Dose 211: How Whatnot Became Our Second Biggest Channel at $5m

This is one of the most sensible and out-of-the-blue marketing stories. Battlbox has built their brand on incredible content and engagement. Now, with live-selling on Whatnot, they’re increasing their reach - not just through live sales - but feeding their core product too.

This week’s dose is also a full podcast interview with John Roman, so tune in on your favorite platform:

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week I had a great conversation with John Roman, CEO and founder of Battlebox, and one of the very first guests I ever had on this podcast years ago.

Battlebox is an outdoor and adventure brand built content-first. The membership, a physical box that ships every month, is still 65 to 70% of revenue.

John told me something that stopped me in my tracks. Whatnot, the live shopping platform, has become their second biggest channel. It's a $5 million channel with a clear path to double, and they only launched on it in April of last year.

Live shopping has been "coming" for a decade, and most of us stopped believing it. But John's channel isn't just moving one-off products. It's feeding his membership, his most important product, at the top of the funnel.

So let's break down what I took from our conversation, because the lessons go well beyond live selling.

1. Engagement is the offer, not the interruption

I've posted plenty of times about billing reminders, and John knows my stance. What surprised me is that Battlebox doesn't send the standard three-day heads up. John will die on that hill, and he's the first to admit it might not be best practice.

But here's what makes it work. They don't go quiet the way most brands do. Most brands skip the reminder because they're scared of reminding someone they're about to get charged. Battlebox does the opposite. They're constantly building hype for the next box.

They tease the theme. They tease an item. They drop a video around day one of delivery walking through everything inside. Everyone gets the same video, whether they're on the premium tier or a lower one, so you see exactly what you missed.

That teasing is doing the reminder's job without the dread. When I asked John how it scales, he was honest. It doesn't. There's no automation telling a story that lands with your members. That's a human writing to humans.

Most brands treat the pre-charge moment as a liability. John treats it as a chance to build anticipation. The customer who's excited about what's coming doesn't need to be talked out of leaving.

Takeaway: Audit what you send in the days before a charge. If you're going silent out of fear, you're wasting the single best moment to remind someone why they subscribed in the first place.

2. Talk to the customers who stay, not just the ones who leave

This was my favorite part of the whole conversation. Battlebox surveyed their existing customers with a 24 question survey, and about 24% of active members filled it out.

Think about that. A 24 minute survey, and a quarter of their best people sat down to answer it. Their post-purchase survey usually gets 65 to 70%, so this one took contests and giveaways to pull off, but they got the gold they wanted.

They learned that 75% of their ideal customers watch content on YouTube, not on TikTok, and not even in their members-only Facebook group. That single insight reshapes where they put their content effort.

Here's the point I keep making to brands. Everyone obsesses over why people cancel. Almost nobody asks why people stay. The cancellation survey catches someone who's already gone. The loyalty survey shows you who to go find more of.

And there's a softer benefit John named that I think is underrated. When a customer can tell a survey is genuinely personal and genuinely going to be used, their affinity for the brand grows. It's so rare that it becomes its own loyalty driver.

So Battlebox now sends it through automation, triggered when a customer hits a certain point in their life cycle, and only to their top customers. It's not a blast. It's targeted at the people whose answers actually matter.

Takeaway: Build a survey for your highest value subscribers and ask them what keeps them around. Their answers tell you who to acquire and how to build a program worth staying in.

3. Match the channel to why people are there

Battlebox is also on TikTok Shop, and John's clear that it serves a purpose. But the numbers told a story. AOV sat around $20, and they weren't seeing members come into the ecosystem. People bought a cheap, discounted item and couldn't tell you the brand five minutes later.

Whatnot is different, and the reason is intent. On TikTok, you're there to rot your brain, and buying is something the algorithm sneaks in. On Whatnot, like on Amazon, you show up to buy. But Whatnot married that buying intent to entertainment and community.

The community pieces are what struck me. When you end a show, you don't just end it. You raid someone else's show and drop your whole audience into theirs. There's a boost feature where the audience funds an ad to grow the channel, not the brand. John didn't build any of that. It comes with the platform.

That community is why it works for a subscription brand. The intent of people on Whatnot lines up with why Battlebox is there and why someone would want to keep connecting. So they naturally head to the website and grab the membership.

The results back it up. AOV is around $80, a 4x on TikTok Shop. Getting someone from Whatnot to the site is running about 30 times more efficient than TikTok Shop. July was their best month ever at over $400k, and it's now bigger than their Amazon.

Takeaway: Before you chase a shiny channel, ask why people are on it. A channel where buying intent and your community actually overlap can feed your subscription, not just sell a one-off.

Bottom line: The thread running through everything John and I talked about is proactive engagement with the right people. He's not waiting to be forced into caring about retention, the way the whole industry got forced into it when acquisition got hard.

He teases the next box instead of hiding from the charge. He surveys the customers who stay instead of only studying the ones who left. He picks a channel where the audience's intent matches his own.

Whatnot didn't become a $5 million channel because live selling is hot. It became one because Battlebox is genuinely good at engagement, and they found a place where that skill compounds. Find the thing you're already doing well, then go find where it compounds.

Until next Tuesday, that's your Subscription Prescription. 💊

- Matt Holman 🩺