Dose 212: Why 10% Off Won't Grow Your New Subscription Brand

Too many new brands are chasing the wrong things when it comes to building subscriptions. On this week’s dose, we’re talking fundamentals for what every new brand should be doing. And next week, we dive into the important elements for any established brand, so stay tuned!

This week’s dose is also a full podcast episode where we dive in deep, so tune in on your favorite platform:

Matt here with your weekly Subscription Prescription 💊

This week I want to talk to the brands at the very start of the subscription journey. Maybe you're brand new to ecom. Maybe you've been selling for years and you're turning subscriptions on for the first time.

Either way, the question is always the same: where do I spend my limited time?

Because you are resource constrained. Everyone is. When you're small, the whole game is focus. And I see new brands spend that focus in the wrong places all the time.

They obsess over their cancel portal and their win-back flows before they have anyone to win back. They polish the back end of a program almost no one has joined yet.

So let's fix the order of operations. Here's where a new subscription brand should actually be putting its energy.

This week's update is also a short podcast episode, so check out the full updates:

1. A 10% discount is not an offer. It's a shrug.

The most impactful thing you can do at this stage is acquire subscribers. That sounds obvious, but it's the part brands skip past on their way to the shiny retention tools.

And acquisition starts with your offer.

Here's the trap. Say you sell tea. One flavor, a 30 pack box. You've poured your savings into it. You can't run elaborate build-your-own bundles like the big players. So you default to 10% off to subscribe.

Put yourself in the shoes of someone who's never tried your product. How much does 10% off, or even 20%, really move them? Not much. It'll work a little, and turning it on beats doing nothing, but you're leaving the compelling part on the table.

You don't need a fancy catalog to do better. You need bulk options. Offer one box, two boxes, or three. Then scale the incentive: 10% off one, 15% off two, 25% off three. Or make the third one free, which lands somewhere near a third off.

What you're doing is giving people who already like your product a reason to commit deeper. Those are value-driven buyers, not discount hunters, and they're worth far more to you.

Gifts do the same job even more efficiently. Ten percent off plus a t-shirt, a mug, or a postcard from where your tea is sourced costs you less than jumping to 20% off. The gift protects your margin while making the offer more interesting.

Everyday Dose leans on a starter kit to pull people in. You can borrow the same thinking with whatever you have on hand. It just takes a little creativity.

Takeaway: Before you touch anything on the back end, build an offer worth saying yes to. Bulk tiers and gifts beat a flat percentage off, and they attract the buyers who actually stick.

2. Feedback is the engine, and you're already blind without it

Here's what I get genuinely jealous of when I talk to founders who started at farmers markets and small trade shows. They were talking to buyers face to face. They knew exactly why people bought.

Then you scale, you go deep on Meta, and a gap opens up between what you think is happening with your customer and what's actually happening.

The fix is to build the feedback loop early, while it's still cheap and simple to do.

Start on the site. A popup that asks how someone plans to use the product, or what their goal is, tells you more than an email capture alone ever will. Then add a post-purchase survey. Not just to learn where they heard about you, but to learn what they're hoping to get and whether they've tried something like it before.

Think about protein powder. You and I might buy the same tub from the same brand for completely different reasons. You're a bodybuilder taking two scoops a day. I'm taking a scoop twice a week because of my age. Same product, same ad, totally different intent and totally different LTV.

Once you can see that, everything sharpens. You might learn that heavy users love your product because it mixes easier than what they get at Costco. That's now an ad angle, a product page headline, and an onboarding message all at once.

You'll also learn who your ideal subscriber really is, and I promise it won't match the persona you whiteboarded. As soon as your product hits the world, it makes branding choices for you. Feedback is how you find out which ones landed.

Takeaway: Stand up a popup survey, a post-purchase survey, and a real cancellation survey now. Buyer intent drives churn outcomes, and you can't act on intent you never bothered to measure.

3. Product adoption in the first ten days wins the whole battle

Getting someone to subscribe is the hard part. The next hardest, and the most important, is getting them to actually use the product.

Keep your comms simple here. Spend a couple of hours on a decent billing reminder. Grab a good photo, write one warm line ("another month closer to your goals"), wire it to your upcoming-billing trigger in Klaviyo, and move on.

Then put your real effort into the onboarding flow for new subscribers.

Because retention starts before you ever send a win-back. If someone bought protein powder because it mixes easier, your onboarding should show recipes, mixing tips, the science behind why it works. You're driving that person to become the super user they were trying to be.

And use your feedback to decide who you're onboarding for. Maybe 10% of buyers take multiple scoops a day and are your most valuable cohort. Maybe 90% are casual. You can build for both, but you need to know the split before you write a single email.

Here's the part worth sitting with. If you sell the right offer to the right person and get them using the product in the first ten days, you've won maybe 90% of the fight. Your billing reminder can be mediocre. Your cancel portal can be rough. It won't matter, because people like the product.

Experience beats price, and adoption is where that experience gets built.

Takeaway: Do the minimum on the billing reminder and pour your time into a ten-day onboarding flow that drives product usage. Adoption is the strongest retention lever you have this early.

Bottom line:

When you're a new subscription brand, you don't have a retention problem yet. You have an acquisition and adoption problem.

Build an offer that's genuinely compelling with bulk tiers and gifts, not just a token discount. Wire up the feedback loop so you actually know who's buying and why. Then spend your onboarding energy getting those people to use the product fast.

Get that loop turning and the downstream problems (month-two drop-off, pauses, too much product) get far easier to solve. They sit downstream of a machine that's already working.

Start there. The fancy stuff can wait.

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

- Matt Holman 🩺