ButcherBox’s Kickstarter campaign in 2015 was wildly successful. Within the first 24 hours, they had already exceeded 3x of their goal of 25,000 pre-orders.
“And so right from the start, from that first day, it was like, ‘Wow, I think we might be onto something here,’” Mike explains. “I had been running a company for about seven years before I started Butcher Box. And with that company, things never seemed to work. Like we would try really hard, we’d launch a feature, we were really excited about it, and then it would be crickets. And so it was just a totally different feeling to feel like the snowball was rolling down the hill and we were part of the snowball.”
It wasn’t just luck though. Mike knew there was a special badge for Kickstarter campaigns that would unlock promotion. Campaigns with that badge would be featured on the Kickstarter iran phone number list homepage and in emails. Mike essentially reverse engineered his way to getting a badge, and it worked. Kickstarter did the rest.
butcherbox delivery
One of ButcherBox’s first challenges was figuring out how to sustainably package meat and seafood for delivery. ButcherBox
For all the talk about consumers being oversubscribed, it’s still a good model for some businesses.
Mike says he couldn’t give away a free first box like some other subscription services, but he found other ways to make subscribers stick around. One of the most memorable was a “Free Bacon for Life” campaign, where customers would receive a free package of bacon in every box.
“Where I see a lot of people fail in subscription businesses is they spend a lot of time on how to drive down acquisition costs, but not a lot of time on how to increase lifetime value,” Mike says. “Increasing lifetime value is by far the easier one to do.”