This week we sat down with Jesse Horwitz, Co-CEO & Co-founder at Hubble, to talk about distribution and discounting.
September 7, 2018
Can you tell me a little bit about you and your role?
I’m Co-founder of Hubble Contacts, a direct-to-consumer subscription business in the daily disposable contact lens space. We raised our first money in May 2016, and launched in November 2016. The whole point of the business is that we are half the price of other contact lens brands. We are $33 a month, or $360 a year, which compares to the typical $700 a year or more for dailies.
What is taking up most of your time right now?
First of all we are spending a lot of time thinking about what our physical distribution looks like, and who we want to partner with on that front. It’s possible for us to experiment with different distribution models, from shipping directly to consumers, to partnerships with physical retailers. Secondly, we’re taking time to analyze our discount offers in greater detail than we have done before. For example, we’ve run a successful ‘get your first two weeks free’ offer for a long time, and it may be time to reevaluate that. We want to understand how deep that offer is, and how changing the offer will have an impact on cost per acquisition and retention.
For the distribution piece, how do you select partners? Do you use a set criteria?
For us it’s a sales process rather than a selection process. We want partners with broad reach and great access to consumers. In return, we have to convince these partners that Hubble can drive value for their business too. We have to make these partners feel good, by promising strong penetration among demographics that they are interested in reaching. Then figure out how to create convenience and savings for the consumer too. Overall, it’s a pivotal time for us, as we’ve spent a lot of time and money over the past two years on marketing and brand awareness. So today, it’s time to shift our focus towards distribution. We’ll keep the eCommerce model in place, and decide if we want to add other distribution points to our model.
Looking forward to hearing about your next steps. Moving away from distribution, tell me more about your discounting strategy?
Tactile discounting is the most important thing for any eCommerce business; you should always be making changes to your offers. Right now, we have a very generous introductory offer that maximizes top of funnel; it has high acquisition benefits but a very high churn as well. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with what we consider to be the correct ‘level of generosity’ in our offers, and how to trade this off against a higher cost per acquisition. These tests take a lot of time to run, but they aren’t complicated. You just have to be very good at analyzing the results. And as a result of this analysis, we’re getting much more efficient at trading off our discounts vs. CPA.
I’d be happy to trade more info on this with other members of the Insiders group. And I’m happy to talk to others around their top-performing Facebook campaigns too, just drop me a DM in the Slack channel!
This week we sat down with Jesse Horwitz, Co-CEO & Co-founder at Hubble, to talk about distribution and discounting.
September 7, 2018
Can you tell me a little bit about you and your role?
I’m Co-founder of Hubble Contacts, a direct-to-consumer subscription business in the daily disposable contact lens space. We raised our first money in May 2016, and launched in November 2016. The whole point of the business is that we are half the price of other contact lens brands. We are $33 a month, or $360 a year, which compares to the typical $700 a year or more for dailies.
What is taking up most of your time right now?
First of all we are spending a lot of time thinking about what our physical distribution looks like, and who we want to partner with on that front. It’s possible for us to experiment with different distribution models, from shipping directly to consumers, to partnerships with physical retailers. Secondly, we’re taking time to analyze our discount offers in greater detail than we have done before. For example, we’ve run a successful ‘get your first two weeks free’ offer for a long time, and it may be time to reevaluate that. We want to understand how deep that offer is, and how changing the offer will have an impact on cost per acquisition and retention.
For the distribution piece, how do you select partners? Do you use a set criteria?
For us it’s a sales process rather than a selection process. We want partners with broad reach and great access to consumers. In return, we have to convince these partners that Hubble can drive value for their business too. We have to make these partners feel good, by promising strong penetration among demographics that they are interested in reaching. Then figure out how to create convenience and savings for the consumer too. Overall, it’s a pivotal time for us, as we’ve spent a lot of time and money over the past two years on marketing and brand awareness. So today, it’s time to shift our focus towards distribution. We’ll keep the eCommerce model in place, and decide if we want to add other distribution points to our model.
Looking forward to hearing about your next steps. Moving away from distribution, tell me more about your discounting strategy?
Tactile discounting is the most important thing for any eCommerce business; you should always be making changes to your offers. Right now, we have a very generous introductory offer that maximizes top of funnel; it has high acquisition benefits but a very high churn as well. Recently, we’ve been experimenting with what we consider to be the correct ‘level of generosity’ in our offers, and how to trade this off against a higher cost per acquisition. These tests take a lot of time to run, but they aren’t complicated. You just have to be very good at analyzing the results. And as a result of this analysis, we’re getting much more efficient at trading off our discounts vs. CPA.
I’d be happy to trade more info on this with other members of the Insiders group. And I’m happy to talk to others around their top-performing Facebook campaigns too, just drop me a DM in the Slack channel!