Subscription consultant | Building Subscription Prescription & The Cancel Page | Ecom Community in Utah
Joined August 2019
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What a clean, focused subscription brand.
@Ancestral does an incredible job in making the subscription option obvious, onboarding you to the program, and making updates clear.
This is my video series where we do breakdowns on how brands are acquiring (PDP), onboarding (email) and managing subscription experiences (portal).
Check it out, or access our free resources at thecancelpage.com
Scaling is a seesaw. New customer losses sit on one side, repeat margin from older cohorts sits on the other.
You can only lean into acquisition as fast as prior cohorts are paying you back. Fix retention first and the gas pedal gets a lot safer.
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
Agree. Every single time, adding a free gift and featuring it in the billing reminder and other places increases the retention against the control. This is an undisputed fact. The question is whether the increase in retention covers the COGS of the freebie and whether the freebie itself drives long-term retention, past the billing cicle it's featured in. If the above is true then bingo – this freebie is worth its weight in gold.
Curious what adding a free gift on Order #2 does for a subscription brand?
🎁 Free Gift Recipients: 77.9% rebill rate on Order 2
❌ Holdout Group: 70.4% rebill rate on Order 2
Given their COGS on the gift, it is well worth it.
(Also, the recipients will rebill more times)
I’m on here!
I gave up $1,000,000 this year to launch this.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
Before this year, I was cash flowing the heck out of The Starters.
We were on a strong trajectory to clear $1M+ in earnings in 2026.
But while it provided a great lifestyle, something was missing.
I knew we weren’t living up to our potential.
After all, if I was taking all our profits instead of re-investing them… how could we?
So I thought bigger. And we went to work.
I dropped my salary to $0.
Every dollar went back into building the platform for a bigger vision.
A year later, it’s here.
The Starters is no longer just a freelancer marketplace.
We’re the human brilliance platform: the place where the best e-commerce expertise lives, and where brands go to learn, get advice, and hire.
See what we built 👇
Subscription teardown series is back!
Tackling @im8health this week going over their offer, post purchase, emails, and subscription portal experience.
End to end - let’s go!
Stop asking if your LTV to CAC is 3:1. Ask what month your accumulated margin per customer pays back CAC.
For most consumable brands that needs to be month three to six. Bootstrapped with little cash? Closer to two or three, and grow only as fast as that window allows.
Matthew Holman 💊 retweeted
Greg’s right, and there’s a version of this most ecom brands are missing..
meta killed the facebook groups API in 2024, so for 2+ years, the biggest pile of unfiltered customer discussion on the internet was unreadable at scale.
with Muse, it’s back.
Join the groups, and you can pull what your whole category is saying in real time for creative strategy.
i ran it on creatine, through the lens of @damccormick13’s Create:
- 24 groups, 8.7M+ members
- 6 real objections (kidney fear, “bubble guts,” ozempic muscle loss)
- how to cross-check against what customers actually say
- 6 personas, each with a marketing move
- 10 diverse ad hooks built on real market language
full teardown 👇
Meta Muse will probably create 1000+ millionaires
This is the most slept on arbitrage I’ve seen in years and it’s not even close.
Here’s how i’d build a 1 person business powered by AI/Muse with with $0 and 0 social following
Dose #219 is live.
Why the 3:1 LTV to CAC benchmark misleads subscription brands, and the three numbers to track instead
Every subscription brand we talk to or work with wants the same thing:
To know how other brands (especially in their space) are scaling.
The "golden rule" many are chasing is a 3:1 LTV to CAC payback ratio.
But it's a myth, and in this week's dose we dive into why with Jon Blair from Free to Grow CFO. It's an incredible interview talking finance and payback and cash flow.
Like most numbers, it all comes down to what your business can make work. Not how you can use another brand's numbers as your north star.
Let's dive in: newsletter.thesubscriptiondo…
Everyone quotes the 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. Almost nobody says whether LTV means revenue or margin, or over what window.
Tomorrow's Dose breaks down why that ratio is incomplete and the three numbers I'd look at first: margin LTV, payback month, and the subscriber cohort funding your discount.
Subscribe now to get it in your inbox tomorrow:
Once you pass a few thousand subscribers, stop treating every cancel the same. Segment by order number, cart value, or lifetime spend.
$25 off a $75 subscription often outperforms 20 percent off. Order one cancels can take an aggressive discount, while a two-year subscriber may respond better to a gift or a swap.
50 percent off the next order will save more people than 25 percent off the next two. Customers value the order in front of them, not the one three months out.
If you want longer-term retention from the save, run the spread offer and accept a lower save rate. Just know which number you are optimizing for.
Most brands hesitate to discount at the cancel flow because they do not want to train discount seekers. The problem with that logic is that most people hitting cancel are gone next month anyway.
If one more order is profitable, take the shot. A bigger discount at the exit is the most effective save tactic you can test in roughly 90 percent of cases.
Dose #218 is live.
Cancel flows are your last line of defense, and the fastest short-term win in your program. Here's how to build one that actually saves people.
You want to know the big trend in cancellation prevention?
Last year and most of this year it was skip screens.
Keeps someone from cancelling, but there's a short-coming:
You don't capture any revenue from that AND skips typically lead to a cancellation before another order processes.
In this week's dose, we dive into the right approach for cancellations, and while skips have their place, the best method is still.... DISCOUNTS.
I know, I know - I hate it too. But it's the truth.
Let's dive in: newsletter.thesubscriptiondo…
Github is so cool can you imagine something like that for marketing? Update copy and it pushes out to emails and website and landing pages all over.
Devs get all the cool tools.
Your cancel flow is your last line of defense, not your retention strategy. But it's also the fastest short-term win in your program.
Tomorrow's Dose covers the three moves we use with brands: content before offers, treatments tied to specific cancel reasons, and why I discount harder at cancellation than I ever would at acquisition.
Subscribe now to get it in your inbox tomorrow:
Shipping three units at once is always cheaper than shipping one unit three times. That gap is what lets you make a quarterly offer feel like a no-brainer.
Price the upgrade from the savings you actually get, give most of it back to the subscriber, and you lock in LTV while cutting churn risk at the same time.
Stop tweaking the discount and the timer on your upsell. Start with three questions: why is this offer here, why should they pay this much, and how does it fit what they just bought.
Supplements win with more of the same. Beauty and apparel win with complete the set.
We see 20 to 30% conversion when a monthly to quarterly upgrade is offered right after checkout. The buyer just made a commitment and is far more open to a bigger one.
Frame it as a refund on the next order, not a larger charge. Then repeat the offer in the billing reminder and the portal for anyone who passed.