Phil Carter: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Discounts, Paywalls... | E1204

(instrumental music plays) Oftentimes, the biggest wins come right on the heels of a failed A/B test. CACs, almost by definition, will go up over time. The average consumer subscription app is losing more than 50% of its annual subscribers in the first year and more than 50% of its monthly subscribers in the first three months. And any time you increase the number of notifications or emails you send, in the short term, it's like this sugar high. It's going to lead to a short-term pop in your metrics. But if you do that too many times, you kill the channel.

Ready to go? (instrumental music plays) Phil, I am so excited for this, dude. We were just chatting and I was like, "Shit, I wish we were recording this." Um, but thank you so much for joining me today.

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be part of the show.

That's very, very kind of you. Now, I would love to just start with some context. So tell us, (laughs) it's been a pretty, uh, diverse and interesting career, but why are you so versed to discuss the topics that we're about to discuss, diving into the granular of growth?

Sure. Well, we were talking about depth versus breadth, so I guess I'll start there. I mean, I'm someone who spent my 20s doing a few different things. I spent a few years in venture capital, investing in mostly early stage consumer companies. Then spent the last seven years being a product and growth leader, and then I just started an advising and consulting business. But the through line has been working with consumer businesses that fundamentally make people's lives better, and then specifically working with a lot of subscription business models. And so I'm sure there are plenty of other people who could speak to this topic, but I feel like I'm somebody who knows, who knows more about it than most.

We were talking before about the definition of growth. If I were to ask you, how do you define growth and growth team, what comes to mind when I say that?

Growth has become such an overloaded term in tech, right? Does growth mean product? Does it mean marketing? Does it mean zero to one? Does it mean scaling, product-market fit expansion? You know, B2B versus B2C? There, there are a lot of different dimensions to it. But to me, what's fundamentally changed over the last 15 years or so, since Facebook created what I would call the first modern growth team, is that the product itself has become the most valuable asset powering the growth of many tech companies. And I think that's particularly true for a lot of consumer products, because a lot of them don't have sales teams. And so when we talk about growth, I mean, fundamentally we're talking about, how do you accelerate your ability to get your product into the hands of more users faster and have those users understand why that value matters to them and why it will make their lives better? That's what's ultimately gonna lead to higher conversion rates, better retention, better monetization over time. But, but the way that looks is very different across different companies and products.