Episode 61: Entitlement with Daniel Corsaro, Founder and CEO of Bundled, Inc.

In this week’s episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Daniel Corsaro, Founder and CEO at Bundled, Inc.

In the episode, we learn what entitlement means in the subscription industry, how Bundled works, and all about Daniel’s career.

Keep reading to learn more.

Bundled, Inc.

Bundled, Inc. builds entitlement infrastructure using a mixture of blockchain and off-chain functionality. Its solutions are built for businesses with their communities and end-users in mind. 

The company's initial goal was to lower the barrier for subscription brands to partner with each other. By so doing, they aggregate value, provide users easy, seamless access across various services, and drive growth.

The team moves away from the complexity of on-chain mechanics, removes the need for businesses to hold cryptocurrency to leverage blockchain, and provides new, unique access to products and services. 

The blockchain area of Bundled’s product is currently built on Solana, a public blockchain platform. This provides the required speed and transaction costs to make the Bundled entitlement network work.

The Bundled team has worked to deliver several iterations of user-facing functionality, core business infrastructure, and systems that increased growth across various applications. The team is excited to provide impressive solutions to complex problems to the Web3 ecosystem.

Daniel Corsaro

At the beginning of the episode, Daniel shares more about his background and what got him into subscriptions. 

Daniel has been working with subscriptions for over a decade in three separate companies. One of them, Crunchyroll, provides the world’s most extensive collection of anime. At Crunchyroll, Daniel helped grow subscribers from 50,000 to 2.5 million. 

After Daniel left Crunchyroll, he pursued a personal passion and worked on servers at Surfline Wavetrak, providing the most accurate and trusted surf reports, forecasts, and coastal weather.

At Surfline, Daniel worked with a bunch of people that loved the same things that he loved. He could expand more into the product, which was a great experience for him. He worked very closely with the engineering team on descriptions and entitlements and helped build that system.

More recently, Daniel worked for a subscription business called BodyFit as a member of the executive team.

Entitlements

One theme the episode focuses on is entitlement. We learn what it means, how entitlement works, and the challenges in the space.

Essentially, a subscription gives you access to your entitlement; All of the software and drivers made available to you because of your subscription are entitlements.

Daniel notes that access is the key word for him when he thinks about entitlements. He says that an excellent analogy for conceptualizing an entitlement is a key.

For example, what key do you have in doors in Netflix? What access are you granted as a result of your key?

Enabling Brands to Partner and Bundle Together

Daniel also discusses how Bundled makes it easier for subscription brands to partner and bundle together. He also talks about reducing churn in the subscriptions industry.

Daniel explains that the vast majority of companies are not actually giving their credit card or payment information. Instead, it’s being processed through Google, so part of the entitlement complexity is due to the payment processor.

If someone has paid for a subscription and the payment has been processed, you’re going back to the key and lock analogy. It’s almost as if each one of those databases or payment processors is a key.

One of the challenges is keeping all the information that is in different databases in sync. In Bundled’s original marketplace, they wanted to enable this easily.

The team would meet with subscription companies. A recurring piece of feedback they received was that those companies were already handling payment and entitlement across all these different systems and have to add on roles. This would be pretty involved if someone wants to change their subscription bundle.

Daniel explains that the team looked at potential partners to see if there was a way to provide some kind of universal entitlement. The team started exploring blockchain and how it connects with databases.

Ultimately, blockchain became a good way of conceptualizing a publicly accessible database. Daniel likes to look at blockchain as a technology and a public database and ask what you can do with it?

Tokenization

Tokenization is when a subscriber signs up and adds their credit card information. The credit card data passes to the payment gateway, verifying the request and processing the payment. The credit card data is stored in the payment gateway's vault. A vault token for the credit card data is assigned.

Daniel explains that when you subscribe to Netflix, for example, the media isn’t something you own. You can’t do whatever you want with that month of Netflix. Instead, you have access to the channels.

Netflix can sell tokens that entitle you to a month of the service, maybe something similar to a gift card. Then you’re done with it. As such, there’s a market for tokens.

Daniel explains the core concept of the traditional business model is that when you buy something, you own it. Ownership implies you can sell it in the future.

But the business model, such as the one involving tokenization, is changing.

Daniel notes that pricing is extremely difficult for subscription companies and many businesses are almost coming up with it in their head based on what else is out there.

He talks about the importance of price discovery services to help subscription companies work out the appropriate price for their product.

The Concept of Membership

In the episode, Daniel also talks about the concept of membership. When you subscribe to a service, you’re a member of a community. Communities are sticky.

As a company, you create a membership and you associate a particular aspect of a person’s life with that membership, so it resonates with them.

Tokenizing the experience and enabling the community helps symbolize their membership.

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