5 lessons from two years advising high-growth subscription apps

Two years of advising subscription apps across fintech, edtech and health, and the same five patterns show up every time: paid is getting less important and product more, monthly loses money while annual makes it up, signup and paywall are the highest-leverage surfaces, PMF is still unsolved at Series B and C, and when in doubt go back to the problem.

Fintech, edtech, health. Same five patterns, every time.

I assume all five are true until proven otherwise.

Two years of advising subscription apps. Here they are.

1. Paid is getting less important. Product is getting more important

If people love what you built, they'll talk about it. If they don't, no amount of ad spend saves you.

Paid still matters. What's changed is where the leverage sits. The organic engine every founder wants is downstream of a product people can't stop recommending, and you cannot buy your way to that. So when you're deciding whether the next hire is a performance marketer or a product person, the answer has moved.

2. Monthly subscriptions lose money. Annual makes up the difference

If your paywall isn't actively pushing annual, your unit economics probably don't work, no matter how good your channels are.

The mechanism is simple enough. You pay acquisition costs once and monthly hands the user a cancel decision every thirty days, so you're funding a customer who gets to reconsider twelve times a year. Annual absorbs the quiet stretches.

This is the one founders push back on most, usually because dropping monthly costs conversion at the paywall. It does. It's still right most of the time.

3. Signup and paywall are almost always your highest-leverage surfaces

The gap between a great signup flow and a mediocre one is often the gap between a profitable LTV:CAC and never being able to scale.

Everything upstream of those two screens is spend, and everything downstream is retention. They're where the money is actually decided, and they're also the two surfaces most teams have touched least recently, because they got built early and then everyone moved on to features.

If you only had time to fix two screens, these.

4. A lot of companies, even Series B and C, still struggle with product-market fit

The pain point isn't strong enough, isn't frequent enough, or both.

PMF problems don't disappear with funding. What funding does is let you paper over them for a while, which is worse, because a growth team gets hired to fix what is actually a fit problem and spends a year running competent experiments against a ceiling nobody named.

Treating a fit problem as a growth problem is the single most expensive mistake I see, and it's usually made by good teams.

5. When in doubt, go back to the problem

What specific need are we solving? Who does it actually resonate with? How are we solving it differently?

Lost on product strategy? Start there.

Not with another tactic. The instinct when growth stalls is to add a lever, and the lever is almost never the issue when nobody at the table can answer those three questions the same way.

The stage matters as much as the lesson

One thing that ties these together: the playbook changes predictably by stage. Pre-launch and launch, then validating your growth channels, then scaling what works.

Knowing which stage you're actually in tells you which of these five to weight right now. Lesson 4 is the whole job pre-launch and a distraction at scale. Lesson 3 is the reverse.

Why I trust these five

None of these are flashy. Not one.

They just keep showing up in account after account, whatever the category, whatever the stage. That's the only reason I trust them.

That's also why I start from them rather than arriving at them. Walking into a new engagement assuming all five are true is a faster way to be useful than treating each one as an open question, because four of them will hold and the interesting work is finding the one that doesn't.

Genuinely grateful to the founders who trusted me with decisions that mattered this much. Best part of the two years by a mile. 🙏

Common questions

What is the biggest shift in consumer growth right now?

Paid is getting less important and product more. A product people love drives the word of mouth that ad spend can't manufacture, so the leverage keeps moving toward the product itself.

What are the highest-leverage things to fix in a subscription app?

The signup flow and the paywall. In consumer products they decide the economics, and the gap between a great and a mediocre signup flow can be the difference between a profitable LTV:CAC and not being able to scale. They're also usually the least recently touched screens you own.

Does product-market fit stop being an issue after raising money?

No. Plenty of Series B and C companies still struggle with it, usually because the pain point isn't strong or frequent enough. Funding lets you paper over a fit problem for a while, which is how a growth team ends up running a year of competent experiments against a ceiling nobody named.