Ep. 107 | Customer-centric subscriptions with Trade Coffee’s Mike Lackman
This week Mike Lackman, founder of Trade Coffee joins Allison Hartsoe in the Accelerator. Trade coffee believes people don’t just want good coffee, they want a variety of curated quality coffees. Mike believes that while the subscription model used to be more unique, today it is so easy that many businesses use it, sometimes to the detriment of customers. These customers then receive things they don’t need which cause them to be more skeptical of subscriptions. To be customer-centric is to deeply consider the incremental value for the customer and respect the dollars given in return.
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Allison Hartsoe: 00:00 This is the customer equity accelerator. If you are a marketing executive who wants to deliver bottom line impact by identifying and connecting with your revenue generating customers. Then this is the show for you. I’m your host Allison Hartsoe, CEO of ambition data. Every other week I bring you the leaders behind the customer centric revolution who share their expert advice. If you are ready to accelerate, then let’s go! Welcome everybody. Today’s show is about creating customer-centric subscriptions that go well beyond the box. To help me discuss this topic is Mike Lackman. Mike is the CEO of trade coffee, a company which believes every cup should be your best ever, and since I’m sitting here drinking a cup myself, I know that this is something I’m very interested in. Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike Lackman: 00:51 Great to be here, Allison. Thanks for having me.
Allison Hartsoe: 00:53 So tell us a little bit more about Trade Coffee and what encouraged you to start this company.
Mike Lackman: 00:58 So Trade does two things really well. First, we connect consumers to the very best coffee personalized to them by a variety of the country’s very best coffee roasters. And second, we help those roasters make coffee on demand for consumers and use e-commerce as a weapon that’s profitable and incremental to their business to grow in ways that are sustainable for them because we’re so excited by what’s happening in the world of craft coffee.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:23 So you’re targeting specifically small roasters people who might not have the marketing heft to be known nationwide, or is it worldwide?
Mike Lackman: 01:32 Exactly. Put very simply, we connect consumers to the very best coffee that they can make at home. And that, in our opinion, is made by the country’s best roasters. We help those roasters use e-commerce as something that can grow their business and the way it’s a creative and profitable and reach this nation full of customers who are looking for their product.
Allison Hartsoe: 01:52 So would it be a stretch to say that your Alexa fora for coffee?
Mike Lackman: 01:55 There are so many like for this for that thing. I’ve heard Spotify for us a lot and that a lot of what we do is curation. I think there are probably some analogs to stitch fix, but realistically we solve a very fundamental consumer value proposition, which is that people don’t just want good coffee, they want a variety of different coffees that are tailored to their taste and so the ability to know what’s important to you, focus on those things, but then have sufficient variety within that world of coffee you’re building for yourself. It’s a really hard experience to create on your own as a consumer, and we think that that leaves an opening for someone like us to do it really well for them as a third party, and we just take that obligation really seriously. We need to prove that we deserve to exist in this market, and so that means absolutely delighting consumers, but also creating so much incremental value in the way that we curate our selections, that we’re materially growing the businesses of our partners in the roaster side of the equation.
Allison Hartsoe: 02:52 I love that it’s like all boats rise and it sounds like Mike, that this isn’t your first rodeo. This isn’t the first time you’ve done a DTC.
Mike Lackman: 02:59 It’s not. I actually came out of the world of operations on, you know, warehouses and call centers and pick pack and ship and things of that nature and then kind of became any commerce merchant marketer over the last decade or so. Did that in the gifting space and in the pet space, but learned a lot about not only basic DTC marketing, but a lot about a pleasurable good subscription along the way.
Allison Hartsoe: 03:19 Oh, that’s perfect. So let’s say that my goal is to just produce an avalanche of revenue through recurring sales of all these quality products that I can pick out. Why should I care about being seen as another subscription box company?
Mike Lackman: 03:35 So one of the first conversations I had with the team that I worked with, I actually joined right after our company’s beta. So I was not the first person in the company, but one of the first conversations I have with our team was if we become a box of the month club, I’d rather just turn off the website and play ping pong until we run out of money. I just don’t think that’s something that’s worth doing. I think that in order for us to earn the trust and the dollars that consumers are so rightfully very careful of today, you really need to solve a core proposition, and subscription needs to be a very natural fit for something that makes that outcome better for consumers. The problem is that, and frankly, at different points in my career, I’ve been on the wrong side of this equation, so I think it takes one to know one, the availability of subscription as a model to sellers is so inexpensive to fulfill compared to where it was six or seven years ago that I think it’s really proliferated as a business model and in a lot of cases, in a way, it’s unnatural to consumer fit.
Mike Lackman: 04:34 So consumers are justifiably skeptical of subscriptions because they don’t want to get jammed with a bunch of inventory they don’t want, and they don’t want to get stuck with things that they can’t cancel. And I think that retailers, because you can put an app on your Shopify site for 15 bucks, are trying to, in some cases, I think push the subscription model in the absence of really good product-market fit, which in our opinion is a losing equation.
Allison Hartsoe: 04:56 So let’s talk a little bit more about that because what I’m hearing you say is it used to be hard to do a subscription model. Now it’s just a matter of installing the Shopify app or whatever app would support that. And as a result, people are just, let’s call it product pushing. They’re just getting product out there for the sake of getting product into the market, but they’re not really thinking about it from a customer-centric point of view. And I think you called it a product-market fit. Can you talk a little bit more about how you see that world?
Mike Lackman: 05:27 I think I admittedly sort of a bit of a straw man there. I think there’s a lot of people doing subscription well. I also think there’s plenty of products that consumers don’t love that they’re subscribed to. And so it’s just a matter of making sure that you’re on the right side of the line. You mentioned the subscription product used to be really hard, and now they’re not as hard. The pipes behind how to set up a schedule and automatically bill are way easier to sustain, and it has ever been the case. Running a good subscription model is harder than it’s ever been, and it’s still a really huge opportunity if you can do it well and kind of how we think about it. So at a really basic level, I look at three layers to the whole equation, which is first, what’s your consumer dieting proposition?
Mike Lackman: 06:05 What’s the thing that you really do very, very well, that is a big enough impact that it matters to a reasonable number of people, and that is the functional benefit that creates the emotional benefit that comes about from solving that functional problem. All those things wrapping together, two, you have this notion then of what I’ve seen described not just as product-market fit but market product channel model fit, which is at least in my estimation, a sense of market product fit. How is this thing that you solve, a fit for a sufficient market that it’s worth doing and then channel and model? Who are the people for whom this is a good solve, and what’s a reasonable way to find them both in media and in terms of a go-to-market experience? Only after you’ve really dug into all those things, do you ask the question, how does subscription, how is it really the best way to solve those higher-level problems?
Mike Lackman: 07:00 And if you can build a subscription experience that is just absolutely welded into the DNA of solving that value proposition through that market product channel model, that kind of leak the app to keep rebuilding as you keep building, you go to market strategies, you can build some really sustainable experiences with very high retention rates. I think if, by contrast, you take a merchant first approach and merchandising is critical to all of what we do, but in this regard, it’s not the first layer. If you take a merchant first approach and say, here’s this inventory, some of it is a consumable. People run out of it frequently. Let’s make it a subscription. I don’t think that creates a really good subscription model and it’s a really tempting thing to do, especially at the early stage of a business when you’re trying to create as much revenue as possible, and you’re under tremendous pressure to create a strong return on your marketing spend.
Allison Hartsoe: 07:51 So let me take issue with that for a minute because I think there may be one example where, or a couple of examples where if I’ve got a consumable that is the example I’m thinking of is diapers. When I was a new mom trying to go to the store and puzzle babies in and out of the car and into the store to pick up diapers that didn’t fit easily into the basket was just a real hassle. And yet when I said to my relatives, Hey, I’m going to have a diaper delivery service, they were like, Oh my gosh, why would you want to do that? It’s so inconvenient. So I ended up in the disposable diapers, but this is a great example of something that should it become a subscription. I don’t really have an emotional connection. I just have a transactional connection to something like that. Are there certain types of products that really do well with that kind of consumable approach that don’t need the depth of product market channel model fit?
Mike Lackman: 08:45 Well, I certainly think diapers is a good example of a vertical that sells pretty well in subscription. I think the two questions are; first, my paradigm here is definitely more about when you’re looking at a company versus just one skew, how do you build these models in a way that’s really successful? And so I think diapers can fit really well into the business model of a seller who solves a central value proposition around taking care of your newborn child, but the subscription model is only going to be a viable outcome if the ability to change diapers sizes, change cadences, accommodate for the fact that you went on vacation or you picked some up at the store, and now you don’t want to be overstocked, especially if you’re an apartment and diapers are very bulky, shifts on a nighttime diapers and your kids get a little bit older.
Mike Lackman: 09:28 Those experiences are really important. And there’s also a male element of being realistic about the amount of earned trust and engagement consumers have with your brand that they’re willing to log in, go through an experience where they actually want to change their preferences, engage with the brand at that level. That’s what’s required to build a really strong lifetime value. And so I think back to your point about diapers, again, if you’re a merchant that already sells very frequently to a customer and you think that there’s a six-month stretch where you want diapers to show up every two weeks, that could be a really good outcome. If you’re a company that wants to market to that customer on a lifetime and you’re not prepared to really make that process of the size of my diapers changed twice in nine months. If you’re not prepared to make that a really great experience, you’re definitely not prepared to make a one or two or a three year kind of a lifetime value proposition investment in the kind of advertisements required to reach those customers.
Allison Hartsoe: 10:22 And it sounds like this is a common mistake that you see or you have a radar for?
Mike Lackman: 10:27 Yeah, I think we’re just very humble about the idea that customers are very sensitive to being jammed with too much inventory and it’s not that hard to get them into the first two or three orders, especially for trade where our reorder frequencies are so rapid, very many of our transactions are every week or every other week. The risk of hitting people with two or three orders too many in the very early stages of a lifetime engagement is really high, and especially when you’re growing a new business, all those signals are really positive. If you’re acquiring customers and you’re getting up to the second or the third order in the first 45 or 90 days of a customer’s lifetime, all you want to do as a marketer at that point is step on the gas, and you need to be really disciplined about making sure that each customer lifetime is as durable as possible. If you really want to build a great company.
Allison Hartsoe: 11:14 So does that go as far as to suggest to the person buying, Hey, we’ve sent you a lot of coffee recently, is it too much? Would you ever send an email like that? Asking them if they’ve need to pull back their order?
Mike Lackman: 11:26 We haven’t specifically asked that question because I do think that starting the question on a negative footing, we have found that we’ve been really successful when we make customers more aware of the features that are available to them to customize their schedules. So being able to change your next order date really flexibly. Being able to customize which coffee’s showing up when it’s showing up, how to deal with a vacation, how to very easily pause a subscription indefinitely and then turn it back on. Very many of the folks who were asking to stop showed really sincere intent for turning it back on, especially around seasons, like the end of the summertime when you’re traveling or the end of the vacation period, like at the end of the holidays. Those are the kinds of things we’re making them aware of those features and then making really a deliberate investment in the products that takes some time to do well based on what’s most important to customers. That’s what’s necessary for us to sustain the lifetime value. That’s at the core of our business model.
Allison Hartsoe: 12:16 I want to talk a little bit more about lifetime value because obviously we love it, but one of the things that makes CLV spin is how recently someone ordered and the frequency that they order. We sometimes think about that as cadence and what I’m hearing you say that I think is an interesting twist on the cadence is sometimes buyers will reflect a seasonal cadence, like you’ll see a big push from people around the holidays when they do black Friday, and maybe you see another big push when new product launches happen, but in this case, with a subscription order, you’re really kind of matching the cadence of someone’s life. Am I on vacation? Am I at home, am I not, am I drinking a lot of coffee, or am I putting in tea for awhile? That kind of cadence is hard to pick up. D, is there a way that you sense that in the CLV models that you do?
Mike Lackman: 13:06 Yeah. I think there are two pieces to what you’re saying. One is it’s a very logical explanation of what merchants are always trying to achieve, which is share of wallet on the part of the consumer. If they’re going to buy coffee, we want them to buy it from us. If they’re going to buy, you know, if you look at Wayfair, really, really successful category merchant, if they’re going to furnish their house or decorate their house, we should be the ones that are doing it. We should own every one of those dollars. Casper is not a mattress company. They are a sleep company. They want every sleep dollar that the customer’s going to spend. So similarly, if we think about what it takes to earn that kind of pervasive trust and the part of the consumer in this one part of their life, I think it requires earning that kind of functional trust that you’re there for them as their life changes.
Mike Lackman: 13:49 If not, I think consumers are going to make really rational decisions to buy as much from you as they know can be sustained by the way that you do business. Which is to say, I’ll buy as much coffee from you as I might want to see show up once in a while on a Lark. That’s a much smaller business than the kind of trust, which is, I know I’m never going to run out, and I know I’m never going to get jammed with too much and feel like I wasted money, boy and I have no, I’m never going to get coffee I don’t like. Being able to re-earn that loyalty versus looking at it from that like start a lifetime value, kick the customer off, and then go onto acquiring the next customer. That’s what’s really important if you want to own that share of wallet, which is really what lifetime value is trying to measure.
Mike Lackman: 14:31 And so when you get into then tactically how you build a business that accomplishes that. I do think it’s where you get into that notion of customer segmentation. What are the different kinds of customers or products able to serve? What behaviors do they administrate? What’s most important to them and how do we build features that really nail it for every one of those people. And I would say in our first two we’ve sold nearly 600,000 bags of coffee. We’ve definitely made plenty of mistakes all along the way chasing our tails by trying to be too many things to too different too many different people, and the successes that have gotten us here have come when we focus on those core experiences that just drive tons of value to demonstrate consumer behaviors, which are our huge part of our core customer base.
Allison Hartsoe: 15:13 So when you talk about those core experiences, what I find very interesting is the quiz on the site that seems to give you maybe a little bit more color behind the transactional behavior. Why is someone buying, why do they belong in a particular customer segment? Do you use that quiz to help relate back to the segments and then to build the corresponding experience?
Mike Lackman: 15:37 That’s exactly what we do. And frankly, one of the things that we are a bit cloak and dagger about in the way that our site is explained, and this is something I would expect to see change a fair amount as we continue to grow, is that we actually have a couple of different products based on what we can learn about you from that quiz. It’s only six questions, but it really tells us a lot about your sense of price value and coffee both as a core product in terms of the price per being depending on where it’s grown and what quality it is and then the produced product, the shipped product. There are some really big, good, better, best kind of price buckets that define the category, and consumers aren’t necessarily in a place where they want to start the conversation by saying, do I want the high price of the low price?
Mike Lackman: 16:19 Do I want the Fender Stratocaster or the beginner guitar player Squier guitar that looks like a fender. That kind of good, better, best is not necessarily built into consumer behavior in coffee. And so a big part of what we learn about is who is this customer? How much value are they ready to get out of the best thing we can do for them? And then how do we find the best fit for that price-value equation where us in tandem with one of our roaster partners will absolutely delight the hell out of this customer. So they want to do it again.
Allison Hartsoe: 16:49 When you say how much value do they get, are you thinking about how you fit into their lives, or are you thinking about it from a quantitative point of view? What does that part mean?
Mike Lackman: 16:58 Much more granular, much more tactical. So we have coffee. The cheapest coffees we sell are when we sell a two-pack of our most modestly priced blends for $25, and that’s usually about 10 or 15% more expensive than random organic coffees in a Public or something like that. From there, we sell coffees up through 16, 18, 20, 25 dollars a bag on up to some really special coffees which can be 30 40 50 $80 a bag. And so what we’re trying to understand is I could absolutely look at this customer and say the best coffee they will ever get their hands on in their life is this $21 pack, and they’re a grown on this tiny little farm in Panama, and this roaster bought 100 pounds of it last year and here’s this incredibly special bag. And if I know they’re putting milk and sugar in it, and they’ve never really asked questions about, gee whiz, I never left the grocery store before.
Mike Lackman: 17:51 What could coffee taste like? That’s a really lousy outcome. They’re not going to taste everything that’s special in that. And I think they’re probably gonna feel like they got a big gouge by the experience. Conversely, I think if we throw a random house blend at somebody who decides in their budget that coffee is the thing they want to do really well in life, we can really disappoint them. They waited a couple of days for this thing to show up in the mail. It was made on-demand for them and then it tasted mediocre. And so figuring out what that difference is. It’s not just a chemical which tones and tasting those do you want. It is a whole price-value equation and the experience behind that coffee, the roaster’s brand, the explanation of their story, where they came from, why that company was founded, what trade can teach you about coffee? All those things around the core coffee experience have to come together where the price value feels like an amazing outcome for the consumer because again, they’re working insanely hard for their money and we need to take really seriously the burden of making them feel like they got a great outcome when they chose to give us their hard-earned money.
Allison Hartsoe: 18:55 I get it. Those are great examples, and I hate to admit that I probably fall in the milk and sugar crowd where I don’t taste the difference yet that maybe I just haven’t been enlightened.
Mike Lackman: 19:05 Just because it’s everything we do. It’s not to say that you can’t taste the difference between coffee if you put milk and sugar in it. We actually spend a lot of time focusing on coffees that are great for milk and sugar drinkers. It’s just there are certain coffees among our assortment. And especially when you layer that against the different price tiers that exist. Well, you have to be really deliberate about what it takes to create the best outcome possible for the consumer. And there’s a really important responsibility we have within specialty coffee that if we have some within the world of specialty, lower grade coffees that are still really solid coffees, farmers don’t get to decide which ones they grow at the beginning of a season. Some seasons are awesome, some seasons are less awesome, and there’s a patchwork of farmers and roasters that bring all this product to market.
Mike Lackman: 19:50 They need sustainably high prices to be able to keep investing in those operations. And in a lot of cases, a blend of a couple of different levels of coffee quality can solve a price value of equation for a consumer and create more liquidity in the kind of markets that sustain this craft coffee movement. So we take that whole component really seriously. This is not about us just scraping the cream off the top of a small market and putting a giant markup on it. It’s really trying to create a better business for the participants in the value chain along the way.
Allison Hartsoe: 20:18 So you were talking about the roaster side of the equation and the grower side, but I was also wondering about if you can bring the customer along in terms of maturity, can you take somebody who is not a coffee aficionado and move them up the curve to become more educated? Is that part of the value prop?
Mike Lackman: 20:37 The analogy I use for this is that it’s a lot like the beach. We can get everybody up to the beach, and then people are going to choose how deep they want to go in the water, and some people are just going to hang out and read a book and that’s great. And there’s going to that person who decides they’re going to learn how to scuba dive and they’re going to go out a mile and go 50 feet deep. And you kind of have every difference along the way. This guy learns how to boogie per board. That woman learns how to surf. People are going to choose how deep they want to get into the movement, and it’s not our job to say, Hey, unless you’re an amazing surfer, you don’t belong here. Our job is to kind of create a space on the beach for every person and then create a bigger world around this. And back to my point a minute ago, that’s what our roaster partners are looking for as well, which is let’s make this specialty movement bigger. Let’s keep the ethos around supporting sustainable growers and supporting the smaller American businesses and bring more people under that tent. And I think you’ve gotta be able to be really welcoming to the people who want to bring you in at your most basic level on hanging out there for a while while finding those folks who are ready to go a level deeper and really showing them something that’s pretty exciting.
Allison Hartsoe: 21:37 Oh, I love that. Creating space on the beach. What a perfect analogy. Let’s talk a little bit about the acquisition side because I imagine as people are somewhat dynamic, you’ve created a space for them on the beach, and some of them go deeper and some do not. At the same time, you’re trying to find who wants to come to the beach. And that acquisition side must be somewhat challenging as you’ve got different degrees of people who are engaging with your product.
Mike Lackman: 22:03 It is, and I think it’s really tough, especially at the early stages of a business, to be okay with the idea that you’re not going to be capable of converting every person you breach into a great customer. So I think as quickly as possible, we worked really hard to define our value proposition and to be realistic about where we would be able to succeed and then tried to create a funnel that would be very self-explanatory to those people. So I think promotional strategies, a great example where we really with a couple of very rare exceptions don’t like over promoting first bag experiences around subscription because a big part of our value proposition is delivering on an extraordinary coffee experience for people who want one not to deliver Brown caffeine in a cup to people who want the jitters. There’s a lot of people who drink coffee for the caffeine.
Mike Lackman: 22:50 We sell coffee as food. We sell coffee as something really special to people who want it to be special, and I think that making sure that there’s an economic level of qualification, albeit with an initial discount that’s sufficient to be able to convert people. That balance is a good example of trying to figure that out in a funnel experience, and that is the perfect example of when you talk about the difference between product-market fit and product market channel model that which is something that Reforge their blog was the first time I read that Brian Balfour is the person who wrote the article. When you talk about that channel model, that that is that, what is your promotional strategy? How is it represented, and then how is it explained in certain go to market channels, and you really have to be open to rebooting that every time you come up with a new channel or a new go-to-market strategy.
Allison Hartsoe: 23:34 And when you say open to rebooting it, what that brings to mind for me is retention. Well, you’ve got a group that you acquire and then a group that maybe you need to reacquire and a group that you’ve retained. Is that what you’re talking about in terms of adjusting it as you go?
Mike Lackman: 23:47 I think that’s right, and probably the easiest way to think about this would be the pretty classic paradigm of a difference between search and social, right? When you’re advertising to someone in a search medium, you’re solving a specific thing they’re searching for. When you’re advertising in social media, you’re starting a conversation about this thing you think they might like, and so the manner in which you approached trial, the manner in which you approached first-order experiences is really rather different. When we think about our influencer marketing, when we think about organic referral or evangelism among our customers, those first order experiences are all different based on how they’re finding the brand and what that proposition sounds like to them. And that’s where a lot of those strategies, you’re not completely rebuilding scratch, but if you try to cut and paste something from channel a on the channel B, I think it’s a very effective way to burn a lot of money.
Allison Hartsoe: 24:37 So it sounds like what you’re saying is there’s a generational split or perhaps there could be a generational split between search and social in marketing.
Mike Lackman: 24:46 I don’t know that it cuts along those lines. I think the behavior that exists when one uses search or social is just different. And what we’re seeing is that more than ever, boomers are acting like millennials in each of those channels. An example I have about this is my dad, who is a retired person that hardly text messages two or three years ago, maxed out my family’s data plan a couple of months ago because he was using Instagram too much. So like those behaviors are happening just as much with boomers as they are with younger people. It’s really a question of, as these technology experiences become universally available to people of all walks of life, how is each form factor different and how can you market to them in a way that’s really native to the experience that they’re having, which really comes back to that notion of making sure that you’re going to market strategy is very natively built to your central value proposition.
Allison Hartsoe: 25:38 I get that, and I’m proud to say that I actually got my 13-year-old son on tick-tock. I led him, him leading me. Okay, so let’s say I’m convinced, and I understand that there’s much more complexity in the subscription model in terms of fit. How should I think about this? If I’m considering this for my business, what should I do first?
Mike Lackman: 25:58 I think the first thing is understanding the benefit that subscription can deliver your customer. When people really love our product, they love the fact that the right things show up and that it’s on time and delivered and they don’t run out of coffee. People didn’t begrudgingly sign up for Starbucks pay. They signed up because it solved a real problem for them and that was not having to wait in line having loyalty points, and those two things created public, one of the largest subscription economies in the world with the billions of dollars of floats Starbucks it’s on every, at any given time from subscribers, prepaying for coffee that they used to pay for it at the register.
Allison Hartsoe: 26:33 And a lot of intelligence about the customer.
Mike Lackman: 26:35 Exactly. And that was all earned by solving a couple of really basic things, right? That customers really wanted and were ready to buy pretty prolifically, and they had the opportunity to sell it in a place where customers were, which is to say in line at the store. So I think understanding what’s really needed to that. Your example about diapers is a good example where people don’t want to run out of diapers, and putting them in the trunk is hard. Great. Can you start to solve that? From there, what are the things in the psychology, what are the basic levels of research that are just sweat equity, things you can do that are the barriers to conversion? When you look at the MVP side of what subscription commerce looks like and then how can you build a product that’s really durable along the lifetime that’s sufficient to warrant investing in and building out not only the advertising but the whole full-funnel strategy to be able to sustain that experience over time?
Allison Hartsoe: 27:23 So not just the first purchase but the next purchase and then the lagging purchase and the retention purchase.
Mike Lackman: 27:30 And especially if you are starting from the merchant’s perspective, I really do think that you’re going to see companies like ours build early, fit on the back of subscription, and then find other ways to sell to consumers who, I know that there are customers that we’re turning down who would love to buy our product, that we could probably convert more prolifically if we augmented our offering with things that don’t look exactly like the way that we can build on the experience today. And so, finding that balance of what those barriers to conversion are and then figuring out how you can earn customer trust and loyalty over time in a way that’s needed at this central value proposition. If you can just answer that really high-level question that’s going to create the true North that guides the weeks and months of execution that’s behind actually delivering on these things in real-time, but if the subscription, true Norris design guidance kind of principles aren’t really rock solid at the very beginning. We’re not in an economy where you can operate your way out of that, and I think that as recently as four or five years ago, there are a lot of false positives which were examples of people who were able to do so because the competitive and consumer environment was different.
Allison Hartsoe: 28:36 And that may be creating kind of a bad taste for some people about subscription boxes.
Mike Lackman: 28:41 Not that it wasn’t there before. I mean P and BMG and Columbia house records did negative option continuity all through the eighties and the nineties, Jim’s have been ripping people off for years. These examples are all out there. The jelly of the month club was the butt of a joke and Christmas vacation in 1989, so I mean like these are all out there. The question is, it’s just why is it fundamentals and the problem you’re trying to solve to your consumer because they are smarter than ever about how much they’re spending and what they’re getting out of what you do for them.
Allison Hartsoe: 29:09 Yeah. Excellent. Well, Mike, that’s a wonderful way to wrap up how we think about this topic. If people want to reach you, what is the best way that they can get in touch with you?
Mike Lackman: 29:19 Well, if you want some incredible copy, check us out on drinktrade.com, we’ll send you roasted on-demand copies, and the best roasters in the country, and everyone will be perfectly personalized to your tastes. And if you want to talk about the journey that we’ve been on and more detail, I’m pretty easy to find on LinkedIn. A fair warning, if it’s a sales pitch, I might not answer, but if you just want to talk about the journey we’ve been on, or do you have any ideas or questions, or if you want to apply to one of the open roles that we have as we’re prolifically hiring on our site, don’t hesitate to reach out. I’d love to get into a conversation about it.
Allison Hartsoe: 29:50 Oh, very nice. As always, links to everything we discussed, including the link to drinktrade.com, are going to be at ambitiondata.com/podcast. Mike, thank you for joining us today. It’s been a lovely conversation.
Mike Lackman: 30:03 Thank you, Allison. This is great.
Allison Hartsoe: 30:04 Remember when you use your data effectively, you can build customer equity. It is not magic. It’s just a very specific journey that you can follow to get results. See you next time on the customer equity accelerator.