On the podcast: putting customers ahead of metrics, why there’s still massive opportunity to build successful apps today, and how a server crash turned into an accidentally successful A/B test.
Top Takeaways:
📈 The app ecosystem still holds massive opportunities
Despite increasing competition, developers can build successful apps by leveraging new technologies and focusing on user needs.
💡 Putting customers ahead of metrics builds better businesses
Prioritizing user experience and long-term trust leads to organic growth and loyal customers.
🎯 Simplified pricing boosts revenue without hurting adoption
Streamlining subscription tiers increases revenue while maintaining conversions.
🚀 Small changes can drive big results
An accidental A/B test proved that minor adjustments can uncover major opportunities for growth.
🔍 Bootstrapped success proves apps can thrive without funding
Indie apps can compete with tech giants by delivering specialized features and solving real problems.
About Bruno Virlet
🚀 Co-founder of Genius Scan, one of the earliest and best scanning apps for smartphones, bringing advanced document scanning to millions of users worldwide.
📄 Bruno Virlet started Genius Scan with his roommate as a fun side project during their time at the University of Illinois, turning a simple idea into a 15-year journey of bootstrapped success.
💡 “We didn’t want to be entrepreneurs—we just wanted to build something useful. It was about creating an app we’d want to use ourselves. That’s still the ethos driving us today.”
🔧 Through continuous experimentation (even accidental A/B tests!), Bruno has grown Genius Scan to 5 million monthly active users—all while staying true to a customer-first approach.
Resources:
Follow us on X:
David Barnard - @drbarnard
Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
SubClub - @SubClubHQ
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] The Genius Scan journey begins: How a side project in a university dorm room grew into one of the most successful scanning apps with 5 million monthly active users.
[02:09] Pivoting early: The original idea was scanning paintings in museums, but technical and market constraints led to a shift toward document scanning.
[05:38] A stroke of luck: How a canceled trip and a refund led Bruno to buy a MacBook and develop the first version of Genius Scan in just six weeks.
[07:26] App Store beginnings: Launching Genius Scan as a free app in 2010 and watching it skyrocket in the rankings before experimenting with monetization.
[13:45] Competing with tech giants: How Genius Scan stays relevant and competitive despite Apple and Google introducing native scanning features.
[19:50] Customer-first philosophy: Why Genius Scan focuses on user experience and avoids dark patterns, keeping features accessible without sacrificing long-term user trust.
[26:43] Experimenting with subscriptions: The shift from one-time purchases to subscription models, and how removing a lower-tier option increased revenue without affecting conversion.
[43:56] The accidental A/B test: A server issue revealed how minor changes in paywall text and presentation doubled conversions.
[50:05] Learning from feedback: How staying close to users through direct support drives product improvements and reinforces customer loyalty.
[57:45] Building a company for the long term: Bruno reflects on balancing growth, profitability, and personal priorities, emphasizing the value of independence and sustainable success.
David Barnard:
Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world, to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue, across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show.
Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard, and with me today, RevenueCat CEO, Jacob Eiting. 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 successful A/B test.
Hey, Bruno, thanks very much for joining us on the podcast today.
Bruno Virlet:
Hey, David, thanks for having me.
David Barnard:
And Jacob, really nice chatting with you today as well.
Jacob Eiting:
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 you were very, very, very, very, very early and somehow we've never talked directly before. But I always joke that, I think about, probably a lot of people like this, but I have always the first 20 signups to RevenueCat burned in my head, because I looked at them in the database so many times. So I'm very excited to get the back story today, so.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, you got some convincing, but you finally got me, so-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, five years, oh no, more than that, seven years later.
David Barnard:
Well, speaking of a long time in the making, Genius Scan and your company has been a many year journey, almost 15 years in the making. So I did want to kind of go back to the founding, 'cause I think a lot of people will be interested to hear that whole story of how you got started, how you got that early product market fit, and then how you grew that to what today is a really incredible business. You have 5 million MAU, 10 person team, like it's a fantastic success story for a bootstrapped app. But yeah, tell us the story.
Bruno Virlet:
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 ago, it'll be 15 years in June. Actually, we didn't want to, I mean, we didn't plan to start Genius Scan, so it was my co-founder and myself, we were students at the University of Illinois and we were roommates. iPhone was quite new at that time, I mean, well, I guess iPhone was 2007. Yeah, well, I think it's 2007, the iPhone, but then the app store just opened publicly to third-party apps in 2009, right? I think at the-
David Barnard:
2008, 8.
Bruno Virlet:
2008, okay. Yeah, so in 2009, basically, I mean, I was like, oh, maybe you should make an app, it will be fun. I was more like in Linux development before, but my co-founder was in, my roommate, I guess at the time, was doing image processing research, and so we thought what could we do with that? We brainstormed, and we had this great idea, was to make an app to scan paintings in museums. You would go to the Louvre in France, you would scan a painting, I mean, take a photo of a painting and you would get all the information about it, like who painted it.
Jacob Eiting:
Okay. So it was like augmented, almost augmented reality?
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, it was augmented reality, like years before it was something. And 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 basically features that you embed in an image and key points that you can identify to recognize an image under any angle. I mean, yeah, it was... And the problem with this technology, that there were some patents on it, I knew at the time we were just students in a dorm room, I guess, and we were like, patents, who are going to be sued by Americans.
Jacob Eiting:
This was in late 2000s, so like 2008 and 9, so this was before kind of the modern AI revolution and all this stuff. So this would've been like, they wouldn't even called it machine learning at the time, they would've called it like, vision.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, it was computer vision, but yeah, and actually my roommate, Guillaume was doing computer vision at the university, so yeah.
David Barnard:
The kids don't have any idea how good they have it these days, just being able to slap a image recognition in, like with one API call.
Jacob Eiting:
Throw more transformers at it, it'll figure it out eventually. But yeah, CV was like a different ballgame.
David Barnard:
So the patent scared you and so you-
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, I mean, there were alternatives, there were like open source alternatives. And then also, there was another problem, that at that time, like if you imagine someone going to the Louvre in Paris to scan pictures, probably was a tourist coming from China or the US. And at that time there were no cellular, I mean, when you went abroad, like roaming fees were crazy high, so.
Jacob Eiting:
When I went to Europe in 2010, I had no cell phone for three weeks, like I went to internet cafes.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly.
Jacob Eiting:
Like really.
Bruno Virlet:
So you would have to download the database in advance on your phone, it was like huge, like big. The database of images to, I mean, because we only had signatures of the images, so it would be used, it would... And so we were thought like, I mean, who is going to do that? But the thing is that when preparing this app, so the way Guillaume was doing it, was like taking photos of a Van Gogh painting on his desk all the time. And actually, I mean, we were detecting the painting on his desk, and we were like, "Okay, we could detect any kind of document like that." And that's how we said, "Okay, maybe we will start doing a document scanning app and we'll go back to the paintings later."
And so 15 years later, like we are still on the document scanning. And that's how it started. And the funny story is that I was, and 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 developed in MATLAB on the computer, it was not like a mobile app. And 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, remember like the, I don't remember the name, it's like Eyjafjallajökull.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
And so, actually I had flown to Chicago and I got my ticket refunded by the airline, I don't know how, but it happened. And I was like, I saved the money of the trip to Paris, and so I went to the Apple Store in Chicago, purchased a MacBook, because I didn't have one at the time, and went back to Champaign, Illinois, and that's where I started. So I started developing the app and actually what really strike me is that that was in May and in June 22, 2010, the app was announced on the app store. So basically the first version of the app was a month and a half maybe, of development. And it picked up really quickly, so I don't have the exact numbers in mind, but we put it as a free app on the app store and it just short up the rankings.
David Barnard:
Was it the first or one of the early scanning apps?
Bruno Virlet:
I mean, there was another one, yeah, I think it was the first app, or I mean, like the first that was working quite well.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, this was like one of the non-obvious like life changing, kind of important utilities that a great camera and a good phone could do. 'Cause it never crossed my mind that like, "Oh, I don't need a scanner anymore." Like I can get a good enough scan just with an app that knows what it's doing, and a camera. And so yeah, I can imagine being one of the first and just locking that down.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And it was kind of magic because for users, I think it was it worked really well, because it was like one of the first apps that kind of bridged the physical world and the digital world. It's almost like AR, right, you take a document and then we would warp it and present it to you very clean. So I think it was fun to use, and the plan was to put it as a free app for a few days, because 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 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 two downloads a day, I think it was 99 cents to be-
Jacob Eiting:
Wow, wow. That just shows, and this is 2010, so this is like... I think people forget how much debasement there was of apps in the early days of the app store, like there was a freefall from like being able to make money, selling an app for $10 or $20 on the desktop, to a race to the bottom, happened very, very quickly.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. That was a race to the bottom, exactly. So basically we panicked and we put it back as a free app. We were like, "We'll worry later." I mean, we were just students, like we didn't have to make a living out of that.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, I mean a few thousand free users is better than $2 a day, you know what I mean?
Bruno Virlet:
After that, we were lucky to be featured by Apple in the month after that. I think that was the summer, I may remember incorrectly, but where iAd launched to the supposedly super high quality ads from Apple. And at the time they had like a crazy high eCPMs, I think you had like $10 eCPMs on-
David Barnard:
No, like $30 and $40, I launched with iAd.
Jacob Eiting:
Were they, just as Apple, just spending, just paying developers basically?
David Barnard:
No, no, no. They set it up with brands, so like massive brands like Disney and-
Jacob Eiting:
I worked on the dang SDK.
David Barnard:
You were inside Apple?
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, when iAds was coming out, yeah, yeah, I was, yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And it worked really well. So we were like, okay, that's interesting, we are starting to make some money with that, even though it wasn't like really the plan at the time.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
So we kept it free and I think in December 2009, so we introduced a paid version of the app, so there was a free version and there was a paid upfront version. The next year, I think that in-app purchases were introduced, so then we had an in-app purchases in the, so as a lifetime.
Jacob Eiting:
That was basically to remove the ads, yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
And that was to remove the ads and slowly we introduced like advanced features. If you want to export to Dropbox quickly, so this was called Genius Scan+, that was a premium plan.
Jacob Eiting:
That would've been fairly early, like back in, I mean, I guess if you were doing, not as a subscription, but as a one-time in-app purchase.
Bruno Virlet:
I think it was as soon as, I mean, basically Apple announced it and then we announced in-app purchases availability and we benefited from that.
David Barnard:
Yeah. I wish I could go back in time and do a better freemium strategy for some of my old ads. I mean, people don't even realize how good we have it these days with subscriptions and everything else. Because my apps, I had a free version, so like one of my early apps was GasCubby, it tracks fuel economy and vehicle maintenance. It was actually quite successful, I sold it and did really well from it. But I had GasCubby Lite, that was a free version that had limited features, and then when you hit the limit, you got pushed to the paid upfront app and so, I mean, man, back then it was just such a, 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've been paid upfront.
Bruno Virlet:
We wouldn't be here today, I think, yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
What was the story for you and your co-founder from it becoming this like side project, sort of curiosity, to like, "Hey, this is something worth working on?" Like when did you make enough money that you could not have to worry about a job?
Bruno Virlet:
We didn't want to be entrepreneurs, I mean, originally. We wanted to make an app and we were not predestined to be entrepreneurs basically. So when we did this app in 2010 and then we graduated in the summer, so Guillaume, my co-founder, went back to France and he started working for a company in France, and I stayed in the US and I went to Seattle, I started working on Amazon. And then we kept working on it, nights and weekends, and it kind of picked up, I mean, it kept growing slowly, but it kept growing with that work. I think we did, I don't remember when, but we started the Android version of the app.
And after a while, then I moved back to San Francisco actually to work for a YC company and funny story also, they contacted me because they found the scanning app and they had scanning needs. So it was called 1000 Memories, and they were doing like scanning of all photos, family photos. And I kept working on the side on Genius Scan, so after a while we were like, okay, we work for our day job, but we also work on that. Were really like, I mean, it means that were really like that, we should go, and in 2014, we went full-time on it. We had enough money to make a living out of it.
Jacob Eiting:
'Cause it was already making enough money that you didn't have to starve.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, I mean, we can talk about that later, but basically we didn't have to raise funds, right, we-
Jacob Eiting:
Just do it, yeah. I think also too, did you find that once you had made the jump and once this was your main thing, did you find it, I mean, obviously you have more time to work on it, but I also feel like if it's your only source of income, you're a little more aggressive and motivated to make it work better and grow it and things like that, if it's all you've got.
Bruno Virlet:
So I think when we started we had some, I mean, we could live out of it, so we were not like grinding to make a living. So I think if it was just enough to live, maybe what you described is true in our case. Yes, I mean, we were full-time on it, we had the time to maybe explore something that we couldn't have otherwise and then grow a team, something we didn't want at the beginning, but over time.
David Barnard:
For those listening and kind of maybe tuning out at this point thinking, "Uh, I don't have a time machine to get 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 and what's so interesting about this story is that there was a combination of multiple technologies that came along, that you leveraged into a business and it grew over time. So today there's all sorts of new stuff coming out, with AI, with new sensors, and so there's been so many different points along the history of apps, that new things have come out that create new opportunities to create new businesses. And sometimes it does take years and years and years to grow, indies out there listening, when it's like three years in and you haven't made that much progress. But then the fourth year it's like, wow, I can actually go full time, like it happens, and I think it can still happen today.
Bruno Virlet:
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 I think subscriptions came, for instance, and they started a new dimension for monetization themselves. So it's always like, you can always say it's too late, but maybe it's too late to do what was.
Jacob Eiting:
I mean, the thing is by the time you recognize people being successful, those people, it wasn't obvious when they did it, right?
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. We don't go compete with Microsoft.
Jacob Eiting:
Right, exactly. Like people that you're looking at and folks who are struggling to start right now and you're looking at folks that are successful and be like, "Oh, I missed the boat." It's like, well, you missed that boat, there's always another boat, at least there has been for 1,500 years. Like we've been always inventing another boat you can catch. But the root story of like recognizing an unfilled technological niche, building something, you guys took one path, which was like slow burn, build it on the side, eventually have enough. Like there's many different versions of that you can do, but it all starts with finding something that people don't have that they want, right?
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And you are giving us credit for that, right, because to be honest, we started, it was like a serendipity when we started this scanning app. We had the needs, because we were students in the US, we always like were moving around, we didn't have much stuff, so we would scan documents. We had to register for immigration stuff, so we always had documents to scan, so we kind of had a need, but like everyone. Yeah, I think also you must factor in like the luck factor, to be sometimes the right place at the right time and yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
No, but the luck factor, with us, you name the company after yourself, clearly.
Bruno Virlet:
It was ironical, right?
Jacob Eiting:
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 never went anywhere, right?
David Barnard:
I like that whole idea of the catching the boat kind of thing. I mean, we see this in RevenueCat data, we should do this Jacob, do an analysis of apps founded in like different launch dates of apps. And I bet, every single year we could find an indie, a big company, a midsize company, a bootstrap company, a funded company. It's like in 2015, there's a cohort that launched and some became huge, and some are indie success stories. In 2016, it's like there's boats leaving the harbor every-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. We have now seven years of cohorts, and with the exception of maybe the first year when they were very thin cohorts of very few people, like every cohort has somebody in it still alive, still thriving, still growing, still compounding. So that's the luck aspect of it, like it might not always be you in that cohort, but it'll be somebody. There's a boat to catch.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And also I think when you find these ideas, like these people who jump on the boat, then after this boat, you will find a lot of other boats trying to-
Jacob Eiting:
Other boats.
Bruno Virlet:
To copy what, to do the same, like take the same wind. And for us there are like, I mean, now, there are many scanning apps and many of them are, I think, doing well. I don't know how profitable they are, but they've been around for a while. So I think every idea, then you can like replicate it to some extent, after a while maybe the market is saturated and then you need to catch another.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, it gets harder. But I mean, that's a good point to talk about, because when did Apple, like iOS has native scanning now, right?
David Barnard:
Yeah. You not only have a ton of competitors, and this is another kind of fun part of the story. You not only have like hundreds of scanning apps in the app store now, it's been like one of the more popular categories for people to go try and build an app. But not only that, then Apple introduced scanning native, and now you have AI and it like seems so obvious. 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?
Bruno Virlet:
I mean, we worried about it a lot, early. I think when new scanning apps were launching, our competitors were launching new features, in the early years we were like, "Oh no, we are done. What are we going to do?" And even worse, like with, yeah, I think WWDC after, like first it was fun and after a while every year you had this uneasy feeling of what are they going to announce that might affect us in a bad way? And scanning, like when they release like scanning, so where they release the, you have scanning in notes in the Files app, I think. We were like, okay, maybe, I mean, how good is that for us? And you know what, everyone says that, I mean, apple covers like the basic needs and when you want to go deeper, you will find a more specialized app. They will also make people aware that, "Oh, you can do scanning with your device."
So it did affected us in a bad way, like we never saw Apple release scanning and our growth stalls or we lose customers. I mean, we have like anecdotes, some people telling us, "Oh, I stopped choosing your app because," or, "Why would I use your app? Because I use scanning in notes." But I think in practice we are fairly confident now that our scanning is better. I'm biased, but I mean, the quality of the scanning, speed of it is actually better. And we offer also like a bunch of features, it's not only scanning, it's like scanning, organizing your documents, exporting them. People are really like, surprising how, I mean, important it is, that's two parts for people, make it easy to export. For instance, we have features where you scan a document and it'll auto export it to a specific folder in Dropbox, depending on the document name.
Jacob Eiting:
I imagine there's a lot of like prosumers that use.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly, yeah, yeah. And it could be like small companies, they want something a bit more advanced, they want something that scans well, for instance in low light conditions, which others don't do maybe as well. And a lot of small factors that when people do some research, they will still go to people like us. So now we are more, I mean, we are less worried about competition, because we have the competition from other independent companies, we have competition from the platform. So Apple and Google have introduced scanning, but also, every major, like cloud storage, so Google Drive, Dropbox, [inaudible 00:21:17], they all have a scanning module in the app. I mean, we're still growing, so maybe we would grow more if they didn't exist, maybe-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. Two observations, is one, in this category, there's a lot of charlatans as David was kind of alluding to. There's a lot of people who just make the cheapest, fastest, whatever, pump it with ads, do cross promo, it's actually a piece of junk. So I think you all being like one of the few reputable brands, it's probably you and Adobe, you know what I mean? Who actually are kind of a trustworthy brand in this, that's probably a huge advantage that nobody can replicate. You can't replicate that earnestness and that reality. So you're somewhat differentiated even if, not by features even, but just by brand.
But then also I think, and this kind of goes back to the bootstrap point, that you guys are bootstrapped that you haven't taken capital. I think it depends on your expectations for return on investment too. And that's up to you, if you and your co-founder are the sole owners and you guys can kind of decide what your expectations are, you can survive well in a very competitive environment. Most businesses in the world are in extremely competitive environments and there's still great 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?
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, it's like food delivery apps, like in Europe, I don't know how it is in the US, but they have been killing each other, buying each other, some have bankrupt and it's super competitive, because they raised huge funds and basically they need to take the market. And now they're like a few, in France, you have Deliveroo, Uber Eats, and that's it. And yeah, it has to be a monopoly given how much money has been pumped in it, otherwise it's not worth the return investment. And in our case, yeah, we see that very differently. We want to be profitable, but I mean, we invested time in it, we exchanged time for money at the beginning, but otherwise I mean, we don't have a need for a ROI. And currently, both me and my co-founder, we have kids, we want to spend time with them and we have the freedom of doing that and to like really spend time with them. And we would have raised money or we would be super aggressive in our monetization, maybe we wouldn't be able to-
Jacob Eiting:
You might end up like one of those charlatans I mentioned, right.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly. It's important to know why you are in business, I mean, what are you in business for, right? And I know your motto is like, help developers make more money, but it's also like, help-
David Barnard:
Only as much as you want to make and not a dollar more.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly. I mean, help us live the life we want, like in a way, right. Yeah, really you have to think about what's success for you and maybe it's not just the most profitable. And about that as well, like I've been worried about, I mean, I've tried to improve like ASO on the app store and we are fairly, I mean, we're ranking, so if you look for scanning, you will find us in five results. And I've looked at the, with the one above us and I'm like, "Why are they above us?" And I have tried to understand all the reasons why they could be on top of us. And I mean, there is no reason I think, due to the way we named the app or we have like a very good number of ratings per downloads, everything at figures recommend you do well. And there is one thing, is like the download velocity, I think that's important. Like the more downloads you have, the more you rise in the rankings in the search results. But it's kind of the, how do you say, in French, we say, "Snake eating it's own tail," but-
Jacob Eiting:
Chicken and egg problem?
Bruno Virlet:
Chicken and eggs, yeah. The chicken and eggs problem. Because if we're not in the top results then, and I looked at the top one, 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're purchasing the ads, but what's their profitability? When you see the revenue numbers in that figures, that doesn't deduct how much they pay for ads.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah. They're probably running incredibly thin margins, maybe even negative margins, because they're leveraged, they might be borrowing money.
Bruno Virlet:
Maybe, I don't know, maybe not. But I'm sure they're not as profitable as they look on the ad figures revenue numbers. And so again, yeah, we have to look at, it's hard to... You have to know exactly where you are and if you are maybe not at the top one, maybe you are doing well enough, yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
You have more equity in your app than somebody else that may be above you in the rankings, and the fact that it actually is profitable, or more profitable and that increases the value. And then there's, I think this gets a bit philosophical, but we tend to talk about equity in an asset in terms of the dollars that would get at market. But then you were alluding to there's more than just the dollars that would get at market as to the value it is to you and your co-founder and your team. It's like it's meaningful work, it's something to do, it's like a way to live, it's all of these things.
Bruno Virlet:
And even the independence we have, because we have been approached a few times by companies interested in... And first you start talking with them, but after a few times you say just, "No. I mean, we like what we are doing, if we were acquired, we would work two years for you and then what would we do?" Like this app is, I mean, super interesting to work on it, we have customers who love the app. When we add a new feature, we can see the effect, like we have customers thanking us for it, it's like super rewarding.
David Barnard:
You're starting to make it sound like you don't like money, and that the app, it's just like this stagnant annuity that sits off in the other-
Jacob Eiting:
He said it's growing, David, it's not stagnant.
David Barnard:
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 then say 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 start digging into like, now you're a subscription app, the story, a lot of people can't relate to, all the early days of the app store and stuff. But I think what a lot of people will be able to relate to is 3x-ing 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 that?
Bruno Virlet:
It's interesting because yeah, I mean, we started using subscriptions, I think when they were introduced in 2017. And at the time we didn't want to force subscription on our users because they-
Jacob Eiting:
I feel like utilities, it was one of these things where it's like, "Uh, is subscription going to fly? Are people going to pay for this?"
Bruno Virlet:
And people didn't receive subscription, I mean, yeah, you could get a lot of backlash from your customers. And so what we did is, basically we added a subscription for a new service called Genius Cloud, so to backup your documents in the cloud. And actually, we kept the one time purchase for the premium features, and so basically the customer were paying for this backup and seeking the cloud, but they were buying storage and they were understanding that you buy storage, there is a recurring fee. It was more like, and that wasn't, I mean, we didn't get any backlash. And I think in 2020, what we did is that we switched, we started adding premium features to that subscription. We renamed it from Genius Cloud to Genius Scan Ultra, and we had two tiers of subscription. We also had the Genius Scan plus tier, so that was the former like legacy, 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 for 99 cents, they still have it, like the premium, most of the premium users today.
Jacob Eiting:
Trust me, taking something away from somebody, even if it's 99 cents, almost never worth it.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, exactly. And they can go to the more premium plan if they want to add more, for sure.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, give them paths to upgrade, you don't have to give them more stuff, I think you can hold back features and stuff like that. But I think I've seen folks like, sometimes there are reasons to go back and raise prices, but typically it's just the backlash is just not worth it, that can cost you your whole business.
Bruno Virlet:
Especially if you're in a, I think it's still like a expanding market, where you have more user coming, you don't have a fixed user base, you don't have to nurture your existing user base. And so at that time, 2020, we had two subscription tiers, had Genius Scan Plus, it was, I think 99 cents a month and Genius Scan Ultra, which was $3 a month, and equivalent pricing for yearly. After that, we didn't make any experiments at the time, we just start two tiers, one for lower end like purchase there 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, everyone keep using it, and we kept the Ultra tier and what we noticed is that demand curve is not elastic at all. Like we had a hundred purchase per day split between Plus and Ultra, we still had a hundred purchase per day, but it was Ultra.
Jacob Eiting:
You're very far off of where the main of elasticity, right. That doesn't surprise me, was it still 99 cents when you [inaudible 00:30:09]?
Bruno Virlet:
No, no, no, no. So now, well, I mean, yeah-
Jacob Eiting:
The low tier was 99 cents. Yeah, I bet that was, because I would've guessed that that's probably already on its own, way underpriced. So you were probably preventing a bunch of users who would've paid more for that and happily paid for the Ultra, but they were just like, this is good enough. And so yeah, it doesn't surprise me, but these are things you don't know that, until you try it, that's going to make a difference.
Bruno Virlet:
What we did is, last year we had still, like the Ultra subscription with a monthly and yearly subscription and both were exposed at the same level. And basically we buried the Plus, the monthly subscription, so you could still access it, but it wasn't, you will have to go a bit further in the paywall. Same thing, we had most people switched to the yearly, I mean everyone switched to the yearly subscription. Ultra subscription, I think it was 20 each, 25 maybe, in 2020, and now it's a 40, I mean 40-ish.
Jacob Eiting:
So 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.
Bruno Virlet:
I mean it depends, because I think lots of competitors do stuff with weekly subscriptions.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah, 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 equity, that's what endeared you with your customers. And so even though you maybe left $3 per month on the table on that, you have to imagine what you probably also gained, which is still a position, a fighting position against Adobe, like a hundred billion company.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And also for us, it was natural because we switched from, I think it was 9.99, one time purchase at the time. We said we switch that to 9.99 a year, like for us, if some people stick like a few years, it's already a great upgrade. And so that's where it came from, and I think it's fine. I mean, easy to have regrets, but we can keep experimenting on that. And I think looking at the pricing, increasing it, be part of the next experiments we want to run with RevenueCat.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, I mean if you're building new things and you're providing more value, like keep messing around with it until you've... 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 our sold side, it's more easy to experiment there. I wanted to kind of jump back, but it's related to all this stuff, but when did you all bring, because you mentioned hiring people, that's kind of a big jump to go from you and your co-founder, to like now you're an employer. When and why did you make that decision?
Bruno Virlet:
So in 2014, I moved back to France and we started working with Guillaume, and I think in 2015 we started hiring first employee. And what prompted that I think was that we had too much on our plate. We were doing so many things and we needed a another iOS developer to help, and we recruited him. And that's still how we do things now, is like when we feel a bit of pain, we start hiring. It doesn't mean that we overwork, but it's just like, when, during your day, I'm still developing and I don't... Like for instance, last year I was doing product and support and developments, administrative work, and I can't do all that if I want to still do some developments, then I have to offload product and support, for instance, to other people. And that's how, for instance, we hired like a support person three years ago, a product manager like this year, for instance.
Jacob Eiting:
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. But you did choose to, instead of taking the path of dialing back and just being happy with what you had, you said like, "No, okay, let's make an investment and let's take some risk and-"
Bruno Virlet:
You say an investment, but we, yeah, it's not, again, it's a bit different, I think, from venture funded companies where you make a business plan, you say, "If I raise this much money, I will hire this many people in sales and developers." And that the plan never goes as planned, but.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, I just stopped making plans. I made two of those and they were fantasy, so I was just like, we're just not going to do that. We do what you do, I do what you do. Just be like what hurts the most? And then we hire there.
Bruno Virlet:
Still, when you talk to other people, journeys they go on, I mean when you raise money, you need this plan because they want to know how it's going to be used. And so that was also, for us, it's not an invest, I mean, that could be the other path. We could say, okay, we are going to invest in more people to grow, I mean, because we think that if we hire, for instance, this iOS developer, we'll do this feature and then we'll get more growth. And it's not really the reasoning, it's more like we have so many things to do that we want to do, it's not necessarily like they are growth driven, it's like, just I have too much on my plate, I need someone.
Jacob Eiting:
I'm slow walking you Bruno into realizing you're a cold-hearted capitalist. I don't know if you realize what's happening, but we don't have to call it an investment, we can call it whatever you want. I mean, there's a reality there that, and I think this is, I mean, Miguel and I went through a very similar transition. Like we went a different path, once you raise money, it was like hire people, whatever. But I think it wasn't as clear to me, and hopefully you've seen this too, it was like you hire good people, they solve problems, and you can just do more things. And there's 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 second transition, which we're talking about now, which is like, okay, this is now a concern for other people that I'm going to bring into this thing, and now it's a company and a business.
I think beyond that, it's actually kind of more of the same. It's like, okay, 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 between those first two decision points where, David, you've always kind of been maybe in between those two. Where you've like worked with the contra, you kind of like strung it together and arguably, maybe if you had gotten some commitment, there would've been a benefits to that. But it's scary, right, it's a risk.
David Barnard:
Yeah. And well, it was always a conscious choice on my part too though. I mean, I talked to VCs in 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. To me, I chose the passion side of it, was like it was really fun building apps and I knew it was not going to be fun managing employees, making payroll, all those kind of things. And it was a very conscious choice of mine. And looking back, I could have built a bigger business and in some ways, maybe have been less stressed, like-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, it depends. It depends on who you hire.
David Barnard:
Yeah, I mean, it could have like flamed out or it could have gone even better, because I mean, and what I figured out over time was like, my model with contractors and everything else came with its own massive headaches and problems. And there were many times along the journey I was like, I should have just hired somebody because this whole contractor, like working part-time, not working for months and it had its own mess. But yeah, I mean, there's choices all along the way. I remember, Jacob, we sat on the patio of a 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 I remember that being a decision point for you, is like you had only raised like one and a half million, there weren't massive expect-
Jacob Eiting:
Hopefully Jason doesn't listen to all these podcasts, 'cause I was always fully intended on returning him his capital in multiples.
David Barnard:
But there's like micro decisions all along the-
Jacob Eiting:
And I'll tell you, I mean, not to make this about me, but I think those decision points kind of never stop. As you're scaling a business, Bruno, you're going through those now, it's like every year it's like, okay, do we double down or do we kind of just be happy with what we got? Do we take more risk?
Bruno Virlet:
I feel like it depends on also where you are in life, where I'm with young kids, I don't maybe want to spend too much time working. When I spent nights and weekends doing work, I was 25, I had the time to do that, and so it's different. But even like, I think that, for instance, we have 10 employees now and that's still, we could be 20, but what you have to take also in account, that the nature of what you do will change then. As David said, I like doing some development, but we are 10 people, I can still do some development. If we're 20, it'll be less and less development, I will be doing more like synchronizing people, product management.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. People problems, and it depends on who you hire and the company culture and stuff like that, but yeah, I-
Bruno Virlet:
I mean, we are very lucky that we are very little, I mean, we try to hire like a very independent people and so we have very little management to do. We have a low turnover, so yeah, it really depends on who you hire and you have to be mindful of that I guess, when you hire.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, but even that itself, that's hard work. I think for a lot of technical people who are makers, ask me how I know, but-
David Barnard:
Yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
Getting a team right, it's technical, it's hard, it's just hours, and then it's very emotionally taxing too, because inevitably you'll make mistakes along the way, you'll have to give people tough news, you'll have to give, like it just depends on what energizes you and what... And that's a decision that, honestly, I'll say, like when we made that first choice to go raise money and kind of do this versus stay in that first zone, unless you've done it before, 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 want to bring this on and I kind of am forced to in some degrees, like I kind of have to. Sometimes life, if you have no choice, it's a little bit easier, 'cause you don't have to worry about it. But yeah, you can take it every day, you can take it day-by-day and when your kids are older or maybe you have a little bit more time, maybe it changes, like your mindset changes around it.
Bruno Virlet:
And maybe there won't be any more documents to scan then, yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
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.
David Barnard:
Well, we've been talking about like all the growth and the journey, but every journey has a bunch of fails. And when we were prepping for the podcast, you wrote down some really great fails, so I want to make sure we got to these. So tell me about some of the massive screw ups you've made along the way and how you've recovered from them.
Jacob Eiting:
David's little massive screw ups, just a little editorializing there.
David Barnard:
Well, I mean, he shared them with me, there are-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
David Barnard:
There are some big ones.
Bruno Virlet:
There are many related to conversion, like to the paywall conversion, so it's very relevant to RevenueCat I guess. Basically we were always measuring paywall, like how many times our paywall is displayed from what feature in the app. In the app, when you are trying to use some premium features, that's where we're going to show you the paywall. And it could be you try to export to Dropbox, that's paywalled, or you try to use a text recognition, OCR, that's also behind the paywall. And so a few years ago we did an update where we redid the UX of a screen where you see 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 is actually displayed much less than it used to be. So I'm trying to investigate and I don't know, it's linked to this refactoring of this screen.
So I figure out that it was caused by this change of this screen, and 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 scan document that you would tap and would show the OCR text. And after this refactoring, we had moved this button, basically in a drawer and it was not directly visible. And the effect on the paywall displays was maybe like 10, 20%, I don't have the exact number in mind, but-
Jacob Eiting:
Which is a direct 10, 20% to your sales, right, like it's-
Bruno Virlet:
It was actually, I think, also a high intent purchase.
Jacob Eiting:
So it was maybe one even higher, more than the relative presentation.
Bruno Virlet:
So maybe it was like 10% less displays and 20% [inaudible 00:42:37], and that's something I noticed like months after.
David Barnard:
So for months your revenue had gone down, but you couldn't quite figure, like you thought maybe the market was shifting.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly. That's where it's hard, you have so many factors. You have seasonality, it's Christmas, people are buying more phones, so you get a big jump maybe in purchases, but then in March, I think it happened in March, like maybe the Christmas time is over and people stopped purchasing, maybe it was that. It could be, yeah, market shifting, maybe it could be ISO that has changed. And we are a small team, we don't have a data person looking at this data every day, which I guess if we had, maybe [inaudible 00:43:16].
David Barnard:
Do you now?
Bruno Virlet:
No, no, but we are looking into having, I mean, we are looking at the metrics more regularly and we try to like-
Jacob Eiting:
I mean, you're the data person, I think it's just about making it easy for you to look at that stuff every day.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, exactly.
David Barnard:
That's so crazy, like one of the primary upsell features, you accidentally broke, essentially, did you put it back in that same place and then like everything came back?
Bruno Virlet:
That we clearly saw the result, yeah. And there is another instance of that fairly recent, we had, so in the free version of Genius Scan, we have an ad banner, it's not a third party ad banner because we removed that a while ago, but basically, it's like an ad banner, but it promotes the premium version. What happens is that, so this ad banner has some text, 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, it's one of the leading entries to the paywall. And this banner is served by a server, so we can change the text remotely. And what happened is that the server went down, one of the reasons that we tracked taps on the banner and the integer on the database overflow, it was not a big hint, was just an in, so-
Jacob Eiting:
I have a friend of mine whose favorite phrase is like, when we're setting up apps, like stuff, he's like, "Always use big end, you got to be optimistic."
Bruno Virlet:
And so the app was nicely designed, because we had in the app, hard coded, we had a fallback ad. So if the remote ad banner 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 stories the other way, but I noticed our purchases had increased. I started investigating why, and that's when I linked that back to the ad banner that wasn't displayed from the remote server anymore and the fallback banner that was displayed most of the time.
David Barnard:
So it was like an accidental A/B test?
Bruno Virlet:
Accidental A/B test, yeah. And so the fallback banner was converting twice as much as existing matter. We restored the, I mean, fixed remote server and we still have two banners, one with the old text and one with the same text as the fallback banner. And this confirmed that the text of the fallback banner was, I mean, the text and the icon was slightly different, but I mean you saw the images in the document, and I don't understand how such small changes can, I mean-
Jacob Eiting:
The problem is that you're not a thousand people, you're one person and you just have to test these things, otherwise it's really difficult to reason about.
Bruno Virlet:
Right. Yeah, the effect of changing the text is like, I guess, it blows my mind that just changing a text, changing an icon has such an effect on conversion. I really don't, I mean, it's-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, I've long learned that, even if you're a person with really good product sense or you think you have really good product sense, there's a limit. There's just a limit, you just can't know like what, there's some obvious rules that are almost always followed, but, like fewer steps is almost always better, showing the paywall more is almost always better. But besides that, because I don't think there's a way to deterministically understand what's going on and it's much faster to just do something. It's interesting, what you did on accident there, is this kind of concept I try to run in management and just life, is like injecting variance. Just even if you're unintentional a little bit, like change stuff and you'll learn things.
Bruno Virlet:
Well, it's like, this make me think of Netflix, I think they had, I don't know how it was called, they had these crazy monkeys, it was like a service that would kill a random server-
Jacob Eiting:
Oh, chaos monkey, chaos monkey, right? Yeah, yeah, they would break random services. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
To make sure that they had these variants in their back ends that make sure that if it actually happens for a bad reason someday, then they're ready for it, right.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's super important and I think sometimes it can be unsettling in my leadership style, David can probably attest to this. But I'll just be like, "Yeah, I don't know what we're going to do, but we're just going to do something different. We're just going to break it and see how we reassemble it and not try to analytically solve every little thing we do and justify every little thing we do." Because like, probably we'll learn more just by trying it and then we'll certainly learn more by trying something semi-thought through than not doing anything and just thinking about it for a very long time.
Bruno Virlet:
And also, you could be completely data driven, but it's boring.
Jacob Eiting:
Where's the fun in that?
Bruno Virlet:
I want to use my intuition, I mean, I'm ready to, you can prove me I'm wrong after I use it, but at least let me use it, right? We are humans building companies, otherwise you just replace the company by AI just like-
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah, the human element. Maybe that'll go away once the computers are so good, they can replicate the human element, but I-
Bruno Virlet:
The question, again, the question, what are you doing a company for? Are you because you're having fun or because you want to make money? And I think part of us is, we want, I mean, it's like you gather a group of people to have fun building something, so.
Jacob Eiting:
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, just being like, "We're going to A/B test and only do that and not use intuition," like you don't have an advantage, you have nothing unique about that, 'cause it's just like... Unless you maybe, like maybe Duolingo is a good example, they just were really, really good at A/B testing, better than anybody in the world.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. But even that, they had to had the creativity to create like a-
David Barnard:
And talking to the product manager, we had him on the podcast, a product manager at Duolingo. One of the things he said was that the founders, I think, end up reviewing a lot of the winning and will sometimes decide to not pick a winning A/B test.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, I mean, there was a period, I think at Facebook, where they were just only following A/B test stuff and you kind of saw the product get a little wonky. And then I think they pulled, this was a big meme in the 2010s, right?
David Barnard:
My favorite quote on this was Thomas Petit, who of course will make it crass, but, "If you A/B test enough, you're going to end up with a porn app or a gambling app." And I mean, if you A/B test without intuition, without thinking about differentiation, without thinking about being customer-centric, which I want to talk more about, like how you think about being customer-centric. But if you A/B test without a framework above, and 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 at RevenueCat, to help developers make more money that you can apply that framework against these decisions we're making, to make progress in the direction of serving the goal.
Jacob Eiting:
It's not like by blowing up the thing, we don't know where we're trying to get eventually, still, right.
Bruno Virlet:
I mean, for instance, if you A/B test, it's hard to A/B test on the very long time, I think like Shopify does that. They keep experiments running for years, but most people, you do an A/B test for a month and then you say, "Okay, that's better." But then as you said, you're going to end up with a, that's actually an interesting point. Is like we, for a while, in the free version of Genius Scan, we monetized it with advertisement and we noticed that the best performing advertisements, there were like for casino games or whatever is legal to be displayed, but the ugliest, worst quality advertisements are the one performing better, at least at the time. And after a while we were like, I mean, we don't want advertisements in the app, it was ruining the quality, it was ugly. We don't like making people buy shit they don't need, it's just like... So we decided to remove it.
But if we had A/B tested, like I mean, what's better? Like clearly it was better to keep the advertisement, but long-term, I'm not sure. The people who still use the free app have a very good experience, they're the one recommending to family, maybe they recommend their kids use it, because there is no advertisement and it's safe to use or whatever. That's the value you can't measure, but you can make a choice as a leader of the company to go that direction.
Jacob Eiting:
This might blow people's mind, that we've never run an A/B test. I mean, we've run very, very small, like marketing page A/B tests here, but I've never really run simultaneous tests on RevenueCat, the product, because 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. There was a point here I wanted to express to our listeners, which is this idea of like, you don't need a data person, you don't need a whole data analyst shop. Just have 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, my alarm goes off, I grab my phone, I go and I look at my founder update email and it tells me all the, kind of like the paywall views. Like that should be probably something you're looking at every single day, like what is the total number of paywall impressions?
Bruno Virlet:
Even that, you know you have, like it's Christmas, your paywall view will drop up. Like for us, we are in Europe and it's like Monday, September 1st, I was like, "Where are all the paywall views done? Oh, okay, it's a Memorial Day or whatever." And so you have still, to take that in account and yeah, I feel like you can do, and I do look at the metrics very often, but you also have to, I think, look once a month as like more you know.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah. You need to look at it at multiple scales, you need to look at it at the daily scale, the monthly scale.
Bruno Virlet:
You want to take the pulse and you also want to have the higher level, higher overview of the metrics, yeah.
David Barnard:
This conversation has brought up like 20 RevenueCat features we need to start working on, Jacob. Better A/B testing tools, 'cause I never did a paywall or pricing test until RevenueCat released experiments and I was able to do it easily. So now we need A/B testing tooling to make this easier to-
Jacob Eiting:
We need impressions, we need to be tracking paywall impressions. Like we have it with our paywalls, but building that in natively and making it in the charts and stuff, like that's.
David Barnard:
What you were just saying, what I love about your charts, 'cause you're such a data nerd, is that you have rolling averages over different timeframes, that needs to be on our dashboard too.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, yeah. You see that, so I always chart the, I'm just getting into my chart theories here. But I always chart the daily value and then the 30-day rolling average and the 90-day rolling average. And 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 the 30 days below the 90-day, we're trending in the wrong direction. But then also like the individual days I think are useful for what you said like, "Oh, did something happen yesterday, right? Was there a big pop somewhere?" So.
David Barnard:
Yeah. 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.
Jacob Eiting:
'Cause I got all kinds of stuff to do. I got, what did you say, people alignment to do, Bruno? Or something like that.
David Barnard:
And speaking of customer centric, this is something we were talking about before we hit record, I wish we had hit record when we were just chatting and there's so many good conversations happen before we hit record on the podcast. So we can try and recreate the magic, but we were talking about AI chat bots and pretending to do customer service with AI. And you brought up like how un-customer centric that is. So I wanted to keep pulling on that thread of just how customer centric you think in building Genius Scan.
Bruno Virlet:
One of the main thing, we don't have values on our website, but one thing is that we try to build the app we want to use. And part of that is that when you have a problem, you contact support and you get the answer you need, and it could be, I mean, you can go on the knowledge page 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 apps, there's a chat bot that's supposed to help you, and then what you just keep typing is like, "Talk to a human, talk to human. I want to talk to someone. I want to talk to someone," and they will never let you until you go deep in their decision tree and they allow it because they don't know how to answer.
And I feel like it's such a bad experience, if you have a problem in the app, you're maybe in a situation of distress, you need to talk to a person. I think it's a need as a human in that case and we want to offer that, so we really do that. I mean, we don't do phone support, because it's not scalable as an app, but we do support for everyone. We have been doing that for 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 you get such a good pulse of the problems and you even get like in your...
For a very long time, we didn't have any, and still now we don't have a complete backlog of feature request we let that sink. Every time we hear about a feature, you read once, twice, 10 times, you know in yourself that that's a need, that's been super helpful and today, we are still reviewing support as founders of the company. We still do, like every day I go and I help for more technical issues or more specific problems.
Jacob Eiting:
Well, one, doing tickets is painful, kind of, you got to write these responses, it's kind of a pain. So I think 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 you like physically feel their pain. I mean, I think that motivates you to do something about it.
I'm actually about that, I mean, when I could, I did all of the tickets and then it becomes too big and then you get it off in systems and whatever. But just having that moment to really empathize, take that break, that beat, because you can look at it in aggregates, right? You can know, oh, 47% of users had this problem, blah, blah, blah, that doesn't hit as well as like seeing a single individual person struggling with that problem.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. That's the only way you have to connect with people, you can do like user research in person, you bring people and they... You can do that, I guess.
Jacob Eiting:
Do you talk to users? Like do you call them ever?
Bruno Virlet:
No. I mean, sometimes people ask us to call them, but I mean, most of our users are US based, we are based in France, so it's, time difference, make it complicated. It happen that we did, but no, mostly it's email. And I think it would help with empathy to have people on the phone.
Jacob Eiting:
I was just listening to a podcast with David Lieb on the YC podcast, he talked about doing customer interviews. And one day he just was like, exported the top 100 most active users, sent all 100 of them an email and talked to them, like wanted 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, is just try that, like grab your a hundred most active users and just make a list and just talk to all of them, not as a support case, but just like... Probably it's terrifying, right, they might not talk to you, but I guarantee you learn something super interesting on that call, so.
David Barnard:
Yeah, and it gets back to 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 those scammy scanner apps that aren't talking to users, that are only running A/B tests, that are thin on margins, like they're not differentiated, in part because they don't care, they don't talk to their users, they don't build what they want.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. I think they don't see their users are as people maybe, yeah, it's a source of money and there are things like, I mean with dark patterns that it means they would do, like for instance, I don't know if it's still considered as a dark pattern. But showing a on, we don't have an onboarding, for instance, we don't show the paywall on onboarding, and if you talk to a paywall specialist, they will tell you that the biggest mistake.
Jacob Eiting:
Bruno, what if I told you I could triple your revenue in 2025?
David Barnard:
Yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
I think there's probably a right way of doing it, and I'm not saying you shouldn't do that. But when you get the paywall on onboarding and where there is a little cross at the top right that fades in slowly so that you think that the only option is to pay.
Jacob Eiting:
For you all, so many utility apps do that, where they're like they're not going to let you go any further, where they make it very hard to get the freemium experience. Like everything I hear about y'all product and your brand and the way you run the company, I think that's actually your differentiated value, it's like-
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. And also I think it's a benefit in the longterm, because customers of these apps, I'm pretty sure they, I mean, churn fairly high, because if they don't have a good experience. Whereas our users, we have free users and some of them convert in the long term and they're also like a benefit because they recommend the app to their, we know that for a fact that they do that, to friends, family. And I think like the best recommendation you can have is from your fellow, if someone tells you, "Oh, I have this app, it's super nice," they show it to you in a bar or whatever and it's like, "Okay, I'm going to download it."
Jacob Eiting:
I mean, one of the biggest indications of product market fit or successful product is just 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 customers, maybe it's hard without an onboarding, but you could put for 5% of users pop a survey and it's like, "How did you hear about us," three big buttons and make it really easy to cancel. It'll be a little bit of a sacrifice of customer experience, but you'll get enough data to like notionally.
I didn't think that would be all that helpful, we put it in RevenueCat and I look at that every day. I look at what everybody answered every day, because it's... We also have free form, which is really fascinating, like we learn about ways people are... That's how I learned that Chat GPT was telling people to use RevenueCat, when they asked how to in-app purchases, people, like all of a sudden, I saw Claude, Chat GPT, like all the LLMs, I was like, "Oh, I wouldn't have even thought to ask about that." It's really fascinating. So open-ended surveys on that can be directional, right, you're just learning directionally.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. For us open-ended surveys they end up with, my email doesn't work.
David Barnard:
Yeah.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah.
David Barnard:
Sure.
Jacob Eiting:
You get that too?
Bruno Virlet:
And I mean, it's interesting. I mean, we have people in small businesses, but we have really, like everyone, like from students, stay-at-home moms, it's like such a wide variety of customers and it's so nice. I mean, to have that.
David Barnard:
Well, I think it's a great place to wrap up. You've built something truly great with this business, something you can be proud of, and also something that has a ton of opportunity to continue growing. And like Jacob was saying, if you were very aggressive with your paywall, you probably could triple revenue in 2025, but that may not be the right move, but you might find something that works with your brand the way you want that freemium experience to happen, with the way you want your product to feel to your customers, and you may still double revenue. The crazy little, like accidental A/B test, was honestly so inspiring for me, because there are just so many little way... In a product that's working, in a product that has some level of product market fit, there are probably thousands of different ways to continue growing that product, even from just changing the text in the default ad. You just got to do stuff, yeah.
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah. It's inspiring, but it's still scary, I find, because it can go up or it can go down. And you might add a feature that kind of hides a bit another one. And yeah, but that's what makes it interesting, right, it's like there's some risk in it and.
Jacob Eiting:
Yeah, it makes the game fun, right.
Bruno Virlet:
Exactly.
David Barnard:
Well, anything you wanted to share as we're wrapping up, we're going to share a link to your Twitter and Bluesky profiles. I guess everybody should just go download Genius Scan, huh?
Bruno Virlet:
Yeah, just give it a try and let us know if you like it or dislike it, we would love to know. Honestly, we like feedback from customers.
David Barnard:
Well, it's been so much fun chatting with you today. Thanks for joining us.
Bruno Virlet:
Thanks for inviting me, it was really fun. Nice talking with you, Dave, Jacob.
Jacob Eiting:
Finally. We'll talk again in seven years.
Bruno Virlet:
There we go.
David Barnard:
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.