Tolen

Tolen puts users in a voice chat with their matched creature within two minutes. Onboarding opens with an oracle quiz, matches the user to a creature with its own personality, explains the match, and starts a voice chat within one to two minutes. The aim is to convert in the first session, since that experience heavily influences return usage and willingness to pay.

Industry context: day zero trial starts rose from 70 to 75% in 2023-2024 to over 80% now, and nearly 90% in some categories. Phil Carter's framing: "you really have to convert a user in that first session or you're not going to convert them at all."

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Tolen makes its personality-match result a shareable infographic. The infographic that explains a user's creature match gets shared, so a magical output doubles as a growth channel.

Tolen also sells credits and tiers. For hybrid models where power users buy extra AI credits, Phil suggests rewarding invites with credits: "if I invite a friend or colleague, I get additional AI credits that I can use for my own product usage." That referral idea is a general recommendation, not something stated as a Tolen feature.

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Tolen protects against AI compute costs with tiers and a short trial. AI features add real marginal compute cost, so a basic tier holds non-AI features and a taste of AI, and a higher tier holds full AI usage. Tolen started with a 7-day trial and adjusted trial length and freemium over time.

A 30-day free trial of AI lets heavy users rack up compute costs and then churn without paying: "you have whales racking up massive compute costs without paying you a dime and then they churn." Phil suspects AI apps are driving the trend toward shorter trials, which RevenueCat's report shows, even though 14 to 30 day trials often convert better. Duolingo Max, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Claude and Eleven Labs also use multiple tiers, and messaging them takes care.

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