She bet on a consumer app when every VC wanted B2B—then grew to $10M ARR. | Anada Lakra, Founder of BoldVoice

If you're not embarrassed by the first version of what you launched, then you launched too late. So it was very important for us to just get the app out there as quickly as possible so that we would start iterating and learning from real user feedback. We had both gone through this and we had first-hand experience and a genuine passion about building a solution for this and also genuine understanding of the pain point. And so basically the founder MarketFit was there even before we had product or product MarketFit. I don't think if Product MarketFit is this like on or off toggle, I think of it as a spectrum. For sure if I had to like pick a number, I think the one million ARR felt like, okay, this is not just a novelty or we found like a few people who really like this, but this is something that clearly a mass of people are starting to use. And I think it was not just in the revenue metric, it's also in the usage metrics. That's product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. I called it the product MarketFit question. Product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. Product MarketFit. I mean the name of the show is Product MarketFit. Do you think the Product MarketFit show has Product MarketFit? Because if you do, then there's something you just have to do. You have to take out your phone, you have to leave the show five stars. It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you. Anato, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. So you started an app called Bold Voice, which is it's a little bit like Duolingo except it's focused strictly on the accent piece, right? The how you speak, not just learning the language, but really getting the accent right. You also started in 2021, which was an interesting time to start. I mean, there was a lot of hype, but then it was painful afterwards and yet things seemed to be going up and to the ride. You just raised $21 million series A a couple months ago. So we'll go through that whole story and kind of talk a lot about what it takes to launch a successful B2C. We don't see that many B2C, Frank, because you have a lot more B2B, direct consumer app in the 2020s, right? Not the 2010s when there was like two apps. Now there's a lot. So anyways, with all that said, maybe just as a first question, like tell me a little bit about that 2019, 2020, 2021 period. What were you doing before you kind of had the idea? Yeah. So the story starts in probably 2020. I was in my dorm room at Harvard Business School, had recently racked up a consulting internship that was not for me. And I was thinking about actively what to do next. And I had already done this started before that I'd been through the founder journey and I knew how hard it was. So I wasn't necessarily eager to jump right back into it knowing what it takes. I was actively thinking though about different ideas that would make me compelled to do something like this again. When I was doing that, something that was very top of mind for me at the time was the fact that I was surrounded by a lot of international students back in business school who were coming from all types of diverse backgrounds from almost any country in the world. And I remember thinking how much those international classmates were struggling to raise their hands in class or how they were talking about how difficult the interviews were for them because they felt like they were not that confident. They felt like they couldn't express themselves as clearly. And these were very smart and very capable people that were being hindered by their English, even though on paper the English was great, right? It was just when it came to speaking, their accent was getting in the way. And this is something that was very, very familiar to me. Obviously, you can hear I have an accent. I'm an immigrant myself. I've moved to the US at this point well over a decade ago for college and I experienced this firsthand, right? You learn English for 10 years, you feel like you've passed all the tests and you're so confident. And then you move here and you quickly have everyone asking you where you're from and if you can repeat yourself. So it's just like universal immigrant experience that is almost a rite of passage. And I remember being struck by, wow, it's been so long and people are still struggling with exactly the same thing I've gone through and nothing has changed. And around the same time, again, this was pre-chat GPT. This was pre the big AI revolution that we've been seeing over the last couple of years, but already AI and audio AI were becoming more powerful and more interesting. So I started to think about, is there a way that we could potentially build something that can serve as an accent coach and a speech coach for all these people who have already done all that English learning on paper but want to speak it more confidently in real life? Because that has real stakes. It's not English is not like a Duolingo language of like, oh, I'm learning a little bit of this and I'm at a hobby level and that's enough. English is the global language of business. You need to speak it at a professional and very confident level and that nth degree does make a difference in your career outcomes. And so it felt like it was a big market. It was a very overlooked problem. And for the first time, there was this NASA AI capability that could actually allow us to do something about this. Were there any digital products at the time? Any other apps that were trying to tackle this problem? I'm sure you, especially coming from consulting in heart, like did a good extensive like market mapping. That'd be my assumption. Yeah, yeah, exactly. There were maybe one or two, but I basically maybe one that was doing something around pronunciation training, but it was still felt like this was very underdeveloped compared to where it could be. And we also had this vision where just using AI and giving people feedback without helping them actually fix their problem and improve it was not going to be enough. And still a big part of our product direction and vision has been combined with the best of humans with the best of AI. So on the app users also get video lessons from Hollywood accent coaches who are the best in the world at teaching people accents and confident communication. And we pair those personalized pre-recorded videos with the speaking practice that you do that you get feedback from AI because AI in itself will tell you where you made the mistake, but then the coach comes in to actually help you fix the mistake that you made. So we had a specific product vision that even though there was one or two things in the market that were kind of trying to do that, we saw that there was a big gap between that and the vision that we had. And was there a big non-digital industry that helped like obviously learning language is a huge industry, but specifically pronunciation accents. How big was that like on its own? How much did people already pay for those sort of things? Or was it more of, you know, you live and learn and most of the time you just, you know, you deal with it? Like what was kind of status quo? Status quo was accent coaching exists. There are professional accent coaches who you can hire for $200 an hour to help you improve your pronunciation. It's very expensive and there are a lot of C-level executives that do this and, you know, silence because there is, let's be real about it, there's also a little bit of a taboo about talking about accents and improving your accent. It's something that is very tied to people's identity and also it's something that people feel judged about and subconscious about. So they're not out there telling the world that they're doing it, but you'd better believe that a lot of your, the CEOs that are non-native speakers have speech coaches and accent coaches actively helping them through this and it works. It is very expensive and the average professional absolutely cannot afford something like that, nor can they make, you know, a habit out of a very expensive one hour a week class in the middle of their business schedule. So our vision from the beginning was we're not going to replace or disrupt this market. This market right now is too small because the price point is just inaccessible. We're going to create an alternative that is fully digital-based and therefore fully scalable that can reach not just the few people who can afford it, but the one billion non-native speakers in the world. And so when you have this idea, you're at HBS, you're at Harvard Business School, do you drop out to focus on this? Do you finish out like the semester? How do you play it? This was my second year of HBS where the curriculum was a little bit more flexible. So I used my classes actively as ways to narrowed into this problem and I used this as my case for a couple of classes that I took. So it didn't feel like I had to drop out. I wasn't, I was at that point maybe six months from graduating. So I figured let's just keep going through this and actually it was a great forcing mechanism. I knew I had six months to graduate and I set my goal for myself that after I would not recruit, I would not accept any job offers. I would not think about that at all. I'd spend those six months just building and trying to raise our pre-seed round. If that worked, great that I'm doing this full time. If it doesn't work, then only at that time frame, I can start to consider other options. And that again, it was a great forcing mechanism to drop everything else, focus on this. And we got lucky that we both got a term sheet from a pre-seed investor, but we also got into YC and I didn't have to think about alternatives. And I see you have a co-founder like when did you set that up? Was that at the beginning or was that kind of later on? Yeah, my co-founder and I have known each other for 10 years plus first job out of college. So I was very lucky to already have someone that I knew and deeply respected and had a very complimentary skill set to me. He's technical, I'm more of a product business person. So I involved him early on with some of my exploration. He was gainfully employed, not interested in the startup lifestyle at the time, but definitely supportive, but also wanted to see more evidence. And so again, I was very, very focused on de-risking this as much as possible, which in the early days meant, can I get any funding for this? But before we even talk about that, I'm not the subject matter expert here. I'm not an accent coach. Can I recruit a stellar accent coach to join our efforts? And so I did that. I reached out and got a fantastic coach, Ron Harlow, to work with us, who was a Hollywood accent coach to the stars, his trained game of thrones actors and more. And yeah, so I was working on de-risking the product and the concept a little bit. And then my co-founder and I both applied to YC and then when the decision of YC came through, there was no question. We both knew that that's what we would both do full time. Was the first version matching you to an accent coach or was there always an AI piece to it, like a fully digital piece? And then the accent coach was like the premium tier. It was never a one-on-one accent coaching because that was the very thing that we're trying to disrupt, right? We're not trying to do the very expensive thing. We're trying to do a digital thing. But the level of feedback that we offer now compared to what we offered back in the day was very different because again, we have been training our own models based on our data and based on expert ML engineers that we have on team plus coaches who help us annotate and train the model to be as close as possible to how they hear accents and all the component parts of them. So we had a very rudimentary first version of that in the early days that we've worked to improve. The division was always, how can we make this into something that could be as effective, if not more effective as a one-on-one coaching session, but at scale. Tell me a bit about, like YC is so many founders or thousands of founders are trying to get into YC. Most don't get in and a lot of the stuff I see is like B2B focused, right? And B2C in apps is just generally harder to kind of have this massive market size opportunity. Obviously, there are companies that do get there, but I think in general, what can you tell us about getting into YC and what you think was the thing that they really latched on to or the thing that you did really well that gave them the confidence you could build something big? I want to push back a little bit on B2C as an opportunity because, yes, I think a lot of VCs do go after B2B as the more repeatable and proven business model, but B2C, I think, has huge opportunity now with AI to really transform a lot of the way that we live, we learn, we entertain ourselves, we work, all of those things. And I do think now VCs are starting to pay more attention to consumer. But in terms of us getting into YC, I think the reason that we did it was to fold A, we understood the problem. This was not two people who were wanting to do startup and found an idea and said, this is what we're going to do randomly. We had lived through this. Again, I already shared my experience, my co-founder, he saw his immigrant parents struggle with this and struggled to advance in their careers because they never felt like their accent and their communication was good enough to land them into management roles. So we had both gone for this and we had first hand experience and a genuine passion about building a solution for this and also genuine understanding of the pain point and why this is difficult. And so that was the basically the founder market fit was there even before we had had product or product market fit. And the second thing is that, again, as I said, we had already de-raced a lot of things which shown that we can give the coaches involved that we need, which shown when we applied to YC, I should have already had a pre-seed investor, but given us a term sheet. So we've shown you're serious about this. We've already gone outside investments. So you want to gather all the potential proof points possible in order to differentiate yourself from like a napkin idea to like a real business. And of course, now things have changed a lot. Anyone can build apps with Vibe code in these days, right? So the threshold and the barriers only higher and expectations are only higher. So I think my best advice for someone applying to YC right now is, you know, do as much as possible before you apply de-raced as much as possible. You need a product, you can Vibe code a product. So you have no excuse not to have a working product for at least most things. I'm sure there are some things in hard tech and so forth that maybe that's not the case. But for a consumer product, you can certainly Vibe code something and you should also be then focusing on how do you get users and have some real usage and ideally also some revenue coming into the app. And again, that's become easier to build, which means that now it's the expectation. And then one of the issues with B2C, these outcome based B2C apps. So like take dating is maybe a weird example, but if you think about it, it's like, if the apps are really successful and you find someone, you turn out of the apps. And I don't know how much that drives. You know, we saw a lot of these companies like Bumble go up and then come down. I don't know how much that's driven by that versus just change, but it's obviously a retention related issue. When I think about Duolingo, they almost solved it if they have solved it by turning it into a game where it's just like people do it because it's fun. And there's a lot of people that will tell you, you know, you don't really learn a language through Duolingo, but it's kind of like edutainment. You stay there. How do you think about that? Like to an extent that somebody comes in, you know, you help them get their pronunciation to a certain level, fix their big accent issues. And then they feel like, okay, cool, like I'm good. I can speak English at 80%, 90%, whatever that threshold is. Do they just churn out? Or how do you think about, is that even a problem? Like how do you think about that retention piece? Retention is always, you know, a focus and they almost definitely seal with any consumer product, right? Especially ones that are in the education area. Best in class is not very good. And best in class, you know, being Duolingo's. And the way we think about it is that there will always be some churn. And if it's positive churn, meaning these are users who had a great experience, they got some improvement, then the market here is large enough that they will now become ambassadors. And they will tell other immigrants, they know that this helped them and they will bring the next people in, right? So the market is large enough, you can afford positive churn. And we really very much focus on again, that learning experience working. And if the person got what they needed and they churned and they will tell the next person, that's great. But then the second thing is that we're working on a problem that seems deceptively easy, but it's actually really hard because we're solving like the last 20% of language learning that takes 80% of the time as anything else when it comes to mastery. You can actually learn grammar and vocabulary pretty quickly, but learning how to change the way that you speak and accent and pronunciation is something that takes a lot of developing of muscle memory. You're learning new ways to move your mouth to pronounce sounds. It's a little bit like going to the gym, you're like strengthening new muscles in your mouth. And then you also have to keep it up because if you get lazy and you don't keep up the training and the skills, then you'll atrophy, you won't keep those results anymore. It's a bit of a asymptotical curve where kind of get close. And then different people again, have different thresholds of what they're trying to reach. But for someone who constantly is getting results and season improvement, it becomes addictive and they can always improve that little bit more. And then it's the product's job to always unlock that next level of improvement for them and to also be relevant to their daily life and to their daily, for example, work meetings, right? If you always might have a call in calendar that's important, you might be able to record that with bold voice. It will give you insights into, okay, I must pronounce this word. This one was good. I improved this one, but I still need to pay attention to this one. So it becomes more like not just an education product, but a continuous utility product that you continue to use. And that's the one kind of highlight category out of all consumers, utility, right? If you nail the Spotify business model, then you're not going to churn as much. But frankly, it's still work in progress for us to kind of bridge the gap between from just pure education where you wrap up a course to something that feels much more like lifelong utility. What is, you mentioned Spotify, what is the business model? I assume it's like freemium and there's some tier above which you pay a monthly fee. Where does that look like? Yeah, for Spotify, I was thinking less the freemium to paid, more the fact that you're not going to listen to all the music that you need to listen to for one month and then leave, right? You'll always want to benefit from it. And there's that continuous use case where if you want to continue to listen to music without ads, you can't binge it and then be done with it. You have to continue to use it and pay for it. So similarly, what we focus a lot on is again, not just like giving you a static learning experience where you're one and done, but a hyper personalized learning experience that is contextual and pulls in from your work meetings and from the real life speaking that you're doing to always surface the next thing that you miss, maybe that interaction, you can say better next time. So what is the business model then for Bold Voice? For Bold Voice, our business model is a subscription and users pay $150 a year for unlimited access to our personalized curriculums with the Hollywood accent which videos and unlimited speaking practice with feedback. So I'm going back, you get into YC and I know like YC is all about, you know, in that three month period to demo day, build ship as fast as possible. How do you work through that stage? Like what does V1 look like? When do you get it out? What happens when you walk me through that stage of the life? YC was crazy. Again, it was three months. It was super compressed. We joined YC, pre-product, pre-revenue. This was when at this point, by the way, timeline wise. This was summer 2021. So this was, you know, June, we do the first week of YC and the first goal, no question is we need to get this app on the App Store because, you know, there is so much that we could build and we wanted to make it perfect, but I think there was this quote, I forget from home, but if you're not embarrassed by the first version of what you launched and you launched too late. So it was very important for us to just get the app out there as quickly as possible so that we can start iterating and learning from real user feedback. So I think it took us, we were already working on this for a couple of weeks, a few weeks before YC started. So about a week into YC, I believe we launched the first version of the app on the App Store. And it was definitely not something we're proud of, but it was out there and people could finally download it. And then I remember within that first week, we got our first purchaser who bought a monthly plan, paid, I think it was $10 a month. How did it work by the way? Was it like a seven day free trial or you had to pay like right out of the gate? Like how did you structure that? I don't think we had a free trial at the time. Right now we definitely do and we quickly implemented that, but I think at the time it was like an instant purchase, I believe. It wasn't about let's invent like the exact, like the perfect pricing structure and like invent the wheel when it came to it. It was just like, from the beginning I knew that I wanted this to be a paid product because if you just get a bunch of free users, you're really getting a lot of like mixed quality, mixed intent and having people actually pay for it filters it down to those who actually have a need for this app. And therefore, the quality of the feedback you get will be much higher. So it wasn't even about making those $10 in the early days or monetization. It was just about getting the best learnings and also showing to ourselves that this is something that people care about enough to pay something for it. It's a big difference between what you're doing, what Duolingo is doing and not to overly compare, but I mean, paid here makes more sense, I would think because you're going after somebody who's trying to like you said, master English and usually you're mastering it for some sort of like professional setting. There's like a dollar attached to it versus Duolingo, it might be for a million different reasons you're doing it, but it could just be a hobby. And so if they were to say like you have to pay $10 a month, they probably kill your business overnight. Whereas in your case, forcing people to pay means you're only getting that top 10, 20, 30% who are serious about it. Exactly. Yeah, I think the comparison to Duolingo is makes sense at the very high level when you think, okay, it's language learning. But then when you think about the user type that we bring in, their intent, the ROI they get from this kind of investment that makes a direct impact and how they show up in their next business meeting, how they interact with their client, whether they can get that job and that promotion and all that is totally different. So we don't even think of ourselves as language learning, the user has already learned the language by the time they come to us, we think of it as communication training. They want to be the best, the most confident, most credible professional they can be. And as an on-native speaker, that means perfecting your English communication skills. So yeah, it is a different business model. This is something that is directly juxtaposed to, again, as we said earlier, you'd pay $200 an hour for one hour of accent coaching with a real coach. With Bold Voice, you get a year worth of unlimited practice or less than a price of one coaching session. So the investment in the ROI makes sense. Tell me a bit more about V1. What was in V1? How did you scope it out? In V1, we started with working with our coach to produce video lessons. I remember we shipped him a camera and he scripted these lessons and shot them from his apartment. And we tried to make it as high quality as possible, but it was clearly kind of not a fancy production. But the focus, again, was to have enough content that we could launch an app with it. And we took these videos back. We had a video editor. I was like, you know, manually looking at every script and changing every script and then making sure every video was perfectly edited to get it into the app. And then we also worked, especially the macro founder, worked on building, again, this rudimentary feedback mechanism where people could record their voice and get feedback at a sound by sound level. Because otherwise, just a simple thumbs up, thumbs down will not work for the level where our users are coming to us from. In the early days, we're just focused on one language and that was Hindi. In hindsight, I don't know why we picked that language because neither of us are from that background. But again, I think it's something that we learned very quickly. It's like, why are we limiting it to just this language? The theory there was that accents are so based on your native language, we can create a much, much better learning experience if we can create lessons that are personalized to the native language background. But then we were quickly able to think of the video lessons as not like each language needs its own unique, you know, specific video lesson. But more as like, here are the lessons and we can use them as building blocks. And this language will not get this building block, but this one will get this extra one based on so we were able to think about this in a way that was much more allowed us to much more quickly add and cover basically every language out there. So the first version of the Alk was a bunch of videos and some practice materials. I think we had in the first version, maybe we had enough materials for someone who used it for 30 days to run out and then they launched it and then we worked on adding more videos and more materials. So by the time that person ran out, they had more stuff to work on. I mean, the video is one thing, the content, but the fact that you could speak and get feedback, you probably had the cusp of what was pop. I mean, these days, I think they'll be taken for granted, but I would assume at that point, that was like, the cusp of what was possible, right? Like, I don't think that technology was all that old or would have worked maybe three, five years before when you started. Yeah, it was again, as I said, it was not very precise and nowhere to the degree of the sophistication that it has right now. But we were able to pull together using, you know, some open source things and some vendors piece together something that worked enough for us to, you know, get something that looked and smelled in the right direction and then allowed us to, okay, there's a flywheel, people are coming in, they're recording their voices, now we have our own real data to train models on. They're reporting where the, there are issues with the feedback that we're giving them. So we have this, all this qualitative feedback from, from the users, then we have our coaches who can, now that they're done with this, you know, big content sprint, they can also now focus on annotating this real user data to help us figure out what we're trained the model on. So we got something going with, we kind of solved the chicken and egg problem with this initial solution that was good enough. And then we knew that that was just a starting point and that would allow us to get the data so we could improve the model. Let's go deep on, on go to market, right? Because I think there's a lot of apps that get launched all the time. And most of them go nowhere, get very little to no traffic. So YC starts, you put out V1 in the App Store. What do you do to get people to find it, discover it, download it, spread word of mouth, et cetera? What didn't I do? In the early days, it was really like crazy gorilla approaches across every thing that we could think of. Well, first of all, they're part of YC, right? With a lot of international founders. So we were constantly asking people to join the app and try it out and see if they could help them nail the pitch that they were going to give at the end of the demo day. I was joining Reddit groups where people were talking about this and commenting. There's like this Reddit thread called Judge My Accent. It was like the perfect environment for something like this where people were already soliciting that kind of feedback on their accents and their speech. I joined Facebook groups with various ESL teachers. I got on calls with them. I started DMing them. Can you get on a call with me? Is this something that would be helpful to your students? I was reaching out in those early days to international student groups on campuses to see if they wanted to try a free version of it. And the only thing is that they would give me feedback. So in that time, I was constantly in calls with a lot of these people to try to understand. But they were like, oh, there weren't liking and how we can make the app better for them. And again, a lot of the people I spoke to in the early days didn't end up being our target audience anyway, but it was a process of discovering who is the target audience for this. What were some of the things that you learned through those calls about who wasn't, who wasn't like your true ICP? Yeah, we quickly learned this in those just kind of intuitive at the time, which is students, international students seem like such an appealing audience because they're easier for us to reach. We're going to reach out to international student groups and they'd be interested in something like this. It made sense like theoretically, but then when we reach out to them, they realize, A, the willingness to pay isn't there. Like when I was a student, yes, I couldn't afford $200 Gaxon classes, but I also could not really even afford $10 a month to pay for an app. So the willingness to pay profiles was pretty different. Two, they were in a social campus setting surrounded by a lot of other international students and they could pick things up a little bit more quickly on their own and it was a much more international environment. So maybe they didn't feel the pressure of their accent as much as someone in a work environment would feel. So we started off of being maybe overly focused on students and then quickly realized that now that's not our ICP, our ICP is someone who is a working professional. They're in their 30s and 40s. They are pretty advanced in their career and they want to take to the next step and they're frustrated that even though they're an amazing, smart, capable professional, people still overlook them because of their accents. And they also have the willingness to pay because they see the ROI of something like this, because if they get even marginally more likely to land a client pitch or an investor pitch or get the job promotion, that's going to pay the app investment for itself 100 fold. So that was the learning and again, it took us a while of doing user interviews to understand that and also then seeing who's actually paying for the app. We have tens of thousands of people who have followed the show. Are you one of those people? You want to be a part of the group. You want to be a part of those tens of thousands of followers. So hit the follow button. I dug in on that because I think figuring out like product market fit and so much of it is about the subtleties and the specifics. You think about who exactly would pay for this and why and it's hard to figure it out on paper. Like you used to have to go out into the world and do this stuff. But as you're talking and telling me some of these things, like it seems now like then it seems obvious, right? But it's like, for example, for this, you need to be truly a top of mind problem for your customer. And for this, the probably the best situation as you can imagine is somebody who's like just had a situation or is having these situations that they're in a business meeting, they're trying to get a point across, they can't get the point across and they can feel they're not being respected to the same level. And that leads to a certain level of frustration where it's like, I need to figure this out. Like I can't not, versus the international student, you think, you know, you're going to need to figure this out. But they're also in other mode. They're doing other things, whatever, like later, you know, and it's so that affects the need and obviously the willingness to pay has to do with that. But it's like, if you can hit them right when that frustration is at peak, that's when they're most likely to say, you know what, like, I can't ignore this anymore. I have to do it because it just, it's truly like pissing me off today, which I don't think is something you could have figured out at the outset, right? But once you, once you clue in on this, obviously it drives a lot of the go to market and the messaging and all the other stuff. For sure. And that's why I think it's so important to launch early, because then you're not talking in hypotheticals, you're not again, doing like potential user interviews where people are saying one thing, but then when they get access to the app, they do something very different, right? The app is out there, you can see, okay, these, these types of people are using it, who's actually coming back the next day and the next day, who's actually paying for it, who has churn. So it gives you real data instead of just what people say, because people are very not intentionally so, but are not very good at describing, you know, what they want and their priorities and it's their actions that show it. So you want to get to the point where you can get a read on their actions on the actual product, this with this possible. So as you figure this out and you're trying out all these like grill tactics, what are some of the things that really work and move the needle early on? Yeah, I remember this was in probably late July, we were a few weeks away from demo day. And the big thing that we did, that was part of like the YC launch playbook was the launching on product hunt. And that was the bigger thing, I think, back from the day, I don't know if product hunt is still nearly as active now. But yeah, we took it seriously. We did a founder video where, you know, I showed how the app works and, you know, some nice screens, but still we had no idea what it was going to work. And we're actually really surprised. I think we hit number two of the day for that day. And it got us, I just remember us like looking at the charts and it's like hundreds of people. But when you have like, you know, dozens of subscribers getting hundreds is a wow moment. And that was really cool. It's surprising though, just because you'd think that the product hunt audience is like early tech adopters. So I'm actually surprised that that drove, you know, that many like paid installs. Yeah, but a lot of people in tech are immigrants are non-editive speakers. So it ended up being actually a really good audience for us. But yeah, again, it wasn't necessarily something that we were expecting. So we're very pleasantly surprised. But again, it's like, you can't launch on product hunt a million times, you can only launch once. It wasn't a repeatable playbook, but it was really great to again go from, okay, we're making like hundreds of dollars of revenue to that we're making thousands of dollars of revenue. And then most importantly, in the early days, what you really care about is just again, narrowing down on who's your ICPE, who's paying and who's coming back. So the more people you get in initially, the closer you get to that answer. So it was really impactful for that. And also being able to say this is our ARR when we did demo day and reporting a much higher than me ARR than we had before was also very nice. What were you doing to get more data out of users? Like were you calling them? Were you talking to them on the phone? Or was it just kind of like they give you some, you know, data as part of their profile or whatever it was. And that's kind of what you used. Yeah, I mean, we did all of the, you know, tracking and mixpanel analytics and everything that every product does. But I was also sending emails to all the users asking for user interviews or just feedback via email. We also had this give us feedback in the app back then, which is still currently there. It has not changed. If you go to the Bulwitz app and the profile, you'll see my face in microvounder, earlier space that says, Hello, we're the founders of Bulwitz and we'd love to hear from you. And then people will reach out and it's so much more, you know, I think welcoming for them to see the founders faces, like caring about their feedback meant to just see like a random link chatbot or an email that is doing somewhere anonymous. So very, very focused on doing user interviews then and, you know, getting feedback in all the ways possible. And I think this is still like a habit that I continue to have where Ilya and I and the rest of our team will do these user interviews. But first time users, people who have been using Goldbus for three years and still use it to know exactly what our users are perceiving and not just rely on customer operations, for example, to tell us what's going on. It's super important, I think, to always know how your customers feel because sometimes I think over the years, you may develop blindness to certain areas. So it's like so eliminating to have the first time customer to say, this thing makes no sense. And you're like, oh, it doesn't make any sense. We've just had it this way. But actually, this is really good feedback. And I think it's also very energizing to hear directly from users. I think it's a really good habit to build in the early days, but also you always need that voice of the customer to make the product better throughout the company's cycle. So, you know, after the after Demer Day, like shortly after you raise like a $3 million seed round. And but as you mentioned, you're still like relatively small. I mean, it's growing, which got kind of thousands in MRR. And I assume you're trying to figure out like that go to market playbook. What are some of the repeatable things that you start trying? And what are some of the ones that start to work? We are trying to do more of the guerrilla approach. But the thing with that is that it's hard to scale for sure. You kind of started from scratch every time. So what we take our next bet on is ads and figuring out can we reach people scalably through different social channels? And we try different ones. I think we try at the early days, some Google search ads, it don't really work. And we have a couple of different channels going YouTube and Instagram as well. And we have no idea what is the form is the channel even going to work for us. What is the formula that works? Also, this is a mobile app. This is post iOS 14.0. If you don't know what that means, as a listener, I'm happy you don't ever have to deal with it. But for mobile app developers, that is a privacy framework that creates a lot of headaches around tracking and measurements. So you don't actually know really how your ad dollars is converting to subscribers. And so there are a lot of things at the time that made this very much of an open question of would be be able to crack it or not. And it took me like taking a lot of different shots and wall to try to figure out what is going to work here, make a bunch of videos somewhere like graphical videos about how the app works. And then I remember reaching out to this one creator and paying her, I don't know, maybe $200 or something to make a video on YouTube that she posted on her YouTube. And they were like, okay, well, maybe this segment could actually be used as an ad. So we tried that. And that worked super well. And it was incredible to see something that is like, Oh, this is not just a one off thing that lasts for five days. This continues to drive clicks and installs and trials and real revenue. And then we knew that, okay, this channel can work for us. So then it's like, okay, how do we get the next influencer to work with us and expand that channel and then does maybe testing the same video on Instagram also work because then we can expand and have multi channel strategy. Even though in the early days, I don't, if you find my channel that works, you should just focus on that. But yet unlocking paid in a way that made sense for our unit economics was a key to starting to really scale this thing. This started with videos you said on on YouTube. Is that or those the first or on Instagram? The first one was YouTube for us. And basically you just get an influencer to to like create like a naturally sounding video and then you just pay to promote it. That was kind of the strategy. Exactly. And you kind of figure out what is the thing that you need in that video for the creator. And for us, I think the big wow moment of the app is that you can record your voice and instantly you see it grading you see the colors, you see the green of what you did correctly, you see the reds, and then you can say it again, you can fix that mistake and you get like the green and the high score and the competitive. So it's a very like audio visual kind of experience is something that's hard to describe in just words, which is why I think the Google ads were not as impactful, the search ads, but the YouTube is impactful because you can show that visually and the person can hear, Oh, I heard a mispronunciation. Oh my gosh, the app caught it. And then she was able to fix it. And then it correctly caught that that was a correct pronunciation. So that kind of showing that that core loop and the wow moment in the video was super important to have that be something that worksprouts because if we just had her talk, I don't think that would have worked. I mean, I tried like different variants. So try to figure out not just, you know, what channel works and influencer collaborations, but what is that one thing that you need to show in that video that is key to get people to convert. And when we discovered that, then we can repeat the formula with, you know, a lot more creators. Yeah, tell me maybe more about because a lot of people, I think want to use influencers to grow their business. Like once you figured out the wow moment and kind of had one video from one influencer that seemed to be promising, what did you do to make that into more of a formula and really scale it? I was personally finding people who are close to our ICP. We didn't need, you know, Americans to talk about this because they've made no sense, right? So we were trying to find people who had an accent, but also their accent wasn't, you know, it was aspirational, right? Someone who was a believable person would be an ambassador for the app who had clearly very confident, clear communication. So finding that person, you know, it takes manual effort because there's no like filters that you can filter on YouTube to figure out the accent level of the creator. So it's about digging and finding who is the best representative for your product and for the problem you're trying to solve that will resonate with your target customer. And then we'd create a script and initially the scripts would look pretty similar because again, we're just starting to do this. So we were nowhere near saturated. Most people, 99% of people were seeing us for the very first time. So we're focused on just, okay, let's, we find a formula that works. So let's just try to replicate that. But then at some point, you also get into diminishing returns from the same exact thing. So you also have to get creative about trying out different hooks, trying out different angles. Maybe one can be more about personal life confidence. The other one could be more about professional. In some, we might be talking about pronunciation in some, we might be talking about accents because different terms matter to different people. So you got to figure out what are those different angles and different influence of personas that you can bring in that will appeal to different audiences. And then just just a matter of testing and iterating and turning this into also with the more budget you have behind the channel, the more you need to always have, you know, creative pipeline going at a higher volume of creatives. So you can test various things, ideally on a weekly basis to find a new winner because even your best creative, after a while, it will get fatigued. It will have been shown to everyone in that group and you need something fresh to take its place. So you need to get into a very good creative testing framework and velocity. But first, you need to figure out what is the first winner and then only go to the next, to find the next winner when you feel like the first one is kind of starting to show fatigue. And then besides the fact that these creators obviously, you know, they weren't Americans, like what did you find was the most successful type of creator? Like were they somehow in this language learning or pronunciation world or were they completely from somewhere else? This was also very counterintuitive. Initially, we're like, well, there's a lot of English teachers out there, a lot of whom are non-native steepers. Let's try to work with them. And I think it goes back to the inside we had in the very beginning about how different this is from language learning and from Duolingo. Our user is not still learning the language. They speak English. They know English. They're using English at work. They're not going to be following these, you know, basic English learning influencers or creators. The people who are following those are much, much earlier in their language journey and they're not looking for an app like Bold Voice. So coming to Bold Voice, I'd be like, I don't understand what's going on and turn right away. So it's definitely been trickier to find these people who can be good creators for Bold Voice. So I don't have a formula to share there. I think it'll be very, very specific to us and to our brand. But again, it's like kind of, I think it's the same exact thing that we're saying earlier about, you know, the difference between language learning and communication training, the difference between what sounds good on paper and what's actually true in real life, like the insight around the international student versus the working professional. So the same thing applies here. And I think it took us a while, you know, it took us some tests to figure out, okay, maybe this person who is a language creator doesn't work, but this person who has been talking about being an immigrant and their progress of adapting into the American culture and workplace, that's a much better person. But it's, again, so specific to each company and to each product that I would say the most important thing is to really understand the user mindset and where they're at. And if you were to scroll their feed, what would they be following? What would they see? And then plan along those lines. Can you give us a sense of what a great paid channel like this looks like from a metrics perspective? Like, are you looking at ROAS or are you looking at LTB to CAC? Are you like, what are you looking at conversion to pay? Like, what metrics are you looking at? And what were they in those early days as this strategy starting to play out? Yeah, you need to have a really good handle on unit economics because you can, you know, have something that you think works and then doesn't work because churn is way too high and you don't realize that until you're three months in. And then you thought these people would have stuck around for six months and you're planning for that, but they actually only stuck around for two months. So one thing that we did not very early, but once we did, it was really transformational, was have the default plan be annual instead of monthly because that gave us a much, much clear insight from, you know, the very first purchase moment. Once they converted from the trial that this is going to be their year one, LTB. So we didn't have to guess about how much they've converted month to month. And then our goal was for the acquisition costs of that user to be well below how much they paid us in that first year. So we've getting this instant CAC payback. You know, we sacrifice some LTB over CAC there for the sake of the instant CAC payback. So you really got to know what are you optimizing your business around. I think the annual works really well, especially for, you know, the, the types of products in consumer where, you know, churn industry wide is a problem because this gives you a level of predictability that it's otherwise really hard to get. But if it's more of a utility product where ongoing usage is something that is much more predictable, then I think monthly is also fine. But then you have to have a really good sense of when do you get CAC payback and having that window be as tight as possible. When it came to the ad tab forms, you got to look at all the metrics. What matters the most for us is cost per trial. And then ultimately cost per subscriber cost per trial was the item that we get on day one, because cost per subscriber has a one week lag because of the one week free trial. So that cost per trial was the thing that I cared about the most. Then you also have to look at, you know, all the earlier funnel metrics to kind of get a gauge of the quality of the ad. And sometimes you might get conflicting things where the cost per click is really good, but the cost per trial is really high. And you really have to use that data to fine tune what ads are working and what seems to be working, but actually is is it. And then once you figured this out, and I'm sure later other things on top, like, do you remember your growth trajectory, like revenue wise from then till now? If you zoom all the way out, it's up into the right, right? But like, if you actually zoom in, there are a lot of moments where we maybe hit a ceiling with a certain channel and we have to go and find a new channel, or we hit a ceiling with, you know, the creator for that channel, and then we have to find a new type of creative that worked for that channel. So it's never as, you know, up into the right as it seems, you always have to kind of reinvent something. And I think a big learning was what I shared earlier, which is around velocity, the infrastructure that you have and the things that you have that support, you know, $1,000 a month spend is going to be very different from what supports $1,000 a day or $10,000 a day or more than that. So you need to always make sure that you're upgrading the infrastructure around your channel, which means a diversity of campaigns, maybe not just one campaign, a diversity of campaigns, it means a diversity of creatives, because different creatives will apply to different users, a higher volume of producing these creatives so that you can have more chances at finding a winner because creative fatigue happens faster when you spend more. So we had to kind of like get into those like points where you hit a ceiling and then we were like, okay, the playbook that got us here maybe doesn't work anymore and we have to figure out what is the next playbook to get us to the next step. And it's an ongoing process. And where are you at now ARR wise? We are around 10 million in ARR. And when would you say that you felt like you'd found true product market fit? I don't think if product market fit is this like on or off toggle, I think of it as a spectrum. For sure, if I had to like pick a number, I think the 1 million ARR felt like, okay, this is not just a novelty, or we found like a few people who really like this, but this is something that clearly a mass of people are starting to use. And I think it was not just in the revenue metric, it's also in the usage metrics, because we're not just having people who maybe have such a big problem that they're paying for it, but they're not coming back the next day. We also started to see really healthy usage metrics of people coming back and then the qualitative feedback they were sharing with us about their improvements. So the ARR is a nice number, but backed by actual metrics was really powerful for us. But again, I think we're always trying to move the product is not done, right? We're now a couple of years out of that 1 million in ARR, and we're still improving the product, we're still trying to get that day zero to day one number coming back to lift. And I also talked a little bit about like making this less of a education one and done app, but more of an ongoing utility app. And I think that's the work to get more and more into that 100% side of product market fit. And was there ever on the flip side a time where like things weren't clicking, things weren't working, and you thought maybe this wouldn't work out? Only about 20 times or 50 times, I don't know. I think if you were as a founder, you're always in the trenches, things are always going wrong in some way. And I really shared that there were various moments where we had various ceilings and it wasn't clear how we're going to break out of that. And we figured out how to do it. And I think any founders, being honest, will say that the same happened in their business. But what's really important, I think is also know if, yeah, what you're working through is something fundamental, like the product has been resonating without people wanting this, but they don't without people who care to fix and to improve their communication confidence in their accents. And they don't, if that had been the case, if that's what we found, I think would have stopped. But I think what we found was like things like I described, which is more like, okay, this creative has kind of had its run its course, we need to figure something else out. And that feels like a, again, a solvable problem, of course, with a lot of work and focused execution to take a lot of experiments and shots on low. So I think you've got to be realistic as a founder about what's a solvable problem and what is a more fundamental business problem. And today, we've come across difficult, but so far solvable problems. And last question, what would be like a top piece of advice you would give an early stage founder that's still in that early phase trying to find product market fit? This is so cliche, but I think a lot of people get so caught up in building a startup and building a business and finding the lawyers and the cap table and the, I don't know, a million things that come up when you're building a business. And the only thing that matters is do people want what you're trying to sell them. And so really focusing on that and minimizing all the other distractions is super important. And I think that was the YC advice to talk to your users. And I remember every time we'd go into those YC partner check-ins or our batch check-ins, it'll be how many times did you talk to your users this week? So just keeping that in mind that at the end of the day, nobody's giving you gold stars for building a company, you really need to solve the user problem. So stay as focused on that as possible. And also be honest with yourself about whether you're doing that or not, because you can always pivot. And yeah, you need to find that thing that the user wants. And you also feel like, okay, this is the kind of thing where I could work on this for 10 years and still feel excited to do it every day. Perfect. Lanana, thanks so much for jumping on the show. It's been great. Yeah, this was fun. Thanks for having me. Wow. What an episode. You're probably in awe. You're in absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn to help someone else. Share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders. Share it on that Slack channel. Send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me, they will love you for it.