Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
13 tactics from Eric Crowley
Building the Berkshire Hathaway of Consumer Subscriptions
Watch the full episode“If you create really high quality content that's SEO searchable or eventually will be AI searchable the consumer will find you... then you have to convince them to do a purchase... the most passionate ones will want something more with you... that's the community and what we've seen is people that monetize those communities with subscriptions.”
The 3 Cs: content, commerce, community map directly to AARRR
Crowley's investment thesis maps cleanly to acquisition, conversion, retention. Content pulls users in via SEO and AI-search; commerce converts them with subscriptions or trials; community keeps the most passionate ones generating UGC that refills the top of the funnel. Missing any leg is a buy signal — acquire it rather than build it.
“Best-in-class content that provides a solution to whatever question they're typing into that browser — which is like how do I lose weight, how do I need a friend, how do I find someone to date. All these questions that consumers ask every day. If you provide top-level answers to that, consumers will find you.”
Win acquisition by ranking on the questions users already type
The acquisition playbook for consumer subscription apps is to rank for the exact questions prospects type. Crowley sets the bar at 'top-level answers' — not surface content. The same asset will increasingly need to be AI-searchable as ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews replace traditional SERPs. Skip content and you're stuck paying Meta forever.
“The passion that people have for certain brands goes them beyond just a purchase history. They wear t-shirts of the company, and you think about that — that's just a weird way to be a walking billboard for certain companies, but I see tons of people with Discord t-shirts and it's just part of their persona.”
Community is the retention moat — do users wear your t-shirt?
The community leg of the framework is the retention lever, and the diagnostic test is whether users would wear your t-shirt unprompted. If your app is 'just another app,' you lose at retention; if users adopt the brand into their persona, marketing budgets collapse because UGC and word-of-mouth feed the top of the funnel.
“Femtech was one we think Family Management is a huge category... Sports is another big one... private wealth and Tax Advisor, right? A lot of this data is out there — your tax code is very publicly written every day, it's just impossible to read.”
Underbuilt category-killer opportunities: femtech, family, sports, private wealth
Crowley names four categories that lack a duopoly winner and are ripe for a category killer: femtech, family management (the 'chief household officer'), youth sports coordination, and personal wealth/tax advisory for the $100K-$1M asset tier. The diagnostic — 'who's the Apple of X?' — should have an obvious answer in a mature category. When it doesn't, that's the gap.
“If you put those three categories together — pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and baby — that LTV, that consumer goes from one purchase to effectively like three years. That's a huge shift in LTV, and if you can acquire those customers at the very beginning and then monetize them across that entire next 36 months, it changes the entire CAC of those businesses.”
Chain adjacent life-stages: 1 purchase → 36 months of LTV
Most consumer apps lose subscribers at natural life-stage breakpoints. Bundling pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, and baby (or pre-college, college, career, family) into one subscription stretches LTV from a single purchase to ~36 months. That fundamentally rewrites the CAC math and lets you outbid single-stage competitors on paid acquisition.
“If you're designing a product that consumers love — not just love because they have to use it like your healthcare app but love it because hey I will pay money for it, it's that good — there's probably a strong rationale that businesses will want to use this... I wouldn't call it a pivot, I would call it a growth extension.”
B2B is a growth extension for loved consumer apps — not a pivot
B2C apps that earn voluntary paid love (Slack, Dropbox, Calm, Headspace, Lynda, Photoroom) have a natural B2B expansion path through workforce productivity or employee benefits. Same product, different sales motion, ~10x per-seat price in the business context. Treat enterprise as a channel addition, not a rebuild.
“Sometimes you're selling something to do with consumer and to a business, and even on a per-seat basis you need to charge 10x in the business context for exactly the same thing — that's hard... it does take a little bit of value capture arguments and sort of making sure we tell the story in the right way.”
Charging 10x per-seat for the same product in B2B is the hard part
Jacob (RevenueCat CEO) flags the under-discussed challenge of consumer-to-B2B expansion: the same product needs ~10x per-seat pricing in business context, and you can't get there without a deliberate value-capture narrative. Pricing isn't a slider — it requires re-storying the product for the buyer, with productivity or compliance angles your consumer copy doesn't carry.
“B2B SaaS you can consistently say 90% gross retention — people look for much higher rates. And CSS you look at, 70 is a really good first-year annual retention rate, so then mathematically you shouldn't take on that much debt because you don't have that much cash flow guarantee.”
CSS retention 70% vs SaaS 90% → cap leverage at 2-3x EBITDA
Crowley sets the M&A-grade retention benchmark for consumer subscription: 70% first-year gross retention is considered strong, materially below the 90%+ floor for B2B SaaS. That gap is why he caps recommended debt leverage at 2-3x EBITDA for CSS deals vs 4-5x for SaaS. Don't pitch acquirers against SaaS comps — position honestly inside CSS norms.
“That is just straight cash flow for the app developer ecosystem, and Apple will find a way to make it back because then those individuals will either lower their prices to get more people to subscribe, or they generally increase price over time by adding a lot more features because they're just so much more profitable.”
If Apple cuts the 30% fee, developers reinvest in features — they don't lower prices
Crowley's read on a hypothetical App Store fee cut: most developers won't pass savings to consumers — they'll reinvest the margin into features and gradually raise prices over time. The implication is that fee relief flows to feature depth and pricing power, not to lower consumer prices, so subscribers should not expect direct savings.
“Designing the user experience for product-market fit means making that onboarding so sticky that you wouldn't have got frustrated and confused — it would have just been easy to use. It requires a lot of setup, it may even have to have required a service angle to onboard.”
In data-heavy categories, concierge onboarding is the moat
Jacob's diagnosis of why family-management apps keep failing: the apps that should win die in onboarding because users abandon during setup. The fix may be a service layer — concierge onboarding — to get past initial data-entry friction. In data-merger categories (family, finance, health), heavy onboarding investment is the moat, not the friction.
“We originally used Greenlight like five years ago and it just wasn't there yet... and then recently I'm sitting at the pool with said fellow dad... I went and signed back up — like five years later I've been reacquired. It takes that long, it takes that long to build really great software. Five years to make a really great app.”
Five-year iteration: churned users come back when the app finally clicks
Greenlight bounced Crowley as a user on v1, then re-acquired him five years later via a peer recommendation. Don't expect a hit on launch, and don't read early churn as a death sentence. Churned users are not gone forever; if you keep iterating, your TAM includes a returning cohort that gets reacquired via word-of-mouth years later.
“The question I ask myself on female health is, who's the Apple of female health... the brand you go to that is by far the best and you don't question it, you just buy it — and there isn't one. There should be one for something that happens millions of times a year.”
Pick a category where there is no obvious 'Apple of X'
Consumer subscription categories tend toward a duopoly of two to four winners plus long-tail SMBs. The biggest validation signal is finding a category with millions of recurring users and no default brand answer: femtech, family management, youth sports coordination, private wealth between Wealthfront and Goldman. Those gaps are the category-killer opportunities.
“SaaS, getting four to five times EBITDA isn't [unreasonable]... I would recommend getting like two to three here at consumer.”
Don't underwrite consumer-sub deals against SaaS comps — buyers price the gap
When raising debt or pitching acquirers for a CSS company, do not benchmark against B2B SaaS multiples. Consumer retention curves are structurally weaker (70% Y1 vs 90%), so debt and valuation math scale down proportionally. Crowley's M&A view: position the business honestly inside CSS norms instead of overreaching on SaaS comps and watching deals fall apart in diligence.