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Skylight · B2C · digital family calendars and frames

Sell the device everywhere: your own site, Amazon, Costco and Best Buy

Called very successful; retail acts as a quality stamp, but lowers subscription attach

Workedpartnershipsintegrations-marketplaces

What they did

Multi-channel distribution: direct on myskylight.com (controls customer relationship, auto-on subscription), Amazon, and retailers including Costco and Best Buy, plus the same abroad. Retailers generally take only one player per category, which works as a moat. Trade-off: in Amazon and retail the subscription can't be bundled at checkout, so attach is lower and the product must sell the subscription after setup.

What happened

'the strategy to be everywhere, that has been very successful for us'; retail seen as the biggest 'influencer', but it pressures post-purchase subscription conversion.

In their words

How Skylight Balances Growth and Profit for Sustainable Success – Michael Segal & Mark Ungerer, Skylight

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David BarnardSay that growth PM, you need to hire. Somebody in this audience, go apply for that job.

Michael SegalYes, please, and thank you. But influencers are huge and very authentic. People can smell an inauthentic influencer. We have thousands of people out there using this, loving it, talking about it, that, plus paid growth. Retail is the biggest influencer of all in our world. The fact that we are in Costco and other great retailers, it's a stamp of quality that can't be underestimated. So, it's kind of that. And the fourth part of the square is just word of mouth. We often poll our customers and we ask, how impactful is this thing to you? Is it life-changing, pretty high bar? Is it very awesome, but not life-changing or is it worse than that? Today, about 20% of people who reply say that it's life-changing.

Michael Segal… the people who are getting us dozens and dozens of new customers just by virtue of they can't stop talking about it. But not life-changing is probably an order of magnitude, in terms of the chatter and how good our business is. So, probably, the best thing we could do for growth long-term is just build, build, build features that take us into 50% life-changing territory. Mark as our chief product officer, that is pretty much explicitly his goal.

Mark UngererThe other thing that we've done is we've decided to be multi-channel, and so this is something that those who are not in hardware are not thinking about. But we have our own website where we sell the product and we directly control the relationship with the customer. We sell through Amazon, and we sell through retailers, and we do the same thing internationally. And so, I think the strategy to be everywhere, that has been very successful for us. But it comes with real complexities and trade-offs, and we could probably do a whole podcast just on how to be multi-channel.

Mark UngererThe point I would make here for subscription focused audiences, in our owned channel on myskylight.com, we have a much higher attach rate to the subscription because we can turn the subscription on automatically. And we actually, pro-tip here, we give a discount on the hardware if you sign up with the subscription, and that is a super successful way to get subscribers, because it seems like a great deal. Wait, I get a free month, and I pay less …

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Tags: amazon, costco, best-buy, web, retail, multi-channel, distribution, international