Introducing the Elemental Growth Newsletter

Frameworks, strategies, and tactics to grow your consumer subscription business.

Growth is magic...

It was early 2020, about a year since I joined Quizlet to build its growth team, and this was the message I was delivering to executives, my team, and the rest of the company.

The message felt risky. After all, growth is supposed to be a science, not a dark art. The best growth teams apply the scientific method to systematically grow their businesses. They use rigorous processes to develop growth hypotheses and then run A/B tests to validate or invalidate them. Business impact is earned through hundreds or even thousands of product and marketing experiments, not with a magic wand.

Yet despite the risks, I wanted to deliver this message for two reasons:

1. When I joined Quizlet, we had one small but mighty growth pod lovingly known as the “Magic Team.” It had a unique ethos that I wanted to preserve as we scaled.

2. I’ve always loved fantasy and grew up reading Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings. How many chances was I going to get to bring my love of magic to work?! 🧙‍♂️

Fortunately, everyone loved it. Of course, it helped that our team was delivering wins. Wins led to impact, impact led to credibility, and credibility led to more resources. Over the next 3 years, we scaled the growth team from one pod to four, assigning each a magical element to reflect its unique role in bringing Quizlet to students everywhere:

🌬 Acquisition: Spreading the magic of Quizlet around the world.

🔥 Activation: Blazing paths for new users to unlock Quizlet's full potential.

💧 Retention: Helping students deepen their learning on Quizlet.

🌱 Monetization: Helping subscribers grow into flourishing lifelong learners.

I’m a nerd, I know! But hey, where better to be a nerd than at an EdTech company? 🤓

During the 3.5 years I was at Quizlet, the growth and monetization teams played a key role in accelerating international user growth, boosting domestic subscriber growth, and increasing average revenue per user (ARPU). This contributed to Quizlet raising its $30 million Series C round at a $1 billion valuation in the middle of the pandemic, and to the company’s ascendancy from #241 to #192 on Deloitte’s Fast 500 List.

Was it magic? No. It took a great team, a lot of hard work, hundreds of product and marketing experiments, and a bit of good luck (yes, the pandemic did provide a tailwind for us in some areas, although it also provided headwinds in many others). But culture counts when you’re at a startup working long hours, and ours was magical. So we embraced it, and I believe it played an important role in our success. ⭐

Fast forward to 2023, and after 7 years of leading product and growth teams at three $1B+ companies - Faire, Quizlet, and Ibotta - I decided to take a leap of faith and start my own growth advising business. My thesis was simple: Having spent several years building and scaling Quizlet’s growth and monetization teams, I found that I loved consumer subscription businesses and believed in their potential, but felt they were being underserved by the growth advisor community. I set out on a mission to help Seed - Series C consumer subscription businesses accelerate growth and achieve their full potential, and in an attempt to borrow some of the magic from my time at Quizlet, I decided to call it Elemental Growth.

I'm glad I took the leap. Over the last year, I've been able to:

• Work with almost a dozen promising consumer subscription startups

• Maintain a >80% NPS and an average client tenure of 7.5 months

• Launch a top-rated course on Consumer Subscription Growth

Today, I'm taking another leap and launching the Elemental Growth Newsletter, where I'll share thoughts and insights on how to grow consumer subscription businesses. This first post is just for fun, but hopefully it’s helped you get to know me a bit better. The rest will be very practical, focused on frameworks, strategies, and tactics that I’ve developed through my client work and refined in my course to help leaders at consumer subscription startups grow their businesses faster.

If you’re curious, please subscribe! You can expect to hear from me every month or so. For more frequent short-form updates, you can follow me on LinkedIn and X. I can’t promise you any magic, just lessons I’ve learned from lots of hard earned experience. But let’s be honest - that’s where the real magic comes from anyway.