| Source | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PKzmTSjuf-o |
|---|---|
| Readwise URL | https://read.readwise.io/read/01kv42tr6ymmk7rm7ne77h8qx0 |
| Readwise ID | 01kv42tr6ymmk7rm7ne77h8qx0 |
| Date | 2025-04-04 |
| Author | App Masters |
| Category | video |
| Cover image | https://i.ytimg.com/vi/PKzmTSjuf-o/sddefault.jpg?v=67ecd878 |
[Music] What is up app nation? It is Steve P. Young, founder of appmasters.com. I know. I’m looking at the countdown. I was like, "Oh my god, we’re on here every Friday to break down what’s really working in the app industry because I bring on the best guests in the industry to really share their knowledge and help
you grow your app downloads and revenues. This guy is somebody I’ve been wanting to have on for a very long time. He’s a leader in the consumer subscription space and I’m super excited. I’m going to give you his full intro after his cool looking video. So, let’s bring him in. [Music] Well, Carter, welcome to the show, my
friend. Thanks for having me, Steve. As you said, it’s been a long time coming. I’m excited to be here, and I have to say, I’m I’m blown away by the production value. I uh I’ve got I’ve got a lot I’ve got a lot of uh improvements to make on my own podcast. Well, thank you. Thank you. The crowd’s going crazy, Phil. You started it the right way, man. I appreciate it. Well, look, I want to give a proper introduction. Phil spent a decade as a VC. He’s led product companies from fair, quizlet, ibto, is that how you say it, Phil? Ibata like
Ibata blank. Ibata built world class products and accelerated their growth. He’s now the founder and CEO of Elemental Growth and that’s elementalgrowth.co. It’s coming soon to a boutique growth advert advising firm that helps seed and series A to series A subscription companies. So, Bill, how’d I do? You want to add anything else to your resume? You did great. I mean, the TLDDR is I spent over a decade as a VCN product leader almost entirely in
consumer. Uh found that I particularly love consumer subscription businesses and so now I do that full-time. Elemental Growth is a growth advising firm that focuses on C to ser consumer subscription businesses. And so if I can if I can ever be helpful, just let me know. Yeah, really great stuff. And Phil’s got a lot of great content everywhere else. And he’s got a great podcast as well. So it’s called Subversive. I’m going to pull that up real quick right now. I’m just bring it on here. So there it is. Go check out that podcast if you love listening to podcasts all about
apps. Did you just talk about apps too, Bill? I know. Yeah, it’s it. So, Subversive, we just launched it in January and each episode focuses on an inflection point at a consumer or proumer subscription business. So, we’ve had founders, CEOs, and product and growth marketing leaders on from companies like, you know, Grammarly, Notion, Tinder, uh, All Trails, Dualingo is coming up. And so, if that’s something you’re interested in, we’d love to have you as a listener. And we’re on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music. That’s awesome. All right. I do
want to say hi to a few people, too, because they’re going crazy. Phantom, man, my my eyesight’s going crazy, too. Jeff Daniel, good to see you from Miami. Caesar is here as well. Cryptocrunch. Dimmitri, is this Moroc? Is that how you say it? Moroc. And then Ace Exam as well. Ace Exam, I guess you’re talking about the Indie app, Santa. You purchased the basic service a couple days ago and your people are very responsive. Thank you, man. I appreciate that. Great. All right, Phil, let’s talk about AI because I know we’re all
talking about it. How do you kind of see AI transforming the consumer subscription space? Yeah, it’s I mean obviously the letters A and I are everywhere these days and so I feel like one of my roles as an adviser and a thought leader is to think about how it’s going to impact our world in consumer subscription ecosystem, right? And so I feel like um the the primary effect that artificial intelligence is having right now in my mind is on the one hand it has opened up all sorts of new uh opportunities for
new products right we pushed the paro frontier forward in terms of what technology can do and so that has created some fundamentally new use cases but I would actually say equally if not more important artificial intelligence is exponentially driving down the cost of software development and it’s also making software development accessible to people who never could have done it by themselves before. Right? There’s this whole vibe coding movement. And so you have people who aren’t aren’t even software engineers who are now independently or with very small teams building their own consumer apps. And I
think that has massive implications for the industry. On the positive side, it’s going to mean that um I think there’s going to be a lot more app development outside of the US that starts happening in other markets around the world. Uh and I also think that products and niches that previously couldn’t support sustainable business models are are going to become viable. And so you’re going to have this like hyperpersonalization of apps that you know, you don’t just have a running app now like Strava. You have an app like RUA that’s specifically built for helping you get the best possible marathon time, which previously like was that a billion dollar company? Maybe
not. Um, but then on top of that, you know, on on the less positive side, it’s just going to mean a huge influx in competition, right? Because there are more and more people now who can create mobile apps. And so it’s a double-edged sword. Yeah, I know you and I both contributed to the revenue cat report and I highly recommend everybody check that out if you haven’t done so. The state of subscription, but one of the things they said is AI apps are printing money and I kind of we can see that happening just in our the clients that we work with and some of the apps that we’re building, but the AI apps are are
really going as well. Yeah. Well, and one of the things that I was heartened to see in this report, I think everybody’s talking about the verality of these AI apps. There’s something that a lot of people are calling the tourist effect, right? Which is some combination of exciting new technology plus fear of missing out, FOMO. You don’t want to be left behind. Uh and so that’s driving a lot of organic growth, a lot of virality that we haven’t seen for a while in consumer technology. But then on the flip side, the question is like how
sustainable is that, right? Are are these tourists actually going to convert into subscribers? Are they going to retain for long periods of time or are they just low value visitors? And so one of the things that was interesting to me in the 2025 report that Revenue Cap put out was that the retention rates on these AI apps are actually higher than average. Now will that remain the case? I don’t know. We’ll see. Uh but so far so good. They they really are printing money right now. You know, when Phil, I always make I always joke that, you know, meditation was like the most
popular category that I always saw and now I’m finding that like AI noteakers are like one of the most popular categories that we’ve seen people reach out to us and all that stuff. How do you kind of see from like just maybe the BTOC side how AI is shaping out to be? Because you know the way I see things is that yes most of the power users like you and I probably can get a lot of things done through chat GPT but a lot of normal users might not be able to. So can you take and this is what I kind of
got I listened to Zach who created Cal AI on the my first million podcast. He was saying like take something that people are always doing something used to kind of like what you talked about with Strava and make it put some AI on it and make it into Rena. And that’s sort of what he did. He’s like he saw a lot of calorie tracking apps, but then he just used AI on top of it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think what I took from what you just said is you mentioned note-taking apps, right? Like, you know, over a decade ago, Evernote built what was for a time a very large business and
then ultimately had not the greatest outcome. And I think part of that was note takingaking started to become somewhat commoditized. And even though Evernote built a beautiful product and was sort of best-in-class, there were so many cheap or even free substitutes that um they didn’t achieve the multi-billion dollar outcome that I think they had uh at one point set out to achieve. Um I think this goes back to the point I was making around there’s going to be this biodal distribution I think that emerges in consumer and proumer subscription where the rich are going to get richer.
the category kings are just going to continue to dominate because they’re able to move faster on some of these frontier innovations that AI opens up than like a brand new startup. But there’s also going to be this other mode on the other end of the distribution of super small teams or even individual developers who build products that you know are targeted towards very specific niches. They’re very personalized. They’re more opinionated software. The example you gave was like okay if I go into chat GPT I can do everything and that’s great but it’s also intimidating because like where do I even get started? And so if you’re smart, you can
build a note-taking app that’s very opinionated, not for everyone, but like for a very specific for a podcaster, right? I’m a podcaster and I want to automatically take notes and then I want to be able to translate those into show notes afterwards. Like that’s a much more opinionated use case. Probably not a billion-dollar company, but if you’re smart about how you um structure the company and how you finance the company, then it could still lead to a great outcome. But that’s the key. you you can’t you can’t go raise a $10 million series A round the way you might if you
were trying to build the next uh Straa because it’s probably not going to be that sort of an outcome. I love it. Hey Phil, I want to get into the subscription value loop a bit too. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Did you coin this term? Because I’ve only associate you with this term by the way. I did. I did. I it’s my claim to fame and and I you know it’s one of these where I will I will uh throw myself under the bus for those who watch Silicon Valley. I don’t know if you remember the conjoin triangles of success. I feel like any any framework on its face the best frameworks are
simple right and so like on its face it’s a simple idea which is that every great consumer subscription business is built on a unique and enduring core value promise. unique because it needs to be different enough to stand out from the hundreds of thousands of other consumer subscription apps in the app store and enduring because it needs to provide value over an a significant period of time otherwise you’re not going to be able to generate enough revenue from your subscribers in order to sustain the business. Right? So that’s the center of the core value of the subscription value loop is the core
value promise and then you have these three steps. You have a value creation, value delivery and value capture. So value creation is typically led by core product teams. This is building the core product um and uh building the right features in order to support the unique and enduring value promise. You have value delivery which is led by marketing teams, growth product teams and in the case of B2B products um also sales teams. And so that’s all about costefficient distribution of the product. And then you have value
capture. And this is the one that I think gets most often overlooked, especially by early stage startups, which is making sure you’re converting the value from your product into enough revenue that you can actually reinvest in product innovation and paid marketing campaigns. And so then over time, those three steps drive LTV over cap ratio up. That’s customer lifetime value over customer acquisition costs. They drive payback period down, which means you’re able to just spin the loop faster and faster. The business is able to grow faster and more efficiently. Um, and that leads to a lot of good things. And actually, if you go to the Lenny’s
newsletter guest post I wrote on the subscription value loop, there’ll be a there will be a much better uh image. Yeah, that that first one right there. Just scroll down a bit and it’ll be in the middle of the post. Keep going. Keep going. There you go. Right there. And and so as as I was saying before,
like it’s a relatively simple framework, but I think it’s really compelling. And and the origin of this was um when I joined Quizlet in late 2018, the company was already growing very fast, but my job was to figure out how to sort of systematize that growth and make it repeatable. And so over over the next few years, I found that we were using these words like, well, the core product team, they should be creating value. And the growth product team, they’re more responsible for distributing that value and then capturing the value through the
right monetization strategy. And so we were using these words informally and there was no framework that really laid it out this way. And so I wish I I wish I had could say that like I wrote all this out at the time and this was the playbook we followed. The reality is, and I think this is often true, it’s like I took the lessons I learned at Quizlet, the hard knocks I I took and then I I sort of created this framework out of it um several years later, you know, like we I love when themes develop, Phil, especially amongst people that that’s why I love doing this podcast because I get to constantly learn. But Nico from a couple of weeks ago, he talked about this specific
concept and he was just like he’s got a Rubik’s solver app, Phil. It’s doing pretty well. And he’s just like, “Look, can I one I’m going to get better at three things.” He’s like one can people input their Rubik’s cube right because ultimately so you got to input it two can my software solve whatever input they put in three can they can my product help them solve it easily and if he’s like if I can improve 10% from each and every step value capture value
creation and value delivery I’m going to see that exponential growth and that’s what he saw as well and he wanted to really do a lot of user research and bring it down to five minutes from the whole value creation, delivery, this whole loop. He’s like, “Yeah, 100%.” Well, and then the other thing I’ll say is, so I teach a course on consumer subscription growth through Maven and um the core framework for the course is the subscription value loop. It’s four weeks. The first week is introducing the
framework and quantifying it like applying specific growth metrics and benchmarks that support the framework. And then the next three weeks are dedicated to deep dives on each of those three steps. value, creation, value, delivery, value capture. Um, and one of the things I talk about in the course is examples of companies that have done each step particularly well, but then also examples of companies that have stumbled on one of these three steps. And I think the key point is even if you’re great on two out of the three steps, if you really get one of them wrong, that becomes the bottleneck that throws the whole loop out of whack. Uh,
and I’m h I’m actually happy to present an example of this. It’s helpful. I don’t know if you want me presenting or not, but bro, I would love that. I was going to ask it. So, I’m glad you brought it up. Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s do it. Where do you want me to go? Here, let me see. Um, let me just see if I can share my screen. You can? Yeah. Here we go. This live streaming thing is new to me, but I like it. Um, all right. Can you see my screen? Okay. You want me to bring it up? Are you ready for me to bring it up? Uh, well, so I’m Yeah, I’m presenting it. Is that showing up or Yeah, there we go. Yeah, perfect. Yeah.
So, these are the three examples I give and and look, I’m not trying to throw any of these. There have been hundreds of examples of companies that have stumbled on these three steps. Um, but I think these are three fairly good examples. So, CHEG is obviously one was at one time the the one of the largest if if not the largest and most valuable company in the edtech space. Um, very very good marketing company. Uh, their core product offering was really around originally textbook rentals and then they shifted their business model towards online uh textbook explanations.
Right? Right? So, if you’re stuck on a homework assignment or if you’re preparing for an exam and you want to be able to jump into your um your software engineering problem set or your uh medical uh medical school um uh exam prep, then you you go on check and you you look it up in in whatever textbook you’re studying from. The problem was after the pan they they rose to a $10 billion plus valuation during the pandemic, right? Because people needed remote learning tools. But then coming off of the pandemic those tailwinds subsided and then on top of
that it was a double whammy because all of these AI tools started coming about right so chat GBT claude Google Gemini and so now you can find answers to these questions through free tools in a lot of cases and so it’s really commoditized their core product use case which has caused their subscriber growth and their revenue growth to slow down. Second example is Blue Apron um which was one of the first meal kit delivery companies. Great product. As somebody who has two young kids, like I know better than most just how helpful it is to have easy to make meals at home that are healthy. Um, but they were very
dependent on paid advertising for growth, which is true of a lot of consumer subscription businesses. And so at some point they moved too far beyond the their ideal customer profile. Their their acquisition cost started to go up, their LTV started to go down, and the unit economics didn’t work anymore. And so growth ground to a halt. And then Pandora is the last example here. I’m dating myself, but in college, this was before Spotify was really a big thing. Pandora was where everybody went to listen to their music, but it was very ad driven, which meant that their average LTV per customer was like cents, right? Or maybe a couple bucks. And so then Spotify comes along with a
subscription business model, and it took them longer to grow. You can see the curves on the slide. But once they really got their business going, they were making one or two orders of magnitude more money per user than Pandora was. And so they could reinvest all of that value capture, that revenue back into product innovation, and paid marketing. And they just catapulted past Pandora. Yeah, I love these examples too though. I love it. So, how do we how what do we learn from this then? So, I think I think the lesson for anybody building a consumer or proumer
subscription app is um you know the vast majority of these products don’t ultimately succeed especially if they’re trying to achieve venture scale returns. And so it’s really important um to understand number one the size of your market and how big the opportunity really is because that impacts your financing strategy impacts who you hire and how big you grow your team. And then second you need to really have a deep understanding for how your business is going to grow. Are we going to be dependent on paid ads? Do we need a
sales team? Are we going to grow through organic word of mouth or through user generated content that drives SEO? And once you start to form a qualitative blueprint in your head of how that’s going to work, then you can start to actually quantify it through a growth model and through growth benchmarks. Uh I’ve worked with RevenueCap to build um this tool called the subscription value loop calculator that allows you to plug in your own benchmarks and and compare your performance to those in your category and and then then you can start to make more and more intelligent decisions around where to allocate your finite resources across product and marketing and growth in order to unlock
the biggest growth opportunities in your loop. For some companies, it’s creation. For some it’s it’s delivery, for some it’s capture and it’s a moving target because as you get better at one step then the bottleneck shifts to another step. Uh but I think it’s a helpful framework for thinking holistically about how to grow these businesses uh sustainably. And I mean the the check example is almost like Phil like get know when to get out. Yeah. No no it’s that’s very true and as somebody who was formerly a venture capitalist Yeah. you know, this stuff really matters, right? Because like um
venture capital is super powerful for companies that have strong product market fit in massive markets and can grow quickly and sustainably. But as a small indie developer, like I I worked with one client called Weather on the Way. Um founders based out of Poland, super successful weather app for people who just need to know what the weather looks like on their road trips. And as somebody who lives in Colorado and is a snowboarder, like super powerful use case for me and my family, probably never gonna be, you know, a billion,
certainly not a billion dollar company, probably never gonna make hundreds of millions, maybe maybe even tens of millions, but as an indie developer, if you could be making one, three, $5 million in ARR, as long as you’re smart about how you finance and grow the company. Yeah. That’s great. That’s a great outcome. Yeah. No, I like what you said. you said, you know, allows you to kind of see how big the team should be, how big of a market you’re addressing, and then how you build your team on top of that because yeah, your cash flow and all that stuff. I like how you put it. Hey, rewind. Phil said it way better
than I just did. All right. I’m doing my best to keep up with you, Steve. No, this is great. Hey, Phil. I want to move on because we’re so keen on this this AI and I a lot of people have talked about the top of the funnel and using AI for growth, but I want to talk about maybe the middle funnel because I’m hearing, you know, insider info and you probably you and I run in the same circle, so we’re hearing the same things, but how do you think AI is going to affect the more of the bottom funnel like retention, conversion? Where do you see that space going? Yeah, I think
um I’ll start with where I left off before, which is because AI creates all of these new opportunities to build compelling product experiences, it should positively impact retention. And so far, Revenue Cat’s latest annual report backs this up, right? The retention rates on these AI apps is higher. they’re making a lot more money uh in their first uh however many months or years than um your legacy subscription products. Um one specific
thing I’ll emphasize is personalization. Right? So I just brought on a new client called Tolen. Um they have sort of this AI companion in the form of an alien that they call a tool and it can do all sorts of things. It can support um your day-to-day activities if you just need help getting through the day, you want to be more productive, mental health and wellness support, things like they had a viral Tik Tok video around cooking. It was this uh you know Genzy woman who is trying to uh create a dish with squash and she has no idea how to do it and so
she asks her to in a playful way alien t o len. Um, and so you know what’s interesting about this product is it’s only 18 months old. It’s very new. Uh, but it’s grown incredibly fast. And part of the secret to their success is just it’s so personalized, right? These this AI companion um can really do do so many different things for its users and it’s context aware and
so it gets better and better at understanding who you are and how it can help you. Um, and I just started working with them, right? And so like I I I’m I’m new to the product, but it’s already impressive to see what they’ve done around personalizing experience for users in a way that wouldn’t have fundamentally was not possible u even a year ago, let alone two, three, five years ago. And so that’s one way in which I think retention is really going to go up with the with products that are built the right way because they’re not being built for a monolithic user now. They’re being built for Steve Young, for
Phil Carter, right? Mhm. Um, on the other hand, the downside to AI with regards to retention goes back to what I said before. It’s it’s just going to make competition even more ruthless. I just had Jacob Iding, the founder and CEO of of Revenue Cat on my podcast to talk about the latest subscription apps report and he was he said at the end of the episode like everybody’s just going to have to move faster, right? like that the the bar for how fast you’re going to iterate on product cycles and get new features out there. It’s just
accelerating exponentially and so that can negatively impact retention if you are not a category king because there are just going to be so many substitutes for your product and it’s going to be harder to rate to hold on to users. It it could also um put downward pressure on pricing, right? Because even if your product is um the best product on the market, if you’re charging twice as much as your next best competitor and they’re 90% as good, then a lot of customers are just they’ll say, "Hey, it’s good enough
and I’m going to pay the lower price." Yeah, I love it. I mean, there’s so much complexity here and there’s so many areas I can take this Phil. But as you’re talking, I’m just reminded because I’ll talk to a lot of people and like, what’s happening here? And they’ll be like, "Why is growth stagnant? what’s you know what what can I do what am I missing here and I’m like look this is hard right like even if you the examples you had up here and I’ll bring it back up it’s these companies were the darlings you know they were amazing and
at a given time like I can’t see the the the years but if you were in let’s say for you and me maybe 2001 right we love the Pandora right and so and I loved Blue Blue Apron back in like 2005 six range and they were the darlings but everything’s hard right even if you get to this size it’s still well to further to further illustrate that because this just happens to be in the same slide deck so nice you know Apple and Google I
I didn’t I didn’t expect to go into this I promise but as long as we’re talking about it I’ve got some visuals that can back it up um so you know Apple and Google really introduced subscriptions into the app stores a little over a decade ago 2011 2012 time frame And so in just over a decade, we’ve seen an explosion in consumer subscription apps to the point where there’s now more than 100,000 of them out there across the two app stores. Wow. Um, but if you go to the or I guess I’m controlling, so on the next slide, there there have only been relatively few that have reached billion dollar valuations and less than
10 that have ever surpassed 10 billion. Duolingo just surpassed D uh 10 billion about a year ago, right? They’re one of the latest examples and and of all of these these 30 companies, right? So out of those 100,000 plus consumer subscription apps, there have been about 30 right now that are sitting at billion dollar plus valuations. And and those 30 are confined to just four categories. Media entertainment, health and fitness, social lifestyle, and education. And then to the point you just made, even the ones that have gone public, so Dropbox, Spotify, Bumble, Dualingo,
Grinder, these are some of the consumer subscription apps that have gone public over the last five plus years, they’ve still seen huge amounts of volatility. And so this um this comes from GP Bullhound. Eric Crowley is is a partner there and and his team does a lot of this analysis. But what it shows is these lines are like the revenue multiples. Um so trailing 12-month um revenue, enterprise value over trailing 12-month revenue. And what you can see is there was this huge spike during the pandemic because you had all the stimulus um money that went into um giving consumers more money to spend,
plus they weren’t able to travel or go out to restaurants as much. And so it drove a huge spike in digital um purchases. But then coming off the pandemic, all of that reversed. Yeah. And as a result, you saw these multiples go way down and they’ve started to climb back up again in the last couple years. And I think AI is really propelling a lot of new innovation. But it goes to your point, which is just this is really really hard. And that’s why I think it helps to have some of these frameworks and benchmarks and tools to just provide founders who for the most part are building great technology and great products. They don’t necessarily grow grow their businesses the most efficient
way. Um just arm them with the right tools. Yeah. Yeah. And like for me it was like, hey, it’s hard. Like, you know, don’t feel bad about yourself. You’re just going through this is business and this is what you signed up for and so you’ll figure a way out. That’s sort of my philosophy when I’m talking to founders. It’s like what therapists do, right, Phil? Yeah. Yeah. That is that is part of it. I mean, I’ve I’ve never gone all in being a founder, but I’ve I’ve built a couple of my own apps as sort of side projects, and it’s really it’s really hard. Like, it’s such
a brutally competitive world out there. I want to let’s see I’ll let you pick Phil. I’ve got a couple areas I want to take this either talking about how indies because a lot of our audience are going to be more indies and founders or and how AI can leverage them or talking about what you contributed to revenue about optimizing onboarding flows. What do you think? Where should we Yeah, I mean we could cover both but why don’t we um why don’t we start with the second question. So um
I am a big believer that uh there are about half a dozen areas for consumer subscription businesses that carry 80 plus percent of the leverage in terms of their ability to grow both subscribers and revenue. And so these include subscription pricing and packaging, payroll optimization, um driving more organic growth, reducing and voluntary churn, but one of the biggest ones is onboarding. And part of the reason this is so important for consumer subscription in particular is consumers are very fickle and they’re very busy, right? The average attention
span um has gone down significantly in the last couple decades. And so you really have this very narrow window of opportunity to convince users that they should use your product, let alone pay for it, right? And the RevenueCat data backs this up. And so this was my contribution to their latest report. Um, what it shows is 82% of trial starts occur the same day that a user installs an app. Um, which is even higher than last year’s report. Last year, I think it was hovering more like 75 to 78%. So, it just keeps going up. More and more
trial starts are happening right away on the first day, which means most of that’s happening on their first session, probably within the first five minutes. And so, you you have this very narrow window of opportunity to convince the user that your app is special. But the good news is if you do a good job, there’s a huge amount of leverage. So, so at the bottom of the slide, it talks about how P90 apps, apps on the top decile, boast a 20% trial start rate. That’s 3x better than the median app. Um, versus trial conversion, P90 apps are only 2x better. And so, what that
says is one of the highest leverage points in the whole funnel for these consumer subscription businesses is getting users who’ve just installed the app to start a trial as quickly as possible and then you buy yourself time to convince them to pay for the product. Um, and so there’s just a lot of innovation happening around onboarding. One of the things I tell my clients is if you have the resources to do it, you should just be continuously investing in onboarding optimization all the time. Yeah, agreed. I’m not just looking for confirmation bias, Phil. I promise you when I do these things, I’m just looking
for like, am I saying the right things? You know, double-checking my work in a way. And like, okay, this is because I say the same thing as you. I’m like, look, if you really want to grow, just focus on what you kind of said, right? like the onboarding, the payw wall, the visibility to the payw wall, and just like that’s pretty much it. Or organic downloads, too. And I I didn’t think you would say that, Phil, frankly, but I’m glad you did. And so, I love that. And you just keep it simple, that simple, and keep optimizing that way, too. Yep. Yeah. Well, but one other So, I’ll add
another layer of complexity to it if I may, which is I I talked at the beginning of um this biodal distribution, right? You’ve got like on and this is oversimplifying it but on one end of the spectrum you have the indie developers and the small teams who are trying to build 5 to 10 million AR businesses and they recognize that their businesses are never going to be larger than that but they can still make a great living building an app like that if it’s a small team. Um for those companies I think it really is often as simple as show the payw wall as quickly as possible. Maximize payw wall view rate. Keep the onboarding flow short and
to the point. Um you know don’t underpric yourself. make sure that you’re capturing enough value from subscribers who convert, that your unit economics are strong. That opens up meta and other paid channels as a way to just reliably grow. It’s sort of money in, money out. Um, and it really is that simple in a lot of cases. But then on the other end of the spectrum, you have these venturebacked businesses like Duolingo, Spotify, Netflix, Straa, uh, you know, and I could go on and on. Then the game really, it’s like checkers versus chess. With those companies,
there is a lot more innovation around reverse trials. Hey, we’re not going to make you put down the credit card at all. You get seven days free. You get all the premium value up front. Or multiple subscription tiers like look at Tender. Uh we’re going to give you Tender Plus, Tender Gold, Tender Platinum, and each one has a different premium value prop. And that way we’re capturing more consumer surplus under the demand curve. It’s a it’s more complex buying decision, but it’s ultimately worth it. Like those are two different games. And I think the challenge is when you’re an indie developer, sometimes you can over complicate things by trying to do all the stuff the big companies are doing. And then vice versa, if you’re a big company, like to get to 10 billion
dollars plus, you got to have a different set of playbooks than, you know, the the entity developers that are just trying to get people to pay right away. Okay. I’m so glad we went there because I even told the Sanu, this is gold. This has to be a clip. This has to be a real You break it down perfectly because I do I feel the same way, Phil. I’m like, you’re not them. You know, indies will compare themselves like do you have those resources? You don’t. And I like how you kept it that simple. And you know what I’ve learned even through just life and I coach my daughter’s softball team, but just keep it simple.
Like simplicity wins all the time. The more simple you can be, the better it is because I get asked the randomst questions, Phil. I’m like, why are you thinking so complex? My simplistic brain doesn’t compute at that level. I just try to keep things simple. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and when your customers are consumers who are busy and just trying to get through the day and don’t have a ton of disposable income, like simplicity is your friend because that’s the way their brands work, too. Yeah. I love it. Phil, since you don’t have a dad joke and I’m I’m gonna I’m gonna
instead of applause, I’m going to give you a laugh to try. That’s my way applausing you. Okay. All right. Let’s talk about AI and retention. And I know there’s some questions, so I want to get to the questions. All right. You actually, let’s get to Jeff. He’s asked it three times. All right. Let let me just read this as event cap. How would you go about raising capital for a new founder for a language app specifically? I’m a oneperson team, full stack dev. Would you consider Kickstarter? Yeah, great question. First of all, I’ve never heard the term vent cap before.
I’ve heard VC, I’ve heard venture capitalist, I’ve heard investor, I’ve heard all sorts of derogatory terms for VCs, but I’ve never heard Ventcap. So, kudos. I thought VCAP meant something else, but good on you for figuring out what Ventcap meant. Yeah. So I I um here in the spirit of keeping it simple, I would say um start by making sure you have product market fit before you go raise venture capital. And and when I say venture capital, I’ll distinguish between like, hey, small friends and family around. If
you’re raising tens or couple hundred,000 from a group of friends and family members, that’s one thing, but what I’m talking about is going and bringing an institutional firm on. You want to make sure you have the at least the initial signs of product market fit before you do that. And there are tools like the um there there’s a question you can ask um called the product market fit score where you basically say on a sc uh how would you feel if you could no longer use this product very disappointed somewhat disappointed not disappointed um this was created by I’m forgetting his name but he wrote growth hacking he was one of the original growth hackers the first marketer at dropup Sean Ellis
yeah Sean Ellis um and so uh you want 40% or more of the responses to be very disappointed because that indicates you have the beginning as a product market fit so that’s step one is like make sure you’ve got a product that is really resonating with people before you put all the additional pressure on yourself of bringing in outside capital of any kind. Um, then once you’ve done that, it opens up a lot more optionality for you. I’ve never personally used Kickstarter, so I I don’t have strong opinions one way or the other on it. I think anecdotally, I feel like Kickstarter is
a really good platform for physical products or something where you can tell a compelling story that’s going to want people to get behind you. doesn’t always work for a digital subscription because it’s not something that’s as tangible that you can kind of hold in your hands. But that’s not to say it can’t work. Um, but I think my more general advice is start small, stay lean, prove out the basics of product market fit and what your unit economics look like, and go as far as you can with as little capital as you can, even if that means you’re doing this as a side hustle at first. And then once you see the indicators that it’s
really working, okay, then then it’s time to bring in some more money and pour fuel on the fire. But even then, I’d be careful about not getting too far ahead of yourself. Yeah, love it. Hey, that’s directly from a VC, too. Or Venap. Okay, there you go. That’s right. Learn new things. All right, since we’re on the topic, I’m going to get through some of the questions. They’re here, Phil. Might as well get through them. Russ says, “Most apps, in my experience, pose questions during onboarding.” And you kind of put that in the revenue chat like Quizlet like or have a quiz onboarding quiz, but most of it’s just often for show, Phil. So, how can we
create onboarding that’s genuinely useful? Do you have a good example? Yeah, this is such a great question and I um I’ve been doing this thing this year on LinkedIn where every once in a while I’ll post about apps in specific categories each month. So in January it was health and fitness, right? Because that’s that’s the Super Bowl month for the health and fitness category with New Year’s resolutions. And so I put up this simple example of on on the left you have N which has like a 100 plus screen onboarding flow, right? they’re famous or infamous depending on your
perspective for this super long highly personalized onboarding flow versus all trails where it’s like it’s like 10 screens at most and that includes like the registration screen, the pay wall, everything soup to nuts. Well, why right like I think people oversimplify this sometimes and I know simplicity is generally a good thing but sometimes we oversimplify things and so the answer is not all on one end of the spectrum or the other, right? The answer is not you should have a shorter onboarding flow or longer onboarding flow. The answer is start with what is your user trying to accomplish. So with N you are probably
someone who has tried other weight loss products before. If you’re coming to N that means these other products you’ve tried haven’t worked for you. And so N’s relatively long, highly personalized onboarding experience. It’s not just for ship, right? They are asking you a lot of questions that help them to more deeply understand you as an individual user and particularly now with AI craft a customized weight loss plan for you and be able to better project how much weight you’re going to be able to lose over what time period and that leads to higher trial start rates higher conversion rates and a better business model. All Trails is on the other end of
that spectrum, right? If you’re downloading the AllTrails app as opposed to just searching for a local trail in your area on web, that means in all likelihood you are already outside. You’re on the trail. You’re ready to get started either as an individual or with your friends or family. So the last thing you want is all the friction of having to like go through a super long onboarding experience. You want to be able to just jump in and start recording your hike. And so All Trails is onboarding flow is really short. And this is the visualization of that. You see All Trails is just much smaller than N here. So I think you got to start with
what does your customer want and then build your onboarding flow as an extension of that to more directly answer the question around like how many questions should you ask and and how do you make sure they’re actually driving value. I think once you understand your user’s intent, it’s much easier to sort of intuitively know what what questions are important and then don’t ask questions that are just wasting your your user’s time. I love it. Yeah, I had to find it. Phil, this is what I do, you know, find. Yeah, find the post. Look, Phil’s a great follow on LinkedIn, so definitely do that. But here’s where I
was able to find it, too. But yeah, this is the visual just really speaks volume. Like when you say 100, you actually see How long did this take, Phil? That’s insane. Yeah, it took me about 25 minutes. And my guess is I probably wasn’t, you know, I I I haven’t dealt with a lot of weight issues. And so I probably wasn’t even the longest version of the onboarding. Oh my gosh. So this Can you go back to that one slide where you had the subscription apps? I want to know how long that slide took too with all the logos on Oh, this one I can’t
claim credit for this. Oh, this one. This comes from Lazard. This is a 2022 Lazard consumer subscription report. So, this was a copy paste. Well, that’s all credit goes to them. They probably They probably had a 20, you know, 22 year old analyst working until 1 in the morning building this over the course of a week. Although, now you could just do it with AI. Yeah, I love it, man. That was awesome. That was a great question. Thank you. And then Phil, look, I I think I’m I’m getting a little bit envious of you. Okay, I’m getting jealous. I’m gonna have to end this
soon. You’re getting too much love. I was I was I was That felt like a great opening for a dad joke, which I feel like I dropped the ball on, but I’m gonna I my I didn’t get enough sleep last night. My brain isn’t working fast enough to come up with one on the fly. And then this move is pure gold. I’m Jeeoff, I’m assuming that you’re talking about Phil being pure gold for that, too. I love it. Okay, I’m gonna go into all questions. How about that, Phil? I’m gonna go to the audience questions. All right, let’s do it. This one we were on the topic. Abdullah says, “Subscription funnel ends after first session, right?” I think subscription funnel ends at the
first session. How do you leverage AI to convert users after the first session? Yeah. Well, first of all, I will I will I wouldn’t say contest the first point, but I’ll make it a little bit more nuance. I think the funnel really ends once the user has reached what I would refer to as the aha moment when they understand why your product is valuable enough to be worth paying for. And for a lot of products, that is the first session. Certainly, that’s the easy that’s the happy path, right? Because if you can demonstrate why your product is worth paying for in the first session, you can get you can you can play into
that 82% of trial starts that happen on first session and get people into a trial faster. But that’s not always the case. And so, like, if you have a fintech product where somebody has to enter all of their financial information, like Monarch Money, right? I use Monarch Money for all of my personal finances. It’s a great app. You’re probably not going to get to the aha moment on the first session because there’s just too much to do. And so it starts with where is the aha moment for your product and I would make sure you’re looking at and interpreting your subscription funnel through that lens. Um but then your second question was um
how can you use AI to improve conversion after the first session? I think this goes back I mean con conversion is a function conversion and retention is a function of value. That’s why it’s the subscription value loop, right? It’s all about value. And so really I would look I I think the mistake that some companies are making right now is they’re like AI AI AI we have to do AI on everything, right? But there’s this risk of building technology in search of a problem and you’re not actually generating any value for the user. So the way I would think about it is start
with what does your user really want? What what is the unique value promise you’re making to this user um that is going to keep them around for a long period of time as a paying subscriber? and then work backwards from there to how does AI unlock new opportunities to build products and features that support that value promise. I love it. And then and then that was a that was sort of a broad answer. So I’ll put a finer point on it. Just go back to personalization. That’s the easy answer is like AI is making personalization so much easier than it was before and people really
value that. I like it. I love it. Okay. The Phantom says, "How do you do market research? How do you research market size? have competitors. Would using their numbers suffice? Yeah. So, um I will let’s pick a specific example, right? Because competitor research can look very different if you’re talking about things like pricing, packaging versus payw wall versus uh core product experience. I’m going to use pricing because that’s to me that’s a great example here is I think a great heruristic for setting
your subscription prices is just look at what your five to 10 closest competitors are doing as a starting point and just get that into the product and see how it see how it works. And then if you have AB testing set up, if you have a tool like Revenue Cat or or another tool that allows you to do AB testing easily, then um you know, you can pretty quickly hone all right $59.99 a year versus $69.99 versus $79, right? You can you can pretty quickly get to your optimal price point. Um, you can also use tools like Van Westendor, Max Deep or Conjooint Analysis, which is something we do with a lot of our clients to to sort of
figure out in a more nuanced way what are different people willing to pay for a monthly versus annual subscription plan and which features are they willing to pay more versus less for. Um, but to to then go deeper, I would say this is another area where AI is super powerful, right? Like Perplexity is one of my clients. I think they are one of the best tools in the world right now for this sort of deep research use case. And competitor research is a great example of an application for that. And so rather than it used to be like I started my career in consulting at Bane and I would I was one of those analysts up
until one in the morning all week going and like painstakingly gathering all of this competitor data. Well, now it’s not all of publicly available, but you can get pretty far just by using these AI tools um and get a good enough answer to start with and then, you know, then it’s around using the benchmarking tools that RevenueCat provides and and going as deep as you can to get the harder to find data. Yeah. Okay. And Simos Simonos says, "I have a 40 search traffic score in my app names. ASO question. I rank number one on it. Would I would should I
change it to a 50 traffic keyword, which I rank six to 20 on it depending on country? Yeah. So, let me make sure I understand. So, 40 traffic keyword in my app name and rank first. Would it change to a 50 traffic keyword which I rank 60 12? Okay. You should change it to a 50 keyword traffic. So, I if I’m understanding this correctly and I will say I’m I’m very much a product growth leader, less so a marketing growth leader. So, we definitely do app store optimization as part of our offering. Um but it’s not an
area where I have as deep of expertise as say onboarding, payroll optimization, pricing and packaging etc. Um having said that I think this comes down to this dichotomy between um popularity versus competition, right? So like in my Maven course uh under the value delivery um module of the course, we talk about various ways to grow your business. One of them is app store optimization, search engine optimization. And with app store optimization, it’s pretty simple. It’s like you want to rank for the most popular keywords you can with the
highest traffic scores to use your parlance, but the ones that you can actually win on. And so it’s hard for me to answer a question like that without getting into the data and really understanding the nuances of who are you competing with? Um, you know, how defensible are those brands against yours? Can can you differentiate well enough against those competitors who are currently ranking higher than you for the higher popularity keyword? uh by by telling customers the right messages. Uh so in the abstract, it’s hard for me to
answer that, but I think you’re thinking about it the right way, which is start with the lower competitive score keywords, get a foothold, make sure that you’ve got a a solid floor of traffic that you’re generating through the app stores, and then start to swing more and more for the fences with these higher popularity scores, but know that it’s going to be an uphill climb because, you know, the bar just gets higher. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I wouldn’t change it too much. I would slowly try to test it some. And then what you can do is try to even run Apple search ads for that 50 traffic keyword and just bid aggressively on it and see what that tap
through rate would be, that conversion rate would be just to get a sense of whether that ranking number one for that keyword would be effective for you too. That’s a way for you to sort of balance it out and test it before changing your metadata. Yep. I think that’s spot on. Cool. Jeff says, “I love this. I got to reach out to you both individually.” Thank you. And then let me see. I think we answered most questions already. All right, the Dion has a good or Joseph. Okay, I talked to Joseph. It’s good to see you, Joseph. Hi, Stephen. Phil, how
do you calculate cost with customers interacting with an AI avatar to keep it cost- effective, profitable? Yeah, I’m so glad you asked this question because one of the things I probably didn’t talk enough about earlier, I think I alluded to it, but when you think about legacy consumer subscription apps, in many cases, the marginal cost to serve a subscriber was zero or close to zero, right? like you’ve got app store fees and you’ve got server costs, but unless you’re serving a physical product like Stitch Fix or um Blue Apron, you know,
your marginal costs are very very very low. That is not always the case with these AI companies because they have these underlying compute costs because they’re paying the LLMs. Um, this is why DeepSk was such a big deal because the cost of the underlying LLMs is there’s sort of this race to the bottom and that is going to ultimately benefit companies in the application layer that are building off of those underlying LLMs, but there are still real costs associated with this. Um, I mentioned Perplexity as a customer, Gamma as a customer, and so they they both have to think about this. Um, so the way I would
be think, and this is the next blog post I want to write, although I just don’t I’m sure you can relate, Steve. It’s like I just don’t have enough time in the day. I’d rather just do this, Bill. I’m like, let me just talk to somebody and then just record the video and somebody for me. Yeah, I agree. I agree. Yeah, podcasts are are so much easier than writing a good blog post. But um but the way I would think about monetization strategy in the context of a business that has real underlying costs associated with serving their bit their their product, uh it’s got to look
different, right? And so this whole model of we’re going to have a single subscription tier and it’s like $10 a month, $100 a year, like that has been the story for the last decade. I think that’s going to change and it’s why you see more and more consumer subscription apps. This was in Revenue Cat’s latest report as well. Like offering lifetime plans at a really high price point, offering inapp purchases that can supplement the subscription like the dating category with Tener and Bumble have really innovated in that area. Gaming is where it all started, but there there haven’t been as many other categories that are doing that. I think that’s going to start to change. And then you’re also going to see higher price subscription tiers that take
advantage of the AI features. So I think you’re already seeing this with proumer tools like notion as a good example where you get the base features for one subscription price, but then if you want to use the AI features, you have to pay a much higher price because you’re incurring costs for the business every time you use those AI tools. And so I think you’re going to start to see more and more of that. Yeah, I like it. Okay, let’s do this. I’m gonna go through some of the questions, Phil, and then we’ll end with that. We’ll skip the app audits. Promise to those who reach out for the app audits, I will get to
them next week. So Paul and Hassan, if you guys are here, I apologize, but I promise you I will get to them next week. We’re going to have a a solo episode, but I want to make sure since Phil’s here, we answer all the questions. Dion says, “Pologies, this is already mentioned. What are three apps that do survey onboarding really well?” So maybe there’s one or two, Phil, that you can mention. When you say survey onboarding, I assume that means these sort of I I call them onboarding quizzes. basically like, you know, five to 10 questions in most cases, 50 in in N’s case, but um that help you personalize the experience. So companies
that do it really well, I mean, I already mentioned N and like it’s easy to poke fun at them just because their onboarding flow is so long, but clearly it’s it’s worked for them in a lot of ways. Um so I think that’s one example, but it’s an extreme example in a category where that actually makes sense. I think other categories where that makes sense, fintech, right? Because it’s a high stakes, you know, they’re they’re dealing with your your money and your financial well-being. So, health, health in certain cases makes sense have an longer onboarding flow. Um, I think N does a great job of that. In fintech, I would say, um, I don’t know that Monarch has a super long
onboarding flow, but you you can probably find examples of fintech companies that do more personalization. Um, and then in the sort of more short to mid-range, um, I’m biased because I’m an investor in this company, but Ladder is a strict training app that’s growing really fast in the fitness space right now. They have they have taken it to a whole another level. They have an onboarding quiz where they can actually predict the LTV of every customer based on the responses to each onboarding question and then they funnel that information back to the ad networks to optimize their ad campaign spin. I had the founder and CEO Greg Stewart on my podcast a few weeks ago and he talked a
bit about this. Um, so they’re a great example to check out if you’re looking for a company that does these onboarding quizzes particularly well. Um, those are probably a few of the best examples that come to mind. I love it. All right, Rafi says, “For a new startup, how long should you how long should you test different pricing models, i.e. like weekly versus monthly, and how do you know when it’s time to change or adjust?” Yeah. So, I will start by saying I do think ultimately AB testing pricing is
the acid test for what what to charge. Having said that, I think a tool that is severely underutilized in our world is um customer research and pricing research. And so this is why I mentioned Van Westendonorp, maxdiff, conjoint. These are just fancy names for basically pricing, research, analytics tools. And this is a service we offer a lot of our clients. And so those help you get a very quick and easy understanding of like not just what is the optimal price point and Western will give you the optimal price point and the acceptable
price range, but then you can also cut the data by demographic, by psychographic, by usage patterns, by uh location. So, like if you if you’re an app that operates across multiple countries or multiple markets, um it can be really valuable for for relatively quickly and inexpensively understanding some of these nuances around pricing. Um, by the way, that also really helps with discount because there’s like your sticker price, but then there’s the discount price that you can offer to certain users based on their activity or where they’re located. Um, so those are really helpful tools, but to directly
answer the question around AB testing, uh, I mean, if you’re doing it the right way, you need to get to what’s called a minimum detectable effect. And so that’s basically like the the difference between a control versus variant treatment. Um, that is considered statistically significant. And the minimum detectable effect determines um how big that delta needs to be for you to be able to confidently say that’s a statistically significant result. And then based on that, you can estimate how long the test needs to run, right? Like
how long do I need to run this AB test based on how many users active users I have or how many new signups I get every day. Um and then you can back out. Okay, this test needs to run for a week or two weeks or four weeks. So there are a bunch of um I guess what I would point you to is there are a bunch of calculators out there. You can just look in like AB test sample size calculator or minimum detectable effect calculator on the internet. Uh and they will help you. You can plug in a few numbers and it will tell you how long you need to run the test. I love it. All right. Russ says, "For an indie developer after launch and the initial app store boost,
should you invest in paid user acquisition right away or lean on organic first and is a budget of 2,000 $20,000 over six months? Too small. Yeah. So, I am I’ll go back to I am not the world’s foremost paid marketing expert. I’ve certainly done enough of it. I also brought on my first employee in January and he’s more of a paid ad expert. So if he were here, he’d probably tell you more than I could. Um, having said that, as a general rule, what I what I try to tell early founders is try to get your organic flywheel
going even at small scale before you invest a huge amount of dollars in paid advertising. And there are two reasons for that. One is if you’re not spending enough money, then you’re not giving the ad networks enough volume in terms of your conversion events. Uh, I mean, ideally you’re optimizing ad campaigns based on downfunnel metrics like trial starts, but even if you’re optimizing based on installs, the rule of thumb I’ve heard is $10,000 uh um a month. You really need $10,000 a month minimum for um Meta or Google or the other ad
networks to get enough conversion events to be able to optimize your campaigns. So, $20,000 over six months probably not enough. Now, if you want to test it a small scale just to get like an early sense of how it’s going to go, you can do that. just be careful not to get hooked on it because it can be addictive, right? You start spending money, you get more users, you get more subscribers, and it’s really tempting to just put more fuel on the fire, but it can it can be very easy to like then end up addicted to paid ads and push it to the point where the unit economics don’t work anymore. So, start with organic, push organic as far as you can, then once you go paid, focus on one channel
first. Like, don’t go across too many channels because you won’t have the budget for it early on. I would say pick one channel. If in doubt, choose Meta, right? They’re like they’re the largest. they have the best um tools in terms of like being able to really customize your target segment um and get one channel working and then once you really have one channel working the unit economics are sound then you can start to go to your second or third channel. Yeah, I’ll add some few things too, Phil. We are running a lot of paid ads for some of a lot of our clients and we we’re seeing
that you know we have one client so 20,000 is about $3,333 but I think it’s enough to get going on meta too. We have seen that sometimes install campaigns work just as well as trial start campaigns. So, play around with it. I normally, and this is why I like having this so you can hear differing opinions. I normally like to start off with smaller budget on ASA Apple Search Ads because with meta, I don’t with Apple Search Ads, I don’t need creatives. So, meta creatives is the king. So, if you’re an indie
developer and you don’t have the resources to pump out a bunch of creatives, I like to generally start with Apple Search Ads too. But I do lean on I put a little bit like we just launched an app last month, Phil. We did put a little bit of spend. We put about $1,000 on Apple search ads. And all combined, we spent a,000 and we made about 700, which I’m I’m thrilled about because not thrilled, but I would like to be I’m like, “Okay, this is good signs.” Like people are paying if I drive downloads. So, and I just need to work out the math now. Yeah. Yeah. I
think that’s a great point and I I couldn’t agree more. Like Apple search ads is a great starter channel both because you don’t need creatives also because Apple doesn’t play by the same rules that it makes everyone else play by. You don’t you don’t you don’t deal with app tracking transparency and SK ad network when you’re doing Apple search ads which means you can actually afford to do it on smaller budget. So for the for the person who asked is 20,000 over six months enough not for meta maybe for Apple search ads right because you don’t because you don’t need to be bass that minimum threshold uh in order for the ad network to optimize and spend. Um so that’s a really good point. Yeah I love it. Okay. Well, Phil, I don’t want to
keep you any longer and I gotta go because I got to leave get a haircut. I know there’s some uh comments in there. Phantom, I’m going to give you this. We’re going to end it on a joke, Phil. All right. Phantom says, “Why did the subscription app break up with its users?” Because it had serious commitment issues and high turnover. There you go. All right. Phantom, you get reach email me stephenappmasters.com and I’ll hook you up with a free indie app Santa promo. All right. The website is Phil. Anything else before we say
goodbye? I want I’ll do all the plugs for you. Sure. I mean, if you’re going to cover the plugs, then I don’t need to do it. But yeah, check me out at phg gcarter.com. That’s where you can find all my other stuff. Yeah, there it is. Phil garter.com and then you can find the Maven course, you can find the podcast, all that stuff. And just search for while you’re listening to this podcast, Subversive in your favorite podcast app, and you’ll hear some great content. The one I want to talk to is the who are the one you just the latter one. The latter the latter episode. That’s the most popular episode to date. So, you’re not Okay, I gotta I gotta
reach out to Greg as well. But all that is linked up at phil gcarter.com. And once again, go follow Phil on LinkedIn as well. He shares some amazing amazing content, including this crazy freaking image, yo. Come on, man. Show him some love. This a while. Work. It’s a grind, man. If the audience wants to follow you anywhere else, you want to send them anywhere else? Sure. Yeah, you can check me out at um LinkedIn X um and Substack. I’m Phil G.
Carter across all three of those. So, pretty easy to find. Uh yeah, and um if you if you’re interested in the podcast, would love to have you as a listener. Just launched that recently. Steve mentioned the Maven course. The next course actually starts in less than two weeks. So, if you’re interested in that, just check out consumer subscription growth on Maven. There’s also if you use Lenny’s list nysl, you get a thousand $100 discount. Um that’s through the Lenny promotion. Yeah. Um, and then, um, the last thing I’d say is, you know, if you’re a consumer subscription, we’re at full capacity right now with our client
business. Um, but if you’re interested in, uh, really having us lean in and help your business grow, then we’d love to hear from you. Yeah. And all that is there. All right. All that linked up in your favorite podcast app as well. Thank you guys for joining. They’re enjoying it. Thank you guys. Thank you, Jim, for coming on. Next week, it’s going to be a solo episode. I’m going to bring on my head of app growth, Yash, on the podcast, but we’re going to do a lot of uh AMA and then go through all the app audits because we have a long list of app audits that we got to get through. All right, Phil, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you guys for watching.
I’ll see you on the next episode.