How to grow a subscription business

Yuriy Timen is a full-time growth advisor who spent roughly eight and a half years at Grammarly leading growth, and has since advised consumer and prosumer subscription companies such as Canva, Airtable, and Otter. The conversation covers how to identify which growth engine (virality, SEO, or paid) fits a subscription business, how to evaluate and time-box each channel, and how the shifting funding and attribution environment changes growth priorities.

01Key learnings

• Give every channel a real test before judging it; many teams wrongly conclude YouTube or other tactics don't work because they were never designed to succeed.
• Virality works best when the product has inherent network effects, where utility grows with more users, rather than trying to manufacture them later.
• Treat SEO as a 3-month time-boxed experiment, favoring angles with a unique editorial, programmatic, or data advantage, and buy a cheap audit before committing.
• Paid acquisition only makes sense when conversion and retention are strong enough to pay back quickly; under 5% free-to-paid conversion is usually a warning sign.
• Focus on one primary growth engine with guardrails and rapid iteration, rather than spreading a small team across many channels that each get too little time.
• Early-stage companies should keep doubling down on their working channel instead of diversifying prematurely; later-stage companies relying 90%+ on one channel should start diversifying.
• Invest in onboarding for complex prosumer products; Yuriy has seen two to four times activation gains at early stages and 20-30% lifts later.
• Invest in customer research and interviews consistently, while matching attribution and incrementality investment to company stage to avoid both underinvesting and overinvesting.

02Frameworks mentioned

Summary and takeaways written by PM Atlas; quotes are short excerpts. © the original author.