Startup Spotlight #190: ScribeUp
ScribeUp is the world’s first consumer wallet & payment rail for your digital subscription services.
I got the chance to speak with Jordan Mackler, co-founder and CEO of ScribeUp, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.
ScribeUp consists of former MIT students who initially bonded over getting caught with unwanted subscription bills (e.g., MTV, Stamps.com, and Dropbox). Their laughs (and tears) quickly turned to the entrepreneurial spirit as they realized that subscription users were missing a product that provided peace of mind in managing all of their digital services. They created a solution that allows users to freely explore the world of digital services and bring convenience, health, and happiness to their modern lifestyles...without the paralyzing worry of an unwanted bill.
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Startup Spotlight: ScribeUp
Problem: Consumers struggle with managing their 20+ personal subscription services and are repeatedly caught with unwanted bills, primarily stemming from free trial expirations. This has caused users to clamp down on trying out new services, in turn creating a massive acquisition problem for merchants with 2/3rds of user churn at checkout due to this ‘user inconvenience of managing free trials and subscriptions’ (source: Hiatus Market Research).
Market: The consumer subscription economy was a $650B market in 2020 and is expected to double to $1.5T by 2025. We currently capture a ~2% market share via our payments infrastructure, representing a $13B market opportunity today, with a medium-term path to monetize conversion efficiency for another 3- 5% of market share opportunity.
Solution: ScribeUp is the first consumer wallet that can auto-detect and auto-manage subscription trials and services for our users, meaning no hassle of manual management (reminders, spreadsheets, etc.) nor the risk of unwanted subscription bills. We go beyond any other generic virtual card solutions by leveraging a proprietary subscription-decision-making algorithm that intelligently makes real-time payment decisions by considering the merchant, subscription plan, trial length, sign-up detection, usage, user inputs, and other relevant factors specific to this subscription use-case.
Team: We are a small but mighty team of 4 former MIT students and a few junior engineers. Jordan Mackler is our CEO (former consumer private-equity investor and investment banker), Yohei Oka oversees our technology/engineering team (former Head of Tech at retail startups and Amazon engineer), Erica Chiang oversees our marketing efforts (former growth marketing lead at ClassPass) and Josh Cohen oversees our product efforts (former product lead at Grata).
Recent Success:
Mackler: We’ve been immediately successful at defining what an ‘acute’ pain-point looks like, finding users at that stage, and delivering a solution that mitigates the user’s pain. After users activate their first risk-free free trial and then see it tracked in their ScribeUp wallet, we often receive feedback on this ‘aha moment’ about the game-changing power this tool can provide for our consumers. Users get a taste of our definition of ‘subscription freedom,’ a truly differentiated proposition to competitive offerings, and can immediately see how this can empower their lives moving forward.
Recent Struggle:
Mackler: From a startup building standpoint, we struggled in the early days trying to figure out how to factor in expert advice. We were fortunate to have access to a wide variety of subject-manner experts, but we initially got caught in a trap of over-indexing for every bit of advice we received. There’s a delicate balance of factoring all bits of expert perspective and feedback, versus keeping direction, focus, and progress internally. We’ve learned that you want to continue to keep the funnel of access to a diversity of expert opinions open but need to create a layer of filtering to when and how to factor various pieces of advice.
Founder Advice:
Mackler: Don’t build a product based on a business idea or market trend. Build a product that genuinely helps you, your business, or someone you know intimately. If it’s not something that you, that person, or that business is actively using to mitigate a pain point, then you can’t expect others to adopt it.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Mackler: Here are three founders you should check out next!
Brittany Brody, Co-Founder of TellTail: TellTail is a comprehensive community-first platform to support trusted pet breeders.
Matt White, Co-Founder of Multitude Insights: MI is the first collective intelligence & collaboration network for public safety stakeholders.
Josh Kaplan, Co-Founder of Smooth Operations & Creator Services: Smooth Ops help content creators operate and scale their businesses.
Who should I profile next? Leave your suggestion in the comments:
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