Subscription Ecommerce: Turning Customers Into Members With Jay Myers

Jay Myers is the Co-founder of Bold Commerce, which builds flexible and customizable e-commerce apps for online stores. Since its launch in 2012, over 780,000 merchants have installed Bold apps on their Shopify stores. Jay has managed online stores since 1998 and has won awards like EY Entrepreneur of the Year and Deloitte Fast 50.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:57] Jay Myers talks about the online archery store he managed in 1998
[16:17] How Jay hacked Shopify’s APIs to upsell on the platform
[21:23] What is subscription e-commerce?
[27:30] The ideal business model for subscription e-commerce
[34:16] How subscription e-commerce impacts purchasing behavior
[40:37] Positioning your products to secure 100% subscription conversion
[49:27] The importance of comparing CAC to LTV
[55:58] How to target niche customer segments
[59:06] Jay discusses the benefits of partnering with other subscription platforms
[1:05:16] Why Jay has never created a resume
[1:09:32] Luck versus success: the difference in timing
[1:21:31] What does Jay suck at?

In this episode…

Ten years ago, brands that integrated subscription apps into their online stores were considered revolutionary and far ahead of the competition. With customer acquisition costs rising rapidly, nearly every brand selling household products offers subscription models since an existing customer is five times more likely to purchase an offer. How can you optimize your in-app subscriptions to turn every customer into a loyal subscriber?

As a pioneer of in-app Shopify subscriptions, e-commerce innovator Jay Myers understands how to increase brand valuation through subscription models. With these models, members save more yearly yet spend more than non-members, making them an asset for brands. Jay maintains that every customer has the potential to become a subscriber, so positioning your product as a beneficial part of their daily routine can influence purchasing decisions. You can segment your customers into subscribers and first-time customers to personalize incentives, like offering free first-month orders for new subscribers and discounts for loyal customers.

Tune in to the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast as William Harris welcomes Jay Myers, Co-founder of Bold Commerce, to discuss the subscription e-commerce model. Jay talks about the brands that benefit from this model, how subscriptions influence purchasing behavior, and the benefits of partnering with other subscription platforms.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"It's not convenience; it's expected. The way people like to buy has evolved."
"The day I stopped listing those products, I stopped making money."
"You have to continually educate customers on the value of the product."
"Timing is everything; being aware of it is essential for success."
"There's only solutions; that's all there is to it."

Action Steps

Evaluate your product line for subscription potential to create reliable revenue streams: This leverages the increasing consumer preference for convenience and predictability.
Develop an enticing initial subscription offer, analogous to trial versions seen on SaaS platforms, to incentivize new subscribers and lower the entry barrier.
Implement a consistent customer education strategy to reinforce product value over time: This is crucial for sustaining subscriber enjoyment and reducing churn rates.
Seek out partnership opportunities with complimentary subscription businesses: This will expand your offering and customer base, crafting a diverse and robust subscriber experience.
Invest in tailoring your messaging and outreach to both your one-time buyers and subscribers, recognizing and capitalizing on behavioral differences.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Music. Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. William Harris here, founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of this podcast, where I feature experts in the DTC space, sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. I'm excited about the guests that I have today. Jay Myers, we're going to be talking about subscription commerce. Jay is the co-founder of Bold Commerce, and one of the true OGS in the space. He's run online stores since 1998 founded Boldin 2012 won the EY Entrepreneur of the Year, Deloitte fast 50, and continues to be deeply involved in the e-commerce community. As of today, I believe you mentioned there's over 780,000 merchants that have installed Bold apps on Shopify. That's incredible number. Jay, I'm excited to have you here, man.

Jay Myers 0:57

I am honored to be here. Thank you so much for having me.

William Harris 1:01

So we were talking about earlier here, actually just a couple of minutes ago, before we hit record, about breaking records where we met, like events with Shopify. There's a lot that I want to get into before we actually dive into the meet here, because this is fun. I believe you and I were introduced by Darren Lynch at an iris Titan event years ago. Does that sound right to you?

Jay Myers 1:23

That is my recollection. I may have bumped into you at a conference or trade show or something before, but that was the first, and you had long hair too. I remember I did like long curly locks, if I remember correctly. Yeah,

William Harris 1:37

that is a good memory. Well, so we were talking about because today I just posted on LinkedIn that one of my previous guests, Tiffany Wilbur, just beat the record that I had for most views on YouTube on one of these episodes, beat the previous record holder was Harley Finkelstein, president of Shopify. Obviously, I told him he's like, he's got a special place my heart, right, is Harley, but it was exciting to see her beat that. And so then there's a nice little feud going on between you, Dylan Whitman, talking about, who's gonna, who's gonna break that record. So Jay Myers, we're gonna break the 1800 view count here, right?

Jay Myers 2:10

Tiffany, Tiffany, you're going down if you're listening. So no,

William Harris 2:15

you were talking about OGS, though. And what's funny we were talking about, I can remember when Shopify didn't even have a 10 by 10 booth at IRC, they weren't there. They didn't even show up at all to IRC. I wanna say this was like 2013 2014 something along those lines, yeah,

Jay Myers 2:30

yeah. It's, it's crazy. I so I, I started selling on Shopify in 2009 I think someone, someone looked it up for me at one point, and it was store number 4000 and something like it was, it was really, really early, very early. Yeah, Shopify. I mean, yet I know the first, I believe their first year at IRC, was 2016 it might have been 2015 but I remember the booth specifically. It was this black box booth that you could only go in if it, if you like, they kind of, it was kind of, it's actually really smart, because you you'd walk by and you have to go in the booth, which every trade show you kind of walk by, and you hope they don't see you, and you just want to look. And then, like there was nothing to look at. It was a black box until you got in, and then you had a drink, and their plus team would sell you. And so it was actually really smart.

William Harris 3:20

I think, yeah, you might be right. I can't remember if it was 2015 or 2016 but I do remember that was the first year that I hung out with Tommy Walker. So he was the editor in chief there at Shopify Plus, and I can remember meeting him there. We ended up grabbing dinner later that night, and he showed me he can rap really fast. I don't know if you've ever heard him rap, but he's a very good rapper, apparently.

Jay Myers 3:46

No, I know Tommy super well. I've had him actually, on our podcast. I've never, I gotta ask him this. I've never heard him

William Harris 3:54

rap. I think it was a Bone Thugs in harmony song like, I mean, he just, but he nailed it. He was very, very good, nice.

Jay Myers 3:59

Okay, good. I got something under my belt the next time I meet them. So yep, but

William Harris 4:03

we're gonna get into subscription e-commerce, because there's a lot here. We haven't covered this topic in any real depth, and so I'm excited about this. Before we do, I want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Element is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that sold to GoDaddy, one that recently ipoed, we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world by Adweek. You can learn more on our website@Elumynt.com which is spelled E, l, u, m, y, N, t.com. That said on to subscription e-commerce. Before we get into that, I want to get into your backstory a little bit more here, because you were selling in 1998 um, What? What? What was the story even about? Like, I actually didn't even know that until I started doing this, and I purposely did not research what the store was, because I wanted to ask you here and just go with it, what was the store in 1998

Jay Myers 4:57

Okay, I'll give you the it is a fun story. So, I mean. Does it definitely ages me. I don't feel that old, but when you like, we have employees at bowl that were born in 2002 right? So, and I was selling in 98 so I grew up in a archery business. So i my i was, i got really competitive in archery as a kid. When I was 13 years old, my dad said to myself and my brother and say, Hey, do you guys want to start an archery store? I was 13. My brother was 16, I think, at the time. And we said, Well, yeah, of course, we want to start an archery store. And so my dad remortgaged his house, and there was a there was an archery business that was actually going out of business. And so we bought all their inventory, their counters, like, literally everything, and started another archery store, and it was kind of like a bowling alley, like there's a pro shop, and then there's lanes. So there was, there was 24 lanes. People would come and shoot, and we would give lessons, but then you could also buy all your your gear and stuff there as well, too, leagues, birthday parties, all that kind of stuff. So in 98 I started experimenting with it was the first site I built. Was using Microsoft front page. And there actually wasn't even a checkout I would, I don't know. So if anyone listening knows Microsoft front page, there was this. It was all just built in HTML, you would, I would build a page and then copy the page, and then change the images and description, and then copy the page again and build the navigation. So like for every single product on the store, I was replicating these pages. I remember I was, you know, so not everyone had a cell phone. In 1998 today, everyone has a cell phone, but I was 18 years old, and that was my reason I got my first cell phone. I said, I said, Dad, I need a cell phone because I might get an order so and when you back then, it was like very hard to get a cell phone. I remember my dad, like CO signed to to get the contract for the cell phone. So I got a cell phone. Of course, no orders. Six Months went by, and I will never forget, I was at my friend's house. We were sitting around this kitchen, and that cell phone rang and someone said, Hi, I want to order a bow. And a bow was like, three or $400 I'm like, oh, yeah, okay. So I grabbed a napkin and a pen, and I took down the credit card number, which is probably not super secure, but it's okay. I got the address everything, and that was my first order. And then, so, yeah, that was 1998 and then, so it was very, very, very slow. Like there would be, like, a sale every, literally, every month, like it was, it was very slow, but there was this one day that I know I told you a little bit about this before, but this, this is what, really what kick started it for me. So we growing up in a retail if anyone listening runs any type of a retail store, you know that typically, when you get inventory, you have, typically 30 days, sometimes 60 or 90 days to pay for it. You get what's called net 30 and so you don't really need more inventory than you sell in 30 days, or 60 days, or whatever your terms are. So like you know, if you sell three of something every 30 days, you only need three in stock, because you can reorder. You don't need 15 stock. So one day I ordered, my dad put me in charge of ordering, and I ordered. It was like 10 of this particular bow, because the manufacturer had like 10% off or something. And so I said, Oh, okay, ship us 10 of them. And I remember there was like 10 on the wall, and I put them up on display. And my dad came by, and he's like, Jay, like, why do we have 10 of these bows? I'm like, well, they had, they would, they were 10% off, like and it was a one time special. And he said, Well, how many of these do we sell in a month? And I said, I don't know, two or three, but they were 10% off. And he goes, Do you know what I look at when I look at these bows? Do you know what I see? And I'm like, I don't know bows. And he goes, No, I see hundreds of dollars, $100 bills stuck on the wall that I can't grab. Imagine seeing $100 bills locked that you can't grab until someone comes in and buys it. And like, that's cash flow. Like it's locked money, right? And he's like, why would you lock up four months of money for a 10% discount when we can turn that over five times and have the cash flow? And I'm like, I, you know, I never thought about that. And he kind of got a little bit upset, because, like, things are tight. And he's like, Jay, you you can't make mistakes like this. Like, this is not smart. And so I, I felt really bad. And so I said, Okay, Dad, I'll, I'll, I'll put it on on eBay and try to sell them for cost and get our money back. And, you know, keep a couple in. So I took a picture of the bowl. I put it on eBay, and this was, like, 1990 like 1999 and back then, eBay was very different than it was now there was eBay should have been what Amazon became. But anyway, so I took a picture of it, put it on eBay, and lo and behold, the bow sold for more than we were trying. To sell it for the store. And I was like, light bulb, of course, right? Like, oh. Like, okay, so I listed another bow, and same thing, it got bit up to more than we were selling it for the store. And then I realized, huh, because there's a lot, there's a lot of people in the United States that don't live within, you know, an hour or two of an archery pro shop, because archery is not like, you can buy a running shoe anywhere, but you maybe can't buy a bowl anywhere. It's a little bit more harder to get to. So people were willing to pay more for something than a regular retail price on eBay. And so then I was like, Okay, well, I started selling everything on eBay, like, I started putting, like, all the accessories and that it actually turned into a super lucrative business for like a 1920 year old kid. Like there was days I was making, like, three to $4,000 a day, like in listing things and selling things. But it was, it was a it was a lot of work, like I was listing the products and selling them. Things went really well until I had a few very large fraudulent orders, which I learned about what chargebacks are, and I learned how, how, even though a credit card is not reported stolen, someone can still get those card numbers and place an order on eBay, and then place 10 orders and 20 orders, and then the cardholder doesn't find out until like 45 days later. So I found a lot of that out the hard way, and then I realized there was this one day that this kind of light bulb went off in my head, and I said, you know, there's a difference between making money and building a business. And like every day I woke up I would have to list 10 more products. And yes, I made money, but the day I stopped listing those products, I stopped making money. So like, I wasn't building a business. And so I told myself, Okay, I gotta start again from scratch and build a an on a proper online store. So the first version of the store, the name of our business, was Heartland archery. It's actually still in business 32 years later, the first one was Heartland archery. It was basically what we sold in store. Then about three years later I started it was called National Archery supply, and it was had it wasn't Heartland archery, it was a different brand. Built it from from scratch. This one did have a functioning checkout, and built that up, and it took about six months to a year before I was kind of doing like the level of sales I was doing on eBay. But the difference was I could go away on a vacation for a week, and it still made sales. Versus with eBay, you stop listing, you stop making money. And this is not discrediting, like, if you hustle and make money on eBay, it's it's fantastic. But I wasn't building a business, you know. So I grew that. So that was like 2003 grew that quite large. And long story short, 2009 heard about this platform called Shopify. It was actually from an email from MailChimp saying, we now have an app that integrates with Shopify. And I said, or we now integrate with Shopify, like as a MailChimp customer, I said, I never heard of Shopify. Clicked on it, looked at Shopify, and I thought, Oh, this is pretty interesting. Like, you know what really got me right off the bat, was the theme store. And I know, like, it's it, that's probably one of their biggest lead gens, is you come in, you look at the themes, you're like, Oh, I like that theme. And I had a CSV of my products so I could just start a free trial import my products. And I like, whoa, this store looks good. Like, what took me a year to build like, it instantly looked good. And that was one of the best things Shopify did early, was have good themes, especially compared to front page. Yeah. And even, like, even like, at that time it was like, Yahoo stores, Geo, Geo, Geo, geo stores, like, even big commerce at that time looked very web 1.0 and the Shopify themes were all responsive, mobile, friendly out of the box. And so I imported a couple stores onto Shopify, or CSVs, and I created supreme archery. I literally it was the exact same store, but just with another name and and within like days, it was doing more sales than I was doing on my other stores. And so then I moved everything onto Shopify, and then, obviously, now it seems like the App Store is just such a part of Shopify, but at the time, they had this app store that had maybe 20 apps in it, like, maybe, like, this was 2009 but I looked at this app store and I thought, oh, like, I could build things that could help me, could help my store and So, long story short, we partnered up with a couple friends, and it took a while, but in 2012 we launched our first app. It was an upsell app, and it actually still is live today. And wow. Doing better than ever. It's, it's probably on its like, fifth version. So, like, there's no code from the original app in 2012 Sure. We launched it in 2012 and it was a very simple app that when a customer, you know, adds a leather jacket to the cart, an offer comes up, saying, Would you like the leather treatment kit? But now you go in the App Store, and there's hundreds of apps that do that. There was no app that did it. And what was interesting we didn't know. We literally got together and said, Oh, maybe we can, like this app will help me from my stores, and maybe we'll make a little extra beer money on the side, or take our wives on a vacation. We had no idea what it would if it would do well or not, but it turned out to kind of be revolutionary, like merchants loved it. And actually, if you go back to, if you go, if you search for Boldupsell in the App Store and scroll, go to the reviews and scroll to the very, very first one, like 2012 and read the reviews like, it's amazing, people will be like, this app is like, I made $100 the first day I installed it. This app has changed my store, like the merchants loved it, but you know, who didn't like

William Harris 16:05

yeah, I was gonna say, so I've heard this because it was revolutionary in more than one ways. You broke, you broke the system, more or less. This was not how it was supposed to be used, and somebody didn't like it.

Jay Myers 16:17

Yeah, it was to do, to to do upsells on Shopify. At the time, we kind of had to hack the way that the APIs worked, and so we were doing API calls on the front end of a store that they weren't supposed to be done that way. And so there was days that one of the first early, big stores of Shopify was called the chive. Yep, they're the chivery, and they keep calm and chive on, and they say, so. They were one of the first bigger stores, and they used our upsell app. And anytime they would have a promotion, and they would promote something on Instagram, and it would, you know, the chives having a sale. And you know, hundreds of 1000s of people would come to their site. And every time someone would add something to cart, our upsells would fire. And I think for each time an upsell would fire, it was like, four API calls, because we had to, like, check what products should be recommended, check inventory, check that it's not already in the carts, because you don't offer the same product they're already buying. And there's a few calls. And so then you get 100,000 people hitting the chive at once, doing all the API calls. And at the time, Shopify had about 30,000 stores, and it would take down all of Shopify, every all the chive would run a sale, and all 30,000 stores would go down, like, literally go down. So, yeah, Toby didn't like it at first, to be honest. And but a fair of course, because it was to shut down all the stores, right? And what, what I was told was that internally, about half of Shopify staff said this, this is a hack to our app store. This is not how the app store was made to work, because at the time, just for a bit of reference, every app in the App Store was really like a connector app, like it would connect your store to UPS, connect your store to MailChimp, connect your store to accounting software. They were it was like connectors. It was more of an integration library. It wasn't an app store of functionality like it is today. It was like a lot of app stores are just all connectors. That's what it was. And then we built this app that was that lived on the front end of a store that was designed to make stores more money that I think it was maybe the first app that kind of was like that, that would was designed to make a store more money, not just sync with HubSpot, sync with Zendesk, sync with MailChimp, sync with QuickBooks like and so I was told that, yeah, but internally they had a meeting, and about half the staff said, Nope, this is no good. This is not what the app store was designed to do. It's taken down. And then the other half's kind of said, merchants love this, like it's it's all five star reviews. It's making merchants for money. So they kind of went back and forth on it, and, long story short, they decided to put in some guardrails to make it work, like API throttling and some other security measures so that an app couldn't take down the whole ecosystem. And today, when you go in the App Store, they're all they all live on the front end, you know. So, so that was how we got into the Shopify world. That was 2012

William Harris 19:16

I can't imagine a world where Shopify didn't have the app store that they have today. I mean, that is basically one of the biggest things that I think helped them sweep the floor with everybody else was the App Store that people had access to, that you could just install without that I can't even imagine where e-commerce would be. You, you, you helped make e-commerce what it is today. Well,

Jay Myers 19:40

I see I it goes both ways. So it would be very easy to say, Oh, well, we pushed Shopify to be what they are, and we put but also, I have to give huge credit to Shopify for enabling developers to do what they can do in the App Store. It's a two. A street, right? So like Apple's the same way like Apple, the the app developers for Apple are who push the hardware to become better, and who push the SDKs and everything else to be better, because that it's the app developers that need better LIDAR to be able to do room measurements and like, it's the apps pushing it right. But then Apple meets those app developers demands and requests. And so yes, app developers pushed Shopify, but then Shopify responded and listen. So like, it goes both ways. So yes, we pushed them, um, arguably, for sure, helped, but they Shopify was super responsive and amazing to work with. And so like it, I we can't take the credit for it. So, no, no, that's fair. But, um,

William Harris 20:50

so moving from this very first app into many, many apps now, and like you said, it's like, you know, over three quarters of a million people using the apps, the one I think that you and I are the most excited about today to chat about that I think has gotten a little bit less attention than maybe what it deserves in e-commerce, is subscription e-commerce. So give me a quick definition of what this means to you, and then let's start digging into like, the how and why of of how we go about this.

Jay Myers 21:23

So subscription e-commerce is, it might sound very simple, like someone might be like, Oh, that's a Subscribe and Save app. And sure that's one version of it like that, like putting a Subscribe and Save option on your products. And so I will say, so we launched subscriptions for Shopify in 2014 and in 2014 if you had a subscription option on your site, you were ahead of the game, like you're like, if you whatever you sell, if you sell coffee and you offered coffee as a subscription, or you sell cat food and your cat litter, or anything else, and you offer it as a subscription, you were beating your competitors, because, of course, I want to subscribe to my cat litter. I don't want to. It's heavy. I don't carry it. I want to buy every month. And if you offer it like that's a reason, I'll buy. I would say today, every cat litter company offers a subscription. Every cat food company offers every every coffee it's it's become. It's become not convenience. It's become expected. I would say it's less of a benefit. It's more of a preference in the way people like to buy so like, for example, I subscribe, we have a cat and I subscribe to cat food, and if I'm buying it from if I buy cat food from one store and they don't have a subscription, I'll just go somewhere where they do have a subscription. So it's become table stakes for me. So that's the bare level. Is, if you have anything that is a replenishable product, and you don't have a subscription option on it, you're you're gonna lose customers, because there's a segment that just wants to subscribe now, that now, in a world where every subscript, every cat company, has a subscription, so then the question becomes, well, how do you win? Then how do you get ahead? If, okay, like, I guess I have to have subscriptions. And so what subscriptions really is about is creating customers who are, who are members, who are they're more than just a one time customer, and you can, if you can do things to you know, you've heard all these data points that like it's it costs 25 times less to market to an existing customer than acquire a new one. An existing customer is five times more likely to buy an offer than than a customer's never bought from you before. And there's all these data points about how important your existing customers are. And so when you get a subscriber, you have a loyal customer who you should then be able to to grow and turn into more and have like, monthly add ons and other benefits, and they're worth a lot more if you do it right, and not just think of them as like, yeah, they're subscribing to my my coffee every month. But no, they should be able to get special offers every month for upgrade, like monthly coffee offers, join the coffee club different like, whatever, like, there's so much more value to a subscriber than the recurring revenue. And believe me, the recurring revenue is awesome, like high level. I love subscriptions because we have seen some of our subscription brands get acquired and get investments at multiples of top line revenue, similar to what software companies get acquired at. So like a, if you're a e-commerce company, so whoever's listening to this right now, and if you sell clothing, one time clothing, and if you're a pretty good brand with decent growth, not like crazy growth, but you have healthy EBITDA, maybe somewhere in. The 20 to 40% EBITDA range, and maybe like 10% growth every year, your value of your company is worth five to 6x EBITDA. So you know, you do a million dollars a year, you have 200,000 EBITDA, you're gonna be worth like 5x that 200 but if you're a recurring revenue company, so a software company that does a million dollars in recurring revenue year, they value it based on the top line. So it's 5x that million like, and I know this because, like, we've had investment in Boldmultiple times, and it's our value at Bold is always a multiple of our top line recurring revenue. They take our services, which is one time costs, and they apply a very, very, very small multiple to that, and then they say, oh, what's your recurring revenue in our apps? Oh, here's the multiple on that. And so we've seen a lot of our subscription e-commerce brands getting valuations the same as software recurring revenue companies. And so the effect that recurring revenue has on the value of your business is incredible. It's, it's absolutely incredible. And it'll it allows you to raise more money if you're trying to grow it. And, of course, all the other side benefits, like the predictable revenue every month, manage, managing inventory, upcoming forecasting, or, like all of that's amazing. But the value that you know, like, when I see someone, I've been through it. I've been that. I've started multiple e-commerce businesses. Some have failed. I've sold some. I know how hard it is. And if you could do the for the same amount of work, I could create an e-commerce business worth 500,000 or I could create an e-commerce business worth 5 million. And the only difference is one has recurring revenue and one has fixed one time orders roughly doing the same top line revenue like just, it's just make your time worth it, right? So that's why I personally love it so much, is I've I've seen it the effect it has on on brands, and I know how hard merchants work. So, so I want

William Harris 26:58

to dig into this a little bit more before we dig into optimizing. Like you said, in some ways, this has become almost a requirement in certain segments or niches. But let's talk about the ones that this works for or doesn't work for. You brought up clothing, apparel. I mean, to a point I suppose you can have subscription businesses for that too. But who do you see this working especially well for? And what type of brands do you see this just not working as well for? Or they got to get creative with how they're going to do

Jay Myers 27:30

Yeah, it can. So there's an interesting subtah, which is the subscription trade association. They put on sub summit every year. They did a an interesting report with Gartner. And the the the one thing that really stood out was that by the end, end of 2024 based off of like trends, and this was actually a couple years ago, that the that 75% of D to C direct to consumer e-commerce brands will have a recurring revenue component to their business. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to have a replenishable product every month, but they'll have it will be either membership, it'll be, you know, clothing. There's a lot of different ways you can, you can capture recurring revenue, like Fabletics doesn't really, actually, I was talking to the guy, the CTO, who rolled it out. It was, it was accidental Fabletics for, no, yeah. So they, they have a Fabletics is kind of like a blend between, like, Nike and Lululemon. It's kind of like athletic gear. And I don't know this was like eight years ago, they had a major inventory problem. Apparently they had to, like, switch manufacturers, and they were going to go months without inventory. And so what they decided to do was they said, well, let's sell credit. So let's let people pay $50 and get a $75 credit. And so at least we don't like lose these customers. And anyway, so what, then, what they ended up doing was they turned that into a monthly thing where you can pay $50 a month but get, I don't know if what the exact numbers are, but you pay like $50 a month and you get a $70 credit, or you pay $100 a month and you get $150 credit. Use it or lose. Use it or lose it, kind of thing. So then they realize that, oh, wow, this has a huge effect on the on the buying behavior of a customer. So if you have $100 and if you don't use it, ever sorry if you don't use it, you lose it. It a it's going to make you the the effect that that has. You're not going to go shop at Nike because you've got credit at Fabletics. You're going to use it. I'm I'm getting a deal because I'm paying $50 for $75 like, the effect that that has versus Nike is like, well, here's a coupon for 20% off. But, like. I always like, tell my wife, like, just because it's a coupon you're not making, she's like, well, I made money because I used a coupon. Like, 10% off, 10 bows, still Right, right? So, but the effect of sunk cost has a huge buying behavior where, like, Oh, if I don't use it, I lose it, I'll even like, find people like, Hey, I don't need anything this month. Do you need anything? So that's, that's one method, like having some type of credit issuance every month. There are a lot of clothing brands that actually do full on clothing clubs, like T shirts of the months and different things like that. And that works. That works in some some lines. And then there's also just just membership, like, so think about like, Restoration Hardware. Lululemon is actually doing this now Rei brands that don't necessarily have, like, I don't need a pair of jogging joggers every month, but I will pay. So Lululemon tested this out. What they were, what they did was, so a pair of Lululemon joggers was like $125 when you went, I'm sorry it was about $100 and when you went to buy it, they said, Buy, join, get a lulu membership for 125 and it includes the joggers. And so now you pay. Can't remember the exact numbers, but it was like $125 I think it was quarter dollars. I think it was quarterly, but that gave you 10% off Lululemon gear. When there was new products that came out, you get access to them ahead of time. Lululemon has events they would do, like jogs and yoga. And then as a member, you could, you could go to them. There was a whole bunch of other benefits you would get, but there was no actual product shipped every month. It was just a recurring revenue for a membership. And Restoration Hardware is a super interesting company to study. I follow them closely. They launched in 2016 they launched their Are you familiar with Restoration Hardware? Yeah, so, so they have amazing stuff, super expensive, but very but if you pay for their $125 a year membership, I think they just raised it to 140 you get 20% off everything. You get free design consultation. You get a number of other benefits. They they launched it in 2016 they were one of the first, like pioneers of this concept of this membership, and they've been, they're a publicly traded company, so they've been very open with their numbers. But the biggest effect that it had was it's not the $125 a year hardly moved the needle for them, but the average, a member, on average, spent 400% more on a non member. So because, and so we actually, we joined a few years ago because we were buying some outdoor patio furniture. We bought the membership, and then we bought our furniture, and then I remember, like, the next time we needed something, I said to my wife, like, oh, we should check restoration art, because we've got this membership. This membership, we might as well use it. Like, we might as well get our 20 right. And so the effect it has on buying behavior is the is the biggest effect, right? And so not just not, not the money every month. And so, yeah, like, there's a lot of ways that a non traditional, like a company that doesn't have, like, a product that runs out every 30 days, that can be creative and still have a recurring and that's why, yeah, I believe, like when, when Gartner had the 75% of direct to consumer brands are going to be having some form of recurring revenue, like, makes sense, when you start to think about All the different ways it can actually happen. Yeah,

William Harris 33:42

I like that where you go with the change in the buying behavior. I feel that way in so many things in my own life, right? Where it's like, you have like that coupon card, or you got, you know, some kid sold you on like this, this coupon card, because they're, you know, raising money for their lacrosse team or something. It's like, oh, go check that first, right? And it's like, we'll buy that. Like that, that psychological effect that your mind can have knowing that you are in this membership that essentially cost you nothing to be in, but you just feel compelled to start there. That's, that's a wild, uh, incentive. It's

Jay Myers 34:16

paid, it's, it's, it's paid loyalty. Think, Yeah, think about how many times have you gone to the mall and you bought something, and then cashier is checking you out, and they're like, Would you like to join our loyalty program? You No, I can't be bought. Like happens all the time, right? But yet, with other brands, you pull out your credit card and you pay like you like, you pay Costco, you pay prime, you pay maybe Walmart, plus you may pay Best Buy, but you pay there's, there's so. And then at the same time, these other companies, like, they're like, Hey, would you like to join our free loyalty program? No, it's fine. I don't need another card. Yes. Like, it makes no sense. Like, what so? The So, but the paid loyalty there's, there's a lot of data points around this that people actually want to they want benefit. It's now, now. So like that same store, let's just say Nike, you've got $200 or $300 with if you got some shoes and some hoodies, and you're checking out and Nike says, Oh, would you like to join our free loyalty program? You're like, nah. But if they said, Oh, if you would you like to like, if you join the get a Nike exclusive membership, it's $50 a year. You'll actually save $75 on this and $25 on this, and you get access to our Nike Run Club app and whatever else. It's very different. And then the future effect of that, when you just I always relate it to airlines. So think about hotels or airlines, and I know some people are, like, super loyal to a specific airline. Not everyone is like me. Personally, when I'm booking a flight like I pick the flight that works with my times. I collect points with Delta. I prefer Delta, but if it's but if it's united, and United gets me there at the time I want, I'll fly united. I don't care. I'll fly American. I whatever. But now, if I paid for a Delta membership, if I paid $1,000 a month for, uh, unlimited flights within the continental US, or something like that, and now I book a flight with Delta, I feel like I'm actually, I'm losing money, versus if I just have, if I earn points with Delta, earn points with United, earn points with Southwest. If I'd booked with United, I'm like, Wow, I'm just not earning my delta points. But now I'm earning my United points. Same thing with hotels, like, like, and actually, Alaska Airlines just rolled out a paid a paid subscription. And we're starting to see that, like, in restaurants and things too, like Taco Bell rolled out one, really, yeah, it's like $30 a month. What is it? Now? It's something that you get, like, one taco meal a day, kind of thing. And they, you know, they do the math and like that, the average person spends X amount more and brings people and whatever. But yeah, the effect that paid loyalty has on buying behavior versus potential of future earnings. It's a drastically different effect on on buying behavior so

William Harris 37:07

well. And I like the longevity of this as well. To your point, once you do have that membership set up, it's really, you really have to think a lot more about eventually switching that to something else. Let's even say, you know, Restoration Hardware. If you decided you want to get some other furniture, you like this couch at another place, you're like, man, but do I want to, like, give up on, like, this thing that I've worked and built now for the last five years? Like there's almost, like, this loyalty now that is just there that I can see where that would get harder to break away from as well, yeah, not even just immediate benefits. Yeah. What about and then, yeah, go ahead. Well, I was

Jay Myers 37:47

just gonna say, like, and then, you know, I don't want to exclude, like, the legitimate companies that have replenishable products. Like, totally that is, that is a big, big, you know, if you're thinking about product creation right now, or what your lineups can be, you know, I I kind of shave. So if you're watching the video, you can see I've got, like, kind of YouTube, right? So, like, we use the beard trimmers. Yep, I bought a beer trimmer. Like, 15 years ago. I used the same beard trimmer. I've used it my whole life. Went to buy a beer trimmer a couple months ago, I bought it through manscaped, and so I bought the beard trimmer. I didn't even, I actually didn't even know I was subscribing. They were kind of sneaky about how it came but anyways, I bought the trimmer for like, $129 bought it, and then three months later, I got a fresh they called it the it was called, like, like a hygiene refresh kit or something like that. Like it was new, new blades, fresh oil and a thing. And so what I didn't notice is, actually, when I bought it, there was a checkbox that said, refresh my my trimmer every three months, or something like that. So how they did it was kind of sneaky. But the concept, I think, is super smart, is like a beer trimmer, is you would never think of that being a subscription product. But when you start to think about it like, what could be a subscription? What component of it could be a subscription? What you know? So there's a lot of a lot of you know brands right now thinking about, like their product lines for the next year and what they can sell, and if, like, if there's anything that's replenishable or wears out, or even doesn't wear out, like we see some of our brands that do like iPhone case of the month. IPhone cases don't wear out, but people just want, yeah, want a new one. Change it up. You know, change it up. Yeah.

William Harris 39:36

So how many we had a coffee company that did this, and I don't remember the exact numbers, so I'm gonna make them up. Let's say, you know, 1% of them their customers subscribed to their copy of the month, or something like that, and they had a goal of getting that to 30% I'm making that up. Yeah, yeah. What percent do you think is realistic for people to be. Subscribers in a lot of ways, and we have a lot of other subscription companies as well. We've got a nicotine gum company, and that one makes so much sense to me. There's a lot of ones that I think make a lot more sense than others. But for the average business, let's say that does sell a consumable product, even than in this situation, we've talked a lot about ones that aren't say it's coffee or something like that. What percent do you think actually have the potential? Where's this maximum amount of people that are actually going to subscribe to something like that in your experience? Or the numbers that you have that seems to suggest this is about the max that most people push up against?

Jay Myers 40:37

Okay, realistically, I think it could be 100% and we see some of our brands that are a lot of them are subscription, really, they're only subscription. They don't even have a one time. So this goes to, how are you positioning your product? And are, if like, from, from, if you, if you from the moment they hit your site. The whole buying journey, journey is about, you know, coffee, coffee could fall in this category. But like, if you talk about, like, maybe you make like, health coffee, and it's got some other coffee with infused vitamins, like, you know, like these the mushroom coffees are now they're like, so like, if the whole benefits of it are, you need to get on this on a coffee routine, and after three months, you start seeing the benefit. And sure, you know. And so we only sell this as a subscription because it needs to. So like, you could go, you could get 100% if you want to, I 100% believe you get 100% but you absolutely could get your all of it. Now, your question is long lines of like, okay, if they want to have both, like, what's a realistic percentage? I don't know the exact answer to it, but I would say that almost every single brand is only realizing maybe, like, half the potential, maybe even a third of what would be a subscriber. And here's why. When subscription conversion is much harder than one time. Order conversion. You when, when to buy something one time. Like, we've all made dumb decisions and like it's you can make an impulsive decision to buy something one time. Subscription is a deeper commitment. You're you're agreeing to pay ongoing. There's a lot of reasons why. You know, subscription conversion is about four times harder, four times lower percentage than one time word of conversion. So when people buy a product as a one time product, a lot of times in their head, what they're actually thinking is, I don't want to subscribe. I want to try this product out. Because I don't, I don't know if I like it. Gonna try this coffee. I might subscribe later, but I'm gonna try it. And then they buy the coffee, and they use it, and they maybe like it, but they maybe either a like, forget who they ordered it from. They get distracted. They go to the grocery store, they buy another coffee, and then they just get on another brand or something. But that store had that customer at that moment on their website. They had them there. They had their attention. And attention is so expensive right now, it's so important. So I think so this is actually we're we're building a lot of tools into Boldsubscriptions. We call them maximizers. And one of the biggest things is maximizing a one time customers into subscribers, and then maximizing the value of existing subscribers. So one time customers and subscribers there. There's a lot of ways you can do this, and of course, I'm a proponent of Boldbut you could probably do this with others, but we have really neat tools baked into the software that does this. But the so when your subscription company, so the average LTV of a subscriber is 178 more. 178% more than a one time customer. For a lot of our brands, it's four or 500% more. So a subscriber is worth more. You can spend more to acquire them. You can spend more to service them. You can spend more to to to any everything about them, because they're worth more. But the problem is, a lot of brands install a subscription app. They slap on a Subscribe and Save option, which I say is like, just slap it on. But their metrics and the way they think about customers is all still from a one time order kind of perspective. And they look at their customer acquisition costs on LinkedIn and how much it requires to get them, but if you know that a subscriber is worth 400% more, you can spend a lot more. And so where I'm going with this is, I, I'm a big proponent of giving the first month free. And think about so that coffee, the reason why, if that coffee was first month, like, free plus shipping for the first month, or even, like, maybe make a trial size or something, so free plus shipping, or trial size plus shipping. And then, if they don't cancel it on month two, it switches to a regular subscription at 20% off because it's Subscribe and Save. But it's like, no strings attached. Try it free for a month. Pay shipping. A lot of e-commerce brands were like, well, I can't give my coffee away for free. And like, well, you're getting a customer that's worth four or 500% more you're willing to pay Instagram $45 per acquired customer, but you won't give away a $7 bag of coffee like that. You know, maybe even less than seven would so with subscriptions, I think it's really important to think about using the the initial product as as a as your acquisition tactic. Because when a customer is subscribing, they really are trying the product. They're not even sure. And so we have this tool built in. We call it convertible subscriptions, and it basically just converts the product from on month one to a different product month two. So you can do completely free, or you can do like $5 plus shipping, and then convert. And we've seen that massively increase conversion. And so if all you do is you have a one time product and you put on a Subscribe and Save with no real benefit, yeah, it's gonna be low. It's gonna be like two to 5% but if you have the whole funnel lead towards it, and you have a really compelling offer to to try before you buy. And that, just for the record, like that's historically been very hard to do with physical good subscriptions. But can you, can you think of software that doesn't have a free trial? No, that's almost ubiquitous there, right, right. But can you think of a physical good subscription that has a free trial.

William Harris 46:42

There are a couple. We have some, but yes, there's some. There's not a lot, right?

Jay Myers 46:46

Yeah, and it's because it's hard to do it. Most apps don't have a mechanism to do it, but, but customers want it. Everyone wants to try, right? And so it, yeah, that I think, I think you can probably get it, you know, again, back to your original question. I don't know what the number is, 30% 40% but I know that every single store right now is only probably at like, one quarter of what it could be, because they think about it from like, I'll just put on a Subscribe and Save, save 10% if you subscribe, and that works for a very small

William Harris 47:21

percentage. So I think of subscribers, I think of people being they're either subscribers or they're not, for the most part. Now there's blending that. It's like, I'm willing to subscribe to some things and not to other things, but I think there are certain people who are much higher likelihood of subscribers. And I'm gonna I say that because there's two things I'm thinking about that with that. One is, if we look at this from the metrics perspective, when we're running this, especially from a growth perspective, we like to separate those out as different cohorts of people entirely, as much as we can. To your point, once somebody makes a first purchase, if they didn't originally subscribe right then and there, then we want a path for them to either subscribe or a path for them to really be back into repeat purchasing for the same reason that, I think of some people go down the management path, and some people are just excellent executors, and it's like, well, let's I think Shopify did this recently where they create a separate path, and I think that's really smart to have a separate path for the people who aren't subscribers. But when we're looking at the rest of the metrics, like to look at, to your point, what's the CAC? What's the LTV? What's the difference in the CAC to LTV for people who just are buyers, and they'll come back and they'll buy infrequently, and whatever that looks like, but they are buyers, and they just purchased that way versus subscribers. And once, what's the months to break even too into your point where, if your month to break even is eight months, sure you can afford it, but cash flow wise, you might not be able to afford that. And so you have to look at those numbers to be able to figure out what makes sense for your business, on your subscription route, for where you go with this. But I think it's important to call out that we look at those as separate paths, separate things. They have the potential to merge. But let's look at these separately, because your LTV, a lot of times, people are looking at LTV across the board, and they're not segmenting that out, and they're assuming that that LTV, that they have is the LTV for all customers, and it's like, that's the LTV when you include subscriptions, what happens? We take that out, you might have some higher, lower. There's a lot of different ways I could go, but you need to look at those separately.

Jay Myers 49:27

100% 100% yes, yeah. It's different for every store. I mean, we see, on average it's a roughly three recurrences. Is a typical break even point. So they're not making money on the first one second, 1/3 on average across. I mean, some of our brands are just killing it, and their retention is in, like, the multi years. But like, on average, it's around eight months. Is an average e-commerce subscription length. Some, some brands are really bad, and they. Get three, two to three months to cancel. Some of them are amazing. So a lot of that depends. I am such a believer that you have to continually educate customers on the value of the product and also like what got them there isn't going to be what keeps them so there has to be continually increasing value. And so an example I often use is Charity Water, which is a they build wells all over the world. Okay, this is not an e-commerce company, but they operate like an e-commerce brand. They're incredibly smart how they run their charity. And so I donate to them. And I remember when I signed up. So if you go to charity water on their site, they talk all about the wells that they build and how every well gets, how many 1000s of people clean water, and for $40 a month, it can you, you provide clean water for roughly 40 people, or something like that. It's all the all the benefits of it. And then I decide to like, Okay, I'm gonna donate $40 a month. So that's a recurring purchase decision. You go through the checkout, and then on the thank you page is a video message from the CEO or the founder of Charity Water and saying, talking about, like, Thank you for your your recurring donation. This, your donation is going to help so many people get clean water. It's going to help this many people dig this many wells. And you're thinking, Well, I know, I just went through the website, and I just like, I just I read all your stuff, and I agreed to donate. And why are you telling me this again on on the thank you page, and then you get an email the next day saying, How many children are getting clean water because of this? You're like, I know I'm I'm donating. Why you do keep telling me this? Because what they know is the day that you stop understanding the value of your donation is when you go to cancel it. They have to continually educate you on the value, like, what made you decide to donate in the beginning? Or what made you decide to buy your mud water or your health shake or your whatever health bar or whatever protein you're buying, or whatever it is, what made you decide to buy day one, if they're not continually educating you on the health benefits of it and there, or maybe you maybe a, you know, 10% of profit goes to people who don't, who have bad nutrition, and you buy protein shake and kids who are malnourished. 10% of that goes to that if they're not, if that's not always in your face. Like, yeah, month four, and I have got a couple protein powders built up in my my cabinet, I'm going to cancel my subscription. And so the brands that have the best longevity are continually educating and also increasing value to like they're they have offers and they have other things. There is a I didn't coin this term a good friend of mine, Robbie Baxter. She's written a number of books behind me. She's written the membership economy, the Forever promise, Robbie Killen Baxter, she, she's, she's, she coined. She said this one time, and I always remember she said, when someone there's a half life of excitement from the moment someone clicks purchase on on a checkout. And so they've done tests on like, brains when people are shopping, and there's like, endorphins that are released the second you purchase something. And like, you've probably, you've probably done it's like, me and my me and my wife have, like, bought, I don't know, some, like, some big thing, and we're like, okay, it's in the cart. Okay. Should we do this and come over here? Let's, let's push checkout together, and you're like, checkout, and it's like, it's like, this moment of excitement. And then you get this, like, boring order confirmation email, and this, like boring Order Confirmation page, and then you don't hear from the brand, nothing, or you get it, and then your order shows up. In five days exactly, you've got, you've got this golden opportunity when they click, excitement that you could probably like. Let's just say I bought a leather couch, whatever it could be, any and let if, when I place that order, you could probably send me three emails that day about where the leather is made, how the letter leather is made in a fair trade country, how to treat leather, why their letters, leather is different. Like, you could literally send me, like, five or six emails, and I'm not going to get mad, because I'm so excited. I want to learn all about this. And you can educate me. You can send me an email every single day, like, if it's you know that a nutrition bar, like, start expecting better health. Here's what you're going to start feeling your your guts gonna in 30 days, you can expect this. And so you just have to continually educate your customer, because value is only there is no such thing as value. There's only perceived value. Like Netflix has billions of dollars of content. Like, if you add it up, every show on Netflix, and it's, you know. $19 for a movie. There's probably a billion dollars of content in Netflix, right? Yep, and I'm in Canada. I don't know what it is, in the US, it's like $15 a month. So I've got access to a billion dollars of content for $15 a month. And yet, there's been some months where I'm like, yeah, maybe I'll cancel Netflix, like, you can't tell me there's no value there, right? A billion dollars of content, but if I don't watch Netflix for a couple months and I'm not into some series, I don't perceive the value. So there's no such thing as actual value, like whatever it is a couch, a granola bar, a shake, a coffee, there's no value unless the customer understands that value. And I think that's a big factor for subscriptions. Is like people will say, like they have their customers are churning after four months or seven, and when I look under the hood, they never have a good education flow for their customers. And like, it's so important. And if you can nail that, like your customers will stay around forever. I've got

William Harris 55:58

a tip for you and anybody else listening to this, because everybody talks about that, that education flow that takes place after through email or through their app or through text messages, those are all great, but they still have a limit in the amount of people that they actually reach. One more layer that has a lot of potential is advertising. So advertising on social media, but this is the trick. If you're out, if you're optimizing it for purchase, which is what a lot of people do. Great. You just bought here. Buy again, optimize it for view through as a video about that thing that you're talking about, or it could be a static image about, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, when you optimize it for view through to specifically just the people who have purchased, you know, you've got an Audience List of 100,000 people, or whatever that might be, your your hit rate ends up being maybe, let's say, even 60, 70% or whatever that ends up being. Facebook, while they can't give a whole lot of attribution to things, still, they still know exactly who Jay Myers is on there. If you put Jay Myers email address, phone number and address in there, they know who that is, and they're going to make sure, like, if he's opted into any kind of advertising, he's going to see it. And so you can end up getting a whole other group of people that maybe didn't open their emails, didn't even see it because they went to their spam, or not even their spam. It's just not in their main inbox, right? If you're using Gmail, you've got your your main one, then you get promotions. I don't ever look at my promotions tab, so anybody who's sending me stuff, I'm not reading that. So it's one more way to do that that I think costs pennies in comparison to trying to optimize your purchase or something like that. That's

Jay Myers 57:21

super smart, and it's probably a lot less expensive because it's a smaller segment. Yep, you're targeting a list of emails that you're uploading to, syncing to Facebook, and you're, you know, I always say, like, when you when you get a customer, your job is, your job is to first. You don't, you're not. It's actually not a customer. It's a lead. First you have a lead. You have someone who's interested in your product. When someone subscribes, you don't actually have a customer yet, until they're they're around for like, month three or four, like, they're still like, Okay, I'll try it out. I'll try this solid subscription. I'll try this. Whatever. Your first job is to turn them into a customer, and then it's to turn them into an advocate, and you're the healthiest subscription companies that grow the best, they have the highest referral rates from customers. But what those customers need is they need, they need. They need the content. They need. They need to see what like these testimonials, and you're right, like even though you just bought it, they need to see other people using it, and it's that's a great, super good tip makes

William Harris 58:25

such a big difference. So I want to dig into who is Jay Myers before I do I told you there are two reasons why I think of people being subscribers that I wanted to talk about. This is an idea that I you, and I haven't talked about this before, and I admit that I haven't dug deep enough into Boldsubscriptions to know whether you do this or not, but knowing that there are some people who are subscribers and some people who aren't, just like, there are some people who are coupon users and will buy it simply because it's on sale, not because they need it or not. You guys have a subscription marketplace where you're like, hey, here's a whole bunch of other brands that offer subscriptions. In case you're innocent, subscribing to something else that you didn't even know that you wanted, but there's subscriptions available to you. We don't,

Jay Myers 59:06

but that is an interesting concept. There are some, there are some subscription there's one called, like, my subscription addiction. There's others that, like, like, a lot of our brands list their subscriptions on them, yep, and, and you're right, there's, your bang on, like there's there's subscribers who will like, I am a subscriber. I i Because I, if there's a subscription option, I'll almost always subscribe if I can a because I like to see the flows on things. But I also be like, convenience, and so we don't, but I so one, I think this is relevant to your on this topic, one thing that we've seen a lot of our brands do successful is partner with other subscriptions to get in their box with some type of an offer. So so if you, if you have, let's say, a sock subscription, and. You've got 10,000 subscribers, and I have a I don't know could be anything. Could be cat could be cat litter. Could be mud, water, could be a health bar, anything fun cat litter. Sure, I don't know what percentage of the population has cats, let's say 50% so I would come to you and I would say, Will, I'd love to put an offer in your box for a month free, or two months free of cat litter subscription. Can I put an offer in your box? And you might just say yes, because, wow, that's an awesome offer. And I would love to give my subscribers that offer. And a lot of our subscription brands actually do this. They say that, like as part of your membership, each month, you will get exclusive partner offers that are only available to our subscribers. But also once you get a certain we've got a couple of these brands. One of them is like a fishing tackle company. They sell a Fishing Tackle Box of the Month, and they've got, like, I don't know, 20,000 subscribers. I can't the exact number is, but they, the fishing companies, actually pay them to put their lure in and a little brochure. And so they like, I'm, well, one of them actually, all of the all of the lures in the tackle box is actually completely covered by the fishing company. So they don't actually pay for any of the lures they get. They get their like FabFitFun is a lot like this as well, too. They hardly pay anything. A lot of times it's free. But if you sell like knitted Baby Hats. And you want your knitted baby hat in the fabfit fun box, you have to, you don't have to pay to be in it, but you got to provide your knitted Baby Hats for free, or, like, very, very low, like, you're going to take a hit. But 100,000 people are getting your knitted Baby Hats, who then you can put an offer in that they might if you do it properly, it expands out. So when you have a subscription, what you have a distribution channel of people who like to subscribe. And that can be leveraged in a lot of ways, and and opening it up to like, if you had a sock subscription with 10,000 subscribers, you could probably find, like, someone who underwear, I don't know, something, something else, and you could probably charge them to have samples or products in your subscription. And there's a lot of other ways to tap into that. So we don't do a marketplace, but there's a lot of brands that they do similar, similar things like that, which is same thing, because people who subscribe subscribes. I

William Harris 1:02:37

love the concept. There was even outside of subscriptions. There was two examples of this. One was a brand that we worked with where they wanted to offer free shipping, but they couldn't afford to offer free shipping, and so we were able to help them find a partner that basically paid for a lot of their shipping by being able to say, Hey, as long as you include us in here, you know, we'll, like, have the boxes branded, I think, like branded tape inserts, like they did a whole bunch of stuff, where it's like, we'll pay for the shipping cost every single one of your shipments. This was 1000s of shipments a day, right? So it was a really good opportunity for for both of these brands. And flip side, like you said, there was a brand that's trying to reach a completely different segment of people than they normally do, and you can get stuck into a really good hole of let's say all of your customers are look and think and sound alike, and you're trying to break into a completely different segment of people. Stanley would be a good example. This. When they're going from construction worker to teenage girl, you're trying to break into a completely different segment of the population. Being able to partner with a brand that already has a really good reach within that segment. It's a really good way to get, like you said, samples, and you can, you know, a lot of different ways you can customize things for them.

Jay Myers 1:03:42

And speaking of your Facebook strategy, if you did something like that, audience swap with each other. 100% yes. So if I'm giving you my deodorant sample subscription, I would you, I think most listeners might know what audience swapping is, but in Facebook, you can share an audience with someone else. They, of course, don't get any personal information, but I we might actually, you know, perfect example, you are an agency. We're an app developer. We're not competitors at all, but we're both in the e-commerce space. So I could share our Boldaudience with you to target on Facebook, and you could share your audience with us that we could target on Facebook, because it's a similar base. And so if you do these promotions in other people's boxes, time it with audience swapping that they they get the product, they see the ads on Facebook. And then, of course, they're gonna be like, Facebook must be reading my mind. How do they know I got this thing? But of course, it is. Yeah, the key

William Harris 1:04:36

for audience swapping, for anybody listening, is you want the logged in users. That's what you want, the people who are paying customers. Those are the audiences you want to swap. Done this, you know, for, you know, over a decade, and whenever you try and swap audiences where it's like people that have website visitors, things like that, you're you got to remember that, you know, 2% of people converted on that website, so 98% of those people weren't relevant. Anyways, you only want the ones that. Converters. That's the audiences that you want to swap. Okay, digging into some of who is Jay Myers, one of the things that I liked about you is you're very entrepreneurial. From the very beginning, you told me that you have never written a resume in your life.

Jay Myers 1:05:16

Why still to still to this day. I mean, I've read 1000s, sure. You know, I'm very I guess. I grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. My dad, you know, we like when I was 13 years old, he quit his job to start the archery store. My mom runs a music teaching she has multiple music companies. And my wife owns a dance studio. My brother owns an archery target manufacturing. My his wife owns a very large floral company. My uncle owns a furniture company. My like, so we always joke it there isn't a single person in our family that is not, doesn't own a business. And we always would like sit around when we had Thanksgiving or Christmas dinner, and we used to add up how many people were employed by the the table and so, so that that's not the point, though. That was just a fun side note, but the point was like, I I wasn't I'm I would personally be more scared to work for someone than to run to then to start my own thing. And like people always say, like, entrepreneurship is hard. You're alone. You It's like running off a cliff and making a parachute. There's 1000 different, 1000 different all

William Harris 1:06:34

true, by the way, too. All true,

Jay Myers 1:06:37

but you're also in charge of your own destiny. And no one, no one. I mean you, of course, things can fail. Of course, things can go wrong, but no one can fire you, but you and you that like, there's like, so I always saw it as not a safety net, but like. I just I felt safe doing it, you know. And I think because I saw so many people around me that, that I that was all I ever thought to do when I as I grew up, was to start my own thing. So yeah, I've probably had about seven different companies and hopefully make it to my grade without writing a resume. So

William Harris 1:07:13

So I actually think I'm similar to you. I don't believe I've ever worked for a job that already was, like, an open listing, or anything like that. So while I have at least submitted a resume to companies every single time I was applying, i The role was being created for me, basically, where they're looking at that, they're like, Okay, I like what you're doing with XYZ. I want you to come and do that at this company and do do this for us kind of thing. So,

Jay Myers 1:07:41

yeah, I so I believe there's a term I don't know if I don't think I coined this anyways, intrapreneurship. So, like, I where being entrepreneurial at the company you work at. Like, I think that's a huge I know Shopify is big on this too. Like, I Harley says that. So Harley's been on both of our podcasts. Yeah, think in common, but I remember chatting with him one time, he said, like, that's one of the key things they look for at Shopify, when they hire people, is people who are entrepreneurs, because they so so an entrepreneur. I think there's a key difference, like, there are business owners that are not entrepreneurs, and there are entrepreneurs, people who are entrepreneurial that don't own a business, so that that's not they're not one in the same. And so I know a lot of people at Bold who are super entrepreneurial, who who create divisions, who create roles, who start initiatives. And they're entrepreneurial. They, yes, they they don't own a business, but they're super entrepreneurial. And then I know a lot of people who own a business, and they are not entrepreneurial at all. They are stuck in their ways. They won't change a thing. They're slowly, slowly dying, a slow business death. So, yes, I think you don't have to. It's not business ownership that is entrepreneurial. That's a mindset, yeah,

William Harris 1:09:06

when we talk about what makes someone successful, which is one of the things that I like talking about a lot characteristics, et cetera. And usually it goes down the path of some type of characteristic. The thing that you brought up to me, though, was timing, and I liked that you were talking about the difference between Facebook and MySpace and timing. So take me through the timing aspect of success.

Jay Myers 1:09:32

Yeah, someone, someone told me once like luck is when preparedness and chance meet. And you know, yeah. So the the thing about like Facebook, like, had Facebook started in 2005 like MySpace? It probably wouldn't. Nobody would even know the name right now, but it started in like 2000 Seven kind of got big in 2008 ish. And the other thing that happened is Apple came out with the iPhone at the same time. And had there not been the iPhone, Facebook probably would, had the iPhone come out in 2005 before Facebook existed, we would all be on MySpace right now, maybe, but not face, not Facebook. And so is Facebook just lucky? Yes, they're lucky, but they were also very they also executed very well too. So when preparedness meets chance, that's luck, and it's arguably not luck. So you know, I, I just were very fortunate and very lucky at Bold that we, you know, started building with Shopify in 2012 like, I think, I think that was the context of some of this earlier. And it's like, people often say, like, it's really, really both like, it's really, I saw, I know probably a solid 50 other developers that were around in the 2030 time that they're not in the space anymore. So they failed. So, so we did a lot of things, right. You know, where we've been in the space for 14 years now, and so, like, yeah, we've done a lot of 13 years, we've done a lot of things right. Also, timing was really important too, and so, yeah, just being aware, just being aware of that, I think, is really good. I think the other thing too is like, I so I say this in my head all the time, there's only solutions. And yeah, and if you truly believe that, you will be blown away how many opportunities there actually are. And sometimes people will say, People tell me all the time that I'm too optimistic. I'm the one in the room that never sees the bad in someone else. Like, I assume good in everyone. I like, it could be the we get the worst news, and I'm and it's not necessarily that I'm, like, I have my head in the sky and I'm overly optimistic and everything. Okay, it's just I lit I only see solutions. Like there, there is only solutions. There's no like, and every single thing. And I look back at my life and like, I've had businesses completely fail. I got, I've gotten down to so I had, I left out a big gap from 2003 to 2009 but in 2006 like 2006 2000 late 2006 I had one of my stores completely go out of business, basically, long story short, like I was shipping everything up to Canada. And it's very expensive to ship stuff to Canada. You pay customs duty, brokerage, everything else. 99% of my customers were in the US, and so I was shipping everything back down to the US, like, and kind of like my biggest competitor was, like, Cabela's or Bass Pro and like, those were the kind of stores that would sell similar products so they could mark something up, like 30% before, and before I could even make a penny, because I was shipping everything up to the USI, then I ended up getting a warehouse, because Winnipeg is about, well, you're, you're close by and soda there, but we're about, we're about 45 minutes from the border. So I got a warehouse in North Dakota, and on Tuesdays and Thursdays, I would drive down to the warehouse and pick up the stuff, and I would do my own I would clear everything through customs myself, do my own brokerage. And then on Thursdays, I would drive down and ship all the stuff. But there was still a ton of cost there. I still like, even though you're clearing the stuff yourself, you're yourself, you're still paying to ship it there and and so I was doing a lot of sales on the website, but I wasn't profitable. I was the best analogy I can give sometimes is like, if you open a hot dog stand the first and, you know, you've got all your costs. You've got to buy your your stand and your ketchup and whatever else. The first hot dog you sell like, let's say it costs you 500 bucks a day to have that stand. The first hot dog you sell costs you $500 Yep. The next hot dog you sell, it costs you 250 the next hot dog you sell cost 125 the next hot dog you sell, it goes down and down and down, and you don't actually make money until hot dog 27 so, like, everybody should know what, what that is, right? So, like, I knew that when I was doing about 60 orders a day, I was gonna be profitable. And so, like, I when I started, it was like, five orders, then 10 orders and 20 orders. And like, there'd be days that, like, we're doing $5,000 a day, and $10,000 a day, and it's like, oh, you're making a lot of money. Like, we're not making money. It's like that hot dog guy who's selling, you know, 10 hot dogs a day, you didn't make money until you sell 27 so I funded a lot of it myself. I spent every last penny I had to keep it going. Maxed out every credit card maxed out every. A term with every vendor, and eventually I shut it. I didn't get to that 27th hot dog, and I ended up having to shut it down. And it was like, hard beyond imagine, you know, when you shut down a business, it's not just like, Oh, I'll shut it down right now. It's you start you know, when you can't pay your bills, you inventory starts coming in, stops coming in. Customers don't get their orders. They start filing chargebacks. You lose your ability to process credit card. People start posting negative things on forums, like, I never got my order. And then 10 other people see that. They panic. They start filing chargebacks too. Now you can't process credit cards, then you try to get another credit card processor, and it's like, it's a really, really ugly, hard thing. And this one business that I ran, I ended up shutting it down, and I got down to a point where I had $50 to my name. I had a $50 bill, and I remember I kept that $50 bill in my wallet, and my wife's dad paid for our rent at our apartment for like, a couple months. And I literally, yeah, it so I but I thought, Well, okay, there's only solutions. So I during all this time. So I still have never written a resume, but there was a company that needed help with SEO work, and they said they had a posting for it, and I didn't send a resume. All I sent was screenshots of every search term. I said, this isn't a resume, but here's, these are 37 screenshots from Google searching for a manufacturer's product. Like, this is a Yeti mic. So like, if you search for Yeti mic, here's my website, here's the manufacturer. Search for this backpack, here's the and I outranked the manufacturers on every single product, and they just said you're hired right on the spot. So I started doing helping this company with SEO. But at the same time, I kept asking all of the companies that I was getting product from the States if they would drop ship directly to the customers. And this was like, in 2006 they thought. They said, drop shipping. What's that? And I'm like, Well, okay, I'm going to sell the products. And they said, Oh, wait, so you want to sell these products on your website, and I ship it to the product like that. Seems like they just thought it was like some type of crazy scam that, like, there's no way, so they wouldn't drop ship it. 2008 I, when I was working for this SEO company, they, one of them emailed and said, Okay, we'll dropship your products now, now, now we'll ship directly to the customer. And like I had shut everything down. I didn't have a way to process credit cards because they shut all the payments down. I was working at this company, helping their them do SEO. But this company said, well, we'll dropship your products. So I went to my wife and I said, Okay, I think I can do this again. I'm gonna, let's incorporate a new number company. She trusted me. She put it in her name so we could get, so we could get a payment processor. I woke up. We didn't have kids, so I woke up every day at like, four in the morning, and I completely rebuilt it. I would go to work, my work at eight o'clock and help this, do my SEO work, come home work all night. And what I did was this, I was starting completely fresh, was I put it on Shopify. And so that was where we I heard about Shopify, put it on that. And like when I look back at that, I you know that, had that business never failed, and had I never lost my payment process, I would have never I would have never heard about Shopify. I would have never tried another platform. Bold wouldn't exist. Like, 100% and so, like, there is only solutions, like even to the hardest, hardest thing. And I'm just such a firm believer that, you know, there's mountains and valleys in life, and nothing grows at the peaks. Nothing grows at the top of a mountain. It's bare, it's empty. Stuff only grows down in the bottom. And when you're in those points in your life, like that's where you grow, and that's where, that's where the next peak will be even higher if you grow, if you if you have the right mindset and look at things the right way. And so, yeah, I guess it's a long winded answer, but that's

William Harris 1:19:32

it's so motivational, though, because I think that we've all been in situations that we feel like that. I mean, really down to the last $50 I'd say to your point, timing being important, but resilience, the ability to say, like, but I'm going to get back up and I'm going to do it like you said, like, there's only solutions. And I can't tell you how many times that ends up having to be a model in my own life, because running any kind of a business, and even if you're not running a business, every day, you will come up against obstacles. After obstacle, and if you see them as obstacles, it can be very frustrating, but if you see them as opportunities, it completely changes the mindset and how you're able to see each thing that you're coming up against. So I love that 100%

Jay Myers 1:20:16

Yeah, I just would challenge anyone, just this life. You know, we talked earlier about, like, how there is no actual true value. It's only perceived value. There are no true hurdles, or like nothing is bad or good. Like I would have said that that business failing. I remember taking all the desks and counters and had shut it down because I couldn't pay the rent, and so I had to get out of the building, and I put it all on trailer, and we actually took it to the dump. And I remember I took a picture. Remember I took a picture. I have a picture of, like, all the desks and, like, the pegboard and stuff they had, like, in in a literal dump. And I'm like, I'm dumping my business in the dump, and I picture, and I'm like, Well, that's what I thought, too, right? But it was the best thing that ever happened. But I could have never seen that lens, and so like, if you can just see things differently and not go down a path of despair and whatever, your life will be different. I guarantee it.

William Harris 1:21:14

I have to ask you one more question. I know we're technically at time, but this is a question that's important because you ask it on your podcast all the time. What do you suck at?

Jay Myers 1:21:25

I do ask it all the time, man, like, Do

William Harris 1:21:27

we have another I've got time to go, but I want to be respectful. No, I

Jay Myers 1:21:31

I suck. Okay, it's, you know, the older I get, the more I realize how much I'm really not good at things. And I like, when you're when I used to think that I was amazing at everything, yeah, like, I remember when I when I start, when I started? Well, I started bowl with three friends. It was four of us, and I thought, oh, yeah, I should run this company. That's my I like my idea. I started bowl. I should be the, of course, I should run it like that makes sense, right? I originally we didn't have a CEO. We just had, we just called all ourselves directors, and then so I was the CMO. We had a CTO, a Chief Brand Officer. We kind of all had our roles. And I remember when we kind of decided that, like, okay, you know, maybe I'm not the best person to be the CMO, and we brought in someone who, like, had a ton of experience that could help us scale. And then, like, our CTO, one of the other founders, Eric, we thought, okay, let's we brought in this, like, senior guy from Adobe, and he came in, and I remember when I replaced myself, like it was really, really hard. And I thought, like, No, this isn't right, like, I should be the CMO. And then fast forward, like, three months later, we had this amazing woman that came in. I remember thinking like, Thank God, I'm not the CEO. Like, I could not do half of the stuff. She is like, I'm so you just, you get acutely aware of what you're not good at the older you get. And I think, you know, I can, I can name a long list of things that I really hard at. But I think overarching is it's, it's important. The reason I ask people that is because it's important to know in life what you're good at. I think a lot of people can, can brag about things that, like, I'm awesome at whatever copywriting I'm also in my creative I'm awesome at this. I'm awesome, but not many people think about what they're not good at. It takes a certain level of emotional intelligence, and I am very thankful on a regular basis that the four other found there are three other founders at Bold we all at one point, were able to know what we weren't good at, and that we could replace ourselves, and That that is why Boldis successful, had like, and so it's really, really important to know what, where, like, where your line is. And, like, I would, you know, 99% of things that I thought I was good at before I know now. Like, no, I'm actually not like, so, yeah, I can list a lot. I don't think I won't get into specifics, like, I I realized that, like, I actually suck at managing people. I'm great. Like, I'm great. I'm being, like, charismatic and people like me, but I'm really bad at hard conversations. I'm really bad at following up on things. Like, I'm I'm, I'm really bad at operational things. I'm really I'm good at big ideas, but really bad when it comes down to tactical things. I need someone to keep me in check, otherwise I go off and I but the point is that, like I know that now, and I don't fight it, and I'll bring in some. One to help. Like, we have, like, a marketing operations person that's, like, on top, like, Jay, you need to do this. You need this. And like, if not, I'm I'm in a different like, my head's in a different space. And so it's a, it's a critical thing in life to know what you aren't good at. And that's not just for business. That's for marriage and friendships and everything else too. So, so I have a lot, and it would be good, you know, anyone listening to give it some thought, because it'll, it'll make you a better person. It's an

William Harris 1:25:28

important question. Um, this has been absolutely amazing, talking to you, reminiscing about the good old days and e-commerce, uh, going through a lot of the subscription stuff, too. If people wanted to work with you, follow you. What's the best way for them to get in touch? Stay in touch.

Jay Myers 1:25:45

Oh, man. Well, it's been super fun, too. It's crazy how much time has gone by, and it doesn't feel like that. So that's how you know it's a good conversation. Well, for Yeah, for anyone who's listened and gotten this far and you'd like to learn about Bold boldcommerce.com. Is our site. I'm quite active on LinkedIn. You can usually catch me in Will's comment section on his posts. Yes, thank

William Harris 1:26:08

you for that, by the way. Yeah,

Jay Myers 1:26:10

no problem. And anyone's I have no issue giving out my personal email jay@boldcommerce.com email me about anything. But yeah, LinkedIn, jay@boldcommerce.com is a great place to hit me up. Awesome.

William Harris 1:26:23

Well, thank you very much for sharing your time, sharing your wisdom with us today. We really appreciate

Jay Myers 1:26:28

Oh, super honored. Thank you. Thank

William Harris 1:26:30

you everyone for listening. Hopefully you have a good rest of your

Outro 1:26:34

day. Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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