Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches

We can learn a lot from subscription businesses that experiment with different revenue models and personalization. Organizations with too many offers risk overcomplicating things with competing goals. I’m talking about companies with multiple revenue streams—different promotions, pricing options and tiers and/or a combination of subscription, one-off transactions, and advertising. But increasingly we’re seeing examples of organizations incorporating multiple revenue streams successfully—for example, in news, fitness, streaming media and ecommerce.   Today’s guest, Trevor Kaufman, is an expert on subscriptions, personalization and digital experience. He is the CEO of Piano, a digital experience platform that helps organizations launch products and programs faster, strengthen customer relationships and drive personalization at scale. Piano recently released their annual Subscription Performance Benchmark Report. It’s full of valuable insights gleaned from their customers, and relevant across many types of subscription models. In our conversation, we talk about the emerging best practices in subscription pricing, the role of freemium and whether there’s a place for ads in the world of subscriptions. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

The single biggest source of churn might surprise you. It’s not a communications issue, or a product/market fit issue, or even an onboarding problem. The biggest driver of churn in most consumer subscriptions is what’s known as passive or involuntary churn. Involuntary churn is when a customer is canceled due to a payment issue or other technical problem. According to ProfitWell CEO Patrick Campbell, a recent guest on Subscription Stories, involuntary churn makes up 20-40% of overall churn.  Many organizations don’t even track passive churn, and that’s a mistake, because there are ways to manage. Today’s guest, Paul Larsen of Optimized Payments, is one of the leading experts on “card not present” payments, and works with many of the largest subscription businesses in the world on churn management. He launched his career at Reader’s Digest, one of the earliest and largest subscription publications in the world. When Paul started, churn management focused on getting people to renew their subscription by mailing in a check. Since then, he has been deep in the world of credit cards, debit cards and alternate payments, helping subscription merchants reduce costs and increase customer retention. In our conversation, we talk about why so many good subscribers end up in the dreaded “do not honor” bucket, who should own passive churn in the organization, and how to bring together the right team to manage involuntary churn.  Excerpt: Subscriptions are great. We love them, but there's promise and peril associated with them at all times. We are joined by Paul Larsen of Optimized Payments, one of the leading experts on "card not present" payments. He shares his vast knowledge about working with the largest subscription businesses on churn management as he discusses the reasons behind the dreaded "do not honor" bucket and how to build the dream team to address this involuntary issue. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

You’re probably all familiar with LinkedIn Learning, formerly known as Lynda.com. It’s LinkedIn’s professional development platform. They offer more than 18,000 video courses available via subscription. There’s a huge range of educational topics covered—from how to use Adobe Aftereffects, to how to have difficult conversations, to the fundamentals of customer success . Consumers can subscribe to LinkedIn Learning on their own, or access the platform through an enterprise license. My guest today, Jill Raines, is Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, where she leads the LinkedIn Learning Business. I first got to know her when I was developing my own LinkedIn Learning courses for the platform. I was interested in the business model for the platform. I have learned so much through my discussions with Jill. It’s fascinating to get her perspective on the unique challenges and opportunities facing the world’s largest professional development and educational platform, In this conversation, Jill and I discuss the LinkedIn ecosystem, and LinkedIn's Forever Promise more generally, before diving into the role of LinkedIn Learning within that ecosystem. We also talk about the specific challenges of professional development subscriptions, how to balance the needs of consumers with the needs of enterprise customers, and whether to offer both pay per course and subscriptions as pricing options.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

We’ve spoken before on the show about the importance of Customer Experience in driving growth, with guests like Wharton’s Peter Fader, Gainsight’s Nick Mehta and Bain & Company’s Stu Berman. But today’s guest says you need to think beyond the customer. If you really want to accelerate growth, you need to focus on the employee experience.  Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce. She’s also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business. Tiffani has been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers and is a welcomed guest on Bloomberg, CNN, Cheddar, MSNBC, and Yahoo Finance, among others. In our conversation, we talk about whether your Growth IQ is something you’re born with or something you build, the ten paths to growth, and how Software-as-a-Service has changed what it takes to thrive in Sales. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

To drive recurring revenue, you need products and services that people use. Habitually. Repeatedly. Organizations strive to design addictive subscriptions. But for every beloved membership, there seem to be a dozen offerings that drive subscription fatigue. How do you design for engagement, retention and expansion, while ensuring the you’ve earned the right to do so? Bestselling author Nir Eyal has looked at this problem from both sides.  His first book, Hooked, is a how to guide for building habit-forming products. More recently, he wrote Indistractable, to help individuals control their attention and choose the lives they want. On this episode of Subscription Stories, Nir and I talk about the specific processes and tools that drive habits, what it means for your subscription business, and how to be more deliberate about how we form our own habits.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Instagram

Hey, it’s Robbie Kellman Baxter, host of the Subscription Stories Podcast. I wanted to just reflect on some of my favorite moments of season 3 and also share a sneak peek at Season 4.  We packed a lot into this season, truly something for everyone.  We opened the season with David Lorsch, the Chief Revenue Officer of Strava, the world’s largest athletic community, talking about how to upgrade freemium subscribers to premium.  If you’re interested in how the membership economy is transforming Health & Wellbeing, you’ll also enjoy my conversations with Ben Foster of Whoop, Joanna Strober of Midi Health, Bryan Welch of Mindful,org and Matthew Mengerink of Thirty Madison. If you’re building subscriptions around great content, check out my conversation with Ariel Zirulnick, who led the 4-year long Membership Puzzle Project which identified best practices in building deep, trusted relationships with readers of newspapers around the globe. You’ll also learn about key metrics and cultural tactics for building a member-first team from Mayur Gupta, the CMO of Gannett, and about building a membership bundle from Outside’s Tommy O’Hare (who happens to be a former Olympian).  And if your startup is looking for a great story to build traction, listen to my conversation with Chief Storyteller at GoodTrust, Daniel Sieberg  Venture investor Ira Ehrenpreis had a lot to share about the power of profit and purpose in creating iconic companies like Tesla, The RealReal and Bellwether coffee.  And Rafat Ali, CEO of the Skift talked about the power of subscriptions in travel and hospitality. For those of you who like to nerd out--Season 3 was like a PhD in subscriptions, with several experts on the cutting edge of markets and trends—Wharton Professor and author of the CustomerCentricity Playbook Peter Fader, as well as Harvard Business School’s Marco Bertini, with whom I have had many spirited discussions about pricing for outcomes and his new book The Ends Game, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategegist Neil Hoyne, whose new book Converted is a must-read for any subscription practitioner, Patrick Campbell, founder of Profitwell, who uses data to go deep on customer retention, and my old friend and colleague Bob Baxley, a leading Silicon Valley product designer and educator who has led design teams at Apple, Pinterest and now Thoughtspot. If you haven’t listened to those episodes—I encourage you to check them out.  And if you like them, please be sure to rate and review them on Apple iTunes or Apple Podcasts—that helps me, and makes it easier for others to find the podcast. This summer, I’m hard at work to make sure that Season 4 is the best and most practical season of Subscription Stories so far. You’ll get to learn about building habits through your products with Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Indistractible and Hooked.  You’ll see how to use employee-centricity to grow customer engagement and retention with Salesforce global growth and innovation evangelist, Tiffani Bova. Employee Experience is an often overlooked lever in building great business models as well as the subject of Tiffani’s forthcoming book. And you’ll learn some of the secrets that have made LinkedIn such a powerhouse in the Membership Economy.  That’s just the beginning. To make sure you don’t miss a thing, Follow Subscription Stories wherever you get your podcasts—just tap on the Follow or Subscribe button. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening to Subscription Stories.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

My final guest of Season Three, Joanna Strober, was the very first guest on the Subscription Stories podcast. Back then, we were talking about Kurbo, the children’s service for WW (that’s Weight Watchers new name). Today, she’s back to talk about her latest venture in direct-to-consumer healthcare, Midi Health. While Kurbo focused on helping kids get to and maintain a healthy weight, Midi is for women at midlife, helping them get better as they get older. You may have noticed my interest in how the way we stay healthy is changing—with guests from Whoop, 30 Madison, Strava, just this season alone. I am fascinated by all of the transformation in the space, as healthcare embraces the concept of a forever transaction. After all, what forever promise is more compelling than more happy, healthy minutes. Healthcare is just embarking on a massive rethinking of how to better align their business models with patient outcomes. Midi is a great example of this. In today’s talk, we cover the consumerization of healthcare and how COVID accelerated the move to digital patient-centric health, the importance of “forever transaction” in treating patients, and the challenges of developing a clear business model in a highly complex environment.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

Not all customers are created equal. The best subscription businesses know the power of customer lifetime value (CLV). They optimize around understanding who their best subscribers are, and then deepening the relationship with those best subscribers over time. Neil Hoyne is an expert at this. As the Chief Measurement Strategist at Google, as well as a Senior Fellow at The Wharton School, Neil helps people use data to win their customer’s hearts. He’s written a new book Converted: The Data Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts on this topic, which I read on the beach while on vacation. It’s a book about data that’s entertaining and engaging enough to read on holiday, if you can believe it. We recently spoke about how to measure the full value of each relationship, engage in an ongoing conversation with your best subscribers, and perhaps most importantly, how to find and win new subscribers just like the ones you find most valuable. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

The first wave of the Membership Economy was mostly digital-- software, content, and services. But increasingly we’re seeing subscriptions around physical products. Challenges abound when manufacturing comes into play, especially with the pricing model. Many companies are selling the physical product and then offering subscriptions as an add-on. Examples include Peloton, where much of the value is in the subscription, but also products like Tile, Ring and Tesla where the subscription is truly optional. One company that’s getting a lot of attention for its innovative model is WHOOP. WHOOP offers a subscription-based service that combines a wearable fitness tracker with software to achieve its mission of “Unlocking human performance”. Today I talk to WHOOP’s Chief Product Officer, Ben Foster. Ben has literally written the book on Product Management along with his co-author Rajesh Nirlikar—Build What Matters, Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision Led Product Management. In this wide-ranging conversation, Ben and I discuss the best metrics for tracking customer value, the unique challenges of a subscription that includes hardware and software and why scrappiness is a key attribute of the best product managers.    Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

Most subscription-based businesses focus too much on acquisition and not enough on retention. But actually retention improvements are usually more effective, both for total revenue AND profitability. Today’s guest Patrick Campbell couldn’t understand why so many organizations weren’t doing the math, and so he started his company Profitwell to help companies better manage churn. Patrick says you have more churn levers than you think. They include how you target prospects, onboard subscribers, support engagement, and of course what you say when they are getting ready to leave. And did you know that one of the best places to look for new subscribers is in your list of former subscribers? In today’s episode, we’ll show you how to optimize your subscription for fewer and softer Goodbyes… from the moment you say Hello. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook