John Warrillow Quotes

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There are two main things you need to focus on. First, 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).”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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