Episode 30: On growing a tea subscription company with Jason Roos, Co-founder at Steepster

On this week’s episode of Subscriptions: Scaled, we speak with Jason Roos, Co-founder at Steepster.

Throughout the episode, we learn everything from Jason’s journey working in the subscriptions industry to Steepster’s success to some top tips for working with customers. 

Keep reading to learn all about Steepster and Jason’s experience in the subscription industry.

Steepster

Steepster is the world’s largest tea community. It allows members to keep track of the teas they’re drinking, receive recommendations from friends, and discover new teas. 

Steepster offers a tea subscription service bringing a sampling of hand-picked teas to members’ doorsteps each month. Tea lovers can try new teas sourced from around the world by a large variety of premium tea brands.

Throughout the episode, we’ll discover more about Steepster and how the community rose to success.

Jason’s Experience 

In this episode, we learn all about Jason’s experience in the subscription industry and how he started working for Steepster. 

It all goes back to around 13 years ago, when Jason left college. He had degrees in writing and philosophy, as well as a minor in Spanish. Coincidentally, Jason worked in tech as a product manager with a friend he went to school with in Minnesota.

This is what initially set Jason on the path to working in the subscription sector.  It was around 2009 that the pair ended up moving to New York City to start their own company, where they developed web products and mobile apps, trying to work out what would succeed and how to start a business for themselves.

The two met a third business partner who became a third co-founder for their company.

One of the first products the team created was a community for tea drinkers called Steepster. That’s where Jason had his first experience with subscription commerce. 

The three ended up running two different Tea of the Month clubs as part of the community as another offering to the audience.

Steepster’s Success

Throughout the episode, Jason also speaks a lot about Steepster and how the brand became so successful over the years. We learn about Steepster’s Tea of the Month clubs along with the brand’s other offerings.

Steepster has been around for a handful of years and has slowly grown to become the world’s biggest community of tea drinkers online. For many years, the online space was regularly receiving 100,000 to 200,000 unique visitors a month.

When Jason and his team understood these numbers, they realized they could turn Steepster into a real profitable business. Previously, it had just been a free website for tea lovers to share their passions and discover new teas.

As part of the subscription launch, the team ran the Tea of the Month club, which involved sending out approximately ten ounces of three different teas. It worked as a tea sampler, and the team aimed to create unique lasting interactions, beyond a single transaction, with customers.

They would try to get to know their customer’s preferences so they can get more value from the brand, rather than the use of a single product.

Creating Meaningful Relationships with Customers

A highlight of the conversation is the importance of businesses creating meaningful relationships with customers and how Steepster manages to achieve this. Jason also talks about the marketing and design aspects of Steepster.

The original premise of creating Steepster was to create a tea community to provide relevant recommendations to consumers. The team ended up working on tea because one of the co-founders was a big tea enthusiast. Then the rest of the team came with a more business-focused perspective, asking how they could apply a model to a vertical or space that focuses on creating quality tea recommendations.

The team soon thought about how they could create meaningful relationships between the business and the customers. They didn’t want it to be a case of a customer buying a single product, and that’s it.

Frequent interactions, which go hand-in-hand with subscription services, help create meaningful relationships between businesses and customers. Members can react to the teas sent to them and understand how they’ve been recommended the products. They can log the teas down and write about them, which feeds into their tea log.

Steepster can see how their customers react to their teas and can further refine the samples they provide the following month. This goes beyond a superficial, single transactional relationship, creating something deeper and more meaningful.

These aspects of Steepster are all valuable for keeping the customer-business relationship solid and steady, and for keeping customers coming back to the brand.

The Evolution of Steepster

We also learn about the evolution of Steepster and how the company has grown over the years. Jason also touches upon the Living Social promotion the brand ran.

Steepster originally began as a free community, and the team was just trying to gain traction and users, hoping people would start logging their teas. Once that was working well, the team asked themselves, how do we monetize this?

The trio tried several methods to grow their business, including affiliate marketing, daily deals, and direct sales. The latter involved sourcing and selling some of their own teas, which was a little challenging.

One of the early options that worked well was the Tea of the Month subscription. It catered towards big tea enthusiasts and drinkers rather than people who consume the occasional tea. Many of the subscribers like to drink premium loose leaf teas and have a genuine interest in discovering new teas from around the world.

The subscription service is an excellent way to introduce new teas to people. As the first subscription was so successful, Steepster ended up doing two subscription services.

At one point, Steepster ran an offer through Living Social. They were able to achieve great success from the deals website, gaining approximately 1000 customers. However, they couldn’t sustain the lifetime value of those customers, and after around three months, most of them were gone.

The conversation slowly wraps up with Jason discussing other competitor subscription services on the market and how they compare with Steepster.

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