How to Build a Subscription Program that ACTUALLY Retains

How to Build a Subscription Program that ACTUALLY Retains Speaker 1: Hey guys, and welcome back to another episode of the Chew on This subscription and retention podcast. It's powered by Stay AI. I am Gina, your host. Again, you're stuck with me this entire season, but I am swapping in some incredible guests. Today we have, you definitely know him, Nick Schack from Breeze. Speaker 2: Nick, what's up guys? This is a long time coming so Gina and I've been in the business for quite a while but being in the business on the subscription side is fairly new and this is actually my very first real subscription brand me being on the inside. Speaker 1: I'm so excited. I'm actually shocked, I don't think we've ever done a webinar of content. We've been together at the same events, but I don't think we've ever done anything together like this. Speaker 2: No, just a lot of emails and texts. Speaker 1: Yes, just a lot of manic text messages. Speaker 2: It's kind of true though. I think the one last text I sent you, you're like, hey, like I'm literally at a wedding. I need you to like jump on with stuff. I was like, no, no, no problem. Because Sophie's my girl. She's the one I get to work with on the stay side. And we go back and forth. And she's like, are you sure you don't want to be in Slack with me? I was like, look, you don't want me in Slack with you? Let's just stick with email. But it's been good. Speaker 1: I don't mind whenever I get a text like I'm usually like we're able to make magic happen quick so I don't mind it and I kind of like to communicate that way so it's it's been good and just watching you guys grow has been incredible. I'll like never forget the moment I logged into the dashboard and saw the first million dollar month and I was like Nick! Speaker 2: No, I was freaking out. I think I was like, I think I'm gonna tweet this, or I think I'm gonna write about it, and you're like, okay, let's just, you can do that, but like maybe we should do a narrative around it. Speaker 1: Yes, yeah, but I was so excited just to see, when you guys moved on, I don't remember how many subscribers it was, but it wasn't like, it wasn't a huge program. I think we moved on like 100 or 200 subscribers in the beginning, so now it's grown quite a bit. How, like roughly, what subscriber count are we at now? Speaker 2: So we're, obviously I checked it before, because knowing what we're gonna kind of go through and talk about this, But we are just under 15,000. We were at 15,000 before this. So we have some, not all good things that are happening. We have some, we have some learnings to kind of go through here, but I will say safely, we have total 15,000, about 400. I'll say active right around like 14,750, if I'm being specific. So it's, we're, we're kind of there and we're two years, we're two years in building this. Speaker 1: I know it's, watching the growth has just been incredible. I get to see a lot of brands and I get to see kind of, you know, what's the typical pace. You guys are definitely above average. Unknown Speaker: Before we dive in a quick word about today's sponsor, Stay AI. Everyone wants that sweet recurring revenue, but building a subscription model that actually works is not easy. At Avi, we spent way too long battling churn, tweaking offers, and trying to duct tape a subscriber experience together. Switching to Stay AI was the turning point. It gave us the tools to automate churn reduction, personalize offers, and improve our email segmentation. Now we can build a subscription flow that customers want to stay in. Stay AI saved us a ton of time. Speaker 2: Now, let's get back to the episode. Speaker 1: I'm excited. Why don't we go back to the beginning a little bit. Um, I'd love to know, like, Why Breeze? Why now? Like with any start, you got to pick timing, why to enter the market, why this product? Why do we think this was the right time? Speaker 2: So I think I, so I got really lucky into this. So our founder, Aaron, who you know Aaron very well, Aaron Nospish, he is, he's kind of like the DTC alcohol alternative guy. Like he's been in it for quite a while. He believed in it and he goes, I think if we're going to do this, it's going to be a beverage. Because in our space, in the legalized hemp, legalized teas, whatever this is, there is a real need for a non-alcoholic alternative. And it's a trend that's popping up. You can see all the reports. It's all over Twitter. It's all over LinkedIn. And then actually you had a lot of reports at the top of the year talking about What the impact as alcohol have on Alzheimer's and just negativity around it, right? There's nothing wrong with it. Everyone has their own bias, their own thing. But when this came about, we kind of like, all right, we want to be another thing that you can drink them because there's all this ice bath and the weekend warriors and these healthy for you areas. And so I jumped into that because I was like, look, I've been sober and non-drinking since high school. I jokingly say I drank more illegally. Yeah, you're a high level sports. Yeah, doing sports. You don't get to do proms. You don't get to do any of these parties. You don't get to go out because you got to wake up or either be on the mountain or be on the field the next day. The actual product itself meant a lot to me. So when Aaron was like, I need you to do this, I was like, absolutely. Here's the issue. This is the part that I didn't really fully get. I'm an ads guy. I'm a media buyer. That's agency background, traditional. And he goes, but I think we need retention and we need email, we need SMS. And at the time, he goes, I think it's gonna be heavy subscription. Now you see these things, but you don't really fully know if that's what the business is gonna turn into. Because I know when we got into it, when we migrated, I basically was like, Yeah, probably, like we'll probably offer it if they want it. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: But I didn't know it'd be, that's almost our core strategy at this point. Speaker 1: And so, okay, so in the beginning, not everything was, were you defaulting to subscription always or was it like defaulting to one time or like on the PDPs or is everything going through landing pages? Speaker 2: Well, so because of the way that we run our ads, we can't always go direct to our site because of For compliance reasons. So it's always a landing page, it's always like an opt-in, it's always another place. So there, you're just getting information and kind of feedback on it. But when you're getting to product page, nothing on homepage for obvious reasons, but when you get to product page, we had not default to subscription, it was all first purchase. And if you see some of our early pages, which I'll probably be able to show you guys, You have a 6-pack, you have a 12-pack, you have an 8-pack, you have a 16, you have so many options. And I'm like, why is conversion rate so low? And so the biggest thing that we had to work on was, what is our subscription take rate? And then more importantly is like, how long are they gonna stick with us? And you don't really know that at the beginning. Speaker 1: No, and like defaulting to what is the right cadence to default people into? Is it two weeks? Is it four weeks? Is it six weeks? And like, everybody always wants to default to the shortest cadence, but is it the best? Does that mean you're gonna get high churn because people are gonna get the product before they're out of it? Like, there's so much to think about. Speaker 2: So you brought this up, we actually defaulted. So we were offering the only discount. So I think this is the approach that some of the newer brands, we were the highest priced product in our space. And the only discount because you don't want to be a discount specific brand. Sometimes you pull the lever. But we were like, the only discount you're gonna get is if you subscribe, right? Makes sense. Make total sense. Well, we did a 25% off discount if you get bi-week, so every two weeks you get the shipment. 20% off if you get it every four weeks. Guess what was the number one section of churn? Speaker 1: I have too much product. Speaker 2: Yeah, two weeks, two weeks, right? So they're getting the deepest discount and I'm starting to go like, guys, it's gonna hurt take rate. And I was like, let's just take it off. Our churn went down because now they're going like, I'm not drinking this. And to be honest with you, it's a newer product. We don't know the behavior of how they're consuming it. I assume if you're buying a six pack, we have a mutual friend, Ash, who enjoys the bevy sometimes. Speaker 1: Sometimes or all the times. Speaker 2: Okay, you can't, I'm telling you, you can't just wake up and rip one of the bevies in the beginning. They're kind of potent. Speaker 1: You heard about my first time. Speaker 2: I did, I did. Speaker 1: It ended in me eating cheese fries on my kitchen floor. That was my first time downing one, a little too fast. Speaker 2: I know, that's the thing, if you don't really know the vibe, and we also didn't really know the cadence, how many are you going to drink, are you going to share, is it a party thing, is it a self-consumption thing? Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So at first we were the normal non-default and the biggest learning was get rid of bi-weekly, just go to the monthly. And we weren't going to offer, and I think this is more thing I'll probably talk to you about it while we're live because I'm trying to think through it too. It's like at what point do we offer, because now we have not just our short cans or tall cans, but now we have spirits, which is more of a mixy kind of thing. And you're not going to go through that in a month maybe. You might have to go through that in By monthly, maybe quarterly. And so I'm trying to figure out like how many different types of selling plans make sense from the backend structure of how many different products we're selling. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That is interesting. Like when you have these just totally different products. I mean, we see it so much like more in the skincare space, where I was just talking to the team today and we were like, you know, it's one thing if you have like pumps where like, you know, you're putting on retinol and it's like two pumps every other day, but like eye cream, how do you know how many servings are in an eye cream thing? Like you have no idea. And like with spirits, how do you know? Like how often does somebody go, even just with alcohol, how often do I go through a bottle of. Vodka. It might be six months. If it's a bad month, it might be less. But you just don't know. Speaker 2: And the holiday season. Say you sell a bunch and it's November or September, October. They might run through it because they're having a lot of parties, but then you come into January, February, March. It might not be consuming it as much. So this option, and I was going to talk to you about this right before, is we just released brand new products. And we'll get into like the convo we really just had because I think it'd be pretty important to people. But we sat there going like, We built our own fully custom bundle builder. I don't recommend people building their own custom bundle builders to be one. Mainly because you have to build the experience plus you have to map the discounts so that you don't cannibalize our existing bundles because now we have all of our subscribers going like, I'm doing the math and they will. Unknown Speaker: They will do this math. Speaker 1: They will sit and say, oh my god, I do this all the time with brands. Speaker 2: This kills me. So we built a unique bundle builder and the more you added to cart, the deeper the discount went. Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: They would add up their cart and it was literally dollars difference from what they would get if they were to originally get the 20% off for being a subscriber. So now we're going back and forth and talking about like negotiating shipping rates because of where they live and why the price is different. And so I will say that if you're going to build something custom on the bundle builder side, make sure that It maps directly to what the prices look like on the subscription side or you're gonna see just this random spike of churn. That's for sure. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Was there a moment like with the brand where you like all of a sudden it was like, you're like, this is gonna work. Speaker 2: Oh my god. I would say so we're two years, we launched in 420. Okay. Appropriately. Speaker 1: Iconic. Speaker 2: This is our second, we're in like the third year now because we just passed the second year. I would say that our first six months when we started realizing First, it was six months in, so we got our full holiday experience and the New Year, New Me. We went right through the New Year, New Me and the take rates and the stickiness. Six months of like 40 to 50 to 60% stick rate. And that's like a brand new product. We don't know how it's working, right? And so we're starting to people, AOV on returning purchasers are significantly growing. So usually right now we fluctuate. First time purchasers, non-offers or non-subscription is sitting around like $85, okay? Repeat purchase rate, non-subscription is sitting at like $92, $95. Repeat purchase on subscription is like $105. Because they're getting the discount, there's adding a bunch more to it and they're keeping it and they're sharing it. So that to me was like, as soon as we started seeing the feedback of going, hey, I'm not drinking as much anymore. Because if you go to a very psychological level, some people are coming to this product for a lot of reasons. And one of your core questions you asked me, when we're thinking about like, how do you make sure that you're creating a unique customer experience rather than just like selling a product? And I'm trying to work through this right now because you have to be, the portal that we get, we have customizations allowed, but there's a lot of different use cases for why someone's drinking our product. Are they drinking because they want to go party? Are they drinking it because it's a little bit of escapism? Are they drinking it because they're medicating with a higher dosage? So when you think about gifting or experiences or incentivization, I can't just give everybody. Speaker 1: Like an experience one gift. Speaker 2: Yeah, so I'm trying to find out like what is the best way of doing this and this is like my Enemy for the year I guess the thing that I'm trying to battle on an ongoing basis Because I just don't know what it is the best approach to do this. What would you think? Speaker 1: God, like now I'm thinking, like, do we ask something like with when you're, when you're checking, like, is there some type of survey that we can actually then link that data in and then like do something and then set up like, okay, then you get this flow, you get that flow, like, should we be asking somebody, I bet we could probably set this up in Klaviyo, like, what's, you have a post-purchase survey going on? Speaker 2: We do, yes. Speaker 1: Okay, so if you were asking like, yeah, like, why did you consume this like based like to a product and then you would do some type of flow, we would set it up in Klaviyo, you'd be like, okay, like, This person has like this attribute for why they wanted it and then you could send a quick action through Stay that would give them that gift and so you could say like okay great apply this to your next order. So there is a way that if we were able to ask them and they filled it out. We could then send a gift that would make sense for that experience. Speaker 2: So I'm getting geeked on that because I have four personas. Speaker 1: I have the partier. I'm ready. Laptop's up. I keep saying this with the podcast. When you do a Laptop's Up podcast. Speaker 2: That's kind of fire because you think someone's drinking this because I'm sharing this with the buddies. Cool, you're probably going to get a really incredible cooler from us or a set of koozies. And we already have these. We're already building these and finding these. There's also the one that's like, I'm at home and I want to mix this for myself. You should get a very psychedelic, unique, mixing glass, spoon, stir. Those experiences live and should be it. And so if there's a way, because we already have the post practice, we're already asking the questions and we already have Clavio and everything. So there's a no reason why. We can at least run a V1 on this. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. Two different ways. Actually, now you said that. I'm excited. We have something else coming out where you can put different variants for people to pick. So you can offer somebody a gift. They can come in and then they can select from a dropdown. So up to you. It's not out yet. It might be out by the time we get this podcast. But yeah, because right now it's been like you just have to pick one gift and then they got that gift. No, we're about to send a quick action out that's like pick your free gift and then it will have the like a drop down where then they could pick from it. So we could do like a couple, we could either like collect the information and then send them the email that like has the thing like tied to their information or we can just send a more general email but then let them pick which gift makes the most sense for them. Speaker 2: I don't have to even go before this one. So say some of the subscription, we started this way and they're going like, we did not do gifts from the get-go because we actually, honest to God, we did not know that we were going to have this big of take rate. We didn't know we'd get this big. So I'm over here coming two years in going, dude, I need to do more uniqueness to these people. So we do what is unique. If you don't have anything Gift wise, you're not going to look to go buy something unique. The easiest place for you to start is like give them free product of what they're already getting. So they're already subscribed to the six pack of a 12 ounce. On their first month or second month, wherever that churn spike is going to be, you're going to get double your product. That's the easiest way to get it out to them so that we've done that. That's allowed us to increase or decrease churn for the first month. And then we've also done random giveaways for people on a monthly basis. If you are with us past this date, which is usually the churn spike day of the month, If you're with us past this date, you're entered to win a free X. And so we choose five of these people. It's actually incredible. We see this bump. Speaker 1: I love that. I'm always looking for somebody to do like, people don't look enough at like the amount of days that people are subscribed and these different like reports that we have on the dashboard where it is so important to understand like, what are those points? Like there are periods when you look at those graphs where it's like, especially by day, like you'll see it'll like be growing at like this like one rate and it's like, Yeah, and then like grow at this and we're like, okay we need to what is this like, you know Day 30 or day 60 or whatever that we can then zero in on. Speaker 2: Well, it's true and and sometimes look I think most of the data you kind of have to the dashboards do as much as you need to do but there's times where you just have to rip this out and pull it because we had so two things we went through with your team which was helping me was we had massive product delays all last month and And we had a drop in paid media spend, which meant two things. Now we have people that are pissed at us because they're not going to get the product and we're not acquiring as much customers. So now I'm going through like two different things. I have churn spike and I have take rate decrease and I have new growth or I have a lack of new growth of subscribers. So I'm sitting here going like, how do I make sure that I message all the correct people That should be notified because now their product is not gonna ship in time, but they are about to get billed. So that to me is like a big thing that we try to have to walk through. Some of that's manual, so we had to kind of export that. You're not gonna get a dashboard that does that. None of the tools are gonna do that for you. So that was one. Speaker 1: It's so unique to the brand. I'm just like, what does that like want, like use case? And like you have to know also what you're looking for. Like you knew that it was gonna be delayed. We're like, we don't know it's gonna be delayed. Speaker 2: No, because that we find out like that was like our ops guy going like, hey, like we didn't pass tests like this needs to be delayed. And so now it's a full scramble. Speaker 1: What did you end up doing? Did you push back charge dates? Did you message people? What did you? Speaker 2: We auto push it by a month. Speaker 1: You guys have a lot of different things that you need to look at. Like there's I mean, if you scroll through our dashboard, like we just talked about you looked at the turn thing. I think you're doing amazing things there with like dates and figuring out what else are you using on the dashboard? Speaker 2: So specifically right now, I wasn't actually looking at this beforehand. I probably should have been paying more attention to it. But because we launched all new products, so we did a bundle builder and then we did basically four new SKUs dropped. Two infused, two non-infused. So we did so much emailing. We did 30 emails. We launched a week and a half ago. Oh, I saw. Yeah, you couldn't get away from us. We were running so many ads. Posts, emails, etc. So we basically are incentivizing them and we're probably going to do something else which you kind of reminded me to, so I'm going to ask about that in a second. I was monitoring on the customer actions within the dashboard. So you have the ability of like, get it now, you have the ability to kind of check and see if They're swapping themselves. And that's what I was really, really noticing. I emailed or I was messaging my head of subscription. I was like, hey, Brian, what are you doing? Like, how do I know if they're adding the new products and SKUs that we added? And he goes like, dude, it's literally show you right here. So we're able to kind of see it week over week growth. And so that's been one area that I love. Second is the forecasting. So you guys have been playing with the forecasting. You have a couple different lines kind of set up there. Forecasted plus like expected. So because I've been so on the paid media side, I understand that we are trying to spend as much money as possible to acquire as many customers as possible. So we're not sitting here going to be like, I want like super high ROAS. I know what Cactarget needs to be, Nick, how much expected subscription revenue is coming because that's basically, that's our safety net, what's coming. So we do a lot of like projecting forward based upon what that dashboard is going to give me. And so we do a lot of exports and just like scenario running on that. Yep. Speaker 1: Yeah. Oh, I love that. So you guys just launched the new products. Are you doing, have you gotten anything yet about upselling current subscribers on the new ones? Speaker 2: So we, I haven't done this yet because I actually haven't taken advantage of the quick actions in emails because we wanted to be like, hey, we're live, this is yours, you have this opportunity. So we kind of just did incredibly beautiful branded emails, but we weren't doing any specific quick actions. Why? Why are you asking? Speaker 1: I want to send an email with a quick action in it to all subscribers. Hey, here are our new products. Add this to your order and get it this week and get a special discount. We'll come up with like what we think the discount is for that. Is it 20% off? Is it 30%? Is it a dollar amount? And so we can send an email to all the existing subscribers. No matter when their next order date is. And then we can stack the quick actions. So we can say, add product, get a discount on the product, and get the order now to push up the order date. Speaker 2: Okay, what if some of them already took this off or what if they've already bought on their own? Speaker 1: We can just run a quick exclusion to who gets the email. So we would just build the audience what somebody is active subscriber and has not bought one of these products in the last six days. Speaker 2: And we run, okay. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: It's hitting me right now. It's literally on my face. Can we incentivize a free product versus a discount? Can I give them free shots if they just get a variety? Speaker 1: So add this product and get a free gift. Speaker 2: Versus add this product and get a discount. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, we would do ad product and then we would add the one product and then I can't remember if the way we built it was like ad product plus free gift or like it's just two basically ad products and then we would add the free gift in as like a second. You would stack basically the quick actions would be like ad product which is the actual product, ad product which would be the gift and then get it now. Speaker 2: Why I want to do this is because if they haven't tried shots or if we have a product that's underutilized, I'm going to give that to you for free. What if you love it? Speaker 1: I love that. Speaker 2: Then maybe they're like, yo, I actually like that free thing. I kind of want this back with me. Speaker 1: I like that. The messaging is going to be like, hey, like try our new product and get a free gift. Speaker 2: This is, this is what I talked about before on post-purchase. If you're doing post-purchase plays and you have a product that's not being utilized often, you can kind of use that as like the free gift or incentivization. Cause then you might, they might be like, I didn't even know you had this. I love this. It could be, especially on the skincare side of things. Cause if you incentivize them, you're doing eye cream. Why aren't you doing anything else around pores? Speaker 1: I talk about it all the time. Most brands have a gateway product and then all the side products like that is what you should be using for gifting. So you like want to sample them around the product catalog. Like you got to be looking like what are the and I think some people catalyze too much. They're like, oh, well, like we just want to sell our top products because that's it. There's a skincare line. They have this Hero product, their BHA, whatever. That's how they get everybody in. It's what all their ads are for. I got in on that product. I actually hate that product. I use seven of their other products that are their sub-products, but those are just a better fit for me. Where I'm like, yeah, I got in on the gateway, but I don't want to keep getting offered that gateway product because there were all these other things that they then put samples in and whatever, and I ended up, instead of losing me as a customer, because I was like, oh, I actually don't want this thing anymore. They sampled me through the product catalog while I was checking out and got me all these samples and now I use all these other products. Speaker 2: This is the beauty of it. This is why I think people got away from sampling. They used to be like the free plus shipping offers, you know what I mean? And so these got hit and then there was a lot of legality around it. But for us that are in this, the flavor and the drink and the consumption behavior is so unique and different and they're all They all give you some sort of feeling, but you have to actually literally try it to feel it. And so the more times I can give it without giving a discount, plus no matter where you stand, like some people might just be against the discount. Some people just aren't going to convert on a discount, or some people are just going to be like, I value product more than saving a couple bucks. Because we already are at the higher tiers on this stuff. Speaker 1: Yeah. And so then also, so we have a brand, I think I highlighted, Olipop does it a ton. When they're going to launch a new product, they actually give it to subscribers first. So they email the subscribers and they're like, you can add this to your subscription and get it. I would love to see you guys do that on a future product launch. Speaker 2: I tried to do this, I think because we're doing well, but we're still new. And so the inventory Lift, for me to get a brand new product launched and not sell it because of the investment of cash into it already. Look, I fully agree. Speaker 1: But what about just a couple days early? Like, what if it's just like you get it five days before? Speaker 2: Well, they don't get it free, but they get access. Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, access to buy it. Unknown Speaker: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Like, you know, like we launch it, like, if we know that the launch date, you know, is like the 15th, subscribers can add it and hit get it now on the 10th. Speaker 2: So we do two emails. So as long as you give yourself at least three days, because three days is enough to be like, hey, you get early access, because that's the incentivization for you to be a subscriber, right? First access to the things. And the second thing you get is, as long as I can email them twice, hey, you get access now, and you're about to lose access, we're opening up to the general public. You've got to give yourself, I wouldn't say five days, I would say keep that gap into three, even two if you really needed to, 48 hour lift. That way you can kind of do a weird, push for urgency without having to be like, hey, hurry up. Speaker 1: I feel that. Unknown Speaker: Here's the truth. Most subscription platforms are built for billing teams and not for growth marketers. We didn't get subscriptions right the first time. There's too much friction and too many drop-offs. Stay AI helped us clean it all up. Now we have the platform to manage subscriber upsells, gifting, Offers and profit analysis. After we added Stay AI, churn went down, LTV went up, and our team isn't stuck in support tickets every single day. If subscriptions are part of your roadmap, check out Stay AI slash Chew on This and mention Chew on This, you'll get $200 off your monthly plan for life. Speaker 2: Now let's get back to the episode. Speaker 1: Give me an example of something that did not go well. Something that you tried that or like just maybe it didn't work the way you expected. Speaker 2: We went through this. It was terrible. This is like the last three and a half weeks of heavy churn. So we are primarily Non-offer based company, meaning any of the people that we're competing against, I always pull inspiration from like the mushroom coffee people. They run the gnarliest offers. Free this, free that, free that. And so look, we haven't done it until now. We didn't think we needed to and now we kind of do need to because we need to incentivize people to stick with it a little bit longer, especially if it's a newer product to experience. So what we launched early was like, This is your welcome offer. Well, our welcome offer, because we only had one product at the time, it's the same. You can get the welcome offer just on the site. So there was no uniqueness of the product. So I think we learned you have to have something unique. You have to have something at least that's incentivizing them other than dollars off, because they're going to get that anyways. Second, when we launched a product with the consumption behavior of Spirit compared to when we were selling six-pack, 12-pack, 24-packs, The spirit production, we should have never allowed it to hit any sort of our like subscribers or because as soon as what people forget is like when you start selling to subscribers and the subscriber take rate is high and they start going, your order velocity is Subscribers times everything else. And so we didn't do the math. The math was wrong. We ran out of product. We sold too much. So it either should have stayed with subscribers to make sure that they had this cool product. Speaker 1: Holding inventory for subscribers. Speaker 2: We should have held inventory. Speaker 1: Got it, got it. Yeah, because then you're not paying to acquire. Yeah, just in terms of... Speaker 2: We're pissing these guys off. These guys are the best people for us. That's the first one. Second, we wanted to... I think in the dashboard, we didn't take enough... So the user portal. You can update the banner. I've talked about this and I think this is coming close from you guys. Depending on how the consumer comes in, I want to make sure that the consumer is seeing on their dashboard, like the banner that we use, that's incredible ad space. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: I want that clickable, I want them to see this, I want them to know that there's stuff coming or there's information or knowledge or videos that they can kind of experience when they land on it. That's something that I know our subscribers are going to want to use. Speaker 1: Do you want like dynamic banner content, more banner content? Okay, all right, good news. Speaker 2: I know, I know, I know it's coming. Speaker 1: Dynamic banners are coming. Speaker 2: Because I was yapping about this because I know for a fact that if we have so many different types of products and experiences as they're coming in, I know they're going to be wanting something different in the dashboard. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: Most of these subscription brands skew older. How many of our people are, and I actually have the numbers on this. I don't have it with me right now. Majority of the people are asking for changes or cancellations through support. And they're like, well, I can't log in. I'm like, well, it's the same log. You don't really need to log in. You already have it. That has been the biggest education issue. We should have done a more thorough walkthrough as soon as you were a subscriber. Just so you know, you subscribed. You know you did this, correct? And then here's how you log in. Here's how you check this. That should have spent way more time. We now actually have a much better subscription onboarding process because they need to be reminded. They need a full video or a walkthrough. Speaker 1: Yeah. One of my questions actually around churn, I've been like, Screaming this recently is that churn just doesn't, you should be fighting churn only at the cancellation survey. You should be fighting churn the entire time and you should learn things from the cancellation survey from those things and then update what is that post-purchase experience? What do we put in that first email? How do we make sure? So what, I guess anything interesting that you've learned from the cancellation survey and anything you're doing before somebody would even come into the portal to cancel that you think is having an impact on churn. Speaker 2: So what we learned earlier on was like we aren't going to do bi-weekly shipping, right? So we normally default to monthly, four weeks. So four weeks is the thing that we default to. If you default to monthly, then you actually miss out on like a billing period. So monthly, it'll always stick with monthly. Four weeks, you'll get a couple more days on there. So I think that's a big, that's a big rebill. We had to make sure that Do the cancellation videos, and I am guilty of not having, because I wanted to fully script it out and make it very professional. Don't make it professional, just do it. It actually is better when it comes to the founder. Alyssa, my retention lead, she was like, just make me a video. I was like, no, I need a script. She was like, no, pick up your phone and rip that. And I was like, so that has been one. So cancellation videos, hey, don't churn, stick with us, here's what you get. That's a big one. Two, offering the ability to skip right away. I think that's one. Why aren't we doing that enough? And I think that's it. It's not an overcomplicated thing. What I would say we're probably not doing good enough is our words And our communication to 15,000 people that are actively subscribed to us, we probably need to be more specific in how we're communicating them or the information that they get. Not just promos or deals. I feel like we need a full new content strategy that really is aimed towards the people that are sticking with us for long periods of time. That's probably the biggest... Speaker 1: To make it more of like this like club membership-y like feeling. Like you're on subscription so like what does that even mean? Like is it just something you see as auto ship or like does it mean something to be a subscriber? Speaker 2: Exactly and people ask like oh, why don't you have like a Facebook community? Why don't you have a membership? I'm like well subscriber In my opinion, subscriber is the ultimate membership. Why would I build a separate membership or why would I build another community? But yes, I understand that there's no place for them to be interacting with each other in a portal. That's where a Facebook, I think, maybe... Speaker 1: Right, yeah, and do you really want to monitor all of that and what people are saying? No, it's a full team member. Yeah, that is a whole job where it's more about what you create and I think that's why the emails that you can send and the messaging and what you put in that bit, it should foster a community where they feel like they're getting something special. Because they're a subscriber and that's I think that banner real estate is really important because it's gated to subscribers So you're only gonna see it if you're a subscriber So if you want to put content in there You want to link out to hidden videos like all of that all makes sense to live in the subscription portal I think so too because we go back and forth at least on Mikey when our dev leave he's like do we build an app? Speaker 2: I'm like, why do we build an app? He's like, well, we want to control the experience the universe like their logins and everything I'm like, dude, we could Spend the time to build a custom solution where they can log in and experience BrezWorld or whatever it's going to be. We have to build the team, and then we have to have all the content ongoing, and then we have to monitor it, and then we have to make sure it's updated. There's so much more work that goes into that stuff that you just have to use what's been provided, and don't worry about it. Just focus on the emails that they get. Speaker 1: Yeah, you can drive a lot through the emails, the customer, all the touch points. I was just talking to a company the other day, and it's one of those hardware, and then they ship a filter, where for them, They don't really need a map. I don't need to be in the world. It's just different, but I'm like, you know what I would love? A text message once a month that reminds me to change my filter because they ship them in three packs, six packs. I think every company is different, but thinking about what makes sense for you. What are those touch points? What should be in the text messages? What should be in the emails? What should be sitting in the portal? How often should we be communicating? Sometimes it really is about fostering community and you don't need a separate app to do that. You can do that with the channels you already have. Speaker 2: And it's very, how do you say this? Like it's art versus science. Like I know people are like, oh, what does the data tell you? Like what are the opening? What are they experiencing? I don't think it's, I don't think it's as cut and dry as that. Like it's so different. People are consuming these products at various times. Now even more, now it's at sleep, now it's during energy time, now it's like not just a beer replacement or a wine replacement. So there's a lot of learning that are coming to it. And I don't know, it's gonna be, this, what I was telling the team earlier this morning, I'm so nervous for what we have to build now because of how many more products we have. And when retail grows, like we're seeing a natural small cannibalization in like some metro areas where we have retail presence, because they're going like, Dude, I don't actually need to subscribe because I'm gonna go pick it in person. So now I gotta even be more creative and be like, why should they stay subscribed? You should get these free things or you should get these experiences or we should do these activations. I'm trying to figure it out. Speaker 1: Okay. And so something else I wanted to touch on. You guys are bootstrap, raised money. How big is the team? How did things get started and where are we at? How are things financed? Speaker 2: We're bootstrapped. So between Aaron, myself, and a couple of members, it's all around money. Great. It could probably change in the future. Beverage is expensive. Speaker 1: Of course. Speaker 2: The space, as you're seeing, is super hot. A lot of people are doing big things. Not even just in our alcohol alternative space, but just the energy space. Tons of movement. Totally. Bev is hot. The easiest thing is We're here we're playing and we know we're probably one of the biggest if not the biggest in the space right now Yeah, so the team sits just about 35 people. Speaker 1: Oh, okay. Speaker 2: Oh my god, so it's Most of this is sales and retail And that channels growing like yeah, that was not a thing like you would have asked me that 30 times actually really lean that if you're talking about all that I was like just thinking about like the econ team, but yeah, oh no, no, no, this is I think retail alone is probably 15, 20 of that. Like DTC is lean, very lean. And then we're in-house agency, we're a freelancer. We're not like everyone's in-house as much as I would love that to be. Look, we've come from the agency. Speaker 1: We get it. What things are you using agencies for? Speaker 2: Content. So we have content, we have, I have a great consultant on subscription, I have a great consultant on email. So I make sure that the people that I would like, I would like a full-time subscription person, I would like a full-time email person, but I can play enough of it and I understand most of it that I need them to be execution while I sit in strategy. And then we have, you need so much content now. I know you're talking to all these other brands, If you don't have, and unfortunately, you can have a creative strategist, but there might be really good in one like style of content, man on the street versus like full 3D rendering. Other than I need to get someone that's like full AI. So we're looking for Always looking for content creators or whitelisting agencies or these guys that pull more content because we need to acquire more. CRO is in-house, so we have Pages and Dev in-house. The vibe is very unique, so it's really difficult to find that on a freelance basis. Retail is all us. We probably have to think about a merchandising team or something that goes in and like fixes it on the shelves that'll probably be outsourced to a person. Ads team is in-house, email team is like hybrid. So yeah, it's a little bit of everything across the board. Speaker 1: Okay, nice. Is there a hire that was very game-changing to you where you're like, I wish we made this hire sooner? Speaker 2: 100%, so his name is Mikey. We, because of how many funnels, pages, we're moving through PLs, CX, he sits, he basically is like, He's an e-com manager, but then also is smart on dev, and he came from Apotheke, and the dude is kind of savage. He gets it enough to be dangerous. He was a game changer. We're now in the process of hiring a head of growth, but different. So normally, head of growth is like, I need to manage channels. We don't need them to touch channels. We need them to own brand, and we need them to own the voice. We already have the people that are really good on the channels and the dials, but they just need to be like, What are we saying and how are we saying it here? And how does that story live on this page and these ads and those emails? Because we already have the team to execute. Usually it's the other way around. We're like, the head of growth is in charge of running all the things, but we're unique in that we all come from paid. We all come from email. So we actually just need someone that's like own voice. Speaker 1: Got it. Okay. All right. That makes sense. Speaker 2: That'll be game changing. Speaker 1: Yeah. Okay. I love that. And then we talked a little bit about things that have gone wrong. There wasn't something else that we had to work on together. You guys added it to the site. It's been really, really great. Can we talk about? Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Leave me in. Speaker 1: Okay. Go Puff. Speaker 2: So I would say Last Mile. I would not even just like because I think you can run into this from like DoorDash from any of them because of the way that Last Mile works and They need it to be within a two minute window. It has to basically, consumer comes in, the locals, whatever geo you're in, they have inventory and they have the ability to deliver to you in 30 minutes. So if you're in Miami, you can get our product in 30 minutes. It's crazy. Speaker 1: Fantastic customer experience. Hands down, incredible experience. Speaker 2: If you can do it, if you can afford it, if it makes sense, if they have your area, do it. It is sick. So for someone to literally order it and get it in 30 minutes, mind-blowing. So the issue with this, and we were talking brief off, we have a post-purchase upsell that has to keep the gate open because now that's more time that As soon as they purchase, the clock starts. We have like a two minute, a minute and 30 second window to where we can offer them a post-purchase upsell. And then depending on how long that takes, then it goes into triggering. If they're on subscription, it rebills on the same exact shipping method that they had. Well, the shipping method, depending on how you set it up in stay, it'll default to the most cost-effective one. Speaker 1: Correct. Speaker 2: Sometimes, GoPuff or delivery app is not the cheapest one. Or sometimes it is, and then all of a sudden they're getting a, the rebill hits at three in the morning. Where they are so yeah people it's at 3 in the morning, and they're gonna get a delivery at their door in 30 minutes So we have a lot of people going like why the? Are you delivering my beverage at four in the morning? Speaker 1: That's a fair question. That is a fantastic question. Speaker 2: We shouldn't be doing that. Speaker 1: Nope. No, we should not. No, we should not. Speaker 2: So the benefit of like, oh my God, you get it so fast. And then all of a sudden now you don't. And so that did take some time. Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, when you guys reached out to me about this at first, I was like, okay, but like, wait, what is the problem? And like, just I'm reading the email and it clicks and I was like, Oh, that's a problem. We need to fix it now. All hands on deck, get in, get this thing sorted. Speaker 2: It was not an easy solution. That's the issue. Speaker 1: And so many people have to talk, and all the tech companies. It took a call where we all got on the phone, and us, and the people from GoPub, and everybody was fantastic. Again, we got it sorted, but it was all hands on deck. What do we want to happen? What is the ideal? And then how do we make it happen today? And does anybody need to change things? How do we have these filters? Because again like that experience on checkout is fantastic but it truly doesn't make sense for a subscription because like I mean I guess like you could have moved the timing over and like maybe had the orders like rebuild in the middle of the day but even then like I don't think that somebody wants their subscription order delivered in the middle because you're not like really expecting it. Speaker 2: No. Speaker 1: You didn't go on the website and like hit get it now. Speaker 2: No. Speaker 1: Oh you know what would be fun if we did some type of integration that it's only available when someone goes in and hits get it now. Like doesn't work on the auto-reveal, but if somebody hit. Speaker 2: That's what I want, that's what I wanted, but we didn't want to push yet. Speaker 1: Let's get the solution in place, but I do like that of some type of, if there's a way that like we could add a filter where if somebody hit get it now, then they should get it literally now. Speaker 2: No, that is, I think you guys on all last mile delivery, anytime it's a get it now for any of the products, they should 100% be able to do that. What's gnarly is like, You rebuild in the morning so that they're prioritized for shipments. But when it's, and GoPub wants it too, because they're like, look, you're paying me to fulfill this product. So they're going to take a little, small little spread on it too. So obviously like, yo, how do you default to us in these regions? Totally get it. But we, for the experience that you guys are all working through, because when I was like articulating, I'm like, why is this not working? Oh, because the rebuild at this time, we can't change the rebuild. And that's what we all had a kind of all hands on deck kind of thing. Speaker 1: Totally makes sense. So grateful that you talk at the same speed that I talk at. I feel like people that usually will have to up the speed when they listen to videos will not have to do that with us, so we've covered so much. I do still want to hit on, is there anything else, in hindsight it's 2020, if you could go back to a year ago, anything else that you would have done sooner or changed? Speaker 2: Yeah, product page. So on product page, you can technically buy everything. You can buy the different versions, The different delivery times. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: The different SKU counts. Speaker 1: Yep. Speaker 2: And bundles on a product page. That's a lot. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: So when you have a 1% conversion rate or maybe potentially a little bit lower at times, why are we doing that? Speaker 1: That's a good question. Speaker 2: So at the time you're like, dude, we have like two products, three products. It makes total sense. They can just like click it and click it and click. And then I go like, well, dude, now we have bundles and now we have like multi bundles and now we have multi SKUs of these bundles. So there's a lot of logic that goes into this. And I probably would have, as soon as we started to expand past like three products, I probably would have done like the individual product pages. Speaker 1: Got it. Speaker 2: So they didn't have to navigate everywhere towards it. Speaker 1: Okay. That makes sense. Speaker 2: I think that's the biggest learning lesson and then I defaulted to subscription first. Like that to me, the take rate literally went from like 12% to like 18, 20% on one change. Speaker 1: We have to like fight people for this. Speaker 2: But do you know why? I mean, you know why. Speaker 1: Oh, it's scary. It's scary. Changing anything on the PDB is scary. I totally get it. But, like, I'm trying to figure out better ways for us to prove this out or, like, convince people of it, because it's always that thing that we're, like, the CSM is, like, fighting with the brand of, like, please just try it, and they'll, like, maybe try it on, like, one product and see, and then, like, slowly roll it out. And, like, every time, like, I've had this conversation a couple times where everyone's, like, that was the biggest game changer that we've had. And I'm, like, I should do it sooner. Speaker 2: I know, because they feel, and it's the same, I had to go to battle with Aaron and the team and be like, I don't want this to feel like we're forcing it upon people. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 2: And I go, if they feel like this is forced, and this is obviously a different take, if they feel like we are forcing it upon them, they are not paying attention, and they are literally taking their credit card out and making a purchase decision, they should be very conscious in doing so. You know, sometimes people aren't. Customers will say what customers say, but this was, that's a change that you, If you need to start somewhere, start there. Two, make sure that you're showing the incentives that they get. Don't go bi-weekly, don't go out of that. The amount of money you're gonna make is not worth the amount of churn and headaches and cancellations that you're gonna get because a lot of these people, they're gonna get it for the deepest discount, they're not the customer you want anyways. Speaker 1: Bi-weekly is a lot. Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, on any product. Speaker 1: Yeah, it really is. Like I can't think of anything that, yeah. Speaker 2: The only one that I think would be like hydration packets, but then you have to be like an ultra athlete and you're like consuming like two electrolyte packets a day maybe. Speaker 1: We're doing a lot of studies with brands that they're actually trying to move to less frequent shipping and finding out that moving up the pack sizes. Yeah, so like taking anybody, like taking customers who subscribe on one month, like one pack one month to three packs three months. And so like after they get them in, like on order two or three, like pushing those, like swap and update frequency to get people on the larger pack size and finding that the LTV of those customers is actually much better. Speaker 2: Are you trying to upsell the household or are you just trying to tell them like, hey, just stock and save? Speaker 1: On a just very basic level, you're like, hey, like this is better for the environment. Usually like your margins are a bit better if you're shipping a larger amount less frequently. So it's more just like, hey, this is better for the environment. Like this is easier for you. Like instead of one pack, you know, one month, three pack, three months. So you're doing like actually an even amount of product. Over like the day. So you're just like tripling the frequency and the pack size. Am I making sense? Speaker 2: It does. Yeah, because I would basically when I look at the second because it usually churn hits in Day 27, 8, before 30. And then it would go, if they're going to stick past me with my first rebuild, they're going to be with my second rebuild. Am I like incentivizing them past month two or like past rebuild two? Speaker 1: I would go after like rebuild one or two. So like you don't like not on the first order, like let them get the product, like let them get a subscription order first. Because now you have customers that like you actually know you want it and then like that way like you're not going to ship Three cases of something and like have this big thing that they're going to return because they didn't want it. So like I'm usually wait, you know, after, you know, the first rebill at least or second rebill. But then if you have like good loyal people that are like, yeah, I just want this amount like at this cadence, you're like, hey, we'll either give you a bigger discount or like some type of reason to switch to that. And then we're seeing that the LTV is higher on those customers because they're not getting it as frequently. Like they're getting the amounts at a like, instead of reminding them every single month, you just got charged. It's the three month. Speaker 2: I also want to, the learning on that would take so long. Speaker 1: That is the issue. Speaker 2: Because you're like waiting a quarter of the time. Speaker 1: Yep. And then you're like measuring out the group. So we had some people who started it about six months ago. And that's, so now we're just able to go in and we're like, ah, this is interesting. Speaker 2: I guess if it's just a flow of going like, do you want Because you don't have to force them, you're like, yo, would you try this? Speaker 1: No, it's an email with a quick action. It's an email that sends out to them. You just kind of like pull a group of people and like, maybe we start small, like maybe we pull like a hundred people and send them an email and just see if they would want to switch to it. But also like for you guys, like you would have to say like, how much more profitable is that order for us? Like, is it, you know, like how much money are we saving by them getting, you know, three, instead of one month, you're four weeks to 12 weeks, but how much better is that for you? Speaker 2: No, we got to go through that. Because of cans, usually they can garage store or they can like store it in pantry so it doesn't have to all be refrigerated. So it also depends on shelf life. So checking on shelf life first. And then shipment, like you mentioned, it's cans. So the more we can get out at one time, usually it's better. So I'm gonna have to look into that. Speaker 1: Yeah, pros and cons. There's stuff like that, especially if you have people that are super kind of regular where they're like, oh yeah, they checked out 90 days ago and they've gotten three orders in that time. It's like, all right, then these are really good candidates to just move them to the bigger shipping. Speaker 2: I got that. Speaker 1: Okay, anything else that comes to mind that you want to leave the people with? Speaker 2: I think we'll probably have to do a part two because what I'm going to do is I'm going to launch gifts and I got to do it in a way where people have already been with us for a long time. Do I give all of them the gifts free? Do I just start it on the new ones coming in and then I just like don't give everybody that's been with me a period of time? Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts like we're thinking about like doing like actual pop-up events where the longer you're at you get to come to like private parties that we're doing. So we're trying to think of experience on a very real experience because that's how they drink the product. They're trying to do it for an experience. Speaker 1: Yeah. Speaker 2: So it's like we have a lot more It's a Brez experience that we have to build in for the subscribers specifically that we're, I don't even know if I'll get to it this year. Speaker 1: Got it, okay. Yeah, there's different stuff and we can also start, we can go through and be like, all right, let's pull everybody that's a subscriber with an historic LTV of this and let's send something to that audience, let's see what the take rate is, let's do it and then start to roll it out. Because I do love giving something out to those people that have been with you for a while and making sure that they feel good and they feel rewarded and I think just with all the new products you're rolling out, the name of the game should really be How do we get somebody who's just been subscribed to one product on two products, on three products, on four products? Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. ARPU, like how do we grow the amount of other things that they're adding to it? Which is why like right now when we launch all these products, I want them to at least add it. So when we finish with this, you said you're gonna help me. Speaker 1: I am. We're gonna laptop stuff right now in the green room. Speaker 2: I know. Because we're, before we jump on, I guess we'll end with this one. It's like we are, we're in a place where we might be underpacing based on So we have acquisition, returning revenue, non-subscribers, returning revenue, subscribers. And our returning revenue subscribers is lagging just a major portion, but a lot of them haven't tried our new products. So if I'm sitting here and I told Gina when I sat down, I was like, I got to make up this gap of dollars. And she was like, Honey, I got it. No stress, I got you right now. So we're gonna go try this out and maybe we'll do an update on the post. Speaker 1: Amazing. Well, thank you all for joining us. I can't wait to send the recap of this. We're gonna have to like stitch it with like, okay, and then we went and did this. So we'll come back to you maybe after this with a part two of our findings. Speaker 2: Thanks for your time. Speaker 1: Yeah, thanks. Bye. Unknown Speaker: If you want more from us, follow us on Twitter, follow us on Instagram, follow us on TikTok, and check out the website, ChewOnThis.io.