This week I give my thoughts about how you break into product management. 

Product Management does not have a clearly defined path - its not as simple as take a few classes and BOOM you are now a PM. 

In this episode, I cover the basics about What a Product Manager does, How I would go about becoming a Product Manager and what steps to take to get into a Payments or Subscription role. 

At the end of the day, it comes down to trying hard, being patience, polite and persistent. This gets supercharged when you prepare by learning skills relevant to the job (think Analytics, Design, Engineering) and coming with fresh perspectives. 

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

This week I talk about the recent lawsuit settled between Visa and Mastercard vs United States Merchants. 

The lawsuit effectively will lower interchange costs for the next 5 years on all Visa and MasterCard credit card transactions.

But what exactly are interchange fees, what do they do and why are they so high in the first place? How do they compare to other places, regions in the world?

Listen to me recite sweet legal jargon from a United States District Judge - shout out to Margo Brodie for the Memorandum & Order that I was able to find on govinfo.gov !  

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

In this episode my guest is Jimmy Somarajan of Levi Strauss. 

We discuss the evolution of payments at Levis and dive into their Loyalty program, the Red Tab Members Program.

Loyalty can be measured in a number of ways; the top KPIs are retention and customer lifetime value

There are different structures you can use to build loyalty and it all results in data. This data can help to personalize the customer experience to drive loyalty. 

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

Chargebacks Attack dives into the wonderful world of chargebacks, why they suck and what you can do about them.

A chargeback is a consumer telling you that something went wrong with your service or product.

There are three main areas of chargebacks: consumer fraud, merchant fraud or criminal fraud - in all three cases someone did something wrong...

Chargebacks are an expensive problem for the merchant - so its up to the merchant to be clear on what their products cost, what their product delivers and to make it easy for consumers to cancel or to receive a refund.

Its also key to make it easy for consumers to identify the transaction - so that consumers don't flag a transaction by accident as fraudulent. 

There are services that will help businesses to manage their chargebacks, but they are costly. Its cheaper to make a better customer experience. 

At the end of the day, the better you deliver on services and customer support, the more likely you will be to keep your customers happy and chargebacks at bay.

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

This week on the Monetization Matrix, I discuss one of my favorite topics - metrics!!

What are the most important metrics to track for your subscription business and how should you be tracking or thinking about your payment metrics? 

These two areas are important meaty topics and are intertwined in their importance (depending on whether you have a subscription , recurring revenue business or not).

Subscription Metrics

1. Subscribers - How many users are paying for your service/product?
2. Churn Rate - How many people are leaving?
3. Retention/Survivability - How long are your customers sticking around ? When are they quitting or leaving?
4. First Pass Success- this is a payment metric, but you need to know how many customers you are able to bill successfully on first attempt - this will be an indicator for how many customers you need to recover
5. Recovery Success - Out of all the customers who you initially can't charge - how many are you able to take out of suspension and turn back into paying users?
   
   
6. Recovery Timing - When do you save customers from being cancelled? 

Payment Metrics

1. Payment Success Rate - Of all invoices / payment attempts - how successful are you 
2. Authorization Rate- When someone gives you a card, how often is it valid?
3. Auth-Capture - How often can you get money from a customer?
4. Average Order Value - How large is the basket?
5. Refund Rate - Are customers asking for their money back? 
6. Chargeback Rate - Are you facing fraud or are there better business practices you should be employing?
7. Customer Lifetime Value - When you combine retention with AOV, you get a view for how much a customer is worth long term.

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

In this episode I discuss how to increase your payment authorization rates.

The focus of this episode is to understand how a payment is accepted by learning about the different entities involved in a transaction. 

Next, the conversation moves over to common reasons why a payment might be denied and fail. 

In the last half of the podcast I discuss some of the common techniques used to stop a payment from failing and to capture payment from your customers.

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

This week we talk about Involuntary Churn and some tactics to fight involuntary churn.

Churn will kill your business very quickly if you don't get it under control.

In this episode you'll learn about the different types of churn, why involuntary churn happens and a few different techniques for combatting and crushing your involuntary churn. 

You’ve reached the Monetization Matrix with me, your host, Kristian Hansen. Your expert with insights into payments and subscription strategies - where I discuss how to help you monetize your products and services for growth.

Payments For Payments

Do Free Trials fuel the growth of a company or create users who don't want to purchase your product? 

In today's episode I discuss the positive and negative impacts of free or discounted trial offers. 

Key Highlights:

• Free Trials bring in new customers, free can be great! 
• You have to be able to track your users and segment them out to understand how they churn and engage with your service
• Make sure you have mechanisms in place to combat fraudulent activity - bad actors like free trials 
• Do the right thing if you are running free trials - Engage with your customers, let them know you are going to charge them - be upfront so there are no surprises (or chargebacks)

Payments For Payments

On the episode of the Monetization Matrix I discuss the steps necessary to consider as you start taking payments online.

TLDR: Start small and expand the services you need as your business and customer needs grow

Key Learnings: 

1. You can start with an out-of-the-box solution like Shopify, SquareSpace to get started selling online
2. If you want a dedicated processor, look for an easy to use company like Stripe or Braintree to get the ball rolling
3. Make things manual where possible
4. Expand your payment capabilities to international coverage if you see a business value
5. Reach out to others and seek guidance - there is a big community of folks in and around small businesses that want to help

Payments For Payments

This is it! The big,  #1 introductory podcast explaining who I am and why you might want to listen to the Monetization Matrix. 

This podcast focuses on how to utilize payments and subscriptions to grow your business and delight your customers. 

Learn about the highlights and lowlights of my entrepreneurship journey.  Listen to how I learned about payments, subscriptions, pricing and growing businesses from scratch to scale.

Some fun facts: 

• Sold chicken coops for a living and partnered with Williams-Sonoma
• Led payment and billing teams at Crunchyroll.com and scaled subscribers from 1 million to 5 million paying users
• Built Levi Strauss Checkout and International infrastructure
• Knows Latin

Listen in to learn more and Subscribe for future content

Payments For Payments