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Your guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life.
Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data-driven growth and lessons learned!
Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty DeGrange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and
have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Hello. Hello. Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing
podcast. As always, I'm your host, Ty De Grange, and I am
very, very excited to talk to Alexa Kilroy today. Hey, Alexa.
Hey. What's up? Thank you for having me. Heck, yeah. It's awesome to see you again.
Been a minute. Yeah. I know. Since I moved from Austin, I feel like I've been on another planet.
How is the how is it treating you in in in up north? You know, Boston
is great. I wanna say I, like, desperately miss Austin, but I'm glad that I'm not
sweating through my clothing right now in September. So I'm gonna take the the fall that I'm
being gutted right now. The heat is, no joke here, and,
New England fall is is probably, just what the doctor ordered right about now. Yes.
Good for the soul. Absolutely. So for all of those of you who do not know,
Alexa is the director of marketing at Stay dot ai, and she's the
former head of brand at Triple Whale d two c com fame, I might
say. Accurate. But maybe. Let's hope.
I think you're famous in in pockets of the inter inter interwebs and for good reason,
and I I think, well earned as well. Thank you. But, yeah,
she's she's building out a team at Stay dot ai. We're doing some really cool stuff
in Shopify subscription solutions and just excited to dive in to all things
growth, learnings, and all the things we talked about here. So let's let's do it. Let's do
it. So love to hear about your background for those of you who don't know, kind of
how you got into this space, how you've kinda navigated it. I'd love to hear a little bit more for for the audience.
Totally. Yeah. So I think like many marketers, I had a weird journey to getting to where I'm at
now. I graduated from college in Boston with a super specific
degree to teach for the rest of my life, teach high school English. I'm, like, totally went through the wringer
taking classes at night, student teaching during the day, really put myself to the grindstone only
to then realize about a year out of undergrad that you make, like, zero dollars as a
teacher. And I was turning on. I was at a new place. I was
broke. It was not the not the situation I want to remain in. So I made a couple of hop, skips, and
jumps, and ended up in the ecom world working on the brand side.
Literally had no marketing experience whatsoever, so it was very much like claw your way up through the
ranks. And a lot of people did me huge solids and took a lot of chances on me, gave
me the opportunity to learn growth marketing, performance advertising, became like a
little direct response queen. I was in product videography and photography and email, like,
literally everything besides shipping and fulfillment, even did CX, on the brand side, I had my
hands in for a number of years. And then a couple years ago, the former CMO of Triple Whale, which
is a another Shopify data analytics and attribution. Former
CMO asked me out to drinks. We were both local to Austin and was like, hey. I just love to bounce ideas around with
you. Ended up offering me a job on the spot. And so I was with Triple
Whale for about a year. They went through their series b round, and then I was
kind of ready for the next growth step and happened to call up a partner and
friend of mine, Gina Parelli, who is the cofounder of Stay, and tell her, you know, hey. I
just wanna talk through what I would love your sage wisdom. Where do you think the next step should be? And
she said, funny you mentioned it. We're we're hiring for a marketing lead at Stay. Any interest?
And so the conversation went from there. And for the past three or so months, I've been the
director of marketing at StayAI. I am literally building a marketing function and
team from the ground up, scratch, which is no joke,
but it is incredibly rewarding work. And so here I am. And I guess to
give some additional context, if you're not familiar with Stay, we are also in the the Shopify app
space. We are a subscription solution app, which I can I can dig more
into if you'd like to do so, Ty, but pretty rad app there as well? And I'm just totally
addicted to the, the Shopify world now. I can't get out of it. I love it. Yeah. And a
couple of things jump out for me, and I think you are I think you
deserve a a lot of, credit. It's quite impressive. I think there's a your level of
dynamism and and hustle and and our and clarity in in
what you're doing and what you're what you're working on is impressive and wanna commend you in that journey.
Not often is easy to make a transition like that. I have seen
some really great talented people come from the education and the teaching space. I think not number
of us on my team, had a passion for learning and or teaching. And so
it's interesting to see that from you as well, and it's impressive how you've navigated your career very
quickly. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. I, I'm pretty sure that I'll I'll fall on
the or die on the hill that teachers make some of the best marketers because if you can convince
Yep. Like, a classroom of kids to care about things that they most certainly don't wake up
and care about, you can pretty much sell anybody.
Yep. Yeah. That's a what a great point. And and
many of us are all just kids at heart anyway underneath it all, and it just kinda
depends on who you're talking to and what the situation is and how kid like they are. Right? Yep.
Totally. Love it. Very cool. And I I think your you know, obviously,
the estate dot ai career move is is a new chapter, and you're building that team there. I definitely
wanna delve into that more. I think the recent example with Triple Whale
is super interesting, given their growth trajectory, given where they sit in the d two c
ecom ecosystem, sitting on top of Shopify as you alluded to. That's an ecosystem
that you and I worked a lot in and our team has as well. And it seems like there is
something special that kind of happened there due to a lot of your efforts and and
team's efforts there. For those that maybe are not aware, can you maybe describe a little bit
about what kinda seemed to come together there with that marketing group and and what kinda
worked well for you? Yeah. Absolutely. So my role at Triple Whale was head of
brand, which is definitely one of those, like, startup titles where you get a
title because you're an octopus doing eight different things at once, and we don't really know what title to give
you. But it was very generous in giving it to me, and it it led me to a a
variety of really awesome opportunities. So Triple Whale, I think, benefited from a
variety of different things. The first was right place and right time. So we really started building this
attribution solution right when the iOS fourteen fourteen point
five chaos started to hit, and advertisers and marketers were just really stressed
having a black box of their data, not really knowing where their customers were coming from. And
so that was part of just the natural, I don't know, like,
fascination, I think, with the solution that was that came to market that was triple
oil. But I think part of it, honestly, was so the founding
team and and my marketing team, especially, was so strategically built
that it just led into just this absolute eruption of success. And
so, Raba, our former CMO, came on first. He then hired a head
of social and a head of community, which I think is really powerful that those were his first two hires. He really
identified that the biggest opportunity in the market at the time was to,
one, have a fun and engaging and unique and interesting presence on social. So if you
follow Triple Whale's official, you'll know that, you know, they're notorious for, like, funny memes related to all
things ecommerce in addition to juicy tidbits and tactics and tips and
tricks. So that was a huge success, and I give all the props in the world
to Tommy Clark, our head of social time, who masterfully developed the social strategy for
the brand, and it was actually, like, integral to our growth and product adoption. Our head of community,
Kevin, was the second hire and an incredible, incredible human being who
really decided to do something, in my opinion, revolutionary, which is take
a SaaS software solution that tackles data and analytics and build, like, a family and a
community around it. So it first started with the digital community, then it it evolved
into literally just throwing what we called roadshows, which were happy hour networking
events just to get people together in the room and talk about what's going on in the world and
going on in their businesses, which for those of us that work in ecommerce, many of
us work on small teams. Most of us are remote. It's really helpful to just meet
people outside of your own bubble sometimes. So that was huge and in further adoption of the triple o
brand. And then I came on shortly thereafter, and my job was kind of somewhere in between the
world of supporting events and experiences and content, some of our bigger bets
that we were making, which range from literally producing things like a full on
BBC reality TV show to some absolutely massive events.
Just all kinds of really rad stuff that we had the opportunity to do built out a full podcast
network like it was just a combination of absolutely really creative and innovative
marketing and knowing who our people were. Like, we knew that our
the founders that were using our product in in our space were kind of in this twenty to
forty year old, like, young and hungry range. We knew the mediums of
content that they'd be really interested in, the way that we could throw physical and digital events that
would be really exciting for them. So in becoming students of our customers, we just ran
incredibly pointed marketing efforts directly towards our people, all with the mission of, like,
hey. SAST tech doesn't have to be boring. You can learn. You can have fun. It can be an
enjoyable and colorful experience along the way, and you can build community
in literally using a tech product, which just hasn't always really been a thing. And
so it was, again, like, some industry innovation, some right place, some
right time, an incredible and creative and passionate team, but I'm so proud of all the
work that we did and what we built. And, I'm just so thankful for that experience. One
hundred percent. Yeah. And the community thing is obviously a buzzword and exciting thing that a
lot of people are chasing. I think we can talk about, like, d to c and
SaaS and how they're I feel like a lot of those worlds are
colliding in different ways. And it's like the the the silos and differences between b to b
and b to c marketing are are less, you know, it's less of a gap as
it used to be in my view. I'm curious to to think through kind of, like, the concept of
community. I think some elements, in my opinion, feel like have been done in the past, and it was just, hey.
It's not shocking to hear, but I think there's a lot of things that did come together at the right moment as you
alluded to in a pretty impressive way, taking on the DNA of the team and
really listening to your customer as well. I think that might be one of my favorite takeaways from what you just said.
But long set up here, what do you think can community be applied to
new models and to be marketed? Do you feel like that's something that you
could bring to an organization? Do you feel like that's something that other people are trying to emulate more of now?
And do you think it can work in a similar fashion as it did with Triple Whale?
Yeah. I mean, I've I've said this before in the advertising, like, you know, digital marketing advertising
for d two c brands, and it applies now to kind of the concept of community for SaaS brands. But
people who are being marketed to are wise. They know what they're being marketed to, or they know what they're
being pitched to. They know when it's something to sales opportunity versus actually, like, a
community that you're building. And so what made Triple Whale so successful, and so much
credit to Kevin Newsom for this, was community for us was not, hey. We are
building this community because we need this, and we wanna put you in a room and sell to you. But it
was, hey. You guys all have stuff in common. You can learn from each other. We can learn along the way.
We're just gonna enable people to get into a room, and then, like, one
percent of what happens in that community is going to be related to our product or business.
I think that that approach to community can be effective anywhere. It just can't
be about you. You can't make a community effort be about selling
and your business and your business goals. It makes tracking KPIs and
evaluating community success difficult in the beginning when you're watching it. But But if you do
it masterfully, then you have situations like ours where we had an event in
January, I think, or February of twenty twenty three called Whalies in which we
literally ran what I would call a true community event. It was shopped with education. It was
it had a bunch of fun social events associated with it. We also incorporated industry awards
for some of the best brands in the space where we, like, crowdsourced votes for people to vote on, you know, most
innovative product drop and stuff like that of the year. And it happened to be that in
Austin, at that specific time, there was a freak snow, ice, sleet storm.
It was a two hundred fifty person event. We had to continue increasing the the batch capacity of the event
because so many people wanted to come. And then with the day of, we got wrecked with this horrible storm.
I literally had no power at my house. I had to stay at a hotel to help run the event. Thankfully, the event space
had power. But the most incredible proof in the pudding of our community
efforts were that people were scheduling and rescheduling and rescheduling their flights just to
get there. We had dozens of people who ended up not being able to get a flight to Austin, but got a flight
to Houston and that took, like, carpooled three hour long rental cars or
Uber rides from Houston to Austin just to be able to come the event. And it's like, sometimes when you're
setting up these foundations of committee in the beginning, it's really hard to prove the
ROI. But then when you have really built it, you've invested in it for six to eight months,
you have situations like that where you can see people going above and beyond to be a part of something.
And it's they're not coming because they want triple whale. They were coming because they
wanted to be there, be a part of something, and learn and grow. And I think that's when you know you've really mastered
community. That's so amazing. I'm I'm just digesting that. I mean, how
many I have so many thoughts and questions. Like, are there examples of that that
you have seen not to take anything away from Triple Whale and what you
guys all accomplished? But do you see examples of that in other arenas, or are there examples
that that you kind of think are onto something? Yeah. Of course. I mean, at least within our
industry, you know, I've been to many a a geek out event. I think in you know,
when they I don't think they're actually running them anymore. Maybe they're slowing them down. But in the geek out payday,
they were doing the same thing. They were really building a successful community around these events, and people are looking
forward to going quarterly and seeing each other and spending time together and really learning. There
is an event coming up in San Diego, I think, next week that Sunlane is hosting with a bunch of
partners called the, like, commerce summit or something like that. It has the same amount of
honestly, like, hype and excitement. And I think, you know, like, there are a lot of strategic things
that you have to do. You have to as a planner of an event, you need to make sure it's
set up in the right place where people are excited about traveling there. You need to make sure you have
speakers that people are really excited about learning from. But, like, once you hit it right once or twice,
then people will keep coming again and again and again as long as you're offering that same quality. And
so it's definitely, like, a replicable effect that you can have. It's
just you've just gotta nail it right the first couple times. It's also one of those things where if you
throw, like, a really crappy event, whether it's digital or in person, people remember that experience,
and it takes three x the energy to win them back. And so, you know, it's one of
those things where you have to, like, play your cards well, but I think it's it's achievable
by many brands and many different industries for sure. How how did you build
trust with some of the other members of the organization? Like, for example, finance, are they just looking at
this going, what the heck are we doing? I imagine there was a number of buy in across the
organization, but I'd love to hear maybe ways that you found moments or
maybe you and your team built trust internally when maybe there was people internally saying,
you know, how are we gonna pull this off or how does this make sense? I'm I'm curious to learn more about maybe
how you you'd approach that. I mean, honestly, you start scrappy. You start with, like,
the most affordable but still great version of whatever it is that you wanna do, and then you prove
the ROI there. And then you scale up a little bit more, and then you prove the ROI there. So you're not gonna start withdrawing
a two hundred and fifty thousand dollar bet. You know? It's just it's way too much of a risk getting the buy in isn't there.
It's baby steps and earning that trust. And then also making sure that the work
that you do is attributable. So if you do meet a new customer and close a deal from a vet,
making sure that that's tracked and understood in somebody's dashboard somewhere.
And then, also, like, frankly, some of it is just it's strategic partner plays as well.
Right? So, like, you don't have to pay for everything yourself. Grab a keynote speaker from a partner
brand, and they have to give you some money to be that keynote speaker. Right? And so you can kind of
mitigate your cost in working meaningfully with your partners, giving them an opportunity to get in front
of the crowd, give give yourself an opportunity to get in front of the crowd. And at the end of the day,
like, as long as you're not blowing an insane amount of money without anything to come from it, it's easy
to kind of scale yourself up and and earn that trust. Love it. Yeah. Definitely like thinking about it in
that agile way. And, yeah, I mean, there's a lot to talk about there.
There's a lot of great challenges and learning. So is there any kind of takeaways that
you felt were meaningful beyond that particular part of the Triple Whale experience
or or their rise? And I'm just curious to know if there's other, like, experiments, learnings,
thoughts that you have around that as we wrap up and move on to the next topic. Yeah. Gosh. I have so
many learnings from my triple l experience that I could spend, like, three days giving a workshop probably.
Not that anybody would maybe care, but I think they would. I think for the learning side, and
this is applicable across kind of all the facets
invest or build in something. And so, like, kind of proving out what you're gonna do before you launch it. And so, like,
on the product side for Triple Whale, that was launching landing pages and beta
invitations to products that we hadn't even started building yet because we wanted to make sure the take
rate was high enough. And then knowing that if it was really low, we have the relationship with our
customers to say, like, like, hey. You know what? We deprioritized building this thing. We hope to build it again in the future. We'd love
to enlist you in this other beta that got higher priority instead. So I think, you know, on the
product side, it's not with events. It's like starting to market the event before, you know, you've
collected all the cash and put it together and make sure you're gonna have the the sign ups for the event.
It's the same thing for webinars. You know what I mean? Like, there's so many ways to prove what you're doing before you go out and
really start to invest all your time and energy in doing it. Because, frankly, marketing is just one of those
it's a sport. It's like, you know, for every three good swings, you might have three bad
ones. And so you just have to accept that not everything's a winner and find
strategic ways to invest your time in the highest probability
winners. So I think that kind of proof before you build was a big learning for me. I think
another thing was, I had the opportunity to hire a lot of really awesome people and and watch the hiring
that happen across the company. And I will always be an advocate of hiring based
on, like, energy and growth mindset and desire to grow and scale over
having, like, the most stacked three page resume I've ever seen. There's
nothing better than someone who is willing to, like, get their hands dirty and learn
and have that flexibility and adaptability that they can just get thrown into
whatever when you need them. And, literally, sometimes, that was like, hey. My guy that runs product marketing,
I need you to help me stuff backpacks full of swag for an event because I'm understaffed right now, and you
are here, and I need your help. And, like, no complaints. Like, just absolutely cool. That sounds like a
great refreshing break from whatever whatever I was doing versus, like, I need you to
go do deep competitive intelligence and data analysis. You know? Like, just go figure out how to do it.
I I don't have time to explain it. Here's what I need. Here are the goals. Here's what we're trying to do. Go get after
it. Hiring kind of based on those skills and and qualities, just the ability to really
collaborate and connect well with someone, that is one of my best learnings. And I think
kind of on the challenges flip flip side, much related to what you're talking about, it's
amazing when you build something that ends up in the spotlight. It's also really hard being in
the spotlight sometimes. You are under so much scrutiny. You have way more, like, PR
fires that are just teeny tiny little things, but they suddenly blew up because the Internet is
like a, you know, monster that rolls down the hill sometimes, collects for a bottle of money.
You know? So it's like there are so many there are so many challenges that are associated
with becoming well known and well loved and well respected because,
like, one thing goes wrong, and it feels like the house is burning down. And I think just being mindful and
building mindful of what you say and what you do with building that Teflon skin and then having the
right processes and systems in place where if something goes awry, like, you know how to handle it
with your customers, you know how to handle it on the Internet, you know how to navigate it. I can't speak
to, like, how much I learned in in kind of the era of, like, spotlight
crisis over the tiniest little thing in my time at Hippo Willow. Yeah. I think I
witnessed a few of those in in real time and was impressed at how you,
handled, pressure under fire and, collaborate with the community
to to sort through it all in in a good way. And I think, we're all learning as as the Internet
evolves and, you know, showing some empathy towards each other. And I think, there's a lot of
there's a ton to unpack and learn from in that statement alone. So thank you. Mhmm.
You kinda mentioned on the hiring piece, our mutual friend, Chase, and, we talked a little bit about
vibe check. What's your view there? Do you do you feel like looking back on the hires
that it was like VibeCheck nine out of ten often led to
a great fit. How do you kinda gauge that part of the hiring process as we
transition into your your stay, hiring work? Yeah. I have
I'm currently operating on a free safe hiring process. I haven't totally refined it, but this is
what I'm using right now to hire. So I do a, like, fifteen to twenty minute
discovery call. So I pick the resumes or the references from the pile. I do a fifteen minute discovery
call. Mhmm. Hey. Hey. This is what we're looking for. Tell me what you're looking for. Does that offline? I
get an initial gauge on, like, their personality and how they can handle things from
that call. And also knowing it's, like, it's short. It needs to be concise. We need to be efficient in that time.
Second call, we get more in the weeds on specifics of the role. I asked them to prep something in advance. So,
like, hey. Take a look at our website. It give me, like, three suggestions you would have for how we could improve messaging
on x y z or something. That's something that's, like, robust enough that you feel bad not paying them for it. I'm
not asking them to design anything, but more so, like, just give me a Totally. A
gloss over some ideas that you have or you'd wanna implement in your first thirty days. And
then the third call is, like, me plus other people on the team, meet the team,
broader vibe check. But all the while, while I'm kind of assessing vibes and
expertise and ability, I have this bug in the back of my brain that I can't even
remember who it was now, but if someone at Triple Whale, that when I was talking about hiring, they kind of gave me this
principle and they call it the airplane seat principle. And it's basically like, if you have to
travel with this person that you're going to hire and your flight gets delayed, like, eight hours and you're stuck in
those terrible plastic metal airplane seats, and you have to sit next to each other for those eight
hours until you can finally take off from your plane, would you be miserable? Would you get work
done? Would you at least enjoy your time time together? Would you wanna kill them? Like, how would how you know,
proceed try and visualize how those eight hours would go together. And if you don't have a
strong gut sense, you'd either get something done and be really productive or really enjoy the time
together and laugh and have a nice time, they're probably not going to be a culture fit to
work with you in a direct capacity. And so that's kind of, like, one of the things that I
always keep in the back of my mind as I'm interviewing. It's like, alright. We're sitting in the airplane seat. We're sitting in the
airplane seat. And they don't always have to be, like, the most fun person that you're gonna go get drinks with because at
the end of day, it's work. But even if you're not gonna get drinks with them or I'm like, are you gonna be able
to sit down and crack open those laptops and it and be able to work together for eight hours without losing your
mind? You know? It's an important factor. I I think it's a great barometer. I love that rule, and,
we've talked about that a lot as well. And I know a lot of others have too, so it's a it's a good one. I love
that. And a good segue. Right? You know, stay dot ai. I'd love to get maybe a little more insight
into what you're looking to do there and installing the marketing systems and team and efforts and how
you're approaching marketing for them. Totally. Yeah. So to give some context on today for anyone
listening who's not familiar, as I mentioned, we're in Shopify subscription app space.
Our the the Shopify subscription app space has really been kind of
nearly monopolized by legacy providers for a long time. So folks launched subscriptions a
while ago with provider ABC, and they've been there. And it's kind of like a set it and
forget it thing. They sign the contract either for multiyear or they do year over year, but they set it.
They're, like, happy to have that chunk of recurring revenue in their pocket every month from their
subscribers, but it's not really something they're actively minding, tending to, whatever. They
could, like, build the email flows. It exists. We update them if we need to update
them. That kind of thing. Reality is like, that is terrible terrible
way of thinking about your subscription program, and you're doing yourself a huge disadvantage. And
your subscription program, much like other systems within your your marketing
org, should be highly optimized and should work to help juice higher
LTV at more current revenue and help support your brand even more. And so this kind of
worst day comes in. So our competitors developed this platform because they just didn't
love what existed in terms of the legacy solution market. And so StayNow offers a
robust feature set that not only includes your subscription basics, but all sorts of additional things that
help you proactively and reactively mitigate churn as well as
boost, you know, order value and your overall customer LTV throughout your subscription
program and improve your customer subscription experiences. All that being said,
what we're doing is saying, hey. The old way, not great. The
new way, better, way better. And when you're working with a situation
like that where many people have been on a legacy provider for five to eight years Mhmm.
They're often not even problem aware, let alone solution aware. And so you have to spend
a lot of your time and energy educating, storytelling,
really, like, preaching to the choir that, hey. There's a better world that exists beyond that one that
you're in. It's very I describe it for my philosophy nerds. It's like allegory of the cave vibes.
And so I don't know if allegory of the cave and vibes have ever
been said to others. But I can't I'm gonna make that a thing.
Yes. Love. Yes. So to when it comes to our strategy, you
know, like I said, like, I came into this team that has already been doing well. We have a a broad
customer set. We've already raised the series a. We're doing great, but we've done a lot
of, like, leading with features. We have this. They don't have that. We have this. They don't have
that. And that's just, like, a horrible sales experience because at the end of the
day, like, if you are at the point where you're booking a demo or smart a website for a
new provider for something, you don't just, like, wanna get slapped in the face
with net new features because that's like, I have to learn how to use that. I have to figure out why that
matters. Yep. You instead put the story of why you should care. And so we focus a lot of our
energy around really, like, rebuilding copy on our website, through our
social messaging, through email communications and newsletter marketing to
tell the story about why you should care about updating and optimizing your
subscription program in the first place, let alone why should you stay and then how our features enable you to do
that. Just providing a lot of robust content marketing and thought leadership
and focusing more so on not even saying, like, hey. We're
better than men because of this, but more so, like, hey. We have a a
team stacked with expert marketers and retention strategists. And at bare
minimum, we are here to give you advice on how to get more out of your program. It would be great if you
sign up for our our tool, though. That would be awesome too. Here's here's here's the tool, and here's how it
works. It's always kind of been, like, the philosophy that we've taken in in since I've come in, and it comes out in a
variety of different ways. But, really, just reframing subscription as a performance channel has been has
been huge in in the work that we've done the past couple months so far. Yeah. It seems like big
problem to solve, good timing, good, you know, good traction, good progress, and
exciting growth opportunity and super thrilled for you on that. Do you feel
like there's community elements that you are seeing an opportunity with? What what
have you seen from community as an opportunity there, and is that a path you might
consider pursuing as the head of marketing? Yeah. Absolutely. I think I mean, right now, because there's
so much to do and I have a teeny tiny team, I'm just not
investing as heavily as I would have, you know, as we did at Triple Whale when I came in.
And, also, both businesses run incredibly differently. Like, you know, there's just a a
lot that needs to be done in each place, and and community made sense the place and the time that I was on a triple o before.
Right now, it's, like, not number one because I have so many things that I need to get done. But
we still participate a lot in other events. We do things like this where we do podcasts
and speaking opportunities, and we attend events, and we host dinners. I'm
currently running it's not every month. I'm trying to do it, like, every other month. A happy hour series
based out of our office in New York, where we literally just get people together. Nice. I hire a bartender.
They bartend cocktails, and we have bites. And then we have a very low key, like, sit on the
couch panelist series to talk about a a particular topic. And it's absolutely not sales pitchy at
all, and so that's kind of how I'm introducing that to say right now. And then I'm also kind
of approaching community from a, like, crowd sourced collaborative content sort of way. So
we include interviews and q and a's in our newsletters and blog, work, you know,
cross functionally with other people on social posts, things like that so that we're working with
partners and also lifting up the brands that you stay to highlight our community in different
ways. Love it. And for brands that have, you know, plugged in and and gotten some of the
value out, I'd love to hear, you know, maybe some of the learnings that that you've seen or some of
the brands have seen in terms of tapping into Stay dot ai and, like, what are some of
the learnings that you can share there? Yeah. Totally. There are honestly so
many, but I pulled three out of my little cheat sheet of notes that's to me, but I pulled three that I think
are perhaps some of the most interesting that I wanna I wanna tackle with you. So,
the first one, I've learned across multiple different brands, but the one that comes most to
mind right now is Hopwater, which is a d to c beverage brand, sparkling water with
hops. Great alcoholic alternative if you aren't into having a an actual drink,
you know, kinda gives you the taste, but and a and a fun drink to drink, but don't have to do the
alcohol. When they came to stay, they were dealing with some high turn
related issues, and they were having trouble identifying why. They started doing some customer
serving, and they've realized that one of the biggest problems that they were having is that they
offered packs of flavors of drinks. And customers didn't want a
twelve pack of just one flavor, and they didn't want a variety pack because that included a flavor that they
didn't care about. And so they needed to offer flexible custom bottling options, and then they also
needed to offer custom cadence subscriptions because sometimes you don't drink all of
it every month, and sometimes you want it once a quarter because it's a special treat for your family.
Legacy providers do not offer that detailed level of flexibility in, like, building your
own perfect bundle with number of products you want, whatever. And they also tend to
operate on a every month or every two weeks. Those are your two options for
how customers can set their subscriptions. And so in offering the flexible bundling
and flexible subscription cadences to their customers, Hot Water saw a forty percent
reduction in subscriber churn since rolling that out, which is massive.
That's nearly fifty percent. So my biggest pro tip is whether you say or not,
you need to seriously consider if you're running a subscription business, how important flexibility
is to your customers. And if you're not giving them even the basics, the ability to pause, skip,
you know, cancel on their own, that sort of thing, you're constraining them. You're stressing them out, and they
want to have that autonomy to manage their subscription how they like.
Next one is kind of somewhere in between the world of surprising delight
and kind of offering unique subscriber programs. But, one of the brands that
we love working with is Ourobora, another beverage brand, actually. I think I absolutely pulled
three beverage brands by some for some reason, but they're my three favorite examples. But Ourobora
also offers fun flavored sparkling waters and things like that. They
were looking to generally enhance the customer experience for their subscriber program as
well as make more money out of their subscription revenue. And so what they did is they took their subscription
program, they added additional benefits. So subscribers now have first access
to new flavor drops. They drop a new flavor each month. It's limited edition.
The subscribers get the first emails and access to add it on in their portals if they'd like
to, and then everybody else gets access to it later. So kind of using the old, like, sneaker drop
analogy. But your added benefit as a subscriber is that you got early access. And so
this was massive for boosting LTV for them. It was something that we were able to offer through our no
code customer portal as well as transactional email offerings. They moved to say over, I
would say, like, a year ago, and they've implemented a lot of different strategies, but this being one of them.
And so so far, they've seen a hundred and twenty eight percent growth in subscription MRR since moving to
stay. So their monthly recurring subscription revenue has literally grown a hundred and twenty eight percent
Awesome. Which is massive. Just by offering customers another product, they can
add on. They're not even getting anything away for free or adding discounts, which is nuts.
And then my last one is maybe my favorite. SED offers you a we
have a a piece for a product called experience engine, which allows you to run AI driven and optim
optimized AB tests for different types of promotional and offer testing. And one of the things that
we have found that led us to kind of build this product in such a way is that
there is often a cliff in the subscriber journey across every brand where somewhere
around order three, four, two, between two and three, subscribers just, like,
randomly drop off. We don't know why. Sometimes they say it's too expensive. Sometimes they say they're
bored. Whatever it is, the reality is they're probably just picking a cancellation reason when
they're canceling. Of course, some of them do have a a legitimate reason, but they often just click something and they bail because
they want on to the next thing. The way to overcome that is to really build that brand
reputation and relationship with your customer. And so there are a lot of unique ways that you can do it. But
Avi, which is a health and wellness brand, women's health and wellness, they're very
popular on Twitter if you know Ash and Ron. They tested offering a
free gift for purchase between orders two and three, orders three and four I'm sorry. Orders,
yeah, two and three, three and four, four and five. And so what they ended up doing is they ran these three different
tasks, and they offered a free gift with purchase with the upcoming order or
no free gift with purchase. They split tested it, and they tested at these three different cadences. So
they had a lot going on. But at the end of their data analysis, they found
that with upcoming order two and three was when people had the highest take rates.
They actually saw that it boosted their conversion rates, so people stayed on to order three with that free gift,
eighty five percent higher, from running that test. So then they've implemented that free gift
at after order two, before order three for every customer. Moving forward, it's
been a smashing success for them. Insane. And you think like, oh, that keeps them on to order
three. No. The the relationship that the customer built then, it enhances the
long term LTV of the customer to stay on for longer and longer and longer. And so super cool
to see some of these tests in action and and see how people are using them in unique and different
ways. Yeah. I'm so fired up. The the opportunity to kind of expand
LTV and the cart size is such a huge initiative for so many d to c brands.
You know, d to c is faced with significant changes in the last few years. It's not as easy as
it used to be. There's more competition, less trans you know, less data insights. You know,
tracking is harder. And so for you for you to attack something that's that you can own,
that cadence of delivery, that cadence of relationship of delivering value to your customer is so
awesome. And so this is really cool, and I I would be shocked if we're not gonna want
to, get some of our clients who are needing this, collaborating with you. And I'm sure
there's a lot of folks that are realizing that this is something you need to pay more attention to, so I love it.
Awesome. Yeah. Bring them to me. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's do it. Good
stuff. So switching gears a little bit, wrapping up with some fun questions. I'd love
to learn. So, obviously, come from education. You're in tech and and performance
and growth. If you weren't in this industry, what might you consider as a
career? I narrowly avoided a career in the art. So my family I had always,
I've been classed with trained piano, and I was classed with a vocalist. And there was a period of
time in which I was auditioning for music school for college. Ironically, I was the
one who was like, mom, this is a big bet. Like, I don't know that I'm really gonna make money doing this.
Chose teaching instead. For some reason, she was like, yeah. I hear you on the music thing. They didn't push
back on the teaching thing. Still had some some words to have with her on that. But, yeah, I
think I probably would have tried to do something in music. And if it if it, I'm not saying, like, I wanna be
famous, and I didn't care to act or dance or anything, but I think I would have maybe gone into music
education or maybe something in, like, the production industry or something like that because
I've always just been so passionate about music and the arts. That's so cool.
Is there a musician or a genre or something that's super inspiring to you
or something that folks should check out, maybe in piano or elsewhere? Yeah. So
my my grandfather was, a jazz pianist and had, like, a big band and swing band.
I have a bunch of his, like, homemade records in our house. And so I grew up
listening to a lot of the standards. And so I think, like, I'm not gonna be
like, oh, go listen to those EDM songs. Like, I'm gonna be like, go go get an
education. Like, listen to some Ella. You know? Listen to some Billy. I think that's where, like, my
my heart really lies when it comes to to music. But I think that there are a ton of really awesome
young and and new and emerging artists, and I'm I'm always stoked when people send me new music. So if
you follow me on Twitter, send me some links. Heck, yeah. And when it's mellow out time,
did you have a go to jazz that you put on? What's the go to? It's so hard to say.
We look we listen to so much. Like, we listen to Duke. We listen to Count Basie. Like, we listen to all over the
place. So I think we just have, like, a curated Spotify playlist now of all I say we, my husband,
and I. We just have, like, a curated Spotify playlist now of music that we put on when we're, like, cooking dinner
or, like, sitting on the couch reading, that kind of thing, and it's just got all of our favorites on it. I love it. That's
super cool. This was a debated, heated topic with, Raba
at the, Austin d two c happy hour that happens on occasion?
And, where do you think the d two c e comm city is? What what are
the top cities? What what's the what's your ranking? Any any thoughts there?
People are everywhere, and, like, everybody moves every five minutes. I don't know. There are a billion people
in California. There are a billion people in Boston. There are a billion people in Miami. I feel like the East Coast is
spread kinda thin. Like, there's still a decent New York crowd, but I I feel like Boston
is actually not super even the Pallavio is based here. It's I don't it's not a lot of founders
are based in Boston. I think the East Coast has kind of been in comparison, but I've
been surprised to see a lot of founders in, like, Utah popping up
now. Yeah. There's been a lot in, like, Seattle and Portland and, like, some of these cities that just weren't
as, like, the the trendy cities a long time ago, probably because the cost of living is exorbitant in all the
fun places now. But, not to say that those aren't fun, but all the, you know, the trendy
spots. So I don't know. Rama Yep. Rama thinks Rama thinks he knows what's up all the time.
So he'll he could take the roast, but I I don't know. Did he say Austin? I'm sure he did. You
gotta gotta put him in his place a little bit when we have a chance. I think he said New York, Austin, and
LA. Yeah. I mean that was interesting. Yeah. I would I would say I would say LA is a
little too niche, though. Honestly, I think it's coast to coast California. Interesting. Yeah. It's
good to get your perspective and, you know, we gotta we gotta, you know, throw it back at him a little bit. Oh, he's used
he's used to me roasting him. Oh, yeah. It's always clear if I was his boss or
he was my boss for the past year. I like it.
I like it. So what are you thinking you might be missing most
about the lovely city of Austin, Texas, if anything? I'm I'm a people person, so
I can yeah. I mean, my old team at Triple Whale doesn't even exist anymore, but I guess working in
my tea with my team in my office and having my little, like, walk about town, getting my my
JuiceLand smoothies and those sorts of things. But I'm a people person. I just miss a lot of the people
there. I'm not super attached to places. I've I've lived in a lot of different places. So I think
for me, it's more about the humans, not the the things there. But I do super
miss barbecue. I like it. And then the flip side, your new adventure with Boston,
with stay, what what's the thing that's most exciting you about that, and what's next?
I mean, from a business perspective, it is amazing to have so much flexibility and room
for growth and, like, the world just feels like my oyster right now for building up this marketing team. So
I'm super stoked about that. From a Boston standpoint, I'm so stoked to have, like, a
cozy Christmas and cozy fall and also start to meet some people in the community that
are up here, because Mhmm. Been so long. I'm also just a quick job from New
York, so I get to go to New York a lot, which is really awesome and connect with people. But, yeah, I think
it's, it's an exciting transition. I think it really does feel like a fresh start because the combination
move and the job change kinda happened around the same time. And so kinda feels like I'm progressing in the next chapter. You
know? Heck, yeah. Congratulations on it all. Thank you. Super super
excited for you. Thank you so much. Heck, yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
And, I do wanna just, again, give a shout out and, give you a
chance to maybe let folks know where they can learn more about all things Alexa and,
where where my people will find you. Yeah. Absolutely. So I'm on Twitter at Alexa Kilroy. My
last name is spelled k I l r l y. And then, if you wanna learn about
StayAI, it's just stay dot a I, and you'll find us there. Love it.
Thank you so much for coming on, and, looking forward to the next one. Thank you.