The Automatic Customer Quotes

“there are two main things you need to focus on. First, as we saw in chapter 12, you need to find a way to consistently acquire customers for no more than a third of their lifetime value. Second, you need to reduce the number of customers who cancel (churn).”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“At the time it was acquired, WhatsApp did not employ a single marketing executive.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“there was a time when you bought books in a bookstore. The bookstore paid rent and therefore had to stock only the best-selling books to ensure that sales revenue per square foot was high enough to cover its rent and staff.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Therefore, your biggest competitor for your subscription business is not the rival service; it is your customer’s inertia in not using your service.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“By early 2014, WhatsApp users were sharing more pictures than were posted on Facebook and the service had twice as many users as Twitter. WhatsApp was adding a million users a day when Facebook decided it had to buy them for $19 billion. WhatsApp is a classic network model subscription, in which the value of being a subscriber increases as more people subscribe.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“The simplifier model promises two things: not only will you take to-do items off your customer’s list, you will also be the one reminding the customer that the task needs doing.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“video attracted so much attention that it crashed Dollar Shave Club’s servers. Within 48 hours of the video’s release, the company received 12,000 orders.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Holland employed a full-time telemarketer who called people who had ordered a $7 case study. First, the telemarketer would ensure that the customer had received the case study and then would follow up with an invitation to a live event on the same topic. “We ended up selling 900 tickets to a $1,500 conference just because we called someone who bought a $7 article.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“WhichTestWon.com subscribers pay $25 per quarter or $75 per year for a subscription. When I interviewed Holland, I asked her why the cost of the subscription was so low. “That’s intentional,” Holland said. “We keep the price low to get as many paying customers as we can. It’s a gazillion times easier to convert a paying customer into an event attendee than it is to convince a nonpaying customer to come to an event.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Like many subscription models, Amazon Prime is a Trojan horse that is expanding the list of products consumers are willing to buy from Amazon and giving the eggheads in Seattle a mountain of customer data to sift through.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Research firm Gartner estimates that “by 2015, 35% of Global 2000 companies with non-media digital products will generate incremental revenue of 5% to 10% through subscription-based services and revenue models.”12”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“These four factors—the access generation, light-switch reliability, delicious data, and the long tail—have led some of the world’s most successful companies and promising start-ups to shift their business models to a focus on subscriptions.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry

“Data has become an asset, and nobody has more customer information than a subscription business. Traditional companies are launching entire subscription offerings just for the data they provide.”
― John Warrillow, The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry