Phil Carter
speaker
228 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Phil Carter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And it has a much more diverse suite of products that it offers to users. And so that includes tools that students can use to review for standardized exams over the summer. It includes tools that teachers can use over the summer to prepare for their upcoming school year. And so that's a third way that you can get around some of the inherent effects of seasonality.
Maybe the most obvious one is they just raised too much capital too fast before they really understand what their product is and who they're selling it to. And that could just lead to a lot of inefficiency and a lot of bad decisions.
And I'll add one more, which is after they've raised that capital, over-investing in paid acquisition to juice growth before they've really figured out the fundamentals of their unit economics and how those unit economics are likely to change over time as they move beyond their high intent early adopters.
I think some of the more recent ones are, if you build it, they will come. This idea that if I just build a really great product, then it will grow itself. I think that hasn't been true for a while, but it's getting harder and harder because... And AI is going to make this even worse. It's never been easier to create a product.
You have more and more stories of non-technical people using LLMs to create an app in a weekend, and then finding a niche audience and getting it out there. And there's only going to be more and more of that. And so, if you build it, they will come is a myth that has been debunked and will continue to be debunked because you really need to solve for distribution.
And then I think the second one we talked about a little bit earlier is I can just pay my way to success. I can essentially buy growth. That can be true in the short term. And there are certain cases where paid acquisition can be a really effective tool for accelerating growth in nascent markets or introducing a new product and getting the flywheel going.
But more often than not, especially as a consumer subscription app, if you don't have a high enough percentage of organic acquisition, then at some point, it's going to catch up with you.
Well, I'll talk about two. And death is too strong of a word. I think that in my realm of consumer subscription, there was this playbook for a while of get to product market fit, raise your series A, and then just scale the hell out of your product on Facebook. And I think that has gotten really hard because... One, it's gotten harder to raise funding.
So it's harder for companies to get adequate funds to put large enough budgets against Facebook for it to be efficient. Two, that channel has become very, very saturated, which has just meant that the cost of installs and subscribers is going up.
And three, Apple's app tracking transparency restrictions that they introduced in 2021 have made attribution much more difficult and opaque for performance marketers, which has just meant paid acquisitions become a lot less efficient. I think there have been some improvements on that recently. So I'm hopeful that paid acquisition is going to start to get more and more efficient again.
That is one that has become much more difficult than it used to be. And then the second one that I think we're watching play out in real time is SEO. There's been a lot of fear mongering around how AI is just going to render SEO obsolete. And I've heard them described as like answer engines now. So like ChatGPT, Anthropic, Gemini, whatever the case may be, is going to displace Google searches.
And on the one hand, I think that is true. It's already happening to a degree, and I think it will accelerate. On the other hand, Ethan Smith, who's one of the top SEO experts out there, and I went to a recent Reforge webinar where he talked about this, 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. You need to have a product that is relevant. You need to have content that people find interesting. You need to have a certain amount of credibility and authority on the internet. And so all of those underlying assets are the same or very similar for SEO versus for LLM prompts.
The difference is just in the dynamics of how it looks. And I do think there will be arbitrage opportunities for clever growth leaders who can figure out some of those more nuanced differences in like how to get my product to rank for a chat GPT response versus for a Google search.
I used to be of the mindset that onboarding flows should be short and sweet, especially for consumer apps. Get the user in, explain your value prop within the first minute, and convert them as quickly as you can. And I've realized through a combination of studying the onboarding flows of products like Noom and HIMS and HERS, as well as just working with clients where we've seen significant lift
in everything from signup rates to trial start and even subscriber conversion rates by actually intelligently expanding the length of the onboarding experience, provided that each of those additional screens is earning its place. And more specifically, it's leading to a more personalized and tailored experience that actually builds user intent rather than hurting user intent.
I guess I've reframed my mental model of what the ideal onboarding experience looks like from time to value is everything to as long as every experience in your onboarding flow is building user intent and not hurting user intent, then longer onboarding flows can work, especially in categories like health and finance, where the purchase decision is a more considered and complex decision.
Yeah, so I will say right up front, I am an investor in this company called Ladder. They are a fitness app that has really built a following around a group coaching product. They started by recognizing that a lot of people struggle to maintain motivation with their fitness, whether that's going to the gym or running or working out at home.
And so having a coach who holds you accountable, but specifically a coach with a group of members who are all doing the same or similar workouts with that coach every week. can be a really powerful way of maintaining user motivation. And it's obviously great for the user because they'll experience better fitness outcomes.
It's also great for the business because it leads to much higher subscriber retention rates. But getting to growth strategy, what this company Ladder figured out over the last 18 to 24 months is they realized their product was perfectly tailored to TikTok because these coaches, many of the coaches on ladder are influencers.
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