A (4:05)

Right.

B (4:06)

And that didn't really get any traction either. So we came up with this hack really on that, that was designed to kickstart that, which we called the burner feature. And so in addition to going on and seeing if you had new friends there on the app, if you didn't have any that had joined or you had friends on the app but didn't have any that were available, we would let you post a phone number on Twitter or on Facebook.

A (4:30)

Oh yeah.

B (4:30)

So we hit the Twilio API, throw the phone number on Twitter, because you.

A (4:34)

Wouldn'T want your personal cell phone number on Twitter, obviously.

B (4:37)

Definitely not. Yeah, people did it and it was, it was a kind of a big deal. Like Charlie Sheen's number got posted at one point and there was kind of this discussion around people's, you know, emails being on Twitter and things like that. The way we set it up was if you called that number, if anyone saw that number and called it, it would ring through to the person who had posted it. And then we would dissolve it after 30 minutes or 60 minutes or whatever. And that feature, when we started showing it to people, they thought it was really cool. And so they, instead of saying, you know, my sister would use this, they would say, oh, I want this. Right. And so that. That became the feature we built into Burner. Right. Which is to this day primarily an app that's known as, you know, the best and sort of most reliable place to get a second phone number.

A (5:25)

Right.

B (5:25)

And that's how that evolved.

A (5:26)

I love that story for a few reasons. You know, one, a lot of people start working on things and just don't find that pull. And so with Rangel, you started butting your head up against those, like, real, like, market issues, like, oh, somebody else will use it, and not seeing that groundswell and the network effects, like you said, it's like you pretty much need everybody, you know, to be on there in order for that matching to happen, where you happen to be free when somebody, you know happens to be free, and then you both happen to want to have a phone call.

A (5:59)

But there was, like, an inkling of something. And then the second thing I love is that you were leveraging this new technology. So Twilio was new phone number as an API. And I think we're in an age right now with AI and so many new opportunities. You know, I mean, this is something I do every time iOS releases a new feature, like interactive widgets, like my weather app, is one of the more useful interactions that you can have on the home screen. And so this idea of, like, looking for opportunities in these new spaces where this new opportunity comes, I forgot that part of the story, that the whole genesis of the company was, like, leveraging this new technology.

A (6:39)

But what would you say were the lessons? And, like, if you were advising somebody today, they're. They're struggling to get that traction. What are the lessons you took from that that you would share with. With folks?

B (6:51)

Yeah. So one of the specific memories I have of that stage, we were actually pitching Rangel, kind of in prototype form to VCs.

A (6:59)

Right.

B (7:00)

And. And, you know, at the time, I had previously worked at Yahoo for a bunch of years and had mentored a lot of startups in the Techstars program and 500 startups and things like that. And so we knew a lot of people and we went and met with a lot of great, you know, VCs with a reputation for Supporting kind of early stage pre revenue type companies. We thought, isn't this great? They're going to want to fund us. And we got so much feedback that was very, well, there's something here, but it's not quite, you know, very neutral. And the learning for me on that was first of all, consumer is hard. Right. And consumer is hard in a way that, you know, you can take a new technology and it absolutely creates new opportunities to build new products. AI is a great example of that. At the time, you know, Twilio, before Twilio we had, you know, Dropbox being built on AWS and there's sort of many examples of these, these things that sort of build off of a foundational technology shift. But you know, the, the sort of market only recognizes you when you actually have traction. Yeah. And you know, that's kind of, it's a little bit of trying to catch a falling knife I think, to try to get into the seed round or the a round or whatever of a, of a consumer startup after the growth potential has been sort of validated. Right, right. And so we were pre that validation and we were chasing it. And knowing what I know today, I would look at that strictly as a distribution problem.

A (8:34)

Right.

B (8:35)

And I think, well, was it just.

A (8:37)

A distribution problem or was it a product problem? Because I mean those are the two main things. Right. Is the product not pulling?

B (8:43)

Yeah.

A (8:44)

Or like would Rangel have worked if you could have figured out distribution or was Rangel just not the product?

B (8:50)

So I think we did not really know how to build at that time like a viral loop where, where it was self perpetuating.

A (8:58)

Really early. Right. That was 2012.

B (9:01)

That was 20. Late 2011. Yeah, yeah, maybe early 2012. It's interesting because there are apps, there are founders out there, there are founding teams out there that are very adept at kind of generating attention and an early audience. And today of course, you know, we have, you know, TikTok and kind of all these other sort of new, new influencer vectors relative to what might have been available even five years ago. And with Rangel, you know, if we had a large audience trying it out from some kind of media validation like that, that would have been fine. Or if we had, you know, every user invites three friends, a factor driven growth that might have worked, that wasn't really necessarily our strength. And in the end, you know, Burner, which is what it became, is pretty much a single player app. Right, Right. We've never really had a network effect model on that versus a lot of other messaging apps that are fundamentally, you know, WhatsApp is the ultimate example of kind of a network effect messaging app. Right. I do think it would have worked well if we had a lot of users to start out. Right, Right. And ultimately, in fact there are other apps that had very similar ideas and were successful.

A (10:18)

Okay.

B (10:18)

But WhatsApp was actually started on, on the idea of what that, that's called presence, that who's available thing. And Slack has, you know, kind of a being online peer to peer messaging. You know, availability is, is the feature. Right.

A (10:33)

So for a team that's struggling, how would you think about whether it is a product problem? You need to pivot to a new product because for you, I mean, maybe that was a blessing in disguise because maybe Rangel could have seen a certain amount of success but then would have hit a wall. But, but instead it kind of forced to pivot because you didn't have the distribution and you landed on what was actually a better product that then had kind of pull in the market. So how would you advise people to think about when is it a distribution problem where you just can't find the eyeballs and when is it a product problem that you're. You don't have a level of product market fit that's worth investing in?

B (11:09)

Yeah, I would back into that, you know, by thinking a little bit about retention. And I think there's a fundamental thing there which is to say, well, what problem does it solve? And I think the learning with Rangel ultimately was it didn't solve a real problem. Right. People weren't necessarily looking for kind of another way to get, get more phone calls.

A (11:30)

Yeah.

B (11:31)

You know what I mean? It was a problem for me.

A (11:33)

Right.

B (11:33)

I was stuck in a car commuting from Santa Monica or whatever, you know.

A (11:37)

Well, maybe you're the extrovert who actually wanted to call us.

B (11:41)

That's right.

A (11:42)

I enjoy my podcast when I have a long drive.

B (11:45)

For sure, it's fun. But also in the era of mobile phones, if you're in the car and you've got an hour to kill, you're driving to the airport or something, you start calling people, you're just getting their voicemail, they're all screening you, you don't know whether to leave a message, they start calling you back. It's a messy problem, but it really wasn't a problem that people were going to look for an app to solve or looking for kind of an extraneous tool for. And when we sort of pivoted into the burner standalone app where, you know, we had built that feature, and that feature was generating positive results. And then we were doing stuff like testing it by selling tickets on Craigslist and we were posting fake ads for giving away flat screen TVs and things like that. We just get, you know, a ton of traffic. And it was, what that did was it quickly validated the problem. Right, right.

A (12:38)

And so started to feel pull from the market instead of having to push yourself into the market.

B (12:43)

That's exactly right. And, and it was like a 10x to 100x level of response from even just friends we were showing this to. So in that actual stage, we went down to south by Southwest here in Austin 2012 and we, it wasn't sort of hardened and ready. It wasn't in the app store or anything like that. But we were showing it to friends on test flight and people, you know, we ended up like with the New York Times interview and we ran back to our room and we kind of set up a worm and set up a, like a launch page. You know, we were capture, capturing waiting lists names and you know, we were on a panel. You know, it was just like it happened really fast and it, for us it was a real sign that there was something here that was actually meaningful, sort of an authentic problem.

A (13:30)

Yeah.

B (13:30)

They were solving for people and, and you know, as much as has happened since then, there's, you know, a lot of evolution we can, we can get into around our product and around how we've thought about growth and things like that. That fundamental piece has, has really only deepened.

A (13:46)

Yeah.

B (13:47)

Right. Having only one phone number associated with your mobile phone is even more of a problem today.

A (13:54)

Yeah.

B (13:55)

You know, for even more reasons. Right. And more use cases than it was when we started Burner.

A (14:01)

Yeah. That's cool though, that, I mean, and this is what you want to see in a product is getting that pull. Now you're, you know, very few people are going to get to have that experience of being at south by Southwest and New York Times interviews and stuff like that. But I think, you know, for a product to succeed, if you're pushing, pushing, pushing and you're not getting any kind of a flywheel, people aren't excited about it. You know, maybe that's a good sign that it is time to pivot and it is the product. You know, if you've, if you haven't, if you're not good at distribution but you're at least trying and you're not getting any pull, then maybe it is time to look at it at pivot. I think there's you know, too many people work for too long on products that just don't solve a real problem. They don't fill a need that, or fill a need that such a small number of people have. And I mean today, you know, if you're an indie developer and you're, you're, you, you're that extrovert and you want to have phone calls and maybe there is a small market of people, but you're not going to build a venture scale business, you're not going to build a big business solving those little tiny problems that not many people have. But it's fascinating to hear that. And once you start building though, you start seeing things, you start seeing like oh this, there's an inkling of something here, there's. And then again with the like Twilio API opportun opportunity, you were experimenting in a place that led you somewhere and you were able to pivot into something bigger. So I think it's just a fun story for people to listen to, learn from. But I do want to go back and talk about at what point did you decide to raise money and why in that journey did you raise it before that blow up at south by Southwest or did you raise after on the kind of heels of that?

B (15:42)

So we were raising during that. It was actually like I got my first commitment on the bus to the Salt Lick that that first round capital would run these buses out to, to the Salt Lick. But actually it was Dave McClure from 500 Startups and I, and I pinned him into a seat and made him listen to my pitch. And then David Cohen from, from techstars, the founder of techstars on the same day at a different, at a different event, you know, he committed but you know, neither of those guys is a fool and wanted to be the only money in. And so I had to, I had a target. I think I was trying to raise a half a million. I didn't quite get there. And so we actually never closed before launching. We launched the app, you know, kind of on my credit card in terms of the Twilio account.

A (16:28)

Right.

B (16:29)

And, and in fact that informed the pricing model because the phone numbers cost money.

A (16:34)

Right.

B (16:34)

So we believe it or not Burner was a paid download when it first launched. $1.99 to download it.

A (16:41)

Wow.

B (16:42)

And then it included a free phone number for seven days or something and then you could re up it kind of like credits.

A (16:49)

Right.

B (16:50)

It had this credit system, it was kind of elaborate thing. You could buy, you know, three, eight, you know, 15 or 25 credits for different price points and then different configurations of phone numbers to extend them. But that's what it was when we launched it. And we priced it out so that we would basically, if a user used every bit of what they were allocated in terms of texts and call minutes, that we would. And after Apple got their cut, we would, we would break exactly even on the two costs. And then anything that a user didn't use was profit, basically. So any breakage was profit. And when we launched we had like $50,000 in revenue on the first day. Right. So we just got picked up. It was, it was I think Giga Ohm that covered us and we were on Hacker News as a top story. It was generating debate and it kind of, you know, you can't recreate that today. Like you said, it's not south by Southwest in 2012, but, but analogs of that exist today on, on TikTok and Instagram and anyone can go viral for a feature. Right. And so we kind of had a little moment where we had initial traction and at that point a couple of months had gone by since those early commitments and everything closed within a couple weeks at that moment. And it was like, okay, did you raise the price? Yes, well, things changed a little bit and you know, the product had changed completely. We were raising on initially kind of a concept version of Wrangle with this Burner thing as a kind of a little by catch on it.

A (18:21)

Right.

B (18:22)

And then, and then it became Burner became, you know, we had to redo the deck and all that stuff. But it was, I do think, you know, it was maybe more driven by signals that there was a consumer app here that had resonance and you know, we didn't invent the category of the second phone number. You know, Google Voice predated us by a number of years. It's a free product. Skype had sort of a variation of this and, and what we did do was we reinvented it for mobile and we made it, you know, much more oriented to the privacy control oriented consumer. And the UX was just, I think 10x better. Yeah, not that I'm biased. You know, it was, it was better enough to generate a lot of interest and people willing to pay us. Kind of a classic painkiller, not a vitamin. Right, right. So at that point I think, yeah, you know, we, we raised an angel round. The thing we wanted to do was take the paid download off, right. Became a free download. We figured out the conversion math and then we also launched an Android in that sort of next Six or eight months. And then we actually subsequently raised a VC round which is its own sort of set of things and dynamics. But again, I think that was very driven by those early signals. And coming back to your, your comment about pivoting or understanding when you have that, you know, one of the signals you can start to see once you have a little bit of traction, of course, is, is retention.

A (19:54)

Right.

B (19:54)

And so not just sort of revenue retention, but there's any number of ways you can look at how many, you know, what's your dau to MAU ratio and how often are people coming back and using an app or what, what hooks can you kind of evolve to re engage people and all that?

A (20:14)

One of the things I call it is a premium feature. User retention is the thing you're going to sell something that people keep using. And so if your subscription, if your paywall has locked a feature, a hard paywall would lock all features. So any feature would be premium user retention. Premium feature user retention. But yeah, are people coming back to that thing that you think is the hook that is the valuable thing in the app?

B (20:39)

I actually think this is a really hard problem.

A (20:41)

Yeah.

B (20:42)

So we're, we're, you know, 10 years later, right? We have a lot of features. Some of those are locked behind. We have multiple tiers of subscriptions, including a standard and a premium today. And the discussion of whether something should be included in the premium bundle or, you know, used to drive engagement at the free tier or the standard tier, I think it's, it's not always obvious.

A (21:06)

No, it's not. But having that signal of people coming back to it is key. You can make a lot of money with a Gimmick like the $99 download. I mean, the Ibear app, you know, this is a famous example of that $0.99, you pretend you're drinking a beer.

B (21:23)

I love that era of the App Store, by the way, the flashlights. It was great.

A (21:27)

But you're not building a real business. You're making, I mean, whatever that guy made, like, you know, hundreds of thousands or a million dollars. But it's a flash in the pan because it's not something that people come back to and they're not pretending to drink a beer on a weekly or monthly or even annual basis. You do it a few times. It's a funny party gag. And that's where the paid up front actually made a lot of sense for those kind of apps. Where today I think you do see a lot of people with that kind of app charging via subscription. But they don't have any retention because you're not going to keep doing that thing. And so it's kind of more flash in the pan and you're, you're. And so I mean, you know, more power to you if you can capitalize on those kind of moments and that kind of attention. But that's very different than trying to build a real business. So I wanted to get back to the raising vc. What was your thought process in raising at that time? And then kind of how do you think about advising folks, especially today in the mobile space when whether or not to raise and how to think about raising?

B (22:28)

Yeah, sure. So this might be a contrarian opinion, but I, I would posit that most apps, and especially most like consumer apps that are sort of one or two person founded startups shouldn't raise vc. They don't need to. I know it's a popular topic of conversation, but I tend to think that institutional capital is really not designed very well for that stage for particularly. I mean we were talking about some of the flashlight apps and some of the. More I don't want to, I don't want to say gimmicky in the sense that sometimes these things can start with a small insight and get traction. That may be ultimately a meaningful insight, not just a gimmick. But I don't think that necessarily follows that it's a good idea to raise, you know, real vc, which, you know, is driven by VC math. Right. Which is driven by the idea that any one investment could potentially repay sort of an entire fund. Right, right. In terms of returns, it's actually pretty hard to do that when you start doing the math. You know, you have to have these hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of outcomes at the end in order to make that work. And that's actually even more true today than it was then. And then I think you cross that with consumer. Right. And, and you're kind of really working on early signals. At the time we, we were a little bit innocent and it was a different time in terms of, you know, you could still get press, you know, that was, there's an app for that essentially. And you know, we thought we could potentially build a very big consumer scale business here. We have built a very scaled business. I was going to say, but, but it's not a billion dollar valuation scale business today. I mean we're, we're on track, you know, for, for a large scale business, but it's taken a long time.

A (24:26)

Yeah.

B (24:26)

So speed of return matters. And you know, we've built A very authentic, durable business. But we've kind of done that in some ways despite having raised vc and we've had very supportive investors, but I think we got very lucky with that. For most founders, I would say my advice generally is don't raise VC because you can raise VC because you feel like you have to. Right. Or you really want to. And kind of you understand what's behind that.

A (24:57)

Yeah. And then maybe adding on to that, make sure you raise from the right folks that if it doesn't turn out to be a venture scale business, they're not going to sell it for parts, put too much pressure on you, run the business into the ground, or any other number of things that some VCs will do in that situation.

B (25:13)

Choosing your partners carefully absolutely goes without saying. I mean, and there's, there's lots of advice out there on this. It is ultimately a fairly rare situation where the founder has like so many different offers of funding that they get to pick. And so, so a lot of times, you know, a founder is faced with a choice or founding team is faced with a choice of, here's somebody who wants to invest in me. They want to put, you know, $500,000 or, you know, $1.5 million into my company and they're kind of setting the terms and you have to say yes or no. Right. And so I just think it's really important to understand what's behind that.

A (25:49)

You just said earlier that, you know, when you were launching Burner, the Twilio account was on your personal credit card. So how do, how do you recommend folks navigate those early stages where a little bit of money would help? I mean, this is something I hear all the time. It's like, gosh, if I just had, you know, 20, 50K to kickstart UA or to at least try, or I need money for this or that. I think that's, that's why people, I think, idealize raising vc is that if I just had more money, money would solve the problem. So how do you get through those early stages without any help?

B (26:25)

Yeah, well, the classic three Fs friends, family and Fools is probably the right source of capital for, you know, that sort of early. I want to throw a few ads on, on Facebook or something and test it with some users. You know, 20k can go a long way. You can't really sort of quit your day job and pay multiple salaries and, you know, kind of have enough money in the bank to just go design apps. If you've never, never done this before, you know, at Least not reliably. Right. That, that's a big sort of bet. But if you are scrappy and you're, you know, able to be personally sort of low burn, whatever your personal circumstances, and you just need a little bit of money, you should not be even thinking about institutional capital. If you start to have some early validation, you start to get maybe a wider set of options and you can start to think about things like the Y Combinator program or other programs like techstars that do put some cash in but do so unfairly open ended governance. Right. So there's this whole stage or kind of model around safes and convertible notes and things like that that they sort of set you on a path toward venture capital, but they don't absolutely lock you in if something goes sideways. And we were in that stage for a while and that and that, you know, kind of ultimately it worked out really well for us the way we did it. We have a VC who's just very aligned to early stage founder led companies, founder collective, and they've been very supportive as things have evolved. Kind of off the classic Alphabet series of rounds one after another. And it's nice not to have to go raise more money in order to survive as a company. Right. But if you're trying to compete in a large category or in a SaaS business or something like that, you kind of have to do that. And that's when VC is maybe the right choice. Right.

A (28:21)

This will be a much smaller audience, but I think even those who aren't in this situation and would be curious and we'll learn something. What was that transition like and what was the time span from we're raising vc, we're going to be a billion dollar outcome to okay, maybe we're not and let's not raise more and let's shift to a slower growth, profitable mindset.

B (28:44)

Yeah. So we closed our angel round right after that sort of first launch and we raised about a $2 million VC round within a year or so of that. That's the one I'm referring to. And it was with that that, you know, the job of around, right. From a sort of classic point of view is to prove something or validate something. And so we were trying to go out and use that. Really you're buying time, right. And you're buying time to validate a market. And we were trying to figure out, you know, how big this market might be after a period of time, you know, we were starting to run low on that cash and we had tried a lot of experiments including trying to make a freemium business out of burner. Very much has a similar formula today as it did back then. It's, it's, it's evolved in a lot of meaningful ways, but at its core it does one thing really well. Right. Which is download app, get phone number.

A (29:36)

Right.

B (29:37)

Okay. And those phone numbers cost money.

A (29:39)

Yeah.

B (29:39)

So you can't just give it away to a million people and Hope, you know, 1% of them convert after some number of months. Right. You have to figure out a way to make that a. Or well, you can do that with a lot of capital. So we tested some things like that to see would it make sense to raise more capital and do more of that. There were some other ad supported competitors kind of in the market emerging around the same time we did. And we were looking at those and trying to do the analytics on what they were doing. And we saw potential to have kind of a business that was a mile wide and an inch deep, but we weren't sure how it would get to be really valuable down that path. And what we were seeing in our business, we were from the beginning revenue driven, kind of a premium app, like a good experience. We're investing a lot in the craft of what we were building and trying to use technology creatively to give people a good experience and then charge for it. And people were paying, add a new subscription tier or add a new higher price point and people will. Some people would buy it. Right. And renew. And so it became clear somewhere in there that this was going to be a nice, you know, healthy business and grow at a certain rate. But it wasn't going to be, you know, kind of 200% growth year over year and scale in that way, at least not in any way that we had unlocked. And so, you know, there was a period of time where we considered going out for more money. That it was on the timeline. It was time to go raise a series A. It was clear we didn't have the metrics for it. Right. And so that's the ultimate test of whether you should raise VC today is at the end of that cycle, will you have the numbers to go raise a subsequent round? And we didn't get there. So we had some insider support to kind of convert the business into a break even at the time business. And we've been really profitable ever since. So for six or eight years we've been, you know, either break even or, or meaningfully profitable and while still also growing the top line, which is great. It's, it's a. And it's a, I mean that's ultimately.

A (31:48)

What you're trying to build toward. And so you just got there quicker but then grew slower. But you started with profit, which is great.

B (31:56)

Yeah. Well, I mean, just to give you some numbers.

A (31:58)

Right.

B (31:58)

So I think we had our first million dollar annual year at about two and a half years in and then you know, we had a five million dollar year by about five years in and you know, it took another couple years to get to 10 million and now we're, we're multiples of that today. But it, you know, this is when I see the dialogue out there about founders flipping apps for 100k or something like that, I think. Well, if you have something.

A (32:26)

Yeah.

B (32:26)

You know, build it. Right. And if you don't have anything, who wants to buy it. Right. And so there's sort of a, my advice would be if you, you know, can, can find the authenticity or the real problem within the thing you're getting traction on, then that's an interesting thing to keep exploring further.

A (32:44)

Yeah.

B (32:45)

And at some point capital becomes an issue. Right. If you kind of saying you're in a situation where it's growing, you're retaining and you need, you know, help, whether that's to do user acquisition and you, you are in a position to increase your, your budgets or you know, product evolution, then you have an interesting problem. Right. And I do see a lot of apps out there sort of in the, let's say sub 5 million in revenue who, you know, they're maybe not going to raise vc, they're not growing at a rocket ship sort of explosive type of rate. But it's a real business and they need capital and so what do they do? The capital markets aren't well set up for that. I don't think today we look more like a growth stage business or maybe a PE business. Right. Not a venture business. But those kinds of investors aren't interested in really small to them, really small is very large to lots of founders. But it's an interesting tweeter kind of problem, I think.

A (33:40)

Yeah. And there are options now surfacing in the market. Bravo Pollen vc. There's others who are kind of filling this gap for that level of company. And then, you know, revenuecat, we're launching a product soon for that, factoring where you can get the revenue ahead from when Apple pays so you can accelerate a little faster. There's little bits and pieces of options for apps today to get some of that, but it's just, it's not like a big, you know, $2 million series, a kind of influx of cash.

B (34:09)

You know, I think somebody, anybody who's innovating in the sort of financial space, serving founders like that, that's fantastic. Right. So that just creates more options for founders. Sometimes, you know, they're not the right price for founders or whatever, but at least they, they have those options and they exist. But you know, as, as a founder of an app, you don't also want to be kind of trying to innovate on the finance side. Right. You just want to, you know, take something off the shelf and you may not be familiar with some of these things.

A (34:41)

Yeah. Well, I want to go back in the story again and talk about the credit system and kind of the transition from credits to subscription and where all that landed, because it's kind of funny, I've talked a lot on the podcast about how if you are a subscription app, and it was actually just the most recent podcast was Ravi Mehta, who worked at Tinder and looking at the demand curve and fitting those consumable credit kind of economy on top of the subscriptions. But you went the opposite way.

B (35:11)

Yeah.

A (35:11)

So early on in Burner, you had a credit system and then layered on subscriptions and the subscriptions were the unlock for you, not the credit system. So I kind of sold your thunder a little bit. Like, tell me how all that went.

B (35:24)

In a funny way, by the way, we ended up in the same place. Right. So today we have a business that's more than 90% subscription revenue. And the 10% or, you know, 8% or whatever that's, that's credits is mostly existing subscribers topping up, not people who are avoiding the, the subscription system. Right. So we, we kind of evolved to that. But we started off as, you know, credits were something you could purchase in an in app purchase. Right. And they were ultimately kind of a consumable. You would use them to get, extend a phone number or get an additional phone number. And one of the differentiators of Burner is you can have multiple phone numbers, Right. So you could have three, four phone numbers. I actually think the right number of phone numbers for most people is not, it's not two. It's not like your main line and your Burner line. It's having a couple of burners. Right. So you can keep one for, you know, your long term sort of podcasts and use one for spam or special circumstances like shopping for a car and so on. Right. And so we had this model that people could kind of mix and match and some of them didn't even have you know, the capability to send pictures, MMs. Right. And so we thought, okay. And in the back of our mind we were looking at games and apps like Zynga, you know, that were kind of gamifying in app purchases. A little bit like a poker chip mentality.

A (36:48)

Yeah.

B (36:48)

So you buy the credits. And then, you know, we had this vision where in addition to phone numbers, we'd have, you know, maybe vanity area codes or special features ringtones or something. You know, we never really did any of that, but it, it worked out pretty well. And when the IAP subscription capability rolled out, we got pretty excited about that and looked for the right product fit to that. Right. So it was very important to us that it wasn't just, well, here's a way we could make money. And a lot of our thinking about growth, by the way, and features is driven by trying to fit an offering to an authentic need or an unmet need among our users. And in this case, people wanted to keep their burners.

A (37:33)

Right.

B (37:34)

They wanted to not accidentally lose them. Yeah, there's some set of users to this day that come through. They need a phone number for a specific purpose. A lot of our users have very high intent, but sometimes that intent is short lived. Right. So you're selling a bunch of stuff on Craigslist. You can have a great experience with a one month kind of tenure as a paying customer. And many of those users kind of come back later. But there's a lot of users who want them for a long, long or indefinite period of time.

A (38:04)

Funny enough, I am that user. I don't use Burner because I got mine pre burner. I got a freaking Skype number in 2008 for my business because I wanted a business number and I didn't want my business number to be my personal cell phone number. And so I've paid Skype I don't know how many hundreds of dollars over the last 18 years I've been running my business. And it was, I was exactly that use case. And so it makes sense that shift to subscription for people like me who have this long term need to maintain a phone number.

B (38:35)

And it's very sticky, especially if you don't use that number all the time. You probably have it on some filings and forms and your post office box and you know if you delete it, you, you miss the renewal notice and so on. So in fact, my, I have a lot of burners, as you might guess. I have a lot of phone numbers. In fact, maybe I'll put one in the show Notes oh, that'd be fun. People to reach out if they want to. But the one that is the one, the last one I'll give up is the one I almost never use. Right. It's the one that's on kind of long term things like that. And so when we went out with the first subscription offering, it was really driven around meeting, you know, a segment of our users needs who wanted to keep their number for longer. And we wanted to make that a fully featured thing. So there was a lot of backstage work to get mms, which at that time wasn't something that was supported by the carriers through aggregators like Twilio. Google Voice didn't have it. Right. And so, you know, nobody had it. We were I think, the first to get it out there commercially and we rolled it into our first subscription offering. So it was a pretty big moment and it was a huge success for us. So that was one of the biggest single step functions in our revenue growth in our history was the day we launched subscriptions. And it was also our first unlimited all you can eat, you know, you can have an unlimited number of texts and voice minutes and photo messages. So it wasn't kind of counted. And that involved contractual negotiation and other things with our suppliers. Right. It got a little bit complex to build as a product, but then was really successful as a, as a SKU bundle. And then immediately we started to say, okay, well what percentage of people are taking the monthly and the annual, what's the retention of monthly? And you know, completely change the, the game in terms of cohort math.

A (40:32)

Right.

B (40:34)

I would say today, you know, we know as much or more about cohort subscription, cohort math as anybody. And it's like a really important dimension of our business and growth. But at that time that was just like the beginning of learning about all of that. That was, I think, our first subscription offering. We had monthly and annual. That's it. And now we today we have monthly one line, monthly three line annual of both of those. And then we have that standard and premium. So that's, that's eight SKUs right there. And then we have the credits for buying up on top of that. But we did sort of slowly deprecate credits on the back of launching subscriptions because our mindset at least originally was well, we should move all of our users through a subscription model and the ones who have longer term intent will retain and the ones who don't will leave early. And so as a consequence of that we have reasonably high churn. And I look back at that decision. And I go, well, we might have been able to fit to the curve even more efficiently if we had maintained a more front and center credits model for those lower, those users with lower long term intent but high short term intent.

A (41:44)

Right.

B (41:45)

So you know, we're constantly relooking at that and testing things and you never know, that may resurface at some point.

A (41:50)

Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. And it's fascinating too that and I didn't know this about Tinder, but talking to Ravi in the last episode, he said, as with you, most of the in app purchase revenue is from subscribers because it's a force multiplier of the subscription. It's not as much a standalone, but I think it can be all things. And so for you right now it is mostly subscribers, but maybe there is an opportunity for non subscriber and to add more on top of the subscription to continue like you said, to fit that demand curve.

B (42:22)

I think products change over time in the context of their marketplace as well. And so one of the contexts that is very important to us is in general the telecom landscape. This is maybe not super relevant to a large subset of your users, but it's if you, if you sort of abstract that. Right. The, the things that we're trying to accomplish are not necessarily well served by having tons and tons of users with really short term phone numbers that are, that are kind of effectively hard to distinguish from, from spammy behavior in the telecom ecosystem. And we think of that as kind of a, a buildup of an increase in the kind of quality of our users over time as well.

A (43:07)

Implicit in what you just said and something you seem to have been very focused on over time is that kind of ethical perspective. And we've kind of like hinted at it a few times here of the, you know, pump and dump and gimmicks and things like that. But I read a story and I wanted to hear a little bit more about this opportunity you had where you saw that users were, were using Burner to game the Uber referral program to get a bunch of money, but you chose not to leverage that in marketing. What's like your ethical framework for how you run the business? And why do you think that's important?

B (43:43)

Yeah, and I think that that's a good example. But there are, there are lots of examples, right? I mean the phone number industry is full of sort of, I don't want to call them scammy opportunities, but, but it's, it's kind of attracts a lot of hustle culture type of people and you know, a great example of that. So there was this moment in time where Uber in its early days had a referral program that could earn you free rides and credits on Uber if you would introduce friends. And we actually got a call from Uber. I don't know, that's how we knew about it. I don't know if I put that in the article. Somebody at Uber's growth team called us and we had, you know, shared VCs and stuff and, and I thought, oh man, we're, you know, they're going to hammer us in this. And they were actually really excited. They were like, this is great. You know, people are, you know, it's, there's some obviously, you know, kind of inauthentic aspect of it, but there were also a lot of people that were signing up for Uber accounts that didn't want to put their real phone number in Uber because they were afraid drivers would call them. Right. And today Uber has this, you know, sort of well architected system that anonymizes phone numbers, but they didn't have that sort of as fully baked in the early days. I think it worked very lightly in certain situations, but a thing would happen where a user would leave something in a car and, you know, the, the driver could no longer call the user and vice versa. And so people were using burners for all kinds of things in the Uber ecosystem. And the growth team was like, we're happy to have this. We just want to understand how it's working. But on our end, we didn't want to promote, you know, hey, get burners and you can get, you know, extra Uber accounts and go get extra referral credits and promote the idea that, you know, a phone number is a way to sort of hack the system. Right. The authentic thing that, that burner solves. And, and this is, this is kind of almost a, like a guiding story for us is I, I, this is something I say internally all the time, which is like to, to team members. If you're stuck in an elevator with the CEO of a wireless company, you know, Verizon Wireless, the CEO is in the elevator with you. What is your sort of 30 second pitch on why burner exists in a world that has, you know, cell phones everywhere? And, you know, the very short version of that is people really want to use phone numbers for many things and those things have a lot of value to them. And even if it's you're texting to make a dentist appointment or you're getting alerts about your flight being delayed, that, that is really important. You just don't want all of that on your main private personal cell phone number. And so it's a kind of, on the one hand, a service to users to have mobile phones everywhere, but a tremendous disservice to users to make them do it all on one phone number. Yeah, and so that, that's a problem we authentically solve for people. Like, we help with that and that's the message we want people to understand about our product. By the way, we do a lot of other things too. We have a vpn, we have spam blocking, and we have AI voicemail handling. We have all these features that we've evolved over the years into helping people control how their data kind of is used on the Internet and how people reach them. But in terms of those individual use cases that might generate a few press hits, you know, that's sort of less an important part of our value proposition than helping people understand, okay, this is my phone number, is my identity, this is what I'm signing in with and I'm registering at the bank with. How can I, you know, just get a little more control over that in a more authentic way?

A (47:23)

Yeah, I mean, just, just again, the thread to this conversation is that in trying to build a long term, profitable real business, not associating yourself with hacks and scams, it's like, yeah, you may have seen a revenue bump from promoting that people could game the Uber credit system to make. You know, you would have, you would have seen a bump and you would have made some money, but you chose not to see that bump and make that money with that long term vision. And so I know you advise a lot of founders, like how do you advise that kind of hustle culture startup person who would otherwise want to take advantage of something like that? But maybe it is a very short term thing that handicaps him in the long run.

B (48:10)

I met a founder not too long ago and he showed me a feature that had kind of gotten some viral. I'm not going to name it, but he'd kind of gotten some virality from this feature. It wasn't in any way a scam, it was a very legitimate thing. It has sort of escaped the event horizon on TikTok and an Instagram. And he showed it to me and I thought, oh, that's brilliant, you know, and, and how's that feature doing? And he said, I designed it to go viral. I don't really necessarily care if people use it. And I don't think a lot of people really do, you know, and I Thought, okay, so it. In no way is that a scam. Right, Right. But it sort of, it was a good attention getter, you know what I mean? And then I think in this particular case, the app is fairly sticky once you get in there. And so I think there was more sort of meat on the bone there than just the, the throwaway feature. But it was a really interesting version of that.

A (49:03)

Right.

B (49:03)

Where I think you can do a lot of things to get attention and you have to do some of that.

A (49:08)

Yeah.

B (49:08)

You can't just sit around and, and product your way to glory. Right. You have to find a way to break out, get attention, do things. And so I just think, you know, from early on we've had many opportunities to take a high road or a low road, you know, and there's, there's a lot of low road tactics out there or just kind of lowest common denominator tactics. That. A good example of that is clones. Right. There's, we've been cloned a bunch of times. A bunch of crappy, you know, fake burner apps out there. We've had opportunities to clone features or emulate, you know, other apps that have, that have been successful and we, we choose to do things kind of the way we develop them independently. And that's, I think that speaks to who we are, not just like. Yeah. Kind of something that's written above the door.

A (49:55)

Yeah. And it speaks to building toward a billion dollar outcome versus flash in the pan or, or being associated. Yeah. Being associated with the stuff you don't want to be associated with as a, as a brand, as a business and everything else.

B (50:08)

Well, and a billion dollar outcome is. That feels like a huge sort of large and unapproachable target for all but a few apps out there. Right. But to say, you know, $100 million in revenue if you're already at tens of millions, it's, it's linear.

A (50:28)

Yeah.

B (50:28)

Right. It's very achievable.

A (50:29)

Yeah.

B (50:30)

And 10 million is very achievable if you're at 1 million and, and you know, fractally all the way down. Right. Like you can really build a real business. It just takes a long time and there's a lot of, in, in, in our case, we think of it as a lot of operational discipline and, and sort of thoughtful process around what we're good at all the way through the funnel. Right. And so like, I think the conversations about raising money, you know, those are premature if you don't have the fundamentals of the business.

A (51:04)

Yeah.

B (51:05)

This is a side note. I used to be in book publishing. I was an editor at a, a trade publishing house called St. Martin's Press before I moved into tech. And at cocktail parties, people would always approach me about how to get their book read or their book published or how to get an agent or how to get an editor. And the answer was always, well, do you have a book?

B (51:29)

Most of the time the answer was no. Right. So it's like, well, write a good book, start there and build on that.

A (51:35)

Build a good product and go from there.

B (51:37)

It doesn't have to be deep and fully featured, but something that works. You can really have a single serving product and then, and then build on it substantially.

A (51:46)

Yeah, well, I want to dive into some more tactical things. I know as a company over time you've done a ton of experiments. So any in the progress that you've made from going from that million to the five to now, tens of millions of dollars of revenue, what were some of the key learnings along the way and the process for obtaining those learnings?

B (52:10)

Yeah, you know, one thing that I think is really important is to focus on analytics as early as you can. We set out from day one to be a data driven company and by the way, to be a very engineering and product driven company, not just a product driven company. Right. And I think there's a lot of overlap there in analytics. As you start to stitch together data that's coming from the product itself, you know, in the client, things that are coming from the server analytics, things that are coming from the marketing analytics and how you munge those together and all that, really starting to understand cohort math and understanding. You know, you could run an experiment and the experiment throws data, but how do you pick the winner? Right. Unless you kind of know what you're trying to actually optimize for. I would say, you know, where we have done, I think an exceptional job is fairly high in the funnel we have, you know, done over the years. I mentioned some of our SKUs, you know, within that there's what's in and what's out of each bundle, there's pricing, there's, you know, kind of what's the default. Right. There's a lot of sort of opportunity to experiment and explore. You know, also of course, the design and the positioning. Right. And that's also true in our ua. Right. We have a pretty robust user acquisition program and a lot of, lot of creative variants and a lot, you know, there's sort of a lot there. Right. And so what's, what's been interestingly True for us consistently. I'll come back to experiments in a minute. But you know, what we don't do as a company is a whole lot of brand marketing.

A (53:59)

Right.

B (53:59)

We have a great brand. By the way, I like to say I love Burner. Thank you. I like to say it passes the F1 sort of car.

A (54:06)

Yeah.

B (54:07)

Like you could, you can imagine it. Right. But, but if we ran, you know, if somebody gave us $10 million and we ran a Super bowl ad, you know, that's not necessarily a very targeted audience for us.

A (54:18)

Yeah.

B (54:18)

And when we have had some, like, breakout mainstream press, you know, every now and again, we've been covered in like Vogue or something, you know, and, and people come download the app, but those people don't convert and they don't retain. Right. And so, so the thing that's been true is we've. We've been pretty focused on. There's a lot of natural intent that already exists for our app. Right. For, for Burner, people go into the app store, people go on to search engines and search for second phone number, temporary phone number, private phone number, burner app, you know, by brand. And we're very good at finding that and harvesting that in terms of getting people to download the app. And then, so we're working with a pretty high intent audience. And those. That gives us a lot of, like, surface area to test different paywalls and different, you know, things at that onboarding funnel. Right. So that's, I think, incredibly important. And the. For a long time has been the biggest single factor in our retention. Right. Which is like, well, what did we, what did we sell them into?

A (55:24)

Right.

B (55:25)

Is kind of the biggest determinant of what their trajectory is as a customer. And what we've been building on is our ability then to retain them. Right. And, you know, give customers more value, kind of stickier features, things that address maybe things they had less intent about as they came in. Right. So, I mean, there are any number of features we've launched, but I'll mention one that was a surprise to me. We have, in our premium tier, we have the ability, if someone calls you on your burner and you don't recognize the phone number, to do kind of a lookup through the telephony system of, you know, and make a pretty good guess of who that that is, who that caller is. And that feature has been very popular. It's funny because when people get burners, they think they're being. They think we're selling their numbers. Sometimes we get these comments like, oh, I started Getting all these telemarketing calls. It's not the one selling 100. I can definitively state we are not.

A (56:29)

But that's the whole point of getting a burner is as soon as you give your phone number out, once it's.

B (56:34)

Out, and then people realize when they would they use this lookup feature. Oh, actually this is somebody, you know, calling me. So that's been really popular and kind of a driver of upsell.

A (56:44)

Yeah.

B (56:44)

And that was, that was really an experiment, Right. It was in a bucket of features that we tested out. I think we had done some surveys and that one surveyed, but I didn't really necessarily intuitively believe that it was going to be a winner feature for us. And so you don't always know.

A (56:59)

Yeah. So how do you think about in this experimentation from pricing to paywalls to onboarding, what are your kind of North Star metrics and how do those shift either even experiment by experiment or year by year? You mentioned earlier you do have a lot of churn from the people who are just like Facebook Marketplace, I just need it for this weekend. I'm going to sell five things on Facebook Marketplace and then they churn out. So how do you balance? I mean, it must be a really tricky thing to try and run an experiment that can generate more revenue on the paywall but then lead to lower retention and getting the wrong people through the door with the wrong incentives with the wrong price. So I mean, it's such a balancing act. How do you think about that?

B (57:43)

I think, you know, if you look at it from the framework of the LTV of cohort, that's probably the right framework as, as a starting point. And it's, it's interesting because that's a hard thing to optimize for in a single experiment. Right. You know, you have to ultimately kind of think about how you segment the customers coming through. And so you might, you know, we have a lot of tools to do that now. Right. So, for example, our highest value customers, we ultimately want to be both in the premium tier and to be longer retaining. Right. So if we have a shorter retaining customer at too high a price, you know, maybe we haven't done that. Right. So we're, we're kind of maybe optimizing the premium subscription differently than we, than we want to optimize a user who's coming in with lower intent or just wants to get a quick hit. But, but a key thing that, that is really interesting about our product, and this has been true since early on. And the thing you don't want to do, I guess is like try to solve a problem that's sort of good enough for everyone but great for no one. Right, Right. And so there is a set of users who just kind of wants to get in and out and there's a different set of users that, you know, needs a number for a long period of time and you know, is going to be price sensitive in a different way. You know how much they're going to be thinking about how much it costs them per year.

A (59:06)

Right.

B (59:07)

Whereas you were talking about, you know, paid downloads. People are thinking about that as a one time expense. Right. So balancing those things really cohort LTV is probably the true north, but within that, you know, you can, you can't wait for those metrics to mature. So you have to kind of project based on things that are happening at day eight or day 30. You know, we have a, a three day trial, we have a seven day trial treatment. And so there are different, different things that you will get bucketed into depending on, on which cohort you're in.

A (59:41)

So with the cohorting, I imagine you're not just cohorting by time, are you cohorting by answers to onboarding questions? Because it sounds like you're not just cohorting.

A (59:53)

Broadly, but you're trying to find. And you and I have talked about this before. Eric Crowley, the tourists versus Locals. For those of you listening to the podcast, if you haven't heard that episode, go back and find it because it's really great. But the idea of like the tourists would be your Facebook people who are just going to be there for a week when they need to sell a bunch of stuff on Facebook Marketplace. But what you're really trying to find is those locals who are going to be around for a long time time and live there and stay in your product. But so it sounds like you're, you're actually cohorting by those kind of intents where you have like a, a tourist cohort and a local cohort and you're, and then you're, you're presenting different paywalls and different options and different pricing based on that. Is that, is that what I'm hearing?

B (60:35)

Well, I would say to date we've mostly done that by presenting different SKUs and different bundles and letting people self select. I do think the, the more sophisticated approach is to understand, to try to anticipate who they are in advance. Right. But there's a phenomenon, first of all, you know, the intelligence is getting better and the tools are getting better to identify Them. And then we also have a lot of users that do that tourist experience and then come back later. So we have, I think, an unusually high percentage of, you know, people who are, let's call them, quote unquote, new subscribers, you know, who incept a subscription, but they're not first time subscribers.

A (61:20)

You've got the smile curve going.

B (61:22)

Yeah, it's north of 20%. It's you know, somewhere between 20 and 30% and it's a very large number. Right. And so, you know, one way of looking at that is like that's a user we failed to retain on their first tourist visit. Right. But also it maybe it's a user that kind of like in a Google search, they had a great experience, they left and they came back again when they needed it again. And so.

B (61:46)

We are, you know, trying to give those people good experiences and maybe do an increasingly good job educating them on why. You know, a good example of this is so at the end of the life cycle of a burner phone number, the user can burn the number.

A (61:59)

Right?

B (62:00)

Right. And so we've increasingly explored what to do at that moment. It's really a fun moment in the app. Right. Like, you know, in the early days, you know, you hit the button and it would do this match sound and this kind of flame visualization. And then like people like doing it so much that they kept accidentally burning their numbers, you know, and there's a lot of support volume, but you know, using that as a way to say, well, you may be done with this transaction, but maybe you want a new number. And so we, we do retain a certain number of people into kind of a second shot there. And you know, ultimately it's about understanding those users. Right. But, but what's been crazy and you know, we're well over 10 years into this company and there's still like the expression is, you know, there's the juice is worth the squeeze. Right. There's still these optimizations that have meaningful, it's not, we're not talking about like tiny bits of basis point types of, you know, little optimizations on whether we underline or what color blue we're using. Right. This is like a meaningful shift of users when we introduce kind of a new, a new plan. We recently tested the making the free trial optional instead of default. And that was a very positive test for us. Interestingly, kind of this is a good example of something that was like a little bit trendy. There was somebody out there talking about, you know, radio buttons at the free trial paywall and this that it came in the door to our company through that kind of dialogue in the app space and the sort of app growth community.

A (63:41)

Yeah, we've talked about it on the podcast.

B (63:43)

Yeah. But internally we said, well, one of the reasons there's an authentic reason for it isn't just a hack. Right. It's like people come in, they want a phone number, they want our product and some people like want to make sure they lock it in.

A (63:55)

Right.

B (63:56)

They don't want to lose it. Right. They really want to. No, no, no, I don't need a trial. I want to buy it. And then other people, you know, I'm not sure, I'm not sure I want to pay for this, et cetera. We'll give them the free trial, you know, and so let them self select. And that's a lot of the, the nuance of that. But it gets more complicated when we get to, I think, more robust features for those users so you can separate locals and tourists not just at the paywall in the sku, but in, in terms of the actual features. So an example of something that's in our premium bundle, I gave one earlier around the phone number lookup, but we also have like an AI voicemail classifier. Not in itself a hugely profound feature.

B (64:40)

We have some other improvements like custom icons and higher quality, you know, video messaging, things like this that a tourist wouldn't care about. Right. But somebody who's using kind of burner as their secondary or tertiary phone number, side by side like with their home number, they're going to want those kind of, you know, higher quality experiences. And so those are bigger investments from a product point of view. And we don't always know if they'll drive, you know, kind of paywall conversion immediately. You don't, you don't know on day eight.

A (65:16)

Right.

B (65:16)

If that's a winter experiment and it's, it may take, you know, real time to build those features, but you'll see it in retention eventually.

A (65:24)

Yeah. And then, you know, one of the things you and I had talked about on the retention front is becoming more multi product and potentially even acquiring apps to drive that retention through bundle and even the, I mean, there's so many layers to becoming a multi product company of solving new needs, of bringing user acquisition in with a different hook, but then has a secondary need. So how are you thinking about that today?

B (65:53)

Yeah, it's absolutely something we're excited about. So we've been thinking about what our customer needs are a lot. And from a product point of view, we try to really come from a place of identifying a problem, validating that problem and solving that problem. But sometimes those problems are, are, are big. We're, we're still a relatively small team, we're about 30 people and that's, that's healthy. But it's a complex app, it's mature. There's a lot to do across, you know, core and product and growth and, you know, operational stuff. And so the biggest single feature we launched that was like a kind of an expansion of the product portfolio is in the first quarter of 2025 we launched a VPN. Right. And VPN is its own category on the App Store. You know, you've, you've probably studied that in detail here and there's, you know, kind of PE stage companies in, in the VPN space and there's a lot of small ones. And you know, we didn't necessarily set out to kind of take over that category so much as to broaden the offering of Burner by, by building that in. There's a like minded customer, right. Who's concerned about their, their privacy to some degree or you know, looking to hire tools that give them more control really ultimately over kind of, you know, how they're seen, how their identity is understood on the Internet. So you can kind of be who you want to be and be where you want to be with a vpn. Right. So that particular product we did with a partnership and it's a white label partnership, there's a provider. And when we were able to integrate that, it was still a pretty significant investment for us.

B (67:40)

And we had to make that investment without. It wasn't easy to validate that need. So it kind of ended up being an expensive investment. It's driven a lot of value and growth of our premium.

B (67:54)

Tier of our premium sku. But it is a, for us, it represents like an example of a buy, build, partner type of portfolio approach. Right. So we decided to partner in that particular case and, and it was the build aspects of, even in a partner strategy were still expensive. Right. But if we had decided to go become a VPN company and build that from scratch and you know, build all the expertise necessary for that. And by the way, that that product exists in the Burner app and there's a desktop version of it on Mac and Windows. Right. So it's kind of a360 product.

B (68:36)

You know, it's an expensive investment.

A (68:38)

Yeah. What was the decision though? To build it into the product versus making it a second product and bundling.

B (68:45)

It as a second app?

A (68:48)

Yeah, yeah.

B (68:49)

Okay. So we've tried that. That's a tactic that has not worked as well for us is having multiple apps. So we have Ad Hoc Labs is the parent company. You know, we have Burner, it's kind of our flagship app. But we also launched an app called Firewall and an app called Dialed to respectively do robocall blocking and business phone numbers. And neither one of those has worked at scale for us. And I'll just be honest, you know, it's. These are things that were, you know, very thoughtful, very, you know, kind of intentional builds. We did all the launch things and all the hardening and quite expensive to build apps from scratch and neither of them got real traction in the App Store. Maybe coming back to that distribution comment earlier, but also in, you know, over a period of time we realize, you know, that the, the acquisition funnel of Burner itself, in part because of our strong organic that's built in and the brand name and in part because of our mature UA program, we have, you know, several million people per year downloading Burner. Right. And plenty of those people could use a vpn.

A (70:05)

Right.

B (70:06)

And those people are a lot easier to sort of get an offer in front of than to go construct a new audience through whatever combination of organic and attention and paid that we would have to do even if we cross promoted. Here's this other app.

A (70:21)

Yeah, no, it's a, it's a really good point. Yeah, yeah, because. And you know, I would think, well, and that, I mean, the App Store is a hard place to get distribution period. And so you, you would think in one hand, oh, launching a VPN app, people are going to search vpn, people are going to find vpn, it's a VPN app. So they find that it's a solution to their problem for vpn. But like that's a whole, that's a whole nother company. Right?

B (70:45)

Yeah. Well, when we launched Firewall, we learned that lesson really fast. And that was before we got Sherlocked when Apple launched, you know, kind of, you know, screen Unknown callers basically killed that app. And we didn't even get to Android on that. Which, you know, you know, all of our products are roughly a parody on iOS and Android, you know, by, by philosophy when so we can serve our customers and increasingly on the web, by the way. But that one never made it past that stage. But you know, it is, it's like you said, really hard to launch apps today. I mean, anyone can do it. It's cheap. It's just very difficult to get visibility and traction and certainly to aso your way to glory is a very difficult thing today. Except maybe if there's a brand new category. I mean, there have been, you know, not just the top LLM sort of OpenAI type brands, but any number of AI apps is an example of a category that's, that's done very well as a sort of new native category.

A (71:49)

Yeah.

B (71:49)

But I think in a, in a highly contested category, we're used to being the incumbents burner. And you know, there's some things that are great about that.

A (71:57)

Right.

B (71:58)

And there's some things that are bummers about that. Right. Like everyone else can target our keyword and cannibalize the organic searches for burner that we think are rightfully ours. Right. But we were on the other end of that when we were trying to compete with Robo Killer and whoever else on Robocall Block. And what is working so well for us by comparison to that is saying, well, we have this robust funnel, we have this user coming in with high intent. That user might be a tourist, that user might be somebody who's like here for whatever you got, but where we can say, great, come for the number, maybe add the text blocking while you're here, or maybe, you know, maybe you like this AI voicemail feature and have you ever tried a vpn, you know, and you can really broaden the offering there. And so we, you know, our vision is much broader than being, you know, private phone numbers. Right. It's really to help users take control of their mobile identity and communications.

A (72:57)

Yeah.

B (72:57)

And so these are tools with which they can do that.

A (73:01)

So then you mentioned build, partner, buy. So we've talked about the build and that's a struggle, launching a brand new app and a new category and a huge investment and everything. The build and partner sounds like it's been a nice value add to the existing app. But I know you're starting to consider buying as well. What does that look like and how are you thinking about that?

B (73:23)

So first of all, the underlying goal there is speed. Right. So it's how quickly can you build things or validate and then build things or partner in things. And you know, how, how much can you drive growth as you get bigger and bigger. Right. As well as deliver complex features to users more quickly. Right. It's like if you have the idea to do something, you know, our customers would love it yesterday.

A (73:47)

Yeah, right.

B (73:48)

So, yeah, we've been in a certain number of conversations to acquire apps. There's sort of a, I think I mentioned it earlier, you know, a little bit of A kind of, I don't want to call it a death zone, but it's a, it's a tough sledding range where, you know, you've got some traction and you've got some revenue and maybe you even have, you know, cash flow to fund a certain amount of growth. But it, you know, where do you go from there other than grind? Right, right. We survived it. We got through, you know, any number of years that, you know, we had a very small team, we had to figure it out and kind of no UA specialist on the team, but we had to do UA or what have you, or, you know, the stage where you have kind of one iOS developer and that person, you know, takes a vacation and the whole thing shuts down. And so we are very keen to grow, you know, in a very tight way. Right. Like, we're not, we're not interested in kind of just randomly acquiring other apps.

A (74:49)

Yeah.

B (74:49)

But we are having a certain number of conversations right now about things that would be, I think, you know, very organic to the Burner brand.

A (74:59)

Right.

B (74:59)

And, and if you think about it, it is a, you know, the, the need that people have for greater control of their communications and privacy extends way beyond phone numbers. Right. There's kind of any number of things that I think are, are good fits for that. So, yeah, we're excited to be looking at that. And we're, we're, I think, good at a bunch of things. Right. So, you know, we've, we've had to develop kind of real subject matter expertise in a bunch of stages of, you know, funnel optimization, analytics and cohort math and pricing and can really leverage, you know, it's not massive consumer scale, but we have a lot of users with a kind of fairly of kind consistent set of needs that we think we could add some more meaningful products to. And so, yeah, we'd love to do that if we can.

A (75:54)

Cool. Yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. And I mean, I guess you're thinking in those contexts both where it would be a standalone app if that app already had some level of traction, but then also potentially buying an app where it would then become a feature in Burner. It would just depend on the fit and how it would fit into the product and stuff.

B (76:13)

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, not, not all apps that are kind of adjacent to Burner would lend themselves to being features inside of the Burner app. I think some would, I think some would, would benefit from being a standalone. But the ideal, and we've definitely given thought to this would be both. Right. So something that has kind of found some traction. We could absolutely accelerate the reach and the development of that app. And it could still continue to be a standalone app that's complementary to Burner as well. So, you know, I, you know, it's hard to generalize that because, you know, every category we've looked at has been a little bit different.

A (76:51)

Yeah.

B (76:52)

But there's some, there's some pretty exciting categories out there and I think some emerging ones that are, that are just emerging needs. I mean, an example just by the way, and this is not to sort of telegraph anything, right. But like, you know, in the world of AI.

B (77:13)

You know, what does it mean to have control over your data?

A (77:18)

Right.

B (77:19)

That, that means something different than the pre AI days when you were focused on maybe Google. Right. And so, you know, kind of what's the facial recognition mask, Right. For. For something, you know, when you want to put your, your medical labs numbers into an LLM and get some feedback on something like that without giving Sam Altman your, you know, personal biometrics. Right.

A (77:47)

This is a very interesting contrast to a lot of the buyers in the market today. Are the rollups or just buying a bunch of apps or, or, you know, I had Blue Throne on the podcast. They're not just buying a bunch of apps anymore, they're buying individual apps. But the whole idea there is like individual apps that kind of scale as their own businesses and a portfolio of like businesses. But this is like a really different opportunity. I'll do the pitch for you. If you're in this space and you think your app would be meaningful to the Burner audience and to the burner brand. His number will be in the show Notes. Text Greg an idea and pitch him on why he should buy your app.

B (78:30)

Awesome. I mean, yeah, I couldn't have said it better. Thank you. But yeah, I mean, I'm not bullish on, you know, app farms. Right. And I think that by and large has not been validated by the market. It makes sense why people thought it was a good idea. And so, you know, some very smart people were operating in that strategy. But I think I wouldn't want to own, you know, ten one million dollar apps. Yeah, right. I just don't think there's that much leverage in trying to scale things that don't connect to one another. Right. Whereas having multiple multi million dollar apps that are complementary to one another, there, there are, it's, it's much easier for us to add 5 million in revenue to our app than it would be to take 500k app and turn it into a $5 million app.

A (79:18)

Yeah, yeah. If you're, if you're trying to pump and dump. Greg is a very sophisticated buyer. That's not going to work out. But it makes sense. You're kind of looking for the sleep stories to the calm. Like you're looking for secondary product market fit to build out this. And so almost.

B (79:37)

That's right.

A (79:37)

As you did with the vpn, it's not even multi product necessarily, but it's multi solution for the audience that you already have.

B (79:46)

Well, that's the starting point. So that's actually a really interesting dimension of it. Right. So if you take, you know, several million burner users coming in a year and then you cross sell them, let's say vpn, that's terrific. But what about when you can then with that combined product, let's say there's another component of it, reach an even bigger audience combined offering. Right. And to the degree that the retention math really drives that. Right. Where you know, a user that comes in, you know, I, I use this example of, of GoDaddy a lot. Like it's kind of an antiquated brand and whatever but they, you know, they kind of, you know, you come for the domain and you end up with a website, an email and you know, E commerce and you know, Suddenly you're like all 84x LTV right customer for them. And, and that, that magic of bundling is not, it's not new. Yeah, right. People have been doing it a long time in cable and telecom subscriptions, but it is.

B (80:47)

You know, tricky sometimes to apply and it's a real opportunity area within. Within I think consumer mobile subscription generally. Yeah, I think if you're not thinking about bundling, you should be. Right. And I think that's where a lot of opportunity unlock for us is both like you said, within the core current sort of scale of the funnel and then in expanding the reach, you know, maybe with a higher CAC target. Right. And a broader, bigger budget. Right. To a, to a broader audience. So we are working on some internal build stuff and some partner stuff that I think expands the strike zone of what burner is as well.

A (81:26)

Yeah, And I think that's a great way folks should be thinking about it too, about that secondary and tertiary product market fit and how to, how to build, build it out into this broader offering. When you have found product market fit in that single thing and you're growing and you're doing well. But then that does provide more opportunity and opportunity to Grow faster. Opportunity to increase that LTV across that cohort. So, yeah, fascinating new direction for Berner and an opportunity I think a lot of people should be considering over the years. I think that's a great place to wrap up the conversation. I've started doing this lightning round and funny enough, I beta tested this lightning round with you and a few other founders on a rooftop in la. It was an incredible evening. There's pictures on the Internet, but we purposely didn't record it. This one will be recorded. So I don't know if you're going to select different answers, but it was so much fun. We did this live. There were about 20, 25 people in attendance. There were, I think, four founders sitting there and I hosted a panel and it was so much fun. And so I started doing this in the podcast. Now to ask these three questions. The first one is what is the biggest. We'll start with the fail. What's the biggest fail of the past year? Experiments, product launch, hiring. I mean, just what's the biggest fail of the year? Yeah, just.

B (82:51)

By the way, that panel was great. And it's a testament to the community being, you know, really coming together here, which I really enjoyed. So the biggest fail in the past year is the same one that we really have every year, which is one way or another is, you know, building things too expensively in the days that take too long, that aren't always the right thing, and kind of ultimately the tax on velocity that incurs because of the opportunity costs. So in the past year I mentioned, we shipped vpn and that is an example of something that, you know, while it's working well as a product, we built it in a very expensive way, even with a partner in the mix. Right. And so if we could run that again, we might have done it in a, in a more nimble way.

A (83:36)

Yeah.

B (83:37)

And I mean, I feel like we learned that same lesson with audio messaging and in that lesson with, you know, kind of infinite numbers of features going.

A (83:45)

Back, it's a tough balance to strike because you, you, you want to put your best foot forward and like build the best possible product. And so it's just so easy to over invest when, when you're passionate about something and you're confident, you're somewhat confident it's going to work and it's working. But.

B (84:02)

Yeah, well, I think that's especially true in a, in a product oriented team. My co founder is this product. He's a design. You know, we have, you know, passionate members of the teams throughout, engineers and they want to build things the right way. Right. So that's an important differentiation. I know this is supposed to be the lightning round, but I know I.

A (84:22)

Was going to say that that's an.

B (84:23)

Important differentiation between just like let's you know, analyze our way to a growth hack. Right. It's like it's a meaningful feature.

A (84:28)

Yeah. Well, we've already blown up the lightning round, so how would you coach yourself and how are you coaching the team to think about in 2026.

A (84:38)

Being able to take those swings but not spend so much every at bat?

B (84:44)

I think the right way to think about it is probably there are no sort of medium sized at bats. Right. You, you either do something that's kind of a painted door test, which is something I know you've talked about a lot, or maybe using you know, kind of an in app modal or something in the onboarding funnel or you rebuild the whole onboarding funnel and that's going to take however many sprints it takes. But it's very hard to do kind of this one surgical thing that involves a complex system and not have it turn into complexity that, that sort of spirals. So that's a big learning and it's one in our sort of product road mapping and engineering kind of road mapping process where we're trying to get, you know, ever tighter about.

A (85:28)

Yeah. All right. What was your biggest win of the past year?

B (85:32)

Biggest win of the past year, I mean aside from launching Premium Full Stop was definitely adding technology to increase our paywall testing speed. Yeah, we were always a very test driven company but we were, you know, shipping one or two paywall tests a month and we're able to do, you know, a multiple of that today. And it's, it's very interesting because it pulled all the, you know, kind of the velocity is now, you know, on the product team. Yeah, not, not gated by the engineering team. And probably the speed to results is mostly gated by analytics now and maturing of data as opposed to how fast can we ship features? It's or excuse me, tests. But it's still true that we don't always know the ones that are going to win. Like, you know, there's kind of one winner for every four or five that we do.

A (86:27)

Yeah, yeah. Paywall Velocity, that's, it's been a big topic over the last couple of years and there's likes there. I mean we've seen a lot of apps do really well. You just wouldn't think that moment would have as big of impact as it.

B (86:42)

Does, but it does that hour of the user journey is just incredibly important. I just feel like I've heard that again and again. And not just the paywall. We want to expand that into onboarding and even sort of win back, you know, kind of cancellation flows, things like that.

A (86:57)

All right, last question. Growth would be easier if, if my.

B (87:02)

Users would stick around longer, especially those tourists. Yeah, it's a hard balancing act, attention versus, you know, kind of optimization at the paywall and when we'll probably talk about the next time we get together.

A (87:13)

David. So why, why specifically though? I mean, you know, the math works out as far as like anybody who sticks around a little longer, you can spend more money on them. The money you spent this year becomes free cash flow next year that you can invest in more user acquisition. But are there specific things you think when you say growth would be easier if retention were better?

B (87:33)

Let me put it this way. If I were advising someone on how to build a large scale subscription business, I would probably advise them not to start with a product that's inherently temporary. Right, Right. So Burner is very churn biased by its nature as a. By its name, throwaway phone number. And people love to burn the numbers, you know, so, you know, all jokes aside, I think we've done a job of evolving it toward a kind of a subscription retention business, but that's almost by kind of the survivor bias of the relatively smaller percentage of customers who stay a really long time.

A (88:09)

Yeah, that's fascinating. All right, well, this is so much fun. Thank you so much for joining me. I really appreciate it. We've already kind of pitched, but anything else? Are you hiring or anything other than people pitching you an app that you wanted to share as we wrap up?

B (88:22)

Yeah, thank you for saying that and thanks for a great conversation. We have a couple of very interesting roles open in both product and analytics and engineering at the moment. And so I would love to hear from anyone who might be interested and I also really welcome hearing from founders in the space. I'm kind of in touch with lots of people. My door is always open and love to be helpful if, if I can save you some, some, some hard years in there in the middle, I'd love to be of help.

A (88:51)

That's awesome. And, and as we said earlier, Greg's phone number, his burner, but his phone number will be in. So text him. I would imagine you'd prefer a text first.

B (89:00)

A text would be good, but it will be really me at the other end of it.

A (89:04)

Yeah. Awesome. All right, thanks so much.

B (89:06)

Thanks, David.

A (89:09)

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