clearly saw. Saw the result. Yeah, it was a. And, and, and there is another instance of that fairly recent we had. So in the free version of Genius Scan, we have an ad banner. It's not a third party ad banner because we removed that a while ago. But it's basically. It's like an ad banner. But it promotes the premium version. What happens is that. So this ad banners a banner has some text, like I think it was GeniusCan Ultra and some text. And if you tap on it you show the payroll, and it's direct on the main screen of Genius Scan, so it's fairly visible. It's one of the leading entries to the paywall. And this banner is served by a server, so we can change the text remotely. And what happened is that the server went down. One of the reasons that we tracked taps on the banner and the integer on the database overflow, it was not a big int. It was just an int.

[C]

So I have a friend of mine whose favorite phrase is, like, when we're setting up apps, like, stuff, he's always. He's like, always use bigint. You got to be optimistic, you know?

[B]

And so the app was nicely designed because we had. In the app hard coded, we had a fallback ad. So if the remote ad banner was on display, we would show the fallback ad. And what happened is, actually, I noticed in the paywall metrics that our purchase had increased for a while. I guess I should have told the stories the other way, but I noticed our purchases had increased. I started investigating why, and that's when I linked that back to the ad banner that wasn't displayed from the remote server anymore, and the fallback banner that was displayed most of the time.

[A]

So it was like an accidental A B test.

[B]

Accidental a B test? Yeah. So the fallback banner was converting twice, twice as much as existing matter. We restored the. I mean, we fixed the reboot server, and we served two banners, one with old text and one with the same text as the fallback banner. And this confirmed that the text of the fallback banner was. I mean, the text and the icon was slightly different, but, I mean, you saw the images in the document. I don't understand how such small changes can. I mean, it's.

[C]

The problem is that you're not 1,000 people, right? You're one person. Right. And you just have to test these things. Otherwise, it's really difficult to reason about.

[B]

Right. But even just. Yeah. The effect of changing the text test is like. I guess it blows my mind that just changing a text, changing an icon has such an effect on conversion. I really don't. I mean, it's.

[C]

Yeah, I've. I've long learned that even if you're a person with really good product sense or you think you have really good product sense, there's a limit. There's just a limit. You just can't know, like, what. There's some obvious rules that almost always followed, but, like, fewer steps is almost always better. Showing the paywall more is almost always better. But besides that, like, I don't think there's a way to deterministically understand like what's going on. And it's just, it's much faster to just do something. It's, it's interesting that what you did on accident. There is this kind of concept I try to run in management and just life is like injecting variants like just. Even if you're unintentional a little bit, like change stuff and you'll learn things.

[B]

Well, it's, it's like a Netflix, I think they had the, I don't know how it was called. They had the Crazy Monkeys was like a service that would kill random servers.

[C]

Chaos Monkey. Chaos Monkey, right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

They would break random services.

[B]

Yeah. To make sure that they had these variants in their backend that make sure that if, if it actually happens for a bad reason someday then they, they're ready for it. Right?

[C]

Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's super important and like, I think sometimes it can be unsettling in my leadership style. David can probably attest to this. But like I will just be like, yeah, I don't know what we're going to do, but we're just going to do something different. We're just going to break it and see how we reassemble it and not try to analytically solve every little thing we do and justify every little thing we do. Because like probably we'll learn more just by trying it and then we will by. We'll certainly learn more by trying something semi thought through than not doing anything and just thinking about it for a very long time.

[B]

Right. And also you could be completely data driven, but it's boring.

[C]

You know, where's the fun in that?

[B]

I want to use my intuition. I mean, I'm ready to. You can prove me I'm wrong after I use it, but at least let me use it. Right. We are humans building companies. Otherwise you just replace the company by AI just like.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, the human element. Maybe that'll go away once the computers are so good they can replicate the human element.

[B]

But I, but the question again, the question, what are you doing money for? You know, are you because you're having fun or because you want to make money? And I think part of us is we want. I mean it's like you gather a group of people to have fun building something, you know, so.

[C]

Yeah, but it's like if you're just executing sort of mechanically a playbook on strategy, there's nothing differentiated there. You're not going to beat the market if it's some, you know, just being like we're going to a B test and only do that and not use intuition. Like you don't have an advantage. You have nothing unique about that because it's just like unless you maybe, like, maybe Duolingo is a good example. They just were really, really good at AB testing better than anybody in the world. Yeah.

[B]

But even that they had to add the creativity, you know, to create like.

[A]

And talking to the product manager, we had him on the, on the podcast, a product manager at Duolingo. One of the things he said was that, that the, the founders, I think end up reviewing a lot of the like winning and will sometimes decide to not pick a winning a B test.

[C]

Yeah, I mean there was a period, I think at Facebook where they were just only following a B test stuff and like you kind of saw the product get a little wonky. And then I think they, they pulled. This was Meme in, in the 2000 and tens. Right.

[A]

My favorite quote on this was Thomas Petit, who of course will make it crass. But if you a B test enough, you're going to end up with a porn app or a gambling app. And I mean like if you a B test without intuition, without thinking about differentiation, without thinking about like being customer centric, which I want to talk more about, like how you think about being customer centric. But like if you a B test without a framework above and like Jacob, like you were talking about, like you tear things down and rebuild and everything like that. But we have such a clear mission here, revenuecat, to help developers make more money that you can apply that framework against these decisions we're making to like make progress in the direction of serving the goal.

[C]

It's not like by blowing up the thing we don't know where we're trying to get eventually still. Right.

[B]

I mean, for instance, if you A B test you, you. It's hard to AB test on the very long time. I think like Shopify does that. They keep experiments running for years. But most people, you do an A B test for a month and then you say, okay, that's better. But then as you said, you're going to end up with. That's actually an interesting point. For a while, in the free version of genuscan, we monetize it with advertisement. And we noticed that the best performing advertisements there were like for casino games or whatever is legal to be displayed. But the ugliest, worst quality advertisements are the one performing better, at least at the time. And after a while we were like, we didn't want advertisement in the app. It was ruining the quality. It was ugly. We don't like making people buy shit they don't need. It's just like. So we decided to remove it. But if we had AB tested, I mean, what's better? Clearly it was better to keep the advertisement, but long term, I'm not sure the people who still use the free app have a very good experience. They are the one recommending to their family. Maybe they recommend their kids use it because there is no advertisement and it's safe to use or whatever. That's the value you can't measure. But you can make a choice as a leader of the company to go that direction.

[C]

This might blow people's minds that we've never run an A B test. I mean we've run very, very small like marketing page A B tests here. But I've never really run simultaneous tests on revenue cat the product because it's harder with what we do. But then also kind of for that reason, I just look at the data. What you were saying, there was a point here I wanted to express to our listeners which like this idea of like, you don't need a data person, you don't need like a whole data analyst shop. Just have like somewhere where you can see your 5 or 10 most important things and look at them every single day. I get an email. The first thing I do every morning I. My alarm goes off, I grab my phone, I go and I look at my, I look at my like founder update email and it tells me all the kind of like the paywall views like that, which should be probably something you're looking at every single day. Like, what is the total number of.

[B]

Paywall impressions even that you know, you have like, you know, it's Christmas, your payroll view will dry up. Or like for us, we are in Europe and it's like it's Monday, September 1st. I was like, where are the payroll views done? Okay. It's a Memorial Day or whatever and so you have still to take that in account and like, yeah, I feel like you can and I do, you know, look at the metrics very often, but you also have to, I think look once a month at like more, you know.

[C]

Yeah, you need, you need to look at it at multiple scales. Right? You need to look at it at the daily scale, the monthly scale.

[B]

You want to take the pulse and you also want to have the higher level overview of the metrics.

[A]

This conversation has brought up like 20 RevenueCat features we need to start working on Jacob better a B, testing tools because I never did a paywall or pricing test until revenuecat released experiments and I was able to do it easily. So now we need ab testing tooling to make this easier.

[C]

We need impressions. We need to be tracking paywall impressions. Like we have it with our paywalls, but like building that in natively and making it in the chart charts and.

[A]

Stuff like that's what you were just saying. What I love about your charts, because you're such a data nerd, is that you have rolling averages over different time frames that, that needs to be in our dashboard too.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, you see that? So I always chart the. Let's get into charts, my chart theories here. But like I always chart the like daily value and then the 30 day rolling average and the 90 day rolling average and like, basically like if I want to know if a metric is healthy and increasing, if the 30 days above the 90 day, like we're good. If the 30 days below the 90 day, we're not, we're like trending in the wrong direction. But then also like the individual days I think are useful for what you said, like, oh, did something happen yesterday? Right? Was there a big pop somewhere?

[A]

So, yeah, charts, charts 3.0. There you go. Why are you building this great stuff for yourself and not delivering it to your customers, Jacob? I want that.

[C]

I got, I got all kinds of stuff to do. I got, I got. What, what did you say? People alignment to do, Bruno, or like something like that.

[A]

And speaking of customer centric, there's something we were talking about before we hit record. I wish we had to hit record when we were just chatting and there's so many good conversations happen before we hit record on the podcast so we can try and recreate the magic. But we were talking about AI chatbots and like pretending to do customer service with AI and you brought up like how un customer centric that is. So I wanted to like keep pulling on that thread of just how customer centric you think in building Genius Scan.

[B]

One of the main thing we, you know, we don't have values on our website, but one thing is that we try to build the app we want to use, right? And when part of that is that when you, you have a problem, you, you contact support and you get the answer you need. And you know, it could be, I mean you can go on the knowledge base and find the answer, but you can also want to talk to someone and they give you an appropriate response. I mean we are so used on websites and, and apps. You, you, you, there's a chatbot that's supposed to help you. And then what you just keep typing is like, talk to a human. Talk to you. And you know, I want to talk to someone, I want to talk to someone. And, and, and they will never like, let you until you, you go deep in their decision tree and bail out because they don't know how to answer. And I feel like it's such a bad experience. If you have a problem in the app, you're maybe in a situation of distress, you need to talk to a person. I think it's a need as a human in that case. And we want to offer that. So we really do that. I mean, we don't do phone support because it's not scalable as an app, but we do support for everyone. We have been doing that for past 15 years. We just, just do email support for a very long time. It's me and my co founder, we were replying to support ourselves. And I think that's super helpful because that's. You get such a good pulse of the problems and you even get like in your, you know, we, for a very long time we didn't have any. And still now, and we don't have a complete backlog of, you know, feature requests. We just, we let that, you know, think every time we hear about a feature. You eat once, twice, ten times. You, you know, you know, you know, in yourself that, that, that's the need. Right? That's been super helpful. And we are still like, today we are still like reviewing support as founders of the company. We still do like every day I go and I help for like more technical issues or more specific problems.

[C]

Well, one, doing tickets is painful. Kind of, you know, you got to write these responses. It's kind of a pain. So I think, like, in some ways it creates this interesting mirror empathy situation where like the customer's in pain reaching out to you. You're doing tickets, which kind of sucks. So that's pain as well. And now you're both in pain, especially if it's a product problem that you created now, now you like, physically feel their pain and I think that motivates you to like, do something about it. I'm actually bad about that. I mean, when I could, I did all of the tickets, right? And then it became, you know, it becomes too big and then you, you, you get it off in systems and whatever. But just having that moment to like really empathize, like take, take that break, that beat. Cause you can look at it in aggregates, right? You can know, oh, 47% of users had this problem, blah, blah, blah. That's. That doesn't hit as well as like seeing a single individual person struggling with that problem.

[B]

Yeah, that's the only way you have to connect with people. You know, you can do like user research in person. You bring people and you can do that, I guess.

[C]

Do you talk to users? Like, do you call them ever?

[B]

No, we, I mean, sometimes people ask us to call them, but it's. I mean, most of our users are us based. We are based in France, so it's, you know, time difference, make it complicated. It happens that we did. But no, mostly it's email and I think it would help with empathy to have people on the phone.

[C]

I was just listening to a podcast with David Lieb. On the YC podcast, he talked about doing customer interviews and one day he just was like, exported the top 100 most active users, sent all 100 of them an email and talked to them. Like, wanted to like 15 minutes with all of them. And I was just like, oh, like, that would be a fantastic. I think every app developer could do that. It's just try that, like, grab your a hundred most active users and talk to all. Just make a, make a list of. Just talk to all. Not as a support case, but just like, price is terrifying. Right? They might not talk to you, but I guarantee you learn something super interesting on that call.

[A]

So, yeah, and it gets back to, you know, so many things we've touched on in the last hour is like, that focus on customers just helps you make better decisions and it's ultimately differentiating. You know those scammy scanner apps that aren't talking to users that are only running a B tests that are thin on margins. Like, they're not differentiated in part because they don't care. They don't talk to their users, they don't build what they want.

[B]

Yeah, I think they don't see. They don't see their users as people. Maybe, you know, see that's a source of money. And, and, and there are things like, I mean, with dark patterns that would do. Like, for instance, I don't know if it's still considered as a dark pattern, but, you know, showing on. We don't have an onboarding, for instance, we don't show the paywall on onboarding. And if you talk, you know, to paywall specialists, they will tell you that the biggest mistake.

[C]

Bruno, what if I told you I could triple your revenue in 2025?

[B]

You know, I think there's probably a right way of Doing it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that but, but when you get the paywall on onboarding and where you know there is a little cross at the top right. That fades in slowly so that you think that the only option is to.

[C]

Pay for you all. So many utility apps do that where they like, they're not going to let you go any further or they make it very hard to get the freemium experience. Like everything I hear about, about your product and your brand and like the way you run the company, I think that's actually your differentiated value. It's like. Yeah.

[B]

And also I think it's a benefit in the long term because like customers of these apps, I'm pretty sure they, I mean they churn fairly high because they don't have a, if they don't have a good experience. Whereas our users, we have like a free, free users and some of them convert in the long term and they are also like a benefit because they recommend like the app to their. We know that for a fact that they do that to friends, family and that's. I think that's the best like the best recommendation you can have is like from your fellow. You know, if someone tells you this app is super nice, they show it to you in a bar or whatever and it's like, okay, I'm gonna donate.

[C]

I mean one of the biggest indications of product market fit or successful product is just how. What percentage of your growth is word of mouth. That's like a very hard to fake One trick for you. And our listeners just ask to ask customers. Maybe it's hard without an onboarding, but you could put for 5% of users, pop a survey and it's like, how did you hear about us? Three big buttons and make it really easy to cancel. It'll be a little bit of a sacrifice of customer experience but like you'll get enough data to like notionally I didn't think that would be all that helpful. We put it in Remedy Cat and like I, I look at that every day. I look at what everybody answered every day because it's, it's. We also have free form which is really fascinating. Like we learn about like ways people are. That's how I learned that Chat GPT was telling people to use revenue cat when they asked how to in app purchases. People like all of a sudden I saw Claude Chat GPT like all the LLMs, I was like, oh, I wouldn't have even thought to ask about that. It's really fascinating. So open ended surveys on that can be directional, right? You're just loading directionally.

[B]

Yeah, for us, open ended surveys, they end up with my email. Doesn't work.

[C]

Sure. You get that too.

[B]

We haven't. It's interesting. It's like a. We have like a very. I mean we have people, you know, in small businesses, but we have really like everyone, like from students, stay at home, moms. It's like, it's like such a wide variety of customers and it's, it's, it's so nice. I mean, it's. To have that.

[A]

Well, I think it's a great place to wrap up. You've built something truly great with this business, like something you can be proud of and also something that has a ton of opportunity to continue growing. And like Jacob was saying, if you were very aggressive with your paywall, you probably could triple revenue in 2025. But that may not be the right move. But you might find something that works with your brand the way you want that freemium experience to happen with the way you want your product to feel to your customers, and you may still double revenue. The crazy little like accidental AB test was honestly so inspiring for me because there are just so many little way in a product that's working in a product that has some level of product market fit. There are probably thousands of different ways to continue growing that product. Even from just changing the text in the default ad. You just gotta do stuff.

[B]

Yeah, yeah, it's inspiring, but it's still scary, I find, because it can go up or it can go down and you know, you might add a feature that kind of hides a bit. Another one and yeah, it's. But that's what makes it interesting, right? It's like there's some risk in it and.

[C]

Yeah, makes the game fun, right?

[B]

Exactly.

[A]

Well, anything you wanted to share? As we're wrapping up, we're going to share a link to your Twitter and bluesky profiles. I guess everybody should just go download Genius Scan, huh?

[B]

Yeah, just give it a try and let us know if you like it or dislike it. We would love to, honestly. It's like we like feedback from customers.

[A]

Well, it's been so much fun chatting with you today. Thanks for joining us.

[B]

Thanks for inviting me. It was really fun. Nice talking with you. They take.

[C]

Finally. I'll see it. We'll talk again in seven years.

[A]

Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.