Another big shift in the toy industry is the move to subscriptions. Lovevery offers educational toys for kids on a subscription model, with each toy designed for children of a specific age. Subscriptions are easy for consumable products and challenging for durables—to sell a toy subscription is to suggest that it’s a toy the child will get bored of... See more

The company was selling about $50k of subscriptions per week in January and sales grew steadily to about $200k during the last week of November. As with jobs sold on the site, there are no incremental costs associated with each dollar of subscription revenues, which makes for a very attractive business model.

It’s brutal out there. But it’s not hopeless. There are a number of consumer apps that have stood the test of time, including some of my favorites: Grammarly, Duolingo, Noom, Calm, Flo, Future, and Spotify. To answer your question, I went deep into these seven companies (along with a few up-and-comers like Copilot, Centered, Mighty Health, and Greg... See more