12 AI Growth Lessons for Subscription Apps – Phil Carter, Elemental Growth

“in the first minute or two, you have this oracle who asks you a bunch of questions about yourself. Based on your responses to those questions, you're then matched with a Tolan that has its own unique personality and character dimensions based off of your personality.”

“They have this great infographic that shows the Tolan's personality profile and how it maps to yours.”

“for serious runners who are training for their next marathon or their next 10K, we're going to put together a customized dynamic plan that adapts to your running performance over time, and that's something that Strava wasn't doing.”

“In Granola's case, it's linked to your calendar. And so every time I have a client call or some other meeting coming up, I get a little notification on my desktop and on my mobile device letting me know that the meeting is about to start”

“So this is another company we've been working with for about a year now in the EdTech space and they're primarily serving college students, but they just have lots and lots of different AI powered features.”

“Runna went from tens of creative concepts per month to 400 plus creative concepts per month that their marketing team is spinning off each month.”

“And so what I've advised my clients is be very, very careful about going the wholesale AI route and using a tool like VO3.”

“by leading with those AI features in ad concepts on Meta and TikTok, they got much better performance, especially when they put it within the first six seconds of the ad.”

“they've grown extremely cost efficiently with very little paid user acquisition because of these PLG loops.”

“in some cases what they found was using some of these longer tail models, not only was the performance good enough in terms of the quality of the output that they were delivering to their users, but also the speed of the product was significantly faster and the cost to the business of the compute power needed to serve these AI powered features was significantly lower”

“they had these early AI adopters on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram, on Discord, just sort of talking about how they were using Notion AI, publishing templates or databases that they were using tips and tricks for how to get the most value out of it.”

“this product is free and it will always be free, but we want you to try the best version of it. And we'll give you the best version of it for a seven-day free trial.”

“we had another client we work with where we attempted the shift to freemium and the initial results didn't work at all. We saw more than a 50% reduction in subscriber conversion. And so we very quickly pulled off of it after a couple of weeks”

“So you're seeing this with Duolingo with their Duolingo Max product, which is their new immersive language learning tool that allows you to talk to Lily and do role plays all using voice, not just text.”

“Tolan is an example of a company that started with a seven-day free trial and has adjusted its free trial length and its premium offering over time.”