Why BoldVoice Charged From Day 1 and Ignored the Duolingo Freemium Playbook — Anada Lakra

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. My guest today is Anada Lakra, Co-Founder and CEO of Bold Voice, the AI speech coaching app for non-native English speakers.

On the podcast, I talk with Anada about scaling to 10 million in ARR with a team of 10, having every employee do two user interviews a week, and why their hard paywall win backfired. Hey, Anada, thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today.

Anada Lakra:
Thank you for having me. I'm pumped.

David Barnard:
Yeah, I'm really looking forward to this conversation. So you, like so many builders, built something for yourself. You came to the US and. And you know what? I'm about to tell your story. Let me just have you tell the story because I think it's a fantastic story and a fantastic example of how when you face real world problems that you need solutions to, sometimes software is a great solution and that often is the best way to build something.

Anada Lakra:
Yeah, so let me go all the way back. I was born and raised in Albania. I lived there for the first 18 years of my life and I moved to the US for college. When I moved here, I had never actually been to the US before. It was my first time visiting. I didn't have any family or friends here, so it was a pretty big move. And I felt pretty prepared for it at the time because I'd applied to colleges, figured out the whole process on my own. I had gotten into Yale, which was, especially at the time, a huge accomplishment and felt very confident when I first moved here. So imagine my surprise when I started to speak and people were asking me to repeat myself and were clearly not understanding me. And it really, again, surprised me because by that point I'd learned English for 10 years and since I was basically eight.
So passed all the tests, got an A's and everything, so why were people not understanding me? And from that experience, I realized that you can learn a language on paper, but it's actually very different to communicate it confidently in real life. Your pronunciation, your accent, your fluency, your conversational skills, all of those things can get in the way of being clearly understood. And again, I realized there was this big gap and all that learning had not prepared me for that moment that I would actually communicate in a native English speaking environment. And definitely played a big role at the time, both in classroom settings where I'd raise my hand and say something and people would ask me to repeat myself. Or later when it came to job interviews where again, I would have to think about, I'm not actually sure how to say this word, let me think of a synonym on the spot because I don't want to butcher this.
So I realized it's a pretty big problem and many, many years later decided to start Bold Voice to help people again at this last mile of fluency. They've done all this learning on paper, but they still maybe struggle to communicate as clearly and be as confident in English as they are in their native language. And the job of Bold Voice is to fill that gap.

David Barnard:
Awesome. And then your co-founder kind of has similar story. How did you meet him and what's his story?

Anada Lakra:
His story is that he actually moved to the US when his parent immigrated when he was four. So he's essentially a native speaker, but his parents, when they moved, they were in their 30s. And even though well-educated software engineers, they still faced the ceiling of having this accent and feeling like, "Well, I can't speak as well and as beautifully as my American colleagues and therefore I don't feel comfortable managing people." And they were never being offered those managerial opportunities and those promotion opportunities to a great extent due to their communication confidence. So he's seen this from the perspective of his parents, which was clearly, again, very aligned with our mission. And we actually met in both of our first jobs out of college in consulting, and I think we very clearly and quickly both realized that financial services consulting was not what we wanted to build our careers around.
And we both wanted to actually build something, do something more entrepreneurial. And so we actually both together left that consulting company to build a startup in a very different space. But we're both now with Bold Voice second time co-founders together, which says a lot about the co-founding relationship and that trust that you need to have with your co-founder.

David Barnard:
That's awesome. I didn't look deep enough in your LinkedIn. Was it McKinsey and you're just not wanting to say it or was it - I

Anada Lakra:
Cannot share. Cannot confirm or deny.

David Barnard:
It's funny because I feel like there are so many stories though. Some of those consulting companies, they just have a really high bar to hire and you can make fun of them and maybe they overcharge for some of their services and maybe they give obvious answers to some folks. But boy, I've known a lot of really sharp people who go on to be very successful founders who got their career started at McKinsey or Accenture or some of these consulting companies. So I know there's a little bit of a stigma around it, but honestly, I just know so many great people.

Anada Lakra:
No, that's very true. But actually, let me tell you this one funny story. I applied to McKinsey in college and I got the interview, but I did not get an offer for McKinsey. And that was one of the cases of those interviews where I felt like, how am I going to, especially when a big part of being a consultant is that clarity and the communication confidence. I struggled to actually communicate my ideas that confidently. And I actually got an offer from a Swiss consulting firm where my interviewers were non-native speakers so we could get way faster into the core of the ideas as opposed to the accent and the communication. And then when I was in business school about five, six, however many years later, I got my offer from McKinsey because by that point I'd worked on my communication and on my accent. So it's kind of a really interesting, again, another validation point of the problem we're going after in a little bit of a funny full circle moment.

David Barnard:
That is so funny. I'm glad I asked because that is such a fun story and a perfect example of why you built this company. So then take me through, you were co-founders with Ilya is his name, right? Yeah. So you and Ilya founded a separate company, maybe just speed run how that went, but then the start of Bold Voice. Did you raise a bunch of money? How'd you get that first product into market? What did that look like?

Anada Lakra:
That first startup that we did was a recruiting technology company and we were bringing more data analytics primarily through third party references to employers so they could make better hiring decisions from the start instead of suffering the cost of hiring a person was not the right fit. We were 23, 24 at the time. It was our first startup. We had barely had any experience, but it was an incredible learning experience of how to build a product, how to talk to users. And in hindsight, there were a lot of, again, the typical mistakes the first time founders made. We made the same things. We started obsessing with the solution before really understanding the problem and talking to users. So I learned a lot through that experience that you can just build a product in a vacuum and then bring it to customers. You actually have to involve them from the very beginning of that process.
And we had some traction with it. We had over a dozen companies using it, thousands of candidates going through it, but we just didn't have quite the momentum to raise a big round at the time and be able to continue with it. So eventually we sunset that company and I, through that experience though, found my passion in product and in building the product experiences, talking to users, understanding and converting that into beautiful functional UX and again, product features that solve problems. So with that, I went into a different series B at the time, startup in New York. Then from there I went to build product at Peloton, which was really fun and another consumer facing product that at the time was exploding and it was a really fun experience to build product there. And then we started Bold Voice when I was in business school and I was, again, thinking about having done a startup before, you realize how difficult it is.
You realize that it sounds sexy from the outside, but actually the inner workings are just grinding nonstop and the more you accomplish in a way, the more the intensity ramps up. So I was very picky about exploring ideas because I knew that if I was going to do something again, it needed to be something where I could see myself spending the next decade of my life working on that problem. And the Bold Voice idea came to me because again, in a way it had been in my head for a decade since I first moved here. And it was also inspired by what I was starting to read. Again, this was 2021, this was before ChatGPT and some of these latest things that we're seeing now with AI, but already I was starting to read more about audio AI becoming more powerful. So the idea there is, can we build something with AI that can hear you as well as a coach would?
Because when it comes to speech coaching, accent coaching, you can't really just give people thumbs up, thumbs down. You really need super precise feedback for it to work. So at the time it seemed like with how AudioAI was progressing, we could build those ears on the machine to actually build a product that could function like a speech coach in your pocket without needing that person in the room. And so that was a thesis and now we're here five years later and we're still building around that same idea.

David Barnard:
Yeah. So then did you raise money? Was this a side project where you're at business school? Did Ilya quit his job? What was the actual founding story?

Anada Lakra:
Yeah, so I was six months shy of graduating from Harvard Business School. I decided to say no to my McKinsey return offer so I could focus full-time on this and I gave myself a deadline. I was graduating with six months. I told myself within those six months I need a term sheet and if I don't have a term sheet, then I can start applying to jobs. But if I do, of course I'll continue this full time. And in the meantime, I'm doing this 110%. I'm not entertaining any other projects. So that deadline was a great forcing mechanism to have that 100%, again, focus that I think is needed. Otherwise, a startup won't happen if your attention is split in a lot of different ways. So got to work very quickly. The first thing that I realized is I'm the user, but I'm not the expert here.
I'm not the speech coach. So first thing I did was to reach out to a bunch of different speech coaches who are experts in the field. I had this idea that if we got Hollywood speech coaches to work with us, that it would be especially differentiated and very cool because these are people who work with celebrities and actors and they often also have an acting background themselves, so they would be really great people to have involved in this project. So that was my first thing that I did. Reached out, explored conversations with them. I also, once we had our first coach, Ron, who's incredible and still works with us now five years later, put together a pilot with him where he recorded a bunch of videos. I found a few people, about a dozen people who were willing to do a beta run of this.
And we were sending them manually these videos and they were giving us their speech recordings back and emails and the coach was giving them feedback asynchronously. So we're just doing the dry run of super manually without any lines of code being written just to see how this would actually go and work when we actually had a real product out there. So with all that being said, then I started to pitch investors and through that process we landed our first term sheet of around 500K. And then once we had that term sheet, we also applied around the same time to YC because we had the term sheet, we had them accelerate our interview process. So we had the term sheet in hand. We also got into YC. So at that point, Ilya quit his job and we're both in it full-time.

David Barnard:
Awesome. And so since you went through YC, you both moved to the Valley for what, three months to go through the program?

Anada Lakra:
We would have had it not been that this is summer 2021 and COVID, so we actually built it out of New York. I have some slight regrets that that was the case and we didn't get to do that. Although we do go there every few months or so to see our advisors there and to a lot of our investors are based there, so it's good to go back. But yeah, we didn't have that in-person experience. So in a way we didn't have any distractions. We're just in a tiny office in New York just working 14-hour days to make as much progress as possible.

David Barnard:
When did the product actually launch? During YC?

Anada Lakra:
Yeah, we launched it in the first couple of weeks of YC.

David Barnard:
How did that go? I know you were charging from the very beginning, which was maybe a little counterintuitive compared to what a lot of venture-backed companies would do, especially at the time in 2021 when money was free and there was still a little bit of a just build it, grow it fast kind of mentality.

Anada Lakra:
Yeah. The biggest thing here in the way I think about charging is that especially in the early days, you really want to figure out who is your customer, who are you building for? Because the tool that you build, although it has a value proposition that could be pretty broad, there will be an ICP that will be your initial target audience that you need to hyper-focus on and make the product better for them before you can think about multiple ICPs. And so charging for the product is a way to already figure out who that ICP is. And this way you don't get feedback or worry and get distracted about feedback or usage patterns or issues with people who are just never going to be your ICP, but you can really figure out who has the willingness to pay, they have the willingness to pay that generally correlates with, okay, this problem clearly resonates with this person.
Let's then narrow down and focus on making that person's experiences as great as possible.

David Barnard:
It makes a ton of sense. Not everybody does that, but it really does make a ton of sense. How did you structure that? Was it just a standard seven-day free trial to a hard paywall? Did you have any kind of free tier or any kind of free stuff that people could continue doing in the app or was it just pay or leave the app?

Anada Lakra:
At the time we had a very simple, I believe $10 a month that was just the standard paywall. We always had a one-week free trial because we believe that people do want to need to experience a product before they can commit. We were not trying to stick them with a product and a payment that they regretted. But having, again, that free trial was still a much stronger signal than just totally ungated. And then yeah, we were not, especially in the YC days, we're not trying to revolutionize the business model. Let's just do the tried and true, just one-week trial, simple $10 a month so that we can focus our energy on actually building a good product experience, building a good onboarding, building the core product instead of just having to do a ton of experimentation on the paywall. Obviously that came later. We've done a lot of variance on the paywall and the pricing packaging.
And today we actually lead with an annual subscription of around $150 a year. And then we also offer a monthly as a fallback option for people who prefer that. And we also have a higher tier that comes with a few additional features like AI chat, which comes at $200 a year. So we have certainly evolved it, but I still think my philosophy is do optimize the paywall. It's important, but don't over-optimize the paywall compared to the actual product value that you're delivering to users, which is the onboarding is that storytelling and that prepping the user for a successful experience and then obviously the core day one plus product experience.

David Barnard:
Yeah, I love that perspective. And the way you put it in the notes was optimize product value, not just the paywall and onboarding. I kind of harp on it a lot in this podcast so I get to get up on my soapbox again because you put it so eloquently. But if you're spending so much time optimizing the onboarding and the paywall and you're getting a ton of trials, but you have a massive trial cancellation rate, if you think that another two pages in onboarding, another hack on your paywall is what's going to get those trial conversions, that's not how it works. It's because people actually get into the product and they're not finding value.That's a massive optimization lever on free trial conversions that not a lot of people are really spending enough time thinking about after the paywall. So I love that you brought that up and that's how you think about it.

Anada Lakra:
Yeah. I mean, look, all these hacks of like, oh, just one copy change and it drives 20% more people. They're so tempting because you're like, oh, I'm just one iteration away from unlocking this huge product value. And of course, again, I'm not saying do no testing at all. It is an important product surface area, but I think people have taken it maybe to an extreme where they're putting so much effort in that as opposed to, again, working on the core product experience. Another really interesting thing that we found in some of those experiments is that the initial metrics actually look really promising. For example, the start trial rate does increase with a few changes that you might make, and I can give specific examples if that's helpful. But at the end of the day, when you actually look who converted, did those payments go through or did they fail?
Did people ask for refunds? The delta after all that work with the bottom line is actually, we found for a lot of these experiments, not that big, if not sometimes even negative, even though the headline number of trial start rate is higher. So I've kind of gotten a little disillusioned with these, again, almost get rich quick schemes that feels like paywall optimization is becoming. And it's like at the end of the day, just make a better product for people and that's how you drive more revenue.

David Barnard:
Yeah. And to be clear, I mean, some of those hacks work and you're experimenting with them, you try stuff, but I love, and I'm just going to read it from my notes because I love the way you framed this, is that the ultimate judge, the ultimate metric you should be measuring against is not trial starts and some of those early funnel, not even initial conversions and stuff, but it's net revenue after refunds per exposed user. And then here's the kicker on a matured cohort. How did you decide on that specifically as your kind of gold standard metric to measure any experiment against?

Anada Lakra:
It came from the experience of running a lot of these and implementing some changes that looked really good. And in hindsight, again, at that time, maybe we just didn't know that we had to wait and see all these other metrics mature. And also we didn't have instrumentation. It was really easy day one to see start trial rate, and that's where you get the most data. That's where you're most likely to get a P value that is statistically significant because you get so many people at that level. But what we learned and started to implement soon after we started to really iterate on the paywall is that's not what actually matters. You have to actually look at the metrics of actual subscription conversion, which again, that's a pretty well-known thing. I don't think that's new, but the more important thing there is that some of those subscriptions, even though initially they convert, the payment doesn't actually go through, and a lot of the refund rate can be a huge delta.
So what I found is that anything that kind of forces or tricks people into starting a trial, you'll pay it when it comes to refunds. And that is a worse experience because those people who ask for refunds are generally pissed. They're not happy that they have to go through that process. You're also creating this negative user sentiment around the product that you don't want. And then of course, the matured cohort piece is important because people won't ask for the refund necessarily on day one. They'll ask for the refund after they've actually seen that the payment hit their bank account. So you have to think about, okay, trials start on this date, give it an extra week for them to convert, give it at least two extra weeks for the dust to settle from refunds. So actually, again, it's very tempting to make a quick decision on trials, but you have to give it more time to see the entire story play out.

David Barnard:
Yeah, it makes so much sense, but it's hard to do and it's hard to find the discipline. And then like you were saying, the tooling, I mean revenue cap, we just in the last year or two finally expanded the experimentation window where you can actually go back and look at three months and six months. And I think now it's over a year that you can look back and we've tried to make that really easy because it's one of those things if you're running your own analytics, it's just hard to do that and then have the discipline to go back and check it and all that kind of stuff. It's all these things that make sense, but then you actually have to execute, you actually have to do it and then have the discipline to keep looking back and maybe reversing some of those decisions that you're really excited about.
I mean, because I would imagine you do sometimes pick a winner on some of those early metrics, then you don't see till three months later that it's something you actually wanted to reverse. Has that happened frequently or how does that work for you?

Anada Lakra:
Yeah, I don't think we've implemented a decision that we've had to reverse, but yeah, there have been many things where we've been really excited about the initial result. And the hardest thing is not necessarily the discipline and checking back on the data, it's the fact that it takes just way longer and you have data you're excited about, you want to be able to action it. And the idea of just sitting there on something that could be really promising for an extra month or depending on X number of months, depending on how much, again, users you need to validate and to statistical significance, that part is hard of just sitting on that and being patient. And it also means you can't iterate as fast, you can implement those learnings as fast. So I get it and I was that impatient person. What we found is, for example, I'll give you two examples actually.
When it comes to the paywall, we tested a hard paywall where we basically removed the X dismiss button. So people had to start a trial in order to proceed. And then we also tested a version where there was still a dismiss button on the main paywall, but then if you dismissed it, we gave people an offer of X percent off that they could not X out of. So they would have to start a trial. If they hadn't started at the baseline price, they would have to start it at the lower price. Again, it's a trial, it's not a payment, so they still can't cancel it. But both of those look so promising on the trial numbers and it makes sense. People have already put in all that time in the onboarding flow. They actually want to see what this app is all about. And we're like, great, this is great.
Why are we sitting on this? Why shouldn't just we put this in front of everyone? And the answer came down to the refunds and the refunds spiked by way more than the gain in star trials. And again, it took us a while to get to that data, but once the data came in, I think it was very clear that that was not the right thing to do. So again, I feel like I've been a broken record already about this, but I think my takeaway from this is that just the mechanical clever things don't actually work and you'll pay the price for those things. And the only thing that actually works is once you have something that generally makes sense when it comes to the paywall, just work on the product.

David Barnard:
So how does it work now? You said you tested a fully hard paywall and then you tested the X to a fully hard paywall with a discount. What happens now if they X out of the paywall? Because you said that you don't really have a freemium experience, right?

Anada Lakra:
We have a very limited freemium experience. So if you X out of the paywall, you're taken to the speech assessment, you'll be able to speak, you'll still see the assessment results, we'll break down all the things that we heard. It's already a pretty valuable experience. Some people work with coaches to just get that assessment, so we give that for free. And then you can also access the rest of the day one experience and do a practice set and I believe also coach video for free. And then only on day two, you can start a trial at that point if you wish to continue. So we've kind of found the middle ground and let's give some of the product experience, but we also have an experience where we have daily plans. So it's easy to say, okay, the first daily plan for free on us. After that, again, you don't have to pay right away, but you have to start a seven-day trial to continue.

David Barnard:
It's essentially a reverse trial at that point because you are giving value, but only for that first set of lessons and the speech assessment. These are the kind of things I think more people should be experimenting with is there a great experience I can give to folks that helps them see the value of the product, but that there is some kind of limit to it? And a great example, I just brought this up on a live stream yesterday. I've been looking at trading card games apps a lot in the past few weeks because we're going to do a live app valuation on Subclub of one of these trading card game apps, and it's like the card scanner to see the value of your Pokemon cards and magic cards and things like that. And one of the really cool things they did, and I hadn't seen this exact user experience before, but what they do is they give essentially the full value of the product, but then they limit it to a certain number of scans and then they make it really clear.
So you've got your whole scanner UI where you're scanning your Pokemon card and it says 35 scans left, and then you scan one and then 34 scans left, and then you scan one, 33 scans left. And so it's really prepping you for that moment that the paywall comes, but it's giving you the full value of the product and a really fantastic experience generally. I mean, some are really bad at scanning the cards, as I've learned. My kids are into both Magic and Pokemon, and they've been pulling me in recently. So I've been actually using them with their card collections, and I've collected a few now. So some of them actually are a bad experience. And this is kind of your point though is those apps that are a fantastic experience, it's way better for me to have that experience and then use the product, and then I'm going to be a product user for life.
I'm going to actually subscribe versus if I'd have done a seven-day free trial, it looks really great, I started the trial, but then I immediately canceled because the product's not delivering. So if you can actually deliver value and people actually care, that kind of finding a way to do a reverse trial, finding a way to do some kind of limited experience, trying to just find ways to give value really preps the customer for that next paywall that they're going to be way more likely to convert.

Anada Lakra:
And the cool thing is that, at least for us, you don't need to do that at the expense of that paywall in onboarding. There will be some people who, through the onboarding experience, have seen enough about the product that they're prepped to start a free seven-day trial. There will be some people who are more skeptical and maybe they have been burned in the past by free trials or other apps that have shady product experiences and they even just putting their credit card down, they don't want to do it even if it's for a free experience. So for those people, you can offer that. I think offering for everyone and just removing the free trial paywall from the experience, I think that could be tricky because you can also maybe risk that people think, "Oh, this is just a free product," and then get kind of upset when you show them a paywall.
So I think we've kind of found an interesting, nice middle ground where we do show them that paywall, they can X out of it and they can get a little bit of a free taster before they commit to putting their credit card down for that free experience. Do

David Barnard:
You think you'll ever have a more kind of freemium tier where people can get some value and continue using the app? Or what's your philosophy on that? Because I know when we were prepping for the episode, you've mentioned that you really enjoyed Jim Kantsu, the chief product officer at Duolingo, his episode, and their big thesis at Duolingo is that that freemium base is the growth engine that they lever. What's your philosophy on that? Do you ever see freemium or do you think that this form of reverse trial and giving away value is enough to keep propelling the business forward?

Anada Lakra:
Jim is great. I'm a big fan of him and the work he's done at Duolingo. I will say though that it depends on the product and it depends on the business model. And I think the worst thing that someone can do is take some playbooks and some elements of a playbook from one app, combine it with a playbook of a different app and create this mishmash strategy. Duolingo strategy has always been huge freemium base that they monetize a portion of, and because they have all the languages, all the levels, they're teaching the basics of everything, they now have all these new skills, give this product away for free, even if you monetize a percentage of it, you're fine. Our philosophy from the beginning is we're not going after this huge base of learners who are at basic level. We are actually intentionally ignoring them. We're not teaching the basics of English.
We're not teaching words. We're focusing on a very different audience that is actually somewhat ignored or deprioritized by a lot of these apps. Which is people who already have a pretty good command of language and want to take it to the next level. So people are an intermediate to advanced level and for whom English is important enough that they want to put more effort behind it. And those people are generally career professionals. They care more about English, they're willing to pay. The alternative to what we offer is a way more expensive one-on-one speech coaching experience with an English teacher or an accent coach. So it's a totally different audience where the intent is much higher and the ROI is also way higher than as a hobby learning the basics of Spanish or Japanese or something like that. So totally different ICP, different value proposition, different willingness to pay.
And so our entire business has been optimized around that. And it makes sense that again, for Duolingo, if they do way too heavy monetization at the sacrifice of their freebase, the freebase is what got them here. So that doesn't make sense. Whereas for us, that was never the case. We're always hyper-focused on this person who has a willingness to pay if they get a product that solves that need. And if obviously the cost of that product is a significant reduction to working one-on-one with a coach, which is the case for us.

David Barnard:
As you say that though, it does make me think that at some point as you grow and have more time and resources to experiment with, that maybe there is a cheaper tier that is aimed at the more casual but still willing to pay. And again, I think this is something if you're building an app and you start to see, because I imagine this wasn't from the get-go, you realized, oh, we're going to sell this to professionals who are willing to pay hundreds of dollars for this. So if you start seeing yourself pulled in that direction, embrace it because it can. $150 a year and then a premium tier above that, that's 200. And honestly, you're probably just scratching the surface of what you could do. And then you mentioned you even have a one-on-one coaching that it's not a huge part of the business, but it's like four or $500 an hour.
So there is massive willingness to pay when it's on that side of things. And so by not chasing that consumer and lower willingness to pay market, you're building a really fantastic business on that higher ROI, higher intent, more disposable income and all those kind of things.

Anada Lakra:
Yeah. And that served us well till this point, and I'm not going to say we'll never deviate from that strategy. I think for sure there will be experimentations with the packaging, especially as we go. Right now, we're still primarily serving people in the US who are immigrants and who also have that higher ability to pay. Whereas outside of the US, spoken English fluency is sometimes as important because you can get a higher paid job, you can get better opportunities, you can go to study at a different international university and so forth. It unlocks even in some cases a bigger delta between the opportunities you could get without that clear English and those you can get with clear communication. But of course the base ability to pay in general is lower. I think as we do more of the international strategy, we certainly can revisit and should revisit the localization and things like that.
I'm not saying this is a strategy necessarily that we will rigidly keep as we continue to scale, but certainly the principle that we're serving a different learner level where they are higher intent and willing to pay for a product that solves their need instead of just a hobby learner, I think that will most likely continue to be the case.

David Barnard:
How did you figure out that that was your market?

Anada Lakra:
Well, in the early days we created this product. I went back to the basics and I said, "Well, I was an international student when I first experienced this problem." And it's such almost a cliche playbook. Let's just put this in colleges because college students are great adopters. And again, this is what happens going back to my point about you take a playbook from a totally different product, like dating app or something where they all start in college campuses or Facebook famously or whatever, and you apply it to product where the ICP and the value prop is super different and of course it's not going to work. So what we found in that process is that it's not like international students were a terrible audience for us. I mean, we still do get a lot of students in the app, but we clearly realize that A, they are a bit younger and they still have some plasticity and they're still surrounded by native speakers in very social environments.
So their rate of improvement naturally will be higher without needing this additional resource if they just focus on it themselves. The second thing is the willingness to pay and the ability to pay for college students is of course lower. And also just the fact that they maybe have not seen the price of their communication as much because they're not yet in a meeting where people will overlook them and listen to the native speaker over them or they haven't yet been in a job interview where they realize that the reason that that didn't work out was their communication and all of those things. So both the willingness to pay and the realization of how much it impacts your income and your career advancement has not happened yet. So we found that actually the audience that resonates the best with this were people who were in the workplace already and who were already seeing the cost and therefore the ROI of investing in their career.
And of course they were having actually income that they could put towards this.

David Barnard:
And then has there been any kind of more direct B2B play with companies because I did see on Hacker News, the founder of Expo said that they talked about having an employee expense this as a solution to help them improve their job performance.

Anada Lakra:
Yeah, we've seen that quite a bit with just inbound companies will reach to us to make this happen for their employees. Or we're also seeing that people will buy this and then have the company pay for it, which is great. We haven't pursued it as much as a intentional go-to-market purely because of resourcing. We're still a very small team and we've gotten to this point by being relentlessly focused on the consumer experience. And I think the muscle of building a B2B company or B2B go-to market is pretty different and I think it'll make sense for us at a future stage potentially. But for now, the consumer market is so big that we've just let it be our main intentional focus and then we get this nice additional effect of inbound from companies because they know that the consumer product is so loved.

David Barnard:
Yeah. One of the things you touched on there and we've kind of been touching on throughout the entire conversation is user obsession and focus. I love your approach to understanding users. So why don't you take me through the layers of how you speak to your users, how you interact with user and how you let that impact the direction of the product?

Anada Lakra:
So we've put a bunch of things in place to make the user obsession not just something we talk about, but a muscle that we keep fresh because I think the user base is always also going to change and their expectations are going to change. You're going to bring in naturally newer people as you expand. So it's really important to not just have this do a bunch of user interviews at the beginning and then be like, okay, that's our user and then just not evolve that understanding. So the things that we've implemented is, for example, we send out automated invites to users and we pick a variety of different people. Sometimes it's subscribers who have been with us for two or three years, sometimes people who just started trial a week ago and converted or didn't convert, and we ask them to jump on a call with our team for 15 minutes and share their feedback.
And that invite automatically invites the people on the team who have availability in their calendar. So what that creates is that basically every single person on the team, myself, my co-founder, our engineers, our growth people, everyone is in at least two user interviews a week. So we're actively talking to people for at least 15 minutes twice a week. And that's just one example. Another example is we've created this super user group and we hold weekly or so calls with them, and that's a great opportunity for, this is the people who already engage with the app a lot to figure out how do we make these experiences better for them. And where that's been really impactful is to actually have our engineers demo new features that we're working on and get feedback from those users on those features so that they're a part of the product evolution and decision making before the feature is even out to users.
So that's been really powerful to figure out what is making sense, what's not making sense. One thing about our product is that it's deceptively very complicated when it comes to pronunciation, speech. It's not like teaching grammar where there are correct and incorrect rules. There's just so many elements and details and exceptions and nuances and it can get really complicated to build, which is what we want, a really user friendly product experience while also not making it over complicated and intimidating to use and understand. So it's really important to get our real user's eyes on features to validate, is this actually making sense before we ship it? So those are just two quick examples, but sometimes we also bring people in office and we watch how they actually use the product and we watch what they tap, what they're spending most time on. Of course, we also have analytics around all of this that we also watch, but being able to actually verbally talk to users and actually see them interact with the product I think is an underrated skill.
So building these, again, automated ways for us, semi-automated ways, of course, then we actually are in these calls, but semi-automated ways to have more user face time has been super helpful.

David Barnard:
I love that level of customer obsession. And it speaks to being such a small team, and we'll get to this later, you're only 10 people and at $10 million in ARR, which is incredible, a million dollars per employee as a small scrappy company is incredible. But that user obsession, you're meeting with the users two a week, everybody at the company, so it's 20 calls a week at least. You have a super user group and then you bring people into the office. There's even layers to it, but that qualitative feedback and seeing people actually struggle is so different than the quantitative, just look at the analytics. And then when you see the analytics and you're like, "Oh, it looks like something's going on here," then you actually can verify that with the super user group or with these in-office testing and those kind of things. So I love that kind of multi-layer approach.
And then you're also not over-indexing on the super users because you're having meetings with the random folks, and then you're actually having people in office to get the human touch. So I absolutely love how you've built that and structured it to touch all those different points and not. Because it is a bit of a trap sometimes where if you only did the super user group, you'd probably be pushing the product in directions that works for them, but not some of the more casual users. And then if you only did the kind of casual user sampling, you may miss some of the things that the super users care about. And so by layering it all like that, you're really getting the kind of breadth of qualitative feedback that you just never would get in analytics and never would get if you didn't do it in this multi-layer strategy.
Did that just come about organically or how did you decide on that approach?

Anada Lakra:
I mean, it's evolved over the years for sure. And more recently, again, we have been figuring out ways to build more and more automation. All of us here in the company use Cloud a lot, so we're figuring out how do we do these things so that we don't have to. Because if you have to have a person email manually a bunch of users, and that's great one-off, but it's a one-off. And so these automations help us, again, make sure that we maintain that muscle instead of just making it a one-off effort. But I will say though, to your point about the diversity of perspectives, one really important flag is that you're always going to get more feedback and you're going to get more people to jump on calls who are happy users because they're like, "Oh my gosh, my favorite product reached out to me for my feedback.
I want to book this call." And people who did not have a good experience are going to be less likely to jump on those calls. So it's really important to keep that in mind and to be aware of the bias in the feedback and the features that people are also asking for. A lot of the time people who did not have a good experience or did not feel like the product met what they were looking for, those people might not want to jump on a call, but if we give them just a three-question mini survey in an email where they don't even have to click on anything, they can just respond in an email, they'll be more likely to answer that. Or when someone goes to cancel their subscription or their trial, having a mini flow there that asks them what actually went wrong. So yeah, I think just being aware of that bias and making sure that you're not overly indexing on making those happy people happier, which is important, but that could also lead you toward making this super niche, super technical product.
And you also want to create a product that has, especially as it grows, wider and wider appeal.

David Barnard:
Such great advice. Gosh, there's so many things I want to talk about. We don't have a ton of time left, but maybe we can speed run some of the virality and growth things y'all have done because you've gotten some really cool growth wins and some viral moments and things like that. What would you say were the maybe top three most impactful lessons on the growth side or top three kind of viral moments?

Anada Lakra:
Well, for sure the top one was the Axon Oracle that we built. So yeah, our team had this idea that if we could build a tool that could predict where a person was from just based on 10 seconds of them speaking, it could have this kind of viral potential. And so we built and trained a model in-house to do exactly that. So I think this also speaks to, again, a really important part of our success is that we have an AudiML team in-house building these and training these really differentiated models from scratch with our own data. And we also have the expert speech coaches who are a huge part of how we label the transcribed and just train these models to be better. So that's a really big differentiation in our product. And the Axon Oracle was built based on one of those in-house created models, and it worked.
It was the most magical thing I think we've done. And the best part about it is that the way that it spread is that every month I write the investor updates. I've been doing for five years. That month that the Axen Oracle was built, I sent it out, I think that even day after or so to our investors. One of them was an angel investor, it was Korean, and he was like, "Oh, this is cool. I'll put in on Threads." And he posted it on Threads, and then I believe the next day we had a hundred thousand people in Korea try this thing. It's again, wild and unlike anything we've seen before. So of course when that happened, we're like, "Let's make this better. Let's invest a lot of time in making the model more accurate, making sure it doesn't crash and all these things." And it was a really wonderful way to get people familiar with the product, and we made it.
There was no gate, there was no free trial. It was a pretty magical experience. You don't even have to download the app, by the way. My co-founder actually made this decision to just put this in a separate web app where you just go to accentoracle.com, you record your voice, instantly spits out your feedback or your results. So it was optimized for this frictionless viral moment that then exposes people to Bold Voice as a brand and then invites them into the app to continue discovering more things about their speech and then actually improving and working on their pronunciation and speech as well.

David Barnard:
Has that been fairly evergreen or have you taken lessons from that in your ads and other viral content?

Anada Lakra:
For sure. Yeah, it's actually surprised us how much it actually has lasting appeal. There are people who use it, who keep coming back. It will randomly go viral. Again, with viral things, what makes them beautiful is also what makes them tricky. You can't over-engineer them with ads where you know exactly I'm spending this much, I'm getting this much out of it. But one thing that has proven true is that when we invest into it, so for example, we recently added this really cool feature where it doesn't just tell you the country where your accent is from, but it also goes down to the city level. And once we implemented that, it had another viral boost because again, had this new unique edge to it. So yeah, we can constantly see it have this evergreen value with random unpredictable spikes, but we have a few levers where we can boost it by adding new features.
Or another thing that we did is that we showed people a snippet of the sample of the full results that they would get in the app. So they're not just seeing this result and then they have to make the leap of faith to go onto the app. We're telling them, "By the way, here are some of the other things you'll see on the app," and that invites them to get to the app or it boosts the conversion rate to get them to the app.

David Barnard:
Yeah, that is so cool. What's the number two top growth hack, lesson, viral moment?

Anada Lakra:
Probably when it comes to viral things, the second thing that we did, which is, again, kind of funny and unpredictable, is just social media and TikTok. There was this trend that was going around with people crying on TikTok when the app gave them low scores. And in particular, there was this one creator who, I don't know, she got 300 million views in a few months or something pretty crazy like that. Again, completely not boosted by ads. So again, another really cool way of getting the product in a more lighthearted, accessible way into the people's feeds. So we're not just doing this some more serious marketing, but we also have these other lighter ways to get in front of people and make them aware of bold voice. Of course, when you do humorous content, you're going to get huge viral spikes, but they're not going to have the same level of intent that you can get from paid ads, for example, or word of mouth, obviously, where you can really target the messaging.
But it's still a really nice, I think, machine to have working alongside the paid marketing efforts.

David Barnard:
Well, for number three then, I want to ask, what is your bread and butter growth tactic? Do you rely on paid ads? What's the bulk of what you put your growth effort into?

Anada Lakra:
I think it's a mix for sure of product-led viral or shareable features plus paid marketing. On the paid marketing side, I know it's very vilified and a lot of people are against it, and I think that's taken to an extreme. And realistically, even those people are saying ads are bad are actually running ads. My experience with it is that there's a good way to run ads and a bad way to run ads. The good way to do it, I think, is to just be fully aware of your unit economics so you're not spending money on, again, low value customers when it comes to, again, LTB over CAC. So there's quite a bit of discipline there that needs to happen to make sure that the unit economics are strong. And one really powerful thing that I have found in the process is using payback period to your advantage and making that as short as possible because it gives you upfront a lot of clarity on a user's LTB.
And what I mean by that is when I already referred to this before with having most users by default being presented with the annual plan as opposed to the monthly plan, what that means is that with an annual plan, we get the cash upfront from users after their seven-day free trial. So we know right away from a particular channel of this many subscribers, this is how much we spent, and then we know exactly how effective that marketing was, as opposed to monthly where you get the initial monthly subscriber, but you don't actually know will they retain one month or will they retain 24 months? And different channels actually do produce very different durations by customers, especially TikTok, I found to be a flimsier channel in terms of just intent and loyalty or attention span, whatever you want to call it. So it's really helpful to have annual as a way to add that discipline where upfront you know what your LTV over CAC is at least for the first year.
And also by getting instant CAC payback, that gives you the safety that you can then reinvest that money directly into acquiring the next customer.

David Barnard:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Gosh, so much I want to talk about. Well, let's dive into being a 10-person team and hitting 10 million in air or as a 10-person team. How do you do that?

Anada Lakra:
It's a good question. I think it's a mix of things. Probably the biggest thing I'd give credit to is just the people we've hired and how much just everyone is a doer and an owner. I think everyone here drives a ton of value for the business. And part of how we do that is by hiring people who are this founder types who want to have that huge impact and who want to be very ambitious with what they build and don't require also a lot of direction and coordination. They are the types of people who can just get things done largely independently. Another thing that we do as a company is minimizing distractions to building. So we have one team-wide company meeting on Mondays where we just all have an opportunity to sync and everyone is aware of what everyone else is doing. But other than that, it's really heads down time and again, talk to users.
So being very also focused on who the user is, super impactful and having everyone work toward to solve that user's problem instead of just building and writing code. So I think a big part of it is thanks to that. And now of course, also with the latest AI tooling that we have now with Claude, everyone in the company's using Claude. For the first time in my life, I'm actually shipping PRs myself, which is crazy. I'm not a technical person, and I'm not here to claim that now I'm the highest producer of code in the company. I'm definitely the lowest, but just the amount of ownership and freedom and just agency that everyone gets, and that's just amplified with the fact that this tooling allows us to build even faster. Another example is our designer. He has done an incredible job, not just building things on Figma, but translating them to prototypes and even getting them to almost 80% there when it comes to then the engineers taking it over and coding it.
So we've also optimized the workflows so that we can get things iterated on and shipped even faster.

David Barnard:
I realized as soon as I said that, some people are probably going 10 million in ARR, that's not that big, and 10 people, that's a lot of people. But it's a very different business, and that's why it's so impressive. This is not you spent 15 million on paid ads to get to 10 million in ARR. This is not you had one viral moment and blew up to 10 million ARR and you're just going to tank after that viral moment. So you've built a repeatable machine, you have machine learning and AI experts on the team. You've built a real company and have done so profitably. So yes, speak to that as well. A lot of people who get to 10 million, it's a very different business at the 10 million than what you've built.

Anada Lakra:
I feel like, again, we've been around here for five years now. We're not an overnight success story. We're also not an AI wrapper where we found there's this short-term arbitrage opportunity of just putting something out there in front of a user building around a specific model. And that means that, I mean, hopefully, again, our value proposition is more durable, our business model is more durable. The investment we've also done on the AI and ML capabilities has also proven to be the correct investment because still to this day, you cannot talk to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever have you and get this kind of feedback that BoldVoice gives you. And we made this bet that when it comes to non-native English speakers speaking English, that is a too maybe niche of an opportunity for the more general models to go after, and yet it's a huge opportunity when you just look at one company going after it and how big the market of non-native English speakers is.
So yeah, we've invested a lot in, again, building a product that doesn't go away in the next iteration of ChatGPT or Claude. But of course, the landscape is always changing, so we're also spending a lot of effort on the technical side, on ML side across the board to continue to innovate and make the product better and better and always a step or hopefully more ahead of where the more generalized models are.

David Barnard:
Well, last thing I did want to touch on before we wrap up is the kind of shift away from just focusing on accent to a broader mission with the company. So I wanted to give you a chance to talk through that.

Anada Lakra:
For sure. So from day one, we've actually called ourselves an accent training app. And the reason for that is that the vision has always been we need to help people speak more clearly and confidently, but we also know that the biggest pain point that we're hearing from a lot of people at this last mile of fluency is their accent, and it seems like such a differentiated and spiky pain point that we can create a product and scale a product initially that focuses on that wedge. And now we've reached the point in the market, in our brand, in our revenue as well where we. And also we raised a series A that allows us to build towards that vision of getting to the next level and using this wedge to expand into this larger market of spoken English fluency. Again, we're now going after early level learners.
The focus is still largely the same learner. We're just going maybe a step earlier instead of last mile, going a step in the penultimate mile of fluency, and then expanding from just accent coaching into also things like confidence of speech, ability to convey your ideas clearly. Did you use the right phrase? Was it idiomatic? Did you use the right sentence structure? Did maybe a grammar mistake slip in there from your native language? Is your point coming across? And all these things that create confident communication beyond just particularly pronunciation and accent. And so this is just to me a natural evolution of the product and the next concentric ring around the core that we've built around accent training that feeds into our goal ultimately of there are a billion people out there and English is for better or worse than the global language of business and the one language we universally have decided to adopt.
And speaking that language at the most confident and fluent level is going to create a lot of opportunities for a lot of people. So let's build every piece that it takes to get someone to that complete fluency and confidence.

David Barnard:
I'm curious personally if this expanded TAM also includes things like coaching against verbal ticks. I mean, as you were saying all that, I'm like, I've been podcasting for six years now and I still say and like, and I don't feel like I'm even the most confident communicator as a native English speaker. Is that ever part of who you might serve with this product or do you think that's just a whole different product?

Anada Lakra:
It's a good question. We've talked internally about speech coaching for native speakers as well and just more general things. My impression of that market though is that it feels more like a nice to have and a one-off problem as opposed to this repeatable higher stakes problem, which is what English coaching for non-native speakers is. And because we still have such a big market and we've just scratched the surface of that market, our intention for the foreseeable future is to stay focused on that person. At the same time, there are a few things that our model is getting better at hearing that could be applicable both for native speakers and non-native speakers, things like vocal fry or filler words and other things like that that we're also, again, in the process of adding to the product that could benefit everyone. But for now, yes, the focus is clear on non-native English speakers because we think that that's both the bigger market and the sharpest pain that people are actually willing to pay to solve.

David Barnard:
Yeah. I am so glad I asked that question because it's just a perfect example of as a product builder, you can go chase all these like, "Oh, well maybe this is a bigger TAM and maybe we could serve those people." But your answer was, "We're focused on the most critical pain point with the highest willingness to pay." And it's just such a fantastic answer and such a clear, great almost summary of this whole conversation is that you're very focused on a very specific pain point that has a high willingness to pay, that matters in somebody's lives, that matters in their career, that matters in how they communicate even day-to-day life. And so it's just such a cool kind of summation of your approach to all of this, so it was a great place to end on. But I do want to ask, the three questions I asked every guest now at the end, what's the most impactful experiment or change, your biggest win over the last year?

Anada Lakra:
Maybe what I already shared around the adoption of these automations and coding tools to make everyone even more of a builder than they were and make people be twice, if not more productive and increasing that velocity.

David Barnard:
It's almost a trope now in 2026, but golly, even just in. I thought I was a heavy AI user, but just in the past few weeks, I've completely changed how I work with computer use. It's just getting good enough where it can just do stuff. So I just send it out on task. It's an assistant updating spreadsheets and fixing this, and it's pretty incredible. So if you think you're super AI native and fluent, keep trying because I feel like every two or three weeks you just get deeper and deeper and deeper and it's getting crazy good. Anyways, what's the worst experiment or change that you've implemented in the last year, your biggest fail?

Anada Lakra:
I already spoke about this, but the paywall stuff, just stop over-optimizing every single word and every button and everything. Optimize them for a little bit and then move on to the actual product.

David Barnard:
Yeah, great answer. Great answer. You won't hear me argue. And then the last thing, fill in the blank, growth would be easier if.

Anada Lakra:
For us, if accents and speech was not so taboo to talk about. We get so many people in user interviews who tell us they love this product, it's improved their lives so much, but on a day-to-day, are they actually posting about this on LinkedIn as much as they're telling us or are they bringing this to their colleague? There's this kind of shyness about talking about something like this because you don't want to offend people. And at the same time, I feel like this does them more of a disservice because at the end of the day, again, it's not about accents, it's about communication confidence. And that's a big part, by the way, of why we're also doing this expansion. First of all, it is to give people a better product that better solves their need and captures more of the things that makes them struggle with their English beyond their accent.
But second, it is also to escape a little bit this almost antiviral word of accent. And that's why also the Accent Oracle was so fun because we kind of turned it on its head and we made a fun viral experience out of a word that is not as people I tend to shy away from. It's always a thing that it's on my mind of as we grow, it's really important to figure out how we combat and how we boost the word of mouth and combat this idea of I don't want to share this product with others, even though it's very helpful for me. And I think there are other industries that went through this and have seen an evolution like mental health was something where people did not talk about it and then it almost feels like overnight, but of course not overnight. With a lot of hard work from a lot of people involved, it then became something that people are talking about more publicly and it got de-stigmatized.
And I hope that we are part of that conversation of doing the same thing for speech.

David Barnard:
Yeah. And I love your framing too because it's not. And I love even the pivot away from overly focusing on the accent because it's not about completely removing an accent unless that's what you want because some people do want that. They want to just be so clearly a native English speaker that people would never even think they were from another country. But if you're from Spain and have a little bit of a Spanish accent, I think accents are cool. Most Americans think accents are cool, but then it just does come down to communication is that it is sometimes harder, especially for native English speakers. And I've mentioned this to colleagues, my European colleagues I feel like have way less difficulty with certain languages and understanding people with those accents because they themselves aren't, like you brought that up, when you're not a native speaker, it's easier.
But when you are, I have found it more difficult. But I love that, that it's not about removing the accent, it's just about helping be a more clear, confident communicator. Such a great mission and such a great expansion of the market.

Anada Lakra:
Absolutely. And again, the goal is to have everyone be as confident in English as they are in their native language. Accents are a very small part of it. At the end of the day, the goal is confidently communicate and get your point across and always be understood without having to repeat yourself or be asked, "Hey, where are you from?" From the first moment of opening your mouth, which is something that I actually hear a lot in user interviews. So we would just want to remove those roadblocks while also allowing people to be as confident as themselves as they can possibly be.

David Barnard:
Yeah. Amazing. And fun place to wrap up. So thank you so much for joining. This is such a fun conversation.

Anada Lakra:
Likewise. Thanks so much.

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.