Driving scalable app growth and profitability through marketing & monetization strategies

Most app teams look for growth in a new channel, a new tool or, increasingly, a new AI workflow. Mackenzie Quinn, founder of Quinn Strategic Consulting, argues the bigger unlock is far less glamorous: getting engineering, product, UA and retention to work from the same picture of the customer. Quinn spent years on the brand side, leading mobile app initiatives before founding her consultancy. That vantage point shaped what she now calls her “customer growth architecture”: a w

For more than a decade, Canva has been the poster child for consumer software done right: a product that turned design from a specialist skill into something anyone could do, used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. So when CEO Melanie Perkins told staff this week that 1,271 people, or 22% of the company, would be affected by layoffs, role changes and relocations, the news landed well beyond Canva’s offices. It is the company’s first mass layoff in its thirteen-year

This week TikTok added a restaurant guide. In August it was reported to be building payments into DMs. In May it started letting you book hotels. Each launch on its own looks like a feature. Together they look like a plan: TikTok wants to be the app you never need to leave.

Subscriptions live and die on behaviour, not features. Last week at Appsforum San Francisco, Daniel Saxon, Senior Product Manager for Subscriber Acquisition at CNN, explained how small quirks in human psychology shape conversion, average revenue per user (ARPU) and retention, and how product teams can use them. The subscription page that shouldn’t have worked Saxon opened with a well-known experiment built on an old Economist subscription page. Students were shown two options