“Don’t be afraid to say no to projects. Prove that you’re serious about specialization by turning down work that falls outside your area of expertise. The more people you say no to, the more referrals you’ll get to people who need your product or service.”

“Once you’ve isolated what is teachable, what your customers value, and what they need most often, document your process for delivering this type of product or service.”

“Next, name your scalable product or service. Naming your offering gives you ownership of it and helps you differentiate it from those of potential competitors.”

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

“there was a time when you bought books in a bookstore. The bookstore paid rent and therefore had to stock only the best-selling books to ensure that sales revenue per square foot was high enough to cover its rent and staff.”

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

“Therefore, your biggest competitor for your subscription business is not the rival service; it is your customer’s inertia in not using your service.”

“Like many subscription models, Amazon Prime is a Trojan horse that is expanding the list of products consumers are willing to buy from Amazon and giving the eggheads in Seattle a mountain of customer data to sift through.”

“These four factors—the access generation, light-switch reliability, delicious data, and the long tail—have led some of the world’s most successful companies and promising start-ups to shift their business models to a focus on subscriptions.”

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

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

“video attracted so much attention that it crashed Dollar Shave Club’s servers. Within 48 hours of the video’s release, the company received 12,000 orders.”

“At the time it was acquired, WhatsApp did not employ a single marketing executive.”

“Research firm Gartner estimates that “by 2015, 35% of Global 2000 companies with non-media digital products will generate incremental revenue of 5% to 10% through subscription-based services and revenue models.”12”

“there are two main things you need to focus on. First, as we saw in chapter 12, you need to find a way to consistently acquire customers for no more than a third of their lifetime value. Second, you need to reduce the number of customers who cancel (churn).”

“Next, name your scalable product or service. Naming your offering gives you ownership of it and helps you differentiate it from those of potential competitors.”

“The simplifier model promises two things: not only will you take to-do items off your customer’s list, you will also be the one reminding the customer that the task needs doing.”