Strategies you should focus on for a successful subscription business

The value of the subscription model for app owners includes a long-term revenue stream and predictability, the opportunity to build relationships with customers, increased upsell opportunities, reduced marketing costs, and word-of-mouth benefits. But the mark that must not be missed is continued value for customers, keeping subscribers happy. App owners must always guarantee: outcomes, not ownership; personalization, not generalization; constant improvement, not planned obsolescence; and convenient payment, not friction.

Subscription fatigue - don't tire them out

Subscription apps have become a daily routine for many people, and routines can get tiring. Subscription fatigue is when mobile users get discouraged about adding new subscriptions to their already sizable list. A fundamental cause is the disconnection between the value customers actually get and what was promised. Subscription apps mustn't overuse the commitment model without offering value that continuously improves and evolves.

Easy come, easy go

Subscription businesses should always make it easy for people to come and go whenever they want. If unsubscribing becomes difficult, customers will churn anyway, and the only reward will be customer complaints and a damaged reputation that hurts future acquisition.

Don't try to build it yourself

Many successful subscription apps experiencing hyper-growth share this wisdom: don't try to build it yourself. Adopting third-party tools for paywalls, payment, analytics, and in-app communication saves significant time, money, and focus, letting the business dedicate itself to delivering gratifying subscriber experiences.

Velocity, velocity, velocity

Launching a sound subscription model means confronting many rules, making hundreds of mistakes, and pivoting several times before finding what works. Successful apps like mojo and Babbel Live have gone through numerous trials and turnarounds; the rule is to go through those stepping stones as fast as possible before draining resources and energy. Taking advantage of third-party tools to expedite experiments, most of which will fail, helps that one working attempt accelerate progress before it's too late.

Episode 3 sneak peek

• On retention: "The clearer you get and better trust you create early on and the more likely you are to first convert people into becoming subscribers. But more importantly, have them retained on the long run, which is really about growing a subscription business is about."
• On subscription fatigue: "Adding content all the time, I think it's the best way to prevent your subscribers from feeling that fatigue."
• On subscription: "I think we would not have been able to build this business so fast without mobile subscriptions. So it's very, I would say instrumental to our trajectory and especially our velocity."
• On outsourcing: "We try to outsource as much as possible everything that we do that is not core business, what we are good at, so we can focus on the rest, which is the product."
• On transparency: "Another aspect is also about making it easy for people, for subscribers, to cancel their subscription to your product. Because basically if you do not, they will churn anyway."

More about Jean Patry

Jean Patry has a background in mathematics and science. He was one of the first employees of a French startup called Stupeflix, focused on video editing apps, which was acquired by GoPro five years later. Jean became Product Manager of GoPro's video editing app, before leaving to start his own venture through the Y Combinator accelerator program. Jean and his co-founder Francescu Santoni launched the mojo app in late 2018, which enables everyone to create stunning animated content for social media and has reached 30 million installs and several hundred thousand paying subscribers, making it the #1 app for creating animated content for social media.