Sub Club Podcast: Raising App Prices the RIGHT Way — Reid DeRamus, Substack

0:00hello I'm your host David Barnard and my guest today is Reed deramus growth product manager at substack prior to joining subsec Reed helped grow subscriptions at Hulu Crunchyroll and HBO Max on the podcast I talked with Reed about whether or not to increase your price how to execute if you do and why price increases often impact growth more than retention hey Reed thanks so much for joining me on the podcast today thanks for having me really excited to be here so I wanted to have you on I have read a bunch of your posts this year and anytime I read a great post I think gosh more people

0:39need to read this so I now with my colleagues publish a sub club newsletter so I've shared your posts I think in three different newsletters and this then I always think we're reading a great post I wonder what else is behind this like what would they say about this situation that wasn't covered I said hey I've got a podcast I figured I'd have you on and we could talk through some of your posts so we'll link to the posts and your growth croissant blog in the show notes so people can go follow along if they want really great stuff we're not going to like read the posts we're

1:11not going to cover everything but I want to kind of hit some of these major topics so the most recent one you wrote and I think is super applicable right now that a lot of apps are thinking should I increase my price and then if I am going to increase my price how do I do it and not get the backlash and everything so I wanted to kick off talking about that so let's just start with should you raise your price well thanks again for having me on and really appreciate the kind words a lot of the times like you'll write a newsletter post and you don't know if it lands or

1:46not so really appreciate you and appreciate you sharing it the price one was one that was timely because Spotify which I've subscribed to for you know the past decade is doing their first price increase and I think they've kind of made it through by now and there's a lot of writing out there and it was something that we wrestled with a lot in the streaming world because it's like one of the most impactful ways to drive up customer lifetime value and drive up Revenue but there's this really hard balancing act with executing a price increase well and the trade-offs are usually like how much near-term revenue gain can I

2:27try to capture and without sacrificing your long-term growth potential because if you go too hard into the price increase you may get a lot of Revenue early on but it could kind of erode your growth velocity one specific metric to think about is your year-over-year growth in paid subscribers that's the one that you kind of want to pay attention to after you do these price increases and yeah we can go a lot of different ways from there but I'm actually curious to get your take on Disney plus and how this is played out so they actually again announced a price increase recently lambasted in the Press

3:01worst time ever to do a price increase everybody's complaining about Disney plus quality going downhill but it's interesting because they actually started at five dollars and that kind of what you were saying and what you talk about in the post about growth versus profitability starting at five dollars is probably a big reason why they grew so big so quick it was just a no-brainer cheap decision for a lot of families and people to stream but now they're at that phase where okay growth is over where's Revenue growth going to come from more price raises so do you think Disney plus got it right even with the backlash

3:38they're getting today in raising their prices Now versus maybe having charged more early on and it wasn't just Disney plus I think when we were at Crunchyroll even Hulu too the primary metric was paid subscribers and baked into that was this assumption that over time you could gradually increase price I think Disney launched at a really low price point and a lot of people were getting Disney Plus for free as part of Verizon they had like a pretty big partnership with them they had really discounted annual plans at launch if I remember correctly and of course they bundled it with ESPN plus and Hulu which I think a lot of people

4:14bought that as well so when Disney Plus launch there was a lot of oh my gosh they got to like 100 million subscribers so quickly but you gotta like dig into the numbers there and look at Revenue per subscriber and really try to figure out are they actually catching up with Netflix or are they still pretty far behind and I think if you looked under the covers the revenue per subscription wasn't quite there whether they're doing the right thing now it's what they have to do like if you look at the streaming space probably right now it's not the easiest space to be operating in it's

4:46been fascinating over the past decade watching a lot of these traditional media companies try to move from cable TV into streaming video where the skill sets needed to grow those products are very different you have to like think about direct to Consumer relationships and how to grow subscribers that way versus doing carrier deals with a handful or more paid TV operators totally different skill set and the economics are really different so I think it's been kind of a wild west and there's a lot of volatility right now there's a lot of M A I think that consolidation will continue whether they handled it right or not I don't really

5:25know and I don't know if it really matters I think they're doing what they kind of have to do at this point a lot of other streamers too in that is kind of and you talk about this in your post is that you will get some level of pushback and I mean anytime somebody has to pay more for what they perceive to already be getting there is going to be pushback I'm a father of four kids and inflation's hitting pretty hard I mean I'm getting a little more sympathetic to maybe always raising prices isn't the best idea how do you think about the consumer sentiment part of the decision

6:04of whether to raise prices or not well one thing you mentioned there that I think is important is if you're asking them to pay more for what they perceive as the same product it's a tough sell maybe a marginal price increase will go through okay like a one dollar price increase two dollar price increase that seems to be kind of the standard set by Spotify and Netflix each time they raise price they're not doubling their price in one swing they're kind of marginally going up the thing that we've seen consumer products do well when they're doing a price increase is reaffirm the value prop that people are paying for

6:40and you can also tease any upcoming changes that would like materially improve the product the value prop and I think that can really help get you through these price increases and so I think Communications are really really important and one of the things you mentioned in the post too was actually not just teasing future features but maybe trying to coordinate the launch of a big new feature with the price increase like how would you pull that off exactly like if you were Disney and you had like some huge Star Wars series in the pipeline I would try to time the price increase roughly around when those shows are

7:22going to Premiere and you could say in the comms this is what we're doing with we're not just asking you for more money for the sake of it and don't blame a price increase on like inflation or something that consumers can't control that's kind of like one of those uncontrollable factors like cost of gas is going up sorry we got to increase our price it's usually best to focus on your product and how it's getting better and how you're going to use this extra money to continue to make the product better and keep in mind the people who are paying for it already definitely value your product in some way so they're

7:55going to be usually thrilled with that idea of you trying to make a concerted effort to continue to improve the thing Disney I think actually did really well maybe is that the time the Press announcement before too big Series so Ahsoka was just released this week as we're recording and then they have a big Marvel show coming out I think in the next three or four weeks so they announced it two or three weeks ahead of that they don't go into effect until mid series with these big new shows and so it kind of did what you're suggesting and they took the pr lumps ahead and now people are excited again

8:33because these big shows are coming on and by the time the price increase actually takes effect they're going to be mid-show on these exciting new shows that I think Disney had a lot of confidence that we're gonna be very attractive to their subscribers that's exactly right I mean that's the best way to do it like if your Spotify you don't want to lose major podcasts or Led Zeppelin or the Beatles catalog right before you do a price increase the timing piece is really important the communication is really important so we've been talking about huge players Disney Spotify a dollar increase in Spotify you know at this point most

9:09people listen to music the way they listen to music is streaming so there's not really that much question of like am I going to cancel Spotify it's me maybe more am I going to switch from Spotify to Apple music it's only really two or three big players out there I mean what do you think and have you done much thought on these smaller subscription apps where they don't have the brand name they don't necessarily have they'll kind of default people are going to stick around are there any tips in how a smaller app should think about a price increase let me bring it into like the

9:43sub stack world because these are effectively all their own subscription media business oh yeah yeah yeah and one thing that we've talked with writers about sometimes we'll do these reviews you know and we'll go in and we'll look at their retention metrics their growth rate all these metrics to evaluate the health of their business and sometimes we'll say hey your paid retention rates are like through the roof they're incredible they're way better than your peers and what we'll usually see is they're like hell yeah and then just totally tune out and feel reassured but there's a flip side to that which is that can also mean that your product is

10:21underpriced or that you're not being aggressive enough trying to grow your audience and so the phrase that we try to hammer home is your health metrics are too good you know it's like going into the doctor's office and they're like look you need to like eat a cheeseburger or something I think that's actually one thing I see a lot of writers on South stack that I think are underpriced and they're not realizing their full earnings potential in part because they set their price a long time ago it's a hard intimidating decision and after you make that decision you don't really want to think about it again so you just see a lot of prices

10:53kind of not changed even over the course of multiple years and I feel like they're not realizing their full earnings potential that's a great way to think about it because if in our consumer subscription app world that we mostly talk about here on the podcast if you're seeing way above median retention rates if you're seeing way above median conversion to subscription rates that might actually be the sign that you're leaving money on the table but then on the flip side if you're seeing 20 retention which at Revenue cap we shared a state of subscription apps report where median retention first consumer subscription app on an annual plan is somewhere in

11:35the 30 range so there's a lot of apps that have way lower than that but then there's also a lot of apps that have way higher retention but if you're in that 20 retention on your annual subscriptions probably signal that you're not in a good place to raise prices on your existing subscribers and really thought about kind of looking at those sorts of metrics as part of the decision process and whether to raise a price or not we see some writers on substack retaining 90 of their subscribers after one year which to me is just like totally Bonkers yeah um and I want to give a shout out to antenna

12:11which is like a data product that really looks at retention for the streamers and they have some really great retention data if you are operating like a bigger consumer subscription product that can be a good source of information to compare and contrast it's obviously awesome if your retention is above your peers or above normal that's great news but I too often see people put their feet on the table and be like nice let's Let It cruise I think it's good to think about well maybe we are leaving some money on the table maybe we're a little underpriced so and then that's actually the next thing I wanted to get into is

12:45like how do you model out whether or not you are leaving money on the table and then how do you think about the potential for churn when you do raise your price I mean I can't show Excel spreadsheets in a podcast but I mean talk me through kind of the high level thinking of how to drop that into a data warehouse or a spreadsheet or how do you model this out to see if it's really worth it in the long run are you sacrificing growth in the short term are you sacrifice retention in the long run I mean there's a lot of factors here the easiest Avenues to break it out at the

13:23highest level is to think about your existing subscribers let's assume you're adjusting the price for your existing subscribers a lot of people when they do a price increase they only do it for new subscribers in the future and that's a fine approach but just know that you're leaving the vast majority of the impact from a price increase on the table to really realize the revenue gain from a price increase it's important to figure out a way to increase price for existing subscribers I would caveat that to say if you're really early in your journey and there's not that many subscribers that's the best time to just grandfather

13:56people in and not piss people off not mess with your churn like later stages when that's maybe most applicable but that's part of the calculation right like how many existing subscribers do I have and if I raise price on all of them is it actually meaningful revenue and worth doing and that's a great Point keep in mind too the people who you're talking about in that early stage are people who are your founding members I remember the first person who paid for my newsletter I'm like you're God's gift to Earth you know like thank you so much I would Happily Never increase their price that's an important Dimension to

14:31think about your early supporters and to make sure you're taking care of them but yeah I think at a certain point if you're at like a Netflix scale or a Spotify scale even Strava Duolingo you have probably enough paid subscribers at that point to think about most of the value of a price increase coming from your existing subscribers if you assume we're kind of in that world it's good to break out the impact by the revenue gain from existing subscribers versus future flow of new subscribers coming in what we typically see when we've done price increases in the past is that they usually impact subscriber acquisition

15:07way more than subscriber retention now that's assuming you kind of execute the price increase well and that you're not going bonkers with it you're not doubling your price you know you're doing the more incremental approach but usually if you execute well you won't see much churn from your existing subscriber base but you will see a little pressure on new subscriber acquisition so say you're adding 100 000 new subscribers per month and you increase the price by 10 it's not crazy to see like a little bit of a step function drop down you know maybe 90 000 a month or eighty thousand a month just kind of pulling Money numbers out of

15:48thin air here but the point being the expectation should be that you're going to see a little bit of slowdown on acquisition whereas retention you might not see too much of an impact and again that's why it's important to like figure out a way to thoughtfully increase price on existing subscribers the basic equation is like do you want fewer subscribers paying you more money or do you want more subscribers paying you less money and then there's really a very few who can achieve the kind of more more subscribers paying you more money it does happen one of the things a Spotify and a Disney plus and others

16:27can't do because they are such a big brand is actually test the price increase on new users before they actually raise a price on existing users and maybe that's actually a great way to think about it for apps that can get away with that if you're not a brand name if people don't know your price offhand if the Press isn't going to write about your price then you can actually go ahead and see first what the impact is on new subscribers and then if you find that sweet spot maybe that's the time to then start thinking about rolling that price out to all the existing subscribers yeah there's a lot

16:59of different ways to go about it testing price increases is really hard if one person sees two different prices and they kind of figure out what you're doing that can make its way to X or Reddit and then you got a thing to deal with but yeah I mean any kind of signal there can be helpful surveys can sometimes be somewhat helpful but people say different things than what they end up doing so I wouldn't put all your trust in those results in those cases where you have race prices in the past have you done surveys is there kind of like price elasticity surveying that you've done and was it helpful or do you

17:34feel like you really just have to experiment we've definitely done a lot of surveys and not only to find like what our core price should be but to think about what our most passionate fans would pay relative to like your core subscriber it's kind of like you want to separate out what the top one percent are willing to pay they maybe have more price elasticity or a higher willingness to pay a higher price for maybe not even that much different of a product relative to like your core product which is what most people are buying the equivalent on substack would be we have a founding member tier and if

18:08people choose that option they can actually fill in their own price and we see a lot of people go way above and beyond what the retail price is on the founding member and some of those people just really want to support the writer that's great to see yeah I was actually going to bring that up that one other option and we even see this in streaming and Spotify and others is that one way to raise your price without raising your price is to add a higher tier so we were talking earlier about adding a big new feature at the same time you're raising your price well

18:40another way to potentially do that is add that big new feature as a new premium tier on top of the existing tiers I wonder if that's actually a better option than raising your price for some apps is actually starting to do the tiering thing do you have any thoughts there in the I mean the problem with hearing is complexity is that how many prices are you showing your paywall gets confusing what are your thoughts on tiering as a way to raise prices I think tiers make a ton of sense you know without them you're kind of forcing one price on everybody when you know that people have different willingness to pay

19:13I think it's good to keep it as simple as possible more than three tiers the consumer's brain might start to break the other thing that we're seeing in streaming is the introduction of AD based subscription tiers at the lower end I think a lot of this is just reaffirming your point around you're trying to think about how many paid subscribers you can realistically get and what the revenue per subscriber is and how they break that out across different tiers subscription tiers and so if you're somebody like Netflix in the US and you're really bumping up against what could be your total addressable Market then introducing a lower price ad tier

19:52could make sense same thing with the other streamers what we see in more of a passion driven world like the sub stacks of the world or the patreons of the world there's this element of like the top one percent of fans who have like a much stronger set of feelings about their subscription to a certain product we saw this at Crunchyroll we had this thing called the T-shirt test which was like if you wear the T-shirt of that brand then it's saying something about who you are about your identity and when you see somebody else wearing that Crunchyroll t-shirt you have this immediate connection this immediate

20:27trust and it's a great symbol for the depth of relationship somebody feels about a brand and so yeah not all subscriptions are created equal and so I think something like Crunchyroll probably has a better shot at like a higher priced subscription tier that has some other stuff in it whereas Netflix as high as priced here is more like a family plan it's a functional value prop I think that point you just brought up about Netflix hitting their potential total addressable Market in the U.S it's actually something a lot of apps are maybe hitting and not quite realizing what wall they're hitting I've heard a lot of folks in the industry say

21:09for everything from fitness apps to other apps in the space that you hit this 10 to 20 million a year ARR and very few apps can break beyond that and maybe that's that you know you're not Netflix you're not going to have 100 million subscribers or whatever it is so these apps may be hitting that total serviceable market like yes everybody works out but realistically your fitness app is not going to be subscribed there's so much competition in that space people have so many different needs once you hit that 10 20 million dollars a year you might actually be bumping up against it and so then that's

21:47the time to then start thinking okay what are these tiers how do we start letting people who are willing to pay more pay more you know visco is an app I use all the time and they raise prices and I still think it's cheap because it's like that's just where I go when I have a photo I really like I've been using the fitbod app and it's just been so perfect for my at-home workouts and it's 60 bucks a year I've paid trainers 60 bucks an hour to come train me I would pay so much more because of how well that product is fitting my needs so

22:19yeah I wonder if that total serviceable Market is what some apps are starting to bump up against and need to start looking at how these bigger players are starting to diversify income streams I think that's exactly right it's hard to know when you're bumping up against that ceiling the question we always got hit with at Crunchyroll was like how many people will actually pay for an anime only streaming service when we got there we had 200 000 subs and I remember us being so skeptical of Ever Getting Beyond where we were the idea of getting to a million mind-blowingly hard there was weeks where we would lose like

22:58a thousand Subs you know or really slow inching along pacing and we just kept getting that question like how many people will actually pay for this fast forward to today and I think there are over 12 million paid subscribers and we didn't increase price for a long time we really wanted to exhaust all the possible ways of bringing on new subscribers not to mention like we tried to launch other products that were like solving tangential needs for people who were canceling Crunchyroll so we tried a bunch of different things and only got to a price increase pretty deep into my time there you know after six or seven

23:32years of really focusing on paid subscribers and scaling that up as much as possible um honestly shocked in that Crunchyroll to get to 12 million subscribers I think there are maybe like two things going on simultaneously here and I want to hear one about how you at Crunchyroll started to solve this and found new ways to grow and expanded that audience but I think there's a second thing at play here here that it's kind of the rising tide lifts all boats that consumers are more and more willing to pay via subscriptions for things they care about for things they value and yes there is subscription fatigue people complain about how many

24:10subscriptions they have but then look at the industry it's growing because when you deliver value people are willing to pay so I think I wonder if some of crunchyroll's growth was part of that Rising tide but then I'm sure y'all must have done a lot of work so tell me about what it took to get from those tens of thousands of subscribers and not even believing you could hit a million to 12 million subscribers which is just incredible I mean we could talk for a full day give me the highlights give me the highlights so the highest level we thought a lot about how do we acquire

24:41more subscribers how do we retain our existing subscribers there's a lot of sub bullets in both of those we did a lot of marketing stuff a lot of partnership stuff and those were really important but at the end of the day what's the most important was like what shows we had on on the service and then we tried to build a strong brand around that and back to the T-shirt thing it wasn't always about building the best video player or the best payments engine or the best website or apps we were able to compete on kind of a different dimension because of the deeper relationship we had with our

25:17audience and so we thought a lot about how do we build out a business around our subscribers and introduce other revenue streams like merch and events and gaming and a bunch of different things and so that was useful because we didn't have to like have the best video player in line with Netflix or Amazon Prime of the world but one of the things you mentioned there is expanding shows so ultimately and you talk about this in a lot of your blog posts including the price increase is that ultimately the amount of money you're going to be able to charge and the revenue you're going to get per customer just really boils

25:53down to how much value you're delivering so it sounds like a lot of that growth had to do with just how do we deliver more and more and more value that's exactly right and I know that's like opaque and flippant to say but it really is all that matters and so what do you do from that you got to really figure out why people are buying your product and try to double down as much as possible on that but the hard part is you also got to keep an eye on why some of your audience is canceling and whether you can start trying to solve some of their problems and gradually

26:25expand from your core of your subscriber base one of example from Crunchyroll when we got there most of the people who were paid subscribers for control at that time were the most hardcore anime fans in the world and we had to adjust how we welcomed new anime fans and that's like a branding and Vibe thing and that showed up in some of the marketing stuff we did but that was a big change and honestly it took a little bit of a change within the company from a cultural perspective because the company was all die hard anime fans and so yeah I think there is mechanics like

26:59that to be mindful of and to think about like okay I need to figure out the value that my existing subscribers are getting I need to make sure I'm reinforcing that but I also need to be mindful of how to slowly expand from my core audience today too if I want to continue driving subscriber growth how do you figure that out I mean you actually talk about this in several other posts but let's talk through aspects of that you survey your users you product analytics how did y'all figure out who those core users were and what kept them and then how did you figure out what those lighter users

27:32who they were and then how to kind of bring them deeper into the Crunchyroll experience surveys are crucial and there's different ways to do that you could do like live interviews pick up the phone talk to some of your most passionate longest tenured subscribers figure out why they have been around for a while you could talk to people who are canceling like right away and try to get a sense of what's the difference here one easy analysis we did pretty consistently in the streaming world was this was back when free trials were a thing you could do it with like the First Billing month as well but look at

28:05the people who are canceling their subscription early on look at the people who are making it through that period and look for the behavior that is different about those two groups and try to figure out early on what is indicative of risky Behavior what is signaling valuable Behavior try to bend the product in those directions that onboarding period is like the most crucial part of a subscriber journey and that could be the first day the first app session or the first month that somebody's using your product that's usually the place to focus if you're really trying to like figure out why people are getting value from what

28:40you're providing and trying to figure out how to like bend the product more toward that direction that's a more objective data analysis exercise but yeah I would definitely do the surveys and you could do that as part of onboarding or just kind of ad hoc to your whole audience and there's different flavors of that you could just send them like a Google form or you could literally hop on a zoom and talk to some people and really dig into what they value and what they would like to see from your product so for the people who are canceling how do you really suss out like there's cohorts that are just

29:14never going to subscribe so there's I think you say one of your posters three buckets it's like the people who subscribe and say subscribe the people who cancel but you actually have potential with them and they have the people who are just not worth chasing but how do you figure out who is who and then especially I think a lot of people will be thinking okay the people who cancel but are actually winnable people how do you suss out what's actually going to be valuable enough to keep them subscribed and go after that market yeah there's like gradients here I guess there's some people who maybe try your

29:50product and they ask for something that's totally abstract totally different than what you're trying to do in a lot of those cases I think you just gotta say okay well thanks for coming by we'll see you later then there are people who are asking for things that are not totally different than what you're doing today for example with Crunchyroll we'd get a lot of requests for like popular shows or shows that were kind of under the radar that we could reasonably try to go get and we go try to get it if we got it we'd email them and say hey this is now on the

30:19service you want to come back and maybe potentially offer some kind of discount to come back or trial period it's kind of an intuition thing I think most operators will probably be able to suss out okay this person just probably accidentally signed up or totally misunderstood our value prop before they signed up yeah this person's pretty close and I think we could win them back if we just made some slight adjustments or slightly bent our product in this direction it's fascinating too in the consumer space just how big the numbers can be is that if you have product Market fit adjacency where people are coming in for some reason but you're

30:56just not quite solving their problem if you figure that out and go from 10 20 trial start rate to 25 30 trial start rate it can just make such a dramatic difference in your business and it's not like growth hacking your paywall you have to actually deliver the value you actually have to figure out what they need and solve those problems it feels like there's just so many competing things there like how much effort you put into new features how much you're testing your paywall how much you're offering discounts there's just so many things to be thinking about I mean the thing about writing the newsletter has

31:37been this is all just like a balancing act and it just takes High judgment decision making there's no Universal right answer to balancing between all these pieces right I think it's like getting a strong sense of your business and like what is driving Revenue growth and then being mindful when things start ticking in different directions one thing that we talked a lot about in the streaming world it's like this pendulum swinging between different business priorities and growth and profitability and all these counter forces and you're always just trying to like fine tune and tweak things and choose the right path but it's all a balancing act and there's

32:14no Universal right answer and that's why it's been fun to write about the Frameworks because I'm just trying to write out the constructs of how we made certain really hard but important decisions and one of the things you keep coming back to and a lot of your posts is that it really does depend on stage like if you're kind of early and pre-product Market fit maybe don't worry as much about returning which is kind of like counter advice to what a lot of people would expect like oh you need to solve the Leaky bucket first through all these retention tactics and win back campaigns and all that

32:47but when you're early probably better to keep focus on product it's interesting how you end up in these Frameworks talking about the context around those different kind of growth stages when your pre-product Market fit you should really just be focused on trying to really find The Sweet Spot of what you want to do and the product you want to build and an audience you should not be really worried about what your cancel flow looks like or overthinking price it's really about a Relentless focus on finding product Market fit and I know that's like another opaque phrase but that's all that really matters early on and so one of the risks I have with

33:28writing the newsletter is there's a bunch of I think early stage writers on substack reading it and I really don't want them thinking about running paid ads out of the gate or thinking about how to better retain long-term subscribers it's a total different set of priorities and it's about just finding that initial traction which is extremely difficult yeah interestingly though in one of your posts you do kind of mention that when retention is super low it might actually be time to just completely rethink things so I mean it's going to vary business to business and Netflix looks way different than the kind of like I was talking about the

34:05media and subscription app does have fairly low retention but yeah how do you decide you know is retention reasonable and there's a path to more value or is it just so low you need to like rethink things yeah if you have like a bunch of people downloading your app using it once and never using it again I think you don't have product Market fit at that point it doesn't even have to be that extreme if they use it three times in the first week but then never come back that could work for some consumer products but for most probably not so I think retention is a part of evaluating

34:38whether or not you have found traction but I don't think it's worth thinking too hard about don't beat yourself up about like some of the retention stuff that we've written about especially those growth tactics you know it's like offering discounts in the cancel flow or trying to solve the problem in the cancel flow yeah there's different growthy tactics which are really aimed at catching people on the fence about canceling before they actually cancel I would put all that stuff out in the future after you have enough subscribers for that to be meaningful yeah and that's a good point too I mean I hadn't thought about it quite this way but it's

35:13like early on your product should be what retains not growth hacks like if you're having to work so hard on subscriber life cycle marketing and doing all these win back campaigns and offering discounts then that's actually probably a sign that you need to double down and figure out what's wrong with the product that the product the value you're actually delivering is not what's retaining them yeah exactly all right Reed we could talk for four more hours and maybe I'll have you back on at some point to talk through like 10 more blog posts because they're all so good we've got through like kind of one and a half

35:45or one in two quarters but it was so fun and we'll link to all these blog posts that we mentioned and growth croissant but anything else you want to share as we're wrapping up no this was awesome I would love to come back thank you for sharing the newsletter and thanks for having me on it's been a blast [Music] thanks so much for listening if you have a minute please leave a review in your favorite podcast player you can also stop by chat.subplub.com to join our private community [Music]