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Building in public: subscriptions for retail stores

I used to run a food cart and a small restaurant with my brother and we have been thinking of opening a new restaurant or coffee shop for a while. In early 2019 -I was working for Amazon at the time- I discovered substack. It occurred to me that retail stores (grocery, cafes, pet stores, bakeries, supplement shops, etc) need a substack-amazon subscribe and save hybrid!

It goes like this:
The customer pays a subscription to certain menu items that auto-renews every month in exchange for a discount.
For example:

  • 20 Lattes a month for 50 $42.5 (15% discount)
  • 10 bagels a month for $25 $20 (20% discount) (muffins, pancakes, etc)
  • Shaving baldes pack every month for $15 $13.5 (10% discount)
    etc
    A customer would buy the subscription and comes in each time to "redeem" one of the items they bought and so on.
    Subscriptions would auto-renew every month unless the customer cancels. Sales on auto-pilot like an app or online newspaper subscription. Amazon has been using this tactic (Subscribe & Save very successfully for 13 years now)

The current climate got me thinking about how retail stores in general can probably increase sales, improve ROI on each customer acquisition through advertising and make walk-ins become worry-free recurring revenue through offering subscriptions.

I guess I worked in software companies -which rely heavily on the subscription model hence why software is super profitable- as a day job for a long time which got that idea in my head.

I'be built an MVP of a web & mobile-based software that stores can use to offer subscriptions, accept payments, keep track of redemptions and auto-withdraw money to their bank accounts. Takes a minute to set up and all the store needs to do is market the subscriptions to their walk-in customers.

Curious what everyone thinks

on January 1, 2021