The Spring 2025 cohort of Consumer Subscription Growth will run from Tuesday 4/22 to Tuesday 5/13.

Spring 2025

Build and execute proven AI-powered playbooks to accelerate the growth of your subscription business.

Growth Advisor | ex-Faire/Quizlet/Ibotta

Perplexity

Gamma

ElevenLabs

Chess.com

Imprint

Phil Carter

CEO of Elemental Growth and former product leader at Faire, Quizlet, and Ibotta.

Consumer Subscription Growth

Build and execute proven AI-powered playbooks to accelerate the growth of your subscription business.

🔥 Featured in Lenny's Newsletter

Faire

Quizlet

Ibotta

Consumer subscription apps are easy to launch but hard to scale. This explains why there are hundreds of thousands of them in the Apple and Google app stores, but fewer than 50 that have ever reached $1B+ valuations, and fewer than 10 that are publicly-traded with companies with $10B+ market caps. These businesses face several fundamental challenges:1. Lack of control over distribution2. Overdependence on paid acquisition3. High subscriber churn rates4. ARPU is often low and hard to grow However, the best consumer subscription apps overcome these headwinds by doing two things:1. Building their businesses on a core value promise that provides unique and enduring value.2. Harnessing their value promise to drive a compounding Subscription Value Loop that increases LTV/CAC and accelerates the Payback Period through three steps: - Value Creation: Quickly connecting new users to the app’s core value promise and offering unique and enduring value that keeps them coming back - Value Delivery: Cost-efficiently distributing the app to users organically through word of mouth and SEO, as well as through sustainable paid acquisition - Value Capture: Converting free users into subscribers, which generates revenue that can be reinvested into the business to strengthen the rest of the loop I developed this framework after leading the product growth team at Quizlet and talking to executives at dozens of other category-leading consumer subscription apps. After I wrote about it in Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter, he said "If you’re building a consumer subscription app, this post is your new bible." I've also spoken about the framework on the 20VC podcast with Harry Stebbings, the Sub Club podcast with RevenueCat, and my own Subversive podcast with CEOs, executives, and growth leaders from some of the top consumer subscription apps in the world. I've now taught this course to hundreds of students across both Reforge and Maven, where it has consistently been among the highest-rated courses available, with a 4.7 star rating and an average NPS of over 80%. In this four-week cohort-based course, you'll learn how to apply the Subscription Value Loop framework to maximize the growth of your consumer subscription business. This includes four live 90-minute events with featured guest speakers from top subscription businesses like Gamma, Tinder, Calm, and Perplexity, as well as 20+ hours of self-paced, asynchronous course content. It also offers permanent access to templates like the Subscription Value Loop Calculator, a tool for benchmarking your company's most important growth metrics vs. other consumer subscription apps in your category, and a private Slack channel for course communications and Q&amp;A.

Supercharge the growth of your consumer subscription business

Founders and execs: Consumer subscription CEOs and product and marketing leaders who want to maximize growth for their businesses.

People managers: VPs and directors managing cross-functional teams responsible for subscriber acquisition, retention, and monetization.

Senior individual contributors (ICs): PMs, marketers, and other ICs working on growth teams at consumer subscription companies.

Who this course is for:

What you’ll get out of this course

Learn how category-leading consumer subscription apps like Netflix, Spotify, Duolingo, Tinder, AllTrails, Strava, Runna, Calm, Headspace, Gamma, and Perplexity drive compounding growth through proven tactics for maximizing Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture.

Learn and apply the Subscription Value Loop framework

Understand the most important growth metrics that drive consumer subscription businesses and compare your company's performance vs. overall industry benchmarks and peers in your category using the Subscription Value Loop Calculator, a tool built on data from &gt;75,000 other apps.

Assess the growth of your consumer subscription app vs. industry benchmarks to identify your biggest growth opportunities

Learn how to create value for subscribers by building a unique and enduring core value promise, connecting new users to this value promise as fast as possible, emphasizing premium features to convert users into subscribers, and using motivation tactics to keep them coming back.

Improve your premium product experience to create compounding long-term value for subscribers
 

Review strategies and tactics for cost-efficiently delivering your product to users and subscribers by maximizing the performance of paid marketing campaigns and driving more organic user acquisition through a combination of ASO, SEO, and viral word of mouth.

Leverage proven paid and organic strategies to drive cost-efficient user acquisition

Explore techniques like Van Westendorp, MaxDiff, and Conjoint analysis for optimizing subscription pricing and packaging, plus best practices for fine-tuning paywalls, making payments easy, and leveraging strategic discounts to maximize subscriber conversion and retention rates.

Optimize your paywall, pricing, packaging, payments, and promotions to maximize subscriber conversion and retention

This cohort of the course features case studies from top subscription apps including Gamma (with CEO Grant Lee), Tinder (with former CPO Ravi Mehta), Calm (with former Director of Growth Marketing Nick Candler), and Perplexity (with VP of Product and Growth Raman Malik),

Apply these lessons to real-world case studies with featured guests from some of the top consumer subscription apps in the world

Provide a brief description for each module as a way to sell the value of what students will be learning throughout the course.

First Module

Second Module

Third Module

Course syllabus

What people are saying

Meet your instructor

Module: The Subscription Value LoopCase Study: TinderFeatured Guest: Revi Mehta (former Tinder CPO) Learn how Tinder built a unique core value promise and used innovative Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture tactics to become the world's most popular dating app.

Tuesday, January 21st

Module: Value CreationCase Study: LadderGuest: Greg Stewart (Ladder CEO) See how Ladder became one of the world's fastest-growing fitness apps and grew subscribers &gt;500% by combining a unique group coaching product with an innovative user acquisition strategy on TikTok.

Tuesday, January 28th

Module: Value DeliveryCase Study: GrammarlyGuest: Yuriy Timen (former Grammarly Head of Marketing) Hear how Grammarly adapted its user acquisition strategies as it evolved from a student web app to a prosumer subscription product to a B2B SaaS platform selling to large teams.

Tuesday, February 4th

Module: Value CaptureCase Study: StravaGuest: Jason van der Merwe (Strava Director of Growth Engineering) Learn how Strava optimized subscription pricing, packaging, paywalls, and trial strategy to capture more value from subscribers and accelerate the growth of its business.

Tuesday, February 11th

Course schedule

This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active hands-on learning

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

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About this course

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