Founder Playbook · Sub Club by RevenueCat
11 tactics from Phil Carter
Using Subscription App Benchmarks to Make Better Growth Decisions
Watch the full episode“The way I think of benchmarks is they're one tool and a very big toolkit of things that Founders CEOs Indie developers product and marketing leaders can use to get a directional high level view of where they're performing better or worse than other peers in their set.”
Benchmarks are directional, not definitive — use them to filter ideas, not make decisions
Benchmarks can surface where a company is over- or underperforming relative to peers, but they cannot tell you why or what to do about it. Carter's framework: use benchmarks to eliminate wrong priorities and focus engineering and marketing bandwidth on the right problems — but always pair data with product intuition. The danger is treating them as a decision engine rather than an input to judgment.
“What we hand waving call execution is really judgment... great execution isn't just doing work isn't being good at programming or good at marketing it's a filtering of ideas into the good ideas and then executing on those.”
Execution is judgment — benchmarks help filter the infinite idea backlog down to good bets
Carter reframes the 'execution vs ideas' debate: the real skill is filtering which ideas are worth pursuing given your current metrics gaps. Benchmarks make that filtering faster and more defensible. For a solo founder especially, the problem is rarely a shortage of ideas — it's having a reliable method to pick the right one, and benchmark gaps are the map that points where to invest next.
“One of the first things that I worked on with that client was figuring out how to get them off of the drug of paid acquisition and how to acquire more users through word of mouth or SEO or other non-paid channels.”
Over-reliance on paid acquisition is a drug — benchmarks expose organic deficit before it kills you
A client was best-in-class at Facebook acquisition but nearly all traffic came from paid channels. Blended LTV/CAC looked great but hid a critical fragility. Carter's value delivery benchmarks flagged the organic deficit before it became existential. The fix: invest in word of mouth, SEO, and content before paid efficiency peaks and forces a cold-turkey withdrawal from performance spend.
“If you haven't registered an account it's very unlikely that you're going to pay for a subscription... if you don't have their email you can't win them back if they don't sign up you can't do so many of the other parts of value delivery and value capture.”
Account registration is your last chance to build a durable relationship with every install
Sign-up / account registration rate is Carter's first upstream proxy metric in the Subscription Value Loop — not because it directly drives revenue, but because without an account you lose the email, the push channel, and all re-engagement ability. Benchmarked from survey data across 600 apps, it signals the maximum fraction of installs that can ever convert to paid.
“Their annual subscriber retention outperform their peer set but their monthly subscriber retention underperform their peer set... we should look at our annual subscription price relative to monthly and potentially offer a more generous annual subscription discount and run additional optimizations on our pay wall to try to nudge more users from monthly into annual.”
When annual retention beats monthly but monthly lags — aggressively push annual plans
A client's annual subscribers retained at above-benchmark rates while monthly subscribers churned faster than peers. Carter's response: widen the annual-to-monthly price spread and add paywall nudges toward annual. The diagnostic is replicable — compare your annual vs monthly retention curves against category benchmarks to discover whether the business is systematically under-leveraging the annual plan.
“The free product is so good do I actually need to pay for the premium product? and what is my willingness to pay for that premium product.”
Giving too much away free collapses conversion — fitness apps especially over-deliver in free tier
A fitness client had below-average subscriber conversion rates and below-average pricing — and a subscription survey revealed the root cause: the free product was so compelling that users couldn't articulate the reason to pay. Carter cites Strava as a known sufferer of the same pattern. The fix isn't adding premium features; it's moving meaningful value behind the paywall or reducing what's available for free.
“I actually think it's the one that most often gets overlooked right because especially early stage companies you have a lot of product driven Founders they want to over deliver value for their customers... at some point you have to capture resources back from your best users.”
Value capture is the most-overlooked step — product-focused founders must eventually monetize
Carter identifies value capture (trial start rate, trial conversion, pricing, plan mix, gross margin) as the underinvested step of the Subscription Value Loop. Product-minded founders default to shipping more features but skip optimizing the monetization funnel. The tool benchmarks all value-capture metrics against 30,000+ apps so founders can see exactly how their paywall and pricing stack up against peers.
“Very few people are going to be P95 on every single metric along the entire chain usually you're going to have a strength somewhere in the chain that you're the real outlier in that and that makes the business work even if you're below Benchmark on another metric.”
No company is P95 across every metric — find the one outlier strength and build around it
Tinder compensates for high churn by being best-in-class at conversion and multi-tier monetization. Duolingo ran below-average monetization for years while building an unassailable user base. Carter's prescription: be 'good enough' across most metrics (within striking distance of P50), and identify the one metric where performance is genuinely exceptional. Benchmarks help surface which lever is already winning.
“If you're an indie developer that's just getting started I would say focus on p50 you want to be better than average if you're already a venture funded startup and you know you feel like you've got a pretty strong product already you probably want to focus on p75 or even P95.”
Stage changes which benchmark tier to target — indie aims for P50, venture-scale targets P95
Carter explicitly calibrates benchmark ambition to company stage. A solo dev optimizing toward P95 wastes cycles chasing benchmarks set by teams 10× larger. P50 is the healthy target for a growing small app; P75-P95 is appropriate once you've raised money and need exceptional performance to justify valuation. Misalignment between stage and benchmark tier leads to either false confidence or paralysis.
“We ran a subscription survey that confirmed a lot of the same stuff that we had seen in the subscription value calculator but got into a lot more detail on the specifics of what needed to change in order to shore up some of those metrics.”
Subscription surveys complement benchmarks — quant shows where, qual shows why
For the edtech client, the calculator flagged low conversion, high price, and poor paid ad efficiency. A follow-up subscription survey confirmed the same diagnoses and revealed the specific onboarding and paywall changes needed. Carter's methodology: benchmarks first to triage across the loop, qualitative survey second to prescribe the precise intervention. Neither tool alone is sufficient.
“The first problem is can I actually trust this data... the second order problem is okay even if you're able to find a reliable source of Benchmark data often times it's too generic... the third order problem is okay even if your benchmarks are accurate and specific enough to be actionable they're only a jumping off point.”
Three problems with bad benchmarks: accuracy, specificity, and actionability — in that order
Carter sequences the three ways benchmarks fail: they're inaccurate (most publicly-available numbers), they're too generic (global averages across all categories), or they're accurate and specific but still just a starting point that can't prescribe actions. The Subscription Value Loop calculator attempts to solve problems one and two by using 30,000+ apps and category/tier filters — but problem three always requires founder judgment.