Hello, and welcome to Recurly's spring twenty twenty five edition of subscription sessions.
My name is Lena Tong, chief marketing officer here at Recurly, and I have the pleasure of kicking things off today.
Now some of you may be long lasting customers or partners of ours. Some of you may not know Recurly at all. If you're in the latter bucket, allow us to make a quick introduction.
We are Recurly.
We've been in the subscription game since two thousand and nine when we were founded. We're a global company with offices in Texas, Colorado, the UK, South America, and India.
We have over two thousand two hundred customers across with sixty seven million subscribers.
Just last year alone, we recovered over one point three billion in failed payments for our customers.
And on average, they saw sixteen times ROI just on our revenue recovery capabilities alone. So whether you have been in the subscription game as long as we have, And these are some of my favorite people to meet. You may be just now dipping your toes in subscriptions.
It really doesn't matter.
If you do subscriptions, you're in the absolute right place. And here's what we have for you today.
Shortly, you'll hear from Priya, Recurly's chief product officer, about the latest and greatest releases innovation for Recurly ahead. From there on out, we'll take a step back and let our guest speakers hit you with some incredible knowledge.
First up, we have fellow subscription sage, Robbie Kellner Baxter, to teach you how to build thriving subscriber communities.
Then you'll learn how to nail transactions, beat fraud, and win back subscribers with our friends at PayPal, Count, and Redfast.
Then you'll hear CFO's talk show up with Recruity CFO Steve Springseal and FabFitFun CFO Josh Maravian on how to scale finance operations the right way.
And finally, we'll round out with spring session with Sendbird cofounder Andrei Rivera on how to break into subscriptions as an ecommerce brand. But before we get into the weeds, let's level set on what matters to our industry.
Simply put, this is what truly matters. We're all trying to answer these questions. What keeps customers coming back, spending more, and spreading the word? What makes a great subscription experience?
It's hard to answer. Right? Customer expectations are constantly changing.
We do our best to understand subscriber expectations every year with our state of subscriptions report.
I'm gonna pause here for a second so you can scan this, QR code and download the report.
But don't dive into it just too much yet. I'll share some of the key findings in that report and what we build to adapt to the shifting industry.
This year, these three metrics caught our attention.
Acquisition is them, returning subscribers are up, but our solar fraud declines.
From this, we can derive that retention is now the focus for successful brands.
So building a valuable product experience is more important than ever before.
Consumers want flexibility to use subscriptions as it feeds with their lives. Subscriptions pause usage search by sixty eight percent year over year in twenty twenty four. And finally, they want a purchasing experience they can trust.
But the learning those three things comes with a lot of challenges.
I also think with a lot of opportunity. We're talking to subscription businesses every single day. Either those new to subscriptions or even years into offering our current model, and these are the common challenges we hear.
You're looking for a new and innovative way to grow subscription revenue, but you're stuck without the know how and the tools to keep up with subscriber experience preferences.
You want to get to the market fast but are overwhelmed by development, bottlenecks, and blind spots that keep you from delivering on your core offering.
You want to expand, but you your current tech stack isn't built to mitigate the complying considerations that come with expanding into new markets.
This spring, we have deliver a product build for twenty twenty five From an AI engine built on more than a decade of subscription experience to a fully native Shopify integration and targeted global pricing capabilities, Recurly merchants have the tools they need to grow smarter, more faster, and scale anywhere.
Now Priya will get into more detail into these releases.
And, I just wanna thank you for being with us today.
Priya, take it away.
Thank you, Lina. Hello, everyone. I'm Priya Lakshmi Narayanan, chief product officer at Recurly.
We've all been very busy over the last few months to deliver over fifteen new products and features to help you grow smarter, move faster, and scale anywhere.
We base our product road map on these three pillars because we believe solving for them unlocks successful and sustainable subscription models for any business, no matter their size.
We work with household names like Paramount and Twitch, as well as brands you may have never heard of. At one point, they all encountered issues around these pillars. Everyone needs help with things like fighting churn, offering the latest preferred payment methods, or even fixing back office accounting processes.
So as Lita said earlier, simply put, if you're in subscriptions, you're in the right place.
So let's talk about what we've built to help you grow smarter.
Now retention is the name of the game, and keeping subscribers engaged and finding new ways to personalize their experience is the key.
Our integration with Redfast allows merchants to surface in app notifications to their subscribers based on behavior or key events.
Listening to this, you may be already thinking about how in app engagement could mitigate involuntary churn, like expired credit cards, for example. But because Redfast can track usage, you can also use it to fight voluntary churn.
For example, customer cohorts that are at risk of churn, you can then give them prompts and flows to guide them from actions that make them less sticky or towards actions that make them more likely to renew.
The use cases are numerous, and I encourage you to explore them.
We've also introduced built in industry benchmarks so that you can see how your key subscription metrics stack up against the industry.
The better you can plot your business's place in the market, the more equipped you are to serve meaningful experiences to your target audience.
Now we've already talked about shifting subscriber demands. Now these benchmarks give you the ability to respond to those expectations so that you can stand out for your subscribers.
As we speak, merchants are using this data in order to set realistic goals and expectations for growth, uncover areas to differentiate and gain a competitive edge, and even how best to allocate long term resources. Okay. Very excited about this one. Now Lina mentioned this earlier that Recurly has been in the subscription space for over fifteen years.
We know a thing or two about it, and we hear from businesses all the time about how they value our expertise and partnership, which until today was only experienced to our people. So I'm happy to announce that we've now channeled that expertise through our product with Recurly Compass.
Recurly Compass is a suite of AI powered tools built on over a decade of subscription experience, delivering insights right to your Recurly home page.
Personalized insights. Now with personalized insights, we can proactively tell merchants that activations decreased in a given time period, why they decreased, and which subscribers are showing patterns.
With Recurly assistant, you can use natural language to get the information you need without digging through analytics reports or talking to support. Now ask the Recurly assistant for activations by plans in the last three months to understand which plans were successful last quarter, and you will get instant accurate answers with cited sources.
With Playbooks, you can use guided journeys to improve your strategy.
If combating involuntary churn is your priority, Compass will pull in your site configuration and walk you through a play to optimize your dunning strategy.
This is all just the beginning of our AI transformation.
Our goal is to create a self driving subscription management product.
We just saw how we are bringing personalized insights right to your home page. Now this is about moving beyond basic reporting and providing a deeper understanding of subscriber behavior, churn risk, and revenue opportunities.
The second wave is all about you. We are building AI powered tools that help Recurly users interact with the Recurly product more efficiently and intuitively.
Think automating routine tasks.
And the third wave is about creating an autonomous system. Our AI engine will take a more active role in managing plans, campaigns, and subscriptions, and not just providing information or assistance.
It'll be able to automate complex workflows, take decisions on your behalf, and take actions as well based on predefined rules and learned preferences.
This is big. We've seen AI apply to subscription management products in the market, but none quite have the focus on pure subscriber growth.
Next up, we have ecommerce.
I don't have to tell you that ecommerce is booming. Nine million plus digital and physical goods companies use an ecommerce solution to manage and sell their products and services.
And subscriptions plays a massive role in that growth as consumers increasingly prefer convenience, customization, and savings through recurring orders.
Many of those companies use the power of Shopify to drive ecommerce sales. And yet, we've heard from customers that the subscription solutions available in the Shopify App Store, they're not enterprise grade. From a feature perspective, revenue recovery capabilities not our support and service. So we've tackled that head on with our newly fully native Recurly Shopify app.
Now Shopify run businesses can launch and manage subscriptions from directly within the Shopify admin experience as well as take advantage of advanced features from Recurly, like smart running campaigns, intelligent payment retries, robust analytics, and more. We are proud to be the only subscription solution in the Shopify App Store that's truly built for the world's biggest brands.
Now we didn't stop with Shopify. So if you run your business on BigCommerce or Adobe Commerce, we are enabling the robust subscription management capabilities the market has come to expect from Recurly across these other platforms as well, and we'll provide full control over your digital storefront for you.
Let's talk next about what we built to help you scale.
If you're thinking about the next market to tackle or maybe a new type of consumer, you've got to consider how you're going to adapt your purchasing experiences to meet these new changes.
But that all depends on the consumer type and the market you're targeting.
We at Recurly pride ourselves on providing merchants a gateway agnostic infrastructure so that we can offer maximum payments flexibility.
As you can see, we've invested even more in our partnerships in the payment space. Merchants can support PayPal on mobile apps. Through our partnership with eBanks, they can unlock millions of consumers in India with support for UPI.
They can also build rich checkout experiences with Stripe elements and soon to come Adiamp components. And, of course, we are rolling out ten plus new payment methods across the board.
Global businesses are looking for robust, scalable solutions that can handle multiple currencies, languages, tax regulations, and the shared transaction volume of the global market. So we're now offering the ability to deploy targeted pricing based on attributes such as the consumer's geographic location and demographics like age. And a given plan can now support multiple currencies, now simplifying plan management quite a bit.
Businesses operating globally sometimes simplify operations by having a regional headquarters or even a different brand altogether.
Now those businesses can manage subscription operations across all entities from a single Recurly site.
Data can be segmented or viewed holistically.
Subscriber communications can be tailored with branding that is specific to the customer's active subscriptions.
We've also enhanced compliance measures for those operating in the EU. To be compliant with EU tax laws and regulations, invoices can reflect proper currency conversion for VAT as well as associate the invoices to the right legal entities.
Now after talk about global scalability, now let's talk about how Recurly will help you improve your speed to market and operational efficiency.
Subscriptions are complex, and we understand that. And that complexity has rippling effects for our friends in accounting.
Well, Recurly is more than a subscription solution.
It's a central hub for all subscription revenue operations.
Our automated revenue recognition product is specifically built for the complexities that come with subscriptions and can handle any transaction volume that you throw at it. It can integrate with your existing ERPs and even other subscription management solutions if you're not ready to completely overhaul your stack.
With our app management product, businesses can feed real time revenue data from the Google Play and Apple App Store so that you have full visibility over all revenue streams.
We are motivated to help accounting teams ditch the spreadsheets and close the books faster so they can spend time on strategic initiatives that grow the business.
I'll stop there, but there's a lot more in terms of products and capabilities that we are shipping. So if you're interested, I encourage you to visit our release page to explore the full list of products and features that we are now releasing as the spring edition.
On top of that, if you've enjoyed the insights and want, to learn more, I encourage you to join us at one of our dozens of global events, access our priority research and data that we release as part of our state of subscriptions report as well.
Next up, we have fellow subscription sage, Robbie Kellman Baxter, to teach you how to build thriving subscriber communities. Over to Robbie.
