uninstalled.io
uninstalled.io set out to solve a specific problem: why mobile app users uninstall apps. The company positioned itself as a niche analytics business focused on churn and retention, and the founder described it as the first company to tackle that problem for mobile app companies. Revenue came from a monthly SaaS subscription priced by number of users and modules used.
The company bootstrapped for the first six to eight months before raising a seed round. It later raised what the founder described as "around 365K USD last year from a bunch of investors," including 500 Startups. The team of 10 was based in Bangalore, which kept costs low. The host noted that the team's monthly headcount cost was roughly $7,000 to $8,000, and the founder said most of the product's insights were automated through models, with a shared analyst refining the output before it reached clients.
The company says it has worked with more than 150 apps over its lifetime, mostly medium to large businesses, and that they grew about 15% month over month in revenue. The company spent nothing on advertising; its main acquisition cost was internal staff time. The founder estimated acquisition cost at roughly one person's monthly salary, which was about $800.
Churn was the central problem. Of 150-plus customers served, only 15 to 17 were still paying. Customers would extract the value within about six months and leave, a pattern the host compared to data tools like Mattermark and Ahrefs. The founder's response was to integrate deeper into client systems, act as a partner rather than a vendor, and push annual contracts with minimum terms of a year, with target ticket sizes rising to as much as $2,500 per month. The founder also said the company had only recently started this transition, so the results were still early.
As of the interview in November 2016, the company reported about $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue, around $100,000 in ARR, and more than $150,000 left in the bank. Monthly burn was about $2,000, and the founder described the cash position as a runway cushion but not a reason to stop focusing on retention. Total 2015 revenue was about $45,000.
- •Acquiring customers at near-zero advertising cost let the company keep its burn low even while churn was high.
- •Churn that came from customers extracting value within months signals a product-value timing problem, not just a sales problem, and the shift toward deeper integrations addresses that directly.
- •Charging several times the average ticket to larger clients paired with annual contracts improves cash predictability more than adding customer count would.
- •A small, offshore team with heavy automation kept fixed costs far below revenue, which bought time to find retention fixes.
- 1.Price the product by users and modules, then test whether annual contracts with a minimum term retain better than monthly plans.
- 2.Measure how many months each customer stays and which features they use in the first few months, so you can spot where value drops off.
- 3.Automate most of the analysis with models, and keep a small human review step to turn raw output into recommendations clients will pay for.
- 4.Move from vendor to partner by embedding deeper into client systems, which raises switching costs and supports larger tickets.
- 5.Track CAC against internal salary costs from the start, since that is what determines whether growth is sustainable.
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