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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 and Android and the web. You can learn more@revenuecat.com let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Bernard and with me today, revenuecat CEO Jacob Eiding. Our guest today is Tanuj Chatterjee, CEO at Super Unlimited vpn. On the podcast, I talk with Tanuj about the product driven growth loop behind the number one VPN app in the world, why they intentionally leave money on the table, and how the prettiest design often loses in their A B tests. Hey Tanoush, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast.
B
Thank you for inviting me.
A
I said joining me, but it's joining us. Jacob, nice to have you here today as well.
C
I'm just here, David. I'm here to bring what I can interject, you know, philosophy as needed. But I'm excited to be here.
A
We had a lively conversation before hitting record. So one of these days we'll have a sub club after hours and talk about life and business and everything else. Well, I wanted to kick it off today talking about your app Super Unlimited and I did not know, kind of embarrassed to say this, but I had not heard of it until you and I met at an app growth summit. And I looked it up and I was like, holy crap. This is the number one result for VPN and just an incredibly successful app. So as we get started, I wanted to give you an opportunity to just talk a little bit about the app and kind of the success it's had to help people understand and kind of frame the conversation and yeah, sure.
B
So thank you for the, for the kind words. If you search for vpn, it's the number one app on the App Store in the productivity category. Before all the chatgpt kind of clones they came in, we were always on the top 10 along with Google. The only other products were from Microsoft and Google. So proud of what we have done over the four or five years. It's a, as we talk through the podcast, you see a lot of it is very product driven growth. But at this time we get over a million downloads a day. Most of them are organic. We have received, cumulatively we have crossed well over a billion downloads. It's also a category where the whole pie is increasing in size and our slice of the pie as a percentage is also increasing in size. So we are in a good spot there. Yes, we have not done too much pr, marketing, branding yet, but that will come over time.
A
A million downloads a day, that's almost an unfathomable number. I don't even know apps were still getting a million downloads a day except for when they like go viral or you know, chatgpt. I'm sure had a few days like that, maybe a few million. That is just an insane number. And then you said most of that is organic, so I wanted to jump to that next. How did you end up at the top result for vpn and how do you defend that?
B
Yeah, you know, we didn't start being on the top. We didn't, we didn't start trying out to be the biggest vpn. Right. We basically my background just FYI is engineering and product. Before getting into the VPN world, I was CTO at Rakuten where we grew the company from, you know, $30 million in revenue to billion dollars in revenue in the US. A lot of lessons learned around the consumer DNA then. And given my background, I think very bottom up rather than marketing down, sometimes to a fault, but it has served us well. So you know, we basically looked at the app, started looking at the reviews right away, started looking at our competitors reviews right away to see what's missing in our app. Not in terms of feature fun, a tv, but what are people complaining about. And we started fixing those things, we started removing friction and then we started reading the competitors reviews in terms of what are the challenges over there that we can fix and resolve. We basically built an app which was very, very high quality. I say to people, sometimes VPN apps are commodity as you know. Right. It's very easy. The open source scores glow in the Internet. So you can find and build a VPN app in two weeks. The first 85% is very easy, but after that every 1% is hard work. You know, how do I connect a user who's in Poland to the best server? What's the right server, what's the right protocol? And then there are blocking and tackling that we'll have to do. You know, some people will might block you because an airline might block you thinking that oh, you might be a bot. How do I give them very, very good service quality? That's really hard work. So that's what we focused on a lot. It's a premium app. That helps because there's no friction. You just come in, no login, no hard, very, very heavy paywalls that are hard to get around. You just start, click on connect and start using it. Right. Our engagement time is literally, you know, half a second, half a minute. The first time they come in, they'll have to do a very quick setup and after. But there's a second time they come in, they come in and they click on the connect button, they go off to their Netflix or to their browsers and. All right. And that's what we want. We don't want people to stick around too long. Unlike a lot of other apps where engagement, we define engagement differently. It's not time spent on the app. It's actually the intention to come back to the app.
A
And it seems like that is kind of feeding the algorithm. Right. It's like people download the app and then it's so easy to use. You get these massive downloads and then that just keeps like this perpetuating cycle. Are there any specific things you've done and experimented with? Like, you know, I know Ariel at Figures talks a lot about rating velocity. You know, have you moved the rating prompt earlier or later and, like, seen moves at all in your aso?
B
Yeah, you know, ratings are super important. Right. But there's a time when to ask for ratings. You can't ask it too many times and too often and at the wrong time, mainly. Right. We basically ask for ratings after we've delivered value to the user. That multiplied by the number of downloads, the number of users who are coming in and using the app and coming back. That helps overall. So, yeah, so rating is important. Very important to us. When people come in and look at the App Store, not only we are number one, they also see 2 million plus very high quality ratings. That definitely is impactful. But we don't try to do too much gymnastics with trying to get more ratings. I think they come organically. We ask for them, but we don't overdo it.
A
Speaking of not doing too many gymnastics, your screenshots don't seem especially fancy. You know, there's a lot of trends in screenshot design now of like bigger text and gradients and span two screenshots with the device image. But I looked at yours and they're like, pretty simple and straightforward. The biggest thing I noticed was that you use logos like HBO and Netflix, and so you're kind of telling people get access to these services no matter where you are. But is that intentional? Any lessons for you on screenshots? Like, have they just not mattered have you experimented at all with them?
B
Yeah, screenshots has been a biggest mystery for us. So we have tried. So of course, for different regions and all, we try different screenshots, localization and whatnot that everybody does. But our screenshots, you know, and you've been very polite, you know, they're a bit stale. They look a little stale. And we have tried modernizing screenshots, and I have to say, 80% of the time when we do AB tests, they lose. And it's like, huh? You know, people just like to see what they were used to seeing. So in many cases, we have gone back to the original ones that we had. In some cases, like I said, 20% of the cases, they do work slightly, but we have not seen any meaningful difference when we experimented with screenshots. We also don't, you know, because we are, you know, number one on aso. We also don't do massive changes at the same, you know, because it's very risky. So we have done tweaks, we have done new screenshots, we have done AB tests, we have changed the colors, we have changed what the content. We've done all of those things in a very organized, methodical way. But most of them have not produced results that we were expecting, although you would think that they are better, more modern, and should be more compelling in 2026. But it doesn't work. So, again, I think the data is proving us wrong, which is fine. It is what the truth is, right?
C
Yeah.
A
I just got done with a live YouTube paywall roast. So we spent an hour on the Sub Club YouTube channel live roasting paywalls. And one of the things we talked about was, like, you sometimes, you know, quote unquote. I don't mean to be disparaging of your screenshots. I don't think they're ugly, but sometimes the, like, super fancy design just doesn't perform as well. And I don't understand it. Like, you know, my bent is always, like, make things prettier. I don't understand why.
C
It's not that the. It's not that the technical elite have some sort like, out of step actual understanding of what people want or like. No, it's not that. It's that people have no taste, David.
A
People have no taste. Well, next, I wanted to dig into SEO, because it's something I've had so many people. I mean, maybe less so the last year. Like, now it's more about LLM optimization. But so many people over the years have asked about breaking into SEO and I know it's something a project y' all worked on. What are your lessons from there? And then to tack onto that, have you seen the work you did do in SEO start to pay off and showing up in LLM responses.
B
Let me go back a little bit. So till beginning of last year we were only a mobile app. We were just a one page site because there was no need for it. So, right. So last year, late last year, we launched our Windows product and to get ready for that, we had to start building a web presence, right? SEO takes time, right? So we said in 2025, where do we start? So what we did was we started with programmatic content. So we worked with this company called Daydream. The founder, I knew the founder from before. He had actually worked in the VPN space before, so he already knew the domain. So I said, okay, let's help me out. So yeah, so we started seeing results there, but the conversion was still not that great. So it's still a work in progress for us. It's still early. I'm not an expert there. I know SEO in general has suffered. Every consumer company that's reliant on the web traffic is suffering a little bit. Both SEO is down a little bit because you know, the first results that you see are Gemini and whatnot in Google as well as even paid search. Marketing is less effective because the real estate is gone. Part of the real estate for the first page is gone because Gemini takes it over. So a lot of people are struggling. So I don't think we will spend time on SEO, but we won't over index on SEO. I think one of our biggest channels for growth, even to send them, to make them start using Windows is through our big mobile user base, right? So we'll spend a lot of time on product marketing within mobile SEO. We know it'll take time. We are still working on it. We have content people, we have SEO people, but that's not the top channel for us.
A
It's funny because I've read the case study about this and it's doing like 1600 app downloads per month, which for at your scale that's just such peanuts. But for a lot of apps that would be a pretty meaningful improvement to download. So it's all about scale there. But I did want to follow up with that last point about LLMs. Have you found that because of the SEO efforts that you've put in, have you started showing up higher or what's your LLM? I forget what that. What's either of you know the. What's the LLM term for SEO?
C
Geo. Right. Generative engine optimization. It's odd. It should just be like leo, but that's low earth orbit.
B
So I, you know, I was, it's interesting you asked. I was looking at Google Analytics the other day for our. We, there is traffic coming in, there are downloads coming in from there. It's not in the top five channels, but it is coming. So it's, it's a good sign that we are starting to get more visible.
C
It's pretty interesting. I think it's. We see so much higher on the like dev tool side, but it makes sense. I feel like choosing a VPN is like, you know, exactly what you're going for at that point, you know, versus like my naivete about the VPN market. But it's like I don't, I don't suppose people are being like, how do I tunnel my traffic? You know what I mean? They know they need a VPN because somebody told them like, if you want to do this, you need a vpn. Right. And so they should search those three letters.
B
Yeah. And also I would say there are bigger VPN players out there. Not bigger in terms of downloads, but there are, you know, few VPN players who are premium only while we are premium. So their downloads are smaller, but their LTVs are much bigger and they came in from the desktop side of things and they've spent years focusing on SEO. So if you're looking for, oh, you know, I'm in Bolivia and where do I watch the Winter Olympics right now? I'm. I bet you you'll find a website
C
from them even on consumer. Because I could say the VPN market's really funny because things like tailscale and Citrix are like also in the VPN market, but don't feel like direct competitors to you. Right?
B
No, some of them are, you know, more Marketing to the B2, B2C side. Right. We are, we are purely consumer play. Yeah.
A
I did want to dive a little deeper into the freemium side of things because it does seem like this is a big part of your growth engine is having that freemium tier which allows you to get so many downloads and so many ratings, which they gets more downloads. How have you balanced the monetization and then as a vpn, how do you manage costs for those free users?
B
Our free to paid conversion is quite low and I'm okay with it because we have focused on the top of the funnel a lot. There are a lot of companies, smaller competitors in the premium world who would try to get more aggressive in monetization. And I think that's not our philosophy. Right. We want to give you a very, very, very, very good quality free product. And the reason it's low, not because the product sucks, is because our free version is that good. So there are. You don't want to throttle or take things away from the free version. There's a reason we have the word unlimited in our name where if you want to come and you can't pay, that's fine, you probably just will have to watch an ad or two and then you can use it unlimited. We have dozens and dozens of countries and cities that you can connect to. It's just fine. I would rather give, give people more value before asking them for more money, which is. So it's a denominated game. Right. So part of the reason you also alluded to before that you know your most of the users are organic. Partly because we are. It's a numbers game for us. Our LTV because it's premium, because of a big majority of the users are premium. Our LTV is not that high. We can't compete with Spotify's of the world where you know, where their LTV and retention is amazingly high. But we are adding a lot more now talking about adding more value. We are adding Windows. So not only you can protect your mobile phone but you can protect all of your devices. Windows, Mac, mobile phones across the family. We talked about adding a second phone number app so we can throw it in the bundle. I think that's where we are going. But the main thing is our top of the funnel is our superpower. Don't mess with it. Give people a fantastic free VPN experience.
A
So do you manage the ad revenue to break even on the free users or do you even lose a little money on the free users? And how do you make money on ads? Are they full screen interstitials? Do those pay reasonably well?
C
Like do they get injected into your web pages?
B
No, no. So you know it's limited. Right. So I mentioned our average engagement time is 30 seconds on the app or less. So you don't have much of a window to show an ad. So to your point, yes, we have interstitials and we have full screen ads and we have some native banners and all. But we don't try to optimize it for profits necessarily. Some countries, you know, high rev countries, us, Western Europe and all, you know, they're profitable and in some cases even the match rates are low, the CPMs are very low. It's totally okay with us. So I came from the E commerce world, right? We used to get spikes on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Our spikes usually happen because of geopolitical issues. So I'll give you an example. Like I think it was last year Turkey banned Instagram for 11 days and we got 15 million downloads in four days. And I mean, if you think of Turkey's population, it's 85 million. And you know, if you think of 15 million downloads and think of the Internet population using it, it's probably 30 to 40%. Right. So do we make that much money in Turkey? Probably not. I mean, there are countries where there are more issues that are poorer. Myanmar, for example. Right. It's having a civil war. But we just think it's the right thing to do. People should have access to information. People should access to free information. They should not be constrained by just propaganda. So we just provide service even if we lose money? As long as, yes, we are running a business, but we are not trying to over optimize this. Right.
C
Are you on ads? Do you defer showing ads until you've determined somebody's not a likely purchaser? Do you have any orchestration between showing ads versus not and stuff like that? Or are you thinking about it that granularly yet?
B
For the first download, if you just install it, we don't show an ad right away. Right.
C
So yes, I guess is the answer is like you do some sort of smart and be like, okay, we're going to defer to see if this person's going to. They might convert right away. And we don't want to degrade the experience.
B
It's not just for conversion. It's also, you know, we want them to see the value of the app. Right. So even the paywalls are not very hard. There's a big X sign where you can cancel out very easily. So we are not trying to over monetize it. Just the main goal is come and use the product.
C
Yeah, I guess like becoming their VPN app is probably more important than monetizing on that.
B
Money will come. Money will come, right? Everything else will come.
A
It sounds like part of how you manage this is just to keep costs really low so that you're not bleeding out by serving all of these freemium users. Any lessons there about just keeping costs?
C
This is my naivete on VPNs, but you all have to maintain that tunneling infrastructure, right? Or do you rent that out for from somebody?
B
No, we maintain It, Yeah, we spend million. So David, you're right. Managing the cost is key, but not at the cost of service quality. So every data packet for a VPN goes through our servers. Right. So if people intergear, you know, some of the lower revenue countries, if they're using it, sometimes you lose out too. And it's okay. It's okay with us. What we can control a little more or what we want to control is marketing cost. Right. That's why we spend in marketing and we will continue spending more, but that's where we can control things. We won't make any compromises on service quality.
A
So then, I mean your business, how do you make money? What are the features that you put behind the paywall? Like how do you entice people to actually subscribe when you do provide such a fantastic premium product?
B
The extra value that we can provide with a paid product is of course, no ads, talk to your customer support, but also a lot more locations and access to higher 10G servers and whatnot. Right. But now starting late last year, multi platform, where once you subscribe, you can use the VPN for all the platforms. So we are upping the value game. That's how we make money, by the way. We are growing very nicely. We are very profitable. The investors are not pushing me otherwise. So it's a good position to be in.
A
Yeah. What an incredible position to be in. I mean, the deeper we get into this conversation, it sounds like there's so much dry powder with a billion downloads and so such a huge freemium base that as you do find secondary product market fit, find new features to add, things like that. You've got so much dry powder to really build the business over time.
B
Yeah, we are looking at long term, Right. Because we are unlike some of the other VPN companies that are desktop first. Some of the bigger competitors that we have, we are mobile first. Right. And so one of the, the apps we recently launched and we are cleaning it up and all before bundling it or promoting it heavily, is this ESIM app. So think of, think of this, right? So a lot of VPN users that we have, think of the cohorts, right? There are a lot of people who are travelers, they just travel to Europe, but they cannot access their favorite content or they cannot access their bank and all right. Or immigrants that want to watch a show, like a Korean immigrant in the U.S. they want to watch a Korean show and whatnot. So there's a lot of access based issues that happen once you cross the borders, Right. We think ESIM is a fantastic market and intersects very well with our user base. Right. Just last year, 500 million people traveled to Europe. If you think of it, it's a very big part of the affluent global population who can afford to travel to Europe. Are there a lot of these people who are using our VPN products? Yes. Do they need ASIMs? Yes.
C
I went to those in Europe last week and for the first time I did it. And it's, I mean compared to like the pay $10 a day, get ripped off, slow access, it was pretty good. I paid $20 for the whole week. I had like first party, pretty decent access. It wasn't perfect, but it was like pretty decent and I didn't have to worry about and like you didn't have to, you don't have to go to a shady shop and get a car to slide into your phone. It's like, it's, it's pretty cool. And I'll tell you, I think there's opportunity in the market because the, the two, like I tried to use the names you've heard of the first one, like their website didn't even work on mobile. It was so bad, which I was like, seems like this should probably work. I think it failed because I was on my phone on bad service. Which I'm like, pretty sure that's a test case you should probably have nailed is like your website shouldn't require JavaScript and be like so crazy. But anyway, I think, I mean I buy it. I think that's a great strategic direction.
B
Think of other values. So we have this massive customer base. What else will they value? It's not, what else can I sell to them? Right. I don't even need to sell. Right. Here's what we have, you know, do you want to use it? They're privacy conscious users. They're access conscious users. I think there's a, with a large denominator, even a small change in the, in the multiple of conversions will help a lot.
A
Your denominator at a billion downloads or is the magnitude larger than most denominators in the subscription app space.
C
I mean, it's a tough challenge. I mean it's a blessing and a curse because once you're at those mega. I mean, I guess if you're playing like a, like a flywheel game, right? Where you're taking the current volume and you're adding new things, like that's fun, right? I think once you get to that scale, it's kind of, can be kind of demoralizing because you're like, well, there's just no more people, you know, that's
B
a part of it. The downside of being the number one is where will the future growth come from? For the, for the top of the funnel, return on.
C
At the end of the day, it's return on capital. Right? Like, where's it coming from?
B
It's a very first world problem to have, but it is a problem nevertheless.
A
So you mentioned earlier we focused a lot on the organic side of things. But you mentioned that you do do some marketing and it's something that it sounds like you're maybe looking to do more of. So more people are aware. I was going to say if you
C
start selling ESIMs, you're going to need to get to know some ad buyers in airports, you know, like some very. Like on prem advertising we are also learning, right.
B
So ESIM was like, okay, you know, we have so many users, just show an ad, let's see how it goes. And unless people are traveling, there's no intent. I mean, why would you buy an ESIM right now? Right. So it's like, okay, good to know. I mean, come summer or before summer, can we offer some promotions at the right time? Not every phone is ESIM compatible either. Right. Do we again, do we not bombard people with an ESIM ad? Just be very deliberate about who we want to show it to, who will actually get value out of it? Right. So the ads is another one of those things. You talked about ads, Right. I would rather leave 10% money on the table rather than bombard people with that. There's a lot of trust that you destroy with overdoing, monetization and back to
A
like growth side of things. What have you done in paid marketing or has it almost been completely organic?
B
Well, Apple and Google, you know, it's for search ads. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
A
Have you found the brand defense especially important or like what wins have you found on search ads when you're already the number one result?
B
Well, number one result on vpn. Right. There are other keywords in there too. Sometimes you also do it for brand defense. Like you mentioned, there are other keywords. You know, we focus on specific keywords, specific markets where we spend dollars on and we look into the roas very carefully and you can't go beyond a certain amount. We also see sometimes some of these ads will cannibalize our organic channels anyway, so there's always that risk. But it's okay. Right. So we are trying to manage it carefully.
A
It's fascinating at your scale that you do spend on that and then philosophically, you're still trying to get a return on ad spend, you're still like penciling it out versus just trying to be everywhere because you already are everywhere with that number one placement.
B
So five years ago we were not number one everywhere. Right. We were probably number one in a couple of locations in iOS. Now we track 71 countries and right now for the VPN keyword, we are number one in 67 of those. Right. And number two in the rest. In Android we are not as successful. We are number one in the US right now. We are in the top five or top 10 almost everywhere. But it's not that we are number one everywhere. Right. So we do see that as an opportunity like glass half full or glass half empty. Right. Okay. Where can I use some extra marketing push to kind of get up there? Because I think the brand definitely helps.
A
I wanted to transition and talk about some of your product driven approach to growth. And one of the things I found fascinating was that you put your support team inside the product team. How does that work?
B
The head of support reports to our head of product. I want a mirror in front of the product team right there. Right. It's not. Our growth comes from product decisions and not just from marketing campaigns. Sometimes we know that. What are people struggling with? What's not clear? What are people asking about over and over? So that could be a UX issue, that could be a communication issue or an education issue or an onboarding issue. Service quality.
A
Ah.
B
You know, I'm in Uganda and I'm starting to see a lot of service quality tickets. You know, product should know first right away. I have been at companies where, you know, product and support was a totally separate organization and support will talk, do a, do a talk once a month and show their KPIs and how many tickets they have sold. It's fine. Right. But the pace at which the feedback loop goes into the product side of the engineering side is a lot less.
C
Yes.
B
So we, because we are so focused and anal about product quality, we wanted the support team inside the product team itself.
C
I mean we essentially not exactly have that at RevenueCat, but support's been an engineering attachment at RevenueCat since day one. And it's like both for cultural reasons because like it's engineers asking most of our questions. So it makes sense, talent reasons. But I just think like, it's same with like qa. Like I think qa. I don't know if you guys are doing it or anyway special, but when I got into the industry it was Very normal for QA to be in the other building kind of situation, you know. And like, I think now QA teams don't really exist because it's all been merged. You have junior engineers, right. You have like people on the team and maybe it's support sometimes, like that's kind of our closest thing to a QA team. It's like the support engineers like involved in the product development. And it seems to work so much better.
B
The fewer dependencies you have, the better. And if you have a dependencies, it cannot be the next building over. Right. You should be able to.
C
Well, we don't have buildings anymore, so we solve that problem.
B
Right? Right.
C
Everybody's in another building building in 2026,
B
mentally in another building. Right? Yes.
A
You mentioned early in the podcast and it was something again that stood out to me about your kind of philosophy is the bottoms up, not marketing down. Any other top lessons there or anything else you wanted to share about that approach to product development and marketing?
B
For us, for our domain service, quality is massive because there are always a lot of corner cases. I could be, I think about it, right? You have a phone, 3G network in Nepal and you're on WI fi in your hotel and then you walked out and in an elevator for some time, it disconnected. And then you are on a 3G line or a 4G line and then something else happens. You're in a bus, you're traveling, you switch from one tower to the other tower, VPN in particular, as opposed to most of the other tech world where it's this quick request and response. It's a very long lived connection. Right. So technically there are a lot of challenges that come with that and people are, our customers are on the move. So a lot of focus on that.
C
I mean, getting all those edge cases, right? Like it is the whole product, the last 10%, the whole product, probably. It's kind of, I think you said something to that effect at the beginning, but I think that's what, you know, sometimes differentiates great products and commodities. Right. Is like, do they do they just always work versus like sometimes maybe work?
B
So it's not just engineering, Right. It's the operational discipline that is important.
C
Meaning, like reacting to all the issues, like actually taking the time and investing
B
in finding them, anticipating reacting. I mean, our QA guy actually walked with his phone inside an elevator down. He had a debug build, so he could see all the logs at that time. And he did the whole thing a few times. So that's how you get better.
C
This is Just, I mean a mobile thing, I think in a lot of app developers, especially when now we're seeing like so many app developers coming into the market and like you kind of always assume good wifi, beefy connections, whatever, which is a rarity, right? Or certainly it's not going to like make your app great, you know, like you could be okay. But like if it's like I was using a fairly new app, I won't, I won't name names but like you've heard of it and it's in the AI category and like their offline stuff just like didn't work for me. Like it, like I downloaded it and then I got offline, opened it up on the plane and like I just got a login screen and I was like, I mean I, I can see that's like a second order case, right. Um, and maybe that's forgivable for our first year app or whatever. But in mobile like you have to nail that, you have to nail the offline case, the online case, the middling case, the changing countries case. Right. But I was kind of wondering, you know, again, it goes back to the VPN being a commodity, like what brands could potentially just attach a brand to a. You know, because sometimes like commodities, just like Coca Cola, it's the brand, right? You're not, it's the sugar water, whatever, but it's mostly the brand you're buying. So it's like, are there brands that could, just by them being the brand, they are like DuckDuckGo is maybe a good example. They're not, they're even very niche. It might be like Symantec or something like that, but I think that's like a 20 year old brand now. I don't think that, or like whatever, that doesn't really have the cachet that it may be used to. But are there like, are there like big brands like that or like. And they just are not investing at the level that you are on the product?
B
No, there are bigger brands and without naming names, you know, there are bigger brands and bigger companies and they come more on the desktop side in the VPN space. This.
C
But that's a different problem, right? Like a desktop, you're not on the bus, you know what I mean? You're not like. So is that your, is it your thesis is that just them, by them not being mobile first, you get, by being mobile first you can, you can just have an advantage.
B
Because we have an advantage. Desktop people pay more.
C
Oh, sure, sure. Well, it's a trade off, right? It's like scale, scale, low ltv, you know, but, but, but there's a niche there. Right.
B
We have to go and tackle and understand that market a lot more. Right. The, the users are different. Right. The mobile users case I just explained. Right. They're a little less, more forgiving because they do experience these issues when walking.
C
Right, Right. I'm not using this to connect to my company's vpn. Right. So it's different.
B
Desktop users are less for gaming. Yes. The technical challenges are not that the person is moving and shifting to 3G. You can assume that the connection is strong. But you know, if, let's say if they're gaming, the reaction time needs to be very fast. Otherwise you cannot, you cannot have any latency in gaming.
C
I was going to say, I think that would be the only time I've used. Well, except for work. A desktop VPN was like when I was trying to do LAN games with people and it was just easier to have a virtual LAN that you were on.
B
So the challenges are different. Right. Bandwidth is very high. Right. If they're downloading big content or streaming in 4G and all you need to make sure the bandwidth is top tier, the latency is as low as possible.
C
Those are all things you control because it's like you have the edge nodes, you have the relays. That's all infrastructure you have to monitor and pay attention to.
B
We control. But it's still a good engineering problem. Right. Because you are connected to some servers for a very long time, for hours in many cases. So the load balancing happens in a very different way.
C
I mean, this is maybe too much. This is off the sub club beat. But can you just host that? You guys just run that in like a standard cloud infrastructure or do you need like specialized infrastructure?
B
No, no, no, we have space. So our. I'm getting a bit geeky with you right now.
C
But they can edit it out. This is just for us.
B
All right. Our control plane is in the standard, well known cloud infrastructures. Our data plane is not. Because we lose our shirts because the bandwidth costs.
C
Right? Yeah. Because it's not designed for just tunneling.
B
It's not designed for that.
C
So you have to go to like a layer lower to rent that.
B
Yeah. Where we have control, we get bare metal machines. We control it, we wipe it out.
C
Okay, so you actually. Yeah, that's very interesting. Which is also another advantage versus like any other. David was talking about like kind of cost inputs. Right. Like when you have that scale, you can afford to make the investment to control your day. Playing at way better rates. And that allows you to have like a different retail economics than. Than somebody who might have to rent it all from AWS and pay ingress outgress or whatever.
B
So those cost optimizations, we do not. We don't do cost optimizations that will affect service quality. That's the last thing we will touch. We won't. We'll not touch it ever.
A
This is great sub club content. I don't know what you're talking about, Jacob. We got a little nerdy there about control planes and data packets, but it is super meaningful.
C
People on this podcast make software still. I think that's. You know what I mean? This is part of how the sausage is made.
A
And it's super meaningful to the business to build those cost advantages. And as subscription app businesses, this is part of what you have to be figuring out. And even in this conversation, I'm thinking about my dinky weather app, and part of the reason I don't have a freemium tier is because our data is really expensive.
C
David, invest in weather stations. You need a weather station in every place on the earth.
B
Well, no.
A
What a lot of apps do for weather is they do actually just use the National Weather Service data, which is generally pretty good. And it's free. And we can, like, you know, there are ways that we can control our costs so that we could offer a freemium experience to users. So it's inspiring me to me to go this deep because I think a lot of people should be thinking along these lines.
C
Revenue cats have had a free experience and we designed it to be supportable from the beginning. Like, all of our cost scaling is such that, like, if somebody's not paying, if a user, end user's not paying, it doesn't really cost us much to support. And that takes design choices. Right. Like, there's ways we could have designed it that wouldn't have been that way, and that's allowed us to maintain this really nice freemium tier.
B
No, but you open up the funnel right there, right. 10x and it has to be still, it has to provide meaningful value, right?
C
Yeah. Then the value is we can give the product away for free if you're small. Right. And just say, like, hey, just use it. Don't worry about it. We'll get you later. Don't worry about it.
A
In the era of insane inference costs, this is a very important topic as well.
C
It's like, yeah, I mean, every app that's AI driven is kind of really having to think about this stuff heavily.
A
Can you run an Open source model. But I think Tanusha, you keep hammering on, don't sacrifice service quality. And I think that is one of the challenges currently is that the leading model providers like OpenAI and Anthropic and Google have set the bar so high from what kind of a response that you could get that a lot of people got super excited about Apple's on device AI stuff. And my pushback the whole time was like people just expect so much out of AI and you're not going to get that from a local model and it's going to be a while and then as, as soon as the local models get better, the leading models will get even better. And so, but there are opportunities to cut costs by using open source models, by using different hosting and things like that. But if you do that at the expense of service quality, if your product degrades because you're trying to cut costs, that's not a good experience.
C
This is really prescient in the AI moment for all these apps that are shipping AI features too. It's like, you know, it's also important to think about because I assume you all did not have your data plane in house on day one, right?
B
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So day one you don't build for Google scale or for our scale. Right.
C
Fastest.
B
It's all about the fastest, you know, the fastest get to market fastest you can optimize the cost later.
C
Exactly. And then that's what I was going to suggest is like have a path, just understand that you can. And it's like when we're building AI stuff internally at Revenue Cat right now, it's like don't worry about it. We'll spend the big, it's going to be expensive, it's going to be a loss leader, whatever. Two things are going to happen. The models are going to get cheaper in 6 months, 12 months. And then we're also going to get smarter about using them. So like the costs are not going to go up from here. Right. So the marginal costs at least time
B
to market is huge. The, you know initially your volume won't be that big. If the volume, if the volume gets bigger, it's a good problem to have.
C
This is always a, I love this is like a classic like, like early entrepreneur mistake when they're like you over obsess about I'm going to lose my shirt or like whatever. It's like this is not going to be a problem. If it is a problem, it's a good problem. Right. And like I don't think any also I Don't think AWS has taken anybody's house yet for not paying a bill.
B
So like typically don't optimize too early. Find the product market fit, you know, grow the funnel and there's so many levers that you can pull for cost without sacrificing service quality.
C
Yeah, I mean I just love the philosophy of like focus on the product. I mean this is revenue Cat mo is customer session. Just talk to customers, see what they want. That's our only guiding principle is like talk to them and see what's broken and then apply our gifts to try to serve them and you know, ultimately creating surplus value. Right. Which then you mentioned the money will come and it will like if you create surplus value, the actually capture part can. Is kind of the, the easy part. Right. If there's so much surplus value created, you'll find a way to like to share in that. And there's optimizations. You can 1, 2x5x that one way or the other. But like unless you focus on the first thing which is the value creation, none of it else is matter.
A
So in those early days. Well actually let's, let's even step back. So my understanding, correct me if I'm wrong, Super Unlimited was spun out of Rakuten. How did that all happen? And then, and then we can tie it into like the early days where you were just using, you know, off the shelf cloud hardware. And then when, when did it start making sense to, to build out your own infrastructure?
B
Yeah, Super Unlimited was spun out, but not from Rakuten. So I had left Rakuten. I joined this company at that time that was called Anchor Free. And we used, we had a few VPN products. You can look it up. But during, while I was there, we had bought this product called VPN Super Unlimited Proxy. Good enough product. Nothing like what it is right now. And I was there as I was running engineering at that company, I was their cto. And then when Anchor Free was bought by a larger company, I decided to step away. My investor said, tanish, don't go anywhere. Here's a product that we bought. Thought, can you run it? Let's just try to grow it. It sounds fun. Let's try it out. Right. I had managed engineering, I'm an engineer. I'd done engineering and then managed engineering all my life. This was something interesting. I was like, oh, what do I have to lose? Let's try it out. And yeah, so I was not the founder of the product. It came from somewhere. But we grew it substantially over the last five years. So five years ago, beginning of January, in 2021, we spun off Super Unlimited as its own company.
A
That's a crazy story. From app acquisition to spun out to the top VPN app with a billion downloads. That's crazy. So what point in that, in that story? Early on, you were just on commodity hardware. When did things start picking up? What was the inflection point? What happened that really started to move the needle? And then when did you start building out your own infrastructure?
B
It was not like one golden moment where everything changed. Right. It was a lot of things along the way. Unfortunately, there was no one silver bullet. But, you know, we looked into, like I said, we looked into reviews. What's keeping us away from being the number one product? A lot of it came back to service quality for us. So we spent a lot of time on service quality. I mean, that's thankfully, that's my DNA. And that's how I think too. We started building a team. We started focusing on service quality. We started some basic things about ASO localizations and whatnot, but mainly service quality. And then things started going up in the last five years, as you know, a lot of geopolitical things also happened, right. Where suddenly we'll get a massive spike. So as we were starting to go up, we will see a massive spike from country A versus country B. And what happens is once the spike is gone, you hit a new normal at a higher level. So some of those things also. And we were, like I said, in many cases, we were not making money, we were losing money. There are many countries right now in this world where we lose a lot of money, but it's totally okay with us. That was totally okay with us even then, Right. We said, okay, let's build a product that everybody wants to use and we are proud of. And that flywheel took effect. We kept improving service quality. We spent some time on aso, those things we did. But I'm sure there are companies that are doing a much better job than us on that one. But the thing that. It's not important. It's important. And we spent some time on it. It. Did we do the best we could at that point? Yes. Are there better ways to do it? I'm 100% sure, yes. Right. So most of it was product. Give the service to anybody who needs it. Don't over index on monetization. Money will come. All those things that we talked about earlier, right. So. And slowly and surely it went up talking about ratings. Right? So we also broke down the ratings by different Countries, for example. Right. Okay. You know, this country, the ratings are quite a bit lower than us, let's say. Right. Why is that? That so understanding and digging into the details helped us a lot.
C
One thing I've learned from this is that VPNs are a good inverse, a hedge against world order. If Ray Dalio is right, everything's breaking down. I should just buy VPN stocks because apparently that's a good hedge.
B
So what we did was we expanded, we added lot of new vendors, we upgraded our vendors.
C
I mean also I imagine you have the international too at some point. Like you need nodes in like every country for like good latency and stuff like this.
B
So we have tens of thousands of servers in dozens of countries right now. Yeah. Coming back, we do use cloud for spikes, Right. The downside of bare metal is it cannot handle surges that well. Right. We can add a little extra capacity, but think of the Turkey kind of a situation where we added, I mean we were practically serving Turkish population.
C
There's no solution to the spike problem. Right. You either are way over provisioned and you're losing your shirt or like you and you can't react like faster even, even if it's a wave takes days, it's like takes time to provision.
B
So then you use cloud providers for surges, right? Soak up the excess, soak up the excess very quickly. Bare metal, you have to order it and it'll take a week for them to deliver. And nobody has 500 servers sitting around, right? Yeah, exactly.
C
Well, somebody has to, right? So it's just like it's a financial operation problem to see who holds that. Which is like going back to the thing, David, about like, you know, building your own weather parsing or running your own local models. It's like, like when you add in all the costs of the hardware sitting there and not being used. At least if you're buying tokens from Anthropic or whoever, you know they're fully utilizing their hardware. Right. It's such a much higher utilization rate. So you might be surprised that like your amortized costs aren't that different.
B
Yeah. Now if you're building a company or a mobile app, which is not a vpn, just go with cloud. Right. I mean and prove fastest way do it and then optimize later.
C
Everything's portable too. The nice thing about, you know, TCP IP standard, you can do it on anything.
A
One of the other things I did want to dig into was the 8020 rule. Like I know that's part of your philosophy, but You've also talked again and again about service quality. Like how do you not over perfect everything and still actually ship? How do you balance and decide what's good enough when your North Star is service quality?
B
We cannot compromise on privacy or trust and we don't compromise on service quality. What we can compromise on is, is features. So I'll give you an example. The algorithm itself for a VPN user, which server to connect to, which protocol to use is very complex, right? And the algorithm that you need or the rules that you need to connect you in the US will be very different from somebody who's connecting from, let's say Saudi Arabia, right. We have built a lot of domain expertise to understand what we need to do for which country, right. We were building this algorithm and it would have taken months and months to build it, right? So we said, okay, you know what do we have this algorithm, what we think is right for these five, five countries, let's just launch it. So we use feature flags and we used it just for those five countries. And for the rest we can build over time. We could be wrong, we could have been wrong, right? In which case we have to iterate on it and got it right. We could have introduced some bugs. So iterate it right now and get it right. So that's how we do it, right? We will do it in smaller chunks rather than build a big massive Taj Mahal and launch it.
A
All right, well, as we're wrapping up, there's three questions I now ask every guest. So let's start with what is the biggest win of the last year? An experiment that like, you know, increased revenue 20%, anything like that new paywall. What was the biggest win of the last year?
B
It's less about an experiment, it's more about us building and launching our Windows product. As I mentioned, it's a first world problem. But the downside of being number one is where is the new growth coming from? Where's the forward looking growth coming from? And this is what we are betting on. This is one, one of the big things that we are betting on on they'll drive us future growth. We are already starting to see a lot of takers. People are coming in onto our website and buying it directly to our surprise, like our website didn't even exist. So our brand is known. We have to start doing a lot more product marketing this year. So building a product that we are happy about, that we are proud of is great. It took more time because we had a product we were not very happy with. Some of the service quality issues, I'm sure there's still issues that we will find. But finally it was at a place where we are very happy about. We launched it and we are very excited about us showcasing it to our users for future for our forward looking growth.
A
I don't think many companies in 2026 would say that their biggest win was launching on Windows, but that's a pretty cool.
C
Don't sleep on Windows, David. Don't sleep on Redmond. It's a lot of companies famous last mistake stake, you know.
A
All right, and then how about what was the biggest fail of the year experiment that went off the rails?
C
Not shipping on Windows soon enough. Sorry.
B
I think not a big one, but a lot of little ones. Right. Like we talked about the screenshot experience we are working towards on improving our design and ui. It's a bit stale still. It has improved a lot over the last in the last 12 months sometimes as we talked about. Right. We Trust tried new ASO screens. 80% of them failed because people didn't like it. The previous screens were much better. We just thought, you know, these designs are, you know, not that great but it's what people like. So that's, that's what I would say. If it's the biggest, I don't know. But it's one of the things that surprised us and lessons learned.
A
Oh, that's great. That counts. Biggest fail was changing your screenshots to a prettier design. Again, not a fail you'd expect.
C
Never change anything. That's kind of.
A
And then the last question is growth would be easier if, if we figured
B
out how to bundle our offerings without friction. Right. We won't get it. So we have Windows now. We have, we, we just launched an ESIM product. We, we are acquiring and almost at the, at the end of acquiring a second phone number. Great products. How do we bundle? What kind of message do we do? How do I reduce friction in terms of, you know, people using the other products too? Who do I target? How do I target? So I think there's a lot of things and a lot of of experiments we will run. We won't get it right the first time 100% but I think there's definitely a big cohort of users who want to use these other products. We have to be able to get the answers right there. So yeah, it'll be easier after we fail a few times.
A
All right, well, as we wrap up, anything you wanted to share with our audience, any job postings you wanted to shout out or anything our audience can do for you.
B
There are a lot of job postings. All of them are in Asia or Europe.
A
We have a a big audience around the world.
B
So yeah, because our product and engineering teams are mainly in Asia and Europe so that's why we wanted there. We are looking for an ESIM Product Manager. We are looking for a Growth Product Manager, Growth Manager or a Director ESIM Product Manager, ideally somebody who works worked in the ESIM space. We are always looking for engineers and QA people. There are at least 15 job postings. I don't remember all of them right now, but if you have any, if you are excited about this, if you're in Asia or you're, please send an email to jobsuperunlimited.com and I promise you I will personally take a look.
A
Awesome. Thanks so much for joining us Tanuj. This was a really fun conversation. A lot of great insights.
B
Nice to talk to you. Thanks Jacob. Take care. David
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.
In this rich conversation, David Barnard and Jacob Eiting welcome Tanuj Chatterjee, CEO of Super Unlimited (the company behind the #1 VPN app with over a billion downloads), to unpack how product-driven growth, carefully balanced monetization, intentional “money left on the table,” and surprising user preferences have built one of the world’s most successful consumer apps. The discussion covers Super Unlimited’s scaling journey, infrastructure philosophy, their freemium approach, and counterintuitive lessons in mobile app design and growth.
| Timestamp | Speaker | Quote | |-----------|---------|-------| | 03:57 | Tanuj | "The first 85% is very easy, but after that every 1% is hard work." | | 07:22 | Tanuj | "80% of the time when we do AB tests, [new screenshots] lose. People just like to see what they were used to seeing." | | 16:39 | Tanuj | "We just provide service even if we lose money... it's the right thing to do." | | 23:16 | Tanuj | "I'd rather leave 10% money on the table rather than bombard people with ads. There's a lot of trust that you destroy with overdoing monetization." | | 25:42 | Tanuj | "The head of support reports to our head of product. I want a mirror in front of the product team right there." | | 33:40 | Tanuj | "We don't do cost optimizations that will affect service quality. That's the last thing we will touch." | | 37:37 | Jacob | "I just love the philosophy of like focus on the product... Talk to customers, see what they want... ultimately creating surplus value." | | 44:14 | Tanuj | "We cannot compromise on privacy or trust and we don't compromise on service quality. What we can compromise on is features." |
This episode is a goldmine for anyone growing a consumer app at scale, especially in commodity (often low-trust) spaces. Super Unlimited’s product philosophy—prioritize quality, delight users, don’t be greedy with monetization, and ignore the hype around trendy designs—offers a grounded, ethical, and highly effective blueprint for sustainable, organic growth.
For orgs at scale: Rethink your spending (especially on ads, infrastructure, and design polish), leverage your community, don’t over-optimize, and always, always ship quality.
For job seekers: Super Unlimited is hiring in Asia and Europe (product/growth managers, engineers, QA). Email: jobs@superunlimited.com
(Skip to [16:39, 23:16, 33:40, 44:14] for the episode’s most powerful insights and philosophy quotes from Tanuj.)