Monetization Newsletter

More companies struggle with quality problems than they know about. Bugs, lack of clarity, and too much friction are relatively easy problems to fix and have an immedate impact on the conversion of your product.

While it's great to hit home runs, you can also build a big business by consistently hitting singles. This we we're talking about projects that don't take long and can deliver solid conversion & LTV gains for years.

Facebook is building a subscription product that will remove ads in the EU. They are not the first company to layer a subscription product with another product line. What can we learn watching this happen?

In subscription products, the early days can feel much harder but once you have the moment, predictable growth is much easier. As someone running one of these companies, you need to plan for this journey. Its very easy to feel behind when you might not be.

Early-stage subscription companies often try to run paid media on top of a free tier. This often kills those companies. They often don't understand why.

This week we take a deep dive into the annual plan to monthly plan pricing trick and what that means for subscriptions businesses.

One of the lessons that I ​wrote about​ from my time as head of growth at Codecademy is that there are no "silver bullets" for growing a subscription business. Subscription businesses grow by getting five core things right and then aggregating hundreds of small wins across the product. The five core things are what I call the brass bullets.

Will a free product work for you? Maybe, maybe not. But if your company doesn't pass these checks, then it definitely won't

Payment Processing is hands down the most powerful and least understood growth level for subscription business. The money is there; you just have to collect it. p

When building something, its always tempting to make it more complicated in hopes of improving it. This, however, can go very very wrong.

Every company puts endless effort into their pricing page. Pricing pages do matter, but are we sure that they matter as much as everyone thinks?

Price is one of the biggest levers you have to increase revenue, how and when should you think about charging more? In this post we'll cover how I think about this problem and how to run pricing tests.

Just because you have a product that everyone wants doesn't automatically mean that you can built a great business around it. Lets take a look at some of the biggest products that failed to monetize effectively

LTV is a common concept in businesses, subscription businesses make this concept harder to apply than most people think.

Checkout pages are the most powerful place in your funnel and the only page where conversion wins turn into dollars immediately.

A common questions that I get from founders is "How how much should I discount my annual plan?"‍Most choose 20%, because everyone else seems to choose 20%. Because of that, should you choose 20%?‍ It kinda depends, but probably not.

How have the biggest brands in the world grown by giving away a "Free" product and why did they all stop?

Checkout pages are crucial for successful subscription companies as they directly impact revenue generation, with even a small increase in conversion leading to increased revenue.

How do you give enough away to capture attention while still building a powerful business?

Lowering CAC can only get you so far, the best businesses in the world find ways of increasing LTV, which allows them to afford more expensive customer acquisition.

Payments Processing and Churn mitigation are the most boring and also most powerful place to work for mature recurring revenue products

Lessons from helping grow Codecademy from 10M ARR to 50M+ ARR. The importance of early monetization, prioritizing speed, fixing barriers to payment, minimizing complexity, and focusing on improving clarity where users convert the most.