When Melissa Cash and her cofounders looked at children's apps, they saw two extremes: addictive games designed to maximize screen time and educational apps built around rote memorization.

So they built something different.

Pok Pok is an Apple Design Award-winning app offering open-ended, Montessori-inspired play - more like a box of LEGOs than a traditional mobile game. 

Previously, Melissa designed products for babies and toddlers at Disney and now also works with companies like Solobo Toys and Inkwell Games to create thoughtful play experiences for kids. 

Tune in to learn: 

• Why Pok Pok deliberately removed levels, rewards, streaks, and every other addictive gaming mechanic from its app
• How Melissa thinks about building for kids while selling to parents 
• Why micro-creators are outperforming influencers and traditional paid marketing campaigns for consumer subscription apps
• Why the company waited over two years before launching on Android 
• Why the key to building technology for children isn't necessarily less screen time but better screen time

Melissa Cash:

• Website: https://playpokpok.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/melissa-cash/ 
• X: https://x.com/melissacash_

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

"If you wait until it's perfect, you're too late."

This was Tyler Denk’s attitude when he took the growth engine he had built as employee #2 at Morning Brew - the newsletter he helped scale to >3M subscribers and a $75M acquisition - and productized it into a new startup called beehiiv.

He launched with a fraction of the features his competitors had, but built an entire process around seeking out criticism, using it to inform the company’s product roadmap, and then executing relentlessly to delight beehiiv’s customers.

This ethos, paired with a 0% take rate model that counterpositions beehiiv vs. Substack, has propelled the company to $30M+ in ARR in just a few years, and it's not stopping there.

beehiiv’s recent product launches have taken it beyond newsletters to websites, podcasts, and online communities, positioning it to be the operating system for the entire content economy.

In this episode

• Why Tyler built beehiiv on a 0% take rate and calls Substack's model "predatory"
• How building in public has become a secret weapon that propels beehiiv’s growth
• Features in beehiiv’s recent launch, including Community, Copilot, and a new visual editor
• Why Tyler believes AI will ultimately make human-created content more valuable

Tyler Denk

• Website: https://www.beehiiv.com/ 
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tyler-denk/ 
• X: https://x.com/denk_tweets

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Most AI coaching apps are just ChatGPT wrapped in a personality. Raj Singh and Mark Manson built Purpose to prove there's a better way.

Raj, cofounder and CEO of Purpose and previously the founder of GoMoment (acquired by Revinate), explains how they engineered an AI mentor that over 40% of users already call "life-changing" less than a year into the company's existence.

In this episode

• The prototype that revealed AI could outperform a $300/hour therapist
• How a poker game led to Mark Manson becoming a cofounder
• The playbook that took Purpose from launch to $1M ARR in two weeks
• Why Purpose initially stayed founder-funded to protect its mission

Raj Singh

• Website: https://www.purpose.app
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rajsinghla/
• X: https://x.com/RajSinghLA

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Sam Chaudhary is the cofounder and CEO of ClassDojo, an education platform used in roughly 95% of US K-8 schools and by tens of millions of children across 180 countries around the world. Born in the UK and raised in Wales and Abu Dhabi, he studied economics at the University of Cambridge, taught at Charterhouse, and advised governments on education reform at McKinsey before leaving to build something himself. In 2011, he cofounded ClassDojo with Liam Don after the two met at a Startup Weekend and went through the Imagine K12 accelerator together. Under Sam's leadership, ClassDojo grew bottoms-up, teacher by teacher, into one of the most widely used education products in the world, reached profitability, and is now expanding into kids’ gaming and AI with Dojo Tutor, Dojo Islands, and Dojo Spark. He was named EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2025 for the Bay Area.

Key Takeaways

• After meeting at a startup weekend, joining a startup accelerator, and deciding to build an education company together, Sam and his cofounder Liam spoke to hundreds of teachers and even spent time teaching summer school themselves to deeply understand and empathize with the needs of their target customers.
• Their first product - a simple tool that allowed teachers to give positive feedback to their students - quickly went viral, resulting in over ten thousand teacher registrations by the time Sam and Liam had graduated from the Imagine K12 startup accelerator.
• After digging into usage data from their early adopters, Sam and Liam realized that the teachers who were engaging and retaining on ClassDojo over the long-term were those who had decided to not only use the product with their students, but also with those students’ parents. This three-sided network effect became the key to not only driving cost-efficient organic growth, but also extremely strong user retention rates.
• After years of only offering a free product, ClassDojo finally monetized its business through ClassDojo Plus, a premium subscription that offered parents additional features to enrich their children’s education. It maintained a freemium model so that most users could continue using the product for free, which bolstered teacher trust and preserved the strength of the app’s core organic growth loops, but with enough premium value behind the paywall to convert 5%+ of users into paying subscribers.
• ClassDojo is now used in ~95% of US K-8 schools and by tens of millions of students across 180 countries worldwide. Recently, the company has leveraged its scale and network effects to launch three new products - Tutor, Islands, and Sparks - that use AI and gamification to deliver additional value to parents and students.
• Looking ahead to 2030, ClassDojo’s mission continues to be helping every child thrive by giving them access to a great education they love at an increasingly low cost. Sam believes AI will play a key role in realizing this mission by reducing the need for human capital, thereby making education more affordable and accessible to all.

Sam Chaudhary

• Website: https://www.classdojo.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samchaudhary/
• X: https://x.com/samchaudhary_

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Esan Durrani is the cofounder and CEO of StudyFetch, an AI-native learning platform used by more than 7 million students worldwide. Esan launched StudyFetch in 2023 with his cofounder and childhood friend Ryan Trattner to build an AI tutor that helps students truly learn rather than shortcut their way to easy answers, ultimately earning both of them Forbes 30 Under 30 awards in the education category. The company has raised $11.5M from Owl Ventures and College Board, partnered with NVIDIA and the White House on K-12 AI education, and recently launched Honen, an agentic learning platform for enterprise workforce development. Before StudyFetch, Esan was a serious drummer who played in more than 500 live performances.

Key Takeaways

• After trying several other startup ideas with his cofounder and childhood friend Ryan Trattner, including an AI-powered essay writing tool that they ultimately scrapped because they felt like it was helping students cheat, Esan and Ryan founded StudyFetch in September 2023 as an AI-powered platform to truly help students learn.
• Unlike other AI learning tools like ChatGPT, as well as a previous era of EdTech platforms like Chegg and CourseHero, StudyFetch intentionally does not give students easy answers. Instead, it provides students with highly personalized learning tools including an AI-powered tutor as well as study plans, flashcards, quizzes, and practice tests that are all calibrated to a student’s specific course materials and their understanding of those materials.
• Not only do 92% of active StudyFetch users report earning higher grades while reducing their average study time by 30%, but multiple case studies have shown that StudyFetch most benefits students with learning differences, which helps raise the lowest grades in a class and compress the achievement gap experienced by underperforming students.
• One key to StudyFetch’s growth has been their student creator program, where the company has used an “army of accounts” strategy partnering with hundreds of TikTok and Instagram microinfluencers to generate 150+ short-form videos per day, ultimately driving over 2 billion social media views and helping StudyFetch scale to over 7 million registered students.
• Recently, StudyFetch announced the launch of Honen, its new B2B skillbuilding platform that aims to help companies more efficiently and effectively train their workforce. StudyFetch has partnered with NVIDIA on Honen to get 250k+ high schoolers on a path to AI literacy.

Esan Durrani

• StudyFetch Website: https://www.studyfetch.com/
• Honen Website: https://honen.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esan-durrani-576b611b4/
• X: https://x.com/esandurrani

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Eugenia Kuyda is the founder and CEO of Wabi, an AI-powered personal software platform that lets anyone create, share, and remix mini apps in minutes. Before Wabi, Eugenia founded Replika, one of the world’s first AI companion apps, which she grew to 40M+ users over the course of a decade. A native of Moscow, Eugenia began her career as a journalist before pivoting to tech and founding the YC-backed startup Luka in 2014, which ultimately pivoted into Replika. She holds a Master’s in Journalism from MGIMO and an MBA in Finance from London Business School, and has spent the past decade building consumer products at the intersection of AI and human connection.

Key Takeaways

• After Eugenia unexpectedly lost her dear friend, Roman Mazurenko, to a hit-and-run in November 2015, she gathered thousands of text messages, fed them into a neural network, and built a chatbot that replicated his personality. This deeply personal project became the inspiration for Replika, one of the world’s first AI companions.
• Replika experienced immediate product/market fit, launching to a waitlist of 1.5 million people. Over the course of a decade, Eugenia and her team grew Replika to over 40 million users, helping people overcome loneliness, depression, anxiety, and recovery from breakups, divorces, and abusive relationships.
• Recently, Eugenia decided to launch a new AI startup called Wabi that aims to usher in the era of personal software with a platform that allows anyone to create their own mini apps in minutes with nothing but a simple prompt. Users can also follow other creators and “remix” their creations into mini apps that meet their own unique needs.
• While Wabi is extremely flexible in what it allows users to create, its platform offers a secure environment and standardized UI/UX elements that help overcome the pitfalls faced by many vibe-coded apps built by non-developers who don’t have the technical expertise required to ensure a high-quality finished product.
• While Eugenia has many ideas for how to grow Wabi through viral word of mouth and ultimately monetize the platform - including revenue sharing agreements for successful creators - she is keeping her team laser-focused on retention right now, given it is all that matters until they’ve demonstrated strong product/market fit.

Eugenia Kuyda

• Website: https://wabi.ai/
• Ted Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w4JrIxFZRA
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eugenia-kuyda-638a8a1b/
• X: https://x.com/ekuyda

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: https://philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: https://x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Daniel Heintzman is Head of Product at Cal AI, an AI-powered calorie tracking app that grew to over $50M ARR in under two years before being acquired by MyFitnessPal in December 2025. Before Cal AI, Daniel was a product designer with stints at Facebook's Growth team, Robinhood, and Mailchimp, and was later a Designer in Residence at early-stage product fund Chapter One. He started his career as a software engineer at BlackBerry and studied engineering at the University of Waterloo. Daniel also writes about product design and consumer apps on Medium.

Key Takeaways

• Cal AI was launched in May 2024 by two high school students, Zach Yadegari and Henry Langmack, after they spent just a couple months building the initial MVP of the app, which was simple enough to fit on a few core screens.
• From the beginning, they realized distribution would be the bottleneck, so they built the app to be easily understandable within a 10-second TikTok video. This led to super strong product/channel fit and was a key to rapid exponential growth.
• Cal AI went all-in on a creator-first growth strategy, partnering with hundreds of fitness influencers on TikTok to generate millions of impressions. After gaining momentum, the company expanded into traditional paid ads and then affiliate marketing, using these channels to expand their reach and double down on their best-performing creator-generated content.
• Later on, Cal AI added features like streaks, milestones, and progress photos that served as viral artifacts, leading to even more viral organic growth through both offline word of mouth and online posts on social media platforms.
• In less than two years, Cal AI achieved $50M+ in ARR and was acquired by MyFitnessPal in late 2025, not only because of their rapid topline growth but also because their complimentary product positioning and customer base made them an especially attractive acquisition target.

Daniel Heintzman

• Website: https://www.calai.app/
• Portfolio: https://danielheintzman.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielheintzman/
• X: https://x.com/heintzmandaniel

Phil Carter

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Mikey Shulman is the cofounder and CEO of Suno, an AI music generation platform that allows anyone to create full songs with lyrics, vocals, and instrumentation from a simple text prompt. Prior to founding Suno, Mikey was the first machine learning hire and Head of Machine Learning at Kensho, an AI company acquired by S&P Global for over $500 million. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics from Harvard University, a degree in applied physics from Columbia University, and is a lifelong hobbyist musician.

Key Takeaways

• While working together at another AI company called Kensho, Mikey and a few colleagues who also loved music would often jam after work to blow off steam. Eventually, they decided to combine their AI knowledge and their passion for music into a new startup, with the goal of using AI to help people make music.
• This started with the release of an open-source, text-to-audio model called Bark in April 2023, as well as subsequent product iteration on Discord, both of which helped validate the company’s vision and provide valuable customer feedback.
• By charging users from the very beginning, Mikey and his cofounders were able to ensure that the product they were building was valuable, and that the feedback they were receiving was from credible users who were genuinely interested in not only using Suno, but paying for it to support a viable business.
• After launching Suno’s web app in December 2023, the product spread virally through word of mouth. AI-generated songs proved to be the perfect viral artifact, because music naturally lends itself to riffing and remixes. This viral loop drove Suno to 2M subscribers and $300M in ARR over the course of just two years.
• Suno recently released v5.5, its most powerful model yet. This also included the launch of features like Voices, Custom Models, and My Taste, all of which help creators generate music that is more powerful and more personalized than ever.
• Suno has faced lawsuits from industry incumbents similar to previous music technology companies like Napster and Spotify. However, the company has already made progress settling these lawsuits on favorable terms, including a recent partnership with Warner Music Group to enable licensed AI models. Ultimately, Mikey doesn’t believe it’s a zero sum game, and hopes that Suno can expand the industry by democratizing music creation for the masses.

Mikey Shulman

• Website: https://suno.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikeyshulman/
• X: https://x.com/mikeyshulman

Phil Carter

• Website: philgcarter.com
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Francesco Polizzi is the former Head of Core Experience at Discord, where he led a complete overhaul of the company’s mobile apps. He has also held roles as the Head of Product at both Outschool and Photomath (acquired by Google in 2023), and served as a PM at Dropbox and a growth engineer at Mozilla earlier in his career. Francesco recently left his role as a product executive to start his own stealth AI startup.

Key Takeaways

• When Francesco first joined Discord in late 2021, the company had a thriving community of avid gamers, but it was struggling to expand to a broader, more mainstream audience because new users tended to find the product confusing.
• After product-driven growth efforts began to demonstrate diminishing returns, Francesco and his team realized they needed to more fundamentally redesign the company’s mobile apps to expand their appeal and make them more accessible to new users who felt overwhelmed by Discord’s complexity.
• For inspiration, Francesco and his team downloaded every single messaging app they could find, compiled best practices, and cross-referenced these ideas vs. feedback from Discord users to identify high-potential opportunities.
• This led to a wholesale redesign of Discord’s iPhone and Android apps, including:
  • A voice messaging feature that increased overall message volume
  • A username change that increased the success rate of outbound friend requests by making it easier to find a friend by their username
  • An update to the profile tab that increased customization, paving the way for additional monetization opportunities through Discord’s Nitro and Nitro Basic premium subscription plans, as well as ad hoc purchases
• Ultimately, these changes simplified Discord’s mobile apps, improved the new user experience, fixed a couple important bugs, and accelerated revenue growth

Francesco Polizzi:

• Website: https://discord.com/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/francescostl/
• X: https://x.com/Francescostl

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/

Jack McDermott is a growth lead at ElevenLabs, where he leads growth for its mobile products — including the ElevenLabs app and ElevenReader, a consumer app built on top of the company’s cutting-edge voice AI platform. Prior to ElevenLabs, he led growth teams at Chegg, where he focused on the company’s skills growth and product during a period of rapid change as AI began reshaping the education category. He started his career in growth at Panorama Education (YC’13). Jack has developed a strong perspective on building and scaling AI-native products, particularly at the intersection of core product, growth, and monetization.

Key Takeaways

• After being founded in April 2022 and launched in January 2023, ElevenLabs has rapidly grown into one of the largest and most successful AI companies in the world with a Voice AI platform that has already been widely adopted by individuals and companies around the world.
• While the company’s core business is an AI platform, it has started to launch vertical apps on top of this foundation, including the ElevenLabs app for creators who want to use ElevenLabs APIs to generate content and the ElevenReader app for consumers who want to consume audio content with custom voices.
• After the company launched ElevenReader in June 2024, Jack and his team initially found traction through bottoms-up marketing tactics on platforms like Reddit and Discord that were great for attracting enthusiastic early adopters. Once the company got traction, it turned to more scalable channels like TikTok, where it gained rapid adoption among readers in BookTok communities.
• Partnerships have also played a key role in ElevenReader’s growth story. The company did a massive partnership with Melania Trump tied to her new memoir called “Melania,” using ElevenLabs APIs to translate the book into dozens of languages that made it more accessible around the globe.
• More recently, Jack and his team have been experimenting with different approaches to subscription pricing and packaging across both the ElevenLabs and ElevenReader apps. Importantly, they have learned that the optimal monetization strategies look very different across these two products, as well as for users making purchase decisions in their native mobile apps vs. on the web.

Jack McDermott:

• Website: https://elevenreader.io/
• Blog: https://elevenlabs.io/blog/authors/jack-mcdermott
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackrmcdermott/
• X: https://x.com/Jackmc

Phil Carter:

• Website: https://www.philgcarter.com/
• Substack: philgcarter.substack.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/philgcarter
• X: x.com/philgcarter

Podcast Production by Podders: https://podders.io/