25+ years. Startups, Fortune 100s, category creation, global scale. What has all that experience taught you about where marketing can create the most leverage, and what does that mean for how you lead at Recurly?
The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that marketing creates the least leverage when it's treated as a function that shows up after the product is built. The moments I'm proudest of, inclusive of helping build the modern retail gift card category from scratch, all came from marketing sitting inside the product and revenue conversation from day one, not downstream of it. At Recurly, that means I don't think of marketing as a demand generation engine that hands off to sales and then goes quiet. I think of it as the function responsible for the entire subscriber relationship: the story that gets someone to sign up, and the experience that keeps them from quietly drifting away eighteen months later. Those are the same jobs now. Leading here means building a marketing organization that owns outcomes across that full arc, not just the first conversion.
Subscription growth looks healthy on the surface until churn, failed payments, and declining lifetime value tell a different story. Where is the industry most exposed right now?
Right at the point where most businesses stop paying attention. Our 2026 State of Subscriptions data shows industry growth slowed from 15.4% to 12.6% this past year, and 52% of consumers canceled at least one subscription in the past 12 months. It’s easy to read that as a demand problem and respond by spending more on acquisition. That's the exposure. Acquisition was never the leak. The leak is what happens after someone signs up: the failed renewal, the card that expired quietly, the subscriber who stopped getting value three months ago and nobody noticed. Businesses are still budgeting like it's 2019, when growth was cheap and forgiving. It isn't that way anymore, and the companies still treating retention as a support function rather than a growth function are the ones who'll feel this first.
Recurly sees data from 100M+ subscribers. What are those signals telling you about how subscriber expectations and behaviors are changing, and where are businesses still playing by outdated rules?
The clearest signal is that control has replaced discounting as the thing that actually earns loyalty. Our data shows 38% of consumers prefer pausing a subscription over canceling it outright, and where brands offer that option, pause usage has grown 337%, with three out of four of those subscribers returning. That's a subscriber telling you exactly what they need: not a coupon, not a retention call, just the ability to step away without being forced into a breakup. The outdated rule is that a canceled subscriber is a lost one. Nearly one in four new sign-ups across our network now come from someone who canceled before. I call that the boomerang subscriber, and most marketing organizations still don't have a lifecycle stage built for them. They're sitting in a suppression list instead of a strategy.
Everyone wants to “solve churn.” That’s not a strategy. What does Recurly actually change across acquisition, retention, and revenue recovery to make subscription growth more durable?
Churn isn't a single problem, so it can't have a single fix, which is exactly why "solve churn" is a slogan and not a plan. Durable growth means treating every stage of the subscriber lifecycle as its own discipline with its own levers. On acquisition, that's giving people flexible entry points, like the micro-subscriptions now converting 13% of buyers into recurring plans, so the first commitment feels low-risk. On retention, it's building the pause-before-cancel and win-back paths I mentioned, instead of a single generic save offer. And on revenue recovery, this is the part people underestimate most: businesses lose subscribers they never actually decided to lose, just because a card expired or a payment silently failed. Automated recovery reclaimed $155 million in the software category alone last year. That's not marketing in the traditional sense, but it's the same subscriber relationship, and it's not durable growth if you're only investing in some of it.
You call yourself a market-creating marketer. How do you recognize a piece of whitespace worth owning and turn that insight into a story the market can’t ignore?
Whitespace worth owning is usually hiding behind a belief everyone in the industry has stopped questioning. With gift cards, the assumption was that stored value only worked as a niche product. The opportunity was realizing consumers wanted choice more than they wanted a specific product, and building the category around that instead. I look for the same pattern now: a belief the subscription industry treats as settled that the data actually contradicts. The boomerang subscriber is a good example. For years, the market has treated cancellation as the end of the relationship. Our data says it's a lifecycle stage, not an ending, and once you can say that with real numbers behind it, you're not describing a trend anymore. You're naming something the market didn't have language for yet, and that's what makes people repeat it.
AI is changing how companies acquire, engage, and retain subscribers. Which part of the traditional subscription growth playbook do you think is most likely to become obsolete?
The static lifecycle campaign. For years, retention marketing meant building a calendar: email at day 30, offer at day 60, save campaign at cancellation. That entire model assumes subscriber behavior is predictable enough to script in advance, and our data says it isn't. Engaged subscribers spend three times more than disengaged ones, but engagement shifts week to week, sometimes day to day. The businesses that will win are the ones acting on what a subscriber is doing right now rather than what a calendar assumes they'll do on day 60. That's not a marketing tactic changing; that's the underlying operating model of retention marketing changing, and I think most teams are still building campaigns for a subscriber who reacts on schedule. That subscriber doesn't really exist anymore.
If you had to bet your career on one thing that will fundamentally change how companies think about growth over the next five years, what would you bet on?
That subscription data stops living in the billing system and starts running the growth strategy. Right now, most companies treat subscriber data as plumbing: useful for finance, invisible to the CMO. I'd bet my career on the shift where that data becomes the single asset marketing, product, and finance all build from, because the answer to whether you should spend on acquisition or retention this quarter is sitting in the same dataset as your dunning recovery rate and your pause-to-return ratio. The companies still asking marketing and finance to work from different versions of the truth are going to lose ground to the ones who don't. That's my bet.
