Subscription Box Answers

You may have to "patch" things together to make your business work.

• Liam Brennan

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In this episode of Subscription Box Answers, I explain how you may need to piece together a variety of different elements to make your business work. In an ideal world, simpler is better—but for most boxes, that isn’t the case. To keep your business running smoothly and the numbers in your favour, you may need to get creative. Listen to this episode for more details.

Speaker 1:

Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, liam gives the answers.

Speaker 2:

Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. As always, I hope you're having a really good day and I hope business has been going really well for you in 2025 so far. Now, today, I want to share something which should hopefully help a lot of people who listen to this podcast, and it's around what a successful subscription or subscription box business usually looks like. And this is really going out to the people who may be frustrated at where they are in their business and they're chasing growth that never seems to happen route that never seems to happen Right.

Speaker 2:

In an ideal world, everything will be really simple when it comes to your business, and you should try to keep it simple when you can. Over-complicating things sometimes can definitely make things worse and a lot more difficult than they need to be, but when it comes to growing a subscription box business or having a successful subscription box business, it's highly likely you may need to patch a number of things together to make the finances make sense. Now let me explain what I mean Again. In an ideal world, you would have one kind of box, you would have one kind of offer and you will be able to scale to the mill. You will be able to scale to the mill, you will be able to get the subscribers you need signed up on a monthly basis and you could just double your marketing budget and get double the amount of subscribers while keeping your CAC in line. Then you could triple your marketing budget and get three times the number of subscribers while keeping your CAC in line. You could keep doing this right and just grow a really, really big business, and I'm sure in some cases this can happen. But for the majority of subscription box owners that have reached massive success, I will say this is rarely the case. Normally they are trying a lot of different things and they're patching a lot of different things together so the finances actually make sense. Let me explain what we're doing in BusterBox right and just what a normal subscription box business looks like.

Speaker 2:

You may reach a certain level in your business and, depending on your niche, that could be a few thousand subscribers. It could be much bigger. It could be way bigger. Maybe if it's a really small niche, it's only a few hundred subscribers. Really depends on your niche and your marketing ability. But you will eventually reach a point where you feel like you can't go any further, and the reason why you can't go any further is your churn basically matches up to your acquisition. So you lose a certain number of people every month and you gain a certain amount of people every month and, no matter what you do, you can't get your churn lower. And no matter what you do, you can't increase your marketing budget because if you do, the CAC rises and it just doesn't make any sense financially anymore. So you feel like you've hit a wall and you're going around in circles and you need to come up with a solution to get your company growing again. This is a perfectly normal thing that can happen and it isn't discussed enough in this industry. It happens to a lot of people and to break through it you may need to patch a load of different things together so the finances make sense and you can push through.

Speaker 2:

Let me explain. In buster box we spend a lot of time on reactivations. We have a big database of people who cancel because we're acquiring people. All the time People are canceling. It's just what happens in a subscription business. So we've got this database growing all the time and we can look at segments of this database and pick out the best quality customers who have been with us for a good amount of time but for whatever, whatever reason, their circumstances have changed and they've cancelled. We're consistently working to bring as many of these people back as possible. We are reaching out with reply yes, emails. We are targeting them with direct mail sometimes. Sometimes we're picking up the phone and calling them. Sometimes. We're making a custom audience on Facebook and we're retargeting them with unique offers and sending them to unique landing pages to try and get them back. This is part of our overall growth strategy and it's very important. When you get people back who you already have on your database and you may pay a low cost to win them back, that is freeing up your marketing budget to invest in more people and it makes the finances of your business make sense.

Speaker 2:

If we never did this, things wouldn't make as much sense financially. It's really important. It's something we're patching. On the next point different kinds of boxes. In an ideal world, we would only offer one type of box and we keep everything really simple. We can't do this because dogs all have unique personalities and their owners have unique personalities as well. Some dogs are allergic to certain things. Some owners don't want their dogs having certain things, so we have to offer different kinds of boxes. We're patching this together and we're taking feedback in all the time. And if we never did it, what would happen? We would have a really high churn rate because people just wouldn't pay anymore, because the stuff wouldn't be suitable and our business would not make any sense.

Speaker 2:

The next point Selling other products. We spend a lot of time selling other products to our list and to our customers. We do this through reply yes emails. We do this through our store. We always have something going on. Why do we do this? Well, the main reason is it frees up more excessive cash flow, so our business makes more sense financially. It's something else we've had to patch on, so the business makes sense. That's pretty much why we do it. We spend a lot of time with reply yes emails because they convert the best. We have one going pretty much every single week, sometimes twice a week, and our customers really enjoy getting them Because it gives them the opportunity to get a really good deal on their product and, most of the time, not pay shipping Because it will be included in their box.

Speaker 2:

But we have to do this. We have agents on the phone. These are ringing up People who are set to cancel. They're selling them other products. They're reactivating people. We do this because it helps us. We've patched it on to our business.

Speaker 2:

We upgrade customers to other plans to raise the average revenue per user. Why do we do this? Well, if the average revenue per user is higher, it means the customer payback period is lower and we free up more excessive cash flow, which makes the business work better. So we have other plans. We've strong tour plans, we've extra toy plans, we've extra treat plans. We've other things going on in the back end, and a certain percentage of people go for these things because it makes our business work better.

Speaker 2:

Look, in an ideal world, we would not do any of this. We just send out a box and that would simply be it. But we can't do that. If we only did that, the business would not function like it does Now. All of these things may not be necessary for your business. I know there's plenty of subscription boxes out there that actually do a lot more of this stuff and they do actually completely different stuff than the stuff that I just covered. But it really depends on the niche and at a certain size. Some of this stuff is only relevant If you're only getting up and running. You definitely don't need to be worrying about putting people on the phones or anything like that.

Speaker 2:

But the point I'm trying to get at is right. When it comes to business, and especially a subscription box business or any kind of subscription business, there's a high possibility you will have to patch different things together to make the finances of the company work. It's all about lowering that customer payback period and getting people in profit as quickly as possible so you have the cash flow required to grow and to actually operate your business. Now, obviously, you need metrics behind that too. You need to have go to lifetime value and sure and all that stuff. But it kind of ties together with the payback period anyway.

Speaker 2:

But yeah, the point of this podcast was basically to explain to you what a lot of these successful subscription box businesses look like and they do, and we test a lot of things as well, and not everything will work out, but when something does work out, it's very satisfying and it can make a big, big difference to how your company actually operates. And the great thing about the day is we're we're on subly, obviously, and the platform actually allows us to test a lot of these things. It's a very flexible platform. Last week I mentioned something we're currently testing chat to cancel and that's been updated on the platform now, hopefully I'll have some more um information about that in the coming weeks and obviously stunning as well. We're testing that. That's working pretty well for us. But yeah, I hope, I hope that makes sense and going forward.

Speaker 2:

If you feel like you're stuck and you feel like things are completely hopeless and you're going around in circles and, no matter what you do, you can't push forward or you can't get your numbers to make sense, I want you to take a step back and look at the bigger picture and try to get very creative. Get creative and test things. Look for things you can patch together with what you're doing already to put things back in your favor and get your business working again. And don't feel like this is unique to you. Don't feel like this is unique to you. This is something. Trust me. This is something that regularly happens to all different sized subscription box businesses. Very rarely do things remain completely linear. Usually, you will have to get creative and patch different things on to make the business work in your favor.

Speaker 2:

I hope you found this episode helpful. Before I go, could I ask a big favor If you've enjoyed this episode and you feel like you've got value from this show, would you mind giving me a review? It doesn't matter if it's on Spotify, apple wherever you listen to this podcast, it just helps me get it out to more people. We'll be back next week at the exact same time. If you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free Facebook group and post your question there. I'll chat to you next week. Bye-bye.