It came from fashion.

I studied fashion design at NIFT, then luxury brand management at SCAD. I started my career in luxury, moved into e-commerce, and eventually landed in subscription platforms.

Different industries, same job: build something people choose again and again.

Some people hear "fashion" and assume it was the phase before the "real" career started. For me, it's the opposite. It's the lens I use every day.

Luxury isn't the original subscription business in the literal sense, but it is the original loyalty business. The best brands don't just sell a product. They create a relationship. The repeat customer isn't just satisfied; they're bought in. They see themselves in the brand.

That's exactly what membership platforms are trying to do now. The hard part isn't adding another feature. It's making the member feel like this was built for them, not like they're buying a coupon book.

Three things fashion taught me that show up in my product work constantly:

I build membership products now, but I still think like a brand designer. And the question I'm obsessed with is rarely "what should we add?"

It's: what does this make someone feel, and will they want to come back to it?

That instinct didn't come from a PM bootcamp.

It came from a pattern-cutting table.

And it's the biggest competitive advantage I have.

In 2017, Netflix tweeted: "Love is sharing a password." In 2023, they killed it. And added 50 million paying subscribers.

Netflix didn't just enforce a policy. They pulled off one of the sharpest monetization moves in recent memory, converting 100 million freeloading households into a revenue engine.

But this only worked because of what Netflix had quietly built over the previous decade. Password sharing wasn't an oversight. It was a distribution strategy. By tolerating it, Netflix seeded millions of households with a daily habit. People built their evenings around it. Kids grew up on it. It became the default. By the time Netflix flipped the switch, they weren't asking strangers to subscribe. They were asking people who already couldn't imagine not watching.

But the real story wasn't the crackdown itself. It was the architecture around it.

They launched an ad-supported tier at $6.99 at the same time, giving displaced users a softer landing instead of a hard wall. They introduced "Extra Member" slots at $7.99/month, opening up a mid-tier revenue stream that didn't exist before.

The result? Daily sign-ups surged 102%. Revenue hit $39 billion in 2024.

Spotify understood this years ago with their freemium funnel. Let users experience value for free, then create enough friction (ads, shuffle-only) that upgrading feels like relief, not punishment.

Duolingo took it further. Their streak mechanic isn't a retention feature. It's a sunk-cost engine. Miss a day and you feel the loss. That's not gamification. That's behavioral architecture.

Adobe made a similar bet when they killed perpetual licenses for Creative Cloud. The industry screamed. Revenue tripled over the next decade.

The pattern is the same every time: short-term backlash, long-term structural advantage.

Every subscription business has a version of this dormant revenue sitting in its ecosystem. The question isn't whether to capture it. It's whether you've built the product architecture to convert it without destroying trust.

Most subscription products don't die in Year 1. They die in Year 2.

Year 1 is about acquisition. The numbers are climbing. Everyone's celebrating.

Year 2 is when you realize that getting people in the door and keeping them are completely different problems.

Your early adopters start churning. Acquisition costs climb because you've burned through the easy audiences. And you start to see two distinct problems that you never had to think about when growth was covering for everything.

The first is involuntary churn. These are members who didn't choose to leave. Their credit card expired. A payment failed silently. A billing update didn't go through. They wanted to stay, but your system let them fall out the back door. This is pure waste, and it's often the first thing worth fixing because the ROI is immediate. Smart retry logic, dunning sequences, card updaters. None of it is exciting. All of it matters.

The second problem is harder. It's the members who technically stayed but quietly disengaged. They signed up, tried one or two things, and never went deeper. They're still paying for now, but they're one price increase or one competitor away from canceling.

Solving both requires the same shift in mindset: stop treating the member base as one group.

In my experience, the companies that survive Year 2 start segmenting early. Different members use the product differently. Different members need different onboarding. Different members find value in different parts of the benefits ecosystem.

When you treat a power user and a casual browser the same way, you lose both. The power user feels under-served. The casual browser never gets deep enough to stick.

Spotify is a good example of getting this right. Discover Weekly isn't just a playlist. It's a personalized reason to come back every Monday. Wrapped turns listening data into something people actually want to share. These aren't generic features. They're experiences built on understanding individual behavior.

Strava figured out that their most retained users weren't the fastest runners. They were the ones connected to other people. So they invested in segments, leaderboards, and clubs. The product experience changed based on how you used it.

The New York Times went from one subscription to a portfolio of daily habits: Cooking, Games, Wirecutter, The Athletic. They tested which combinations drove the highest retention and built around those patterns.

The real work of Year 2 is experimentation. Test, learn what drives habit formation, and double down on what works.

None of this is glamorous. It's cohort analysis. It's A/B testing onboarding flows. It's fixing payment retry logic. It's tracking which benefit combinations correlate with 12-month retention. It's figuring out what makes one member stick and another leave, and then building around those signals.

The foundational work is what compounds.

If your Trust & Safety team reports to Legal or Compliance, you're leaving money on the table.

T&S is a product discipline. And in subscription businesses, it's one of the biggest growth levers you have.

Every subscription platform has a version of the same problem: bad actors who exploit trials, abuse promotions, or game referral systems. Left unchecked, they don't just cost you money. They degrade the experience for legitimate members and erode the trust that keeps people paying.

T&S protects platform integrity. Integrity builds confidence. Confidence drives retention. Retention drives revenue.

When I think about T&S as a product leader, I frame it in three layers:

The best subscription businesses don't treat T&S as the team that says "no." They treat it as the team that protects "yes."

If you run a subscription product, ask yourself: does your T&S team have a seat at the product table? Do they have a P&L impact metric? Can they show you the dollar value of abuse they prevented last quarter?

If not, you have a compliance function. Not a growth lever.