To launch a successful subscription business, you need to think like an innovator. But what does that really mean?

Rita McGrath is widely recognized as the premier expert on leading innovation and growth, particularly during uncertain times. A longtime professor at Columbia Business School, Rita is also the author of several bestselling books, including Discovery Driven Growth, The End of Competitive Advantage, and her most recent book, Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.

In today's episode, we talk about the right skills to launch, scale and lead a subscription initiative, the neuroscience of the status quo, and the seven archetypes of Innovation.

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Pricing is one of the trickiest elements of good subscription strategy and one that most practitioners feel unprepared to tackle. Coming up with a simple and clear pricing strategy is really complicated. That's why I invited Mark Stiving to the podcast. Mark is an educator at heart as well as a pricing expert, and in this episode, I ask him all kinds of questions about how to determine, test, communicate, and adjust pricing.

In this conversation, we talk about:

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Do you believe in the adage "Kind Folks Finish First"? Entrepreneur Sam Jacobs certainly does, and it's the driving force behind his successful organization, Pavilion.

Sam is the Founder & CEO of Pavilion. In 2016, he started Pavilion, originally named Revenue Collective, and bootstrapped it to an impressive $10M in ARR.

In 2021, he secured a $25M growth financing round, with Elephant Ventures and GTM Fund leading the way. With 15 years of experience as a senior revenue leader at various VC-backed companies in New York, including Gerson Lehrman Group, Axial, Livestream/Vimeo, The Muse, and Behavox, Sam has a wealth of expertise in the industry. He resides in the West Village of Manhattan with his wife and two dogs, William and Oswald, and fondly remembers his beloved Walter who passed away in the Summer of 2022.

In this episode, Sam shares his belief in playing the long game when it comes to business growth. He also shares his experiences as the founder of Pavilion, a paid membership community for revenue executives, and how the key to success lies in creating human connections and continuous learning.

He also tackled the challenges of balancing investment in community versus learning, and the importance of aligning incentives for growth.

Is there a different way to do business that leads to both success and peace of mind? Tune in to find out!

Key Takeaways from this episode: 

3:48 Different ways to do business

9:25 What is Pavilion?

17:45 The constant battle of centralization vs decentralization, consistency vs quirkiness, and how to have intimacy with consistency

24:20 The difference between Acquisition and Retention

29:49 Why bootstrapping is a strategy to achieve success

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If you haven’t been focused on subscription compliance before, you definitely need to start paying attention now. 

The Federal Trade Commission (or FTC) is getting serious about cracking down on “dark patterns” in the world of subscriptions.  They recently filed a lawsuit against Amazon for enrolling consumers in Amazon Prime without consent and for what they call “cancellation trickery. They’ve also announced plans to increase stringency around subscription rules. 

Today’s guest on the podcast, Davis + Gilbert partner Paavana Kumar, is a legal expert on eCommerce, with an emphasis on subscriptions.  In today’s conversation, we talk about some of the key elements in subscription regulations, the planned changes being proposed by the FTC in the US, and specific actions every subscription-based business should take if they want to stay on the right side of the law.

Excerpt:

One of the great things about the subscription industry is that you don't have to be super technical to break into it. You don't have to be a coder. You don't even have to have tons of VC money. You can be an industry disruptor if you have a great idea. Paavana Kumar is a Davis + Gilbert partner and a legal expert on eCommerce with an emphasis on subscriptions. She explains the proposed regulations changes in the Federal Trade Commission that will push many to pay attention to subscription compliance. Paavana also discusses the best actions to be taken to follow the law, especially with a lot of subscription-based businesses not aware of such legalities.

https://www.dglaw.com/

https://www.linkedin.com/in/paavana/

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The Device-as-a-Service (DaaS) Market is expected to Surpass $190 Billion by 2026, according to Market Research Future. That’s a compound annual growth rate,of of 55.8%. Acer is at the forefront of that wave, and today’s guest, Mailin Jappé, launched and now runs Acer’s DaaS business for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA). It’s hard enough to launch a subscription startup on your own—doing it inside a large manufacturer adds a whole level of complexity.

In today’s conversation, Mailin shares the challenges she faced in launching the business, how she’s transformed the culture to one of access, not ownership, and the right kind of team to support subscription innovation in manufacturing.

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In the world of subscriptions, the role of a marketer is rapidly evolving. It’s not enough to acquire subscribers—you have to acquire the right subscribers. But how do you market with an eye toward retention? Today’s guest, Anne Janzer, is the author of Subscription Marketing, now in its third edition. In this episode, we focus on the right mindset for marketers and how to establish the right voice to connect with your subscribers. Anne also shares some clever ways to get the biggest return on your marketing spend, as well as who and how to hire for your subscription marketing team.

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When I first started talking about the Membership Economy, there just weren’t that many academics or researchers interested in studying the power of customer retention.  That’s why I’m really happy to see some of the best minds in finance, strategy and marketing today are thinking about how to build, and measure durable relationships between organizations and the people they serve. Today’s guest, Eva Ascarza, is the Jakurski Family Associate Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. Her primary research subject is customer management (with special attention to the problem of customer retention). That’s good news for all of us building subscription businesses. In today’s discussion, we talk about the right metrics to measure and improve customer retention, how to use pattern recognition to predict which customers will be most valuable, and why cohort-based analysis is so important.

Based in Germany, and a global leader in digital language learning, 16-year-old Babbel was part of the early wave of online subscriptions. When they launched, subscription pricing was unusual and controversial. The early team even had to develop their own Subscription Engine to support the business. My guest today, Julie Hansen, has led the company’s expansion to North America, as well as their evolving overall business strategy. In our conversation, we discuss the differences between European and US-Based Subscription best practices; how to make the case for investing in features that drive engagement, rather than just acquisition; and how a first mover can stay nimble even as the competitive landscape grows more crowded.

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Before you start building your subscription product, make sure you really, really understand the ongoing problem you are solving. So says product leader Tom Willerer. Tom, my guest today, has worked with some of Silicon Valley’s most renowned companies, like Netflix, Opendoor and Coursera. He’s also an Entrepreneur in Residence at Reforge and a Venture Advisor at VC firm NEA. Today we’re talking about how to define your forever problem so you can build a forever transaction. In our discussion, we share the secrets to building subscription products, how to build conviction you’re on the right path and when to commit to scale.

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In the Membership Economy, customer-centricity is critical in building lasting relationships and optimizing lifetime value. As a result, the Chief Customer Officer, or CCO, is increasingly present at the leadership table. Today’s guest, Rod Cherkas, founder of HelloCCO, literally wrote the book on the CCO role. It’s called The Chief Customer Officer Playbook: 8 Strategies that will Accelerate your Career and Win you a Seat at the Executive Table and it just came out in Spring of 2023. The book is based on Rod’s own experience as a Post-Sale leader at companies including Intuit, RingCentral, Marketo and Gainsight. In today’s conversation, we talk about key metrics for customer success, the changing role of CCO, and what most companies get wrong when trying to build forever transactions with their customers.