When I wrote The Membership Economy, I knew that nearly every organization could build trusted recurring revenue relationships with their customers just by focusing on a forever promise. I really saw a huge future and hoped that companies would follow this path. But what I didn’t realize was just how quickly and broadly they would heed my words and invest in subscriptions.

It can be hard to predict what will happen next, but in this episode, we’re going to do just that. Today, my guest, Joe Rohrlich, CEO of Recurly, and I will talk about trends for 2025. We’ll explore what’s ahead, both for digital natives and large companies just dipping their toe into the world of recurring revenue.

You’ll learn best practices of the most successful household names, as well as how to manage challenges relating to speed to market and scaling without losing your secret sauce.

—

Listen to the podcast here

2025 Trends in Subscription Businesses with Recurly CEO Joe Rohrlich

When I wrote The Membership Economy, I knew that nearly every organization could build trusted recurring revenue relationships with their customers just by focusing on a forever promise. I really saw a huge future and hoped that companies would follow this path. But what I didn’t realize was just how quickly and broadly they would heed my words and invest in subscriptions.

You’ll learn best practices of the most successful household names, as well as how to manage challenges relating to speed to market and scaling without losing your secret sauce.

—

Robbie Baxter: Welcome to the show.

Joe Rohrlich: Thanks, Robbie. I am very glad to be here.

Robbie Baxter: Tell me a little about the journey that led you to where you are today at Recurly.

Joe Rohrlich: I was a Recurly customer. If I go back 9 or 10 years, I was working in a business where we were tasked with launching a new product line, and we had to take it to market really quickly. We identified at the time we found Recurly as a way in which we could get subscriptions up and running in a matter of days, not months, and that was a big deal to us, but that was 10 or 11 years ago, and Recurly was not the thing I woke up and thought about every single day until I got a call from a board member of the company about 18 months ago, who I had worked with previously. They said, “I’m working with this company. It’s a really good company that can be an amazing company, and it’s a great fit for you personally, and you need to learn something about it.” And when I heard the name, I said, “It is a great product.” That’s what I remember. So that got me intrigued. And here we are. I started at Recurly on January 2nd of this year (2024). So we’re going on. By the time this airs, it’ll be just over a year, and I’m so glad that I’m here.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, it’s 2024. So we’re at the end of 2024 while recording this. And yeah, it’s exciting to hear about what you guys are doing. But before we get into what you’re doing at Recurly, I understand that as part of your due diligence, before you took this role, you talked to 50 subscription-based businesses about the challenges facing organizations that rely on recurring revenue. I’m really interested in what that was like—the 50 calls, or maybe there were more than that. And what you heard from these businesses. This would have been in 2023 that you were doing these conversations.

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah. So I had calls with about our 50 largest customers. And I asked them all two questions. And then I listened closely to the commentary that was said in between. The questions were really simple.

The first one was, “If you could assign a letter grade to Recurly today, what grade would that be?” And the following question was, “If it’s not an A, how do we get there?” And to me, that was actually the most exciting. There are things that I heard in response that got me really enthusiastic about where we are in the subscription industry. Our grades were pretty consistent, and they were pretty good, to be honest, but getting an A is hard. The thing that I heard over and over again about how to get an A was some form of we as a subscription merchant are still in the early stages of figuring subscriptions out. And what we really are looking for is not just tools and capabilities, but his expertise and expertise to help us see around the corner what’s coming next.

And ultimately, I categorized the expertise that they were asking for into three areas. The first was what I call, charting the core. Where should we not reinvent the wheel because there are proven best practices for how to design bundles and offers to meet this use case or to price effectively, or what have you.

The second was about speed. So this was about how do we push the pace? How do we move faster while keeping up with the trends that consumers are driving in the subscription industry?

And the third was really about how do I anticipate and make decisions that are going to look smart 234 years from now in terms of how my business is going to scale. I don’t need to solve for global expansion today, but if I’m successful, that’s going to become a big deal three years from now. So how do I think about that? Again, if I just take all three of those and put them into one umbrella, I would say there’s a lot of hunger for leadership and expertise.

Robbie Baxter: So the three were charting the course. What are the best practices that have been defined? Speed to market. How do you get there more quickly? And dealing with the inevitable, or scaling challenges, right?

Joe Rohrlich: These are the luxury problems.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah. And so I’d love it if you went through each of those and shared back then in 2023, you were learning what they needed to hear. I think now hopefully you have some answers to those questions or some thoughts when you circle back and talk to these 50 largest accounts.

What are some of the insights that you have on each of those areas?

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah, so great point. I think the first piece around charting the course, I want to share two examples because I think it helps to illustrate how prevalent the need is for this kind of expertise. So when we think about subscription businesses, we talk about the subscription native. So these are businesses that have been in the subscription business for a long time. It’s core to their business model and then subscription newbies. These are businesses that may be more transactional in the way they’ve run their business historically but are interested in recurring revenue or subscriptions for a variety of reasons.

I’ll give you a tactical example, but that makes a big deal on the bottom line. One of the things we found when we looked across, even the data of our customer base, was that there’s a ton of variety in how merchants are optimizing the timing and the language of their dunning campaigns with their consumers, and at the same time, if we look at the data on actual successful revenue collection from subscriptions, there clearly are best practices, particularly around the timing, at which point you communicate with your consumers when you’ve had a, essentially, non-renewal or a failed renewal transaction.

We had a great example in 2023 with Kahoot. If you have children, it’s a great online learning platform used by most elementary schools globally. And we found that just by tweaking the timing to basically marry up the timing of their dunning with industry best practices, we could recover a substantial increase in revenue each month by doing that. So this is a small configuration tweak just to take what they had originally designed in a bespoke way, move it more in line with best practice that results in a growth in their bottom line.

Robbie Baxter: I have a follow on question. So when you implemented those best practices on the timing of their dunning, were there things that you did intuitively? So like they made logical sense, like instead of doing it automatically at the close of business, do it in the morning, was it something like that? Or was it really unintuitive and highly technical?

Joe Rohrlich: I think when you look at the rationale, this is what we see in most of our best practices, they’re all intuitive. And at the same time, we’re trying to take a data-led approach to this. Which is that rather than simply following our intuition, we can look across, in our case, our network of data, so our network of subscriber behavior and merchant, basically merchant trends, across our network and say, with statistical significance, in this case, which Dunning windows are proving to be the most effective in terms of their yield revenue back. But yes, I would say the answer is pretty intuitive.

Robbie Baxter: What is an example of that? You don’t have to give super specifics, but just for color.

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah. I think for them originally, with a lot of our merchants, they were set up several years ago in terms of the way they organize the dunning campaign. And it was essentially one outreach to the consumer a number of days after a failed transaction. And so what we did was going to go back through and say again, “What is the kind of proven methodology?” We look at the data of our customer base, and that involved them making a number of communications to the consumer on shorter durations of time there, and again, clearly yielded a better result for them.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, that makes sense. I was interested in that question because I always wonder, is it something when you’re telling your merchants what to do? Are they saying, “Oh, of course, it makes sense to reach out more than once and do it more frequently and not wait so long?” Or are they saying, “Wow, that’s something we never thought of.”

Joe Rohrlich: I do think most of our merchants are deeply data-driven and so they both want evidence, they’re going to take a recommendation at face value. They’d like to see some evidence of that, but they also want to be able to go measure on their own. They want to be able to go. To run an A/B test and to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that this is the right approach. And so I think maybe that’s just part of who we are operating in this space, as we want concrete proof. But that is something that we really do see with our customers quite a bit. I was going to share with you that in addition to these native subscription companies like Kahoot, we’re also seeing new entrants in the subscription space, and in that case, I think there’s an even bigger premium in some way that is placed upon the best practices and the expertise.

So an example that I like to use for that is we got into a conversation with Alaska Airlines about a year ago, and to me, this was surprising initially. So what is a subscription for an airline? And Alaska has a number of interesting strategies and very progressive ideas around why this is important and why this works.

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk. Subscriber behavior evolves, and so should your strategies. Stay agile, test new ideas, and adapt to keep ahead.

But the thing that was most important to them was not breadth of feature functionality and capability, but it was reall about how do we learn from the best subscription companies that have come before us around meeting the consumer’s needs? And I guess, maybe as I think about that in your question, your follow-up question around Kahoot, I think the common thing that we end up telling a lot of our merchants is that we can give you best practices, but the best practices are going to evolve because subscriber behavior is evolving. And so what you really need is the ability to move in an agile way, basically with trying new things. So perhaps you start with a fixed price of $9.99 a month, but you need to be able to quickly test a ramping price. What happens when I start the consumer at $2.99 a month and ramp that up every month? And so really the ability to quickly access those changes, which gets into my second point on speed to market, is a huge competitive advantage in our space right now.

Robbie Baxter: Speed to market, by that, you mean I have a new idea. Maybe instead of charging $9.99 a month, I want to see what would happen if I charged $2.99 and then ramped it up. How long does it take me to be able to go from sitting around the table with a brainstorm to designing a test and getting it to the market and getting the learning so that we can decide what to do?

Joe Rohrlich: That’s exactly right. I think the extreme case of this is: imagine that one of our competitors creates a new bundle, a new offer in the market, and we want to respond to that with a competitive offer of our own or a new bundle of our own. Are we able to do that in a matter of hours or days after making the business decision? Or, is this a series of IT requests that are going to take us 10 to 12 weeks? And I think in the speed at which subscriptions are evolving, the latter is a huge competitive disadvantage. And so we talk about speed to market, it is really about the ability to not only bring a subscription program online quickly, but I think even more important is the ability to go evolve that program very quickly.

We can give you best practices, but the best practices are going to evolve because subscriber behavior is evolving. Share on X

Probably the most common thing we see when we are talking to a new potential customer is that the business has developed a series of its own custom technology workflows and business processes to support the subscription line of business. And then, at some point, the subscription business grows to a place where every change they want to make requires another series of backlog tickets with engineering and the growth leader. This is a big change that we’re seeing in terms of our own customers. We’re seeing much more of the revenue growth leader in addition to the finance leader or the technology leader who is historically charged with managing billings and tax and so forth. And that growth leader is saying, “I can’t wait in the queue because it’s just too long. I need to be able to go in and make changes to my offers, to my coupons, and to my pricing in real time.”

Robbie Baxter: There is a big change. Now you’ve alluded a couple of times to how quickly the subscription world is changing.

As specific as you can, what are some of the things that are changing that if you were at dinner with a friend and they said they were thinking of getting into subscriptions with their old line business, what are some of the things that you’d say to watch out for or things to say these are coming around the pike?

Joe Rohrlich: I think the macro thing is really about flexibility and customization for the subscriber so I can have it my way in effect. A tactical example of that is how I want to pay for my subscription. We focus largely on consumer subscriptions or high-velocity subscription businesses. The majority of those subscriptions are still paid for via a credit card or a debit card. The reality is that we’re seeing consumers be turned off when they don’t have the availability of choosing to use their Apple wallet or choosing to use Venmo or whatever you can fill in the blank on the alternative payment method. And that’s a list of payment methods that’s really growing every year. And so what we see is that there’s a big premium on being able to go provide essentially the feeling of customizeability for the subscriber.

Photo by cottonbro studio. Consumers want choices like Apple Wallet, Venmo, and more. It’s important to offer customizable payment options that cater to their preferences.

Think another example of that comes down to the configuration of bundles. So offering really is offering kind of multiple ways into the subscription here. An annual subscription, a monthly subscription, the ability to pause your subscription and restart your subscription. So really, the sense of customization and personalization from the subscriber experience, I think is the sort of single biggest trend, and as a merchant, it can feel very hard to keep up with that because it’s a moving target.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah. I’ve always said that a big part of the reason that consumers like subscription is that they can relax into it. They know what they’re paying every month. They know what they’re getting and don’t have. They can almost set it and forget it. I know I’m going to want to get movies. I know that this new service has a way for me to get movies. I don’t have any late fees. I don’t have to remember what I have out. So it’s easy for me. The more personalization you give somebody, the more flexibility you give them, the more they have to remember. The more they’re in control, the more they have to be in the driver’s seat.

Now if it’s B2B, that’s what a lot of B2B companies want, and people are paid to keep track of that stuff. But for consumers, I feel like there’s a trade-off between the more choice you give them and the more personalization you give them, maybe the less likely they are to treat it like a subscription. I’m going to turn it on this week because I’m on vacation. I’m going to turn it off. I’m going to turn it on this month because I’m watching this new series, and I’m going to turn it off. What are your thoughts there?

Joe Rohrlich: I think there’s probably two ways in which you can look at this. There’s the paradox of the choice of keeping it simple. And even if we think we want choice, we actually all prefer some level of simplicity. But I also do think that the sort of like the cat’s out of the bag on consumers. Just developing a higher bar or more thoughtfulness about their subscriptions and the value that they’re getting from those subscriptions. The simplest version of it is that when we talk to merchants, the conversation has just shifted dramatically from acquisition of subscribers to retention and lifetime value of subscribers.

And I think that’s just a reflection of us as human beings or subscribers having a bit of scrutiny on that. And so what we are seeing is that there is a lot of benefit. At the end of the day, if you’re focused on lifetime value, there’s a lot more benefit in retaining the subscriber, even if it involves giving them the ability to pause or potentially reducing their price for a period of time.

An example of this that we’ve heard a lot of our merchants talk about would be if we know that you have been an essentially low user for the last two months and are proactively coming to you with a price decrease to try to remind you your favorite program comes back on air in March of next year. We know you’re going to want to see the new season of that. But until then, we have these things to go offer you, but we’re also going to go ahead and give you a promotional reduction for the next four months. So we’re hearing a lot more of our merchants wanting to experiment with different levers to offer a bit of personalization. But really, I do think the business objective is to focus on lifetime value over acquisition numbers or subscriber numbers.

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, that’s fascinating. I have a million questions, and I love this idea. It is tricky because I always say it should feel simple and intuitive to the consumer, but to be able to do that, there has to be a lot of flexibility on the platform to allow that.

But there’s also a difference between I’m going to threaten or I’m going to outmaneuver the subscription that versus someone saying, “Wait, they’ve bundled together all this stuff that I don’t need. And all I really want is this one thing. And they’re making me pay as if I’m getting the full value.”

This idea of saying, if we’re recognizing, for example, that they only watch, let’s say a seasonal sports, right? Which is something that I’ve done a lot of work on, the NBA and other sports leagues. That’s a real issue. Like, why should I pay in the off season? But at the same time, you want them to stay committed, and let’s say that if you know that the content is not as interesting to them in a certain season, or that they’re especially busy, or you notice that they’re not using it that much and recognizing that and saying, “Hey, you’re not using it that much, we’ve automatically downgraded you. And we’ll upgrade you back again in the season.” I think if that’s done in an elegant way, that can really feel like you see them and you’re looking out for them. You mentioned at the beginning this concept of seeing around corners for your clients. I think a big value of good subscriptions is they see around corners for their subscribers, right? Instead of having to transact all the time and be aware and keep your wits about you and say, “Oh, there’s a new movie, I’m going to pay the $14 to get it. You say, “Hey, we’re going to have the movies that you want to watch. And we’re going to charge you a fair price so that you can manage your budget.” I think that’s what people want from their subscriptions, and that’s what drives trustworthiness, which ultimately, hopefully leads to retention and lifetime value.

Joe Rohrlich: I agree with you completely.

Robbie Baxter: So we were talking about speed to market. The third one that you mentioned as these kind of three big trends that Recurly merchants were asking you for was scaling.

And I assume that’s just scaling up, but also scaling globally and maybe even a new programming. Can you talk a little bit about what it is that you’re seeing subscription-based businesses talk to you about scaling? What kind of scaling are they doing? And what are some of the challenges that they run into?

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah, so you touched on it. Especially when you start to then unpack it, so what might this business look like in three years, four years, and five years? The dimensions are going to start with the simplest, which is that today we measure our subscribers in the tens of thousands or the hundreds of thousands, but we think that we’re going to start to measure them in the millions in the future. So how do our costs scale with that? How does our technology, the accessibility of what we offer, scale with that is important. Global is a huge one. How can we start to scale this more globally without having to stand up bespoke operations for every country and also remain in compliance globally is a very big one there. I touched on the sort of the proliferation of payment methods. This is something that becomes exponentially more complex as you scale globally, just localized preferences in terms of payment methods. So I think that what we’re seeing is that, like a subscription merchant, when they’re evaluating, how do I make the right series of decisions in terms of investment behind, even if it’s standing up a brand new subscription program? They’re thinking pretty far out, like they’re imagining, Is this something that if we have success? Is it going to scale for the next three to five years, or are we going to have to press pause at some point and go through the painful step of finding new solutions and migrating our customers or our subscribers to those behind the scenes? So I think this is a huge one. We are fortunate at Recurly to have been through some incredible scaling stories with our merchants. We started as an almost fully self-serving business where subscription merchants would sign up and begin to offer subscriptions. And so we’ve had the pleasure to work with somebody like Justin.tv, which was Justin and his garage streaming video games, which went on to become Twitch, which is a global leader.

And so I think we try to learn from some of those experiences on watching businesses go through that incredible scale to then going to go help a merchant slow down and ask the next questions they need to be thinking about now.

Robbie Baxter: What were some of the questions that came up for Justin.tv/Twitch in that growth phase that’s fascinating?

Joe Rohrlich: I think it’s happened so much, and just being totally candid, we’re still growing with them. So we’re still going through it all the time right now. And so a lot of it, as I said, is about how to open up in new markets from both a currency perspective and from the payment type perspective from a tax and compliance perspective.

Some of it is about the literal scalability of their platform. Like another customer who we’ve scaled with a lot and had some incredible experiences with, Paramount+ is one of the largest streamers in the Super Bowl every year. And so we had the pleasure of onboarding literally millions of subscribers in a day with them. That’s a difficult thing to go do. And so those are the questions we sit around the table with those sorts of customers quite often talking about what the biggest peaks are going to be and how we ensure that we’ve tested, we’re ready to go. And you are ready to go scale to serve those.

Photo by JESHOOTS.com. Testing is key to scaling success—be ready for every peak, just like we Recurly did in onboarding millions during the Super Bowl with Paramount+

So those are the questions that I said. I think that the exciting part to me about this industry is that even the largest names that we can think of, we happen to be sitting here as we’re recording this in the middle of November, three days after Netflix streamed the Mike Tyson and Jake Paul fight. And for a lot of people, it was a challenging experience because it didn’t really stream. There were tons of buffering challenges. And Netflix is one of the best at what they do, but I think it just illustrates the point that we’re all still learning about the continual scaling challenges. And for us, like we do learn about it with our customers as we kind of plan for what’s coming next in their businesses.

Robbie Baxter: So you mentioned that you divide your subscription businesses into two categories, natives and newbies.

Joe Rohrlich: Yes.

Robbie Baxter: What are some of the things that they can teach each other?

Joe Rohrlich: I think that’s such a good question. There’s so much in here.

The newbies are super hungry for that playbook. If you could dial back the clock to 5 years ago, 8 years ago, 10 years ago, and tell your first year in the subscription business self, what you know now, what would it be? They’re deeply hungry for that playbook. But I’ll give you what I think is a really interesting side of it, which is the other end. A lot of these newbies, if you start to really ask the questions, why subscriptions? Yes, recurring revenue is attractive. Like any CEO or CFO would gladly take more recurring revenue. I’ll give you a good example, we worked with a brand called citizenM Hotels. They’re a fast-growing hotel chain out of the Netherlands, and they launched a subscription program with us. And the primary goal is not revenue, they do generate revenue, but it’s really to flip on its side the idea of loyalty programs. So rather than the traditional loyalty program being, I need to spend more and more money with your hotel or with your airline in order to then earn points and then be able to redeem those points. They’re saying what if we simplified this dramatically and we told our guests that for a low subscription price we can transparently guarantee you the following benefits, and they’re finding that it’s performing well, and it’s again the thing they’re really focused on is loyalty and trust with their consumers.

For a lot of the natives, it’s worth it, and I run a subscription business too. Recurly, our customers are on subscriptions. I have to sometimes come back to the basics, which is like we are in the lifetime value. This is an annuity lifetime value business. It’s the number one thing we’re trying to do is build long-term trust with our customers. And I think that’s something that a lot of the newbies are thinking about, maybe more than revenue because they’ve already got really healthy revenue streams. The natives are who we have conferences with our customers. They’re getting excited about those ideas.

Robbie Baxter: I did some work with citizenM too, and they really are there. And what they know during COVID, they had some really interesting subscription experiments, like a membership where you could have unlimited stays for a fixed price. I think it was about 1500 US dollars. That’s a bold and interesting choice. And I think there’s a lot of companies out there in hospitality, healthcare, automotive, and others that are just starting to think about what could subscription be for us? That’s a fascinating question. And they scale really fast because they already have all the customers. Subscription is just a new product or a new way to interact with them.

Joe Rohrlich: Absolutely.

Robbie Baxter: They’re a startup.

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah, they are startups, and they require great champions within those organizations who are really entrepreneurial.

We’re working with a restaurant chain right now, which I can’t share the name of yet, but I never would have thought. It’s an unlimited pizza subscription for them. And it is really exciting to watch. We think when we study the market subscription merchants, the best data that we can see says that the subscription economy is really going to have very healthy growth, at least through the next five to six years. There is growth in the existing industries, things like media, streaming, and telecom, but a lot of the growth is being driven out of these new categories, moving online.

Robbie Baxter: What are the categories that you think are most interesting in terms of what they’re doing in subscription right now?

Joe Rohrlich: We touched on travel. I personally think this one is incredibly interesting. So we’re seeing airlines and hotel chains start to experiment in a meaningful way with subscriptions. Retail and e-commerce are certainly deeper in the experimentation kind of cycle, but I think there’s a very bright future with that. That’s my background. I have a lot of background in the retail and e-commerce space.

Healthcare is probably the thing that in a good way caught us totally off guard over the last year. So we weren’t focused on it. We just have a big pipeline of brands. These are again, mostly existing, known brands in and around the health and wellness space who are interested in subscription models, and financial services and financial literacy is another big one that we’re seeing.

So we launched the brand NerdWallet, which is a great digital brand. We launched their first subscription program this past year. I think there’s ones that I’m not thinking about and that none of us are thinking about that are going to surprise us over the course of the next year as well. We’re seeing more from organizations like the NBA, but we’re seeing more interest from the sports franchise and the teams themselves globally. I’m so excited about all the diversity of new categories moving to subscription.

Robbie Baxter: It’s really interesting. One that you didn’t mention but that I think about a lot and have been just starting to do more work with is automotive.

And there’s so many different ways that they can do subscription, right? You can subscribe to the car so you don’t have to have the burden of ownership. Yes, you can subscribe to the interior of the car, right?

That’s the one that seems to be getting traction right now.

This idea that your environment, for those of us who find ourselves working in the car, sometimes having great wifi and being able to connect to your Zoom calls or your team’s calls, that’s becoming something that people are really willing to pay for and then autonomous driving as a service. But it is, like you said, hard to know which ones are going to become the thing we all do and which ones are going to remain novelty-edge cases.

Joe Rohrlich: Do you have a perspective on, is there like a tipping point in terms of each of our wallets, like what we spend each month,where is there a waterline where subscription versus oone-time purchases balances out for us?

I look at my own behavior, which is a bad study, but it’s a study of one, and I know that every year my percentage of dollars going towards recurring is increasing, and it makes sense when we look again. We look at all the data that we have looked at over the past year on recurring, and it says that it is growing faster than the rest of the economy.

I’m always curious, where is the watermark? Like, where does it find equilibrium?

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, I think that remains to be seen. And I also think it’s different by generations. I’m in my 50s. We have owned a home for 25 years. We own our cars. We drive them into the ground. We drive them a long time, and then we give them to our kids, honestly.

Joe Rohrlich: I’m feeling old now. I might not be the best proxy for this.

Robbie Baxter: We’re one segment or we’re certain segments, but I see my kids or young adults not really that excited about ownership and really appreciating the benefits of access, the flexibility it gives them, the variety it gives them. That wasn’t an option for me, right? The ways of, for example, the citizenM that subscription, which I don’t think they offer anymore, but this idea that you could be a global citizen, a nomad, a digital nomad, and work remotely. They rent their clothes, they rent their furniture, they subscribe. Having Uber one or one of the sort of subscription based upgrades to car ride sharing and the like. Those are some really big expenses that we all have. And if you’re not owning and you’re accessing that tipping point, I think it’s very different what they’re willing to do versus what I’m comfortable with.

Joe Rohrlich: I totally buy that premise, and I’ll give you one little anecdote to support it. So we were speaking this morning with Nuuly, which is a great apparel subscription brand owned by Urban Outfitters.

We’ve worked with them since their onset, and we said, one of my colleagues has a daughter who’s a senior in college right now, and she was just visiting her two weeks ago, and she took a picture and showed us her, and all of her friends all had Nuuly boxes all over place, and to your point, Nuuly was telling us that this is true that college is a huge growth segment for them that’s become the norm, right? Don’t need to go shopping for new every month. When I can get new and recycle it back. And so I think you’re right. We are underestimating the future growth of subscriptions. When you think about how consumer behavior is changing.

We are underestimating the future growth of subscriptions. Share on X

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, absolutely. And the alignment of what your goals are with what’s the most efficient way to achieve those goals. And payment systems really can allow you to better align the value you’re getting with what you’re paying. I think it’s only going to get more complicated for the vendor and more complicated for the merchant in order to provide greater flexibility for the consumer.

Joe Rohrlich: For sure.

Robbie Baxter: I have a lot more questions for you, but I will save them for another day if that’s okay. I hope you’ll come back. Before I let you go, I’d love to do a speed round with you.

Joe Rohrlich: Yeah, let’s do it!

Robbie Baxter: Okay. First subscription you ever had?

Joe Rohrlich: The first subscription I ever had was the Dodgers, Los Angeles Dodgers fan club.

Robbie Baxter: Your favorite subscription that you use today for personal?

Joe Rohrlich: I’m really on this baseball theme. I love MLB. I love my MLB subscription.

Robbie Baxter: Awesome. The most beautiful college campus you visited while at Top Hat?

Joe Rohrlich: The factual answer is that the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, my alma mater, is the most beautiful.

But my favorite visit is probably Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Photo by Oregon State University

Robbie Baxter: Yeah, beautiful place. And the best piece of advice you have for a non-technical CEO coming into an engineering-driven company.

Joe Rohrlich: Curiosity cures all ills.

Curiosity cures all ills. Share on X

I think being an engineering-centric company, We can tend to fall in love with our solutions, our products, and our complexity. At the end of the day, engineers get super excited about solving interesting problems though for the customer. And so bringing a curiosity for really understanding the customer and then being a translation device to help translate what you’re hearing from the customer. I talked about my 50 interviews at the beginning and back to an engineering culture, like incredible things can happen from that.

Robbie Baxter: Fantastic. Joe, thank you so much for taking the time to join us on Subscription Stories.

Joe Rohrlich: It’s been great being here. Thank you, Robbie.

—

That was Joe Rohrlich, CEO of Recurly. For more about Recurly, go to recurly.com. And for more about Subscription Stories, as well as a transcript of my conversation with Joe, go to RobbieKellmanBaxter.com/podcast.https://robbiekellmanbaxter.com/podcast

Also, I have a favor to ask. If you like what you heard, please take a minute to go over to Apple Podcasts or Apple iTunes and leave a review. Mention Joe and this episode, if you especially enjoyed it, reviews are how listeners find our podcast, and we appreciate every one.

Thanks for your support. And thanks for listening to Subscription Stories.

—

Important Links

About Joe Rohrlich

Joe joined Recurly to lead the company in a new phase of growth and super-charge the capabilities of our subscription platform across the globe.

Prior to Recurly, Joe was CEO of Top Hat, the leading higher education engagement platform, scaling to serve over 750 universities and completing multiple acquisitions. Before this, Joe led a range of customer and go-to-market teams at Bazaarvoice, as CRO and General Manager EMEA, realizing tenfold revenue growth over his 11-year tenure.
Outside of work, Joe enjoys world travel with his family, cheering for the Michigan Wolverines, and playing rec league tennis in Austin, Texas.

Joe joined Recurly to lead the company in a new phase of growth and super-charge the capabilities of our subscription platform across the globe.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

Here’s How »

Join the Subscription Stories Community today:

2025 Trends in Subscription Businesses with Recurly CEO Joe Rohrlich

Listen to the podcast here

2025 Trends in Subscription Businesses with Recurly CEO Joe Rohrlich

Important Links

About Joe Rohrlich

A veritable blueprint for success in the new membership economy.

Categories