Subversive

Mikey Shulman is the cofounder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation platform that allows anyone to create full songs with lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation from a simple text prompt. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning hire and Head of Machine Learning at Kensho, an AI company acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University, a degree in applied physics from Columbia University, and is a lifelong hobbyist musician.Key TakeawaysWhile working together at another AI company called Kensho, Mikey and a few colleagues who also loved music would often jam after work to blow off steam. Eventually, they decided to combine their AI knowledge and their passion for music into a new startup, with the goal of using AI to help people make music.This started with the release of an open-source, text-to-audio model called Bark in April 2023, as well as subsequent product iteration on Discord, both of which helped validate the company’s vision and provide valuable customer feedback.By charging users from the very beginning, Mikey and his cofounders were able to ensure that the product they were building was valuable, and that the feedback they were receiving was from credible users who were genuinely interested in not only using Suno, but paying for it to support a viable business.After launching Suno’s web app in December 2023, the product spread virally through word of mouth. AI-generated songs proved to be the perfect viral artifact, because music naturally lends itself to riffing and remixes. This viral loop drove Suno to 2M subscribers and $300M in ARR over the course of just two years.Suno recently released v5.5, its most powerful model yet. This also included the launch of features like Voices, Custom Models, and My Taste, all of which help creators generate music that is more powerful and more personalized than ever.Suno has faced lawsuits from industry incumbents similar to previous music technology companies like Napster and Spotify. However, the company has already made progress settling these lawsuits on favorable terms, including a recent partnership with Warner Music Group to enable licensed AI models. Ultimately, Mikey doesn’t believe it’s a zero sum game, and hopes that Suno can expand the industry by democratizing music creation for the masses.Mikey ShulmanWebsite: https://suno.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeyshulman/X: https://x.com/mikeyshulmanPhil CarterWebsite: philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Francesco Polizzi is the former Head of Core Experience at Discord, where he led a complete overhaul of the company’s mobile apps. He has also held roles as the Head of Product at both Outschool and Photomath (acquired by Google in 2023), and served as a PM at Dropbox and a growth engineer at Mozilla earlier in his career. Francesco recently left his role as a product executive to start his own stealth AI startup.Key TakeawaysWhen Francesco first joined Discord in late 2021, the company had a thriving community of avid gamers, but it was struggling to expand to a broader, more mainstream audience because new users tended to find the product confusing.After product-driven growth efforts began to demonstrate diminishing returns, Francesco and his team realized they needed to more fundamentally redesign the company’s mobile apps to expand their appeal and make them more accessible to new users who felt overwhelmed by Discord’s complexity.For inspiration, Francesco and his team downloaded every single messaging app they could find, compiled best practices, and cross-referenced these ideas vs. feedback from Discord users to identify high-potential opportunities.This led to a wholesale redesign of Discord’s iPhone and Android apps, including:A voice messaging feature that increased overall message volumeA username change that increased the success rate of outbound friend requests by making it easier to find a friend by their usernameAn update to the profile tab that increased customization, paving the way for additional monetization opportunities through Discord’s Nitro and Nitro Basic premium subscription plans, as well as ad hoc purchasesUltimately, these changes simplified Discord’s mobile apps, improved the new user experience, fixed a couple important bugs, and accelerated revenue growthFrancesco Polizzi:Website: https://discord.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescostl/X: https://x.com/FrancescostlPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/Substack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Jack McDermott is a growth lead at ElevenLabs, where he leads growth for its mobile products — including the ElevenLabs app and ElevenReader, a consumer app built on top of the company’s cutting-edge voice AI platform. Prior to ElevenLabs, he led growth teams at Chegg, where he focused on the company’s skills growth and product during a period of rapid change as AI began reshaping the education category. He started his career in growth at Panorama Education (YC’13). Jack has developed a strong perspective on building and scaling AI-native products, particularly at the intersection of core product, growth, and monetization.Key TakeawaysAfter being founded in April 2022 and launched in January 2023, ElevenLabs has rapidly grown into one of the largest and most successful AI companies in the world with a Voice AI platform that has already been widely adopted by individuals and companies around the world.While the company’s core business is an AI platform, it has started to launch vertical apps on top of this foundation, including the ElevenLabs app for creators who want to use ElevenLabs APIs to generate content and the ElevenReader app for consumers who want to consume audio content with custom voices.After the company launched ElevenReader in June 2024, Jack and his team initially found traction through bottoms-up marketing tactics on platforms like Reddit and Discord that were great for attracting enthusiastic early adopters. Once the company got traction, it turned to more scalable channels like TikTok, where it gained rapid adoption among readers in BookTok communities.Partnerships have also played a key role in ElevenReader’s growth story. The company did a massive partnership with Melania Trump tied to her new memoir called “Melania,” using ElevenLabs APIs to translate the book into dozens of languages that made it more accessible around the globe.More recently, Jack and his team have been experimenting with different approaches to subscription pricing and packaging across both the ElevenLabs and ElevenReader apps. Importantly, they have learned that the optimal monetization strategies look very different across these two products, as well as for users making purchase decisions in their native mobile apps vs. on the web.Jack McDermott:Website: https://elevenreader.io/Blog: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/authors/jack-mcdermottLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackrmcdermott/X: https://x.com/JackmcPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/Substack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Rik Haandrikman is the VP of Growth at RevenueCat, the world’s largest SaaS platform for subscription apps that need help powering in-app purchases, managing customer data, and growing revenue. Prior to joining RevenueCat in 2022, Rik held growth leadership roles at Bitrise and Divitel, and also founded his own eCommerce company called Gimmerce that leveraged printing technology to allow for rapid, cheap, and scalable personalization of products to target niche groups of consumers.Key TakewaysSubscription apps are becoming a "winner-take-most market,” with the top 10% of apps growing >300% YoY vs. the median only growing 5% YoY.AI has driven a 7x increase in new app launches from 2022 - 2026, but apps launched before 2020 still generate 69% of all revenue.AI apps generate 41% more revenue per payer but churn 30% faster, highlighting that many of these apps are still figuring out retention.80-90% of trial starts and half of conversions now happen on Day 0, which means that new user onboarding flows are more important than ever.Hard paywalls convert 5x better vs. freemium (10.7% vs. 2.1% install to paid), but after one year, retention rates look nearly identical.North America continues to be king, with metrics like D60 RPI and Y1 RLTV ranging from 2.5 - 5x higher vs. the worst-performing regions.Rik Haandrikman:RevenueCat Website: https://www.revenuecat.com2026 SOSA Report: https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhaandrikman/X: https://x.com/HHaandrPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/Substack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Casey Winters is the cofounder and CEO of SuperMe, an AI-native company that is designed to be the professional network for the AI era by connecting users with AI avatars of professional thought leaders. He is also one of the most respected and influential growth leaders in technology, having previously held product and growth leadership roles at Eventbrite, Pinterest, and GrubHub, as well as advised dozens of high-growth tech companies like AirBnB, Canva, and Faire. On the side, Casey is also a teacher, content contributor, and guest speaker for Reforge, and an investor as part of Harry Stebbings’ 20Growth fund.Key TakeawaysAfter starting his career at Apartments.com in 2005, Casey had immediate success but was told he was an odd “product and marketing hybrid” who needed to pick a lane. But Casey wanted to keep working at the intersection of product and marketing, so he decided to join GrubHub as their first growth hire in 2008.Over the last two decades, Casey helped define the emerging growth profession, holding product and growth leadership roles at Pinterest and Eventbrite, serving as a Growth Advisor in Residence at Greylock, and advising category-leading tech companies like AirBnB, Reddit, Thumbtack, Canva, Figma, and Faire.In April 2024, Casey teamed up with former Pinterest colleague Ludo Antonov to cofound SuperMe, which is building the professional network for the AI era with a platform that ingests blog posts, podcasts, and other content from top experts to build AI avatars capable of providing highly specialized knowledge and expertise.Casey and Ludo have built SuperMe as an AI native startup from the beginning. This means everyone they hire is expected to operate like an engineer, with the ability to contribute directly to the codebase. It has also had profound implications on their product development process, which looks significantly different than a traditional SaaS startup given how rapidly LLMs are evolving.AI is not only changing how technology products are built but how they grow. One of the growth loops Casey is most excited about is embedding SuperMe into other AI products, so that its AI avatars can automatically be called as “tools” when users have questions that these avatars are uniquely positioned to answer.SuperMe’s competitive advantage vs. ChatGPT and Claude is based on quality over quantity. By curating knowledge from the top 1% of experts in each field, and continuously improving responses based on feedback loops between its AI avatars and users, Casey believes that SuperMe can deliver significantly better results vs. horizontal LLMs that base their responses on lower quality inputs.Casey WintersWebsite: https://www.superme.ai/Blog: https://www.caseyaccidental.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caseywinters/X: https://x.com/onecaseman?lang=enPhil CarterWebsite: www.philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Sameer Ahuja is President of GameChanger, which he originally joined as VP of Finance and Analytics in 2017 before being promoted multiple times. He is also an SVP of Dick’s Sporting Goods, which acquired GameChanger in 2016. Prior to joining GameChanger, Sameer founded a boutique hedge fund called Dera Capital Advisors that he ran for six years. He is also a venture advisor for Marquee Ventures.Key Takeaways:GameChanger’s initial core product was built around scorekeeping for youth baseball and softball teams. They built strong product/market fit in this niche and established powerful network effects between coaches, parents, athletes and fans.Once the company had established these network effects, they naturally grew through word of mouth both within and across youth sports teams. Coaches loved GameChanger for all of its team management features, and parents and fans enjoyed following the scores of their teams.When the COVID pandemic hit in 2020, Sameer and his team recognized that teams were desperate for connection. In one pivotal week, they decided to fast track the development of livestreaming video as a way to ensure family members and other fans were able to stay even more connected with their teams.As livestreaming video was being developed, one of GameChanger’s interns identified an opportunity to automatically generate highlight clips from video footage captured during games. The company launched both features in less than a year, and they’ve become a crucial part of the company’s success.In 2026, GameChanger launched its most advanced product to date with expanded features for baseball and softball, including livestreaming video in 1080 pixel resolution. Going forward, the company is also excited to continue its expansion into other sports like basketball, soccer, and flag football as part of its mission to become the “home of youth sports.”Sameer Ahuja:Website: https://gc.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sameerahuja/Phil Carter:Website: philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Connor Zwick is the cofounder and CEO of Speak, a billion dollar app that is reinventing digital language learning by getting users into real conversations with AI-powered voices. Connor started Speak in 2016 with cofounder Andrew Hsu. Prior to founding Speak, Connor built his first startup called Flashcards+ when he was still in high school and eventually sold it to Chegg. He then went to Harvard, but dropped out to become a Thiel Fellow and found another startup called Coco Controller.Key Takeaways:After dropping out of Harvard to pursue a Thiel Fellowship, Connor became very interested in deep learning along with another Thiel fellow named Andrew Hsu.After Connor and Andrew developed a speech recognition model that outperformed all of the existing models at the time, they realized that AI had the potential to revolutionize language learning, which led them to cofound Speak.From the beginning, Connor and Andrew believed there was a major gap in the language learning market around immersive language learning. Unlike Duolingo and Rosetta Stone, which focus on helping people learn vocabulary, Speak went all in on AI-powered voice right away to help students learn by speaking.For the first four years, Speak exclusively focused on English language learning in South Korea. This is a ruthlessly competitive market, with South Koreans spending 1% of GDP learning English, but this forced Speak to tune its model to be great at one language before the company decided it was ready to expand.Since international expansion was part of Speak’s DNA from day one, it allowed the company to expand quickly to other markets once it was ready to grow beyond South Korea. Today, Speak helps people around the world learn six languages, including English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Based on this growth, the company recently raised a Series C at a $1B valuation.Connor Zwick:Website: https://www.speak.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/connorzwick/X: https://x.com/connorzwickPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarter

Paul Warren is the founder and CEO of Margins, a beautifully-designed reading app that recently won Apple’s App of the Day award and that reached hundreds of thousands of active readers less than a year after it launched. He is a self-described “extreme reader” who reads hundreds of books every year. Prior to Margins, Paul held CTO and Head of Software roles at multiple companies, including Daylight Computer Company, Darvis, and an undisclosed stealth crypto startup. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in computer science from Stanford University.Key Takeaways:As a self-described “extreme reader” who reads hundreds of books per year, Paul founded Margins in 2023 because he wanted a single integrated platform for discovering new books, tracking all of his reading activity, and keeping up with what his friends were reading.Before spending any time on app development, Paul invested nearly a year into building their own proprietary book database, which has become a critical competitive advantage.Unlike other reading apps like Goodreads that can feel overly transactional, Paul and his team are obsessed over craft, which has led to delightful features like the ability to search for a book based on “vibes,” as well as lots of fun easter eggs.In late 2024, just before the holidays, Paul hired a few microinfluencers to create TikTok content that quickly went viral on BookTok. Then in 2025, the same thing organically happened on X. Margins also recently won Apple’s App of the Day award in December 2025. These spikes have contributed to viral word of mouth, helping to organically propel the company to hundreds of thousands of users just a year after launching.While Margins doesn’t yet have any premium features, it has managed to convert many enthusiastic subscribers by appealing to their love of reading and asking them to support the app. That being said, Paul and his team have lots of plans to supercharge Margins’ premium product experience over the next year to further accelerate subscriber growth.Paul Warren:Website: https://margins.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulandrewwarren/X: https://x.com/paulwarren_Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Weber Wong is the founder and CEO of FLORA, an AI-powered workspace designed to help creative professionals ideate, iterate, and scale their ideas faster than ever before. Prior to founding FLORA, Weber had a diverse range of professional experiences that included stints as an investment banker, a geopolitical researcher, a venture capitalist, and an artist.Key Takeaways:After stints as an investment banker, a geopolitical researcher, a venture capitalist, and an artist, Weber went to NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) where he studied how to use technology for creative innovation.Weber observed that tools for creatives were outdated, and that AI had created the opportunity to reinvent the creative process for marketers, product designers, architects, and other creative professionals. And because Weber is an artist designing for his own needs, it’s given him a very clear vision for FLORA’s product.FLORA’s core innovation has been moving beyond single LLM prompts to an infinite workspace that integrates cutting-edge AI models across text, images, and video, allowing creative professionals to continuously iterate on their ideas.In two years, FLORA has gained adoption from some of the best creative teams in the world, including industry leaders like Netflix, Nike, Levi’s, WPP, and AKQA. Not only are these companies customers, they are also design partners whose feedback has played a critical role in shaping FLORA’s product vision and strategy.Weber expects AI to shift creative tools from a bottom-up paradigm that requires users to manually design creative assets piece by piece, to a far more efficient AI-native paradigm that is top-down, where creatives can start with a rough concept and then iteratively refine it until it’s pixel-perfect.Weber Wong:Website: https://www.florafauna.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/weberwong/X: https://x.com/weberwongwongPhil Carter:Website: philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Allen Chen is the cofounder and CEO of Fitbod, a strength training app launched in 2015 that has since scaled to $38M in ARR. Prior to Fitbod, Allen started his career as a software engineer building high frequency commodities trading platforms. He holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from UCLA and a partially completed master's degree in mathematics and finance from Columbia University.Key Takeaways:Fitbod was first founded in 2015, after Allen Chen left his lucrative finance career to team up with his former college friend, Jesse Venticinque, to build the strength training app they both wanted for their own workouts.For years, Allen and Jesse kept Fitbod lean and built the product to meet their own needs, choosing to bootstrap the company and focus on building a highly retentive core product before raising outside capital to accelerate growth.Inspired by Nir Eyal's "Hooked" framework, Allen and Jesse built habit loops into Fitbod around natural muscle recovery cycles that bolstered subscriber retention, as well as extrinsic triggers to bring subscribers back to the app more often.Fitbod has grown subscribers exponentially through two primary growth loops: organic word of mouth amplified by viral hooks built into the product experience, and performance marketing through Meta and other paid user acquisition channels, which the company optimizes based on LTV/CAC and payback period.Fitbod is already using AI to hyperpersonalize workouts for its many subscribers, and as AI continues to evolve, Allen expects it to unlock all sorts of additional applications within the fitness category that will further benefit human health.Allen Chen:Website: https://fitbod.me/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allen-chen-17a7748/Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Kenneth Schlenker is founder and CEO of Opal, which has rapidly grown into the world's #1 screen time app since launching in 2020, reaching $10M in ARR with a team of just 11 employees. After starting his career in Product Marketing at Google, Kenneth has spent more than a decade founding multiple companies, including a private marketplace for private art sales called ArtList, as well as a venture studio called Stellar Base that incubated multiple successful startups. Key Takeaways: After spending more than a decade as a serial entrepreneur, Kenneth founded Opal in 2020 with the mission to "align technology with human wellbeing" because he believed it was more important than ever for people to track their screen time and understand the role it plays in their lives.In 2022, when Apple launched its Screen Time API, Opal seized the first mover advantage and used this opportunity to reinvent screen time tracking, propelling itself to $10M in revenue by 2025 despite keeping its team very lean.From early on, Opal was laser focused on D8 ROAS as its primary growth metric, because Kenneth wanted to ensure the company could convince enough subscribers to pay for its product that they could grow reliably through paid ads.More recently, Opal has invested in gamification to boost motivaion and retention, as well as word of mouth and incentivized referral programs to help supplement paid user acquisition with organic growth.AI is making social networks and games even more addictive, which makes Opal even more important than before. Longer-term, Kenneth plans to expand beyond screen time tracking to other use cases that align technology with human health and happiness, and to also market the product to companies, schools, and insurance companies in addition to individuals. Kenneth Schlenker: Website: https://www.opal.so/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kennethschlenker/ X: https://x.com/kschlenker Phil Carter: Website: https://www.philgcarter.com Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter X: https://x.com/philgcarter Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io 

Simon Mizzi is currently the VP of Product Growth at Preply, the world’s largest online marketplace for connecting language learners with human tutors. Since joining Preply as a Director of Product in 2021, Simon has been promoted twice from Director to Senior Director to VP. Prior to Preply, Simon spent eight years as a PM and then Director of Product at Agoda, which is an online travel agency that specializes in booking accommodations, flights, and activities, with a strong focus on the Asian market.Key Takeaways:Preply has built the world’s largest language learning marketplace, with an online platform that connects over 100,000 experienced tutors teaching dozens of different languages to millions of learners across the globe.Preply’s human-powered marketplace differentiates it from language learning apps like Duolingo and Babbel that are 100% digital. While scaling to 100,000+ tutors has been difficult, it has also helped Preply boost learner motivation, increase subscriber retention, and ultimately improve learning outcomes.Preply has run hundreds of experiments to optimize its learner onboarding flow, improve its tutor matching algorithm, and accelerate time to value. While these experiments have improved registration, activation, and trial lesson start rates, ultimately Preply focuses on subscriber conversion and retention as the metrics that matter most, because subscriptions are what drive value for the business.In parallel, Preply has invested heavily in maintaining tutor quality as it scales the supply side of its business. This includes surfacing metadata about tutors that build confidence for new learners, as well as imposing policies that encourage tutors to maximize their availability so that learners have a positive experience.While Simon believes language learning is an inherently human activity that will never be fully replaced by technology, he is excited about the potential for AI to boost tutor productivity and hyperpersonalize the language learning experience.Simon Mizzi:Website: https://preply.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/simon-mizzi/details/experience/Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

After starting his career in derivatives trading, Nick Candler pivoted into user acquisition before joining Calm to serve as Director of Growth Marketing during their hypergrowth period from 2019 - 2022. After leaving Calm, Nick started his own performance marketing agency called 10 Scale, and is now a consultant, coach, and advisor supporting products that make a positive social impact. Nick has supported hundreds of millions of dollars in media spend on tech products and political campaigns.Key Takeaways:Nick joined Calm in 2019 at an exciting time when the company was on the cutting edge of optimizing both how to monetize a digital product through subscriptions and how to distribute it through performance marketing channels.The launch of Sleep Stories was a critical inflection point for Calm, both because sleep proved to be a more acute pain point vs. meditation and because paid social channels like Instagram proved to be perfect for acquiring users who were up late at night doomscrolling because they were struggling with insomnia.Calm was one of the first companies to get sophisticated about using “social listening” techniques to incorporate trending memes from social media into their ad creatives to improve the performance of paid user acquisition campaigns.Not only was Nick’s performance marketing team at Calm extremely creative, but they also took a highly iterative and analytical approach to optimizing campaigns while using metrics like LTV/CAC and payback period to measure performance.Ultimately, Nick’s team ran 5,500 ads while he was at Calm that converted an incremental 1.2 million subscribers. Calm’s paid user acquisition efforts were also complemented by Calm’s organic growth engine, which fueled additional and highly cost-efficient user acquisition and subscriber conversion.Nick Candler:Calm Website: https://www.calm.com/10 Scale Website: https://10scale.co/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicolascandler/Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Coco Mao is the cofounder and CEO of OpenArt, an AI-powered creative platform that enables anyone to generate images and videos from simple text prompts. Since launching OpenArt in 2022, Coco has led the company through rapid growth, expanding from generative art tools to its new “One-Click Story” video feature and scaling revenue to over $30M in ARR. Prior to OpenArt, Coco spent several years at Google, where she worked on search as well as experimental products like Tangi, which focused on short-form creative content. She holds a degree in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University.Key Takeaways:After spending seven years at Google, including stints working on search and short-form video content, Coco left in 2022 with her cofounder, John Qiao, to cofound OpenArt as an AI platform for visual content creation.One of the keys to OpenArt’s initial success was building a community where content creators could not only see what images other people were generating, but the specific prompts they were using to create these images.In addition to word of mouth, OpenArt leaned into programmatic SEO as an early growth strategy by creating templatized pages that ranked for longtail keywords like “3D Art Generator” or “D&D Image Generator” that drove thousands of visits.OpenArt eventually pivoted from image generation to video generation, which required changes to the company’s core product offering, go to market strategy, and subscription pricing and packaging model.The center of OpenArt continues to be its highly-engaged creator community. While AI may soon surpass human intelligence, Coco believes that humans will always have a desire to create, and OpenArt’s mission is to use technology to help people all over the world express themselves through visual stories.Coco Mao:Website: https://openart.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kechunmao/X: https://x.com/openart_aiPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Dmitry Gurski is the cofounder and CEO of Flo, a leading women’s health platform widely known for its period tracking and broader reproductive health insights. Dmitry cofounded Flo in 2015 and has led the company through major milestones including 100M+ downloads, a $200M Series C funding round, and a $1B+ valuation. Prior to Flo, he founded several ventures in publishing and health tech, drawing on a background in pharmaceutical chemistry and executive education from Stanford.Key Takeaways:Flo made two contrarian bets early on that helped it to outcompete hundreds of other women’s health apps. First, it offered period tracking for free, which became a powerful driver of organic user acquisition, and second, it built features for different use cases like conception, pregnancy, and perimenopause into a single super app, resulting in category-leading long-term retention rates.Strong retention rates allowed Flo to compound its active user growth over time. More active users has led to increased organic growth through word of mouth, which has in turn led to more active users, creating an efficient growth engine.As Flo scaled, it also developed a rigorous experimentation culture. The app now runs thousands of experiments per year with 200 to 300 active experiments running at any give time. This has had a tremendous impact on its growth, and particularly on metrics like trial start and conversion rates that drive monetization.As its revenue growth accelerated, Flo reinvested more and more money into product innovation, leading to even more rapid growth. Today, Flo is the #1 health app in the world, with 450 million installs, 80 million MAUs, and $300M in ARR.After launching “Flo for Partners” in 2023, the company has already acquired >2M male users who are actively using Flo in Partner Mode, and the company believes it can very realistically grow to >10M partners over the next few years.Dmitry Gurski:Website: https://flo.health/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dmitrygurski/X: https://x.com/flotrackerPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Brent Zajaczkowski is the VP of Product Growth at Noom, one of the world’s largest preventive health platforms that is widely credited with pioneering a novel psychology-based approach to weight loss. Brent joined Noom in 2020 as a Senior PM, and has since been promoted multiple times. Prior to Noom, Brent spent 8+ years in product management and software engineering at TripAdvisor and Wyzant. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering from Brown University.Key Takeaways:After being founded in 2008, Noom has become one of the largest online weight loss platforms in the world, and is widely credited with pioneering a novel, psychology-based approach to weight loss built on cognitive behavioral therapy.Noom is famous for its “longboarding flow,” which asks users to answer dozens of questions to help personalize their weight loss plan and product experience. While this approach is unconventional, it works because Noom’s users have often tried many other ways to lose weight unsuccessfully, which means they need to be convinced that Noom will work where other solutions have failed.Many of Noom’s most successful A/B tests have tapped into underlying user psychology to boost motivation. These include asking users to pay for a trial so they really commit to their weight loss program, and building a “re-onboarding” flow to encourage users who have fallen off the wagon to try again.The proliferation of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy threatened Noom’s core business, but the company has adapted by investing in several PMF expansion bets, including offering GLP-1s through its own platform.Recently, Noom built an AI companion called “Welli” that helps users navigate its increasingly complex service offering and receive a personalized experience, which has helped to increase user engagement and retention rates.Brent Zajaczkowski:Website: https://www.noom.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brent-zajaczkowski/Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Andrew Grauer is the CEO of Learneo, a holding company valued at $3.6 billion that owns multiple learning and productivity businesses including Course Hero, QuillBot, CliffsNotes, Scribbr, LitCharts, LanguageTool, and Symbolab. After cofounding Course Hero in 2006 when he was a sophomore at Cornell, Andrew spent 15 years growing it into one of the world’s largest EdTech businesses before folding it into Learneo. Over the last few years since Learneo acquired QuillBot, Andrew has been focused on transforming that product into a multimodal generative AI platform for students and professionals.Key Takeaways:Andrew started Course Hero in 2006 when he was a sophomore at Cornell because he wanted a platform that could help student like him find and study academic materials that were highly course-specific.Course Hero developed an elegant model where students could access content either by uploading their own course materials, which made the entire platform more valuable, or by paying for a subscription, which generated revenue.As more students contributed content to Course Hero, the platform became more valuable for other students, leading to more sign ups and even more content. The company accelerated this core growth loop by investing in on-campus marketing, search engine optimization, and other user acquisition channels.From 2020 and 2023, Course Hero formed a parent company called Learneo and expanded into math, literature, and writing through its acquisitions of Symbolab, LitCharts, CliffNotes, QuillBot, Scribbr, and Language Tool. This strategy allowed Learneo to expand horizontally while keeping each of its portfolio companies narrowly focused on building great products within their respective verticals.Now, as generative AI unlocks new opportunities for learning and productivity, Learneo is focused on leveraging its existing assets and capabilities to build new multimodal creation tools, starting in the writing space with QuillBot.Andrew Grauer:Website: https://www.learneo.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrewtategrauer/X: https://x.com/atgrauerPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

David Futoran is cofounder and CEO of Honeydew, a skin health platform called Honeydew that helps people struggling with acne and other skin conditions get effective treatments and expert guidance from licensed dermatologists. Prior to founding Honeydew in 2022, David was the Head of Product and Growth at Somatix, an AI-powered remote monitoring service that uses a wearable device to help senior citizens live longer and more independent lives. He holds degrees in Biology and Healthcare Management from the University of Pennsylvania, where he also wrote a masters course and served as President of the Wharton Undergraduate Healthcare Club.Key Takeaways:David’s personal decade-long struggle with severe cystic acne and the difficulties he faced getting access to effective care inspired him to partner with a nationally renowned dermatologist named Dr. Joel Spitz to cofound Honeydew.Unlike other telederm startups that sell commoditized topical treatments for mild acne cases, Honeydew is laser-focused on democratizing access to Accutane to treat patients with moderate to severe acne who have the most acute need.After launching in New York, Honeydew overcame multiple operational and regulatory hurdles to expand nationally, and is now licensed across all 50 states.This scale has also allowed Honeydew to lock in exclusive supplier partnerships that already made it the lowest-cost provider of Accutane in the United States.While Honeydew’s best-performing acquisition channel has been Google given the company’s ability to target specific high-intent search queries related to acne treatment, they’ve also had more recent success with paid ads on Meta and Reddit and with UGC content generated by microinfluencers on TikTok.Looking forward, Honeydew is excited to go beyond acute acne treatment to offer lifetime skincare, expand to additional skin conditions like eczema and psoriasis, and use AI to improve diagnostics, streamline support, and cut operational costs.David Futoran:Website: https://www.honeydewcare.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-futoran/X: https://x.com/davidfutoranPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Brandon Gador is the Product Growth Lead at onX, where he has spent the last 2+ years helping to scale and evolve the company’s growth team to support vertical-specific apps across hunting, fishing, offroading, and backcountry. Prior to onX, Brandon spent 10+ years in product roles at multiple FinTech businesses including Gusto, Lending Club, and Intuit. He is an avid hunter and outdoor enthusiast and a proud (though misguided) Green Bay Packers fan.Key Takeaways:Since raising its $20M Series A in 2018, onX has grown ARR >10x, expanded its team >300%, and diversified its product offering beyond hunting with additional apps for offroading, backcountry, and fishing.onX’s growth has largely been driven through organic word of mouth among its highly passionate user base, which the company has amplified through partnerships with online influencers and ambassadors in the outdoor space.As the company has scaled, onX’s growth team focused first on accelerating its experimentation velocity and then on fine-tuning strategy to increase its A/B test hit rate and impact per experiment, all of which has driven compounding growth.While supporting four vertical-specific apps creates additional challenges, it has allowed onX to better tailor its UX specifically for hunters, offroaders, backcountry enthusiasts, and fishermen, all of whom have different feature needs.While AllTrails and onX are often compared to one another, they target different customers with different strategies - AllTrails has built a freemium experience for casual hikers with an SEO-driven growth strategy, whereas onX is focused on a more passionate and sophisticated group of outdoor enthusiasts that relies on word of mouth to drive growth and a hard paywall to maximize monetization.Brandon Gador:Website: https://www.onxmaps.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandongador/X: https://x.com/brandongadorPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Tanay Kothari is the cofounder and CEO of Wispr, the company behind an AI-powered voice dictation app called Flow. Prior to starting Wispr in 2021, Tanay has been a serial entrepreneur for 16 years since he taught himself how to code as a child. He has founded multiple companies, many of them focused on the next generation of personal computing after Tanay was inspired by the character J.A.R.V.I.S. in the movie Iron Man. He has also held product and engineering roles at Cerebra Technologies and Microsoft and served as a Computer Science teaching assistant at Stanford University.Key Takeaways:Tanay Kothari and Sahaj Garg cofounded Wispr in 2021 with the vision of using a native voice interface to power the next generation of personal computing. Since then, the company iterated through seven other products before ultimately finding strong product/market fit with an AI-powered voice dictation app called Flow.The biggest thing Wispr Flow has done to differentiate its product vs. other voice dictation tools is tackle the upfront technical challenges that allow their product to work horizontally across any other single application. This year, Wispr Flow has been used successfully across over 25,000 different apps and websites.Unlike other voice dictation tools that transcribe what a user speaks verbatim, Wispr Flow waits until a user has finished talking and then transcribes a polished version based on what the user would want if they were writing. It uses context awareness to understand what type of message the user is writing (email, text message, etc.) and then makes formatting decisions based on that context.Two KPIs that Wispr Flow uses to measure product/market fit are zero edit rate and average time to send after completing a message. Wispr Flow’s zero edit rate is currently 81% and its average time to send is half a second, both of which are best-in-class vs. other voice dictation apps (including Apple and Google).Wispr Flow has early adopters across a broad range of users, including founders and business leaders, engineers, creative influencers, and senior citizens. Its horizontal use case and simple and intuitive interface have also driven viral word of mouth, allowing the company to rapidly expand across international borders.Tanay Kothari:Website: https://wisprflow.ai/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tankots/X: https://x.com/tankotsPhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Albert Cheng is the Chief Growth Officer of Chess.com. Prior to joining Chess.com a year ago, Albert served as the Head of Product Growth and Monetization at both Duolingo and Grammarly, two of the world’s most successful consumer subscription businesses. Earlier in his career, Albert also held product and engineering roles at YouTube and SoFi, as well as a couple smaller startups. Outside of work, he is an avid chess player and diehard San Francisco 49ers fan.Key Takeaways:Chess.com was founded in 2005 after Erik Allebest and Jay Severson acquired the domain for $55,000. The company now has >90% market share of the online chess market, with 200 million registered users, 40 to 50 million MAUs, 10 million DAUs, 1.5 million subscribers, and north of 20 million games played everyday.For years, Chess.com grew slowly but steadily by investing in its core product experience and underlying infrastructure to provide the best possible gameplay experience for users. This attention to detail was the foundation for its success.Then in 2020, the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and the release of a massive hit TV show called The Queen’s Gambit led to a chess boom that drove a quadrupling in Chess.com’s daily registrations.Chess.com has grown almost 100% organically driven by strong SEO and ASO performance thanks to its domain, as well as a powerful word of mouth flywheel supported by online tournaments, partnerships, and strong relationships with celebrity chess players like Magnus Carlsen and Gukesh Dommaraju.Going forward, the company is focused on instilling a product-led growth culture rooted in high-velocity, hypothesis-driven experimentation to continuously improve key metrics like user retention and subscriber conversion, which it hopes will drive compounding long-term revenue growth.Albert Cheng:Website: https://www.chess.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertcheng1/X: https://x.com/albertc248Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Max Marchione is the cofounder and President of Superpower, a startup that is reinventing digital health by offering patients a comprehensive panel of 100+ labs, an online panel that centralizes all of their health data in one place, and access to world-class longevity clinicians to help them lead longer and better lives. Prior to Superpower, Max has spent the last five years as an investor and serial entrepreneur as the founder of Next Chapter, Ultraviolet Ventures, and Fractal Capital.Key Takeaways:After years of struggling with chronic health issues, Max was inspired to cofound Superpower to help democratize access to the world’ best concierge medicine.Superpower launched with a manifesto highlighting the brokenness of the current healthcare system and quickly went viral, building a waitlist of hundreds of thousands of people looking for a better way to manage their health.The company now offers a $499/year subscription that gives members biannual labs to test 100+ blood biomarkers, 24/7 access to concierge medicine through a dedicated health team, and the ability to purchase diagnostic tests, supplements, and other medical products and services through an online marketplace.Similar to models like CostCo and Amazon Prime, Superpower ultimately hopes to make healthcare more convenient and less expensive by bundling a comprehensive set of medical products and services into a single membership.Eventually, Max expects that AI will surpass human doctors, unlocking profound new possibilities for diagnosing and treating medical conditions that will make healthcare significantly better, faster, and cheaper than it is today.Max Marchione:Website: https://superpower.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maxmarchione/X: https://x.com/maxmarchionePhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarter/X: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Olivier Lemarié is the VP of Growth at Photoroom, one of the world’s largest and most popular photo editing apps. Olivier joined Photoroom in 2020 as the company’s second employee and helped it scale to >$50M in ARR in less than 3 years. Prior to Photoroom, Olivier held sales and marketing roles at Google, Wooga, and Molotov TV. He is also an experienced growth advisor who helps mobile app startups with user acquisition, product-led growth, monetization, hiring, and culture.Key Takeaways:Photoroom was founded in 2019 and launched publicly in 2020 with a focus on using powerful photo editing software to help creators and entrepreneurs market and sell their products online.The key to Photoroom’s differentiation vs. other photo editing apps comes down to their superior technology, which allows them to equip online sellers with photo editing tools that are faster and more accurate than anyone else.In early 2023, Photoroom launched an AI-powered feature that allowed its users to remove and replace photo backgrounds faster and better than ever before. This product launch became an instant hit within Photoroom’s creator community, which led to rapid organic growth through viral word of mouth.Photoroom’s AI photo editing tools created such a powerful “wow effect” that they also dramatically improved the efficiency of the company’s paid ads, reducing CPIs so significantly that Photoroom was able to expand into new international markets like Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil that were previously not inaccessible.Over time, Photoroom developed country-specific playbooks for expanding into international markets, including hiring agencies in Japan and Korea to navigate the local culture and offering weekly plans in Thailand, Mexico, and Brazil where consumers often have less money to pay for monthly or annual subscriptions.Olivier Lemarié:Website: https://www.photoroom.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/olivierlemarie/X: https://x.com/olivier_lemariePhil Carter:Website: https://philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Miranda Paine is the Head of Growth at Runna, where she has contributed to its rapid expansion and recent acquisition by Strava. Prior to Runna, Miranda held growth and marketing roles at two other London-based fitness startups, including another fitness app called Fiit and a boutique kickboxing-inspired group fitness studio called Flykick. She holds a degree in Marine Biology, and credits her background in science and data analytics for helping her succeed as a growth leader.Key Takeaways:Since being founded in 2020 and launched in 2022, Runna has rapidly grown into one of the largest and most popular running apps in the world, using AI to give runners personalized training plans that adapt to their unique needs.The key to Runna’s success has been building features that adapt to each runner to provide them with hyperpersonalized experiences, including pacing tips, real-time audio feedback, and dynamic goals that change based on performance.Once Runna had product/market fit, it built an ambassador program and focused on creating strong relationships with runners, both online through UGC on channels like TikTok and Instagram, as well as offline at races and other events.Runna has deliberately crafted an aspirational brand at a premium price point, which has influenced its ad creatives, product positioning, new user onboarding experience, and approach to free trials and discounts.As a result of its rapid growth, Runna was recently acquired by Strava, which has provided the company with additional resources, expanded its reach, and unlocked all sorts of additional growth opportunities.Miranda Paine:Website: https://www.runna.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miranda-paine-55b573a7/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/miranda.paine/Phil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Jon Noronha is the cofounder and Head of Product at Gamma, where he's creating a new medium for presenting ideas. Gamma allows anyone to generate a presentation, document, or webpage in minutes using AI, just by writing a topic or pasting an outline. Before starting Gamma, Jon was the VP of Product at Optimizely, where he helped companies integrate rapid experimentation into their product development process.Key Takeaways:After launching in 2020, Gamma struggled to find product/market fit until early 2023 when it bet the company on a big launch focused on AI-powered presentations. By August of that year, the company was profitable.Gamma unveiled this launch on X with a viral post that read: "The most valuable skill in business is about to become obsolete. Designing a killer slide deck used to take days. Now AI can do it in seconds for anyone. Introducing Gamma: your AI design partner for presenting ideas beautifully."One key to Gamma's early success was using cheaper, faster models even if it meant sacrificing some performance. This allowed the company to run lean with lower costs, and it also minimized latency leading to a better user experience.Gamma has benefitted from multiple organic growth loops that allowed it to scale cost-efficiently, including word of mouth (users telling friends and colleagues), casual contact (users discovering Gamma through another presentation), and SEO (users creating websites and presentations that get indexed by Google).Gamma offers two subscription tiers, Gamma Plus and Gamma Pro, each with monthly and annual plans at relatively low prices compared to other AI products. It loses money on a small percentage of its users, but this is a tradeoff Gamma is happy to make to keep its premium product offering simple and delight its best customers.Over 90% of Gamma's users and over 75% of its subscribers are from markets outside the US, and the company has invested in product localization, support for local currencies, and international price optimization to serve these users.Jon Noronha:Website: https://gamma.app/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonnoronha/X: https://x.com/thatsjonsensePhil Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Ajay Mehta is an accomplished entrepreneur who is currently cofounder and President of Portola, the company behind a viral AI companion app called Tolan. Prior to launching Tolan, Ajay founded other successful consumer startups including Birthdate Co., Therapy Notebooks, and FamilyLeaf, and he has held product and growth leadership roles at Wealthsimple (Canada’s largest FinTech company) and Tilt.Key Takeaways:After finding product-market fit with an AI companion in the form of a Pixar-like alien friend and officially launching its app in February 2025, Tolan has gone viral among Gen-Z women who use it for everything from emotional support to relationship advice to help with homework and everyday tasks.The magic moment for users is when their Tolan remembers something they said the previous day and realize their Tolan really sees and understands them. The “wow factor" of this emotional connection has helped the app go viral, similar to how the stunning speed and quality of ChatGPT’s responses made it go viral.TikTok has been the top channel for Tolan. Because of the way TikTok’s algorithm works, Tolan was able to generate multiple viral videos even before it had any real online following, which has helped propel its exponential growth.Tolan is doubling down on its rapid organic growth by transitioning from a hard paywall to a freemium model and building social experiences into its app that will allow users to create a “solar system” of close friends and their Tolans.Like many AI apps, Tolan’s monetization strategy must consider the underlying costs of AI-powered features. However, as these costs have continued to come down dramatically, it has allowed application-layer companies like Tolan to push the envelope on feature development and give more value away to users for free.Ajay Mehta:Website: https://www.tolans.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajayumehta/X: https://x.com/ajaymehtaPhil's Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarter

Cori Shearer is currently a Lead Product Manager at Headspace, where she has spent the last four years leading teams focused on growth as well as engagement with their full suite of human-delivered care offerings like coaching, clinical, and AI-based services. Prior to Headspace, Cori worked at Quizlet as a Senior PM focused on acquisition, activation, and international growth. She is also an entrepreneur, startup advisor, and instructor for Product School.Key Takeaways:Headspace was founded in 2010 by Andy Puddicombe as the first meditation app in the app store after Andy returned from being a monk and wanted to share everything that he had learned about meditation and mindfulness with the world.After Headspace acquired Ginger.io in 2021, it evolved from a single product focused on meditation into a platform of health and wellness services that now includes human-delivered care in the form of coaching, therapy, and psychiatry.In parallel, Headspace has also expanded from a pureplay consumer app to a B2B solution with Headspace for Work, which offers health and wellness services to companies and their employees.As Headspace has evolved on both of these two dimensions, it has needed to stretch its brand in new and different ways while also adapting its product to be able to serve a range of customers with different mental health needs. This has meant slowing down at times to make sure they got things right for their customers, and building a new set of outcome metrics to measure efficacy.In late 2024, Headspace launched its AI companion called Ebb, which helps users navigate through Headspace’s various products and services to get what they need to improve their mental health and ultimately live happier lives.Cori Shearer:Website: https://www.corishearer.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/corishearer/X: https://x.com/alacodeblogInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/alacodeblog/Phil's Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Natalia Castillejo is a Director of Product at Duolingo, where she has spent the last decade since graduating from Yale University in 2016. Natalia started her PM career at Duolingo working on the company’s English Language Test and other core product features. More recently, she helped lead the development and monetization of AI-powered features like “Video Call,” “Roleplay,” and “Explain My Answer” that form the core of Duolingo Max, and then transitioned from core product to monetization to help accelerate the growth of this new higher-priced subscription tier.Key Takeaways:Duolingo started investing in AI product features in 2022 after getting early access to ChatGPT. It spent a year building and refining these features before packaging them into its new higher-priced Duolingo Max subscription tier in 2023.Duolingo Max wasn’t an overnight success. It wasn’t until the company launched video calls and repositioned Max from “pay more for AI” to “pay more for conversational language learning” that the new subscription tier really took off.Duolingo requires all PMs to be daily users of its app, and the company A/B tests every product change. This has led to a world-class product development culture built on both strong product intuition and rigorous experimentation.Duolingo always starts with the user problem that needs to be solved and works backward from there. This helps avoid “technology in search of a problem,” which is especially important right now as AI is unlocking all sorts of new technology.Duolingo is also encouraging its PMs to invest in AI tools to boost efficiency. This includes using tools like Replit to build prototypes without engineers, and building internal tools to predict the impact of an A/B test based on previous experiments.Natalia Castillejo:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natic/X: https://x.com/naticstiPhil’s Carter:Website: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Jacob Eiting is the founder and CEO of RevenueCat, the world’s largest SaaS platform for subscription apps that need help powering in-app purchases, managing customer data, and growing revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. Prior to founding RevenueCat in 2017, Jacob was the CTO of Elevate Labs, a consumer subscription business offering both brain training and meditation apps, and a software developer at multiple other companies, including Apple.Key Takeaways:The cost of building apps is falling exponentially. This is opening up opportunities for products in niches that were not previously viable, but that can now support profitable businesses. However, it’s also dramatically increasing competition.Subscriber retention is the most important metric for consumer subscription apps, but retention rates continue to decline as the app stores become increasingly crowded. While there are tactics companies can use to improve retention on the margins, this metric is hard to move and is ultimately driven by product quality.The rise of AI has created a “tourist effect” that is driving organic growth through viral word of mouth, but this will slow down eventually. To win in the long run, AI companies need to develop sustainable and repeatable growth strategies.Given that 80% of trials occur on the same day an app is installed, optimizing the new user onboarding experience is one of the highest-leverage opportunities consumer subscription apps have to accelerate growth.Consumer subscription apps are at a disadvantage vs. B2B SaaS businesses because most of them only monetize users through a single subscription tier. Recently, a lot of apps have begun testing lifetime subscriptions and/or one-time purchases to capture more consumer surplus and increase ARPU.Jacob Eiting: RevenueCat Website: https://www.revenuecat.com 2025 SOSA Report: https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps-2025/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeiting/ X: https://x.com/jeitingPhil Carter: Website: philgcarter.com Substack: philgcarter.substack.com LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter X: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Yuriy Timen is a seasoned growth and marketing advisor with 15+ years of experience scaling technology companies. Yuriy joined Grammarly as the company’s first marketing hire in 2012 when it had just 10 employees and left in 2020 as Global Head of Marketing and Growth. Since then, Yuriy has advised more than 40 companies, including Airtable, Canva, Oyster, Whimsical, and Otter.ai. He specializes in marketing, product-led growth, and hiring and developing high-performing growth teams.Key Takeaways:Grammarly started by building a web app with a 7-day free trial marketed to students through paid channels like Facebook and Twitter, and through SEO given the high volume of students searching online for help with their writing.After realizing the global market opportunity for professional knowledge workers was much larger than for students, Grammarly pivoted its product, business model, and growth strategy to serve this new customer segment.Product: Grammarly created browser extensions for Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, built plugins for Microsoft Office apps, and launched a mobile keyboard, all of which helped it integrate into existing prosumer workflows.Business Model: The company also introduced a freemium business model with a free tier that gave prosumers more time to experience the value of Grammarly's product before needing to make a purchase decision.Growth Strategy: Grammarly cracked YouTube as the perfect channel for explaining its nuanced core value promise to knowledge workers.In 2018, the company launched Grammarly Business and began selling to entire teams of professionals, with enhanced admin and security features, function-specific value props, and updated ad campaigns to reposition it as an enterprise solution.As Grammarly has gained traction with businesses, it has benefitted from word of mouth within and across professional teams that has helped the company to land and expand within enterprises.Yuriy TimenWebsite: https://www.yuriytimen.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/yuriytimen/X: https://x.com/TheTimenatorPhil CarterWebsite: https://www.philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Rachel Hepworth is the former CMO at Notion, where she helped the company expand internationally, move upmarket, and grow by 10x. Prior to Notion, she was part of the marketing leadership team at Slack, founding the Growth Marketing function and scaling the company through IPO. Rachel is now a full-time marketing and growth advisor, helping companies like Clay, Luma AI, and Attio reach their full potential.Key TakeawaysAfter a pivotal company offsite in 2022, Notion’s founders recognized that AI was the future and directed the company’s entire 60-person team to throw out their roadmaps and focus all of their attention on launching AI Writer.As a horizontal product with a lot of different use cases, Notion has always relied on its highly engaged community to educate other users on how to get the most out of its product. When Notion moved into AI, it leveraged its community to raise awareness of AI Writer and help other people understand how to use it.Specifically, Notion crowdsourced templates and demo videos from users to help people understand the most powerful ways to use AI Writer, and it has continued using this strategy as Notion AI has evolved into an entire suite of AI tools.Notion’s community has helped it overcome the challenge of building a business that is distributed both functionally (~80% of customers are individual users but ~80% of revenue comes from businesses) and internationally (roughly a third of the company’s users come from North America, EMEA, and APAC, respectively).Roughly 25% of Notion’s B2B workspaces came from individual “champions” who were then able to convince their companies to invest in Notion as an enterprise. The company got very good at using data to identify these champions and then empower them to spread Notion to other people within their companies.Over the last couple years, Notion AI has expanded into Q&A, database creation, and a suite of many other tools. These investments have had a tremendous impact on the company’s growth trajectory.Rachel HepworthLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rachelhepworth/X: https://x.com/rachelhepworthPhil CarterWebsite: philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Zain Abiddin is a global product builder and leader with 15+ years of experience. He joined Canva in 2020 as the company’s first subscriptions PM and spent four years helping to scale Canva to billions of dollars in ARR, including the launch of Canva for Teams as well as tools to support localized pricing, price migration, and involuntary churn management. Prior to Canva, Zain ran several startups before transitioning into a career in product management. Zain is now the founder and CEO of Hewwi, a startup dedicated to helping people boost their health, wealth, and wisdom. He has travelled to 30+ countries and worked in APAC, EMEA, and North American markets.Key Takeaways:In the last five years, Canva’s valuation has soared from $6 billion to $49 billion, fueled by international expansion and the launch of Canva for Teams.Expanding internationally has required Canva to support local currencies, adjust prices to align with local willingness to pay, and integrate alternative payments methods (APMs) for specific regions.Canva has also made significant investments in dunning and other techniques to minimize involuntary churn, which happens when users lose access to subscriptions due to failed payment methods or insufficient funds.More recently, the company launched Canva for Teams, which has accelerated revenue growth by unlocking larger accounts while also boosting virality given the natural network effects that exist between teams of knowledge workers.Going broad through international expansion helped Canva get past its first $1B in ARR, then going deeper with the launch of Canva for teams helped the company get from $1B to $2B in ARR, and now the company is increasingly expanding into enterprise accounts to grow ARR even further.Zain Abiddin:Website: https://zain.blogSubstack: https://zainabiddin.substack.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zainabiddin/X: http://twitter.com/zainabiddin Phil Carter:Website: https://philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Greg Stewart is the CEO of Ladder, an innovative strength training app that has grown subscribers by 2,000% over the last two years. He has a mix of startup leadership, company-building, and corporate finance experience. Prior to Ladder, Greg served as COO and a founding team member of Bungalo, an operationally intensive consumer-facing real estate technology platform he helped to build and launch from the ground up within Amherst Residential. Before Bungalo, Greg was COO and then CEO of a high-growth SaaS startup also in Austin. Earlier in his career, Greg served as a technology investment banker at Goldman Sachs, first in New York and then in San Francisco.Key Takeaways:After launching during the pandemic, Ladder pivoted its way to product/market fit with a coach and team centered strength training app for fitness enthusiasts.When it realized its initial $60/month price point was too high, Ladder rebuilt its subscription pricing and packaging from the ground up until it felt confident its premium product and new $30/month price were aligned with its target customer. The company built a framework to identify its highest-value user segments and worked backwards from their unique needs to recruit the perfect coaches.Ladder cracked user acquisition on TikTok (and now Instagram) by turning in-house coaches and creators into short-form content creation machines, converting the best organic content into paid ads, using an onboarding quiz to predict each new user's LTV, and leveraging this pLTV data to continuously optimize its advertising spend.Ladder’s innovative growth strategy, combined with category-leading subscriber retention rates driven by its coach- and team-centered approach to fitness, have helped it grow ~2,000% from 10k to 175k subscribers over the last two years.Greg Stewart:Website: https://www.joinladder.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregoryfstewartX: https://x.com/gregoryfstewartPhil Carter:Website: https://philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Ron Schneidermann is an entrepreneur who is passionate about building great companies that help people have healthy, authentic, real-world experiences. He is the former CEO of AllTrails, the world's largest and most trusted outdoor platform with a community of over 75 million trail-goers. In 2005, Ron cofounded Liftopia, the global leader in ski lift ticket bookings, and was Head of Growth at Yelp Reservations. Ron attended UCLA, earning his bachelor’s degree in Communications, and lives in Northern California with his wife Jenny, their three children, and their dog Sally.Key Takeaways:After launching in 2010 and establishing initial product/market fit among a loyal early adopter base of outdoor enthusiasts and search and rescue professionals, AllTrails pivoted to a much larger mainstream audience of casual hikers.This pivot required AllTrails to change everything from its copy and creative to its user acquisition strategy, core product experience, and subscription price.AllTrails leveraged SEO to drive cost-efficient organic growth, particularly for hyperlocal search queries related to local hiking trails, where content created by its user base gave the company a highly defensible competitive advantage.More recently, AllTrails has expanded internationally using a playbook where it seeds new countries with manually curated trail guides and then leverages this content to attract early adopters and get its UGC-driven SEO flywheel going.While AllTrails relies on AI to boost internal productivity, it has intentionally been slow to create consumer AI features until it recognizes a compelling use case that enhances its core value promise of helping people get outside.Ron Schneidermann:Website: https://www.alltrails.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schneidermann/X: https://x.com/AllTrailsPhil Carter:Website: philgcarter.comSubstack: philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

Ravi Mehta is a senior product executive with experience leading product organizations for globally recognized brands like Tripadvisor, Facebook, and Tinder. Over his career, Ravi has scaled well-known products that have impacted millions of people and built teams to meet the challenge. Ravi is a well-respected thought leader, and his frameworks on product strategy and product leadership have been adopted by thousands of professionals across the industry. Previously, he was Chief Product Officer at Tinder, Product Director at Facebook, VP of Consumer Product at TripAdvisor, and Executive-in-Residence at Reforge. He is an active advisor and investor, primarily focused on consumer tech companies.Key Takeaways:After launching at USC in 2012, Tinder went viral on college campuses across the country by combining mobile-first features like Facebook Connect and its famous “hot or not” swiping mechanic with a GTM strategy focused on frats and sororitiesTinder expanded beyond college students by investing in features like Festival Mode and Swipe Search designed to create network effects among other user segmentsTo overcome inherently high churn rates in the dating category, Tinder has developed a sophisticated monetization strategy that includes three subscription tiers - Tinder Plus, Tinder Gold, and Tinder Platinum - as well as complementary in-app purchases like "Boosts" and "Super Likes" that capture additional value from high-intent usersTinder deeply understands the fundamental goals of its subscribers and aligns the premium value promises of its subscriptions and in-app purchases to ensure that it always creates more value for subscribers than it takes back in the form of revenueTinder’s innovative approaches to product development, growth, and monetization have turned it into the top dating app in the world with well over $1 billion in revenueRavi Mehta:Website: https://www.ravi-mehta.com/Substack: https://blog.ravi-mehta.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/ravimehtaX: https://x.com/ravi_mehtaPhil Carter:Website: https://philgcarter.comSubstack: https://philgcarter.substack.comLinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarterX: https://x.com/philgcarterPodcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io