Our friends at Bold Commerce recently sat down with our Co-founder and COO, Yasmin Nozari to chat about all things ecom, subscriptions, and analytics. 

Yasmin loves seeing and hearing brands discover that “aha moment” in their data – the details, patterns, and stories that lie within their data. She’s always encouraging users to find those stories, as there’s so much to be discovered about customer behavior.

That’s really what led to the creation of Peel; brands need a better way of getting to the treasure trove of insights that already lives within their data. Using Peel’s automated analytics tools, brands turn their data into actionable strategies for faster growth. 

From listening to hundreds of brands about their creation and growth experiences, plus getting key pieces of feedback, Yasmin and the team here at Peel stay on the pulse of what ecom brands need, and build features accordingly. And that’s why Bold asked her to have a chat about so many things that are crucial for ecom brands and subscription businesses, plus Bold and Peel have an integration to analyze subscription data.

📝 Here’s a quick rundown of what was on the table for the chat:

• Biggest industry challenges in understanding and analyzing data.
• Metrics that might fly under the radar, but are big for long-term action.
• 3 metrics that companies can’t live without.
• Most commonly used metrics? Least commonly used?
• What’s the key to understanding metrics for subscription businesses?

🎧 Grab your headphones and check out the full interview here, or read on below for the full transcript!

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Full Bold x Peel Interview Transcript 👇

Jay: Hey everyone. We’ve got a great episode today. It’s with one of our partners at Bold, a wonderful company. I have the co-founder of a company called, Peel. Yasmin Nozari, she’s – like I said – the co-founder. She’s also the COO of Peel. She leads customer product experiences, sales, and marketing. 

When you’re a co-founder you wear a lot of hats. One of the things she said before joining was she has a lot of fun finding what she calls the “aha moment” in data, which I want to dig into a little bit, because I think a lot of merchants probably don’t have that aha moment; there’s metrics and analytics, and there’s a large majority of people that are trying to make sense of it.

But we’ll get into that. She has worked with a lot of different software startups in different product roles, and I found it interesting. You had a history of being a math teacher, which makes perfect sense, given the industry. Yasmin, thank you so much for joining us today.

Yasmin: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Jay: Oh, such a pleasure. Can you give us a quick background? Who are you? And I know I said a little bit in the beginning there, but who are you and what got you into this analytics space?

Yasmin: Sure. I’m Yasmin. And my background’s in product. When I was always working at different product jobs, you’d always want to know how your users are using the tool and the analysis behind it. And so my background is in product and in data. So, thinking about how people use our products, and what are opportunities with strategy with the business. So knowing your numbers. When it came to coming up with Peel or thinking about Peel, it was always like, well, how do we make this better?

How do we make this more scalable? I’m not super technical, so I could do sequel, but then I would make a mistake on a join, like most people would (or non-technical people). So, I’d always have to partner with technical folks to get the analysis that I wanted. And it just seemed disjointed, like how do we make this accessible to everybody without having blockers in place?

So, that’s a little bit about my background and what led me to want to continue to work in data and make it more accessible and scalable and easy for brands to have the numbers that they need to figure out growth opportunities for their business.

Jay: I love it. When did Peel start? What’s the story of how it came to be?

Yasmin: So, my co-founder Nico and I used to work at a company together and we would always partner on data projects. He’s an engineer, and I was the non-technical person. So we’d always be digging into data, and we wanted to start our own thing. We sort of joked, “Oh, when we’re working together, this is our passive way of interviewing our next co-founder,” which was each other.

And I think we just started working together on different data projects. I think we actually met on my birthday, which was our joking start date. And we just would start thinking, talking about not problems, but opportunities we saw in our previous roles of like, “Okay, we didn’t know that this segment of customers was behaving in a specific way,” because no one was asking those questions. No one was querying the data in that. We were focused on other projects or other things because that’s where our biases were.

So I was like, why can’t we just get a slack notification that tells us, “Hey, this part of the business is trending or something’s happening that you’re not actively paying attention to.” So then people can start digging and finding more opportunities. So, you’re like digging around with this idea in data. And then we ended up focusing on eCommerce because of the opportunity.

People don’t need to hire data engineers, but there are eCommerce bands because they could build brands with so many tools with the Shopify platform and other eCommerce platforms. But they’re building amazing brands and they have amazing customer data with tons of different dimensions that tell different stories to find opportunities. So, it was just like digging through these ideas and interviewing our network of things that came about, which is sort of how we landed on this. But data was, and is, always our route. Like we’re curious about it. We want to make it accessible; we want to make it easy. How do we do that?

Jay: And then just for background: So, what year was this that Peel was founded?

Yasmin: 2018. So, it was my birthday. Well actually 2017. Maybe we incorporate 2018.

Jay: Well, that’s easy to remember the anniversary. So it’s interesting. Like I think there’s no shortage of data, but there’s definitely a shortage in understanding it and making sense of it. And I’ve often found, which I want to get into a little bit, but just a few more questions on Peel itself. And then I want to get into, I think a lot of the listeners will find it interesting about some of the analytics that you look at and which ones are important to you, but just in building the company and building Peel, I’m a co-founder as well. Was there anything that it’s never as easy as you think it is? Were there any challenges building the company or even around, like, data itself, that you maybe didn’t foresee as challenges when you set out to build Peel?

Yasmin: Oh yeah. There’s tons of things. And I think that’s what’s fun about being an entrepreneur. Also, this is what’s fun about working with merchants of eCommerce brands because they’re also entrepreneurs figuring out things too. Well there are tons of things like nothing’s easy and there’s things that you think are easy, but there’s like new problems. I’m thinking, well maybe not necessarily with data.

Well there could be people’s understanding or the way people ask questions versus how we present things. So, there’s this constant, I think UI and UX problem that I think will never go away and it’s not, maybe I should frame it as a challenge of report. I think over 180 different metrics. The reason we have so many that are automatically computed is because different people want different things, but also everybody sort of wants the same thing.

So for instance, I look at net sales, you look at total sales, they look at gross sales, blah, blah, blah. But how do we present it in a way that is not overwhelming, but that also shows the expansiveness of our offering. So it’s always a UX challenge and understanding how people’s aptitude is in using the tool. That’s something that I think we’re all observing as we’re using tools and then there’s yeah, there’s lots of other difficult, tricky things with company building. And sometimes you really think that execution, like I can get this done really fast, but maybe takes a lot longer to do it or those types of things. But those are fun.

Jay: Yeah. Agreed. I think actually something you do a good job of is, and I have Peel installed on one of our stores and my email is the email linked to it. So I get the daily Peel shout out.

Yasmin: Yeah. The report. That was the MVP that we built. So, when Nico and I were tinkering in now 2018, now that I remember the year, that was the first thing we built because we wanted that at our previous job. We’re like, why can’t we just get a slack report? And slack was a quick way for us to get something out without building a UI for it. And then we were using emojis because we can use their template. And that was the first thing. Then it led to building the interface and what not.

Jay: It’s great. Well, I think it’s awesome. I think this is what, as a merchant, you’re busy, you’re worried about products and marketing and acquiring customers and you’ve kind of got data building up in the back end and it’s always time and effort to dig into it. But to surface it in a daily email where I’m looking at it right now, I have the email up from this morning. I can see at a glance, my 30 day stats.

This is for our subscription store and I can see total sales or up 4%. Total sales for new customers are down 0.14%. Total sales from returning customers are up 4.4%. Revenue growth is up. I can see really all the key metrics. New customer sign up is up 21%. Like this is exactly what I want to have my fingers on the pulse of if I’m a merchant and this is specifically for a subscription store, which actually I want to get into in a little bit. But I think that’s the biggest challenge. Why don’t we go ahead and actually dive into Peel then, what did you say 180 insights?

Yasmin: I lost count. So we like tons of metrics. It all depends on how many integrations you have, but yeah, so we pre-compute. So a brand connects to Peel and so it’s a no code product. So, you literally just press add app. You give us a few permissions and then you wait, the software’s downloading all the data and then it depends on how much historical data you have and whatnot, but then all these metrics are ready and available on your account.

So lifetime value analysis for all of your cohorts from the beginning of time are available, repurchase rate, orders, all that type of stuff, AOV, all available for you and you just click around.

Jay: There’s so much there. And so would you say, are these insights or analytics, what do you call them first of all? Do you call them insights, analytics, metrics? What’s the term you use internally?

Yasmin: I say metrics because it’s easier on the tongue.

Jay: So, are these metrics, are they available anywhere else? Is it just a matter of they’re out there, they’re hard to find, and you’ve wrangled them together? Or are some of these metrics really not possible to get in other places and you’re doing the computing and building the metrics out?

Yasmin: Well, some of them are simple formulas and some of them like cohort analysis take a lot of time to put people into cohorts and compute it for all the metrics. Things we’ve heard from brands, also running analysis ourselves. We know it takes a lot of time to download all the data. Then there’s a whole data cleaning process. Then it takes hours and hours just to build these massive cohorts, but then the data stale.

So, I might have spent all day yesterday getting some report together on, I want to know the LTV of subscribers, but then tomorrow new subscribers that have been added it’s dated and then it’s by all the dimensions. So one of our biggest, and this goes back to why when we are tinkering with the idea is, we want to know about the dimensions in the business set. So it’s cool to know your overall average order value.

And that’s pretty simple to compute or the lifetime value for customers. But like by what cohort, like when did you acquire those customers and how did they come in? Did they come in on a discount code from a specific location? Are they tagged a specific way? Like a part of a loyalty program? Did you use an upsell offer on them? So all the different things that brands are doing and identifying. What products did they buy?

That is near impossible for somebody to compute all at once and have it readily available. So it’s sort of just like when you’re on Google and you’re searching for things or you’re on Wikipedia, you could just click around and feel like, okay, I want to know repurchase behavior of everyone who came in on this discount code. Oh, but then they bought this product. Now I want to understand the product purchasing path of people who came in with this product and then purchase that.

And all of this, you would have to then rerun queries, download data, join it from different sources. You pull in marketing data too. You’d run it also. And so this is all available for you. You spend time on looking at the data, being like, oh, that’s interesting. What did we do? Thinking about things we could try or just being aware versus like all the data cleaning and all the computing yourself. And then you also don’t know if it’s right, like all those types of things. We just give you this out of the box.

Jay: Okay. I want to dive into a few things here. One, I guess it’s worth letting our listeners know. And the reason that sparked this podcast is Peel and both subscriptions are now fully integrated. So if you run subscriptions and you want better insights into your metrics or insights or analytics, whatever you call it, you can connect Peel and get, what is it, 37 different subscriptions?

Yasmin: 37

Jay: Specific to subscriptions. And to me it’s a no brainer to have this connected. I think I can speak for probably most subscription apps, is subscription apps often have some dashboards and they have some pretty decent maybe analytics built in, but they’re very high level. And what Peel offers is a lot more deep insights into it. The cohort analysis is something that I’m very interested in because I think as a brand doing one time orders, I mean, you do have repeat customers and I know that’s a metric you track, which is awesome. But with one-time orders, the one that always gets me is over Black Friday. And like November holiday sales.

Brands are running crazy promotions and it’s somewhat easy to track on one-time orders. There is a chance, like they do want to track the lifetime value of that customer if they come back, but with a subscription it’s even more important because you don’t really know if that customer’s valuable until maybe six or seven months later.

And so the cohort of who subscribed in November or even a specific week or some period versus the customers that subscribed in January, you might have triple the new customers in November, but their churn is three times higher than a cohort a week later. And this is things that you absolutely have to look at as a subscription brand. But I think a lot of them don’t. They look at LTV, they look at churn and they look at customer acquisition costs. And those are kind of like their key metrics.

I don’t know, maybe I’m biased, but I feel like this is even more important for subscription brands than one time. But obviously you would say it’s important for everyone, but I feel like subscriptions are a black box that people don’t really know what’s going on.

Yasmin: Subscriptions are predictable in theory, but knowing what they first brought when they subscribe, what day of the week they subscribe to, their order frequency and those components of it can give you different nuggets of information of how to optimize, to re-engage more customers or keep them subscribed or understanding all those different nuggets. That’s very, very interesting.

And looking at monthly recurring revenue over time, like there are still opportunities when you have a subscription brand to upsell them things and to bundle things in different offerings. And is that experiment that you’re trying, or should you do that experiment three months in, six months in, you can track the behavior of that and if it was successful through analysis without having to compute it yourself. And so that’s very empowering to try new things and to keep finding ways to find your best customers.

Jay: So would you say in general of the metrics, like something I always hear and I’ve always believed is that metrics should only matter if it’s something that can move the needle or drives a decision. There are a lot of vanity metrics and typically they say if the metric doesn’t drive a decision, it’s not worth measuring, but sometimes there’s things that would be related to the health of a company. I don’t know, what’s your thoughts on that? Are there some metrics that maybe don’t necessarily drive a decision, but are still worth looking at and considering?

Yasmin: Yes. So we do a lot of product tours with brands. So, what I have observed is that people look at the numbers and this is sort of like the “aha moments” and they see, “Okay, whoa, we acquired all those customers. Oh, maybe that was when our Reddit post went viral.” And so they see the impact of actions they've taken in analysis because we look at all the historical data. So it’s more of like knowledge is power that you see the fruits of your labor paying off or things that you’ve tried that didn’t pay off in a way.

So then you are more empowered to try something else or you’re just more informed. So there’s tons of different metrics that tell different stories and you can take action on them if you’re actively thinking about the problem. Like some people come in and they’re like, I want to know X, Y, and Z. I want to know the repurchase rate of people who came in on this discount code or people who have an AOV over this because they’re thinking about the problem.

But then there’s also that passive of just being aware of, oh wow. July was such a valuable cohort. Usually our LTV of our customers is around $25. This cohort is starting at $37, like what did we do? And then let’s go into the dimensions of that and figure out the segments. That’s pretty empowering. And it allows people, like probably in the shower to think, “Oh my God, we should do this. Or we should try that.” And then they may be able to take action.

Also they’re more empowered to try experiments, which is very cool. Maybe it’s not specifically built as an AB testing platform, but when you have the numbers already and it’s already all measured, you’ll try more things. And that can lead to bigger growth opportunities.

Jay: Yeah. And you can go back historically and look at things you’ve already done, correct?

Yasmin: Yes, exactly. Yeah. You connect. And you’re like, “Oh, I could see exactly the behavior of all those people we acquired Black Friday, Cyber Monday in 2021. And how long are they sticking with us? What’s their lifetime value? What’s the percentage that they’ve repurchased again, two times, three times? How many days between their first and second orders?” And that’s really powerful for them to plan for this coming Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

Jay: Oh, absolutely. If someone installs Peel right now, do the metrics go back to the day their store started or is there a certain period you go back to?

Yasmin: No, the day their store started, which is why the download time can take like a day or two.

Jay: I notice that.

Yasmin: Yeah. It’s everything. So that’s really neat because you really can see the trends over time.

Jay: Yeah. Well it’s worth the wait to get the data.

Yasmin: It’s not like instantaneous. So set it up today at 4 o’clock, it’ll be ready tomorrow. That type of thing. So, you mentioned one-time purchasers before. You might be selling coffee, but you might say, okay, I’ll sell this bag of coffee once, but you really want people to subscribe and you have this whole email drip or SMS campaign to get people that purchase once to then eventually subscribe.

And you’re constantly tweaking that. Now, how do you measure that one-time purchasers to subscribers? And that could be a huge funnel opportunity. So we have five metrics all about that behavior. The time between it takes from one time purchasers to subscribers. So in all of our everyone’s business, there are these segments of types of people, customers that you have and finding which ones are your best ones is essentially the whole point of analysis.

Jay: Yeah. I’m looking at the list right now. So you’ve got rate of one-time to subscriber. So that’s a percentage of one time customers that turn into a subscriber?

Yasmin: Subscriber. Yeah. And how many days does it take a one time purchaser to be subscriber? And if you know that, then you can time communications to the one-time purchasers who just bought once to try to get them to subscribe with different incentives offerings. Your creativity is all on your own, but you’ll have the data for you. And that’s pretty neat.

And you could segment it too, based on what product they first purchased. And then they subscribe to. What discount code, where are they actually coming from? And we’ve had customers who actually find different customers in geographic locations that they didn’t think their customers would be in. And they can use that in creative. They can use that in lots of different ways to tell their brand story.

It’s not just numbers in a spreadsheet that are color coded. There are lots of creative opportunities that you can get from looking at the numbers and understanding a narrative of who your customers actually are and their customer purchasing patterns, which is what’s cool and why it’s fun to look and understand. There are a lot of curious thoughts that you can have answered with looking at data.

Jay: Yeah. And then your brain starts combining some of these, like I’m willing to bet a large percentage. Let’s just use the coffee store example, a large percentage of people who sell coffee or anything that could be recurring. If someone buys it as a one product, they just get the standard order confirmation email. And that’s probably it. But putting in, like you said, an email drip series of trying to convert them to a subscription.

Now you can track that exact metric and then combine that with, if I know I have the, I’m looking at all your metrics here, like I can see my LTV, my lifetime value of a subscriber versus my LTV of someone who’s not a subscriber, just a one time purchaser. If my one time purchaser, my LTV is $37 because maybe they buy two bags of coffee in their life and that’s it on average.

But my LTV of a subscriber is $600 because on average they subscribe for 11 months. Let's just say, I know the difference. I know my cost and I can incentivize with what is it worth to me to turn that one-time purchaser into a subscriber. Maybe I can offer them, put a coupon code in there for the first month free. And that’s super easy to do with Shopify. You can create a coupon code that works with subscriptions that only works once on the initial shipment and once per customer.

So, you can give one month free because you know that there’s $500 more in LTV and your cost is only $100 on that or whatever the coffee cost is. And so combining metrics is where it gets really powerful and you can make smart marketing decisions. And this is when metrics really matter to growth. It’s not just interesting things. It’s like you’re making decisions that absolutely move the needle.

Yasmin: Exactly. It’s really neat to hear what people try too.

Jay: I believe it. If you’re an e-commerce store owner and you’ve got TVs up on your wall in your office, what are the metrics you hear brands call their north star metric. We have TVs around our office in Bold and we track churn and we track lifetime value of our customers and different things like that. But if you’re an ecommerce store owner, what are your metrics that you’re putting on the TV? Let’s say there’s three TVs?

Yasmin: OK. I would say definitely. I think LTV and churn are obvious ones, but I think repurchase behaviors is really interesting because brands spend tons of money acquiring new customers, but you’ve already got these customers. Now you can reengage them for them to become super loyal to your brand. And so tracking that, when are these people coming back? How often. The number of days between orders, whether it’s first or second, second and third?

What are people buying like the product purchasing back? I just gave you a lot of metrics. I would do like customers returning rate or repurchase rate. And I probably depending on what products that are on our campaigns or that we’ve talked about in different collateral that we’ve launched, depending on my brand I’d probably look into those segments, like repurchase rate of people who bought the yellow t-shirt that type of thing. Whatever it is or the coffee.

Jay: Oh, so you could break it down? You can do repurchase rate by product?

Yasmin: 100%. That’s why Peel’s so cool. Every metric we have in Peel is available by all the segments, all the dimensions. So discount code, customer tags. If you tag Peel as part of an experiment or you’re using a tool like an upsell tool or a loyalty program that tags customers, Peel out of the box shows you, this is the LTV, repurchase rate, subscribers rate of people who bought this product came with that tag or this order tag, location, like all of the dimensions.

What survey question do you ask them? All this type of really rich data and NPL. We have a way that you can upload tags, so you can upload more data. So, an example would be if you sent out a catalog to all of your customers and you want to see what’s the value of this expensive marketing initiative, sending paper to people, are people coming and buying from us? What’s the lifetime value people receive this catalog?

You can do that in Peel because you could just upload a list of everyone who received the catalog, call them “catalog.” And now it’s available across all the metrics to analyze and all the subscription metrics. And that’s really cool.

Jay: That is super cool. So what do you do? Do you upload that into Peel or do you upload into Shopify and add a new tag?

Yasmin: You could do either, but we built a fancy name for a CSV upload, so you can add it into Peel without having to do it with Shopify. But if you could also add in Shopify, it’s flexible. So you could do whatever you want.

Jay: Totally. Well, that’s such an interesting tracking offline to online is such a challenge. So if you sent out a mailer or if you had an event or if you have some type of anything where you have the customer’s information that you did anything offline, tag it with that, and then if they make a purchase six months later, you can tie it back to that event or that mail or whatever it was.

Yasmin: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: Amazing.

Yasmin: It’s really neat.

Jay: That’s so cool. I like that repeat purchase rate as one of the ones that would make the cut as a key metric. The reason I like that is I think there’s data around that it’s five times less expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to sell to an existing customer and 70% chance that an existing customer will accept an offer to a new product than a new customer.

So, there’s all this data around the value of your existing customer base, but I feel it’s not leveraged as much as it could be totally and brand spends so much on new customer acquisition and they’re spending a fortune for new customer acquisition and then just letting them slowly, drip out the bottom of the bucket and there’s just money bleeding out.

And that is a very important metric. So I’m glad you highlighted that one. Do you know metrics are accessed the most by merchants? Do you see in your back end which ones are the most popular?

Yasmin: Yeah. LTV, the repurchase rate, retention analysis, purchase frequency are the big ones.

Jay: Purchase frequency.

Yasmin: It goes back to this retention story because it’s so hard and expensive to acquire new customers, but how do we get to re-engage our existing customers? And then always like the classics, like CAC, LTV to CAC ratio, those types of analysis average order value. But it’s really, the cohort analysis is where we have a lot of really great offering with the cohort analysis. So it’s lifetime value. Yeah, so the LTVs aren’t linear metrics. It’s LTV by monthly, weekly or quarterly cohort repurchase rate by monthly, weekly or current cohort.

So depending on if weekly cohorts are relevant to your brand. Coffee yes, probably because it’s highly consumable clothing or like a snowboard, so much so. It just depends on what you’re sort of looking into.

Jay: Yeah because if you don’t tie it back, averages actually can be very misleading. And if you don’t tie it back to a specific cohort, I don’t want to say it’s not worth looking at the data, but they can be very misleading and numbers can actually be skewed. You can have a couple months a year that are driving the majority of your LTV. And meanwhile, you’re losing in a number of your other months and like the unit economics are, you’re actually bleeding money in some areas, but over making in others.

And so that’s one thing I appreciate about it is looking at the subscription analytics. You’ve got active subscriptions per cohort, active subscribers per cohort. You’ve got lifetime per subscriber cohort, monthly recurring revenue per cohort. So like you might have more active subscribers that join during a certain cohort, but maybe they have a lower lifetime value, they don’t stick around.

And if you just looked at one of these, it could be misleading and the data’s not telling the whole story. So I think sometimes combining them together is what I think is a lot of the value. Just diving into the subscription aspect. We skipped past it a little bit, but this episode will be out very soon. So for people listening, this is live for both versions of both subscriptions. What’s the process in connecting the two together?

Yasmin: You add the Peel out from the Shopify app store. And then after that you click that and then you add either both V1 or V2 or both into Peel. In the integration section you just scroll down, you add it. And then we just start pulling in all the data and then the analysis will be ready, few hours later, 12 hours later, that’s it.

Jay: So you’ve got this concept of you call them data sources, correct?

Yasmin: Yes.

Jay: And so you can connect multiple data sources to one Peel account. And does that enrich the data more and more, the more you connect or do you recommend keeping it clean? Like you just mentioned, you could connect both subscription versions if someone had V1 or V2, but in general, is it the more you connect the better? Or how does that work?

Yasmin: Oh yeah. So if you have multiple Shopify stores like a store in the UK and North America, Australia, and you want to add all their analysis together, analyze the company as a whole, you can connect all those data sources. You can connect all those stores together into Peel. You can add your paid marketing channels. And then some of our other integrations. The assumption is that the more data you get into a tool, the bigger story you have about your customer base.

And so that’s why we offer a lot. So no, you should add as much as you want. So you definitely connect to Shopify first and then you connect to Bold, but you definitely need to connect to Bold to get the 37 unique subscription metrics that will tell you all the behaviors like active subscribers versus active subscriptions, your churn rate, your monthly growth rate, your subscriber rate, the activation stuff, and all the cohorts, all about subscription side of the business. So it’s very rich.

Jay: Yeah. Awesome. Is there any specific subscription metrics you want to call out as key ones or the ones that you would highlight as really important to subscription brands?

Yasmin: Oh sure. So the active subscribers per cohort or subscriptions, and the reason we have both is because some subscription brands, it’s a one-to-one relationship between subscriber and subscriptions, but some it’s a one to many. So I might be a subscriber and have like five subscriptions. So it depends on how the brand wants to look at it. And that’s why there’s 37. Don’t get overwhelmed. You will know which one you want to look at, whether it’s subscriber or subscription.

I think it’s super interesting because it’s retention. So it’ll tell you how many subscribers or subscriptions you’ve acquired in each particular month. And how long are they staying with you? Is it within three months that’s still 90% of your subscribers are still subscribed? Is it within six months? When are they dropping off? And also based off of what product are they subscribing to? What’s their order frequency?

What customer tag do they come in? Is it a specific variant that has a better subscriber retention than another variant? I think those are very interesting, because it’s all about the whole acquisition retention game. And then obviously if customers are staying longer with your brand and they’re retained, then the LTV for that same group of subscribers by that specific product will be high and understanding the balance between those two and flipping back and forth between those is very interesting.

And then as I mentioned before, if you have a transaction side of the business and you want to measure the one time purchasers behavior, to subscribers, there’s a whole suite of metrics that talks about that. And then another metric that we actually recently built based off of some feedback is called subscribers rate. So this looks at your entire business and it tells you, when are people becoming subscribers over time in a specific cohort. Are they becoming all at month one?

And how long are they staying with you or are they becoming all at month two? And so is it 10% of your entire business is subscribers or is it 80% and knowing how long they are staying and how long it stays 80% or 30% compared to your entire business is there too. And that’s super interesting also.

Jay: Yeah, that is super interesting. I haven’t looked at that one. I’m going to check that one out. Is that a fairly recent one that got added?

Yasmin: No, but this is my whole UI and UX problem. It’s right under the subscription activations one it’s right under the last one subscribed. This is our problem that we’re constantly figuring out as entrepreneurs. How do we show all the cool stuff and get people to get it without being, like, very overwhelmed?

Jay: Yeah. That’ll always be the challenges, merchants have a question in their head, but looking at it or phrasing it the right way or coming to your software to answer that question, you’ve got to present it in a way that makes sense to them. We have a data team at bold and we have an internal data request channel and I see the confusion in there as someone just wants to know like, Hey, what’s the LTO.

Yasmin: It’s a little bit like a therapy session. It’s like, well tell me a little bit more. And we do that over chat. And I think that’s actually totally fair because there’s sometimes a lack of confidence in understanding, not like understanding it, but you’re thinking through a problem, you’re jamming on something in your head and you want to get numbers to understand it more.

So it’s a little bit of just people are working together. And so I think we understand that all because we’ve been doing this ourselves also. So you could chat in and be like, this is what I’m looking for. And then we’ll be like, okay, this is the report that you should look at. And then we’ll show you how to find it. That type of thing. It’s a very fair use case.

Jay: Yeah. And I think the analytics that you give in the emails cover a lot of the high level ones that probably answers a lot of the questions. I want to go through a bit of a fun lightning round with you. And then I want to tell people where to go learn more about Peel. But I don’t know if you read the question or not, I’m going to fire them away. I ask these to every guest and one day I’m going to compile them all into a blog post and everyone can compare everyone’s answers. But what would you say is the biggest mistake you see merchants make in e-commerce?

Yasmin: I would say it’s not paying enough attention to the repurchase behavior of customers or doing enough experiments. Use the data, do things. Don’t be afraid of it being perfect. Just like, oh, try that. Try that. Taking action on things quickly.

Jay: Yeah. Do you have a pet peeve when you shop online?

Yasmin: Pet peeve when I shop online. Okay a few. I don’t like it. Like I look for something and they don’t have it in my size and I don’t get up like, Hey, give me a back in-stock notification. Like I’m always shopping for my kids and they might not have a size four in the blue pants. Come on, tell me when it’s available because it’s just the usability of things

Jay: That was on the email. I get morning brew. I get [30:21 inaudible] brew. And the topic today was, oh, I forget what the title was. I’m going to look it up on the spot here, but that’s a major, major issue right now. And I guess there’s inventory shortages and the way that brands are messaging it. And it’s something like 78% of customers in only like the last couple weeks have left one site and will never shop at them again because of the poor experience they had with not having inventory or adding it to cart. And then later finding out there was an inventory or brands are really struggling with dealing with that properly.

Yasmin: Yeah so just take my email and text me when it’s ready,

Jay: Yeah, exactly. What’s your favorite thing about your job?

Yasmin: I like talking to customers, I like working with entrepreneurs and learning. All these merchants. They all are doing something really cool in the commerce space and it’s very unique and innovative and hearing that and learning about what they’re doing is very motivating. It’s very motivating because we’re sort of in the same boat. And so that’s fun. What I like about being an entrepreneur. I like working on lots of different things and I sort of like the fires, it’s fun.

Jay: You gotta have a bit of sense of urgency?

Yasmin: Oh yeah. Totally. At school pick up, on Intercom chat, responding to somebody. No big deal. But I like that.

Jay: Just gotta go to the washroom and then you’re responding to tickets in there.

Yasmin: Yeah, exactly.

Jay: So speaking of stores that you like, what is your favorite online store or if you can’t think of a favorite one, what’s the last place you bought something?

Yasmin: Last place I bought something was primary clothing. It’s a children’s clothing brand that makes bright colored cotton clothes. I guess it’s gender neutral. They don’t have like boys versus girls. They have like purple pants for everybody and it was started by two women, but I like it. I have little people, so it’s great. And so I just ordered them new clothes because they keep growing. So their pants are way too short. So I had to order them more clothes.

Jay: I am going to check it out because I also have little people.

Yasmin: Yeah. It’s very nice, bright colored clothings. They have lots of great representation and there’s photographs of children in clothes. It’s just wonderful.

Jay: It looks really good. I haven’t heard of this site before. Definitely going to check it out. You’re an entrepreneur and most of our listeners are entrepreneurs and they’re writing their own businesses and different types. Do you have any favorite quotes or advice or sayings that have been important to Peel as you’ve started it and built it and grown it that you would pass on to any of our listeners?

Yasmin: Well, my daily mantra, as cheesy as it is, is like everybody has a lot on their plate and we all want to do a lot. I’m just like one thing at a time. Like you can get through all of it. That’s just the mantra when I get overwhelmed and I also sort of, you could figure it out, but that’s not a beautiful quote, but one thing at a time and my sister might be like spinning about something at work. I’ll just text her. This is my mantra. One thing at a time and she’s like, oh, that’s good. That’s good. Just simple.

Jay: Yeah. I find myself saying that a lot as well too. And it’s easy to have three or four tasks that you’re working on at once and then you’re actually not effective at all, but do one to complete it, do the next to complete it. I gotta remind myself of that a lot too. So where do people go if they want to start with Peel and ideally, hopefully connect it with both subscriptions if they have that, ow do they get started? And is there a trial? What does the pricing look like? How does that work?

Yasmin: Great. You can go to our website, Peelinsights.com, but easier is going to the Shopify app store and finding us there. And you just click add the app and then you add your Bold subscriptions data source. And then once all your data is downloaded and processed into the analysis, you can start your 7 day trial and the pricing, our current pricing today is based off of the number of monthly orders that you have, because it’s equivalent to how much data the servers have to process and that’s it.

But you have a 7 day free trial and you get lots of really cool stuff. Pretty much everything I was talking about. Ready for you to explore and you can chat to us any time and we could diagnose the things you’re thinking about. And the daily report that we just mentioned will also be sent to your inbox.

Jay: And if the data doesn’t, I don’t know what the different costs are for the different buckets, but if the data doesn’t allow you to make 10 or a hundred times that by making smarter decisions, I would be surprised. And I’m also just looking at your app listing. You’re one of the few apps I’ve ever seen that has only five star reviews. You don’t have a single four star or lower review, so you are doing something right.

Yasmin: Thanks.

Jay: That’s amazing. Congrats on that. I’ll put all these links for all our listeners in the show notes as well too. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been super insightful. Are you active on any social platforms where our listeners can follow you? And if you’re not active, that’s okay as well too. But I always like to direct people if our guests are on social and if they’re active?

Yasmin: LinkedIn, I guess active is the closest. Twitter. I’m not cool enough for that, but I’m on it.

Jay: Perfect, I’m in that boat as well too.

Yasmin: I read it. I consume it. I just don’t know what to say.

Jay: Just like and retweet, that’s easy stuff. Yasmin this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on our show and I wish you all the best with Peel and we’ll have to have you back again sometime in the future. Thank you so much for coming on.

Yasmin: Thank you. Thanks guys.

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