Notes on growth.
Your Google Play listing probably names an iOS-only feature
People buy on ratings and reviews, and 4.0 stars is the inflection point. The five things I find most often on a listing, each with its source, plus the Play-versus-iOS defect worth going to look for right now.
Your best email is a receipt, and your trial window is silent
The first 24 to 48 hours decide whether someone stays. The five things I find most often in a lifecycle program, why open rate stopped meaning what it meant this year, and the two sends most products are missing.
The Meta cost benchmark for subscription apps does not exist
Ad accounts fail in knowable ways. The five things I find most often, each with its publisher and its caveat, plus why the Meta cost benchmark for subscription apps does not exist and what to measure instead.
Stop cutting onboarding steps. Measure what each one gives back.
Onboarding has two jobs: teach what the product does, and tie that value back to why they came. There is no standard first screen, only a standard first job, and it changes by vertical. The five things I find most often.
How to audit a subscription funnel from public surfaces only
Growth is an engine and the drop-off can be anywhere in it: ads, store listing, onboarding, paywall, activation. The five things I find most often, why established best practices simply are not being done, and how to read a funnel from public surfaces alone.
The paywall audit: three levers, and the five things people get wrong
The paywall is your highest-leverage surface for LTV:CAC and it runs on three levers, not one: how well it converts, where it sits relative to value, and the LTV of the plan people end up on. The five things I see missed most, each with its source.
Paywall optimization: six changes that lift conversion without touching price
Six paywall changes that lift conversion without touching price, each with a named source and a real effect size, plus the order to run them in. Framing and the default go first: cheapest to ship, and they move the plan mix.
Subscription app benchmarks: the two funnel shapes your numbers reveal
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.
Referral landing pages: referred users are worth 3x, and this flow keeps them
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.
Six paywall A/B tests to run first (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.
Meta ads targeting is dead. Creative is the targeting 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.
Subscription app pricing and free trial structure, the simple version
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.
Six growth questions founders ask, with real answers (when to charge, trials, paid ads, annual)
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.
5 lessons from two years advising high-growth subscription apps
Fintech, edtech, health. The same five patterns show up every time: product beats paid, monthly loses money, signup and paywall are the leverage, PMF is still the hard part.
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.
Wellness and education app retention is a motivation problem, not a content 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 playbook: onboarding, the first 48 hours, and the goal loop
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.
Referral programs 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.
K-factor math: why referrals won't fix high CAC
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.
Founders obsess over morning routines. The wind-down matters more
Everyone optimizes their morning and almost nobody has a post-work wind-down. Your brain keeps cycling all evening either way. Here's the 10-15 minute routine I use to close the day.
The content wall is dying, and that's good for your app
For years, B2C content apps copied Netflix and assumed more content equals more value. But a bigger library encourages browsing and quietly kills the thing that matters: starting.
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.
In growth, your tools quietly decide your velocity
Your team isn't slow because it needs better tools. It's slow because it has too many perfect ones. Fragmentation is a real cost and it never shows up on an invoice.
Conversion rate optimization for subscription apps: where to spend your time
The program that lifted conversion 25% a quarter, every quarter, came down to backlog quality and execution speed. Here are the moves in the order they pay, and the one you can start this week.
Backlog prioritization: five levels from voting to a bets portfolio (Product Foundations, part 2)
Part 2 of Product Foundations: 5 levels of backlog prioritization, from intuition and voting to grading, measuring, and a risk-mitigating bets portfolio.
Product ideation techniques for a roadmap that works (Product Foundations, part 1)
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
ICE scoring: how to prioritize a growth roadmap on impact, confidence and effort
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 for early-stage startups, part 3: measure value, not metrics
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 for early-stage startups, part 2: scope the test, then prioritize
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 for early-stage startups, part 1: growth is a process
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
Solutions are slow to test and principles are fast. Reverse-engineer the principle behind your idea with five whys, then test that.
Minimum Viable Value (MVV) is the new MVP
MVP is a contradiction: a viable product is not a minimum. What you are validating is value, and you can validate value with no product at all.
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.
Growth notes, in your inbox
Occasional writing on subscription growth, product-led strategy, and lessons from working with leading apps. No spam.