BOLD: a subscription reframed around progress

Stakes

Most of BOLD’s revenue was subscription, and customers didn’t expect a subscription. That surprise created resentment, call-center volume and cost per customer, and it wore on the brand. Leadership didn’t want to drop the subscription.

The bet

Turn a “gotcha” into something customers want to keep: make the subscription about the job search, not the résumé.

Three moves

Asked what a dashboard is for. Call-center interviews, mental-model interviews and an expert-review scorecard against LiveCareer, Indeed, Glassdoor and ZipRecruiter. Job seekers described a dashboard the way they would in a car: it tells you where you are and where you’re going. Ours was acting more like a coat rack, a place to hang tools. Why: the expectation decides whether the product feels like value or a trap.

Tested the layout before building it. Rapid iterative testing on UserTesting, then a counterbalanced preference test of one- versus two-column designs for guided search. Why: cheap evidence first.

Followed job seekers for four weeks. A 28-day diary study across employment status and time on search, segmented into archetypes drawn from labor-market data: targeted, hit-or-miss and desperate. It showed people wanted to move quickly from a finished résumé to matched jobs, and to track their search. Why: retention follows value, and value is the job.

For the methodologist

RITE sessions (unmoderated, UserTesting); counterbalanced AB/BA preference test; 28-day diary study reporting three times a week; archetypes from secondary labor-market sources and mental-model interviews; competitive expert-review scorecard. Outcomes are measured on dashboard traffic.

What I’d do next

Instrument the job-match loop directly: which matches led to applications, and which applications to interviews. That is the leading metric for keeping the subscription.