Interview with Subbly CEO - Stefan Pretty

Long story short, I was running a digital marketing agency a few years back when one of our clients came to us looking for help with a new subscription business concept. Their budget was quite small and there were no solutions in the market at that time — which presented a massive opportunity to capitalise on a ‘scratch your own itch’ moment and take the leap to build a new, subscription-first platform. 

Subbly is an all-in-one platform subscription-first commerce platform that lets anyone set up, run, and scale any kind of subscription business model with no coding skills. Our feature set expands regularly in line with our users’ requests, the idea being that every core feature anyone would need in a subscription context (and then some) is easily and reliably accessible from one single place. We’ve got 100+ so far, from a website builder and marketing automation tools to inventory tracking, analytics, secure payment processing, customer areas and more.

The biggest difference between Cratejoy and Subbly is that Cratejoy’s main focus is on the marketplace aspect, not their software platform, which hasn’t made any major leaps in at least 3 years. I’m certainly not denying the power of marketplaces. Cratejoy has made a big impact in the US, and your work at uOpen has done the same in the UK which more people should be aware of. 

Yet, you can’t run a business without the right software. If your platform or stack are overpriced or limit your ability to grow as a business through lack of features — even more relevant when your platform and marketplace are completely intertwined — you’re much less likely to reach your full potential. The problem is that even though more and more people are realising this and preparing to jump ship, the process of liberating data from Cratejoy’s clutches can be a long, long process… and time is money as we know. It’s a restrictive model that stops merchants from seizing ultimate control of their subscription box brand and reaping all the rewards of their efforts. 

Shopify, on the other hand, also doesn’t have a marketplace, but was never built specifically for the needs of subscription businesses unlike Subbly — their focus has always been on transactional businesses. In their case, users are almost obliged to buy into their plugin ecosystem to hack together a stack that works for them. We did some research into this and found that the equivalent plugin setup on Shopify is an order of magnitude higher per month in terms of cost, with Subbly clocking in at an average of $74/month versus an average of $469/month for a comparable feature set using Shopify plugins.

In the current economic climate, business owners are focusing more and more on creating financially viable businesses and cutting costs to remain competitive rather than opting for expensive moonshots that are less likely to pay off without having to rely on traditional digital marketing methods like paid ads — which themselves are getting pricier by the day. Part of this involves replicating and emulating the strategies of the largest competitors in their fields when it comes to UX, websites, and purchase flow — which can be quite useful for smaller businesses looking to fill a gap in the market, i.e. concepts like ‘the HelloFresh for Indian food in the UK’, or the ‘BirchBox for Australian-sourced vegan face masks’.

On a broader level, it explains the popularity of the subscription business model, in that once you’ve hooked a subscriber with value-driven messaging, if you’re running a tight ship, they’re yours indefinitely. You don’t need to keep poking them with new marketing messages all the time to sell one-time products when they’ve bought into an offer that delivers, time in, time out. This level of consistency makes subscription businesses easier to sell as well — a topic that’s also gaining more popularity over time. Even physical retailers are getting in on the action, with household names from Pret A Manger to Urban Plate offering subscriptions to brick and mortar establishments with a global presence.

One other interesting trend that’s been going on is the concept of subscription bundling. For example, companies that sell boxes are now selling a digital subscription to bundle together. Businesses experimenting with these models have significantly more complex needs than a single product subscription, which will affect the tech stack they use to achieve their goals. Merchants who haven’t already done so will want to unify everything into a single platform to save time and energy — and our bet is that they’ll want to use Subbly for everything!

Our long term vision is to become the logical home for the world’s subscription-first businesses and everything we’ve been doing behind-the-scenes has been focused around that. So many businesses are spending thousands per month on enterprise-tier software, agencies, or custom solutions to maximise their access to advanced functionality, and we’re working to make that possible in one place for a significantly lower price. The more customization we can offer — our API framework is a big priority at the moment — the better. Watch this space!

Ordinarily, our trial is only 2 weeks long, but as a special offer for uOpen merchants to try us out and see just how much easier it is to run their businesses with Subbly, we’d be happy to provide a 60-day free trial for new merchants and a whopping 12 months for anyone who switches from another platform — get in touch with our support team directly to verify that you’re a uOpen merchant and we’ll sort you out!

We would like to extend a big thank you to Stefan, CEO of Subbly.co, for sharing his valuable insights and experiences with us. We now have a better understanding of how Subbly operates and the strategies that have helped it become a successful platform for subscription-based businesses.

At uOpen, we are excited to establish a strong partnership with industry leaders like Subbly, and we look forward to exploring new opportunities and creating more content together in the coming months.

Finally, we want to express our gratitude to Subbly for offering uOpen merchants a fantastic discount on their free trial. This will undoubtedly help our merchants take full advantage of the benefits that Subbly.co offers and grow their businesses even further.