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Sub Club
United States
เข้าร่วมเมื่อ 12 พ.ค. 2021
Interviews with the experts behind the biggest apps in the App Store. Hosts David Barnard and Jacob Eiting dive deep to unlock insights, strategies, and stories that you can use to carve out your slice of the 'trillion-dollar App Store opportunity'.
Using Subscription App Benchmarks to Make Better Growth Decisions — Phil Carter, Elemental Growth
On the podcast: how to effectively use benchmarks to aid decision making, the limitations of benchmarks, and why even the best companies aren’t top quartile in every single metric.
Top Takeaways:
📏 Benchmarks are a starting point, not a roadmap
Treat benchmarks as directional indicators to uncover growth opportunities and prioritize actions, but don’t chase them blindly. They work best as tools for identifying areas to explore rather than metrics to perfect.
🏆 Focus on strengths over chasing perfection
It’s unrealistic to aim for excellence in every area. The most successful companies lean into their strengths, improve key weaknesses, and focus resources where they will make the biggest impact.
⚔️ Beware of misleading benchmarks
Not all benchmarks are helpful. Poorly sourced, overly generic, or irrelevant data can lead to wasted effort or misguided decisions. Use benchmarks that are specific to your category, geography, or growth stage.
🔍 Metrics only matter with context
Numbers on their own don’t tell the full story. A high churn rate might be fine if you acquire users cost-effectively and retain high-value customers. Metrics need to be interpreted with a deep understanding of your product and target audience.
💡 Data is powerful, but intuition seals the deal
Data highlights where to focus, but the most effective decisions come from pairing metrics with experience, intuition, and a clear understanding of your customers. This balance of analysis and instinct drives smarter, more impactful strategies.
About Phil Carter
👨💻 Growth Advisor at Elemental Growth, a consultancy dedicated to scaling consumer subscription companies through actionable benchmarks and strategic insights
👥 Phil Carter is committed on empowering consumer subscription companies to achieve sustainable growth by leveraging benchmarks, refining growth strategies, and identifying key opportunities for value creation, delivery, and capture.
💡 “Where people get in trouble with benchmarks is they try to make them the end-all. be-all right. They try to do more with them than they really should be.”
👋 LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter/
Resources:
Elemental Growth Website - www.philgcarter.com/
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] First Impression from Phil Carter.
[1:37] The Subscription Value Loop: Phil introduces his framework for driving sustainable growth through value creation, delivery, and capture, and how it applies to subscription businesses.
[5:52] Benchmarks as tools: Phil explains how benchmarks are a directional tool to guide decision-making and identify growth opportunities rather than an end-all, be-all.
[13:07] Judging good ideas: The team discusses how great execution relies on judgment and filtering good ideas to focus on what moves the business forward.
[20:53] Using the Subscription Value Loop: Phil shares how the framework acts as a diagnostic tool for spotting bottlenecks in client businesses and setting growth priorities.
[24:47] The impact of pricing and free value: Phil describes a fitness app’s challenge with over-delivering value for free, resulting in low subscription conversion rates and pricing adjustments.
[30:26] The power of subscription retention insights: Phil explains how understanding differences in retention between annual and monthly subscribers can shape pricing and product strategy.
[36:32] Interpreting benchmarks through context: The hosts discuss how benchmarks differ based on the business model, user acquisition strategy, and market dynamics.
[42:46] Paid vs. organic growth strategies: Phil underscores the risks of being overly dependent on paid ads and the value of diversifying acquisition through organic channels.
[47:18] Value capture and monetization: Phil explores strategies for optimizing conversion rates, pricing, and paywalls to increase revenue capture from free users.
[55:45] What’s next for the Subscription Value Loop Calculator: Phil shares plans for enhancing the tool with better data, new filters, and expanded benchmarks in future versions.
Subscribe to the podcast → www.subclub.co
Follow Us:
• David Barnard: drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting: jeiting
• RevenueCat: RevenueCat
• Sub Club: SubClubHQ
Top Takeaways:
📏 Benchmarks are a starting point, not a roadmap
Treat benchmarks as directional indicators to uncover growth opportunities and prioritize actions, but don’t chase them blindly. They work best as tools for identifying areas to explore rather than metrics to perfect.
🏆 Focus on strengths over chasing perfection
It’s unrealistic to aim for excellence in every area. The most successful companies lean into their strengths, improve key weaknesses, and focus resources where they will make the biggest impact.
⚔️ Beware of misleading benchmarks
Not all benchmarks are helpful. Poorly sourced, overly generic, or irrelevant data can lead to wasted effort or misguided decisions. Use benchmarks that are specific to your category, geography, or growth stage.
🔍 Metrics only matter with context
Numbers on their own don’t tell the full story. A high churn rate might be fine if you acquire users cost-effectively and retain high-value customers. Metrics need to be interpreted with a deep understanding of your product and target audience.
💡 Data is powerful, but intuition seals the deal
Data highlights where to focus, but the most effective decisions come from pairing metrics with experience, intuition, and a clear understanding of your customers. This balance of analysis and instinct drives smarter, more impactful strategies.
About Phil Carter
👨💻 Growth Advisor at Elemental Growth, a consultancy dedicated to scaling consumer subscription companies through actionable benchmarks and strategic insights
👥 Phil Carter is committed on empowering consumer subscription companies to achieve sustainable growth by leveraging benchmarks, refining growth strategies, and identifying key opportunities for value creation, delivery, and capture.
💡 “Where people get in trouble with benchmarks is they try to make them the end-all. be-all right. They try to do more with them than they really should be.”
👋 LinkedIn - www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter/
Resources:
Elemental Growth Website - www.philgcarter.com/
Episode Highlights:
[00:00] First Impression from Phil Carter.
[1:37] The Subscription Value Loop: Phil introduces his framework for driving sustainable growth through value creation, delivery, and capture, and how it applies to subscription businesses.
[5:52] Benchmarks as tools: Phil explains how benchmarks are a directional tool to guide decision-making and identify growth opportunities rather than an end-all, be-all.
[13:07] Judging good ideas: The team discusses how great execution relies on judgment and filtering good ideas to focus on what moves the business forward.
[20:53] Using the Subscription Value Loop: Phil shares how the framework acts as a diagnostic tool for spotting bottlenecks in client businesses and setting growth priorities.
[24:47] The impact of pricing and free value: Phil describes a fitness app’s challenge with over-delivering value for free, resulting in low subscription conversion rates and pricing adjustments.
[30:26] The power of subscription retention insights: Phil explains how understanding differences in retention between annual and monthly subscribers can shape pricing and product strategy.
[36:32] Interpreting benchmarks through context: The hosts discuss how benchmarks differ based on the business model, user acquisition strategy, and market dynamics.
[42:46] Paid vs. organic growth strategies: Phil underscores the risks of being overly dependent on paid ads and the value of diversifying acquisition through organic channels.
[47:18] Value capture and monetization: Phil explores strategies for optimizing conversion rates, pricing, and paywalls to increase revenue capture from free users.
[55:45] What’s next for the Subscription Value Loop Calculator: Phil shares plans for enhancing the tool with better data, new filters, and expanded benchmarks in future versions.
Subscribe to the podcast → www.subclub.co
Follow Us:
• David Barnard: drbarnard
• Jacob Eiting: jeiting
• RevenueCat: RevenueCat
• Sub Club: SubClubHQ
มุมมอง: 120
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Such an underrated podcast. Please keep up the good work guys :)
Awesome video. As an app developer myself there were so many great insights in this conversation. Especially the advice on building things and ideas is very inspiring and motivating. "The first idea isn’t really that important. What is really important is to start moving and build anything. " Huge advice right there. Oftentimes we get so caught up in making things perfect right from the start so that we miss out shipping that vital first thing..
Very nice
Great conversation! Thanks for having us.
nice one!
such a good episode, thanks!
It's impossible. You have to sell physical product to use stripe or any other payment method rather than apple's IAP or subscriptions.
Great content and super valuable! 🙏 Can I access the Maslow’s framework/chart somewhere?
Any really successful delighter inevitably strives to become just an industry standard after release. So true!
Subcultures
Congrats on your 1000 subscribers.. I clicked the button to roll you over :) Keep up the great work!
Such an underrated channel. Amazing content!
Thank you so much for this episode. Amazing insights and frameworks.
how can you even think about “ethics” when apple/good are mafia bosses taxing you 30% on top of your likely 30-40% income tax. 😂
Great stuff! Any suggestion for services that can create web2app flows for a business? As always, getting roadmap space in a big company might be a challenge?
Great podcast, I was wondering if I should go web app or mobile app, this podcast came at the right time 😊
Thanks for the podcast, but what's the irony that I can't find your guest's homepage when I search for it..."Search Ads Optimization" "Dilip".. can't find anything..
Great content ! Love to see some content related to Android for once :)
Great talk. It'd be really interesting to have an episode dedicated to creating and running subscription via PWA for mobile instead of native apps. Existing Apple tax makes it unsustainable for many businesses to use a native app. Math just doesn't work when 30% of the revenue is stripped before a company even covers expenses. So, PWA is the alternative way to go. Maybe it's better to have 30% fewer users but have more control and keep 30% of the revenue. So, it'd be really interesting to watch an episode all about creating and managing PWA on mobile.
Thanks for the great information
Man, you had one of the best marketing guys out there and you turned the show into the meta ads history lesson :)
Awesome episode. Regarding the feature request it would also be awesome to not only have a checkbox for renewal or not but also to see if this is a resubscribe, which means the user had a subscription in the past, canceled it and now resubscribed. This would help a lot to see how the actual retention is for travel apps like mine where users come back each year.
WHAT?
germans are sexy!
Best episode yet! Sebastian is an amazing builder!
Thanks for the kind words, Mike ❤
Sebastian's such an inspiration! 👏
Thank you for saying that, Jack ❤
You guys are totally awesome! Thank you, thank you , thank you!!!
One of the best interviews about app growth and marketing
Learnt something today! 💯 i should build something too
Let's go 🙌
Let’s go, love Seb!
Hi very helpful video. But my question is does this only applies for iPhones? What if someone has a droid. I have an iPhone and I’ve always run my ads from my phone. But what if I log in to my account using a Droid, will the 30% charge still be applied?
the turkish dev shops have mastered the black hat (look at the gpt apps, cleanup etc )
Was so much fun having this conversation with you
It was really great, thanks. As an app created I have new things I will think about.
Do you have the link to the whitepaper? Thanks!
Really cool interview, thank you
Whatever happen to the android store? And not Google playstore .
I have listened to 20 or so episodes on Spotify and I thought if there videos available. So good, the channel exists here as well. It is good to see your faces
Any plans to coming to India?
Congratulations Ramit it's very knowledgeable n commendable podcast Proud of you
Great point at 38:00 about learning reality and levers of change, fully agree
How do you know roas if you don’t even have reliable attribution?
The actual threshold for SKAN 4.0 on Meta is 20 conversions (post backs) to get 97% confidence. If you wanna get 100% confidence you’ll need 120+ post backs. From AppsFlyer SKAN 4.0 research.
Thanks so much super value content
Thank you for such valuable insights
Great Episode!! I strive to have a "fail" like that. And of course, I'm in the midst of a "Big App Launch". Ahhhhh....
David you are a legend. That launch was far from a fail and this talk is so useful. Stepping back from the coalface and having a debrief like this is something we should all do.
Great episode guys! When can we expect to see the 2024 PDF? Anxiously hitting refresh :) Looking forward to diving in!
You forgot "First!" 😅 We're about an hour away!
Aaron: great video. would love to chat.
Thanks for sharing our MySwimPro story, David! Awesome interview, Fares :)