User retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on day one.
Finding hidden growth opportunities in your product
October 05, 2025
Featuring: Albert Cheng (Head of Growth, Chess.com)
11 quotes · 10 insights
Watch Full EpisodeConsumer subscription lacks B2B's natural advantages
AI amplifies judgment, doesn't replace it
By the nature of having these AI tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too, right? It's like just having a thing that you can converse with that you feel comfortable in makes a huge difference.
Growth means moving users to value, not just metrics
Growth as the job is to connect users to the value of your product. Growth sometimes gets this reputation that it's just pure metrics hacking.
High agency is the ultimate hiring criterion
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. Sometimes experience could be a crutch, especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI.
Free tiers must show your full magic
What if we actually sampled a number of different paid suggestions and interspersed them to free users across their writing? All of a sudden, people were seeing Grammarly as a much more powerful tool than they were before.
Try to have your free product be a reflection of everything that your product can offer you. Obviously to an extent there's some costs involved with some of the paid features, but it generally will pay for itself if you're able to put your best foot forward.
Meet users where they already are
As opposed to going against human intuition and trying to get them to share stuff that they otherwise wouldn't, lean into it more, actually grab the moments where users are already organically screenshotting and make those much, much, much better.
Curiosity beats credentials
By the nature of having these AI tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked. And I think you see this in ChatGPT too, right? It's like just having a thing that you can converse with that you feel comfortable in makes a huge difference.
60% week-1 retention or you don't have product-market fit
When you have your D one retention somewhere around the 30 or 40% mark, that's quite solid I think for a consumer app. If it's much lower than that, then sometimes I might question the intent of the user.
Build systems, not one-offs
The system matters just as much as any given experiment, probably even more. I think starting with a growth model, so you have an understanding of how your company grows in the first place and which channels you're going to leverage is critical.
Human behavior is predictably irrational—use it
80% of people that review their games actually do so after a win. And that's really counterintuitive to when we initially built the feature. We thought that people would want to use it after losses.