Founder of Elemental Growth, independent growth advisor and angel investor for consumer subscription apps
Subversive · Aug 20Apt turned a personality and aptitude quiz into an AI career mentor, using a long conversational onboarding quiz as its main conversion funnel. The episode covers why longer quizzes converted better, how an AI chat quiz lifted conversion more than 60%, and how an app-layer startup can stay defensible against OpenAI and Anthropic.
What to take from it
Subversive · May 14Cal AI designed its calorie tracking app to be understood in a 10-second TikTok video and grew through hundreds of fitness creators, then layered paid ads and affiliates on top. The result was over $50M ARR in under two years and an acquisition by MyFitnessPal in late 2025.
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Sub Club · Apr 15Phil Carter walks through twelve AI-era tips organized by his subscription value loop (value creation, delivery and capture), covering onboarding, personalization, creative testing, tiering and credits. He backs them with client results such as Runna going from tens to 400+ creative concepts a month and a 75% LTV lift from a multi-step freemium paywall.
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Subversive · Mar 19Rik Haandrikman walks through the biggest findings of RevenueCat's 2026 State of Subscription Apps report: a winner-take-most market, AI apps that churn faster, hard paywall versus freemium tradeoffs, and onboarding as the decisive moment. The data shows the top 10% of apps grew over 300% year over year while the median grew 5%, and that 80 to 90% of trial starts happen on day zero.
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Subversive · Dec 26Allen Chen explains how Fitbod grew a strength training app from a build-for-yourself prototype to $38M in ARR with small funding rounds, built on habit loops, word of mouth, ROI-positive paid ads and now in-house LLM personalization. The result is over 100 million workouts and about 40% yearly growth while staying cash flow positive and in founder control.
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Subversive · Nov 27Preply's growth lead explains how a human tutor marketplace measures success by long-term subscriptions, matches learners to tutors, and designs onboarding with deliberate friction. The takeaway is that deliberate friction in onboarding produced the biggest conversion win he had seen, and that optimizing for subscriptions rather than funnel proxies keeps a team honest.
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Subversive · Oct 30OpenArt's CEO explains how an embarrassing one-week MVP, SEO and a pivot from image generation to video storytelling took the company from 1 million to 10 million in ARR in 2024, to over $30M in ARR. The episode covers programmatic SEO, credit-based pricing changes, which growth metrics matter, and how an app company competes with foundation model labs.
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Subversive · Sep 17Course Hero grew through a contribute-or-subscribe content loop built school by school, then Learneo aggregated focused edtech brands like QuillBot, Symbolab and CliffsNotes instead of forcing one product to go generic. QuillBot grew from about $4 million ARR in 2021 to over $60 million ARR and over 30 million monthly active users.
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Subversive · Aug 21onX's growth lead explains how a four-person horizontal growth team supports vertical apps for hunting, off-roading, backcountry and fishing, by building an experimentation system, doing user research and fixing the paywall and onboarding. Since its 2018 Series A the company has grown ARR 10x and its team more than 300%, mostly through word of mouth.
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Subversive · Aug 7Wispr Flow turned voice dictation into a zero-edit writing tool by outputting what users meant to write rather than a word-for-word transcript, then grew mostly through free influencer seeding. The result is an 81% zero edit rate, a 0.5 second send time after output, and use in over 25,000 apps, with a small growth team and a $30 million Series A.
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Subversive · Jul 10Superpower's founder explains how a $499/year health membership grew a waitlist of almost 200,000 people mostly by word of mouth, a distinct brand and viral product drops, with no paid ads yet. He also covers why launching at a $10,000 price point was a mistake and why targeting tastemakers comes before the bigger short-term markets.
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Subversive · Jun 12Runna's growth lead explains how a narrow focus on race-training runners, an in-house ambassador team, a high-volume creative flywheel, web-to-app checkout and premium pricing drove rapid growth. The result was growth from a 3-person growth team to over 20 and an acquisition by Strava.
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Subversive · May 29Gamma's cofounder explains how a bet-the-company AI launch in early 2023 led to product/market fit, viral sharing loops, and a pricing model that covers AI costs. The company hit cash flow positive three months after launching monetization and grew to 50 million registered users and $50 million in ARR.
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Subversive · May 8Headspace grew from a single meditation app into a mental health platform with coaching, therapy, psychiatry, a B2B business and an AI companion called Ebb. The episode shows how to expand a consumer product into new services while keeping brand trust, proving outcomes and moving carefully in a regulated space.
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Subversive · Apr 3Jacob Eiting walks through findings from RevenueCat's 2025 State of Subscription Apps report (75,000 apps, over $10 billion in revenue) and what they mean for retention, onboarding, monetization and AI-era competition. The useful takeaway is that retention is capped by product quality, so the biggest leverage sits in big product swings, an optimized first-session onboarding, and monetization beyond a single subscription tier.
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Subversive · Mar 5Notion's former CMO explains how a community of power users, templates and influencers helped launch Notion AI, spread the product globally and move upmarket into businesses. Notion grew 10x to more than 100 million users while about 80% of users are consumers and more than 80% of revenue comes from businesses.
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Subversive · Feb 20Canva's first subscriptions PM explains how patching retention first, then localizing prices and payment methods, cutting involuntary churn and launching Canva for Teams drove growth. Each lever matched a stage of scale: international expansion to the first billion in ARR, Teams from one to two billion, and large organizations beyond that.
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Subversive · Jan 31Tinder grew virally on campuses first, then built a layered monetization system of three subscription tiers plus in-app purchases that each lift a specific limit on matching. That system added north of $100 million in year-over-year revenue in its fastest growth years and took Tinder to significantly over $1B a year.
What to take from it
