Episode 34: On Helping Companies Launch Mobile App Subscription Businesses with Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder & CEO at Nami ML

Aug 9

Do you want to learn how a service that helps businesses launch mobile app subscriptions works? Then tune in to the latest episode of Subscriptions: Scaled, with Dan Burcaw, Co-Founder & CEO at Nami ML.

Throughout the episode, you’ll learn all about Nami ML as a company, the recent changes in the subscription industry, mobile app subscription integration, and so much more.

Nami ML

The episode begins with Dan explaining the concept behind Nami ML and how he ended up starting the company.

Nami ML prides itself on being the smartest service to assist clients in launching, scaling, and optimizing your mobile app subscription business. There are many issues in mobile-first businesses, and Nami is there to help streamline processes and make mobile app subscription businesses run as smoothly as possible.

Nami delivers a full-suite that meets clients where they are in the timeline of their subscription product. Whether you’re new to the game or scaling up, Nami was developed to help people succeed in the app economy.

The service allows you to:

Build your purchase experience
Track revenue and customer insights
Monitor purchase event in real-time

The brand provides a drop-in native paywall control which can be managed from the Nami Control Center. This allows clients to join all areas of their subscription or in-app purchase paywalls without an app update.

Clients can also understand how effectively they are converting users to buy on their paywalls. They can track revenue in real-time and gain insights into growth.

Nami also deals with the client and server integration points with Apple StoreKit and Google Play billing, including receipt validation and working with subscription notifications. The real-time Developer links together server notifications, paywall screen impressions, transactions, and more into one view.

The Integration Process

Dan talks about bringing different mobile ecosystems together, such as the Google App Store, Google Play Store, and Roku.

While Nami is focused on digital subscriptions, Dan tells us that digital subscriptions are sold directly through an external website or mobile website. Or, there may be an affiliate or partnership where a subscription is sold in bulk.

The different mobile ecosystems are brought together in a similar way to how Nami supports the underlying technologies. They are delivered via mobile through the App Store and Google Play through APIs that are provided by those vendor platforms.

Nami also supports some of the popular platforms that people use, such as SAS apps. Likewise, some people like to implement subscriptions through Stripe, so they offer a Stripe module. If clients want to sell and manage billings and transactions through Stripe, that’s possible.

The Recent Changes in the Subscription Industry

One focus of the 45-minute long episode is the changes in the subscription industry over the years. Dan claims that the opportunity customers now have to cancel subscriptions easily is a significant shift from before.

Thanks to modern technology, many people expect certain features or characteristics from a subscription service. Dan notes that today, people expect to have the choice that they can exit a subscription easily.

He also stresses that it doesn't necessarily mean the end of a relationship when a customer cancels a subscription. It’s always possible to get a user back, and they may be willing to return at some point; it all depends on how you treat them.

If you make it difficult to cancel a subscription, that can be extremely frustrating and off-putting for people. If you’re going to make customers go through hoops to cancel a subscription, they’re a lot less likely to return.

Maybe one day you offer a new type of product. If you treated the customer well with the initial subscription they ordered, they’re more likely to return if a new product or service catches their eye.

The Future of the Subscription Industry

Following on from this, Dan gives his ideas on what he expects to occur in the future in the subscriptions industry.

The subscriptions industry is a growing space, and Dan notes that UBS expects digital subscriptions to double by 2025. Today, mobile app spending is 270 billion dollars, and it continues to grow. This includes a mix of in-app purchases, one-time purchases, and subscriptions.

All these subscriptions are growing faster than the market, and in-app purchases tend to skew toward the game space. Dan notes that games have been lagging in terms of adoption to subscription, which he expects will change over time.

Dan also mentions the importance of family plans or subscriptions whereby those in a household are all subscribed to the same service. There is one billing relationship but multiple users. Dan believes family plans like these are an untapped opportunity to generate more revenue. While the family plan would be more expensive than for a single person, the value for several people in a household is impressive.

What's Next for Nami ML?

The episode finishes up with Dan speaking about the future of Nami ML as a business and what they hope to achieve moving forward.

Dan is excited to improve the marketing side of Nami ML. The aim is to provide more capabilities for clients to support their subscribers and deliver better customer support. He sees this coming together through automation.

Machine learning is a huge part of how Nami thinks about their future. They’ve been building the world’s first (as far as they know) learning data set that’s created around predicting mobile-first practices. The first data set has learned how to predict key moments in the subscriber’s journey.

With billions of data points collected, brands can begin to automate marketing and support, for example, considering where the subscriber is in their journey. Maybe their subscription is active, about to be paused, or they’re using a free trial.

Dan believes automation will be a game-changer for making the customer journey come to life during subscription services. It will eliminate friction and help the process become a lot more streamlined.

Toward the very end of the episode, Dan discusses the possibility of a future of personalized subscriptions. This could involve tailoring a subscription to a person in a highly scalable way to gain metrics and data.

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