Before You Go Deep, You Need to See How the Subscription Business Fits Together

Last week, we went pretty deep into subscription technology. We published nine new Subscription Technology Vendor Briefs covering subscription management, billing and monetization platforms, along with a guide to why vendor history matters when you are choosing technology.

Those are not beginner resources. They are for someone who is already comparing platforms and trying to understand what a company really does, how its capabilities came together, what may sit with partners or other systems, and what questions to ask before making a decision.

While we were building all of that, I kept thinking about someone at the other end of the spectrum. What if you are new to subscriptions and do not yet know how all of these pieces fit together?

Maybe you have just joined a subscription, membership or recurring-revenue business. Or maybe you are very experienced in finance, marketing, product, technology or operations, but your role has gotten broader and suddenly you need to understand much more of the business.

We already have a lot of basics content throughout the Member Center on acquisition, pricing, payments, metrics, retention, technology and more. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was still a problem:

If you are new, how would you even know where to start?

You should not have to hunt through categories, already know the terminology or know the right question before you can begin to understand how a subscription business works.

I wanted to give you a clearer way in.

Introducing How Subscription Businesses Work

• How Subscription Businesses Work: A Practical Beginner’s Guide is the first book in our new Subscription Operators Book Series.

And yes, it is an actual book, available on Amazon.

I edited a special Member Center edition specifically for Subscription Insider members. It includes additional guidance on how to use the book and connections to deeper Member Center resources when you are ready for the next step.

I wrote the book because subscription businesses are easy to learn in pieces and much harder to understand as a whole.

Someone can know acquisition, billing, retention or technology really well and still miss how decisions in one part of the business affect the rest of the subscriber relationship. For someone new, that can make the business feel more complicated than it needs to be.

I wanted to give them the whole picture first.

The book gives them a foundation, a common language and a way to see how the pieces connect. At the center of it is our Subscription Lifecycle Operating Map, which helps make that bigger picture visible.

From there, the deeper Member Center resources make a lot more sense.

Who I Think Will Find It Useful

I wrote this as a foundation book on purpose. If you have just joined a subscription, membership, club or recurring-revenue business, it gives you a place to begin. It can also help if you already know one part of the business well but now need to understand more of what happens around it.

And I think it could be particularly useful when you are bringing someone new onto your team.

Instead of handing them a collection of articles and expecting them to figure out how everything connects, you can start them with the larger picture. They get a common language, a map of the business and enough understanding to know where they need to go deeper next.

Take a look at what is useful to you, and as always, let me know what would help you next.

Kathy

Kathy Greenler Sexton
CEO & Publisher
Subscription Insider®