Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
12 tactics from Greg Cohn
Pivots, Funding, and Building Apps That Last
Watch the full episode“When we sort of pivoted into the burner standalone app… it was like a 10x to 100x level of response from even just friends we were showing this to… started to feel pull from the market instead of having to push yourself into the market.”
Stop Pushing — Wait for the Market to Pull
The shift from Wrangle to Burner happened because potential users stopped saying "my sister would like this" and started saying "I want this." Greg treats that reaction gap as the earliest reliable signal of product-market fit — 10–100x stronger response with essentially the same audience.
“I would back into that by thinking a little bit about retention… well what problem does it solve? The learning with Wrangle ultimately was it didn't solve a real problem… when we pivoted into the burner standalone app we were testing it by selling tickets on Craigslist and it quickly validated the problem.”
Use Retention to Tell Product Problem from Distribution Problem
Greg's framework for deciding whether to pivot: if people keep coming back (retention), it's a distribution problem you can solve. If they don't, it's a product problem no amount of marketing can fix. Testing Burner via fake Craigslist ads generated immediate, authentic demand — proof the problem was real, not created.
“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. Institutional capital is really not designed very well for that stage.”
Most Consumer Apps Should Never Raise VC
Greg's contrarian take: VC math requires billion-dollar outcomes and that bar is nearly impossible for most consumer apps. Raising VC on good early signals locks the team into a growth rate the business may not be able to sustain — creating pressure that destroys otherwise healthy businesses. Raise only if you truly need it and understand what's behind it.
“The classic 3Fs — friends, family and fools — is probably the right source of capital for that sort of early stage… 20K can go a long way. You should not be even thinking about institutional capital [early on].”
Friends, Family, Fools: The Right Capital for Early-Stage Apps
Before spending time chasing institutional investors, Greg recommends leaning on personal-network capital for the first tests. A small amount of money — 20K–50K — is enough to run meaningful paid-acquisition experiments and validate distribution before committing to the full VC path.
“We've been really profitable ever since. For six or eight years we've been either break even or meaningfully profitable and while still also growing the top line… we had our first million annual year at about two and a half years in.”
Burner Was Profitable for 6-8 Years After VC Runway Ended
After failing to hit Series A metrics, Burner converted to a breakeven model with insider support rather than raising more capital. The result: a stable, growing business that has been profitable for most of its history. Greg frames this not as failure but as the most durable outcome most consumer apps can realistically achieve.
“That was one of the biggest single-step functions in our revenue growth in our history was the day we launched subscriptions — it was also our first unlimited all-you-can-eat offering.”
Launching Subscriptions Was Burner's Biggest Single Revenue Step-Function
Burner started with a credit system but pivoted to subscriptions when the capability launched, pairing it with MMS support — a feature no competitor (including Google Voice) had yet. The combination of a new business model and a genuine product differentiator created the biggest single revenue jump in the company's history.
“We're working with a pretty high-intent audience and that gives us a lot of surface area to test different paywalls and different things at that onboarding funnel — that's been the biggest single factor in our retention.”
High-Intent Organic Users Are Your Paywall Test Lab
Burner's UA strategy focuses on harvesting existing intent — people searching for a second phone number or burner app — rather than broad-reach branding. A high-intent install base allows rigorous paywall and onboarding experiments because the signal isn't contaminated by people who were only mildly curious.
“We recently tested making the free trial optional instead of default and that was a very positive test for us… some people want to make sure they lock it in — they don't want to lose it — and then other people say I'm not sure, give me the free trial.”
Making the Free Trial Optional Outperformed Making It the Default
Burner found that presenting the free trial as a choice outperformed forcing everyone through a trial. Users who already know they want the product convert immediately without friction; uncertain users still get the trial. Self-selection beats one-size-fits-all trial defaults.
“I wouldn't want to own ten $1 million apps. I just don't think there's that much leverage in trying to scale things that don't connect to one another — whereas having multiple multi-million dollar apps that are complementary to one another it's much easier for us to add 5 million in revenue to our app.”
App Farms Don't Work — Complementary Multi-Product Does
Greg's experience with building and acquiring additional apps showed that standalone apps in new categories are nearly impossible to grow without an existing funnel. The leverage comes from cross-selling to existing high-intent users — not from operating an unrelated portfolio of small apps.
“If you look at it from the framework of LTV of a cohort that's probably the right framework as a starting point… that's a hard thing to optimize for in a single experiment — you have to project based on things that are happening at day eight or day 30.”
Cohort LTV Is the True North — Proxy Metrics Get You There Faster
Burner runs paywall and pricing experiments with cohort LTV as the north star, but since maturing LTV data takes months, the team uses early proxy signals (day-8 conversion, day-30 retention) to pick winners before the full curve is visible. Knowing what you're optimising for upfront is the prerequisite for trustworthy experiments.
“For an app like that to work you need a network right — it's sort of an empty restaurant problem, classic for social. We were basically trying to do a Web 2.0 idea on top of the phone.”
The Empty-Restaurant Problem Kills Social Apps Before They Start
Wrangle required simultaneous availability of two contacts to work — a classic two-sided coordination problem that makes early growth nearly impossible without a large existing user base or built-in viral loop. Recognising this pattern early is a key pivot signal: if the core value depends on a network that doesn't exist yet, you likely have a distribution problem too big to solve cheaply.
“When we launched we had like $50,000 in revenue on the first day — I think Gigaom covered us and we were on Hacker News as a top story. It was generating debate and you can't recreate that today — but analogues of that exist on TikTok and Instagram and anyone can go viral for a feature.”
Organic Press and Hacker News Drove $50K on Launch Day
Burner launched at $1.99 paid download and generated $50K on day one purely from organic press and Hacker News. Greg uses this to make a broader point: the channel has changed (now TikTok and Instagram) but the underlying principle — a specific, shareable feature that sparks debate — is still how apps go viral without a paid marketing budget.