Paul Chambers co-founder and CEO of SubSummit, Jay Myers co-founder and CEO of Bold Commerce, and Andrei Rebrov founder and CEO of Finsi AI (formerly co-founder and CTO of Scentbird) share their best subscription marketing advice at SubSummit 2025.

Marc: Hey everybody, Marc with 10-Minute Ecom Success, live SubSummit edition here at the Sheraton Hotel in Dallas for a subscription based episode at the 9th SubSummit Live event, headliner Mike Posner. Lots of cool live events, keynote speakers from companies including Walmart, Amazon, Netflix, and so on, with between about 3,000 plus meetings booked between solution providers and merchants.

So it’s been quite fun and a very eclectic group. With that being said, today my guests are SubSummit Co-founder and CEO Paul Chambers, Bold Commerce co-founder and CEO Jay Myers and Finsi, co-founder and Chief Agentic Officer Andrei Rebrov, formerly co-founder and CTO of Scent Bird, which he helped profitably scale to over a million active subscribers over a 12 year period across their portfolio, using data-driven technology.

Who’s now recently partnered with Jay over at Bold Commerce to help them and their clients improve their marketing implementation, here to share their best e-commerce business building advice in today’s rapidly changing world. So with that said, thanks for joining me guys.  

Paul: So now a question for you, Mark, if it’s normally 10 minutes with one guest, because there’s three of us, is this gonna be 30 minutes?

Marc: I think we gotta do 30 minutes, right? Get the gold nuggets from three amigos. We got, yeah.

Jay: Plus sound effects, Paul.

Paul: Oh yeah. Trumpet. 30 minutes!

Marc: Nice. But yeah, thanks for joining me. I don’t know, maybe which one of you guys want to kick this off, but I know you’ve known each other for quite some time. I was gonna kick it over to Paul.

Paul: Well, it’s fun, the different circles coming together and the different people, the brains that are on the stage here.

I know all of you from different ways. Marc, we just met recently and recently became LinkedIn friends, and then text friends, and now in life real, in-person friends. And Jay and Andrei, the events we see each other out at across the years .But so it’s fun to come together and share our collective knowledge here.

Marc: I calculated it this morning. IYou have at least 44 combined years of business experience across, maybe more. But 44 subscription-based years. So that’s pretty incredible.

Jay: Don’t set the bar too high for us here.

Paul: Hey, well, Jay, you started running an eCom brand, didn’t you?

Jay: Man, 1998, I built my first online store using Microsoft Front page. So I grew up in a retail business with my dad and then started moving the stuff online and I was on every platform. 2009, moved one of them to Shopify.

Marc: eBay. You were on eBay? Of course.

Jay: Oh, eBay should have been what Amazon is today, right? I was one of those like eBay kings. I was 18 years old. And I sold Sunto watches.

Marc: Nice.

Jay: And I would make $3,000 to $5,000 a day, go to the bar and, “How many shot classes do you have? Bring them all down! This is eBay money.” Literally. And then one day I realized, well, yeah, I can make money on eBay, but I’m not building a brand.

And the day I stopped listing the products is… so I had a really good job. I wasn’t building a business. So that’s when I started building the stores that were more of a permanent brand that could scale bigger and then eventually started building apps for those stores, which became Bold.

Marc: That’s amazing. And then I was talking with you, Andre, before we hopped on about how you started Scentbird, what was that, 2013?

Andrei: Yep.

Marc: And I mean, the first 10 years is just a series of one up and down after another. And then the iOS update came through and it was just brutal. But you guys managed to go straight to the bottom line and look at profit and re-engineer that.

And then grew to what, like 800,000 subscribers at Scentbird and then 200,000 at Drift.

Andrei: Mm-hmm.

Marc: So data-driven technology is kind of your thing.

Andrei: It is. But I would say data like is only as good as people use it. So what’s more important is to make sure that people speak the same language and they look at the same data.

Because in some cases I know companies… like finance has one definition of profit margin. Marketing has a different definition of profit and no surprise they have some issues. So yes, it’s important to use data, but make sure that people look at the same data at the same time. Data is not delayed, and you can trust it, because like what you don’t want to see…

And that that’s the big case for AI, why people are concerned using AI for data. They don’t want hallucination in that area. So whenever I ask about what’s my revenue, I should get the same number. I don’t want it to see to 2 million now and 5 million in five minutes.

Paul: Two to 5 million, is a very big difference though, by the way. But Andre, I’m curious. You were almost ahead of your time in terms of, focusing on the profitability, because a lot oof the subscription brands that were hyper scaling, have in the past, really was like growth at all costs.

Andrei: We had a hard lesson back in 2019 when it was, we were venture funded. Obviously when you’re VC funded, it’s grow, grow, grow, higher, higher, higher, spend, spend, spend. At some point, we had like four or five months run rate, and we realized it cannot go like this. So we did the restructuring.

Like we let a lot of people go. We changed the way how we calculate all our data. Everything should be around profit. LTV should be by profit, LTV to CAC by profit. How we spend money, my job was always even as a CTO, not like to be the best in technology, but to make sure that we spend money on the right technology, and we spend the right amount of money on technology.

That was the mindset of every leader in the organization. So by doing this in 2019, we were prepared for the iOS, we were prepared for the, COVID. We were prepared for the nonsense of 2022, 2023. And it’s nice when you are profitable because, control your destiny and you control what you can do.

Paul: Oh gosh, I bet like a huge sense of relief. I mean, you talk to a lot of e-commerce founders. How many do you hear that talk about the focus on the profitability?

Marc: I did interview quite a series of leading experts on this, but so one of the main things they all have in common, the people who are making these businesses grow at a high level. They are profit first businesses. So they’re all well aware that the only reason we’re here is to make those numbers go up.

But sometimes to make the profit go up, you gotta make other numbers go down, right? So you gotta know where to cut the fat. And it’s actually quite exceptional if you talk to these guys, it’s all about the profit at the end of the day. Like, why are we here?

Paul: Do we all start with cutting meta ad spend?

Marc: Well, the other thing is, impact at the end of the day, is profit to the business to impact the business, but also if you want to be profitable, you have to impact the customer, right? So it’s not just numbers at the end of the day, it’s how are you adding value to those customers, because that ultimately is what’s going to drive the profit.

Paul: Yeah. I feel Jay, I feel like you’ve got a good eye on that from just with the apps and the things that you guys have built out, the focus on the customer.

Jay: This is our number one thing that I hammer into brands, and there’s a term in subscription, or a metric, called net dollar retention.

And net dollar retention is, when you get a, a user, a subscriber, anyone who subscribed, what value do they become over time? And so let’s say you get a subscriber for a hundred dollars a month, but you have 10% churn. But 10% of your subscribers upgrade, addon a product, but in some way spend more.

You would have, let’s say it’s even, you have a hundred percent net dollar retention. Sometimes people, if it’s 105% net dollar retention, sometimes people refer to it as negative dollar churn. But it’s one of the most important metrics, and when investors are looking at a subscription business, they’ll dig right into that.

What’s your net dollar retention? If you can acquire a dollar, what can you turn that dollar into? And if you have a business that can acquire a dollar and turn that dollar into a dollar 20, a dollar 30, you’ve got a super healthy business. And so we built tools. On the back of my hoodie, it says, “Maximize every subscriber.” Like that’s what we do.

Marc: Well, when you say acquire a customer, turn a dollar into a dollar 20? Are you talking on that first transaction or are you talking after a period of time?

Jay: You don’t have a customer on your first transaction, right? You just have a lead, right? You just have someone who’s trying your product.

They might turn into a customer, but you have a lead that you have to educate them on your product, everything else, and then down the road you need, you the customer. 92% of customers actually want to buy more from brands they’re subscribed to, but they don’t have opportunities, or the opportunities aren’t good.

They’re like, they’re recommended a generic product or there’s too much friction, but you know. Someone who subscribed to one flavor of coffee should be recommended a certain syrup for that coffee versus a different one. It needs to be personalized. So as they’re subscribed, there’s a hundred opportunities to either upgrade, cross sell and the biggest miss I think a lot of subscriptions brands have is, they don’t have an upgrade path.

They have zero… I subscribe for $39.99 a month, and there will always be a segment of customers that you could call your super customers, your super fans, your super users, but it’s like 10% to 20% of your customers will always spend 10x what other customers will you need to have a path for them.

Marc: The VIP path. So you said there’s hundreds of opportunities to cross sell, but really the failure there is implementation.

Jay: Yes, a hundred percent. I mean it’s usually, too many brands just kind of slap on a, like a, “Oh, I’ll, I’ll upsell, or  I’ll cross sell or have this offer”. And then they think that’s… but they might actually be hurting their retention by, if it’s not a relevant product to the customer,

Marc: That is a perfect fit, right? Correct. Complimentary.

Jay: But it is a good product, it actually increases retention.

Marc: Absolutely. It does.

Jay: So it’s a, it’s a weird thing.

Marc: It’s a value add, when you can do that, where you can complement what they came in for, to solve that problem. If you can provide them with the complimentary products that helps them solve that problem faster, better, or ancillary problems related to that. And then Paul obviously, Gentleman’s Box.

Paul: Yeah.

Marc: So you guys were curating four or five hand-selected products every month and shipping it with a copy of GQ Magazine and then had a nice exit on that. So you’re very familiar with selecting the appropriate product for that customer.

Paul: It’s an incredibly stressful business. I mean, product curation, it’s tough. Yeah. It, it takes a lot of time and attention and especially monthly. Gosh, you know, John Haji did all the product curation. He was brilliant with it.

But you’re constantly working to get ahead. The quarterly box we fell in love with because, one, way higher customer lifetime value, way higher ROI on there. You weren’t working to fulfill every single month. You weren’t trying to calculate your inventory and all the challenges in there.

And I’ve watched too many subscription businesses, subscription box businesses go under from some of the challenges of having that multi fulfillment and trying to stay ahead.

Marc: You gotta stay focused on it every month. I mean FabFitFun was on here the other day and they have a whole operation, boardroom meetings on merchandising. So they can select the right product.

Paul: Yeah they’re really shifted the business over the last decade and, Mike and I tried to dig it into a little bit and, I think we kind of missed it, but really shifting the business over the years to be more focused on getting you some of the products and, but, but playing with the way their system works, and it’s not just, we ship you a bunch of stuff, and we see what you like, it’s way more curated now than it was ever before.

Marc: Right. They’re not just slinging mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Paul: I mean, that was the ultimate demise of Birchbox Box. And why you’ve seen so many like restarts with Birchbox too. They just kept trying the same model over and over, and that’s the definition of insanity.

Andrei: That’s actually one thing that I see more and more often. Like you cannot just do subscription for ages. At some point, you either convert into an e-commerce brand, right? For example CratePlate. Like you have to do something else, otherwise people have enough of your product, they’re not curious anymore in what you ship, and they just move away.

Marc: Well, I was curious about Scentbird a little bit ’cause we were chatting about it before we hopped on and it sounded like to me like you guys were curating the scents, but so are those white labeled products or is that all made in house?

Andrei: So we were curating this selection. So we initially starting just by selling famous designer fragrances, Versace, Gucci, Dior. At some point, we had to constantly add more because every year there is about 10,000 new launches. So people always want to try new stuff. Obviously there is classic like I dunno, Chanel for example, not to say that Chanel wants to work with us, but it’s what it is.

At some point we started to do our own creation, but. Yes, there are people who stay with Scentbird for two, three years. They have an amazing collection of like 30, 50 fragrances, but some other people have eight. That’s enough for them. So what’s next? So here comes an add-on, a candle, a diffuser.

And that’s why the Drift acquisition happened because if you want to have a nice fragrance in your life, most likely you want to have it everywhere. So in your car, then we launch the wall plug on the Drift brand, and more other products will come under the Drift brand as well, like car wipes, detergents and so on, so forth.

Because people, once you love a good fragrance, you want to have a everywhere. And then it’s the job of the brand to think how we can compliment this.

Marc: So you were bringing these candles and diffusers under your brand name?

Andrei: Both, like we were buying them, but also at some point, we launched in total of five different brands, each with a personality. But what helped us a lot is the data that we had about customers, their preferences throughout the year, because it changes. And also we had the distribution, and the digital footprint.

So to give you some math, usually when the brand launches a new fragrance, they spend $250,000 on the bottle design. They spend a lot of money on the marketing. They invest heavily in the inventory that they have to ship all around the globe first.

Marc: So you want to leverage that, obviously.

Andrei: Yeah, and what we did, we just developed the fragrance. We launched it as a default option for people who didn’t select their fragrance for the next month. In one month we had 5,000 reviews. We know what to improve if there is something to improve. If the people like it, now we can scale to full bottle. Now we can do the distribution

Marc: Testing.

Paul: That was almost like what Wink was doing with wines. And how they built out their, I think it was their Hampton, one of the wines that they had became really famous, did really well.

And they used the bottles, or the subscription as a way to kind find customer preference. And then ship out.  Wink, their challenge was they got over their skis during COVID. Spent way too much. I mean, you look at when they filed bankruptcy, their two biggest creditors or debtors, they were, it was Meta and FedEx.

Andrei: Naked Wine is doing the same, but they, I believe, are more successful right now. At least it seems so.

Paul: Yeah, I think Wink just got caught up in the COVID challenge. Like Peloton did, like a bunch of others where you grew, they grew hyper fast during COVID, thought that growth was gonna continue, and and so again, looking at the data, but focus on the customers.

Anyway, getting back to what you’re at on that though, was it’s about using that as a way to shape preference and understand consumers, and that’s super smart.

Marc: So I wanted to maybe shift gears a little bit now that we’ve talked about maybe mistakes, or areas of focus, things like that. What would be interesting to see if what we could do, seeing as we have, three of the utmost leading experts here on growing subscription based businesses specifically, but we want to give maybe like the single best thing, if you had a gun to your head.

If you could only focus on that in your business, that’s gonna drive the most growth in a subscription based e-commerce business. And maybe it’s, hey, top the other guy. Or maybe it ends up being more collaborative. Maybe there’s a lot of agreement, but maybe there’s some disagreement. And so I was curious, what’s your single best thing that you could give to someone who really wanted to grow and scale their business sustainably, profitably?

Jay: The single best thing…

Paul: Yeah it’s gotta be THE best one Jay, nothing else.

Marc: The best thing you got?

Jay: Well, I try to always like, avoid like growth hacks and things like that. And so I don’t want to like go down that path.

Marc: Well, maybe like strategy is an option here.

Jay: Yeah.

Paul: By the way if it’s good, you’ll get a clap. If it’s bad, you’ll get a sad.

Marc: Strategy included, by the way. Not tactics, necessarily.

Jay: There’s like 10 coming to my mind, so I’m gonna pick one. I actually think I would do this if I was starting a new subscription business from day one right now. I would make it 100% member exclusive.

I wouldn’t allow people to just sign up. I would, invite, I might open it to the first 500 or something. ’cause I need some kind of a base and I would make it invite only, I would have a wicked referral program that each person that signs up gets three invites or maybe five, that they can give with extreme value, to invite someone for maybe three months free, five months free.

Not 10% off, but extreme, extreme value. ’cause you only need, to grow. A couple years ago we did a talk, and it was all about the viral coefficient and, you just need the average subscriber to refer 1.0001 to have growth that looks like a hockey stick.

Marc: Exponential growth.

Jay: So one person can refer five, one can refer zero. That’s fine. But I’m getting the exact ideal customer profile I want when customers, when it’s a high touch referral.

Marc: Referring people just like them.

Jay: I’m getting, say I have a skincare brand. I’m getting people who are referring people who care about skincare, who are passionate about it, who have a skincare problem. I’m not just getting a broad audience. I’m getting the exact customer I want, who is then likely to refer more customers.

Marc: So the second part of this question is always a use-case example maybe that you could point to, that’s a good, hey, this is a very exclusive membership. This is maybe an ideal model.

Jay: An example of someone doing that?

Marc: Yeah.

Paul: Jay, first the idea… *plays crickets sound*

Jay: Oh, oh first… you got to turn that off.

Paul: You just got crickets.

Jay: What? Oh!

Paul: No, it was a good idea. It was a good idea.

Jay: That sound effect! I thought you put some crickets in here.

Paul: Alright, before we get into your example. I remember I pulled Jay off the stage one year. One of the best talks ever at Sub Summit 2022.

I was waving my arms wildly in the back of the room because you’re way over on time. But people kept asking amazing questions and they loved it, but I was like, we gotta keep people moving. It was one of the best talks ever about this.

Jay: Yeah. The talk was 25 minutes and the questions were 45 minutes.

Paul: They were so good.

Marc: Well, I met yesterday, a music curator, so he did like indie upcoming labels, and they have a membership. But he was having trouble building his community on Facebook, because they would add like maybe 2,500 people to the group, but only maybe like 20 were really active and vocal.

But it was a free group, so I told him, ’cause I’d interviewed John Roman over at Battle Box and their community is exclusive. So in order to participate in that, you have to be a subscriber. Otherwise you’re not in the group anymore. No hard feelings. But so you get exclusive membership perks in addition to that, live events.

Paul: Who are you seeing crushing this? Who are you seeing just dominating this, viral culture?

Jay: I mean, the example I used in that talk, it’s not relevant anymore, but it was Clubhouse. During the pandemic clubhouse scaled faster than any subscription app ever.

Paul: Because we were bored and just wanted to talk.

Jay: A little bit of that. But then also Twitter kind of eliminated it. They launched Twitter spaces, and there was some other kind of macro factors that affected that, but when you signed up for Clubhouse, well actually you couldn’t sign up for Clubhouse. You had to get invited.

Paul: I got my invite from you.

Jay: Did you? Okay and I invited Chris George too, and I remember texting Chris George and saying, “Are you gonna actually use this invite? ’cause I only got five.

Paul: You opened up a whole can of worms with that by the way.

Jay: Because I don’t want to give you my invite if you’re not going to use it. And he was like, yeah, yeah, let’s do a, I forget what it was called, but we did a talk, a space, or whatever. Let’s do a talk together. And we did one with Robbie.

Paul: Yeah, we’re talking about you.

Jay: Hey, we were talking about you, and I invited you to Clubhouse.

Paul: How he just ruined a week for me in my life, when he wouldn’t give you a Clubhouse invite.

Jay: He’s always, he’s always lurking in the background there somewhere. And so, but what that did is, I was actually qualifying him as a perfect user, and not just a perfect user, but someone who’s invested.

Yeah, I’m gonna do a talk.

Marc: You have skin in the game that he actually participate

Paul: Yeah. You coveted that. You coveted that invite that much that you’re like, no, I don’t know if I’m gonna give it to you or not.

Marc: It’s exclusive.

Jay: And you would think, man, if you want to grow super fast, you need everyone to be able to sign up. But you couldn’t. So the fastest growing platform actually had limited, sign up subscriptions.

Marc: Plus, when you do that, the users are going to be likely to use the product.

Paul: Well, why, why are we not seeing this more in the physical commerce space? Why are we not, I mean, it worked so well for them. Are we, are we just missing it? Like, who else?

Jay: Yeah. It’s a good question to be honest. I mean, that was, that was the whole. I know a few are trying it. Tiege Hanley, after that talk, they implemented something very, very similar to it. I had actually a call with Kelly and their whole team after the talk. He’s like, “Hey, can you do that exact talk again? But for my whole company.” So we did it like a week later and they implemented a wicked program, so they’re doing it pretty well.

Marc: Blind Barrels who was here was doing something very similar. You could buy a bottle on the front end, but the membership price was right on the page. And you get a much better deal, and it drives a lot of exclusivity.

Jay: Yeah. And then, I would just say, probably all of you’ve walked around this conference and you’ve heard these words come outta your mouth. “Well, how many subscribers do you have? How many subscribers do you have?” And I think that is a little bit at the core of the problem, is we refer to them as subscribers, I think one step better is.

Get that vocabulary out of your language. They’re members. And then even one step further is, they’re leads. So if someone comes up to me and says, “Oh, I have a thousand subscribers.” I would say, you have a thousand leads. You have a thousand. You have a thousand people.

Marc: You have a thousand potential members.

Jay: Yeah. Because if they’re good members, if they’re members that have a holistic, membership value offering, which means, because they’re subscribed to a product, they maybe get VIP pricing on the store. They maybe get access to products that non-members don’t. They maybe get access to the founder once a quarter on a Zoom call.

They maybe get access to in-person events, you know, like a holistic membership view of what it means to be a member. If you have that, then you have a customer that will buy. On average, 400% more than a non-paid member.

Marc: You had mentioned a stat like this yesterday that customer support was really driving a lot of retention. I can’t remember the exact numbers you used, but it went from like 30% to 83%. And then to speak to Blind Barrels yesterday, I think his members, he actually gives them his phone number. Most of them don’t contact him, but he says any person that he speaks to on the phone. They never quit.  

Jay: So the data point was we looked at, thousands and thousands. I don’t know the exact number of subscribers. But there was a cohort that was the activation, which just means they become, after month one is, is activation, like month one. They’re essentially trying a product. Month two, we consider them activated. Went from 28 to 83%.

Marc: Wow.

Jay: And then you might think, “Oh, well there’s ways you can increase activation. Like really good try before you buy, or free samples.”

Marc: Which Scentbird was trying, initially.

Jay: Yeah. So then we also looked at a one year retention rate. Like, okay, that same thing that we did to this one cohort. How did it affect retention? Because like, oh, maybe they aren’t around anymore. And it went from, I think it was 23 to 73%. It was twenties to seventies. It’s insane. And you’re like, well, what if I told you, like I always say, when you go to a conference, if you can come home with one idea, that conference pays off.

Marc: One idea can revolutionize everything.

Jay: One idea can make you hundreds of thousands, or millions more, literally. And so what the thing was that drove that increased, not conversion, sorry. Activation and retention, was, they talked to customer support one time. So we, we segmented out a cohort. We went in Zendesk, we looked at every customer. That had talked to support one time, not if it was like a good interaction, bad interaction. Were they angry, happy? We didn’t even look at any of that.

We just segmented out all the customers that had at least one interaction with support, and then we looked at their activation rate of that cohort. And then we looked at the one year retention rate of that cohort, and it was mind blowing how much it impacted it.

Marc: You even had mentioned yesterday, wow, that it didn’t matter if it was good or bad, the interaction.

Jay: No. It was just that there was an interaction.

Marc: No difference. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah. And we’ll drill down deeper. We just didn’t then segment it out. Like Zendesk has sentiment analysis and we can see positive interaction versus negative interaction. And I guarantee you the positive interactions are better,

Marc: Probably a little bit.

Jay: But the bottom line was, is they interacted at least once and that was the impact it had. So now we’re looking at like, how can we actually like force interaction? How can we make it part of the onboarding process? You get your product, schedule your week one phone call with a skin expert.

Marc: Well how much personalized can you be than a personal conversation? Because speaking to that one big idea can change everything. I was wondering what you might think that you would latch onto, Andrei, if you had to drive it to one thing, that could revolutionize a business, that if that it was the only strategy or tactic that you could focus on, what would you bring to it?

Andrei: I would say what I see more and more and maybe wide swing over the exclusive memberships, invite onl,y is more and more company starts as a media companies. First they create a following, and then on top of this, then they create a product. And I see both in B2C and actually in B2B, too.

Marc: Oh yeah.

Andrei: And maybe it’s just because everything that right now is in entertainment. Like whenever you ride a train or subway, or like everyone sits and look at the phone, so. If you found your way to get in there and you have a following, now you can, but people listen to your advice, and now you can start giving them more and more product. Like sometimes it, it could be natural for example, like Andrew Huberman, like.

Marc: Huge.

Andrei: Naturally promote, huge.

Marc: Huge business based on content and audience

Andrei: All that stuff.

Marc: AG1, I don’t even know what he’s doing, but I think he’s pulling in millions of dollars a month on AG1.

Andrei: One of my favorite YouTube channel right now are Perkins Brothers. So a guy from North Carolina who just built houses. And like it’s interesting to watch, they launch their own products right now, and they make a ton of money out of this.

Marc: So content and community?

Andrei: Yeah, content and community.

Marc: Well, Paul, so you’ve done quite a bit with content and community. You and Chris George and John Haji have really put something nice together.

I mean, the live event last night with Mike Posner was incredible. I like the robots. That was really cool. I got a clip of that, so.

Paul: They were fun. You know, the space that I’m in now is, look, we started the SubSummit because selfishly we wanted to meet other subscription box owners. And this started when Chris and John were saying like, “Hey, we’re gonna go to this e-commerce conference.”

And I said, you know. “Why don’t we go to a subscription box conference?” And it didn’t exist. And so we built it. And we wanted to create a community. And I’ll never forget, and I tell the story quite often, that first night after our first day sitting with Michael Broukhim at the after party, and he gave us a tip for Gentleman’s Box, that changed the business.

He told us, you know, “Hey, instead of going to buy your socks, you put in there from Happy Socks, you go to Happy Socks, you say, we’re gonna manufacture these in China. We’ll put your label on them. And, you’re gonna get promotion from it.” And it just was an unlock for us. And that should have been something simple and basic, but we were new, we didn’t know.

And so it was about creating that community and finding those people. And so going back to your question, I think every time somebody comes to me and says, “I wanna launch a subscription box, or I wanna launch a subscription business,” and if they’re just bootstrapping it and they’re trying to figure out how to do it on their own, I always say, just start recording content.

Start building a community. Build a following. And then when you’re ready to launch it, you’ve got a built in customer base right there. You’ve got people that will come and order from you and respect you and admire you. And don’t do it because you’re just trying to sell a product and make some money.

Do it because you actually care and give a crap about what you’re doing. And I think, you know, we really try and put our heart and soul into this event and everything we do here. ’cause we truly care about the community and the people. And so I think when you put that into your business and when you put that into what you’re doing, then the rest will follow.

Marc: I think that’s amazing. It’s almost like if you go back to what Jay was saying, if you have a subscriber, you don’t have a subscriber, you have a lead. Content, pre-business, is the lead before the lead.

Paul: I mean, there’s a reason Netflix stuff reporting on subscriber numbers. Because that’s not the metric that matters.

The metric that matters is revenue and profitability, and the subscriber numbers are what they’re gonna be. But you can raise, I mean, gosh, it’s amazing to me how much more valuable an ad subscriber is to them, versus an ad-free. And so like, it’s hard to look at just pure sub numbers in there.

Andrei: That’s actually the key point here. Like you know, the famous quote, “Show me the incentive and I’ll tell you the behavior.” And the big mistake that a lot of companies do initially, they separate growth from retention. They have literally different teams responsible for that. And that creates a very big problem, because people respond for growth.

They will just drive a lot of, toxic traffic. And then the retention team, is like, “What do we do with these guys? Like, they just want a freebie from us.”

Paul: Oh, we would see that all the time with Gentleman’s Box. When we would try, we would do like, get your first box 50% off, and those were the worst subscribers.

Or you, we would do like first box for a dollar. First box for a penny. We would try all sorts of different things.

Marc: It’s try before you buy, but.

Paul: It just didn’t, it wasn’t the value that was there. And, and we realized quickly as we started to unpack that data.

Marc: You’re attracting the wrong profile essentially, right from the very beginning.

Paul: It’s on discount sites, and it was just, we got so many arguments over it, like, “Let’s do this, let’s do that.”

Marc: Because it’s a balance in this subscription box game because when you give them all of these amazing products at an exceptional value, they’re getting a great deal. But it doesn’t feel discounted because it’s curated, it’s targeted, and it fits their specific needs.

So they’re willing to pay for that value, and then it stays in this environment of an elevated environment. That’s what I thought was so interesting from listening to Michael with FabFitFun.

He talked in depth about that process, that it’s really the merchandising and the curation, ongoingly behind the scenes that’s driving that. And you mentioned Birchbox, maybe there were, maybe throwing things against the wall and seeing what would stick.

Paul: Look, they were still, in the early days, they were learning. They taught everyone else a lot of lessons. I think, but that time too, is like, growth at all costs. By the time they did start to focus on the bottom line, it was too late.

Marc: Yeah. The wrong kind of growth leads to the backend results, just not being where they need to be, basically.

Andrei: And then Spark happened.

Jay: Yeah, and maybe a bit of selling the wrong thing too. Like if you’re selling Gentleman’s Box and if you lean in too much on first month free, value, you’re getting, I see a lot of boxes saying like, guaranteed a hundred dollars worth of value, but it’s only 39.99 a month.  But going back, like, what are you actually selling at that point?

Marc: You’re not selling the product, or the value.

Jay: You’re selling curation. You’re selling stuff I wouldn’t find normally, you know? So you have to be careful how you sell it. If you sell the wrong thing, they won’t stick around,

Marc: You’re selling on a discount. Basically.

Jay: You have to sell what the value is that they are getting long term. The long term value is not necessarily the discount, so you just have to align. Value-based pricing, right? Like you have to line the, the pricing with what the true value is.

Marc: It’s really the details that go into that curation process. Yeah.

Jay: Yeah.

Marc: Awesome. Well, I appreciate that. So I think that’s about well over probably our 30 minutes. I’m not sure what the time says under the table, but that was excellent.

So if anybody wants to find you guys, for what you’re working on now, obviously Jay, you’re doing a lot of things. I mean, you’re flying all over the place to be here, so that was amazing.

Paul: Oh, you, you skipped Shopify editions for this.

Jay: I skipped Shopify editions for this, but we have a whole team there.

There’s a whole crew there. I was there earlier this week yesterday, came here. I think some people, there was people flying back and forth.

Paul: If we can talk to Harley and organize that better next year.

Marc: Yeah. You spoke there and then you came here.

Jay: I can set that up.

Marc: Chase was here and he flew out when you flew in.

Jay: Yeah. Yeah. It’s just, you know what? There’s only so many weekends in a year and I know it’s, yeah.

Marc: So, where can guys find you?

Jay: Where can people find me? Well, BoldCommerce.com is my company. I also host a podcast that’s called the Shopify1Percent, like the number 1, Percent. So if you’re on Shopify, that’s a one to check out that, and I’m super active on LinkedIn. I’ve kind of given up X, because I just get angry every time I go on it. It makes my blood pressure rise. So LinkedIn is where I am.

Marc: All right. How about you, Andre?

Andrei: Same for me. LinkedIn is where I am. Or Finsi.ai, that’s the company that I’m building right now.

Marc: Can you talk a little bit about what Finsi.ai does for clients that Jay decided that you had to join his company as a partner?

Andrei: So what Finsi does is we help subscription companies to improve their retention, because we can look at all the data, across all the systems, and tell you, what you can do better. So you always stay focused, and we already spoke about the importance of focus because you can only do so much.

Marc: Because if you get the insights without the implementation, then you have some good ideas, but that’s not really gonna move the needle.

Jay: It’s Finsi, F-I-N-S-I.ai, right? Check it out. It’s, it’s slick.

Andrei: Yes. Thank you.

Marc: Awesome.

Jay: I have no ulterior motives. Not an investor anything. Just, it’s, I saw a demo about a month ago and right away knew that like, this would add value to our merchants to understand, like things we talked about earlier, like some of those numbers, like one thing you, you figure out in the numbers can unlock huge growth.

Marc: Just a simple thing as the right timing with the cancellation flow.

Andrei: Exactly.

Marc: All right. And Paul, obviously we can probably find us at SubSummit.com.

Paul: Yeah, SubSummit.com. All over LinkedIn.

Marc: For the next live event is what, Kansas City next year?

Paul: Kansas City, May 13 to 15, 2026. And it’s funny ’cause Kansas City’s an unlikely destination for conferences. I’d never been there before.

Marc: Because we’re on Commerce Street right now, kind of makes sense.

Paul: Yeah exactly, we, you know, we toured toured it a few months ago and, and just fell in love with the city. Very cool. We wanted to find a place that would give us the same community vibe that we have being in a venue here. And so that allows us to do that there. So we’re super excited. And then I’m active on LinkedIn quite a bit. I am on X still. I found it really good. Like my following is honed in on D2C.

Jay: Okay. You’ve finally tuned your profile.

Paul: I did.

Marc: You’re on money Twitter.

Paul: Yeah, the algorithms like working on my favor.

Jay: I gotta work on that. I think I’ve liked too many political posts or something.

Marc: Yeah, that’s what happens. You gotta be careful, the algorithm will get you.

Paul: Yeah so you know, as I was enough to get @PaulChambers on Twitter and I’ll post up there every once in a while, but LinkedIn’s the main jam.

Marc: Well, guys appreciate you guys joining me up here for the live edition of 10-Minute Ecom Success and we turned it into 30 plus minutes ’cause we have the three amigos. And it was a good time. I appreciate it.

Paul: This is like the ASOMer Pod, right?

Jay: Oh, I hope they hear that.

Marc: ASOMer, watch out. Watch out, Jimmy Kim, John, we’re becoming the ASOMer Pod.

Paul: The ASOM Podcast.

Jay: Oh, he’s here. Hopefully he’s gonna jump out from behind us.

Paul: Yeah they’re not around, come at us.

Marc: You guys had that really cool thing in the bathrooms where you could scan their QR code and they’re like, let us rate you 1 outta 10. They’re like, you’re top of the line. You look great.

Paul: I got a 40.

Jay: I haven’t done it yet. I’m gonna go do that.

Paul: Check it out.

Marc: You should do it. Yeah. You might get a lower number. I don’t know. Nah!

Jay: I’ll just post Paul’s face on there.

Paul: Awesome, well, thanks for having us, Marc. Appreciate it.

Andrei: Thank you.

Marc: Thank you.

Jay: Yeah it was a ton of fun.

Paul: Cool.