Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
10 tactics from Eric Crowley
Why AI Probably Won't Kill Your App (But Ignoring It Will)
Watch the full episode“I wouldn't be shocked to see everyone having something between 15 to 20 in the next two to three years especially as new categories came up right like four years ago no one had an AI buddy in their pocket nobody now right it's one of the fastest growing companies of all time mostly consumer.”
Subscription fatigue is overplayed — the real ceiling is 15–20 subscriptions, not 3
Crowley's data shows consumers are rational, not subscription-fatigued: they cancel things they don't use and willingly pay for things that save time or add real value. Today's average subscriber count is 6–8 and trending toward 15–20. The ceiling isn't wallet exhaustion — it's product quality and genuine utility. Every category delivering consistent value earns its slot.
“the big thing we've discovered is Google wants the number one source of traffic to the internet is now no longer the sole default right so if you're a builder or a marketer right and your job is to get your product in front of someone seo your website your content that was it and that fractured a lot over the last two years.”
SEO is the first channel fracturing — AI has broken the 30-year Google discovery moat
Crowley compares AI-driven SEO disruption to the shift from desktop to mobile: a total rebuild is required, but existing SEO cannot be let to decay. Traffic drops of 30–40% year-over-year are hitting major publishers. Consumer subscription founders need LLM-native discoverability strategies now, even while maintaining Google SEO, because the two audiences and intents are increasingly distinct.
“what RUA did is they enabled people to go from being on the couch to running a 5K to running a 10K and now they're an athlete so for Strava that's a massive TAM expansion number one right so now all of a sudden you can actually be for people that are not athletes but want to be an athlete.”
Runna/Strava is the blueprint: be the TAM expansion a giant cannot build internally
Crowley advised the Runna sale to Strava. The acquisition thesis was TAM expansion plus a second pricing tier: Strava had strong retention but weak tiered pricing, while Runna onboarded people who weren't yet athletes. Rather than building this internally — which Strava couldn't do without cannibalizing their identity — they acquired it. The lesson: build for the consumer a giant's core user base doesn't yet include.
“what I tell founders is build a really great business that consumers love just that's your northstar right everything else will work out and let's just say you're running it maybe it wasn't going really well and it didn't work out with Strava there'd be another suitor you know why because people loved the app.”
Build something consumers love — acquisition rationale will find you on its own
Crowley's advice to founders tempted to engineer toward an acquisition: it doesn't work because acquisitions require precise company-to-company matching. The only durable strategy is consumer love — if the product is genuinely beloved, strategic rationale will come from multiple directions. Building for a specific acquirer is a bet with terrible odds; building for consumer love is a bet with compounding optionality.
“the ability to do product testing message testing right content creation is just off the charts faster than it was two years ago right and best of breed businesses are quickly finding like they don't have to hire 20 marketers to go out and create content they can basically spin up a 100 different versions test it really quickly.”
AI tailwinds: faster creative testing, feature velocity, and hardware-anchored moats
Crowley lists three AI tailwinds compounding for consumer subscription founders: faster creative and message testing without large marketing teams; AI-assisted feature development letting smaller teams ship more; and hardware-anchored moats (Aura, Whoop) where proprietary sensor data creates defensibility ChatGPT cannot replicate. The common thread is that AI helps build better products faster while also helping discover and defend distribution.
“the one thing that people don't understand about a lot of the apps that we know and love is they are places other people are putting their content into that make the apps better and then we are happily contributing our content our energy into those apps to make it better for us and for other users and that is something I don't think AI apps have done yet.”
Community and brand are the moats AI cannot replicate — users investing content in your app compounds over time
Crowley identifies user-generated community as the defensibility layer AI platforms currently lack. When users invest data, achievements, and social graph into an app, switching costs compound over time. ChatGPT can simulate a running coach; it cannot replicate four years of your training log, your run club connections, or the badges earned inside Strava. Community-building is a strategic moat worth designing for deliberately.
“I'd say like the last two years every one of my clients and I do mean everyone is building web funnels and I think one they're just not as worried about Apple coming after them or being mean right and we've all heard stories about product updates getting jammed up.”
Every serious-scale app is now building web funnels — fear of Apple retaliation has faded
Crowley reports a near-universal shift among large consumer subscription apps toward web payment funnels, driven by two factors: Apple's enforcement posture softened after losing the Epic lawsuit, and the business case at scale is compelling — getting back 15–20% margin at $100–200M revenue is multi-million dollar EBITDA improvement. For smaller apps the calculation is less clear, but the direction of travel is unmistakable.
“they will buy an app or a business right a subscription business and they will fire 97% of those employees within the first month and just think about that concept right effectively they're not shutting down the business they're just lifting the business off whatever infrastructure and team was done and they're putting it onto their existing team.”
Bending Spoons runs 600 people across a growing portfolio — that's operational leverage tech has never seen
Crowley breaks down the Bending Spoons playbook as extreme operational leverage: a fixed elite team of ~600 runs an ever-growing portfolio by applying shared infrastructure, pricing expertise, and marketing systems to each acquisition. The 97% staff reduction isn't business destruction — it's elimination of redundant overhead. The surviving business runs leaner with more resources than it had before.
“Strava for pets is something we've thought about for a while and if you think about like long-term TAMs big waves that are impacting the world and health and wellness is a big one and then treating our pets like our kids is another one those things are not changing right and they're only going to accelerate.”
Pets and digital focus are the next billion-dollar consumer subscription categories
Crowley identifies two underserved TAM expansions: pet health tech (activity tracking, AI-driven insurance pricing, wellness monitoring for the $100B+ pet care market) and digital focus/screen time management. Both share the profile he looks for: massive pre-existing consumer spend plus a clear software layer that can extract subscription value.
“the future will be built by those who combine AI's power with enduring human insights and design creating products that people not only use but refuse to live without and choose to evangelize to their friends.”
The future belongs to founders who combine AI power with enduring human insight and design
Crowley's summary of the AI era for consumer subscription founders: AI is not a moat, but using AI to build better products faster while layering in human design intuition and community is. The apps that win combine AI-assisted development speed with the irreplicable craft of deep consumer insight — products that inspire evangelism, not just usage. That combination is what strategic acquirers pay premium multiples for.