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The crowded world of subscription businesses offers ongoing opportunities to screw up your relationship with subscribers.
At Disrupt San Francisco 2019, I spoke with Forerunner Ventures& Eurie Kim, Lola CEO Alex Friedman and KiwiCo CEO Sandra Oh Lin about key issues and priorities for scaling a subscription service post-launch.
A primary theme: building relationships with customers who&ll help you decide where to look for your next product.
&The first product just has to work or else you&re just not gonna have a company.
But to be a big company, you have to have much more than just the product, it has to be the full experience and the full relationship that you have,& says Kim.
&And then certainly you have to have the muscles on your team to be able to listen, evolve, test, and grow.
So we&re obviously searching for companies… where the founders know so much about their customer that for the first few years, you have a very clear line of, you know, path forward.
It not complicated.
It just execution.
And that hard to do.
But you need to have a pulse on that customer.&
Instead of striving to meet the needs of every customer, entrepreneurs should focus on trying to understand the subscribers they&ve zeroed in on by being purposeful — instead of throwing a bunch of ideas against the wall to see which ones stick.
&What hard is your cash constraints.
So you&re starting with one or two products.
It not like an amazing experience, because it one or two products,& Kim said onstage.
&You have to have like that laser-sharp product that is actually solving so much of the need that someone like, ‘well, it only one product, but it like a really good product.
And so I&m going to start there, I&m going to trust Lola, and I&ll get this tampon.
And then if I like it, I&m going to stick with it.
I&ll sign up for the subscription, because I do need it monthly.
And then hey, maybe I&ll buy something else.& And so the brand relationship builds over the course of time naturally.&
Lola, which makes women health products, launched with an organic cotton tampon that shipped to users monthly.
After entering that space, the startup co-founders strategized about how expand their offerings.
&We figured, okay, there this opportunity to build an end-to-end experience here,& says Friedman.
&Where do we start? Obviously, there are a lot of different categories and moments.
So how can we be there for [our customer] at every stage with products and content and community.
And so after period care, we went to sexual wellness, because that is very resonant with our current customer base.&
