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

Channel: Sub Club by RevenueCat
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGQUPvDHB_4
Duration: 1 hr 2 min
Language: English
Words: 13726
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/vGQUPvDHB_4

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[0:00] Hello, I'm your host David Barnard, and with me today RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiding. Our guest today is Bruno Virlet, co-founder of The Grizzly Labs, makers of Genius Scan, one of the oldest and best scanning apps for smartphones. On the podcast, we talk with Bruno about putting customers ahead of metrics, why there's still massive opportunity to build successful apps, and how a server crash turned into an accidentally

[0:27] successful AB test. Hey Bruno, thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today. Hey David, thanks for having me. And Jacob, really nice chatting with you today as well. Always, David, always. But I'm very excited to talk to Bruno because you were one of, I think, the 15 people who signed up for RevenueCat in 2017. Like, when we launched in December, you poked around. We never made it happen for a while, but like you were very very very very very early, and somehow we've never talked directly before. But I always joke that the I think about probably a lot of people like this, but I I have

[1:01] always the first 20 sign-ups for RevenueCat burned in my head because I looked at them in the database so many times. So, I'm very excited to get the backstory today, so. Yeah, you got some convincing, but you finally got me, so. Yeah, you know, 5 years later, well, no, more than that, 7 years later. Well, speaking of long time in the making, Genius Scan and your company has been a many year journey, almost 15 years in the making. So, I did want to kind of go back to the founding because I think a lot of people would be interested to hear that whole story of of how you got started, how you got that

[1:36] early product market fit, and then how you grew that to what today is a really incredible business. You have 5 million MAU, 10% team, like that's a fantastic success story for a bootstrapped app. But yeah, tell us the story. Yeah, so Genius Scan is the main app that we develop as a mobile app development studio, and we started it like 15 years almost 15 years

[1:59] ago. It will be 15 years in June. Actually, we didn't want to I mean, we didn't plan to start Genius Scan. So, it was my co-founder and myself, we were uh students at the University of Illinois. And we were roommates. iPhone was quite new at that time. I mean, well, I guess that iPhone was 2007. Yeah, well, I think it's 2007 the iPhone, but then the App Store just opened publicly to third-party apps in 2009, right? I think at the 2008 8 2008? Okay. Yeah, so in 2009, basically, I mean, I was like, "Uh maybe we should make an app. It would be fun." I was

[2:32] more like in the Linux development before, but my co-founder was in my roommate, I guess, at the time was in doing a image processing research. And so, we said, "What could we do with that?" We brainstormed, and we had this great idea. It was to make an app to scan paintings in museums. You would do go to the Louvre in France. You would scan a painting. I mean, take take a photo of a painting, and and you would get all the information

[2:57] about it, like who who painted it. Okay, so it was like augmented almost augmented reality, like Yeah, it was augmented reality like, you know, years before it it was something. So, we started working on that. After a while, I mean, we had it kind of working, but then we had two problems. One was that we used a technology which was called SIFT. It was like basically features that you embed in an image and key points that you can identify

[3:24] to recognize an image under any angle. I mean, yeah, it was a And the problem the problem with this technology is that there were some patents on it. And you at the time we were just students in a dorm room, I guess, and we were like, "Patents? We're going to be sued by Americans. You know, what?" So, this was in late 2000, so like 2008 and 9. So, this was before like kind of the modern AI revolution and all the stuff. So, this This have been like They wouldn't even called it machine learning at the time. They would have called it like vision Yeah, it was computer vision. But yeah,

[3:57] and actually my main roommate was doing computer vision at the university. So yeah. The kids don't have any idea how good they have it these days. They slap a image recognition in like with one API call. Throw more transformers at it. It'll figure it out eventually, you know. But yeah, CV was like a different ball game. So the patent scared you and so you Okay, yeah. I mean we were I mean we

[4:20] There were there were alternatives. There were like you know open source alternatives. And then also there was another problem that at that time like if you imagine someone going to the Louvre in Paris to scan pictures, you probably was a tourist, you know, coming from China or the US. And at that time there were no like cellular I mean when you went abroad like roaming fees were crazy high. So When I went to Europe in 2010, I had no cell phone for 3 weeks, right? Like I

[4:44] went to internet cafes. Exactly. So so you would have to download the database in advance on your phone. It was like huge because it was a database of images to I mean even the because we only had signatures of the of the image. So it would it would be huge. It would take I mean and so we all said like I mean who's going to do that? Like but the thing is that when preparing this app, so the way Guillaume was doing it was like taking photos of Van Gogh painting on his desk all the time. And actually we I mean we we were detecting the the painting on his desk

[5:14] and we were like Okay, we could detect any kind of document like that. And that's how we we said okay, maybe we will will start doing a document scanning app and we'll go back to the paintings later. And so you know, 15 years later we are still on the document scanning. And and that's how it started. And for the funny story is that I was I mean what triggered actually the start of the development was in I think it's May 2009. So we had basically the tech but it was in developed in MATLAB on the

[5:43] computer. It was not like a mobile app. And uh in 2000 in May 2009 I was going back to France for a wedding and actually I got stuck in the Chicago O'Hare Airport because of the Icelandic volcano. You remember like the I don't remember the name. It's like I used to flew. And so I was actually I I had flown to Chicago and and and I got my ticket refunded by by the airline. I don't know how but it happened. I was like I saved the money of the trip to Paris and so I went to the Apple Store in Chicago, purchased a MacBook because I didn't have one at the

[6:19] time and went back to Champaign, Illinois and that's where I started so I started developing the app. And actually it's what's reached strike me is that that was in May and in June 22 2010 the app was launched on the App Store. So you know basically the first version of the app was a a month of a month and a half maybe of development and it picked up really quickly. So I don't have the exact numbers in in in mind but it was like we put it as a free app on the App Store

[6:48] and it just shot up the rankings. Was it the first or one of the early scanning apps? I mean there was one another one is what Yeah, I think it was the first app. I mean like the first that was working quite well. Yeah, this was like one of the non-obvious like life-changing I don't know important utilities that a great camera and a good phone could do cuz I never it never crossed my mind that like oh I don't need a scanner anymore. Like I can I can get a good scan good enough scan just with an app that that knows what it's

[7:18] doing and a camera. And so yeah, I can imagine being one of the first and like just locking that down. Yeah, it was kind of magic because for for users I think it was it worked pretty well because you it was like one of those first apps that kind of bridged the physical world and the digital world. It's like it's almost like AR, right? You take a a document and then you we would warp it and present it to you very clean. So it was a I I think it was fun to use and uh and the plan was to put it free as a free app for a

[7:47] few days because it was a you know, it was like a launch offer. So, we would do that and then after a few days we would just put it paid and then you know, make some money. And so, after a few days I put it as a paid app and immediately we went from like I don't know, thousands of downloads a day to one to downloads a day. I think it was 99 cents to be to be

[8:06] Wow. Wow, that just shows this is 2010. So, this is like I think people forget how much the basement there was of apps in the early days of the App Store. Like there was a free fall from like being able to make money like selling an app for you know, $10 or $20 on the desktop to a race to the bottom happened very

[8:26] very quickly. Mhm. Yeah, that's why it was a race to the bottom, exactly. So, so basically we panicked and we put it back as a free app. We were like we were worried etc. I mean, we were just students. We know we didn't have to make a living out of that. Yeah, I mean, a few thousand free users is better than $2 a day. You know what I mean? Like After that we we were lucky to be featured by Apple in the months after that. I think that was the summer. I may remember incorrectly but where iAds launched to the you know, supposedly super high quality ads from Apple and

[8:56] they had like at the time they had like a crazy high eCPMs. I think you had a like $10 eCPM so I know, like $30 I launched with iAd where they just Apple just spending just paying developers basically. no, they set it up with brands. So, like massive brands like Disney and I worked

[9:14] on the dang SDK. You were inside Apple? Yeah, yeah, yeah, when iAds was coming out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I was. Yeah. Yeah, it was and it was really well. So, we were like, okay, that's you know, interesting. We start we are starting to to make some money with app even though it wasn't like really the plan at the time. So, we kept it free and I think in December 2009, so we we We a paid version of the app. So, there was a free version, and there was a paid up front version. The next year, I I think that in-app purchases were introduced. So, then we had in-app purchases in the So,

[9:45] as a lifetime, you know. That was basically to remove the ads. Yeah. And that was to remove the ads, and and slowly we introduced like advanced features. If you want to export to Dropbox quickly, so this was called Genius Scan Plus. That was a premium plan, right? That would have been fairly early, like back in I mean, I guess if you were doing not as a subscription, but as a as

[10:06] a one-time in-app purchase. I think it was as soon as I mean, we basically Apple announced it, and then we announced in-app purchases availability, and we, you know, we benefited from that. Yeah, I wish I could go back in time and and do a better freemium strategy for some of my old apps. I mean, people don't even realize how good we have it these days with subscriptions and everything else, cuz my apps, I had a free version. So, my like one of my early apps was Gas Cubby. It tracks fuel economy and vehicle maintenance. It was actually quite successful. I sold it and did really well from it, but I had Gas

[10:40] Cubby Light that was a free version that had limited features. And then when you hit the limit, you got pushed to the paid upfront app. And so, I mean, man, back then it was just such like there were no kind of free trials and like the multiple SKUs, and uh early days of the App Store. It's crazy how much better things have actually gotten on the monetization front, but I mean, happy accident, honestly, because if you would have been paid upfront, we wouldn't be here today. I think,

[11:10] yeah. What was the story for you and your co-founder from it becoming this like side project sort of like curiosity to like, "Hey, this is this is something worth working on." Like when did you make enough money that you could like not have to worry about a job? We we didn't want to be entrepreneurs. Like I mean, originally, it's like we we wanted to make an app. And it is Well, we were not predicting to be entrepreneurs, basically. So, what when we did this app in 2010 and and then then we graduated in the summer. So, Guillaume, my co-founder, went back to France and he started working for a a company

[11:40] in France and I I stayed in the US and I went to Seattle. I started working at Amazon. And then we kept working on it at nights and weekends and it kind of picked up. I mean, it kept growing, you know, slowly, but it kept growing without work. I think we did I don't think I even remember when, but we

[11:57] started the Android version of the app. And after a while, then I I moved back to San Francisco actually for to work for a YC company. And funny story also that they contacted me because they found the scanning app and they had scanning needs. So, it was called a 1000 memories and they were doing like a scanning of old old photos, family photos. And I kept working on the side, you know, on Genius Scan. So, after after a while, we were like, "Okay, we we work for our day job, but we also work on that. We really like I mean, it means that we really like that. We

[12:28] should go full-time." And at that Well, in 2014, we went full-time on it. We had you know, enough money to make a to to make a living out of it. So, it was already making enough money that you didn't have to like starve. Yeah, that's I mean, we can talk about that later, but basically to we didn't have to raise funds, right? We Just do it. Yeah. I think also too, did did you find that once you had made the jump and like once this was your main thing, did you find it I mean, obviously you had more time to work on it, but I also feel like if it's your only source

[12:56] of income, you're a little more like aggressive and motivated to like make it work better and like grow it and things like that. If if it's all you've got. So, I think when we started, we had like some conf- I mean, we we could live out of it. So, we were not like grinding to make a living. So, I think if we were like if it was just enough to live, maybe we would have what you describe is is true in our case. Yes, I

[13:16] mean, we it's we were full-time on it. We had the time to maybe explore some things that we couldn't have otherwise and then grow a team, something we didn't want at the beginning, but You know, for those listening and and kind of maybe tuning out at this point thinking, "Ah, I don't have a time machine to go back to 2009 and build a scanning app." I actually think today we're kind of seeing this new wave with like AI, AR is coming. Like what was unique at What's so interesting about this story is that there was a combination of multiple technologies that came along that you leveraged into

[13:49] a business and it grew over time. So, today there's all sorts of new stuff coming out with AR with new sensors, with new And so like there's been so many different points along the history of apps that new things have come out that create new opportunities to create new businesses. And sometimes it does

[14:07] take years and years and years to grow. You know, indies out there listening when, you know, it's like 3 years in and you haven't made that much progress, but then the fourth year it's like, "Wow, I can actually go full-time." Like it happens and I think it can still happen today. Yeah, and even at the time everyone was saying the gold rush was over. So, maybe it's not the gold rush of the early App Store days, but you know, I mean I think like subscriptions came for instance and they they started a new like dimension for monetization themselves. So, so it's always like you can always say it's too

[14:36] late, but maybe it's too late to do, you know, what was I mean, the thing is is by the time you recognize people being successful, those people it wasn't obvious when they did it, right? Yeah, we don't go compete with Microsoft, right? Right, exactly. Like people that you're looking at folks who are like like struggling to start right now and you're looking at folks that are already successful and you're like, "Oh, I missed the boat." It's like, "Well, you missed that boat, right?" There's always another boat. At least there has been for 1,500 years. Like we've been always like inventing another boat you can catch. And but the the root story of

[15:08] like recognizing an unfilled technological niche, building something. You guys took a like, you know, one path which was like slow burn, build it on the side, eventually have enough like that that there's many different versions of that you can do, but it all starts with like finding something that people don't have that they want, right? Yeah, and I mean and you are giving us credit for that, right? Because to be honest, we started like it was like a serendipity, right? When we started this scanning up, we had the needs because we were in a students in the US, we always like we are moving around, we didn't

[15:40] have much stuff, so we would scan documents. We had to register for, you know, immigration stuff. So we are always always had documents to scan, so we kind of had a need, but like everyone Yeah, I think also you you must factor in like a like the luck factor to be sometimes the right place at the right

[15:56] time and yeah. No, but the luck factor but that's you name the company after yourself, clearly. It was ironic, right? Yeah, the luck factor is that you got right the first time. Like that's the luck. You know what I mean? Like I think if Well, actually you kind of didn't. It was the second time. It was the second time because the Mona Lisa scanning app

[16:12] never went anywhere, right? I like the whole idea of the catching the boat kind of thing. I mean, we see this in RevenueCat data. We should do this, Jacob. Do an analysis of apps founded in different like different launch dates of apps. And I bet every single year we could find an indie, a big company, a mid-size company, a bootstrap company, a funded company like in 2015, there's a cohort that launched and some became huge and some are indie success stories. In 2016, it's like there's boats leaving the harbor every Yeah, we have we have now seven years of cohorts and with the exception of maybe

[16:50] the first year when they were very thin cohorts of very few people, like every cohort has somebody in it still alive, still thriving, still growing, still compounding. So that's the luck aspect of it. Like it might not always be you in that cohort, right? But like it'll be somebody, right? There's a boat to

[17:06] catch, you know? Yeah, and also I think when you find what this idea is like if people will jump on the boat, then you will find you know, after this boat you will find a lot of, you know, other boats trying to Other boats. to copy what, you know, to do the same like take the same wind and and and you know, like for instance there are like now there are many scanning apps and many of them are like I think doing well. I don't know how profitable they are and that they've been around for a while. So, I think every idea then you can like

[17:32] replicate it to some extent and after a while maybe the market is saturated and and then you need to catch another, you know, Yeah, it gets harder. But like I mean that's a good that's a good point to talk about cuz what when did Apple like iOS has native scanning now, right? Yeah, you not only have a ton of competitors and it's a another kind of fun part of the story. You not only have like hundreds of scanning apps in the App Store now. It's been like one of the more popular categories for people to go try and build an app. But not only that, then Apple introduced scanning native

[18:03] and now you have AI and like it like seems so obvious. Like how do you think about competing and how have you thought about competing in this landscape where it's just like a thousand flowers are blooming but you're one of those. I mean we we worried about about it a lot early. I think when the new scanning apps were launching or competitors were launching new features in the early

[18:25] years we were like oh no, we are done. What are we going to do, you know? And even worse like with yeah, I think WWDC after like first it was fun and after a while you had like every every year you had like this uneasy feeling of what are they going to announce that might, you know, affect us in a bad way. And scanning like when they released like scanning so they released the your scanning in notes in the files app I think. We were like okay, maybe I mean how good is that for us and you know, what everyone says that I mean Apple covers like the basic needs and

[18:58] when you want to go deeper you will find a more specialized app. They will also, you know, make people aware that oh, you can do scanning with your device. So, has it affected us in a bad way? Like we never saw, you know, Apple release scanning and our growth stalls or we lose customers. I mean, we have like anecdotes, you know, some people telling us, "Oh, I stopped using your app because Oh, why would I use your app? Because I use scanning in notes, but I think in practice we are fairly confident now

[19:24] that our scanning is is better." I'm biased, but but it It has I mean, it like the quality of the scanning is you know, speed of it is actually better. And we offer also like a bunch of features. It's not only scanning, it's like you know, scanning, organizing your documents, exporting them. People are really like surprising how I mean, important it is that's two parts, you know, for for

[19:46] people. Make it easy to export. For instance, we have features like where you scan a document and it will auto export it to a specific folder in Dropbox depending on the document name. I imagine there's a lot of like prosumers that use Exactly, yeah. Yeah, and could be like small you know, small companies. They need like they want something a bit more advanced. They they want something that scans well for instance, in low light conditions, which other do maybe as well. And a lot of small factors that when people do some research, they will still like go to people like us. So now we are more like

[20:19] I mean, we are less worried about competition. And we have like you know, we have because we have the competition from other independent like companies. We have competition from the platform. So Apple and Google have introduced like scanning, but also every major like cloud storage, so Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, they all have a scanning module in the in the app. I mean, we are still growing. So maybe we will grow more if they didn't

[20:41] exist, maybe. Yeah, two observations is one, in this category, there's a lot of charlatans. All right, as David was kind of alluding to, there's a lot of people who just make the cheapest, fastest, whatever, pump it with ads, do cross promo. It's actually a piece of junk. So I think you all being like one of the few reputable brands, it's probably you and Adobe, you know what I mean, who actually are like

[21:04] kind of a trustworthy brand in this. That's probably a huge advantage that nobody can replicate. You can't replicate that earnestness, right? And that reality. So, you're somewhat differentiated, even if not by features even, but just by brand. But then also, I think and this kind of goes back to the bootstrap point that you guys are bootstrap, that you haven't taken capital. I think like it depends on your expectations for return on investment, too, right? And that's up to you. If you and your co-founder are the sole owners and you guys can kind of decide like what your expectations are, you can survive well in a in a very competitive

[21:35] environment. Most businesses in the world are in extremely competitive environments, and there's still great, you know, ways to spend your time and build things. It's when you need to win a winner-takes-all market that competition becomes a problem, right? Yeah, it's it's like like food delivery apps, you know? Like in Europe, I don't know how it is in the US, but they've been like you know, killing each other like and buying each other. Some have a bankrupt, and and it's super competitive because they they you know, they raised huge funds, and they need to basically they need to take over the market. And now there are like

[22:06] a few in in France you have Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and that's it. Yeah, it has to be a monopoly given how much money has been pumped in it, right? Otherwise, it's not worth the the return on investment. And in our case, we yeah, we see that very differently. We want to you know, we want to be profitable, but we I mean, we invested time in it, right? We exchanged time for money at the beginning, but otherwise, we don't need we I mean, we don't have a need for ROI. And currently, you know, both me and my co-founder, we have kids. We want to spend time with them. That's we have the

[22:34] freedom of doing that and to like really spend time with them, and we would have raised, you know, money or we would be super aggressive in our you know, monetization. Maybe we wouldn't be able to You might end up like one of those charlatans I mentioned, right? Exactly. And it's it's it's important to know why why you are in business I mean, what are you in business for, right? And I know your your motto is like help developer make more money, but it's also like you know, help like Only as much as you want to make, you

[23:00] know, and not a dollar more. Exactly. I mean, it's it's it helps you live the life you want like in a way, all right? Yeah, really you have to think about what's success for you. And it maybe it's not just the most profitable. And about that as well, like I've been worried about like I mean, we have we have tried I've tried to improve like ASO on the App Store and we are fairly I mean, well ranked. So, if you look for scanning, we'll find us in the five results. And I've looked at the you know, the one above us and I'm like, why are they above us? And I have

[23:29] tried to understand all the reasons why they could be on top of us and and I mean, there's no like reason, I think, due to our the way we named the app or we have like a very good number of ratings per downloads, everything that figures, you know, recommend you do well. And and there is one thing is like the download velocity. I think it that's important. Like the more downloads you have, the more you raise in the rankings in the search results. But, you know, it's kind of the I don't know do you say in in French we say snake eating its own tail, but um

[23:58] Chicken and egg Chicken and egg Yeah, the chicken and egg problem. And and because if we're not in the top results, then And I looked at the top ones, but then if you look at them, you see that most of them they purchase App Store ads. So, in the end, they are before us in the rankings, they are purchasing ads, but what's what's their profitability? When you see their revenue numbers in App Figures, that doesn't deduct how much

[24:19] they pay for ads. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're probably they're probably running incredibly thin margins, maybe even negative margins because they're leveraged. They might be borrowing money. Maybe. I don't know. Maybe not, but I'm I'm sure they are not as profitable as they look on the on the App Figures revenue numbers. And so, again, yeah, yeah, we have to to look at it's hard to you have to to know exactly where you are and if you are maybe not at the top one, maybe you are doing well

[24:45] enough. Yeah. You have more equity in your app than somebody else, right? That may be above you in the rankings in the fact that, you know, it actually is profitable and it or more profitable and that that increases the like value. And then there's I think this is this is gets for a bit philosophical, but you know, we tend to talk about equity and an an asset in terms of the dollars it would get at market. But then you were alluding to there's more than just the dollars that we get at market is as to the value it is to you and your co-founder and your team. It's like it's

[25:12] meaningful work. It's something to do. It's like a way to live. It's it's all of these things. And even though like the independence we have like we because we we've been approached a few times like by companies interested in and you know, the first you start talking with them, but after a few times like you say just no. I mean we we like what we are doing if you know, if we were acquired we would you know, work two

[25:33] years for you and then what would we do? We would like this app is I mean super interesting to work on it. We have customers who love the app. When we add a new feature we can see the effect like we have customers thanking us for for for it. It's like super rewarding. You're starting to make it sound like you don't like money and that the app is just like this stagnant annuity that sits off in the other I said it's growing David. It's not

[25:55] stagnant. No, but that's what I was going to bring up is that part of the reason you actually approached me about coming on the podcast and it's a that over the last few years you've actually been doing a ton of experiments and actually trying to grow the app and have been very successful grown MRR almost 3x in the last couple of years. So I did want to like start digging into like now you're a subscription app. The story a lot of people can't relate to all the

[26:19] early days of the App Store and stuff. But I think what what a lot of people will be able to relate to is 3x revenue by experimenting with stuff. So I wanted to dig into that. So what are the things that you've done in the last couple of years that really moved the needle on

[26:32] that? Yeah, it's interesting because we yeah, we I mean we started using subscriptions I think when they were introduced in 2017 and at the time we didn't want you know, to force subscription on our users because they um I feel like utilities it was one of these things where it's like a subscription going to fly, you know, are

[26:48] people going to pay for this? And people didn't receive subscribe I mean yeah, you could get a lot of backlash from your customers, right? And so, what what we did is basically we added a subscription for a new service called Genius Cloud so to back up and and your documents in the cloud and and actually we kept the one-time purchase for the premium features. And so, this basically the customer were paying for this back up and seeking the cloud, but they were buying storage and they were understanding that you buy storage, there is a recurring fee, you know, it was more like a And it wasn't I mean, we didn't get any

[27:21] backlash. And I think in 2020 we what we did is that we switched we started adding premium features to that subscription. We renamed it from like Genius Cloud to Genius Scan Ultra. And we had two tiers of subscription. We we also added Genius Scan Plus tier. So, that was the the former like legacy

[27:38] one-time purchase became a subscription. And what we did, we grandfathered all our existing users. So, the one who have purchased it in 2010, they for 99 cents, they still have it like the premium most of the premium features maybe. Trust me, taking something away from somebody, even if it's 99 cents, almost never worth it. Yeah, exactly. And and and they can go to the premium more premium plan if they want to add more Yeah, give them paths to upgrade. You don't have to give them more stuff. I think you give them, you know, you can hold back features and stuff like that, but like I think I've seen folks like

[28:12] sometimes there are reasons to go back and raise prices, but like typically it's just the the backlash is just not worth it. That can cost you your whole business. Especially if you're in a I think it's still like a growing expanding market where you know, you have more user coming. You don't have a like a fixed user base. You don't have to yeah,

[28:29] nurture your existing user base, right? And so, at that time 2020 we had like two subscription tiers. We had Genius Scan Plus which was I think 99 cents a month and Genius Scan Ultra which was a three dollars a month. And they like you know, equivalent pricing for yearly. After that that we start we didn't make any experiment at the time. We just you know start two tiers, one for lower end like purchase there and and more premium purchases. And after last year we started experimenting. And what we did is that we removed plus tier. So still we grant I mean we everyone keep using it, right? And we

[29:07] kept the pre ultra tier. And that what we noticed is that demand curve is not elastic at all. Like people who were like we had a 100 great purchase per day split between plus and ultra. We still had a 100 purchase per day, but it was ultra. You're very far off of like where the main of elasticity, right? That doesn't surprise me. Was it still 99 cents when you No. No, no, no. So now I mean well I

[29:30] mean yeah. The low tier was 99 cents. Yeah, I bet that was cuz I would have guessed that that's probably already on its own way under priced. So you were probably preventing a bunch of users who would have paid more for that and happily paid for the ultra, but they were just like this is good enough. And so by make yeah, it doesn't surprise me. But these are the things you don't know that until you try it, you know, that's going to

[29:50] make a difference. What we did is like we are now we have the last year we had the still like the ultra subscription with a monthly and yearly subscription. And both were exposed at the same level. And basically we buried the plus monthly subscription. So you could still access it, but it was you would have to go a bit further in the paywall. Same thing we had most people switch to the yearly I mean everyone switched to the yearly subscription. Ultra subscription now is was I think was it was 20-ish 25 maybe in 2020. And now it's 40

[30:24] I mean 40-ish. like $4 a month, $3, $4 a month, right? Yeah, which I would bet I don't know what your competitors are priced at, but I would bet that you guys are still probably comparatively low. I mean depends because I think most of lots of competitors do like stuff with weekly subscriptions, you know. Yeah, sure, sure. Yeah, yeah. I was going to say that even that 99 cent price point that you guys were able to run for a while, I think that's doable for you because you weren't dependent on paid acquisition. You kind of had your own destiny and by doing that you preserved a tremendous amount of brand

[30:55] equity. You probably were you know, that that's what endeared you with the customers and so even though like you maybe left $3 a month on the table on that, you have to imagine like what you may you probably also gained which is like a still a position a fighting position against Adobe. You know, like a hundred billion dollar

[31:13] company. Yeah, and also far as you can actually because we switched from I think it was $9.99 one time purchase at the time. We said we switched switch that to one night $9.99 a year, you know, it's already like for us it like if if some people people stick like a few years it's already you know, a great upgrade, right? And so that's that's way where it came from and I think it's fine. I mean you have to easy to have regrets but we can keep experimenting on that and I think looking at the pricing increasing it's the part of the next experiments we want to

[31:41] run with with revenue get. Yeah, I mean if you're building new things and you're providing more value, like keep messing around with it until you you know, it'll always probably be worth it. I mean we're still looking at our pricing like every year, every other year, especially on like like our sold side like there's it's more easy to experiment there. I wanted to like kind of jump back but like it's related all this stuff but when did you all like bring cuz you mentioned hiring people like that's kind of a big jump to go from you and your co-founder to like now you're an employer, right? When when and why did you make

[32:12] that decision? So in 2014 I I moved back to France and we started working with Guillaume and I think in in 2015 we started hiring first employee. And what prompted that I think that what was that we had too much on our plate. We were like doing so many things and we needed a new another iOS developer to help and we recruited him and and that's still how we do things now is like when we feel like um we feel a bit of pain, you know, we start hiring. It doesn't mean that we overwork, but it's just like when during your day you are I'm still

[32:44] developing and I I don't, you know, I like for instance last year I was doing like a product and and support and developments uh administrative work and I can't do all that if I want to still, you know, do some development then I have to offload product and support for instance to other people and that's how for instance we hired like a support

[33:00] person 3 years ago. Uh product manager like this year for instance. It's interesting there's an implicit choice you made there that maybe you didn't even think about, but you could have not hired somebody and just done less stuff. You know, but you did choose you did choose to instead of taking the path of like dialing back and just being happy with what you had, you said like no, okay, let's make an investment and like let's take some risk and And you say an investment we but we yeah, it's not again it's a bit different I think from venture funded companies where you, you know, you make

[33:27] a business plan, you say, if I raise this much money, I will hire hire all these many people in, you know, sales and and developers and And that's the plan. Never goes as planned, but Yeah, I just stopped making plans. Like I made two of those and they did they were fantasy, so I just like we're just

[33:41] not going to do that. We do what you do. I do what you do. Just be like what hurts the most and then we hire there. It's still when you talk to other people it generally they want I mean when you raise money you need this plan because they want to know how it's going to be used, right? And so that what also For instance that an invest I mean that's could be the other path. We could say, okay, we're going to invest in more people to to grow. I mean because we think that if we hire uh for instance this iOS I will do this feature and then

[34:07] we'll get more growth and it's not really the reasoning it's more like a we have so many things to do that we want to do. It's not necessarily like they are growth driven. It's like just I have too much on my plate. I need someone. I'm slow walking you Bruno into realizing you're a cold hearted capitalist. I don't know if you I don't know if if you realize what's happening, but we don't have to call it an investment. We can call it whatever you want. I mean there's a reality there that like and I think this is I mean Miguel and I went through a very similar

[34:33] transition like we went a different path once you raise money it was like hire people whatever but I think it wasn't as clear to me and hopefully you've seen this too is like good people you hire good people they solve problems right and you can just do more things and it's there's like two big phase shifts in somebody building a thing there's like I'm building a thing that's a project then there's the first jump which is like okay I'm building a thing it's now my thing it's now my main thing and then that that second transition which we're talking about now which is like okay this is now a concern for other people

[35:02] that I'm going to bring into this thing and like now it's a business that's a company and a business I think beyond that it's actually kind of more of the same right it's like okay like there might be no bigger transition than those two and I don't know I think there's a lot of really successful indies that are kind of in that between those first two decision points where you know David you've always kind of been maybe in between those two where you've like worked with contract you kind of like strung it together and arguably maybe if like you had gotten some commitment and like you know there would have been a

[35:32] benefits to that right but it's it's scary right it's a risk Yeah and it well it was always a conscious choice on my part too though I mean I talked to VCs in like 2008 2009 and I made that conscious choice was like I didn't want to be on that treadmill and I didn't want the complexity of managing people like to me I chose the passion side of it was like it was really fun building apps and I knew it was not going to be fun managing employees making payroll all those kind of things and it was a very conscious choice of of mine and you know looking

[36:06] back I could have built a bigger business and in some ways maybe have been less stressed like Yeah it depends it depends on who you hire I mean I it could have like flamed out or it could have like gone even better because I mean and you know what I figured out over time was like my model with contractors and everything else came with its own like massive headaches and problems and it was there were many times along the journey I was like I should have just hired somebody because this whole contractor like working part-time, you know, not working for months and it had its own nice but but

[36:38] yeah, that I mean there's choices all along the way. I remember Jacob we sat on the patio of the Airbnb at the 2019 RevenueCat offsite with five employees or however many we we were like seven people total at that time and I remember having a conversation with you of like RevenueCat could be this just amazing little cash generating business and the seven of us travel the world and surf and and I remember that being like a decision point for you is like you know, you'd only raise like one and a half million. They weren't like massive expect you know, like Hopefully Jason doesn't listen to all

[37:12] these podcasts cuz I was always fully intended on returning him his capital in in multiples. But there's like micro decisions all along And I'll tell you I mean not to not to make this about me but like I think those decision points kind of never stop. Like as you're scaling a business Brennan, you're going through those now. It's like every year it's like okay, do we double down or do we kind of just be happy with what we got? Do we take more

[37:32] risk, you know? I mean it depends on I feel like it depends on also like where you are in life, you know, where I'm with young kids. I don't maybe want you know, to spend too much time working. I you know, I when I spend nights and weekends doing work, I was you know, 25. It's I had the time to do that and so it's different but even I like I think that for instance we have 10 employees now and that's still you know, we could be 20 but what's you have to take in also in account that the nature of what you do will change then. As David said you can

[37:59] you would I like doing some development but we are 10 people. I can still do some development. If we are 20, it will be less and less development. I will be doing more like synchronizing people, project management. Yeah, people problems. I mean it's just and it depends on who you hire in the company culture and stuff like that but

[38:15] yeah. I mean we are very lucky that we have very little I mean we we try to hire like very independent like people and so we we have very little management to do. We have a you know low turnover. So yeah, it really depends on who you are higher and you have to be mindful of

[38:29] that I guess when you hire. Yeah, which but but even that itself that's hard work. I think for a lot of like technical people who are makers. Ask me how I know. But getting a team right it's very it's technical. It's hard. It's like just hours and then it's very emotionally taxing too because like inevitably

[38:47] you'll make mistakes along the way. You'll have to like give people tough news. You'll have to give you know like just depends on what energizes you and what you know and that's that's a decision that you know honestly like I'll say like when we made that first choice to go raise money and kind of do this versus versus stay in that first zone. Unless you've done it before I don't think it really you don't really understand what that's like. You probably have a taste of it now but I think also it's nice that you have control over your destiny there and you can kind of decide at what pace do I

[39:17] want to like bring this on and like like I kind of forced to it in some degrees, right? Like I kind of have to. Sometimes life if you have no choice it's a little bit easier because you don't have to worry about it. But yeah, you can take it every day. You can take it day by day and depend you know when your kids are older or you maybe you have a little bit more time like maybe it changes like your your mindset

[39:36] changes around it, right? And maybe there won't be any any more documents to scan then. Yeah, right. There you go. There you go. That's a good point. That's a good point. Maybe you should call those M&A people up just in case. Well, we've been talking about like all the growth and uh the journey but every journey has a bunch of fails and when we were prepping for the podcast you wrote down some really great fails. So I want to make sure we got to these. So tell me about some of the like massive screw ups you made along the way and and how you

[40:03] recovered from them. David's a little mas- massive screw up is a little editorializing there. Well, I mean he shared them with me. They were some big ones. There are many related to conversion like to the paywall conversion so it's very relevant to RevenueCat I guess. Basically, we we were always measuring like paywall like how many times the our paywall is displayed from what feature in the app. In the app when you you are trying to use some premium features, that's where we're going to show you the the paywall and it could be you try to export to Dropbox, that's paywall or you can you would try to use

[40:34] a text recognition OCR, that's also behind the paywall. And so in a few years ago we did a an update where we um redid the UX of uh the a screen where you see all the scanned documents. That was a really nice screen. I mean, much better, much nicer and after a while I'm looking at analytics and I'm seeing that our paywall uh is actually displayed much less than than it used to be. So I'm trying to investigate and I don't know it's linked to this refactoring of the screen. So I figured out that it was linked to this uh caused by this uh change of the screen and and the reason why was

[41:12] that we had one of the reason people were opening the paywall for was because they tried to access the OCR of the document and on the former screen we had a button on the on the scan document that you would tap and it would show the you know OCR text and after this refactoring we had moved this button in a basically in a drawer and and was not directly visible and the effect on the paywall displays was like maybe like 10 20% I don't know the exact number in in uh in my mind but Which is a direct 10 20% of your sales, right? Like it's

[41:46] It was actually I think you're also a high intent purchase. So it was maybe one even higher more than the relative presentation. So maybe it was like a you know 10% less displays and 20% less. And that's something I noticed like after like months after. So for months your revenue had gone down but you couldn't quite figure like you thought maybe like the market was shifting you Exactly. That's where it's hard. You have so many factors you have you have seasonality, you know, it's Christmas, people are buying more phones, so you have get a big jump in maybe in purchases, but then in March, I think it happened in March, like maybe

[42:18] you know the Christmas time is over and people stop purchasing. Maybe it was that. It could be yeah, market shifting, maybe it could be I ASO that has changed and we are a small team, we don't have like a you know, data person like looking at this data every day, which I guess if we had maybe No, no, but but we are looking into into having I mean we are looking at the matrix more regularly and we try to like I mean you're the data person, right? I think it's just about making it easy for

[42:46] you to look at that stuff every day. Yeah, exactly. That's so crazy. Like one of the primary upsell features, you accidentally like broke essentially. Did you put it back in that same place and then like like everything like came back? Exactly, we clearly saw saw the result. Yeah, it was and and and there was

[43:05] another instance of that fairly recent. We had so in the free version of Genius Scan we have an ad banner. It's not a third party ad banner because we removed that a while ago, but it's it's like an ad banner but it promotes the premium version. What happens is that so this ad banner ad banner has some text like I think it was Genius Scan Ultra and some text and if you tap on it you show the paywall and it's directly on the main screen of Genius Scan, so it's fairly visible and it's one of the leading entries to the paywall. And this banner is served by a

[43:34] by a server, so we can change the text and and remove it. And what happened is that the server went down. One of the reasons that we tracked taps on the banner and the integer on the database overflow. It was not a big int, it was just an int, so I have a friend of mine whose like favorite phrase is like when we're setting up apps, like stuff he's always he's like always use big int. You got to

[44:00] be optimistic, you know? And so so the app was nicely designed because we had in the app hard coded we had a fallback ad. So if the remote ad banner wasn't displayed we would show the fallback ad. And what happened is actually I noticed in the paywall metrics that our purchase had increased for a while. I guess I should have told the story the other way but I noticed our purchases had increased. I started investigating why and that's when I linked that back to the ad banner that wasn't displayed from the remote server anymore and the fallback banner

[44:35] that was displayed most of the time. So it was like a accidental AB test. It's accidental AB test, yeah. And so the fallback banner was converting twice twice as much as as existing better. We restored the I mean we fixed the remote server and what we still have two banners one with a old text and one with the same text as the fallback banner and this confirmed that the text of the fallback banner was I mean the text and the icon was slightly different but I mean you saw the the images in the in the document and it's I don't understand how how was such small changes can I mean

[45:10] It's the problem is that you're not you're not a thousand people, right? You're one person, right? And you just have to test these things otherwise it's really difficult to reason about. Right but but even just yeah the effect of changing the text test is like I guess it blows my mind that just changing the text changing an icon has such an effect on conversion. I I really don't I mean it's Yeah, I've I've long learned that even if you're a person with really good product sense or you think you have really good product sense there's a limit. There's just a limit. You just can't know like what there's some

[45:39] obvious rules that almost always followed but like fewer steps is almost always better. Showing the paywall more is almost always better. But besides that like I don't think there's a way to deterministically understand like what's going on and it's just it's much faster to just do something. It's It's interesting that what you did on accident there is this kind of concept I try to run in management and just life is like injecting variance. Like just even if you're unintentional a little bit, like change stuff and you'll learn

[46:06] things. Well, you see it's like I'm thinking of Netflix. I think they had the I don't know how it was called but they had these crazy monkeys. It was like a series that would kill a random server. Monkey. Chaos Monkey, right? Yeah, they would break random services. Yeah, to make sure that they had these variants in their back end that make sure that if if it actually happens for a bad reason someday then they they're

[46:28] ready for it, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I I think it's it's super important and like I think sometimes it can be unsettling in my leadership style. David can probably attest to this but like I will just be like, "Yeah, I don't know what we're going to do but we're just going to do something different. We're just going to break it and see what how it how we reassemble it and not try to analytically solve every little thing we do and justify every little thing we do cuz like probably we'll learn more just by trying it and then we will by we'll certainly learn more by trying something

[46:55] semi-thought through than not doing anything and just thinking about it for a very long time, right? And also you you could be completely data-driven but it's it's boring, you know? Where's the fun in that? I want to use my intuition. I mean I'm ready to you can prove me I'm wrong after after I use it but at least let me use it, right? We are humans building companies not Otherwise, you know, you just replace the company by AI just like Yeah, the the human element. Maybe that'll go away once the computers are so good they can replicate the human element but But the question again the question what

[47:25] are you doing a company for, you know? Are you because you're having fun or because you want to make money? And I think both of us is we want I mean it's like you gather a group of people to have fun building something, you know? So Yeah, but it's like if you're just executing sort of mechanically a playbook on strategy, there's nothing differentiated there. You're not going to beat the market if it's some, you know, just being like we're going to AB test and only do that and not use intuition. Like you don't have an advantage. You have nothing unique about that cuz it's just like unless you maybe

[47:52] like maybe Duolingo is a good example. They just were really really good at AB testing better than anybody in the world. Yeah, but even that they have to add the creativity, you know, to create like um And talking to the product manager, we had him on the on the podcast, a product manager at Duolingo, one of the things he said was that that the the founders, I think, end up reviewing a lot of the like winning and will sometimes decide

[48:12] to not pick a winning AB test. Yeah, I mean, there was a period, I think, at Facebook where they were just only following AB test stuff and like you kind of saw the product get a little wonky and then I think they they pulled This was a big meme in in the 2010s, right? My favorite quote on this was Thomas Petit, who of course will make it crass, but if you AB test enough, you're going to end up with a porn app or a gambling And I mean, like if you AB test without intuition, without thinking about differentiation, without thinking about like being customer-centric, which I want to talk more about like how

[48:45] you think about being customer-centric, but like if you AB test without a framework above and like Jacob, like you were talking about like you tear things down and rebuild and everything like that, but we have such a clear mission here RevenueCat to help developers make more money that you can apply that framework against these decisions we're making to like make progress in the

[49:05] direction of serving the goal. It's not like by blowing up the thing, we don't know where we're trying to get eventually, still, right? if I do anything for AB test, you you It's hard to AB test on the very long time. I think like Shopify does that. You see keep like experiments running for like a years, but but most people, you know, you do an AB test for a month

[49:23] and then you say, "Okay, that's better." But then, as you said, like you're going to end up with a That's a actually a interesting point like we at Faraway Engineers in the free version of Genius Scan, we monetize it with advertisement. And we noticed that the the best performing advertisement, they were like for, you know, casino games or whatever is legal to be displayed, but the ugliest, you know, worst quality advertisement are the the one performing better, at least at the time. And after a while, we were like we we I mean, we

[49:52] we didn't want advertisement in the app. It was ruining the quality. It was like ugly. We don't like, you know, making people buy buy they don't need. Like, it's just like So, we decided to remove it. But if we had AB tested, like I mean, what's better? Like, clearly it was better to keep the advertisement.

[50:07] But long term, I'm not sure, you know? The people who still like use the free app have a very good experience. They are the one recommending to their, you know, family. Maybe they recommend their kids use it because there is no advertisement and it's, you know, safe to use or whatever. That's the value you can measure, but you you know, you you can make a choice as a as a leader of

[50:24] the company to to go that direction. This might blow people's minds, but we've never run an AB test. I mean, we've run very very small like marketing page AB tests here, but like we've I've never really run like simultaneous tests on RevenueCat, the product, because like it's it's harder with what we do. But then also, kind of for that reason, I just look at the data. Like, kind of what you were saying. I think there was a point here I wanted to like express to our listeners, which is like this idea of like you don't need a data person, and you don't need like a whole data

[50:51] analyst shop. Just have like somewhere where you can see your five or 10 most important things and look at them every single day. I get an email. The first thing I do every morning, I my alarm goes off, I grab my phone, I go and I look at my I look at my like founder update email, and it tells me all the kind of like the the paywall views. Like, that which should be probably something you're looking at every single day. Like, what is the

[51:14] total number of paywall impressions? Even that, you know, you have like you know, it's Christmas, your paywall view will drop. Or like for us, we are in Europe and like it's Monday, September 1st. I was like, "Where are all the paywall views done?" Okay, it's a Memorial Day or whatever. It's like And and so, you have still to take that into account. And like, yeah, I feel like you can you can do that. And I do, you know, look at the metrics very often, but you also have to, I think, look once a month at like more, you know, Yeah, yeah, you need you need to look at

[51:41] it at multiple scales, right? You need to look at it at the daily scale, the monthly scale. You want to take the pulse, and you also want, you know, to have the higher level uh higher overview of the metrics, yeah. This conversation has brought up like 20 RevenueCat features we need to start working on, Jacob. Better AB testing tools, cuz I never I never did a paywall or pricing test until RevenueCat released experiments, and I was able to do it easily. So, now we need we need AB

[52:06] testing tooling to make this easier. impressions. We need to be tracking paywall impressions. Like, we have it with our paywalls, but like building that in natively and making it in the day in the charts and stuff. Like, that's What you were just saying, what I love about your charts, cuz you're such a data nerd, is that you have rolling

[52:23] averages over different time frames. That that needs to be on our dashboard, too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You see that So, I always chart the I'm just going to get into my chart my chart theories here, but like I always chart the like daily value, and then the 30-day rolling average, and the 90-day rolling average. And like basically, like if I want to know if a metric is healthy and increasing, if the 30-day is above the 90-day, like we're good. If 30-day is below the 90-day, we're not we're like trending in the wrong direction. But then also like the individual days I think are useful for what you said, like

[52:50] oh, did something happen yesterday, right? Was there a big pop somewhere? So. Yeah, charts charts 3.0. There you go. Why are you building this great stuff for yourself and not delivering it to your customers, Jacob? I want that. Cuz I got I got all kinds of stuff to do. I got I got What did What did you say people alignment to do, Brynner? Or

[53:06] like something like that? And speaking of customer-centric, there's something we were talking about before we hit record. I wish we had to hit record when we were just chatting. And there's so many good conversations before we hit record on the podcast. So, we can try to recreate the magic, but we were talking about AI chatbots and like pretending to do customer service with AI, and you brought up like how un-customer-centric that is. So, I wanted to like keep pulling on that thread of just how customer-centric

[53:35] you think in building Genius Scan. And one of the main thing we, you know, we don't have values on our website, but but one thing is that we try to build the app we want to use, right? And when part of that is that when you you have a problem, you you contact support and you get the answer you need. And you know, it could be I mean, you can go on the knowledge base and find the answer, but you can also want to talk to someone and they give you an appropriate response. I mean, we are so used on websites and and apps to you you there's a chatbot that's

[54:06] supposed to help you and then what you just keep typing is like talk to a human. Talk to a human. Yeah, I want to talk to someone. I want to talk to someone and and and they will never like let you until you you go deep in that decision tree and and and bail out because they, you know, don't know how to answer. And I feel like it's such a bad experience, you know, it's it's if you have a problem in the app, you're in a maybe the situation of distress, you

[54:28] know, you need to talk to a to a person. It's uh I think it's a need as a human in that case and and we want to offer that. So, we really do that. I mean, we don't do like phone support because it's not scalable as an app, but we do support for everyone. We've been doing that for like past 15 years. We just do email support. For a very long time, it's me and my co-founder, we were replying to support ourselves. And I think that's super helpful because that's you get such a good pulse of of the problems and you even get like in your you know, we

[54:56] for a very long time, we didn't have any and still now and we don't have a complete backlog of, you know, feature requests. We just we let that you know, sink. Every time we hear about a feature you hear it once, twice, 10 times. You you you know, you know, you know in yourself that that's a need, right? That's been a super helpful and we are still like today, we are still like reviewing support as founders of the company. We still do like every day. I go and I help for like more technical issues or more

[55:22] specific problems. Well, one doing tickets is painful, kind of. You know, you got to write these responses. It's kind of a pain. So, I think like in some ways it creates this interesting mirror empathy situation where like the customer's in pain reaching out to you. You're doing tickets, which kind of sucks. So, that's pain as well. And now you're both in pain, especially if it's a product problem that you created. Now now you like physically feel their pain, and I think that motivates you to like do something about it. I'm actually bad about that. You I mean, when I could, I did all of the tickets, right? And then

[55:51] it became you know, it becomes too big, and then you you get it off in systems and whatever. But just having that moment to like really empathize, like take take that break, that beat. Cuz you can look at it in aggregates, right? You can you know, "Oh, 47% of users had this problem." Blah blah blah. That doesn't hit as well as like seeing a a single individual person struggling with that

[56:12] problem. Yeah, that's the only way you have to connect with people. You know, you can do like user research in person, you bring people and they you can do that again. Do you talk to users? Like do you call them ever? No, we I mean, sometimes people ask us to call them, but it's I mean, most of our users are US-based. We are based in France, so it's you know, time difference makes it complicated. It happens that we did it, but

[56:33] you know, mostly it's email. And I think it would help with empathy to have people on the phone. I was just listening to a podcast with David Lieb on the YC podcast. He he talked about doing customer interviews, and one day he just was like exported the top 100 most active users, sent all 100 of them an email, and talked to them like wanted to like 15 minutes with all of them. And I was just like, "Oh, like that would be a fantastic" I think every app developer could do that. It's just try that. Like grab your 100 most active users, and talk to all just make a make

[57:03] a list and just talk to all of them. Now as a support case, but just like phrases terrifying, right? They might not talk to you, but I guarantee you learn something super interesting on that call, so. Yeah, and it gets back to it's you know, so many things we've touched on in the last hour is like that focus on customers just helps you make better decisions, and it's ultimately differentiating. You know, those scammy scanner apps that aren't talking to users, that are only running AB tests, that are thin on margins. Like, they're not differentiated in part because they don't care. They don't talk to their

[57:38] users. They don't build what they want. Yeah, I think is they don't see they don't see their users are as a people maybe, you know, they just see it as a source of money. And And And there are things like I mean, with dark patterns that means they would do like a friends I don't know if it's still considered as a dark pattern, but you know, they're showing on we don't have an onboarding for instance. We don't show the paywall on onboarding. And if you talk, you know, to a paywall specialist, they will tell you that the biggest mistake Bruno, what if I told you I could triple

[58:06] your revenue in 2025? You know, I think there is probably a right way of doing it. And I'm not saying you shouldn't do that, but but when you get the paywall on onboarding and where you know, there is a little cross at the top right that fades in slowly so that you think that the only

[58:20] option is to pay. For you all, so many utility apps do that where they like they're not going to let you go any further or they make it very hard to get the freemium experience. Like, everything I hear about about your product and your brand and like the way you run the company, I think that's actually your differentiated value. It's like Yeah, and and also I think it's a benefit in the long term because like customers of these apps, I'm pretty sure that I mean, they churn pretty high because they don't have a if they don't have a good experience. Whereas our users, we have like a free free users

[58:47] and and some of them convert in the long term. And they're also like a benefit because they recommend like the app to their we we know that for a fact that they do that to friends, family, and and that's I I I think that's the best like the best recommendation you can have is like from your a fellow, you know, if someone tells you, "Oh, I have this app is super nice." They show it to you in a in a bar or whatever and it's like,

[59:06] "Okay, I'm going to download it." I mean, one of the biggest indications of product market fit or successful product is just how much what percentage of your growth is word of mouth. That's like a very hard to fake. One trick for you and our listeners, just ask the ask customers. Maybe it's hard without an onboarding, but you could put for 5% of users, pop them a survey. It's It's "How did you hear about us?" Three big buttons and make it really easy to cancel. It'll be a little bit of a sacrifice of customer experience, but like you'll get enough data to like notionally I didn't think that would be

[59:34] all that helpful. We put it in RevenueCat, and like I I look at that every day. I look at what everybody answered every day, because it's it's We also have free form, which is really fascinating. Like we learn about like ways people are That's how I learned that ChatGPT was telling people to use RevenueCat and when they asked how to win at purchases, people like all of a sudden I saw Claude, ChatGPT, like all the LLMs. I was like, Oh, I wouldn't

[59:55] have even thought to ask about that. It's really fascinating. So, open-ended surveys on that can be directional, right? You're just learning directionally. Yeah, for us that open-ended surveys they end up with my email doesn't work. Sure. You get that, too? We have Let me say it's interesting because it's like we have like a very I mean, we have people, you know, in small businesses, but we have really like everyone like from students,

[1:00:18] stay-at-home moms. Well, it's like it's like it's such a wide variety of customers and it's it's it's so nice. I mean, it's uh to have that. Well, I I think it's a great place to wrap up. You've built something truly great with this business. Like something you can be proud of, and also something that has a ton of opportunity to continue growing. And and like Jacob was saying, if you were very aggressive with your paywall, you probably could triple revenue in 2025. But that may not be the right move, but you might find something that works with your brand the way you want that freemium experience to happen

[1:00:51] with the way you want your product to feel to your customers. And you may still double revenue. The crazy little like accidental AB test was honestly so inspiring for me, because there are just so many little way in a product that's working, in a product that has some level of product market fit, there are probably thousands of different ways to continue growing that product, even from just changing the text in the default

[1:01:17] ad. You just got to do stuff, yeah. Yeah, it's inspiring, but it's still still scary, I find. Because it can go up or it can go down. And you know, you might add a feature that kind of hides a bit another one. And yeah, it's but it's that's what what makes it interesting, right? It's like there's some risk in it. And

[1:01:35] Yeah, it makes the game fun, right? Exactly. Well, anything you wanted to share before wrapping up? We're going to share a link to your Twitter and Blue Sky profiles. I guess everybody should just go download uh Genius Scan, huh? Yeah, just give it give it a try and and and let us know if you if you like it or

[1:01:50] dislike it. We would love to know. Honestly, it's like a We we like feedback from customers. It's a Well, it's been so much fun chatting with you today. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for inviting me. It was very fun nice um talking with you. Take Finally. I'll see you I'll talk again in 7 years.

[1:02:11] 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.

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