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Ten Tips and Steps, Chips and Monthly Goodies
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From your own photos to meals to vinyl records to jerky to socks to beer to bacon, you can put the hurt on your mail carrier with this list of subscription services. If you go around and go all in, I would advise against the clothing as subscription. After all, you may never have to leave your home again.
If the previous list gives you a bright idea, there are some tips
Here are some pretty good tips if you have an idea for a subscription business. For instance, try testing the concept with crowdfunding. Also, don’t forget about packaging; consumers want something special when they open your package. And get a partner to fulfill the order.
And if someone approaches you to invest in their subscription business…
If you are early into the investment, you’ll need to focus more on things like vision and market size. Later on, you’ll have more concrete numbers like unit economics and retention rates. Regarding churn, this is key: “Unlike a good SaaS business, consumer businesses tend to have fairly extreme retention curves. It’s not unusual to see tons of customers flow into the service and then churn out quickly. This is not necessarily bad assuming that the value of the remaining loyal customers make up for the churned ones.”
Who would’ve thunk? It was the chips!
If you ever been part of a business that charged regular to a credit, you’ll know that a consumer or business changing their credit card may wreck temporary havoc on your business. Well, Netflix is saying that the U.S. rollout of chip cards to replace stripe cards caused higher-than-expected “involuntary churn”. I love the convenience of credit cards, but can we improve it for the online economy?
Who owns customer experience at your business?
This author says EVERYBODY! Since it is 6-7x more costly to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one, it makes sense to point more sales and marketing spend to retention. The article makes the case for a “Total Community” approach, where customer peers, internal experts, influencers, vendors work to provide faster, more accurate information throughout the customer experience journey.