^{Today’s one idea / first-party data, revealed}

Hey everyone, quick little housekeeping note before we start today’s edition.
The Diff is obviously a new thing, most of you know me from How They Grow.

HTG was looong-form company case studies. One company. Everything you need to know about their story, growth and product. 40 minute reads…deep stuff with lots of analysis, but also, a big ask of you.

The Diff (pre today) was the flip side. Shorter, talking about my own apps. Building in public energy. More a “here’s what I’m doing”. But what I’m doing isn’t always going to be super interesting.

The Diff (now) is a hybrid. Each week, I’m going to pick one stealable product idea or growth play I’ve seen in the field. It will come with evidence from winning companies who shipped it (various mini studies vs one big one), and then where relevant, proof from me trying it in our build-in-public lab. Putting things to practice in either Little Moments, Good Times, or DataDonkey.

This blends the actionable idea we both need to grow our products, with the research and analysis you know deserve and know me for, with the shorter and personal flavor I enjoy.

I like it, and as one myself, I think it’s the right direction for product builders and founders who want to grow their business.

Anyway, babbling over.

Today’s idea comes from 5 companies, 4 industries, 1 stealable move.

The other day I opened RevenueCat to look at my mostly-static dashboard. One paying subscribers. The usual.

Nobody told me honest building in public could be so embarrassing.

And then I saw something more interesting. Something new RevenueCat launched. Benchmarks.

Telling me, politely, with charts, how badly I'm doing compared to other paid apps.

Where I sit on conversion. Where I sit on retention. Where I sit on refund rate (rocking here guys…my one paying sub is holding out). A whole percentile readout of how I stack up against thousands of other apps in their network across all apps or categories.

I'd never had this data before. Nobody outside RevenueCat could give it to me. Not Apple. Not PostHog analytics. Not a podcast. RevenueCat could tell me—because they sit on the data of 116,000 apps including OpenAI, Notion, VCSO, and of course, mine—and they decided to.

That's the idea this week.

People want to know how they're doing.

Don’t you?

It's one of the most reliable human pulls we have. We’re remarkably fascinated with how we size up compared to peers.

But for a lot things that matter—money, fitness, career trajectory, your app's monetization—knowing is genuinely hard. Not the Buzzfeed survey data that nobody needs. The data that nobody hands out for free.

Unless you're sitting on a platform like RevenueCat that already has it.

The move: if your product has aggregated first-party data your users can't get anywhere else— and most products do—turn it into individual peer benchmarks and show it back to them. Not a leaderboard. A percentile.

"You're in the bottom 32% of paid apps in your category. Here's what the top quartile is doing differently."

It's the cheapest growth feature you can ship. You already have the inputs. The compute is trivial. And it pulls on three threads at once: authority, retention, and acquisition. One feature, three jobs done.

First-party data, revealed, is the move.

Let’s get to it!
—Jaryd

^{Today’ partners / Your support helps keep this all free}

I’ve been playing a lot with a new product that launched recently, Rezonant.

TLDR, they’re like a vibe delivery platform for product teams. It’s an agent-based platform that works for folks like us, tying discovery, planning, coding all together.

The move: install their Chrome extension, click around your product highlighting what you want changed, or just start a screen recording and talk. It ingests it, and turns them into PRDs and tickets.

If you allow it to, it goes a step further and their coding agent can build and ship them in parallel.

Free to start. Start talking to your product...

Supercharge your productivity with HubSpot's comprehensive guide. This free resource is a fast track to AI mastery:

Plus, in-depth sections on email composition, content creation, customer support, and data analysis. Find Your Guide Here

^{Why the idea works / A deeper review}

Five things stack here. Any one of them would be enough. Together they're a wedge. I love wedges.

^{The evidence / Who’s done this and won}

So, who’s dunnit?

RC has become the gold-standard SDK layer between mobile apps and the App Store. They see every transaction, every renewal, every churn. They've quietly become the source of truth for what subscription apps actually look like at scale.

And they’re only productizing this first-party data now. Before this, they executed the move slightly differently, almost a test case. They launched State of Subscription Apps, a downloadable report built on 116,000 apps, $16 billion in revenue, and more than a billion transactions.

Sliced it by category, platform, trial length, paywall strategy, AI vs. non-AI, and more.

Pair that with Rico and the loop closes. I don't just see where I am, but get suggestions in my dashboard tied to my specific weak spots on what I can do in app, and how to use RevenueCat better. Show, then suggest.

They take private subscription market data for apps, and contextualize if for founders and growth marketers.

Klaviyo runs email marketing for tens of thousands of e-commerce brands. They benchmark you against your peers—by industry vertical, by store size, by send cadence. Doing what RC does but for your email. And notice below, also doing the Show x AI move.

The platform that names the problem is the platform that gets to sell the solution. It’s just free reinforcement that you should keep using them. Retention move for days.

They take private email performance market data for apps, and contextualize if for the content and growth marketers.

Carta sits at the cap table layer for tens of thousands of startups and thousands of funds. They see every priced round, every option grant, every secondary sale, every dilution event across a meaningful chunk of the venture market.

So, the pulled the move → "Companies like yours typically raise X at Y dilution. Median Series A in your sector is Z." Built into the product. Plus public-facing reports like their quarterly State of Private Markets that founders read before every raise, and journalists quote when they want a number on what's "normal" right now.

The reason this works is the moment. Every founder considering a raise has the same anxious question: "Am I being offered a fair deal?"

Carta has the only data-grounded answer in the market. Crunchbase has rumors. AngelList has selection bias. Pitchbook costs five figures a seat. Carta has the actual ledger and it's already open on the founder's screen.

They take private market data for funds, salaries, rounds, and contextualize if for the founders, investors, and employees.

Here's the compound effect. Because Carta benchmarks are the canonical reference, every conversation about valuation now happens through Carta's vocabulary. Founders quote Carta to investors. Investors quote Carta back.

RevenueCat, with their newer Benchmarks, will likely become a canonical part of apps raising money, showing on their pitch deck how they compare to others in their category.

^{Action / What you can do with this}

TLDR: People want to know how they are doing.

So, take your platform data, show it back to them, and use LLMs to level up to actionable insight.

If you sit on aggregated user data your users individually can't see, the move is to take your platform data, show it back to them, and use LLMs to level up to actionable insight.

Think [Your product] takes private [what type of data] data and contextualizes it for [the customer who cares about this data].

Playbook to do that is roughly:

That's it. First-party data, revealed.

I’m putting it to practice with a fun little web app with v0 called The Millionaire Calculator. I don’t have aggregated platform data due to size obviously, but a quick move was loading up data around income etc, and in the calculators, showing users how their inputted numbers size up. Just a curiosity thing

Just a fun implementation of the idea at a small scale. No relevant move here really for Little Moments or Good Times.

At my full-time job though (I work on a B2B2C white-label travel booking platform for membership businesses to sell travel) just a few days ago we were talking about a very relevant thing.

A customer asked me, casually, "How is [other customer redacted] doing with hotel conversion?" Genuinely curious. They wanted to know what a peer's funnel looked like, what was normal, what booking values were typical, what was working for someone their size. We sit in the middle with that data. They didn't. It can help them grow, meaning it helps us grow.

Roadmap updated 🙂

~Thank you for supporting today's sponsors. If you haven’t, check out HubSpot and Rezonant.app — they keep posts like this free and the lab running.

^{Closing notes / Check this out before you go}

Every week, I highlight tools I love and those I actually use as full time staff product manager and part time solo builder. Today, I’m highlighting beehiiv—the platform I use to write, grow, and monetize my newsletter. If you want to write a newsletter, start here. I’m new here, but I’m loving it.

See the full set of vetted tools I use all the time here → Jaryd’s Stack

As I share ideas with you, I also put them to practice on my own personal apps. Here’s what I’m working on.

ICYMI, here are some recent entries from The Diff

If you’re looking for something else to sink your teeth into right now…

How Kleo Made $30K in 4 Days: The Complete SaaS Launch Playbook

A nice breakdown covering a launch path TLDR: Content, Waitlist, Webinars.

The webinar part and how they did it so well is what’s interesting.