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Reforge's early subscription growth blinded leadership to missing retention features

Brian Balfour · Brian Balfour: Startup Growth Secrets from HubSpot; Distribution Stratagies; Impact of AI | E1049 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings · Aug 16, 2023 · at 53:56

Brian Balfour is founder and CEO of Reforge. He details how switching business models initially produced misleading growth metrics before hitting a growth stall.

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“We transitioned from a transactional to a subscription model, a membership model, and that had huge growth initially like just massive growth. And that kind of put the blinders on us to whether or not we were also doing the things to make a subscription product sustainable. And as a result, we ended up being too late to following up with some of the products and some of the features that create the type of habitual usage that's required for a recurring model.”

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