· 4 min read
Founding couples: why the first 50 couples never pay
Fifty couples get Duoheart free for as long as they use it. Here is what we get out of it, what we ask of them, and what happens after fifty.
The first fifty couples to use Duoheart never pay for it. Not a discounted year, not a trial, not a plan we can quietly retire later. Free for as long as they keep using the app. We call them founding couples, and this is the reasoning behind an offer that sounds like we did not think it through.
What we get, which is the part that makes it sensible
We are a small team in Estonia building an app for two people at a time. That last part is unusual and it makes the normal way of learning about a product mostly useless to us.
Ordinary product analytics tells you what people tapped. We cannot see what people write, because their answers and messages are end to end encrypted and our servers only hold ciphertext, and we would not want to see it even if we could. So the whole category of learning-by-reading-your-users is closed to us by design.
What is left is talking to people. Fifty couples is a hundred human beings who can tell us that the third question of the day felt intrusive, that the unlock notification arrived at the worst possible moment, that the app is unusable one-handed on a train, or that a translation into their language reads like a form letter. That is worth far more to us than fifty subscriptions, and it is the only way we will find the things that are wrong.
Fifty is also a number we can actually keep up with. We can read every message from fifty couples and reply properly. At five hundred we would be triaging, and the whole point of this stage is that we are not.
We cannot read what our users write, so the only way to learn what is wrong is to ask them. Founding couples are how we ask.
What we ask in return, and what we do not
We ask for honesty when something is broken or annoying, and a reply when we ask a question. That is all.
We do not ask for a review, a social post, a referral or a testimonial. We do not ask you to be positive, and we do not want a friendly version of your opinion. A founding couple who tells us the daily questions are shallow is doing exactly what we want. And you can stop answering us at any point without losing the free access. It is not a contract, it is an invitation.
Why free forever and not a discount
A discount would have been the safer commercial choice, and we picked the other one for two reasons.
First, it is a fair trade. Using an app this early means putting up with rough edges, bugs on real evenings, and features that change under your feet. Early users pay in patience. Making them pay in money as well, for a product that is not finished, sits badly with us.
Second, it is a promise we can actually keep. "Fifty percent off forever" is the kind of thing companies discover they cannot afford in year three, and then there is an e-mail explaining why the terms have to change. Fifty couples on a free plan will never be the reason our numbers do not work, so we will never need to write that e-mail. The offer is small enough to be permanent, which is exactly why we capped it.
What happens after fifty
After the founding couples, Duoheart costs a small monthly price. One price for the couple, not per person. No ads, no data selling, no feature held hostage behind a higher tier.
We charge because the alternative is worse. An app funded by advertising has to know things about the people using it, and we have built ours specifically so that we cannot. Being paid by the people who use the app is the arrangement where our interests and yours point in the same direction: we make money when it is worth keeping, and when it stops being worth keeping you stop paying. That is the correct feedback loop.
How to become one
There is no application form and no interview. Founding couples are simply the first fifty pairs who install the beta and start using it. Both partners need to be in, because the app does not do anything with one person: the five daily questions only unlock when both of you have answered.
The iPhone beta is on TestFlight and the Android beta is on Firebase App Tester, and the install guide for both is at duoheart.app/get. Sign-in is a code sent to your e-mail, so there is no password to invent. The app is in sixteen languages, and the two of you do not have to pick the same one.
If you get in and it turns out Duoheart is not for you, that is fine and we would still like to know why. That answer is worth a free account too.
Questions people ask
- How do I know if we are one of the first fifty couples?
- The app tells you once both partners have paired and started using it. It is first come, first served, with no form to fill in.
- Does free forever really mean forever?
- Yes, for as long as you keep using the account. We capped the offer at fifty couples precisely so it is small enough to keep permanently.
- Do we have to give feedback to keep it free?
- No. We would love your honest reactions, but the free access is not conditional on giving them.
