The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 40 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Phil Carter: CAC almost always increases over time for scaling startups
“For everyone else, CACs almost by definition will go up over time for a couple reasons.”
Carter: Apple and Google will lower App Store fees within 10 years
“I do think that there may be some factors over the next 10 years that start to make this a little bit easier. For example, 15 to 30% app store fees. I think Google and Apple are under increasing pressure to lower the average app store fee, at least in certain …”
Carter: Longer onboarding quizzes drive higher conversion for health and finance apps
“In categories like health and wellness or finance, where you're making a very considered purchase. And part of the value promise is believing that this product is being tailored to your unique needs. In that context, a longer onboarding quiz, if implemented co…”
Carter: Winning in LLM Optimization Requires the Exact Same Assets as SEO
“A lot of the underlying things that you need to do to be really successful in SEO. Are the same things that you need to do to be really successful with these LLMs, right? You need to have a product that is relevant. You need to have content that people find in…”
Carter: Average Consumer App Loses 50% of Annual Subscribers in Year One
“The average consumer subscription app is losing more than 50% of its annual subscribers in the first year and more than 50% of its monthly subscribers in the first three months.”
Carter: Startups Should Hire First Growth Leader Only After Reaching Product-Market Fit
“In my opinion, Before you have product market fit, you don't even really know if you're building the right product. And then even once you have product market fit, you then need to figure out how do I get this product to scale within the right channel so that …”
Phil Carter: Seed and Series A startups should avoid small growth optimizations
“So if you're in the early part of that S curve, which by definition means any seed or series a startup, You should not be focusing on small optimizations. It's a waste of time for a couple reasons.”
Carter: Spending Under $10,000 Monthly on Facebook Ads Is Inefficient
“Like they're spending 5000 dollars a month, 10,000 dollars a month on Facebook. That's just not enough to get an efficient outcome.”
Carter: Fast-Growing Startups Get 70%+ of Early Users From One Channel
“70% or more of user acquisition for most fast-growing tech companies is going to come through a single channel early on, and so don't spread yourself too thin.”
Carter: Consumer subscription apps cannot spend their way to dominance
“There are some rare exceptions where I think that has happened. Typically in marketplace businesses where the network effects are so strong once you get to the tipping point that you can have upside down unit economics for months or even years. And then, you k…”
Carter: Consumer App CAC Payback Benchmark Is One to Six Months
“Six months is good. One month is great. You know, first, first session is exceptional, which is significantly lower than B to B, right? And B to B, you know, 12 months can be considered a good payback or even 18 months for an enterprise SaaS business.”
Carter: Only 30 to 40 Consumer Subscription Companies Are Worth $1B+
“I actually just published a guest post for Lenny's newsletter, and one of the figures that I include in that article is a list of consumer subscription businesses that have achieved billion dollar plus valuations. So that's both publicly traded companies as we…”
Carter: Quantified Self Apps Lose Subscription Value After Two Months
“In many cases, after I see a month or two of my data, I kind of know, okay, these are the things that lead to better sleep, and these are the things that lead to better fitness metrics like HRV or resting heart rate or whatever the case may be. So the value di…”
Carter: Consumer Apps Should Target 80%+ Paywall View Rate in Week One
“You want your paywall view rate to Ideally be over 80% and over 80% ideally within the user's first session, or if not their first session, then certainly within their first week.”
Carter: Organic Apps Suit Freemium While Paid Acquisition Requires Hard Paywalls
“You do see a lot of correlation between companies with lower price points and organic acquisition strategies like Quizlet going more freemium. And companies with higher price points that are much more dependent on paid advertising for subscriber acquisition go…”
Carter: Web-Based Checkout Discounts Neutrally Bypass 15-30% App Store Fees
“That email will often lead to a web-based checkout flow, which means that you're avoiding the 15 to 30% app store fees, and so your net revenue as the business is neutral, but you're converting subscribers that otherwise wouldn't have converted because the pri…”
Phil Carter: Overusing Push Notifications and Emails Kills Engagement Channels
“Anytime you increase the number of notifications or emails you send, in the short term, it's like the sugar high. It's going to lead to a short-term pop in your metrics, but if you do that too many times, you kill the channel.”
Carter: Quizlet Generated 95%+ of User Acquisition Organically via SEO
“Quizlet that's, you know, 95% plus organic acquisition through SEO and word of mouth”
Phil Carter: Early-stage startups lack sufficient user volume for A/B testing optimizations
“And then the third reason is oftentimes, even for consumer businesses and certainly for B to B businesses, if you're that early, You simply don't have enough users to be able to measure a statistically significant difference in a small optimization type of an …”
Carter: Interview Assignments Should Take Under Two Hours on Ubiquitous Companies
“What I found works best is pick an assignment that truly shouldn't take more than an hour or two before you hit diminishing returns. On, you know, spending more cycles on it. And that number two is either more of like a hypothetical scenario or it's a company …”
Carter: The biggest growth wins often follow failed A/B tests
“The biggest wins come right on the heels of a failed A-B test where, like, that's not what I was expecting to see, but based on what I am seeing now, I've learned something new about the customer, so now let's go run a second A-B test on the basis of that lear…”
Phil Carter: SEO drove over 70% of Quizlet's growth
“With that context SEO was driving more than 70% of Quizlet's growth and had been for some time.”
Carter: Quizlet's content creation metrics were higher in UK than US
“All of our content creation metrics in the UK, metrics like what percentage of teachers and students become content creators and how many pieces of content does each of those creators create? Those metrics were actually higher in the UK than in the US, which k…”
Phil Carter: Consumer Apps Lack Upsells to Drive Net Revenue Retention
“There's no real concept of net revenue retention, because unlike B to B SaaS, you can't land and expand. Like most of the kinds of companies have one subscription tier. They don't have anything they can really upsell consumers into.”
Carter: Invest in secondary channels 6–12 months before saturation
“Ideally, once you start to see the early signs that, okay, we're not at saturation yet, But I can connect the dots to six to 12 months from now. We're probably going to start to hit saturation. You should be investing heavily at that point and figure out what …”
Carter: 75% of Consumer App Trials Start Within 24 Hours of Install
“RevenueCat recently had their state of subscriptions report for, ah, for twenty-twenty-four, and they reported that over 75% of trial starts actually happen in the first 24 hours after a user installs an app, in many cases on the first session.”
Carter: Retaining 50% of Monthly App Subscribers for Six Months Is Exceptional
“For monthly subscribers, I think any company that is retaining more than 50% of its subscribers for six months or more is doing a very, very good job because monthly subscribers just tend to turn at much higher rates”
Phil Carter: Oura is best in class at releasing features and retention
“Oura is truly best in class at this, is the velocity with which they are launching new features, new insights, and Explaining those new features to users either through the app itself or through emails or other channels is pretty remarkable.”
Carter: Overusing scarcity and urgency tactics destroys user credibility
“Scarcity and urgency are real things, and they can work to drive Short-term DAU retention or to drive, you know, trial start rates because I'm getting a one-time only discount. But when you do too much of that, you lose all credibility with the user.”
Carter: Consumer Apps Should Maintain a Single Pricing Tier Until Scaling
“So on tiers, I think the vast majority of consumer subscription businesses should only have a single tier, at least until they become very large, mature businesses, and they're actually becoming platforms that are offering multiple premium product offerings ra…”
Carter: Weekly subscription plans suffer high churn and rarely work at scale
“Weekly plans just have such high churn rates that I think they generally don't make sense for companies that have achieved any meaningful scale.”
Carter: Consumer subscription startups should revisit pricing at least once a year
“So on pricing, it's like, this is something that should be revisited, in my opinion, at least once a year.”
Carter: Paywall complexity depresses subscription conversion rates on the margin
“The more complexity you introduce in the paywall, the worse your conversion rates are going to be on the margins.”
Carter: Noom's Onboarding Flow Contains Over 100 Screens Taking 20+ Minutes
“New, right? Which has more than a hundred screens in its onboarding flow, or at least the version of the onboarding flow I've gone through, right? It's got so much personalization that everybody probably gets a slightly different adventure through their onboar…”
Phil Carter: Indiscriminate discounting erodes brand equity and long-term outcomes
“The mistake that a lot of companies make is they treat it as a blunt instrument. It's like, we're just gonna throw out 50% discounts like they're candy. It's like the Oprah meme of like, you get a discount. And more often than not, that's just gonna road your …”
Phil Carter: Marketing cannot force students to use edtech in summer
“No amount of brilliant marketing or new product innovation is going to force students to use an education app in the middle of summer. It's just not going to happen.”
Carter: Ladder Grew Subscribers 6x in 2023, Surpassing 100,000 Total Subscribers
“And that has led to Six, six X subscriber growth over the course of 20, 23. And then they just crossed a 100,000 subscribers recently.”
Phil Carter: Ladder's Facebook and Google ads failed completely during pandemic
“They tried during the pandemic to just run Facebook and Google ads like everyone else. And it didn't work at all. It was an abysmal failure.”
Carter: Annual app subscribers retained for two years stay long-term
“There's a lot of data that shows that after the second renewal period, the subscribers that you've retained for two consecutive years as annual subscribers are often going to retain for many years after that.”
Phil Carter: Quizlet hedged summer seasonality via international growth
“As you expand internationally, you can offset some of the seasonality. And so that was one of the biggest things I worked out at Quizlet was international expansion. And we did start to see some hedging on that seasonality as we got more users in Asia or in La…”