#20 - Brian Kenny and Conor McCarthy of Subscription Club
#20 - Brian Kenny and Conor McCarthy on Subscription Club and what it means to put the customer at the centre of your brand.
On this episode of The First 10 Podcast, my co-founder on our new venture, Subscription Club. Subscription Club is simple eCommerce subscription management for your business that is branded beautifully and helps you to continue the relationship with your customers, digitally.
Show Notes
White Mausu (our first customer)
Permission Marketing by Seth Godin
Contact Details
Transcription
SPEAKERS Conor McCarthy, Brian Kenny
Brian Kenny 00:01
And I think that a lot of really amazing art design retailers and creators of products that are out there that have small businesses because of geographical restrictions or tech not serving them correctly. It's not right, I get it, that problem needs to be solved.
Conor McCarthy 00:18
Hello, and welcome to the last episode of season two of the first 10 podcast. I can't believe we're at the end of season two already. I'm your host, Conor McCarthy. And in each episode, I interview Business Builders on their first 10 customers who they were, how they found them, and they talked to them, and what effect they had in their business so that you can learn what worked and what didn't. So I'm really, really excited to be releasing this episode. It's somewhat different from past episodes when I interview other people about their businesses, because in this episode, I'm the actual business builder. I'm co founding a company with Brian Kenny from mini Corp. He was my guest all the way back. He was Episode One of season one of this podcast, the company we were forming together is called subscription club. And we create simple ecommerce subscription management software for your business that's branded beautifully and helps you continue and deepen the relationship with your customers online. So this episode is obviously quite mad at the first 10 podcast turns into an interview with the host, who is currently finding his first 10 guests. I guess this is kind of like building in public. We talk about the origin story of subscription club about approaching our first flagship customer, or what it means to put the customer at the centre of your brand. Let's get to it. So this isn't the normal podcasts. Brian was guest number one on the podcast. Remember, remember that all of the what was it October, November 2020, all those months ago?
Brian Kenny 01:48
I sure do. And it's absolutely fantastic to be back again, and to having the the chats with your good stuff. I really enjoyed that first podcast, and it's fantastic to see where the podcast has gone since then. so wonderful. And congratulations.
Conor McCarthy 02:03
Thanks a million. Yeah, thanks for kicking it off. And it's great to have you back on now. Because got even six months seems like a long time. But we've been cooking something up together. That's pretty exciting. And so we thought it'd be interesting to do an episode where we, we talk about it live, and we'll see where it goes. Because we're definitely in the first 10 stage, little Drum roll, the company is called subscription club, and maybe you'd like to tell us what the Christian club is
Brian Kenny 02:28
all about. Absolutely. And it is amazing to be finally talking about it. I think it's been a combination of a lot of work over the past couple of months. But I guess to introduce it, I'll actually go back to the problem that was always irking me. And that was, if you're today to take a, let's say, a traditional, you know, high brand, high identity business, the type of business that when you walk into their physical retail store, the, either the founder, or the staff will wave to you and say, Hi, Brian, God has been, you know, haven't seen you in a while has the kids, and are you having the regular kind of latte or, or coffee or, you know, they just have this own real connection and bond with each of their customers, and really have that as a huge priority and importance in their brand and identity, even to a point that it would be such a huge factor for them when they're recruiting or hiring staff members in across different retail stores, for example. And the one thing that always kind of caught me is that hasn't really translated well into the digital environment, to a point that that same feeling from both the customer and the brand, because honestly, the founders needed as much as the consumers need us and doesn't seem to translate so well. And I think it's an amazing problem to try to solve. And it's going to, you know, take many different facets and many different elements in order to solve it properly. But the one that we've really honed in on initially is within subscriptions. So as we've all hit COVID and the pandemic, I think that whole area of the facilitation of the connection between the business and the consumer, and moving not to a virtual environment is being felt by all and trying to now ride that wave where, number one, the customer gathers his amazing convenience while still having the connection with the business. But number two, the business is no longer geographically constrained. So let's say you have had your four or five different businesses in the middle of you know, retail stores in the middle of Dublin City or wherever it might be. Your the majority of your customers would come from the surrounding areas, versus if we can bring that into a more virtual environment. The, you know, the capability and the geographic restrictions are removed. And that's amazing because these businesses, they need that, you know, they're doing such wonderful curation and really caring about their customers and their products so much that why shouldn't they have the full feel of total addressable market and so on to them. So that's the goal. The goal of subscription club initially is to help those businesses to connect with their consumers in a way in a way that feels akin to what they're used to. But from a consumer point of view, for them to feel connected with the brand, and that same feeling of when they walk into the shop, if that makes sense. Conor McCarthy 05:47
Yeah, I love it. I mean, and we've obviously had many conversations about this. And I think that the thing that keeps coming back to me is white glove service, like how can you as a, as a business owner, provide more of a white glove service to your customers, especially to the ones who love your product, and the way you do business and the brand that you've established, because it's all well and good to sell someone something. But if you can, if you can, like really make them feel like there's a deeper relationship there that there's a connection that they really matter. I think it's a pretty powerful thing for any brand to be able to 200%.
Brian Kenny 06:23
And even when you think about that, and extrapolate it a bit further. So this has been happening for years where, let's say Brian walks into a wine shop. He knows Sarah, who's, you know, being the owner of that wine shop for so long, and says Brian, you normally like a burgundy, or you're like this type of wine, or whatever it is. But you've never really tried one like this before. Here's your regular two bottles that you would normally take plus, let's try, you know, try this on as well. And come back and tell me what it was like that in a subscription model is what we really want to aim towards were number one, the business owner gets to understand what is the customer's behaviour and habits? What type of products do they like? And watch? You know, what, what are they really in love with within my business? And how can I bring them on a journey? You know, as we start to think about releasing new products or new services? Can i beta tested as what we're now calling it been in virtual land? But realistically, it's Can I slide that different bottle of wine to heighten the experience for the customer? And then can I get feedback from them to say, God, that bottle of wine was amazing. Do you have anything similar? Could you recommend something else to me? And to really, you know, it just increases that bond yet again?
Conor McCarthy 07:48
Yeah, yeah, I love it. And it's, it's, it's true from the from the brand's point of view, there's, it's a huge signal, when when someone decides to sign up for a subscription offer of your product. I mean, talk about putting your hands in the air, this is like both hands waving at you. I love what you do. And and that's a kind of an extra special marketing channel, I suppose you'd call it and then not to get too technical on it. But But in terms of relationships, like those, those are the people that will, they'll give out a thing that you put out a shot, and they will give you probably the best the highest quality feedback that you can get on on what you do on your brand on your customer service on your new offerings, whatever it is,
Brian Kenny 08:30
yeah, so the you know, statistically churn rates and lifetime value of customers, and the connection between the customer and the brand is heightened to a phenomenal degree through this. Convenience comes in at a huge factor here as well, where if you're to think about those businesses, cash flow is king and making sure that they can, first of all forecasts correctly and accurately, to know, how many subscribers Do I have this month? What do I want to increase it by? and allowing the consumer to say, Yeah, I really want this to be a recurring thing where I don't have to drive down to the shop, or I don't have to worry about replenishment or anything like that. It just arrives. Both parties want this. And I think because of day to day life of running a shop, it can be really, really difficult to go, God, you know, what if I just automatically sent this out to Brian every single week, he probably loved that, you know, but instead we're worried about inventory or marketing or rewards or something else. So I think just helping that on the business side is a huge plus to revenue and cash flow and business growth. Yeah, absolutely. I
Conor McCarthy 09:43
mean, the convenience, can't. You can't shortchange that convenience factor of this. There's a wonderful I mean, I I definitely have a lot of Seth Godin in my background, and he wrote the book called permission marketing. And I think we talked early on about hey, this was like a form of permission marketing, like your, if you're a brand your customers are giving you permission to, to send them that their product. So So it's, you know, the definition of permission marketing is personal, relevant anticipated. So it's personal because it's a brand they love. It's relevant because it's the it's the items they want. And it's anticipated because they've said ahead of time, look, this is something I need to have, sign me up and just take the money out of my account. Actually, that's the holy grail, isn't it? Please take my money.
Brian Kenny 10:30
Yeah, and it's, it's, it's so strange, I don't know whether it just feels like a strange arc. And some people push. The consumers actually want this to happen. But for some reason, we find it strange as business owners to go in for the ask. And I think just offering it and saying, hey, if you want it, it's there. And as we've launched and kind of gone through our beta process, and and got our launch customers, we now see such a significant uptake and how people are reacting to it. And there's a yes, you know, like people are mad to see it. And, but there's also, you know, one of the biggest things that we've strived to do is just ready to get the basics completely, right. So when you take out a subscription, after reviewing multiple different products in the past, and things like pausing subscriptions, or I'm going on holidays for a couple of weeks, or I want to have coffee delivered to both my house and to my work, multiple locations, all of these really basic technologies, simplistic things to do never seem to be done really well. And so accomplishing that seemed to be a big hurdle. And then number two is to allow content to be paired with product. And what we're trying to accomplish around that is really, if you took let's say the the wine scenario there, a person may subscribe to a wine club, let's say, and, and at the very beginning, they get sent out three bottles of wine. But tell me more about those bottles of wine, you know, send out an email to myself and tell me about Pablo and his vineyard and why he grows these grapes and why his family care so much about the heritage of the vineyard and where it's coming from. And that connection past the retailer and into the actual product is another leap forward for Pablo is now seeing the knock on and economic effects of subscriptions down to the consumer level. So yeah, lots lots of fun to be uncovered in the next while
Conor McCarthy 12:35
Yeah, yeah. And it's it's interesting to see once you open this door, you know, we've we've talked to a good few companies at the moment, many of whom had this on their roadmap. And they couldn't figure out a way to do it, simply a guess, or to the degree that they wanted. So it's great to be having that conversation with them where it's like we've got the solution. And actually just Let's talk for a moment maybe about this is the first 10 customers. So people might be curious about how we're going about finding our first 10 customers.
Brian Kenny 13:07
Yeah, so I think it was strange, it was something that came up on another call with myself earlier today. So I obviously run a digital product agency. And we work with lots of different early stage or conceptual ideas. And we tend to see three different mediums, let's say or pots on how they accomplish the first version of their product. Number one is true investment. So either going to an accelerator or an incubator looking for a grant some sort of early stage capital to help them to direct their attention fully to the idea, and to push it forward. The second is to bootstrap it and to you know, either have saved enough for your salary or to ask for friends and family to support you, in order for you to build the first version of the product, and then eventually to bring it to market. Or number three, what we've done here with subscription club. And that is to take the idea and to build a pitch and to build a set of UI designs as to what we're trying to accomplish, where we can tell a story easily to a potential set of clients that we'd love to work with, or retailers that we'd love to work with. And to not have built anything at all really at the very beginning. And to say is enough people or are enough people reacting to this favourably and saying, God, if I had that, that would be fantastic. Let's do that. And when we heard that, yes, more than once, and we know that there is a early validation that's coming through there. Now. Now it's time to start thinking about building and working with that early customer to say Do you want to push the button? Like, is it something? Is it all talk? Or like, do you really believe in it as much as we do, because cards on the table, this is a new company, and and we would really, really love to do this together with yourselves like it would be heaven. And for them to turn around and say yes. And for us to make sure that they're understanding that they're a golden customer, they will never be forgotten by ourselves, they have our full backing and support in subscription club to be a part of this journey well into the future. And to bring the product to market together as a force has just been phenomenal. And to bring that to the next retailer and the next retailer, and to see such a positive response continually growing from there means that, number one, we get to learn like we get to intimately have conversations with these retailers who say, what are we getting? Right? What are we getting wrong? what resonates with you, and what doesn't, adapting the product based on their feedback to a certain degree. So caveat point on that of, we want to do 80 or 90% of the workload for subscriptions perfectly for the majority of retailers, those 10 or 20%, it is idiosyncrasies that are specific to a retailer, we're not going to do because it's a mass product, it's something we want to bring to market across the board. But yeah, to see that support to see, to see the product launch to see clients using it and coming on board has been a wonderful experience.
Conor McCarthy 16:37
Yeah, it is, God The Furious notetaking that we've been doing in some of those meetings, because you don't know how people are considered subscriptions, or how this is gonna land with their audience that of course, the brands we're talking to are rightly as was protective of, of who this is going out to, and how it's going out. So it's great to have that kind of feedback for us to go, you know, what else do we need to? What else do we need to build into this to make sure that we're providing something now, as as fast as possible, that's of highest quality that we can think of? And over time, I suppose making like collecting all this feedback together, noticing the patterns of what people want, and building those things in until as you say, we get to that 80 90% Oh, yeah, this is something that everyone wants and needs. So we're going to, that's what we're going to do. A month ago, you talked about like bringing, bringing your set of designs out to show people and the designs, which you did, which were fantastic. They were to look at them you were gonna go Oh, this is built on an up and running. And this is fantastic looking. Because the the, I guess the imagination, I went into them of what a subscription. And what an excellent subscription service could be told the story was like, Oh, this I can I can see myself using this product by the quality of those original designs. I think that really helps.
Brian Kenny 18:04
Yeah, so I think it's something that I've learned from my my own history when I was doing the inflight entertainment company. And that's if you're selling b2b, paint a picture and and tell her tell a story and tell a narrative. So if you can imagine extremely busy business owner who is in the middle of COVID, and everything is uncertain, and times are really difficult, right? Like it's, it's, it's really difficult for everybody at the moment, help them to understand the concept in as few slides as possible. So even with the likes of white Malsu, the first launch customer adapting the designs to be completely on brand. And exactly as it will be when we launch with them helps them to understand, ah, okay, I completely get that, like, I can imagine that being live tomorrow. And it's pixels, and it's just design, and that's grand. But it helps them to get a full understanding of what what this is. And I think, you know, picture tells 1000 words and all of that. It's just, it's so much simpler, and it becomes so much easier. And it takes all of 10 or 15 minutes at the beginning of beginning of any pitch to a new client to adapt the brand, adapt the identity and make sure that you have it all put into place and do a comprehensive pitch put on put in the time and effort if it's the deal that you want to see have happen. Because it just it makes things run so much smoother.
Conor McCarthy 19:39
Absolutely. Yeah. It's like that. So the thing you see when people are saying, you know, how do you become more relatable when you're in a conversation it's like usually the person's name a lot. People love to hear their own name. But that kind of goes the same for a brand you know, like to, to use a brand's own assets, I suppose Arduino to do Do that bit of research where you kind of go, I understand a lot about this brand now, because I've done the work. So when I'm on that call, when we're talking about things, I feel like we're having a, I feel like I have a relationship already. Instead of I mean, like cold, cold data thing is, it's a tough, it's a tough game to play. And it doesn't work, for obvious reasons, and the most, for the most part, but yeah, to your point, like putting in that little bit of extra work upfront to understand what their needs might be, and then to do some matching, I think is time well spent.
Brian Kenny 20:30
100%. So I think I think it's something that I would have said in episode one, which is, if you're looking for those first 10 customers, so those 10 customers, to me, are absolute golden customers, as in, they should be appreciated for the lifetime of the product, essentially, to say thank you for believing in something that was in its infancy. And we've all brought it to market. And just a big thank you. That said, you must do as much research as possible to figure out is the alignment correct. And what I mean by that is, if we go for an absolutely huge retailer out the bat and say we're trying to launch subscription club, here's what it looks like with your brand and identity and everything. And they turn around and say yes, we're just like, we're not ready for that volume that scale that size. And so choosing the top 10 customers, where are your first 10 customers where you've done diligent research to figure out number one, how do they fit into your product roadmap? So do you have polarising different types of early stage customers where they're in different industries or different markets? Or you're trying to validate different parts of your business? And number two, can you grow well together? You know, can you can you start to market together? Can you tell the story together, all of these things where you need to do all of the groundwork initially, to make sure that it fits, and then go in for the pitch all behind the scenes. And then the third point that I had on that has now just completely jumped out of my mind, but it was to come back to me.
Conor McCarthy 22:08
Okay, yeah, the, I think what's also been surprising about working with white medicine, let's say that's, that's our first client is that there and people can allow the link in the show notes, obviously, people go and check, check out what we do alive. And what was really interesting was the, you know, the initial conversations turned into even more conversations where we got an amazing opportunity to look at the, to kind of go one or two steps below the surface and see how they operate, because what we're doing needs to integrate with a few different parts of their business. And that was a great way to, I suppose to kind of non judgmentally Look, the business kind of go, Oh, this is brilliant, like, how else can we help? Like, you've got a big operation, they're very successful at what they do. They've got a fantastic brand. And it was it was great to just kind of look behind the scenes and see a brand that started it was it was a bootstrap brand. And, and no, they've grown to what they are, and they're growing still. But I suppose to kind of have that access and have that trust. And it's great, because we as much as we want our retailers to improve their relationship with their customers, we also want to have a high relationship business with our retailers. So it's high relationship all the way up the chain?
Brian Kenny 23:23
Absolutely. And I think Yeah, going back to that third point, the third point is really, you know, as we as we launch, you see such an influx of other companies who would love to have subscription club. But we also need to push the brakes and to say, not too much too quickly. Performance reputation, and doing a diligent job becomes Paramount at the very beginning. And you know, it's not saying drop a brick wall and say no, but saying, you know, we're releasing this in a stage over a period of time, and we'll unboard you over that process. But not letting everybody just influx and join the product and kind of getting getting blown away with that. And from the other side, looking at the back office or the back of house, even with quite Mozu or lots of different businesses. You know, subscriptions for us is only the very beginning or the very surface of where this whole venture goes into. So we really want to push this into the complete unified commerce arena. So everything from we start with subscriptions. But if Brian walks into a retail store from one of those businesses, they should know who I am, there should be a complete and cohesive nature to the whole thing from a consumers point of view. We know that your Brian we know that you're on your subscription we know that you're connected with this whole plan. Everything from the point of sale device down to inventory management and preorder or even rewards and loyalty, the whole comprehensive nature of making Sure that brands that are high touch and intimately care about their customers have a full comprehensive platform that lets them continue that relationship with those customers in a virtual capacity as well as a physical one, which is going to be amazing to do, I'm really pumped to get stuck into that.
Conor McCarthy 25:18
Yeah, this is this is the the big goal, which I love is this kind of 360 degrees, relationship focused e commerce, which is, which is amazing that I don't know, you know, every now and again, you'll buy something online, or you'll engage with some service, and they'll do something nice, there'll be some nice little Oh, that's actually that's great. Like, there needs to be more of that there needs to be a deeper ingrained sense of this customer is now part of our world, and everything in our world should be in service of that customer. So yeah, connecting all the dots and all the different parts of businesses together, so that the customer is at the centre is just Yeah, I love I love that part of it, I think it's gonna be really exciting.
Brian Kenny 26:01
Yeah, I think there's such an overlap between if you look at creators are like Patreon and YouTube subscriptions, and all of these other elements were essentially your sub subscribing to, to help or to, to, essentially to grow that creator and over a period of time and to show your support support is a perfect word that eluded me there. And, and that, that creators is doing that thing. Like they're, they're creating something and bringing it to the world. And you're showing your support and saying, Thank you, thank you for bringing that to the world. And I think that a lot of them really amazing art design, retailers and creators of products, and that are out there that have small businesses because of geographical restrictions or tech, not serving them correctly, is just, it's not right, I get it, that problem needs to be solved where there is some continuation there is some mushroom outside of that, where we can still facilitate that connection between the retailer and that customer. And even just the discovery element alone is just really, really interesting.
Conor McCarthy 27:11
Yeah, yeah, I love it. There's one of the stats since since COVID, I mean, COVID has accelerated so much, but something like e commerce has gone from 5% to 30%. of online business. Yeah, something like that. It's like it's, it's, it's huge. A lot of people have been forced kind of against their will. To set up. There's a lot of new Squarespace shops out there a lot of new Shopify and WordPress, shops overseeing. But I think no matter who it is, this is it's surprising where subscriptions fit in for people.
Brian Kenny 27:47
Yeah, and even, you know, like the grandiose nature of where retailers going is really interesting to myself. So you think about those high street shops and things. It's becoming such a curation from now on where it's not necessarily just a single branded store, it will be a curator who owns the store and you know, stocks, many different types of products from many different areas. And I think that's going to be really interesting, where there's certain products that people want to go in and have a look and feel at and to just just to figure out whether that's a product that they want to buy, but they leave that store with, yes, that's for me or No, that isn't for me. And that relationship should continue from that period on as in, they've gotten that validation, they feel the connection with the brand. Let that now kind of bond happen between the consumer and the brand from then on. So thanks, subscriptions is a absolutely fantastic place to start. And we're number one from a retailer's perspective, or from a business's perspective, solid cash flow, predictable cash flow, connection to your customer, where you feel that one on one with them, and pop them an email, you can ask for feedback, you can be a part of the relationship, which is huge. And then from a consumer point of view, to feel that same connection with the brand to go, I'm supporting that business. And it's coming. It's convenient to me all of the time. And I can pause it when I go on holidays, I can cancel it if I don't need us. I can use multiple locations. And I just you know it seems to fit perfectly to be the first part of our journey. I think.
Conor McCarthy 29:33
I love it. I think that's a great place to wrap up. And there will be more episodes like this because we're on our first Ted journey. We are again I'll include like mesu in the show notes. We're, we're we're working with our second customer at the moment. And that's a lot of fun. And they'll there'll be more so I'll pepper in more episodes where we can update the audience of what we're doing. Thanks a million Brian, great to chat to you.
Brian Kenny 29:57
Absolutely fantastic. Yeah, thanks for having me on. Again, it's a absolute joy to chat.
Conor McCarthy 30:08
That's a wrap. I hope you enjoyed this episode and that there was something in there that was actionable and insightful for your business. Do check out the show notes for more information on what we discussed, as well as ways to contact my guest. And it would really make by year if you could help me grow the podcast by leaving a rating or even a review. Helping you identify and create those first 10 customers is what I do. So if you like what you hear on this podcast and want more information, including a bunch of free resources on how to find your first customers and grow your business, do check out www.first10podcast.com, or find me on Twitter @TheFirst10Pod.
