Recap: 2018 Recurring Revenue Conference

We recently attended the Recurring Revenue Conference in Marina Del Rey, California, where more than 600 entrepreneurs and industry leaders came together to discuss today’s subscription economy.

So while you may not have had the chance to attend in-person, you can get the next best thing: We’ve put together a recap of the day and some of the major insights and takeaways. In this post, we’ll dive into some of the biggest lessons we learned during the event.

Important Insights

With several different sessions on topics ranging from the growth of the subscription model to effective leadership, we heard about a wide range of interesting subjects. Let’s look at a few of the most interesting and important insights from the day.

Competition means polishing product and process

In a session titled “Are We Headed For an All-Subscription World?” Georg Richter of OceanX explained how in the increasingly competitive subscription environment, your product has to be streamlined and perfected before it hits market. He noted that it’s not enough to sell something — the product has to be special. Why? Because data shows that the subscription industry has grown more than 800% since 2014.

“If you want to make any money, the company has to be run cleanly. Know your inventory, know where your customers are, and then use that information to relate to front-end development so shoppers can more easily take action and make decisions,” Richter said.

The CMO shouldn’t be viewed as a “corner office” job

In another presentation called “The Chief Marketing Officer as Leader of the Brand”, a panel discussed, for subscription brands, the CMO role should be very hands-on. Panel experts explained that CMOs need to have boots on the ground — doing things like meeting clients, tracking data and conversions, and listening to feedback from clients. They also noted that curating content is difficult, but learning what type of content to curate is just as important as distribution.

Chathri Ali, our Head of Growth here at ReCharge, said during the panel: “The key to getting those first few agencies off the ground is a personal connection. Our co-founders picked up the phone from day one to interact with every single developer that worked with our product. That feedback loop was crucial to how we continued to adapt the product and still is today.”

Know your numbers

During the session titled “From Zero to Hypergrowth: Building a Team to Ride the Rocket”, we heard that many CEOs and managers run their businesses and departments by feel. But is that the best idea? Maybe not. Rick Stollmeyer, CEO of MindBody, explained that there are certain numbers every company should live by — and when they’re not where they should be, it’s a massive red flag to management that something needs to change.

“Lifetime value and customer acquisition costs are averages, not exact ratios. Numbers, markets, and customer needs change every day. When we took a deeper look into our data it painted a very different story that what we had assumed,” Stollmeyer said.

Three Major Takeaways

Aside from the interesting insights we took away from a few different sessions, we also gleaned some high-level takeaways from the conference as well. Three main ideas stuck out: Hiring matters, top-notch product is essential, and customers need solid processes. Let’s look at each in a bit more detail.

Hiring matters.

Many of the speakers discussed the importance of hiring the right people and creating a company culture in which everyone is involved. Doing so enables better scalability because you’re not constantly training and onboarding new team members — and all employees are working toward common goals. Plus: it’s cost-effective. Quickly hiring someone who turns out to be the wrong person can end up costing up to 10–15x their original salary.

Having a quality product is “table stakes” today.

We also heard a lot about how it’s not enough to simply have a good product. Customer service, sales, growth — everything has to be top notch to be successful in today’s competitive sales environment. Jon Ferrara, CEO of Nimble said, “Stop talking about how great you are…nobody cares. Talk about how you can help other people. Service is the new sales. Having a quality product is table stakes — you need something more to win a continuous customer.”

Build efficient processes for your customers.

With customer experience becoming the next competitive battleground for eCommerce businesses, it’s extremely important to think about UI and UX in deeper, more meaningful ways for your customers. The bottom line: If you match the right people with a solid product and know how to bring that product to life, that’s where success lies.

Wrap Up

With the insights and takeaways we’ve spotlighted here, you can start thinking about how some of the big ideas at this conference may be part of your subscription business strategy in the coming months. From metrics to study to company culture, there are many areas you can focus on to improve your company.