Ended up studying a bunch of #DTC subscription data lately and found a troubling trend in the subscription ecommerce market.

Here's the data and my best @web impression

Where's this data coming from?

Our @profitwell metrics product provides free subscription metrics by plugging into ReCharge, Stripe, Recurly, Braintree - whatever you're using.

We now have roughly 20% of the entire subscription market on it - so lots to study 2/

When COVID initially hit we started studying the aggregate trends in what we call the ProfitWell Index.

After cleaning everything up (outliers, etc), we were left with 15k companies ranging from johnny and Jane startups to Fortune 50 in Saas, DTC, Media, etc. 3/

This data studies the bottom of the funnel and post funnel - revenue and retention, which complements the great analysis or data published by @TaylorHoliday, @AaronOrendorff, @digitallynativ, @andrewjfaris, @TravelinTweeter, and a bunch of others. Thanks for paving the way fam 3/

Here's the aggregate subscription index since Jan 2019 (SaaS, DTC, etc). We all got hit for a few weeks and then generally recovered back to the beautiful compounding growth of subscription revenue. 4/

Some verticals suffered greatly - anything having to do with going outside - but others just absolutely crushed it. This was subscription ecommerce's (and ecommerce in general's) time to shine with insane growth rates in aggregate. Insane is the only way to describe this. 5/

If we zoom in though, look what's happened the past few weeks, we're actually starting to *contract*. 6/

Why is this happening? Well the growth side is actually coming from the obvious wave of new revenue. This data is one layer deeper - it's showing the daily new revenue (new customers and upgrades) since Jan 2020. COVID directly correlates with an insane jump. 7/

The contraction is coming from an almost equal inverse when we look at the daily lost revenue (churn and downgrades) since Jan 2020. 8/

Sure, we're netting up given the new customers, but we're at risk of losing a once in a generation opportunity because - quite simply - our retention sucks. 9/

The beauty of recurring revenue is that it's the first business model where the relationship is baked directly into how you make money. We need to foster and build these relationships instead of treating this as a single move game. It's multi-move. 10/

When I was at Gemvara (DTC competitor to Blue Nile), the entire business was predicated on repeat purchases. If we had a subscription, it could have taken that pressure off and resulted in a better outcome. We all have that opportunity. Take it seriously.l 11/

Recap/Action steps:
1. Acquisition is great, but retention needs to be forever
2. Measure the healthy/not so healthy parts of retention (*cough* @profitwell's free). Then optimize.
3. Happy to give free retention audit w/ benchmarks and specific areas to focus on. Just DM. 12/

Ok back to my analyst hovel.

If you thought this was worth at least $1, please retweet the first tweet in the thread. Want to get this knowledge in the hands of as many people as possible.

Also, give me a follow @patticus for more.

What else do you want to know? /fin