Sub Club by RevenueCat
00:53:08 · David Barnard, Jacob Eiting, Jack McDermott, Tanmay Jain
[00:53:08] S0: And also the brand side. I mean, the fact that Jacob and I both recognize ElevenLabs as being like the best voices in the industry by far. [00:53:16] S3: Certainly, I'm not gonna go to AWS first. [00:53:18] S1: You know I mean? [00:53:18] S3: Like like, I've heard of the good one. I'm gonna try the good one, and then maybe we'll look at the cost or whatever. But, like, yeah, certainly, like, that that certainly is gonna give you some sort of advantage as long as it's Yeah. [00:53:28] S2: I mean, it goes back. Like, just just animator is compounding. Right? Right. Every time someone thinks about voice or speech and audio, ElevenLabs is the name that floats to mind immediately. Right? And sure, the the model providers will go and make their best effort to release something, but our mix of focus of relentlessly beating the drum and launching often and, you know, pushing the edges faster than anyone else in the market and compounding that on the earned media and compounding that with, like, you know, a smart growth model that really enables that and really empower engineering teams. All of that just stacks up so that you have this moat. And I I don't know what you call that moat. Maybe it's old school. We call that brand or... You know? [00:54:09] S3: Brand almost seems too simplistic. You know what I mean, in 2026. Yeah.
00:54:09 · Jacob Eiting, David Barnard
[00:54:09] S3: Brand almost seems too simplistic. You know what I mean, in 2026. Yeah. [00:54:13] S0: Well, I I think that's a great place to wrap up. Well, I've got three questions that I've been asking every guest now, and either both of you can answer each one or one of you can take it. But what's the most impactful experiment or change you've implemented this year? What's the biggest win you've seen this year that you think people could take a lesson from?
00:54:30 · Jack McDermott
[00:54:30] S1: I think the biggest, win that that we've had, on the app that that I lead is is really to not lose sight of the fact that, yes, AI is everywhere. And if you you spend time like us trying to evaluate benchmarks and per credit spend and, like, in tokens and and all of the... These things. When when you go to meet a consumer who's trying to think about, hey, I wanna consume a certain amount of content and audio, they're often not gonna start from the point of tokens and credits and that type of thing. So the biggest one is just being able to convey or being able to communicate in simple pricing plans and simple storylines that kind of begin to abstract away from the AI complexity, which is real. Unlike in the past with some SaaS apps, There's real cogs. There there's real cost that you need to be smart about. But that shouldn't mean that that you communicate that way out to a consumer. The biggest win that we had on our side was just we stripped out an entire pricing tier. We switched over to be able to communicate with the amount of hours that you spend to be able to play great content, and beginning to abstract away from a lot of the fine tuned details that go into an AI model, I think has just been the biggest one on our end.
00:55:46 · Tanmay Jain
[00:55:46] S2: I think for us, it's just been simplicity as well, like a version of simplicity. And that's been... That's come up in a few different ways. Working on the app that I do, we try and bring over the best of web to the mobile app. And so so often we talk about distilling it down and not just porting the whole thing over and squishing it down in... Into a mobile form factor. I think it kinda reminds me of the old days where everyone had these supplementary apps that were either really, really, like, bare bones, or they were just basically the desktop dashboard squished into, like, a tiny form factor. And we we think about how can we make it, like, super simple and pick the best of what is working on web, what's really resonating with the audience and bringing that down. And then that went through as well with our pricing, you know, the way we offer, I think, upwards of five plans. And on mobile, it just didn't make sense, you know, for a variety of reasons across Apple and Placer limitations. But even just as a mobile app, we want it to be very simple in the different pricing structures we offer. And so we offer one price. You know, we we test with that, and we test with different, you know, incentives around it. But it keeps us it keeps things very simple, and it means as well that we hold ourselves very accountable when we pick the next thing to work on.
00:56:53 · David Barnard
[00:56:53] S0: Alright. A fun one. What's your biggest fail of the year? What did you screw off? That was an incredible lesson that... To to your comment earlier, Jack, that provided a lot of information even if it didn't provide a huge win.
00:57:06 · Jack McDermott
[00:57:06] S1: First impressions count, and you need to spend a lot of time to be able to get onboarding right in the form of being optimized and being performant, which can mean a lot of things. We probably have spent too much time trying to smooth out and trying to optimize with it... Within onboarding. And ultimately, some of the things that that I would have done in hindsight is like, what's the what's the base case? Like, what what what happens if you just have a sign up form that goes directly into your zero state product? What is the incremental amount of retention or amount of engagement or amount of monetization that this flow is going to unlock when it comes to the group of consumers that you serve? Right? And so I think without that really trying to assess that scale of incrementality, you're sort of just like betting blindly compounding. Right? You're like trying to double down on something that you've already tried to double down on. And so we just overwrote... I think we over rotated a lot in that specific area because there's a lot out there. You read tons of blog posts about this quiz and this onboarding funnel. But I think if you don't compare it to a base case of like, just strip it out entirely for 10% for five days and see what's the opportunity size there. And so that was a big fail. We we probably spent too many too many cycles, too many experiments, and and ultimately just being simple, clear, and direct about who the app is for and trying to get you to that with fewer screens has proven to be the bigger one.