Sub Club by RevenueCat
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.
00:58:39 · Tanmay Jain, David Barnard
[00:58:39] S2: Yeah. I would say mine is more about my former past as a founder, which is making your price cheaper won't drive meaningful retention if people don't care about the product. Mhmm. Right? Like, sounds super obvious when you say it out loud, but you go, this price point, maybe we've maxed it out. You know, you do the typical YC thing of first we charge, you know, a $100 a month and then $204,100, and then somehow you end up charging, you know, a a couple grand. And then you see suddenly it flattens and maybe people are churning at the, you know, the the thousand dollar price point. So you go, oh, okay. They tell me there's budgetary constraints. Maybe, you know, dropping the price will mean that we're able to kind of retain people better. Maybe you retain them an extra month, but if they just don't care about your product, they're not gonna stick around. They'll be happy to walk through... You know, walk over fire or walk walk over coals to use your product even if it's super expensive. And that sounds, yeah, super obvious in hindsight. But in the moment, you can kind of get really academic about it and mess it up. [00:59:33] S0: Alright. Last question. Growth would be easier if... All my competitors gave up. Sorry.
00:59:33 · David Barnard, Jack McDermott, Jacob Eiting, Tanmay Jain
[00:59:33] S0: Alright. Last question. Growth would be easier if... All my competitors gave up. Sorry. [00:59:38] S1: I'm not supposed to be... I was gonna say if there weren't over 2,000,000 apps on the App Store. I think one one that I was gonna say is, you know, and I know that we've spent a lot of time in this too, Tanmay, is just the number of tools that are used in a modern growth stack in the right way has begun to proliferate, which which is good. Getting all of the tools to talk to each other and to kinda have true north when it comes to... Especially around attribute, you know, especially around attribution and like that's well well written about and well known about. But I think at the end of the day, like, if tools could talk as well as our voice models can talk, then we... If they could talk to each other, then then we'd... We would save a lot a lot of time. [01:00:19] S3: That that may not be as a high in the sky wish, you know, in another year, that's obviously when pigs fly. But, you know, this might be the year. We still actually do start talking to [01:00:28] S2: each I mean, my engineer was like, why can't we just curse at this? And I'm like, well, this MMP isn't... Code base isn't in cursor. And, you know, the meta ads API isn't in cursor. So sorry, dude.