20Growth: The 7 Core Levers to Win at Consumer Subscription: Growth Loops, CAC + LTV Benchmarks, Pricing, Packaging, Notifications, Discounts, Paywalls | The Breakdown with Phil Carter

**Phil Carter** (0:00)
Oftentimes, the biggest wins come right on the heels of a failed A-B test. CACS almost by definition will go up over time. 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. 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.

**Harry Stebbings** (0:29)
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. 20 Growth is the monthly show where we sit down with the best growth leaders in the world to unpack their strategies and tactics. Today is probably the most dense episode when it comes to really granular tactical advice. Joining us in the hot seat is Phil Carter, one of the best growth leaders of the last decade, helping world class companies like Faire, Quizlet and Ibotta accelerate their growth. But before we dive in today, as this is my growth podcast, I'm so excited to share with you the story of the fastest growing company in my portfolio, voiantis.ai, who isn't being asked by their board to improve unit economics. Voiantis is the first and only company I've seen that has found the way for you to crack this nut by not only leveraging your first party data to predict customers lifetime value, but truly coupling these predictions with a prescriptive layer, integrating with and influencing each and every step of your customer's growth journey. Voiantis helps you acquire the right customers in Google and Meta, allocate incentives to the right customers via your Salesforce and Braze, and trigger the right upsell option at the right time for each of your customers. Oh, and the best part, Voiantis are not only increasing ROI by 20 to 40% and improving the quality of your customers, their solution has already improved unit economics for leading companies such as Miro, Rappi, Moneyline and many, many more. So, if you want to improve your LTV-CAC ratio before your next board meeting, start by heading over to voyantis.ai/20vc, that's VORNTIS dot AI slash 20VC to get a free value assessment. And speaking of truly game-changing products, when I spoke to Canva co-founder Cliff Obrecht on the podcast last year, he touched on how visual content is fast becoming the fuel that's driving the modern workplace. Your team needs to create an engaging visual pitch deck to sell in an idea, a product launch needs an inspiring video to excite investors and customers. Projects gather steam with visual whiteboards. That's where Canva can help. It's a game changer for visual communication at work. Canva turns your team into master visual communicators, so they can get their point across with visual impact inside and outside your business, with no design experience needed. With Canva, any team member and any company, whether you're a startup or a global organization, can design compelling on-brand visual content quickly and easily. That's why 90% of the Fortune 500 use Canva. Start designing today at canva.com, designed for work. You have now arrived at your destination. Phil, I am so excited for this, dude. We were just chatting and I was like, shit, I wish we were recording this. But thank you so much for joining me today.

**Phil Carter** (3:09)
Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be part of the show.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:11)
That's very, very kind of you. I would love to just start with some context. So it's been a pretty diverse and interesting career. But why are you so versed to discuss the topics that we're about to discuss diving into the granular of growth?

**Phil Carter** (3:23)
Sure. Well, we were talking about depth versus breadth. So I guess I'll start there. I mean, I'm someone who spent my 20s doing a few different things. I spent a few years in venture capital, investing in mostly early stage consumer companies, then spent the last seven years being a product and growth leader. And then I just started in advising and consulting business. But the through line has been working with consumer businesses that fundamentally make people's lives better. And then specifically working with a lot of subscription business models.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:49)
We were talking before about the definition of growth. If I were to ask you, how do you define growth and growth team? What comes to mind when I say that?

**Phil Carter** (3:58)
Growth has become such an overloaded term, right? Does growth mean product? Does it mean marking? Does it mean zero to one? Does it mean scaling, product market fit expansion, you know, B2B versus B2C? There are a lot of different dimensions to it.