Michael Ribero: A lot of people want to launch a premium product and I'm like, "No." I think that's the status quo is no, but prove to me there's going to be enough value and there is another cohort here that isn't just 1% or 2% that we're going to do a lot of work for maybe not a lot of return. David Barnard: Welcome to the Sub Club Podcast, a show dedicated to the best practices for building and growing app businesses. We sit down with the entrepreneurs, investors, and builders behind the most successful apps in the world to learn from their successes and failures. Sub Club is brought to you by RevenueCat. Thousands of the world's best apps. Trust RevenueCat to power in-app purchases, manage customers, and grow revenue across iOS, Android, and the web. You can learn more at revenuecat.com. Let's get into the show. Hello, I'm your host, David Barnard. My guest today is Michael Ribero, Senior VP of Global Consumer Revenue at Condé Nast, where he helps oversee story brands like Vogue, The New Yorker, GQ, and so many more. This episode was recorded live on stage at RevenueCat's App Growth Annual conference. On the podcast, I talk with Michael about the blessing and curse of having a brand, why post-purchase is a perfect upsell moment, and why partnerships are hard to pull off but can be well worth the effort. Michael Ribero: Thanks for having me. David Barnard: Yeah, I have really been looking forward to this chat, so you and I got a chance to chat a few times ahead of this. And listen, you've been on a lot of podcasts. If you want some good listening, just search Michael Ribero YouTube podcast and other things like that. He shared a lot of insights over the years and so we're going to pull some new things in, maybe some old things in, but it's going to be a really fun conversation. Michael Ribero: Exciting. David Barnard: Thanks so much for joining me today. The first thing I wanted to kick off with is competition and brand, and we're in this place in the industry where creating apps to compete is so much easier with AI and we're seeing just a proliferation of apps. I mean, we were talking, Jacob was talking earlier about the insane increase we've seen in the number of apps shipped. You have Instagram creators sharing recipes competing with Bon Appetit. You have bloggers and influencers and everything complaining for mind space with The New Yorker, and there's so much competition. And then you were at The Washington Post where media has had a decade of challenges with all the new competitors and how to monetize and everything like that. And so I thought it'd be really interesting to start here because I think a lot of the people in this room and listening afterward will be in a place where they're starting to get a little worried, how do I compete? What does brand mean in this new age, when Cal AI spun up out of nowhere with 17 year olds and is competing with MyFitnessPal and Lose It and some of these storied brands in the app space are now facing competition from 17-year-old kids. I wanted to start there of how do you think about competition and brand and how to manage that? Michael Ribero: Yeah, I'd probably offer maybe three different things here. So brand, I think blessing and a curse. Blessing in the sense where you have this past. I think the challenge was a lot of brands, especially in media, you potentially get stuck in that past or you essentially become your parents' app, and nobody wants to be their parents' app. Maybe your parents, I don't know, liquor or something else. But when you're your parents' app or you're your parents' media outlet, I think that could be a very difficult place to be. So I think that's the tension that we ultimately work through. But I think you do have brand recognition, you have consideration because you've potentially been exposed to this brand since a very young kid. I think whether it's Washington Post or whether it's MTV and a lot of these different things, someone's exposure is not necessarily when they're thinking about buying or ever going to be a buyer. It's 10, 15, 20 years before that, and it's thinking how do you ultimately nurture that tie over time? I know it's backwards and maybe not appropriate for an app conversation, but I always refer to John Deere. If anybody has kids in the audience, but they make essentially a small little tractor and that kid is never going to, probably not going to be a buyer of a tractor for 40 or 50 years, but it's the early positive association that I think you can ultimately build on over time. The second is media I think is interesting in the sense everyone is maybe a frenemy, platforms and other brands. I think it's nice with media in a lot of times it's not a zero-sum game. So you can be a watcher or a reader of one publication and usually that's actually a positive indication you're going to read other things. So in a sense, we fight for real estate on the home screen or the app, but in a way there's always that second position, third position, the platforms is also an interesting one just because it is this frenemy, it's fighting for now time, how much time do you want to spend on the office? And historically for us, Facebook was a great refer. All of these social platforms are a great refer and now they're like, "We don't want to refer you any traffic." It's a very difficult dynamic to deal with because at the same time, a lot of our readers and our current readers, the people who want to ultimately subscribe are on those platforms too and spend a big chunk of time on those platforms, so we really have to find ways to work together. Easy to say, I think really hard to do. Again, even Condé Nast is a really small drop in the bucket for someone like Meta. They say they care, but I know they don't really care. And so we have to fight really hard in order to how do we do programming? How do we do paid media, how do we do those various things? So I think between those two things it is really important we to invest in it. The one thing I think we were getting into backstage too is potentially finding ways where you can be different. The one for us I think has really been how do you bring people together in real life? I think community is really important to people, especially now and in the context of AI and all that jazz. But we have this platform I think we've used well and I've seen it across my career where you can bring people together in real life, help support that community, and then ultimately feedback into, well, how do you connect event to event? And it's really like being in the app, doing those sorts of things, spending time with us so you're ready for that next event. That's been a way we've able to see this as a positive cycle. David Barnard: Yeah, I think the differentiation is the key to a lot of this. And funny you brought up the frenemy kind of thing. You probably don't even know this. Some of the audience will, I run a weather app on the side and I actually know that my target market right now for my weather app is weather nerds who probably have two or three other weather apps in the space. And so the way you're thinking about it as well, there are going to be certain categories where it's okay, embrace the competition, it's okay, but how do you fight for that mind share? How do you be the first one they open instead of the second one they open or the first one instead of the third one that they open? How do you get your widget on the home screen versus somebody else's widget? And the key there is that the value prop is the differentiation is how do you think about that. And when you were at The Washington Post, how did you think about that in the world of just abundant free media? You were there as you were transitioning into having to charge more and paywalling more things, how did you think about that transition and so much free competition and creating that value? Michael Ribero: Yeah, I think a little or maybe a lot lucky and a little bit good on the lucky front. I mean, there are externalities that I think when you find one of those take full advantage. For us at The Post, it was the Trump bump and then COVID and it's like there's nothing I could have done to be a fraction of the success that we saw because of those two things. I think the good part is when you do get that influx, how do you make the most of it? And then how are you taking the right steps in order to set yourself up for success? One thing we thought a lot about is how much access do we give someone? I think that was really important. I think it could have been easy to say lock it all and especially in those times and when people would've paid weighing some of these short-term, long-term benefits also like the brand going back to the brand consideration that we wanted to do right by people still be successful from business perspective, but just have that balance of the amount we were harvesting now versus continuing to sustain and feed for potentially success down the road. David Barnard: Yeah. How did you think about that separation, the free versus paid? Because I mean this is, if anybody in the audience and listening later, it is a really, really tough thing to get right. And I know watching the posts, you all experimented with a few different things and do you give one story? Do you give five stories? How hard do you paywall, how many ads do you use? What were some of those internal conversation of how do we still be the story brand? And a lot of folks, they won't have that kind of story brand, but they have to make those similar decisions of we don't want to make the free experience crappy, but we want to incentivize people. So how did you think about that? Michael Ribero: Yeah, no good answer. David Barnard: It's a process. Michael Ribero: No, definitely a process. I mean, I'd maybe say three different ways to approach it. One, I think always doing a competitive audit who's giving away what I think we were talking about before. I think people who are in the category are going to be in the category. The person who reads the Post is also probably reading the Times is also reading the Journal and deciding do you want to be different than your competitors? And if so, do you have a very deliberate reason why and maybe it's certain sections or certain features, but I think that's one. The second is you've got to try stuff, and I think that's the easy part. I think that hard part is internally convincing people to have this kind of test and learn approach. When you have revenue targets, if you're talking to a product team and they really want to advocate for one part of this should absolutely be free because we want the most people using it. I think there's that internal debate and ultimately if you can align KPIs, I think those conversations become a lot easier, but often I would love a show of hands of whose company's KPIs are completely aligned so you can all make perfect decisions. It's zero. I know it's zero. So those two. And then lastly, I think just willing to be wrong and maybe willing to walk back. I think about us, we put up a registration wall. We have a property called Pitchfork. It's for music fanatics, it's focused on music reviews. We put up a reg wall, registration wall for certain folks. The next day, there was a big announcement on the editorial side, and the backlash that we got of, "You're going to put up this reg wall to now make us register when it was completely free before and now you're doing all these changes." I mean, it was hard. And so we just took it all down and we said, "You know what? We're going to pause and we're going to reset once we figure out the editorial product part of it right, and then we'll try to remonetize it at that point." And I think I would say we're going back through this process again of is now the time, is now not the time? I think we earn goodwill by being willing to say, "Hey, we're going to walk back on what we ultimately did." David Barnard: Yeah, that's a tough point. You said it's the easy part of figuring it out, but that's a hard part. I mean especially a big, Pitchfork, a brand with very loyal readers and very loyal community. Washington Post, again, story brand. I mean this is what I think a lot of us struggle with. My weather app is a hard paywall and I want to move it back to ad supported freemium tier, but then what do you put behind the paywall? What do you do? And I think there's always a hesitation of, and so I love that you shared a mistake. You should make mistakes. If you're not making mistakes, you're not trying hard to get that balance right. And it's a great example of you should try, and if you make a mistake, you can recover and you can walk it back and then take the next step. So yeah, if you're operating a freemium app, if you've got a hard paywall app, try, figure it out, and you need to. Michael Ribero: Absolutely. And I would say with all the testing, a lot of times the person who I'd say is maybe closest to the vision, to the mission, I would say it's usually right. I think we go back, so we recently launched Vogue with an app. It was essentially we relaunched the app before and we were paywalling stuff which we hadn't paywalled before. I think we had all of these discussions. What's the right way to do it? Can we overlay AI to make these decisions with us? And ultimately it was like, I think it helps that it's Anna Wintour and she's going to have a very strong opinion too, but her gut was right. It was like, here's the most important stuff and this is the stuff we should make people pay for. So I think when you have a partner like that, whoever might be in your organization, it's really helpful because usually that's right. David Barnard: Anna Wintour being your partner in figuring out your paywall. That's pretty cool. Well, the next thing I wanted to talk about was as a story brand, but as a print publication that's like trying to enter the modern age, I've been impressed with all the different kinds of monetization experimentation that y'all have been doing to figure out this new age. I have a whole list of things that you've been playing with, bundling, unbundling, rebundling, post-purchase upsell. Let's walk through those one by one and talk about, and this is something I think again, this is Tinder and Duolingo and Condé Nast and some of these bigger brands have started to figure these things out that the rest of us will be figuring out over the next few years. And so I want to hear from you, how are you increasing LTV with those post-purchase upgrades? How are you bundling? Let's start with those and the most. Michael Ribero: Yeah, no, absolutely. I wish I could take credit for a lot of this and it was a novel idea or not. The one thing I would say is I always go back, I think it was Picasso who said the quote, but good artists copy, great artists steal. I mean to me that is, I think I've based a lot of my career on that. I mean on the bundling, I think part of it is what assets do you have and then how do you ultimately put them together? You look at something like The New York Times, the newspaper was deconstructed over years and years and years with the internet, with various things and they're essentially putting it all back together and making it really easy to buy. I think it helps that they were getting outside pressure to say, "Make a bet on this." I think that was a catalyst for a lot of our conversations internally at Condé Nast. We benefit from, we have this very wide portfolio from GQ to Vogue. I go back to this double-edged sword is a lot of times these things seem to fit together, but sometimes they don't. The question is someone who is interested in Architectural Digest also going to be the person who is reading Wired? I think yes at points, but probably a lot of the time no, those are some of the considerations we went into. What I will say, and I've now seen this work over multiple instances. When you get to that point of purchase, giving people more for less money is always an equation that's going to work. So coming from TV, at one point in my life, most people watch, and this was probably five or six years ago, most people watched something like six to eight channels. We would try all sorts of messaging, all sorts of packaging to say, "Hey, just get six to eight channels." Every single test that we ran, it lost when you said, "Get over 100 channels." I mean, it was unbelievable to see. But I think reinforce the idea of when you have that moment of truth, really making sure you put your best foot forward, even if it is, it doesn't make sense or it doesn't agree with any of the research and really the importance of testing. So that's where we came from. I think the one good thing too, which we're seeing now just on the bundling is all of a sudden you have different ways into a consumer usually say with a single subscription or if you don't pull it apart, hey, it's one monolith, there's a benefit here and we're just going to keep hammering that one benefit. The context may not make sense. There's something, might be external, at least for us, and I'm sure a lot of people who are doing the bundling is here's another reason why we can show you the value of the subscription. There's a new event coming on, there's a new tent pole that we could talk about, so that's been really interesting for us on the bundling front. David Barnard: A lot of folks either thinking, well, I don't have GQ, Vogue, and things to bundle, but when you're at The Washington Post, y'all bundled with Headspace. Tell me about that deal because this is another thing where I think we're going to see the subscription industry going is these kind of bundles. Okay, you're a huge outdoor fan with AllTrails and they have some weather features in there, but can they bundle AllTrails with the Weather channel to create this synergistic bundle between the two? And I'm just throwing ideas out there, but those kinds of things, and you did that at The Washington Post. What did that look like, bundling with Headspace? Michael Ribero: Yeah, I would go two different. So bundle internally, I do think there's a path bundling internally you have more assets than I think you think you have. We recently relaunched the Wired subscription and one thing that we were doing but maybe not necessarily charging for was AMAs with editors. And now all of a sudden we said, "Hey, this is now part of the subscription. We're only going to make it subscription only." And so I think there are things that either you're doing that you can now put into a subscription and call it a bundle or probably low lift, but maybe high impact to continue to build that existing offering you had on the partnership front. I'll just warn buyer beware. Partnerships are really hard, really hard. And we did multiple at The Washington Post, which I think is super exciting. I think the theme, we really tried to coalesce around one of two things. One is the occasion. Coffee and newspaper go together really well. And so we hammered that a whole in a bunch of different ways. You can have access in certain cafes or get a Washington Post-branded coffee bean with your subscription, so that made sense. And then the other was really what person are you going after? That's more in line what you were talking about. The context also helped in the sense a lot of the research we got was people were just overwhelmed by the news. And so the insight for us was yes, we do some counter-programming, shoulder programming that is either happy news or food or whatever it might be, but realistically, The Post is going to be known for very serious topics, Washington, very serious stuff. So how do we bring in this moment of maybe peace and calm? That was the thinking there. I would say trying to hammer out a deal and really, I think going in eyes wide open is, are you going to be the big fish or the little fish? And not to say either position is bad or maybe big spoon or a little spoon, but being okay with that going in. I think when you have two companies that are equal size or at least in the same ballpark, all of a sudden it's like, "Well, I want it on my stack and I want control of the building relationship," and all those things. We've run into issues. I've run into issues before. So really being deliberate about that. But if you can make it work, I think very cool. Very cool for the press, and then definitely business results behind it too. David Barnard: So what are you working on with post-purchase upsells? I know that you all made a lot of headway with those. Michael Ribero: Yeah, I think if there's one thing I always try to do, one, do this thing, I call it post-purchase upsell, but once you sell your subscription, either sell something else, have someone else sell the real estate to someone else so they can sell something, or ask someone to do some sort of action. That point of purchase is probably the most engaged your customer's ever going to be. We've taken advantage of that in typically upselling another title or upselling a premium type of product. For example, if you subscribe to Architectural Digest, most of the times we don't know in what realm are you? Are you just a consumer who's aspirational, or is this your business? So we will offer the business membership after purchase, and we get pretty decent conversion rates in that five-ish percent and all of a sudden I have zero incremental customer acquisition costs and now I'm driving something like $100 to $200 in lifetime value from just one pop-up. David Barnard: Give people an opportunity to spend more. Michael Ribero: Just yes, and you think about and any sort of purchase, but car or McDonald's or whatever it might be. When the credit card's out, you're ready to go. And so how do I just maybe put one more thing in front of you, and again, I don't need great conversion rates, I just need little and I'm making a little bit more money. David Barnard: Yeah, I was talking to, I don't know if he's in the room, but Toby from Brightmind, this is a guy to talk to if you're here in the audience. We're at the conference, I was talking to him earlier. He runs Brightmind. It's a mental health app, a meditation app, and I've known him for, gosh, five years. We had an office hours call together and we were just talking 15 minutes ago about how his app has done all right, is such a crowded space, it's so hard. And so he recently introduced online intensives, one-on-one coaching, monthly four-hour meditation events, week-long meditation retreats, and by taking the thousands of subscribers, but then the tens of thousands of engaged email lists and everything else like that, he increased revenue 50% by just thinking out of the box. Like, okay, you're a subscription app, but what else can you sell? Coffee beans in The Washington Post. I know a lot of this sounds like, "Oh, he's at Condé Nast and he was at Washington Post, you can't do this." Toby's doing it. He's thinking outside that box and increasing LTV and increasing revenue by trying new stuff and engaging that audience. So props to you, and go find him. But that's exactly the kind of stuff we're talking about. And it doesn't have to be at a global scale, it can be in a smaller scale. Michael Ribero: Absolutely. I love it. That's really great stuff. I think lessons for everyone to learn. But I do think knowing, especially if you just started an app, I think those are probably going to be your most loyal buyers and knowing that the demand curve is not flat. It is probably very steep, especially for those first buyers. David Barnard: But the willing is to pay curve, we're not taking advantage of that. Michael Ribero: Absolutely. And I think we've tried to do that on a lot of occasions, but maybe doing bespoke stuff that doesn't scale but you think is going to be worth it, I'm highly supportive on. David Barnard: Yeah. So what do you mean by unbundling? I'm still a little confused about that. Michael Ribero: Essentially, I think a lot of the pushback that we've got is from a media perspective is this concept of subscription fatigue. And I think paired with the fact that news and I'm overwhelmed with content, and so the thinking was can you essentially create a micro product or a mini product, maybe the Diet Coke to the Coke? And so when I was at The Post, we did something called starter pack and as opposed to getting an unlimited subscription, it was essentially read four stories every single month, and then you can decide. If you consume more, you're going to hit then another paywall or an upgrade wall and then go forward from that. That's the thinking. David Barnard: And that was two bucks a month, right? Michael Ribero: Yeah. David Barnard: It's like way undercut your main, but how did that turn out from an LTV perspective? Jury's still out? Michael Ribero: Well, so I think there's two things. One, the one thing I have appreciated about publishing, extremely difficult to be in, but you get a lot of visitors and you get a lot of data. I think we ultimately decided that this couldn't be a product that we were going to advertise to everyone. It was really in the cases where we saw low propensity, we would determine propensity really based on referral source or something like that. But if we could determine you were going to be really low propensity, this would be an offering and it would be, but really hidden behind the scenes, but just trying to, I would say lower the hurdle to get you into our payment ecosystem and then we could go from there. David Barnard: No, that's so smart. And I mean there's so many ways to do that in an app. I mean, I was talking to Will from [inaudible 00:23:48] recently, and we were talking about they have some really clever things they're thinking about with being able to engage those people who, and it's pretty common in the industry now of people are closing out the paywall. Like, hey, they're there, so give them an offer, bring them in. Michael Ribero: Absolutely. David Barnard: But if there's even smarter, more sophisticated ways to do that with data to figure out if they're low propensity, give them that. But don't give that to everybody. That's great. The last thing I wanted to talk about was tiering and how you think about tiering. And again, I think there's just so much headroom as a super trippy app industry. We're still not fully exploring. The Tinders and Duolingos are getting there, but exploring the entire demand curve of the people who just love your brand, who are just willing to spend way more than your current offerings are. So how have you thought about breaking up those tiers and being able to offer those really hardcore fans who are willing to spend a lot more, let them spend? How do you think about? Michael Ribero: Yeah, I think really interesting question. I don't think anyone's done it super well. I would say my thinking on this has changed. Before it was like, let's just launch new products and new tiers to capitalize on this very dynamic. Some people are willing to pay more than others. The adoption rates I've seen have been low single percentage, and it's like, well, is it even worth it? So I think I'm more now, I talk to our editors a lot and a lot of people want to launch a premium product and I'm like, "No." I think that's the status quo is no, but prove to me there's going to be enough value. And there is another cohort here that isn't just 1% or 2% that we're going to do a lot of work for maybe not a lot of return when we can be doing other things like IRL or merch or whatever it might be to capitalize on that same dynamic. So I think if you have enough, great, it does feel the examples out there, whether it's ad free or family, okay, I'm still not completely sold on, if that makes sense in the media world, but we're thinking about it. The one thing I would call out is we've gone more of the away from the app, but into the membership community world. And Vogue I think presents a really good case study in trying to monetize different parts of the demand curve or the willingness to pay curve. We have extremely high price products, very elite select people, everything IRL, everything white glove to all the way down to freemium in an app, making sure that your brand, your company, your product, whatever it is, has a large enough umbrella. And if not really being the default in no, don't do it. Focus on driving as much as value into your subscription. Get the retention rates right, get the right pricing that you think makes the most sense before you want to distract yourself because it is distracting. David Barnard: For a lot of companies, there is still so much low hanging fruit. Don't jump to the premium tier before you've captured a lot of the low hanging fruit, but you can think more strategically of here's what we're wanting to build over the next five years, and here's how we're going to build toward offering that much value that we can charge more, so it's a fascinating place to play in. Michael Ribero: Yeah. David Barnard: All right. Well, it's been so much fun chatting with you. I wish we could talk for another hour, but. Michael Ribero: Appreciate it. David Barnard: Thank you so much. Michael Ribero: Thank you. David Barnard: Thanks so much for listening. If you have a minute, please leave a review in your favorite podcast player. You can also stop by chat.subclub.com to join our private community.