The Origins of the Mobile Life Cycle Program

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Andy Carvell is the Partner & Co-Founder of Phiture, a mobile growth agency. Here he has worked with some of the biggest apps on the App Store, including Headspace, Spotify, Triller, and VSCO.

Prior to founding Phiture, Andy worked on the marketing and growth teams at SoundCloud. His team built SoundCloud's activity notification system, which delivered over 500 million pushes per month, and increased M1 retention by five percentage points in its first few months of operation. 

Andy has been in the mobile industry since the late ‘90s, when he started working at Nokia. Andy has a deep interest in technology, strategy and the execution of ideas.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• Andy’s user retention techniques
• The most overlooked component in marketing your app
• How to optimize your customer’s App Store experience
• Andy’s formula for maximizing your app’s notification strategy

Links & Resources

• SoundCloud
• Headspace
• Spotify
• Triller
• VSCO
• Nokia
• RevenueCat
• Salesforce
• Intercom
• Elevate
• KiwiCo
• Braze
• Leanplum
• Iterable

Andy Carvell’s Links

• Phiture
• Phiture’s Mobile Growth Stack
• Andy on Twitter: @andy_carvell
• Andy on LinkedIn
• Work at Phiture

Follow us on Twitter:

• David Barnard
• Jacob Eiting
• RevenueCat
• Sub Club

Episode Transcript

Andy: 00:00:00

So the impact that you can drive with notifications is reach, times relevance, times frequency. What we learned from the time at SoundCloud was not all notifications are equal, and the really killer ones that are going to really supercharge your business, have high reach, high relevance and high frequency.

And then, then you’re in that golden quadrant.

David: 00:00:35

Welcome to the Sub Club podcast. I’m your host, David Bernard. And with me is always Jacob Eiting. Hello, Jacob.

Jacob: 00:00:42

Hi, David. 

David: 00:00:43

It’s a thundering in your neck of the woods, I hear. 

Jacob: 00:00:46

It’s, you know, it’s cleared up now. I think we’re gonna make it.

David: 00:00:50

I’ve got a plumber. Our guests might have some construction workers. It’s going to be a fun one today!

Jacob: 00:00:55

Is it, David? You’re breaching the magic of podcasting and it’s going to get audited out.

David: 00:01:01

All right. Speaking of our guests, our guest today is Andy Carvell, partner and co-founder of Phiture, a mobile growth agency. At Phiture, Andy has worked with some of the biggest apps on the App Store, including Headspace, Spotify, Triller, and VSCO.

Prior to find founding Phiture, Andy worked on the marketing and growth teams at SoundCloud.

Welcome to the podcast, Andy.

Andy: 00:01:23

Thanks, David. A real pleasure. Thanks for inviting me on. Excited to be here.

David: 00:01:27

Yeah. So, you and I were chatting a little bit about your background as I was kind of prepping your bio, and you shared a really fun anecdote. So, I think I’m like, “Old man in the mobile space,” you know, or Jacob and I both; we both had apps on the App Store in 2008, you know, we were early. But you started in mobile a little, just a few years before that. 

Andy: 00:01:52

Just a little bit more. 

David: 00:01:53

Tell us about that. You were at Nokia making games in 1999.

Andy: 00:01:58

Yeah, right out of university, I graduated computer science in ‘99. I always wanted to be making games, and I was applying for roles in the games industry, and then the agent that was kind of helping me find those said, “Hey, there’s this company Nokia. They make mobile phones.”

I didn’t own a mobile phone at that point. None of my friends did, but it was just kind of reaching the tipping point, and they wanted to put games on these things, and I’m like, okay, that’s sounds interesting.

I went along to the interview. I really was very kind of amazed at the, you know, the R and D center there. It was like, like pretty space age, you know, they were working on some real next level shit.

And, I was actually pretty excited by the idea of like cramming, you know, decent games into like 16 kilobytes, which is what I had to play with building embedded games on a black and white 84 by 48 pixel display.

Jacob: 00:02:55

So, I was going to ask, are we talking like Snake, or are we talking like Java level stuff?

Andy: 00:03:00

It was pre Java. It was an embedded game. So, I was coding in C in Assembly, and I basically had to like build the whole game from start to finish. We had this shared designer who did the pixel art, and I had to cram it into 16K and make it fun. Yeah.

I wrote a pretty game called Space Impact there, which was released on the 3310 phone, which I think wasn’t available in America. But in the rest of world a lot of people played that game. It was like the first, side-scrolling arcade, shoot-them-up, on a mobile.

David: 00:03:30

That is amazing. 

Jacob: 00:03:31

Well, it’s pretty incredible. Just even think like the iPhone wasn’t that far behind that right? Like you were doing 16K assembly and C, and like eight years later, we were going to have like open GL driven games. So just pretty wild.

Andy: 00:03:51

Yeah, it’s moved on a lot.

David: 00:03:53

So after Nokia, you spent some time at SoundCloud, and there’s a couple of things you did at SoundCloud that I wanted to dig into, because it seems like you’ve kind of continued that work at Phiture, and it’s really relevant to our audience in subscriptions. So, one of those is the mobile life cycle program, and this is something I think so much about.

There’s such a huge story that’s hard to tell, and hard to really understand. It’s something like,...