How Opal Reached $10M ARR with 11 Employees

Kenneth Schlenker is founder and CEO of Opal, which has rapidly grown into the world's #1 screen time app since launching in 2020, reaching $10M in ARR with a team of just 11 employees. After starting his career in Product Marketing at Google, Kenneth has spent more than a decade founding multiple companies, including a private marketplace for private art sales called ArtList, as well as a venture studio called Stellar Base that incubated multiple successful startups. 

Key Takeaways: 

• After spending more than a decade as a serial entrepreneur, Kenneth founded Opal in 2020 with the mission to "align technology with human wellbeing" because he believed it was more important than ever for people to track their screen time and understand the role it plays in their lives.
• In 2022, when Apple launched its Screen Time API, Opal seized the first mover advantage and used this opportunity to reinvent screen time tracking, propelling itself to $10M in revenue by 2025 despite keeping its team very lean.
• From early on, Opal was laser focused on D8 ROAS as its primary growth metric, because Kenneth wanted to ensure the company could convince enough subscribers to pay for its product that they could grow reliably through paid ads.
• More recently, Opal has invested in gamification to boost motivaion and retention, as well as word of mouth and incentivized referral programs to help supplement paid user acquisition with organic growth.
• AI is making social networks and games even more addictive, which makes Opal even more important than before. Longer-term, Kenneth plans to expand beyond screen time tracking to other use cases that align technology with human health and happiness, and to also market the product to companies, schools, and insurance companies in addition to individuals. 

Kenneth Schlenker: 

• Website: https://www.opal.so/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethschlenker/ 
• X: https://x.com/kschlenker 

Phil Carter: 

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com 
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter 
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter 

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io 

Chapters

• 3:19 Kenneth’s entrepreneurial background and why he started Opal
• 8:44 Why screen time tracking is more important now than ever
• 13:00 Why Apple’s Screen Time API launch in 2022 benefitted Opal
• 16:42 How this success showed up in Opal’s KPIs
• 20:08 Why Opal prioritized D8 ROAS as its primary growth metric
• 24:31 Other key growth metrics that Opal focused on
• 27:49 Organic channels that have been critical for Opal’s growth
• 29:53 How Opal plans to maintain its first mover advantage
• 33:16 How Opal achieved $10M in ARR with just 11 employees
• 37:10 Key features that have helped Opal stand out vs. competitors
• 41:08 Kenneth’s long-term vision for Opal
• 44:05 Lightning round