Phil Carter

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

Spring 2025

The Winter 2025 cohort of Consumer Subscription Growth will run from Tuesday 1/21 to Tuesday 2/11.

Winter 2025

Winter 2026

Summer 2025

Summer 2026

I’ve built a&nbsp;Subscription Value Loop Calculator&nbsp;that allows you to measure the performance of your company’s Subscription Value Loop and identify your biggest growth opportunities.&nbsp;This tool is powered by&nbsp;RevenueCat's proprietary data, with benchmarks compiled from &gt;30,000 consumer subscription apps accounting for &gt;290M subscribers and &gt;$6.7B in revenue! The tool even allows you to filter by app category and performance tier so you can compare your performance against the most relevant benchmarks for your business.

The Subscription Value Loop Calculator

In this article, I explain how companies like Duolingo, Spotify, Tinder, and Calm overcome the challenges of scaling consumer subscription businesses using the Subscription Value Loop framework and proven tactics for improving Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture.

Lenny's Newsletter Post: The Subscription Value Loop

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

Growth Advisor | ex-Faire/Quizlet/Ibotta

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

Consumer Subscription Growth

Founder

SVP Marketing & Growth

UX Design and Strategy Consultant 

Co-founder/CPO

Product Manager

Group Product Manager, Customer Lifecycle

Director of Marketing

co-founder

Perplexity

Gamma

ElevenLabs

Chess.com

Imprint

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.These businesses face several challenges:1. Overreliance on paid ads2. High subscriber churn rates3. ARPU is low and hard to grow The best subscription apps overcome these headwinds by:1. Building their businesses on a unique and enduring core value promise2. Harnessing it to drive a Subscription Value Loop that improves LTV/CAC and Payback Period through three steps:- Value Creation: Quickly connecting new users to the app’s core value promise- Value Delivery: Cost-efficiently distributing the app to users through paid and organic channels- Value Capture: Converting free users into subscribers to generate revenue that can be reinvested into the business In this course, which Lenny Rachitsky called the "new bible" for anyone building a consumer subscription app, you will learn how to harness the power of the Subscription Value Loop along with dozens of proven frameworks, strategies, and tactics from category-leading subscription apps to accelerate your own business.

Supercharge the growth of your consumer subscription business

Learn and apply the Subscription Value Loop framework

Assess your app vs. industry benchmarks to identify major growth opportunities

Improve your premium product experience to generate more value for subscribers

Leverage proven paid and organic acquisition strategies to accelerate growth

Optimize paywalls, pricing, packaging, payments, and promotions to boost revenue

Apply lessons in live cases with leaders from Gamma, Tinder, Calm and AllTrails

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.

How AI is Changing Consumer Subscription Growth

Growth advisor, investor, and former product leader at Faire, Quizlet, & Ibotta

We discuss how top consumer subscription apps drive growth through Value Creation, Value Delivery, and Value Capture.

The Subscription Value Loop framework

We introduce a benchmarking tool for identifying your biggest growth opportunities that will be shared with attendees.

Tools for measuring and improving your company's performance

We review tactics like using AI to build hyperpersonalized onboarding flows and automagical first time user experiences.

AI-Powered Value Creation Tactics

We discuss leveraging AI-powered PLG loops, investing in community, and  utilizing new AI marketing tools to reduce CAC.

AI-Powered Value Delivery Tactics

We highlight how monetization strategies are evolving to support AI costs, including pricing, packaging, and paywalls.

AI-Powered Value Capture Tactics

Top 10 Tactics for Growing Consumer Subscription Apps

We review 10 effective growth tactics from top consumer subscription apps like Duolingo, Spotify, Tinder, and Calm.

Proven tactics for accelerating the growth of your business

How to Scale Your Consumer Subscription App

We review data from >30,000 consumer subscription apps and highlight why they are easy to launch but hard to scale.

Why consumer subscription apps are hard to scale

We discuss the Subscription Value Loop as a framework for growing consumer subscription apps with real-world examples.

Learn directly from Phil Carter

Phil Carter

About Phil

Courses

Consumer Subscription Growth

Lightning Lessons

How AI is Changing Consumer Subscription Growth

Top 10 Tactics for Growing Consumer Subscription Apps

Top 10 Tactics for Growing Consumer Subscription Apps

Top 10 Tactics for Growing Consumer Subscription Apps

How to Scale Your Consumer Subscription App

Top 10 tactics for growing consumer subscription apps

Resources

The Subscription Value Loop Calculator

Lenny's Newsletter Post: The Subscription Value Loop