On the podcast: scaling to $10M ARR with a team of ten, having every employee do two user interviews a week, and why their hard paywall "win" backfired.

Top Takeaways:

🧪 Trial-start rate is the wrong scoreboard
A hard paywall and a no-exit discount both lifted trial starts, then refunds spiked by more than the gain; judge paywall tests on net revenue after refunds, on a matured cohort.

🗣️ Every employee does two user interviews a week, engineers included
Automated invites to a mixed sample of users book whoever has calendar space, so the whole team hears customers directly instead of through a PM.

💳 Charge from day one to find out who you're building for
A plain $10-a-month paywall with a one-week trial at launch filtered for willingness to pay and freed the team to work on onboarding and the core product instead of pricing tests.

🧩 Mixing other apps' playbooks is the worst strategy of all
Duolingo's freemium base only works because it teaches the basics of everything to hobby learners; a product for high-intent professionals should ignore that base entirely.

📅 Lead with annual to know your channel ROI the week the trial ends
Annual cash lands after the seven-day trial, so payback per channel is visible immediately and can be reinvested; monthly leaves you guessing between one month and 24.

🧑‍💻 $10M ARR with 10 people runs on owners, one meeting a week, and everyone shipping
Hire founder-type doers, hold a single Monday sync, and let AI coding tools turn the whole team, including a non-technical CEO, into builders.

About Anada Lakra:
Anada Lakra is the Co-Founder and CEO of BoldVoice, an AI accent and speech coach for the billion people who speak English as a second language. The app provides real-time feedback powered by our proprietary speech models and lessons from Hollywood accent coaches.

👋 LinkedIn

🗣️BoldVoice

Follow us on X:

• David Barnard - @drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
• RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
• SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] Building a subscription app by focusing on product value over paywall hacks
[01:12] Anada's personal experience with communication barriers
[08:53] The early founding story of BoldVoice
[13:30] Why BoldVoice charged from day 1
[16:36] Why over-optimizing paywalls distracts teams from improvement
[18:40] Why mature net revenue after refunds is an important metric
[22:04] How hard paywall experiments backfired once refunds were factored in
[24:17] BoldVoice's reverse-trial freemium model & why it ignored the Duolingo playbook
[33:32] How BoldVoice found its real ICP: professionals over students
[36:42] Keeping customer obsession alive with user interviews
[43:29] How Accent Oracle drove a major viral growth moment
[48:33] BoldVoice's approach to paid growth and annual plans
[50:45] How BoldVoice reached $10M ARR with 10 people
[55:02] The expansion from accent training to spoken-English fluency
[1:00:37] The stigma around accents and how BoldVoice hopes to change that

On the podcast: scaling Meta ads from zero to $100,000 a month, why they waited a year after launch before buying ads, and how a pricing page experiment shifted users toward annual subscriptions.

Top Takeaways:

📉 A big audience buys you a launch spike, not a growth engine
Even 7 million subscribers produce a bump at launch and a steady trickle after; durable growth still came from paid ads, SEO, and a product that converts cold traffic.

🧱 Fix trial-to-paid before you spend a dollar on ads
A full year of product work before the first ad lifted the conversion floor for every channel, because paid traffic always converts colder than organic.

🧲 Cold traffic converts better on a quiz than in the App Store
A long, personalized web quiz educates users, overcomes objections, and raises perceived value — and it beat direct-to-store traffic in a head-to-head test, which is why 90% of traffic goes there.

💰 Show annual first and shrink the perceived risk, not the price
Presenting annual upfront with a day-by-day trial timeline and a promised day-12 reminder shifted plan choice from 60/40 to 75–80% annual, with no price change.

👯 A two-person plan is retention insurance disguised as a discount
15% off for adding a workout partner gets 15% of trial starts to take it, raising order value and keeping both users subscribed longer.

🔬 70% of experiments fail on the first try — winners come from documenting why
Locking in the problem before brainstorming solutions, and writing every test down, turns failures into iterations instead of dead ends.

About Ethan Ethier:
🏋️Head of Growth and Operations at Built With Science, a science-based fitness app founded with YouTuber Jeremy Ethier. Personalized workout plans, nutrition guidance, and AI-powered coaching designed to help users train with research-backed methods.

👋 LinkedIn

🚀 Built with Science

🖥️ Built with Science Careers

Follow us on X:

• David Barnard - @drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
• RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
• SubClub - @SubClubHQ

On the podcast: hitting $10M ARR without ever testing a paywall, paying their own customers to help make video ads, and why you might want to turn away some potential customers.

Top Takeaways:

💸 You can reach $10M ARR with the growth playbook still in the box
$1M to $10M in subscription ARR in two years, with no lifecycle email, no paywall test, and no SEO, TikTok, or AdWords. The precondition was over a year of giving the product away first.

🚪 Screening buyers out protects every metric that matters
A web quiz that tells some visitors the product isn't for them caps conversion on purpose, because the wrong subscriber wrecks retention, reviews, and product signal.

🎬 Your own customers can be a creative engine
Members submit an audition tape, get a weekly brief, and receive a flat fee in real money (not credits, not discounts) for any video that’s used as an ad.

🏷️ Where you put the hardware margin is a bet on where the value lives
Sell the band at cost, roughly $80, and the $20 subscription carries the value; charge a premium for the device only if it reads as an object people want.

🆓 Hardware kills the free trial, so the free tier has to do the de-risking
You can't give away a physical device, so the free tier becomes the proof of quality that a trial would normally provide.

🔬 Published research is a moat nobody can clone over a weekend
Opt-in anonymized data sharing, ethics sign-off, and peer-reviewed papers move no revenue number this quarter, but are exactly what a skeptical buyer finds when they research your product.

About Luke Martin-Fuller:
🫀Co-founder of Visible, a wearable activity tracker built for illness, not fitness. Real-time heart rate data and personalized insights help users pace activity within their energy envelope.

👋 LinkedIn

🛥️Visible

🖥️Visible Careers

💬Visible on X

Follow us on X:

• David Barnard - @drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting - @jeiting
• RevenueCat - @RevenueCat
• SubClub - @SubClubHQ

Episode Highlights:
[00:00] From $1M to $10M ARR in Two Years

[01:57] How Long COVID Led to Visible's Founding

[04:18] 5,000 Waitlist Signups for a Product That Didn't Exist

[05:54] Building the Founding 100 With a Free App

[07:33] Raising Just Enough Money to Get Started

[08:27] Why Visible Won't Call Itself a Cure

[11:06] Turning Research Into a Credibility Engine

[16:49] The Stigma Around an Invisible Illness

[19:40] Why Lived Experience Matters for Investors and Employees

[21:57] Why an Existing Wearable Wasn't Good Enough

[24:46] Designing for Brain Fog and Limited Energy

[26:53] Partnering With Polar Instead of Building Hardware

[29:12] The Hidden Complexity of Hardware-Enabled Subscriptions

[30:59] Oura, Whoop, and the Three Hardware Pricing Models

[37:13] From $1M to $10M ARR Without Testing a Paywall

[42:09] Meta, UGC, and the One Paid Channel Behind Growth

[44:37] Paying Customers to Create and Test Video Ads

[47:56] Running an Influencer Program With a Team of Two

[51:21] Why Visible's Funnel Qualifies Customers Before They Buy

[55:24] Why Hardware Forces Visible to Sell Through the Web

[58:49] A 10-Day Journey From Landing Page to Purchase

[1:00:44] Using the Free App to De-Risk a Hardware Purchase

[1:02:08] A Quiet Series A at $7M in Revenue

[1:07:11] Biggest Win: Rebuilding the Web Funnel In-House

[1:08:00] Biggest Fail: An AI Feature Users Hated

[1:09:41] Why Growth Depends on Insurance, and Who Visible Is Hiring Next