Subscription Stories

True Tales from the Trenches

Subscription models are crazy powerful. Savvy small companies can easily deploy them to knock huge Goliaths off kilter. We’ve seen it in entertainment, software, hardware, news, retail, hospitality—the list goes on. In her podcast series, Robbie Kellman Baxter interviews the leaders of this revolution about how they’re using subscription pricing and membership models to redefine the biggest industries and generate predictable recurring revenue along the way.

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Episode Blogs

Emerging Best Practices in Personalization with Piano.io CEO Trevor Kaufman

We can learn a lot from subscription businesses that experiment with different revenue models and personalization. Organizations with too many offers risk overcomplicating things with competing goals. I’m talking about companies with multiple revenue streams—different...

Maximizing Customer Lifetime Value in Volatile Times with Paul Larsen of Optimized Payments

The single biggest source of churn might surprise you. It’s not a communications issue, or a product/market fit issue, or even an onboarding problem. The biggest driver of churn in most consumer subscriptions is what’s known as passive or involuntary churn....

Building an Educational Subscription at Scale with LinkedIn Learning’s Jill Raines

You’re probably all familiar with LinkedIn Learning, formerly known as Lynda.com. It’s LinkedIn’s professional development platform. They offer more than 18,000 video courses available via subscription. There’s a huge range of educational topics covered—from how to...

How Employee Experience and Customer Experience Drive Corporate Growth with Salesforce’s Tiffani Bova

We’ve spoken before on the show about the importance of Customer Experience in driving growth, with guests like Wharton’s Peter Fader, Gainsight’s Nick Mehta and Bain & Company’s Stu Berman. But today’s guest says you need to think beyond the customer. If...

Bestselling Author Nir Eyal on How to Ethically Hook Your Subscribers

To drive recurring revenue, you need products and services that people use. Habitually. Repeatedly. Organizations strive to design addictive subscriptions. But for every beloved membership, there seem to be a dozen offerings that drive subscription fatigue. How...

Season Three Wrap-Up and Season Four Sneak Peak

We packed a lot into this Season 3. There's truly something for everyone. We opened the season with David Lorsch, the Chief Revenue Officer of Strava, the world’s largest athletic community, talking about how to upgrade freemium subscribers to premium. Listen...

Midi Health’s Joanna Strober on the Ultimate Forever Transaction—Healthcare

My final guest of Season Three, Joanna Strober, was the very first guest on the Subscription Stories podcast. Back then, we were talking about Kurbo, the children’s service for WW (that’s Weight Watchers new name). Today, she’s back to talk about her latest...

How to Find Your Best Subscribers and Develop Relationships That Last with Neil Hoyne, Google Chief Measurement Strategist

Not all customers are created equal. The best subscription businesses know the power of customer lifetime value (CLV). They optimize around understanding who their best subscribers are, and then deepening the relationship with those best subscribers over...

Subscriptions that Combine Hardware and Software with Ben Foster, Chief Product Officer of WHOOP

The first wave of the Membership Economy was mostly digital-- software, content, and services. But increasingly we’re seeing subscriptions around physical products. Challenges abound when manufacturing comes into play, especially with the pricing model. Many...

Getting Good at Goodbyes: Optimizing for Retention from Hello With Patrick Campbell, CEO of ProfitWell

Most subscription-based businesses focus too much on acquisition and not enough on retention. But actually retention improvements are usually more effective, both for total revenue AND profitability. Today’s guest Patrick Campbell couldn’t understand why so many...

Using Subscriptions to Democratize Healthcare with Matthew Mengerink, CTO of Thirty Madison

Nearly every industry can benefit from joining the Membership Economy, and most industries have great examples of subscription-based organizations. One of the slowest movers has been the healthcare industry and for good reason. There's so much complexity to delivering...

Beyond Subscriptions – Pricing for Impact with Harvard Business School/Esade Professor Marco Bertini

Even though people think of me as a subscription person, I always say that for me, subscriptions are simply a tactic. Subscriptions force companies to better align their pricing with performance. If the subscriber doesn’t perceive ongoing value, they cancel the...

Designing for Subscriptions with ThoughtSpot’s Bob Baxley

Design is such an important if sometimes overlooked element of the best subscriptions. Today's guest, Bob Baxley, is a thinking person’s designer, with the book and teaching credentials to prove it. He’s also an experienced practitioner, who has been “in the trenches”...

The Right Teams & Culture for Subscription Growth with Gannett-USA Today Network CMO Mayur Gupta

Mayur Gupta is the Chief Marketing and Strategy Officer at Gannett – USA Today Network. He is responsible for leading the transformation of Gannett into a subscription platform that is obsessed with user value and not just site traffic. Mayur is responsible to...

How the “Daily Homepage for the World’s Largest Industry” is Rethinking the Future of Travel with Skift’s Rafat Ali

In March of 2020, travel as we knew it abruptly ground to a near standstill. First cruise ships were docked, and then air travel quickly became limited to very special cases. Hotels stood empty except for those that held people in quarantine and the health care...