How Opal Reached $10M ARR with 11 Employees

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Dec 11, 2025

Kenneth Schlenker, founder and CEO of Opal, previously worked at Google and has a history of successful startups. He discusses how Opal evolved from a wellbeing app to the world's top screen-time tracker, achieving $10M ARR with just 11 employees. Kenneth reveals the impact of Apple's Screen Time API, which allowed Opal to track data more accurately. He highlights the importance of gamification for user retention and shares insights on their organic growth strategies. Lastly, Kenneth envisions a future where Opal scales to a billion users using AI.

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ADVICE

Charge Early And Optimize Onboarding

Focus early on users willing to pay and validate monetization with performance marketing.
Optimize onboarding to trial and demonstrate tangible ROI like saved time before asking for payment.

ADVICE

Prioritize Day-8 ROAS

Measure and optimize D8 ROAS to ensure paid acquisition pays back quickly.
Iterate marketing messages and onboarding to increase trial starts and reduce refunds.

INSIGHT

Shift From Revenue To Engagement

After scaling revenue, shift focus from monetization to daily active users and mission reach.
Track content views and brand mentions to measure broader cultural impact.

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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