Buoy’s Revenue Soars Over 200% in 90 Days After Switching to Stay AI
Migrated from: Smartrr
Industry: Health & Wellness
Subscription Growth by the Numbers
Increase in total subscription revenue, in 90 days
Increase in first-time subscription revenue, in 90 days
Decrease in subscriber churn, in 90 days
Founded by three long-time friends — COO Cole Puchi, CEO Daniel Schindler, and CMO Eddie Zelenak — Buoy was built to improve hydration. Unlike other electrolyte products laden with sugars, sweeteners and artificial ingredients, Buoy offers healthy hydration supplements with a neutral flavor profile, making them suitable to add into literally any kind of beverage (even your cocktail or beer!).
How Buoy Increased First-Time Subscription Revenue by 4.5x While Decreasing Churn
Challenges
After debuting on Amazon in 2019 and seeing strong subscriber growth, the team began building their DTC presence. Cole said, “We thought, if we’re seeing this kind of success on Amazon, imagine what we could do if we could actually market to them, upsell them, and build relationships.” After trying a few other subscription apps and finding them lacking the sophisticated retention tools the Buoy team really needed, they started to look for a stronger solution.
The Solution: Stay AI
As CMO, Eddie started looking for the most innovative subscription apps, with the best features for retention and promotions, that could take their business to the next level — and found Stay AI. “There’s a lot of retention features in there that a lot of other apps don’t have or don’t prioritize,” Eddie mentioned. With the right technology in place, they were able to really focus on growing subscribers and building the right experience for their brand.
“Being on the cutting edge in terms of the things we can do to help retain customers is highly important to us, and we found that with Stay AI.”
Strategy
Check out some of the strategies that have supported Buoy’s massive subscription program growth since switching to Stay Ai.
Delivering a self-service home base with the customer portal: Buoy’s explosive growth over the past 18 months — from just a couple hundred subscribers to over 7,000 — could have put a ton of pressure on their small internal team. But not with Stay Ai’s easy-to-use customer portal: “It’s huge for us to have a self-service tool that makes it easy for people to manage their own subscriptions. It takes a huge amount of work off the people on our team handling customer service requests,” Cole said.
Saving more subscribers with RetentionEngine cancel surveys and rebuttals: The Buoy team recently deployed their cancellation survey and follow-up treatments using Stay’s RetentionEngine. It’s only been live for a month or so, but they’ve already saved thousands in MRR with strong offers and thoughtful flow design.
Maximizing marketing efficiency with easy-to-understand reporting: When you treat subscription like a performance channel, analytics and reporting become all the more critical. “We live in that dashboard,” Cole told us. Since beginning to focus on paid media for subscriber acquisition, they use cohort performance metrics to see what’s working and what’s not. “We’re looking at the different cohorts each month to see how sticky they are, and trying to optimize for the stickiest customers possible.”
“Working with Stay is like working with an extension of our own team, not just inputting a support ticket and waiting to hear back from an unknown person on the other side of the email. […] Scaling with Stay has been very easy, and we believe that continuing to scale far beyond where we are now will be possible with this team, and that’s really huge.”
