Subversive

Phil Carter

Subversive is a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category-defining companies and innovative startups.

  1. How OpenArt is Using AI to Reinvent Content Creation

    OCT 30

    How OpenArt is Using AI to Reinvent Content Creation

    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

    55 min
  2. How Best-In-Class Retention Propelled Flo to a $1B Valuation

    OCT 16

    How Best-In-Class Retention Propelled Flo to a $1B Valuation

    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/philgcarter Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

    1h 4m
  3. How Noom Avoided PMF Collapse in the Wake of GLP-1s

    OCT 2

    How Noom Avoided PMF Collapse in the Wake of GLP-1s

    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/philgcarter Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

    57 min
  4. How Learneo Leveraged M&A to Build a $3.6B EdTech Empire

    SEP 18

    How Learneo Leveraged M&A to Build a $3.6B EdTech Empire

    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/philgcarter Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io

    56 min
  5. How Honeydew is Reinventing Telehealth for Skincare

    SEP 4

    How Honeydew is Reinventing Telehealth for Skincare

    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

    50 min
  6. How onX Built a Portfolio of Apps to Grow ARR by 10x

    AUG 21

    How onX Built a Portfolio of Apps to Grow ARR by 10x

    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

    59 min
  7. How Wispr Flow Uses AI to Save Professionals Hours Every Day

    AUG 7

    How Wispr Flow Uses AI to Save Professionals Hours Every Day

    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

    51 min
  8. How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App

    JUL 24

    How Chess.com Became the World’s Top Chess App

    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

    54 min
See All (22)

5
out of 5
10 Ratings

About

Subversive is a podcast dedicated to sharing stories from the best consumer subscription apps in the world. We'll bring you lessons for how to grow your consumer subscription business, including insights and inflection points that led to exponential growth from leaders at category-defining companies and innovative startups.

Information

  • Creator
    Phil Carter
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    22
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2025 Subversive
  • Show Website
    Subversive

You Might Also Like