Notes on growth.

Subscription funnels fail in a few recognizable shapes

Give me eight of your numbers and the shape of the problem usually declares itself. Top of funnel, monetization, or retention. Here are the two shapes I see most, why a blended median hides both, and how to build the column you should actually be compared against.

How to be the only human in the loop without being the bottleneck

If everything routes through you, the fix isn't delegating decisions. It's delegating the analysis and keeping the call. Here's the brief format that makes a real decision answerable in one word.

Running parallel AI coding agents: how I got to 400 commits a week solo

How to run parallel AI coding sessions on one repo without shipping broken code. Seven weeks, 1,439 commits, one person, and a 6x gain that had nothing to do with prompting.

The new bottleneck in product is judgment, not research

Building is fast and cheap now, so the constraint moved from engineering to judgment. The judgment work is five questions: the problem, the ICP, the solution, the alternatives, and your two differentiators.

Speaking at Business of Apps NYC.

On "The Ideal Flow: top strategies from high-converting onboarding flows and paywalls," September 17 in NYC.

The best B2C teams don't plan a launch

A launch is a spike that fades. The teams that win build a system that compounds from day one: ship early, test the paywall early, and improve the loop every week.

Referred users are worth about 3x. Your referral landing page decides whether you keep it

The share moment is the window between one person tapping Share and another accepting, and it is where most products squander their most valuable users. Referred users are worth about 3x (Branch.io). Here is the flow that converts them.

Your paywall is the highest-leverage experiment you have

One paywall test moves lifetime value across your entire base. The difference between 30% and 60% choosing annual can decide whether the business works. Six tactics to test first.

Targeting is dead. Paid accounts are won on creative now

Creative is the targeting now. You reach a different audience by making creative that speaks to that persona and spending enough for the algorithm to find them. Meta has already demoted your targeting to a suggestion.

The pricing and trial structure most subscription apps overcomplicate

Nobody converts on a trial until they have experienced the value, and how long that takes is set by the product. Entertainment lands on day one, wellness and education need a week or two, health and fitness around 30 days.

Your team doesn't need to be good at AI. It needs to be top 0.1%

"We use AI" now means about as much as "we use the internet." The gap that matters is how far out on the curve you are, because the returns pile up in the tail.

The right go-to-market for a B2C app, from zero to one

You do not pick a go-to-market. Your product type already has a known playbook. The job at zero to one is a product people love, and buying whatever traffic you need to learn how.

How to get organic traffic from Reddit, carefully

The whole addressable universe on Reddit is maybe 200 to 300 comments. Play it as SEO, win the threads already ranking on Google, and respect the thresholds nobody publishes. Here's the process and the numbers.

Founders ask AI for growth advice and get slop. Here are 6 real answers

Ask an LLM a growth question and you get AI slop and SEO-bait, written by people who never shipped anything. Here are six questions I get constantly, with the actual answers.

A free teardown of your signup flow.

Calling PMs, designers, and founders building education apps: want a free assessment of your signup flow?

51 onboarding flows, 105 insights, one Figma file.

I tore down 51 subscription onboarding flows and pulled out the 105 patterns that actually move conversion.

"Do things that don't scale" is outdated

Just build it. The trade-off was always the cost to build against the cost of being wrong, and with build cost at about a tenth of what it was, being wrong is cheap. Test live, trust the signal, and keep the winner.

I tore apart the onboarding of top wellness apps.

Weeks of teardown across the top wellness apps, distilled into the patterns that actually drive activation.

Education and wellness apps don't have a content problem. They have a motivation problem

When an education or wellness app churns, the team reaches for more content. It rarely works, because the content was never the problem. Motivation is what leaks.

Education App Retention: The Unfair Fight (And How to Win It Anyway)

You are not competing with other learning apps, you are competing with TikTok, and day-30 retention for education sits around 3 to 4%. Here is what actually moves it: commitment at onboarding, the first 48 hours, and the goal-loop screen at the end of every session.

Understanding Referrals as a Growth Channel: A Framework for Realistic Expectations

Most referral programs deliver 10-20% incremental acquisition. Learn the 3-level framework for building effective referral strategies without chasing viral dreams.

Referrals and k-factor won't save you from high CAC. Here's the math

A referral program is a percentage of a funnel that already works, which is why it cannot fix a CAC problem. The k-factor arithmetic, why the tail decays, and what to fix instead.

AI-Enabled Couples Therapy: The Massive Market Opportunity Everyone's Missing

People spend thousands on individual therapy but avoid couples therapy over stigma and cost. AI changes the economics, and that underserved middle is one of the biggest opportunities in mental health.

Monthly vs annual subscriptions: the thirds that decide your LTV:CAC

Buyers split into rough thirds: never annual, convincible, always annual. Your paywall only moves the middle one, and weekly is the lever most teams have never tested.

What "product-market fit" actually means, and how to measure it

Most startups do not have product-market fit until Series B, which is the job rather than a failure. Here is how to measure it simply, how to run the Superhuman analysis on the result, and the thesis exercise that makes the number mean anything.

Product Foundations Part 2: Prioritization

Part 2 of Product Foundations: 5 levels of backlog prioritization, from intuition and voting to grading, measuring, and a risk-mitigating bets portfolio.

Product Foundations Part 1: Ideation

An in depth guide for how to maximize your product features roadmap using best practice ideation techniques.

The 4 Stages Of A Good Growth Process

The four stages of a growth process, and the specific way each one breaks. The failure points are what you actually manage against, and the stage nobody has ever had to defend is almost always the last one.

How To Use And Optimize A Growth Model

A growth model is one sheet showing how your levers feed revenue, CAC and LTV, so you can see what moves what before you commit the quarter. Includes a worked one-month model you can copy.

My Experience at MasterClass

I’ll tell you why I joined MasterClass and what excites me about where we’re headed, about how I think we stack up in the key areas that I evaluate companies on, what makes MasterClass unique, what th

Impact, Confidence & Effort (I.C.E.) Prioritization

Force-rank your growth roadmap with ICE: impact over effort, wrapped in confidence. What each factor means, why confidence is the one everyone skips, and how to split the backlog.

The Top 5 Reasons Why Companies Fail

The top reasons startups fail, why 3 of the top 5 come down to focus and execution, and what Goldratt's The Goal says the goal actually is.

20 Insights From Top Growth Leaders

Takeaways from conversations with 20 growth leaders at Pinterest, GrubHub, Lyft, Morning Brew and more, spanning traffic, sign-up, engagement, and process.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 3

Part 3 on growth experimentation: why success metrics are the wrong frame, evaluating results as value versus cost, and quantifying tests in revenue terms.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 2

Part 2 on growth experimentation: scoping tests around the solution you would implement, why A/B testing comes later, and ICESRR scoring for prioritization.

Growth Experimentation Pt. 1

Part 1 on growth experimentation for early stage startups: growth as a process, the 5% rule, and brainstorming in questions instead of hypotheses.

Testing Principles, Not Solutions

Minimum Viable Value (MVV) is the new MVP

7 Keys To Innovative Ideas From The Book "Originals" By Adam Grant

Summary notes from Adam Grant's book Originals: 7 themes on recognizing original ideas, timing, alliances, identity, group dynamics, and emotion.

The 1 Step That Everyone Forgets w/ Decision Making

Why validation is the most commonly skipped step in hypothesis testing, and a simple way to sort-rank ideas before committing weeks to a test.