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 venture in direct-to-consumer healthcare, Midi Health. While Kurbo focused on helping kids get to and maintain a healthy weight, Midi is for women at midlife, helping them get better as they get older. You may have noticed my interest in how the way we stay healthy is changing—with guests from Whoop, 30 Madison, Strava, just this season alone. I am fascinated by all of the transformation in the space, as healthcare embraces the concept of a forever transaction. After all, what forever promise is more compelling than more happy, healthy minutes. Healthcare is just embarking on a massive rethinking of how to better align their business models with patient outcomes. Midi is a great example of this. In today’s talk, we cover the consumerization of healthcare and how COVID accelerated the move to digital patient-centric health, the importance of “forever transaction” in treating patients, and the challenges of developing a clear business model in a highly complex environment.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How »   Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Robbie Kellman Baxter on Instagram Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches on Apple Podcasts

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. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How »   Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Robbie Kellman Baxter on Instagram Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches on Apple Podcasts

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.

I’m fascinated by the recent explosion of healthcare subscription companies.  If you’re a regular listener of subscription stories, you probably knew that, as recent guests have included Midi Health’s Joanna Strober, Whoop’s Ben Foster and Matthew Mengerink of Thirty Madison.  We’ve even explored telehealth for PETs on the show with Fuzzy’s Zubin Bhettay.  Today’s guest Dan Zavorotny, Co-Founder and COO of Nutrisense, is focused on helping subscribers optimize metabolic health through a solution that combines hardware, software, and professional advice.   In our conversation, Dan shares the story of how he found product market fit, the challenge of building retention around a “checkup-type offering” and how to manage a business when  third parties (in this case hardware manufacturers) provide a significant part of your prop.

I have interviewed today’s guest many times, and it’s always a wild ride. Mighty Networks founder and CEO Gina Bianchini is so smart, passionate and insightful.  She was my finale guest for Season 1 of the Subscription Stories podcast, back in 2020. That episode holds the record for most popular Subscription Stories show of all time.  We were all stuck at home, afraid to go out in person, and were looking for ways to connect, authentically with others.  Mighty Networks was established to make it easy for people to build engaged communities around their passion and purpose. Nearly 3 years later, people are back to connecting in person—but Mighty Networks continues to grow.  Why? Gina would say it’s because people crave meaning and connection through community.     I invited her back to the show to talk about her new WSJ bestselling book, Purpose: Design a Community and Change Your Life. In our wide-ranging conversation, we also discuss how to implement best practices in launching, scaling and hosting a vibrant online community, and how someone can actually discover their purpose, even if they’re feeling stuck. Welcome to the show Gina!

Hey it’s Robbie Kellman Baxter, host of the Subscription Stories podcast. Season 5 is launching soon, but while you wait, catch up on our most recent season. Season 4 has some of our listener’s favorite episodes ever. We opened the season with two thought leaders, Nir Eyal, author of Hooked and Indistractible, and Tiffani Bova, Salesforce Global Evangelist. If you’re interested in the technical side of building forever transactions, you’ll love hearing from, Piano’s Travor Kaufman and Optimized Payment’s Paul Larsen, experts in operationalizing online subscriptions and billing. And there were some great practitioners with years of “in the trenches” experience leading Membership Economy businesses—LinkedIn Learning’s Jill Raines, Fuzzy’s Zubin Bhettay, and Product Leader Caitlin Roman, most recently of The Athletic. If you haven’t listened to those episodes—I encourage you to check them out. And if you like them, please be sure to rate and review them on Apple iTunes or Apple Podcasts—that helps me, and makes it easier for others to find the podcast. This spring, I’m hard at work to make sure that Season 5 is the best and most practical season of Subscription Stories so far. You’ll hear from Mighty Network’s Gina Bianchini, our most popular guest ever returning to talk about her new book, Purpose, as well as Rod Cherkas of Hello CCO sharing the Chief Customer Officer’s Playbook, and Dan Zavorotny, founder of Nutrisense, sharing a new model for metabolic health. And that’s just the beginning. To make sure you don’t miss a thing, Follow Subscription Stories wherever you get your podcasts—just tap on the Follow or Subscribe button.   Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening to Subscription Stories. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook  

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 promotions, pricing options and tiers and/or a combination of subscription, one-off transactions, and advertising. But increasingly we’re seeing examples of organizations incorporating multiple revenue streams successfully—for example, in news, fitness, streaming media and ecommerce.   Today’s guest, Trevor Kaufman, is an expert on subscriptions, personalization and digital experience. He is the CEO of Piano, a digital experience platform that helps organizations launch products and programs faster, strengthen customer relationships and drive personalization at scale. Piano recently released their annual Subscription Performance Benchmark Report. It’s full of valuable insights gleaned from their customers, and relevant across many types of subscription models. In our conversation, we talk about the emerging best practices in subscription pricing, the role of freemium and whether there’s a place for ads in the world of subscriptions. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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. Involuntary churn is when a customer is canceled due to a payment issue or other technical problem. According to ProfitWell CEO Patrick Campbell, a recent guest on Subscription Stories, involuntary churn makes up 20-40% of overall churn.  Many organizations don’t even track passive churn, and that’s a mistake, because there are ways to manage. Today’s guest, Paul Larsen of Optimized Payments, is one of the leading experts on “card not present” payments, and works with many of the largest subscription businesses in the world on churn management. He launched his career at Reader’s Digest, one of the earliest and largest subscription publications in the world. When Paul started, churn management focused on getting people to renew their subscription by mailing in a check. Since then, he has been deep in the world of credit cards, debit cards and alternate payments, helping subscription merchants reduce costs and increase customer retention. In our conversation, we talk about why so many good subscribers end up in the dreaded “do not honor” bucket, who should own passive churn in the organization, and how to bring together the right team to manage involuntary churn.  Excerpt: Subscriptions are great. We love them, but there's promise and peril associated with them at all times. We are joined by Paul Larsen of Optimized Payments, one of the leading experts on "card not present" payments. He shares his vast knowledge about working with the largest subscription businesses on churn management as he discusses the reasons behind the dreaded "do not honor" bucket and how to build the dream team to address this involuntary issue. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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 use Adobe Aftereffects, to how to have difficult conversations, to the fundamentals of customer success . Consumers can subscribe to LinkedIn Learning on their own, or access the platform through an enterprise license. My guest today, Jill Raines, is Director of Product Management at LinkedIn, where she leads the LinkedIn Learning Business. I first got to know her when I was developing my own LinkedIn Learning courses for the platform. I was interested in the business model for the platform. I have learned so much through my discussions with Jill. It’s fascinating to get her perspective on the unique challenges and opportunities facing the world’s largest professional development and educational platform, In this conversation, Jill and I discuss the LinkedIn ecosystem, and LinkedIn's Forever Promise more generally, before diving into the role of LinkedIn Learning within that ecosystem. We also talk about the specific challenges of professional development subscriptions, how to balance the needs of consumers with the needs of enterprise customers, and whether to offer both pay per course and subscriptions as pricing options.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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 you really want to accelerate growth, you need to focus on the employee experience.  Tiffani Bova is the global growth evangelist at Salesforce. She’s also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book GROWTH IQ: Get Smarter About the Choices that Will Make or Break Your Business. Tiffani has been named to the latest Thinkers50’s list of the world’s top management thinkers and is a welcomed guest on Bloomberg, CNN, Cheddar, MSNBC, and Yahoo Finance, among others. In our conversation, we talk about whether your Growth IQ is something you’re born with or something you build, the ten paths to growth, and how Software-as-a-Service has changed what it takes to thrive in Sales. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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 do you design for engagement, retention and expansion, while ensuring the you’ve earned the right to do so? Bestselling author Nir Eyal has looked at this problem from both sides.  His first book, Hooked, is a how to guide for building habit-forming products. More recently, he wrote Indistractable, to help individuals control their attention and choose the lives they want. On this episode of Subscription Stories, Nir and I talk about the specific processes and tools that drive habits, what it means for your subscription business, and how to be more deliberate about how we form our own habits.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Instagram

Mindful.org is dedicated to a very specific goal--sharing the gifts of mindfulness through content, training, courses, and directories— and helping people enjoy better health, foster more caring relationships, and cultivate a more compassionate society.   Because of that core focus, Mindful has been able to develop deep expertise about how people want to engage in mindfulness--expertise which has provided a launching pad for a range of additional offerings, including a very successful corporate training business, which has become a larger source of revenue than the subscription itself.   In other words, their niche focus has allowed them to be more impactful, while generating multiple revenue streams to support their mission.   In this conversation with Mindful.org CEO Bryan Welch, we’ll discuss how you can build multiple revenue streams around a strong vertical with a small number of passionate members. This conversation was recorded as part of the D2C (Direct to Consumer) Summit that I coproduced with FIPP, the Global Media Association, so you’ll hear a couple of references to the conference.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

Just over 10 years ago, I had my first conversation about the idea that would become Strava with serial entrepreneurs Mark Gainey and Michael Horvath. They talked to me about their bold objective of building the world's largest community of athletes.   Since then, they've achieved that goal, touching over 90 million athletes and logging over five billion activities across more than 30 sports in virtually every country in the world. While subscriptions have always been a part of Strava, in the past year, they've moved some of their most popular features behind the paywall and an introduced a bunch of new features for paying subscribers.   I recently interviewed David Lorsch, Strava’s CRO for the inaugural D2C Summit, a new conference I co-created with Global Media Association FIPP, and want to share that conversation with you here on the podcast. We discussed how Strava determined what should be free and what should be paid as they build a subscription business around a social platform, and how to guide members to make the most of their membership.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

Since The Membership Puzzle Project (MPP) launch in May 2017, they have studied, advised, and supported more than 100 newsrooms around the world, from Akron, Ohio, to New Delhi, India as they make the transition to a member-driven newsroom. In this conversation I’m talking with Ariel Zirulnick, who runs MPP's Membership In News Fund, which supports these exceptional experiments with.   I recently interviewed Ariel for the inaugural D2C Summit, a new conference I co-created with Global Media Association FIPP and want to share that conversation with you here on the podcast.   In our conversation, we discuss the original goals of the MPP as this public research project nears its end, explore how the project has fared since launching four years ago, and share key lessons from the Project that can help any membership organization to thrive.    Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

Everyone’s talking about “product-led growth” in the subscription world right now. Companies are seeing the connection between the way the product is designed and how effective the company is at acquiring, engaging and retaining customers—and even driving referrals. To do product-led growth well, product managers need to think like business leaders, as well as thinking like product builders. It isn’t easy and not everyone has the right skills. My guest today, Caitlin Roman, has led product teams at three great subscription-first organizations, LinkedIn, Medium and most recently The Athletic, which was acquired in January of 2022 by the New York Times, for about $550Million. I’m excited to talk to her, because she has developed pattern recognition about what it takes to build great products that actually help grow the business. In today’s conversation, Caitlin and I talk about best practices learned at LinkedIn, Medium and The Athletic, the skills needed to drive product-led growth, and how to partner with data analytics teams to make better, faster decisions. Excerpt: "If you have real value behind your content, you can confidently charge for it." Caitlin Roman has led product teams at LinkedIn, Medium, and most recently, The Athletic. She sits down with Robbie to share the best practices she has learned working in these companies, putting product development into the spotlight to generate tangible business growth. She also talks about building an effective product team that can work alongside the data analytics team to make better and quicker decisions.  Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Robbie's Instagram Profile

Sometimes the best way to launch a digital subscription is to launch a physical subscription. Even if you plan to scale with a virtual business model, you can learn so much more about your customer, value proposition and messaging by starting the old fashioned way—in person. That’s the approach Zubin Bhettay used in launching Fuzzy. Today, Fuzzy’s Pet Parents get round the clock access to exceptional virtual veterinary care, as well as wellness products for their pets' health needs. But when Zubin and his cofounder launched the company in 2016, they recruited and served their Pet Parents in person. Starting slow allowed Fuzzy to “crack the Product Market Fit code” and scale rapidly, raising over $80 million in the process. Full disclosure—I’ve been involved with Fuzzy since the beginning, and think Fuzzy is one of the most thoughtful Membership Economy organizations I have ever worked with. In this conversation, Zubin and I reflect on Fuzzy’s humble beginnings in San Francisco dog parks and Pet Parent living rooms, explore the path to profitability, and discuss the right metrics at each stage. Excerpt: "We wanted to be the guide and partner of pet parents through every stage of their pet's life. We wanted to ensure that was available to every pet parent and not just a luxury service only available to the select few." Zubin Bhettay is the CEO and Co-Founder of Fuzzy, a telehealth subscription service offering virtual veterinary care. In this episode, he shares how their in-person company evolved into a digital platform, expanding their reach and saving a lot of pets in the process. Zubin explains the business scaling process they followed to fully embrace the digital scene and how to decide if a subscription model is ideal for you. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook Robbie's Instagram Profile

Hey, it’s Robbie Kellman Baxter, host of the Subscription Stories Podcast. I wanted to just reflect on some of my favorite moments of season 3 and also share a sneak peek at Season 4.  We packed a lot into this season, 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.  If you’re interested in how the membership economy is transforming Health & Wellbeing, you’ll also enjoy my conversations with Ben Foster of Whoop, Joanna Strober of Midi Health, Bryan Welch of Mindful,org and Matthew Mengerink of Thirty Madison. If you’re building subscriptions around great content, check out my conversation with Ariel Zirulnick, who led the 4-year long Membership Puzzle Project which identified best practices in building deep, trusted relationships with readers of newspapers around the globe. You’ll also learn about key metrics and cultural tactics for building a member-first team from Mayur Gupta, the CMO of Gannett, and about building a membership bundle from Outside’s Tommy O’Hare (who happens to be a former Olympian).  And if your startup is looking for a great story to build traction, listen to my conversation with Chief Storyteller at GoodTrust, Daniel Sieberg  Venture investor Ira Ehrenpreis had a lot to share about the power of profit and purpose in creating iconic companies like Tesla, The RealReal and Bellwether coffee.  And Rafat Ali, CEO of the Skift talked about the power of subscriptions in travel and hospitality. For those of you who like to nerd out--Season 3 was like a PhD in subscriptions, with several experts on the cutting edge of markets and trends—Wharton Professor and author of the CustomerCentricity Playbook Peter Fader, as well as Harvard Business School’s Marco Bertini, with whom I have had many spirited discussions about pricing for outcomes and his new book The Ends Game, Google’s Chief Measurement Strategegist Neil Hoyne, whose new book Converted is a must-read for any subscription practitioner, Patrick Campbell, founder of Profitwell, who uses data to go deep on customer retention, and my old friend and colleague Bob Baxley, a leading Silicon Valley product designer and educator who has led design teams at Apple, Pinterest and now Thoughtspot. If you haven’t listened to those episodes—I encourage you to check them out.  And if you like them, please be sure to rate and review them on Apple iTunes or Apple Podcasts—that helps me, and makes it easier for others to find the podcast. This summer, I’m hard at work to make sure that Season 4 is the best and most practical season of Subscription Stories so far. You’ll get to learn about building habits through your products with Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Indistractible and Hooked.  You’ll see how to use employee-centricity to grow customer engagement and retention with Salesforce global growth and innovation evangelist, Tiffani Bova. Employee Experience is an often overlooked lever in building great business models as well as the subject of Tiffani’s forthcoming book. And you’ll learn some of the secrets that have made LinkedIn such a powerhouse in the Membership Economy.  That’s just the beginning. To make sure you don’t miss a thing, Follow Subscription Stories wherever you get your podcasts—just tap on the Follow or Subscribe button. Thanks for your support, and thanks for listening to Subscription Stories.   Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

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 time. Neil Hoyne is an expert at this. As the Chief Measurement Strategist at Google, as well as a Senior Fellow at The Wharton School, Neil helps people use data to win their customer’s hearts. He’s written a new book Converted: The Data Driven Way to Win Customers’ Hearts on this topic, which I read on the beach while on vacation. It’s a book about data that’s entertaining and engaging enough to read on holiday, if you can believe it. We recently spoke about how to measure the full value of each relationship, engage in an ongoing conversation with your best subscribers, and perhaps most importantly, how to find and win new subscribers just like the ones you find most valuable. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook

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 companies are selling the physical product and then offering subscriptions as an add-on. Examples include Peloton, where much of the value is in the subscription, but also products like Tile, Ring and Tesla where the subscription is truly optional. One company that’s getting a lot of attention for its innovative model is WHOOP. WHOOP offers a subscription-based service that combines a wearable fitness tracker with software to achieve its mission of “Unlocking human performance”. Today I talk to WHOOP’s Chief Product Officer, Ben Foster. Ben has literally written the book on Product Management along with his co-author Rajesh Nirlikar—Build What Matters, Delivering Key Outcomes with Vision Led Product Management. In this wide-ranging conversation, Ben and I discuss the best metrics for tracking customer value, the unique challenges of a subscription that includes hardware and software and why scrappiness is a key attribute of the best product managers.    Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Here’s How » Join the Subscription Stories Community today: robbiekellmanbaxter.com Twitter Facebook