I gave away an hour and got paid

By Georg Malahov

Wednesday, 26 August, morning. Opened the Telegram bot that sends me notifications and saw that the person I wrote about a week earlier was back in the app. First time in a week. He left a minute later, and what he did in there I couldn't tell at that point: either he looked at the plans or he just closed the tab.

A week before that he had got stuck on microphone access — in the exact spot I knew was broken and hadn't got around to fixing. So I gave him sixty extra minutes and sat down to write an email by hand. Minutes in Call Copilot are counted as credits: one minute of transcription is one credit, and when the credits run out the pricing screen shows up. Over that week the gifted hour was running down — going exactly the way I had expected it to.

It all lined up a bit too neatly for comfort. Felt like the odds were good, but I didn't want to call it early — no point setting myself up to be disappointed again.

The next day it turned out there was nothing to be disappointed about. The payment went through on the evening of the 26th: a one-time pack, three thousand credits for 24 euros. That's three thousand minutes of transcription, eight euros per thousand, no subscription and no expiry — the credits just sit there until they get used. The first purchase since I changed the store listing, reworked the demo logic and started writing emails by hand.

Two days earlier, on 25 August, I had posted the nine-month tally: about a dozen people had paid over those nine months, and by the end of August exactly one subscription was still running. This purchase doesn't move that number — packs and subscriptions are separate lines for me, and the subscription count is still one. What moved is the other line: there's now a one-time purchase whose path I can retrace step by step.

Picking apart what actually did the work, I can't hand it to the listing or the demo. The product was the same the whole time — only the shape of the contact changed. What worked was the gifted minutes and an email written by hand rather than by a campaign tool: an apology for one specific bug and step-by-step instructions. One case stays one case, and no rule comes out of it, but this is the first time the chain from install to payment ran end to end and I can point at the step it was holding on to.

It's also worth something that the chain got to the end at all. Over nine months it broke at nearly every link: microphone access one time, credits not being granted after payment another, because a webhook had changed shape. This time nothing broke — install, gift, email, pricing screen, payment.

The unpleasant part is that there's no mechanism behind this sale. Before the holiday I meant to email every address I had: sort people by how warm they were, and give an hour to the ones who had actually used the app and then gone quiet. Whether they uninstalled the extension or just stopped showing up doesn't matter — if they used it, the product was good for something as far as they were concerned. I started, grouped everyone by activity and never finished it. It was close to done, and I still didn't finish. The payment that happened came out of one email from two weeks ago, not out of a system.

So now I'm putting that logic back together: sorting by warmth and a mailer with the gift attached, so I don't have to sit down and spend two and a half hours writing by hand every time. The hour of credits doesn't go to everyone — only to people who got through the whole free flow and did real work in the app. I used to hand free minutes to anyone who signed up, and that bought installs rather than conversations: the minutes went to people who didn't particularly need the product.

I'll know this wasn't a one-off if the same sequence — an email by hand plus a gifted hour — brings back at least two more of the people who went quiet. If it brings back one in ten, then I've found a way to talk to the people who got as far as real work in the app and then stopped. If it brings back nobody, then August just went my way with one particular person.

We'll see.