Subversive

How Cal AI Hit $50M ARR in 2 Years by Nailing Product/Channel Fit on TikTok

Daniel Heintzman is Head of Product at Cal AI, an AI-powered calorie tracking app that grew to over $50M ARR in under two years before being acquired by MyFitnessPal in December 2025. Before Cal AI, Daniel was a product designer with stints at Facebook's Growth team, Robinhood, and Mailchimp, and was later a Designer in Residence at early-stage product fund Chapter One. He started his career as a software engineer at BlackBerry and studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. Daniel also writes about product design and consumer apps on Medium. Key Takeaways * Cal AI was launched in May 2024 by two high school students, Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack, after they spent just a couple months building the initial MVP of the app, which was simple enough to fit on a few core screens. * From the beginning, they realized distribution would be the bottleneck, so they built the app to be easily understandable within a 10-second TikTok video. This led to super strong product/channel fit and was a key to rapid exponential growth. * Cal AI went all-in on a creator-first growth strategy, partnering with hundreds of fitness influencers on TikTok to generate millions of impressions. After gaining momentum, the company expanded into traditional paid ads and then affiliate marketing, using these channels to expand their reach and double down on their best-performing creator-generated content. * Later on, Cal AI added features like streaks, milestones, and progress photos that served as viral artifacts, leading to even more viral organic growth through both offline word of mouth and online posts on social media platforms. * In less than two years, Cal AI achieved $50M+ in ARR and was acquired by MyFitnessPal in late 2025, not only because of their rapid topline growth but also because their complimentary product positioning and customer base made them an especially attractive acquisition target. Daniel Heintzman * Website: https://www.calai.app/ [https://www.calai.app/] * Portfolio: https://danielheintzman.com/ [https://danielheintzman.com/] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielheintzman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielheintzman/] * X: https://x.com/heintzmandaniel [https://x.com/heintzmandaniel] Phil Carter * Website: https://www.philgcarter.com [https://www.philgcarter.com/] * Substack: philgcarter.substack.com [http://philgcarter.substack.com] * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter [http://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter] * X: x.com/philgcarter [http://x.com/philgcarter] Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/ [https://podders.io/]

How Suno Grew to $300M in ARR by Democratizing Music Creation

Mikey Shulman is the cofounder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation platform that allows anyone to create full songs with lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation from a simple text prompt. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning hire and Head of Machine Learning at Kensho, an AI company acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University, a degree in applied physics from Columbia University, and is a lifelong hobbyist musician. Key Takeaways * While working together at another AI company called Kensho, Mikey and a few colleagues who also loved music would often jam after work to blow off steam. Eventually, they decided to combine their AI knowledge and their passion for music into a new startup, with the goal of using AI to help people make music. * This started with the release of an open-source, text-to-audio model called Bark in April 2023, as well as subsequent product iteration on Discord, both of which helped validate the company’s vision and provide valuable customer feedback. * By charging users from the very beginning, Mikey and his cofounders were able to ensure that the product they were building was valuable, and that the feedback they were receiving was from credible users who were genuinely interested in not only using Suno, but paying for it to support a viable business. * After launching Suno’s web app in December 2023, the product spread virally through word of mouth. AI-generated songs proved to be the perfect viral artifact, because music naturally lends itself to riffing and remixes. This viral loop drove Suno to 2M subscribers and $300M in ARR over the course of just two years. * Suno recently released v5.5, its most powerful model yet. This also included the launch of features like Voices, Custom Models, and My Taste, all of which help creators generate music that is more powerful and more personalized than ever. * Suno has faced lawsuits from industry incumbents similar to previous music technology companies like Napster and Spotify. However, the company has already made progress settling these lawsuits on favorable terms, including a recent partnership with Warner Music Group to enable licensed AI models. Ultimately, Mikey doesn’t believe it’s a zero sum game, and hopes that Suno can expand the industry by democratizing music creation for the masses. Mikey Shulman * Website: https://suno.com/ [https://suno.com/] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeyshulman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeyshulman/] * X: https://x.com/mikeyshulman [https://x.com/mikeyshulman] Phil Carter * Website: philgcarter.com [http://www.philgcarter.com/] * Substack: philgcarter.substack.com [http://philgcarter.substack.com/] * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter [http://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter] * X: x.com/philgcarter [http://x.com/philgcarter] Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/ [https://podders.io/]

How Discord Completely Redesigned its Mobile Apps

Francesco Polizzi is the former Head of Core Experience at Discord, where he led a complete overhaul of the company’s mobile apps. He has also held roles as the Head of Product at both Outschool and Photomath (acquired by Google in 2023), and served as a PM at Dropbox and a growth engineer at Mozilla earlier in his career. Francesco recently left his role as a product executive to start his own stealth AI startup. Key Takeaways * When Francesco first joined Discord in late 2021, the company had a thriving community of avid gamers, but it was struggling to expand to a broader, more mainstream audience because new users tended to find the product confusing. * After product-driven growth efforts began to demonstrate diminishing returns, Francesco and his team realized they needed to more fundamentally redesign the company’s mobile apps to expand their appeal and make them more accessible to new users who felt overwhelmed by Discord’s complexity. * For inspiration, Francesco and his team downloaded every single messaging app they could find, compiled best practices, and cross-referenced these ideas vs. feedback from Discord users to identify high-potential opportunities. * This led to a wholesale redesign of Discord’s iPhone and Android apps, including: * A voice messaging feature that increased overall message volume * A username change that increased the success rate of outbound friend requests by making it easier to find a friend by their username * An update to the profile tab that increased customization, paving the way for additional monetization opportunities through Discord’s Nitro and Nitro Basic premium subscription plans, as well as ad hoc purchases * Ultimately, these changes simplified Discord’s mobile apps, improved the new user experience, fixed a couple important bugs, and accelerated revenue growth Francesco Polizzi: * Website: https://discord.com/ [https://discord.com/] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescostl/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescostl/] * X: https://x.com/Francescostl [https://x.com/Francescostl] Phil Carter: * Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/ [https://www.philgcarter.com/] * Substack: philgcarter.substack.com [http://philgcarter.substack.com/] * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter [http://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter] * X: x.com/philgcarter [http://x.com/philgcarter] Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/ [https://podders.io/]

How ElevenLabs is Building Consumer Apps on its $11B Voice AI Platform

Jack McDermott is a growth lead at ElevenLabs, where he leads growth for its mobile products — including the ElevenLabs app and ElevenReader, a consumer app built on top of the company’s cutting-edge voice AI platform. Prior to ElevenLabs, he led growth teams at Chegg, where he focused on the company’s skills growth and product during a period of rapid change as AI began reshaping the education category. He started his career in growth at Panorama Education (YC’13). Jack has developed a strong perspective on building and scaling AI-native products, particularly at the intersection of core product, growth, and monetization. Key Takeaways * After being founded in April 2022 and launched in January 2023, ElevenLabs has rapidly grown into one of the largest and most successful AI companies in the world with a Voice AI platform that has already been widely adopted by individuals and companies around the world. * While the company’s core business is an AI platform, it has started to launch vertical apps on top of this foundation, including the ElevenLabs app for creators who want to use ElevenLabs APIs to generate content and the ElevenReader app for consumers who want to consume audio content with custom voices. * After the company launched ElevenReader in June 2024, Jack and his team initially found traction through bottoms-up marketing tactics on platforms like Reddit and Discord that were great for attracting enthusiastic early adopters. Once the company got traction, it turned to more scalable channels like TikTok, where it gained rapid adoption among readers in BookTok communities. * Partnerships have also played a key role in ElevenReader’s growth story. The company did a massive partnership with Melania Trump tied to her new memoir called “Melania,” using ElevenLabs APIs to translate the book into dozens of languages that made it more accessible around the globe. * More recently, Jack and his team have been experimenting with different approaches to subscription pricing and packaging across both the ElevenLabs and ElevenReader apps. Importantly, they have learned that the optimal monetization strategies look very different across these two products, as well as for users making purchase decisions in their native mobile apps vs. on the web. Jack McDermott: * Website: https://elevenreader.io/ [https://elevenreader.io/] * Blog: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/authors/jack-mcdermott [https://elevenlabs.io/blog/authors/jack-mcdermott] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackrmcdermott/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackrmcdermott/] * X: https://x.com/Jackmc [https://x.com/Jackmc] Phil Carter: * Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/ [https://www.philgcarter.com/] * Substack: philgcarter.substack.com [http://philgcarter.substack.com] * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter [http://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter] * X: x.com/philgcarter [http://x.com/philgcarter] Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/ [https://podders.io/]

Insights from RevenueCat’s 2026 State of Subscription Apps Report

Rik Haandrikman is the VP of Growth at RevenueCat, the world’s largest SaaS platform for subscription apps that need help powering in-app purchases, managing customer data, and growing revenue. Prior to joining RevenueCat in 2022, Rik held growth leadership roles at Bitrise and Divitel, and also founded his own eCommerce company called Gimmerce that leveraged printing technology to allow for rapid, cheap, and scalable personalization of products to target niche groups of consumers. Key Takeways * Subscription apps are becoming a "winner-take-most market,” with the top 10% of apps growing >300% YoY vs. the median only growing 5% YoY. * AI has driven a 7x increase in new app launches from 2022 - 2026, but apps launched before 2020 still generate 69% of all revenue. * AI apps generate 41% more revenue per payer but churn 30% faster, highlighting that many of these apps are still figuring out retention. * 80-90% of trial starts and half of conversions now happen on Day 0, which means that new user onboarding flows are more important than ever. * Hard paywalls convert 5x better vs. freemium (10.7% vs. 2.1% install to paid), but after one year, retention rates look nearly identical. * North America continues to be king, with metrics like D60 RPI and Y1 RLTV ranging from 2.5 - 5x higher vs. the worst-performing regions. Rik Haandrikman: * RevenueCat Website: https://www.revenuecat.com [https://www.revenuecat.com/] * 2026 SOSA Report: https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps/ [https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps/] * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhaandrikman/ [https://www.linkedin.com/in/hhaandrikman/] * X: https://x.com/HHaandr [https://x.com/HHaandr] Phil Carter: * Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/ [https://www.philgcarter.com/] * Substack: philgcarter.substack.com [http://philgcarter.substack.com] * LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter [http://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter] * X: x.com/philgcarter [http://x.com/philgcarter] Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/ [https://podders.io/]