Subscription Stories: True Tales from the Trenches Robbie Kellman Baxter

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.
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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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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