A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders He killed a viral app with 50k users. 2 years later, he hit $10M ARR and raised $30M from Sequoia. | David Paffenholz (Juicebox)
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Dec 11, 2025 
David Paffenholz, the Founder and CEO of Juicebox, previously worked at Snap and launched a viral music app with 50k users before pivoting to AI recruiting. He discusses the tough decision to shut down a popular product due to low retention compared to Snapchat. David shares insights on launching a cost-effective B2B product, overcoming high churn through manual efforts, and securing a $30M Series A from Sequoia. He emphasizes the importance of staying lean with a small team while executing a strong product-led growth strategy.
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Viral Music App Reached 50k Users
- David and his co-founder built a music discovery app called Juicebox that reached 50,000 users quickly.
- The app had virality but poor retention, which informed later decisions to kill the product.
Retention Beats Viral Signups
- David killed the viral music app because day-30 retention was catastrophic compared to Snap benchmarks.
- Top-of-funnel growth without retention convinced them the product lacked sustainable habit formation.
LLMs Unlock Profile Review At Scale
- Recruiters spend a large share of time reviewing profiles, creating a major opportunity to automate that work.
- The LLM release (ChatGPT) enabled automating human-like profile assessment at scale.