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 distribution

2. Overdependence on paid acquisition

3. High subscriber churn rates

4. 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 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 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 84%.

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, Duolingo, Runna, 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&A.