How We Added A Subscription Service And Grew Revenue To $280K/Month

Florian Simmendinger

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Published: January 31st, 2022

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Florian Simmendinger

Founder, Soundbrenner

$280K

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Soundbrenner

soundbrenner.com

from Hong Kong

started

$280,000

revenue/mo

Founders

Employees

Discover what tools recommends to grow your business!

Discover what books Florian recommends to grow your business!

Shoe Dog Phil Knight

Idea Man: A Memoir by the Cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die Chip Heath

Want more updates on Soundbrenner? Check out these stories:

1. How We Designed A $230K/Month Wearable For Musicians (2020) ➜

This is a follow up story for Soundbrenner. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published about 4 years ago, check it out here.

Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.

I'm the CEO of Soundbrenner. Our goal is to design the world's best music tools to make music practice addictive. We serve musicians of all instruments and skill levels.

We make a range of wearables that help you play on the beat, stay in tune, protect your hearing, and more. To date, we shipped over 100,000 wearables.

Besides this, we also make a mobile app for iOS & Android that is free but also comes with a subscription. To date, we have over 8M downloads and over 670,000 monthly active users.

how-we-added-a-subscription-service-and-grew-revenue-to-280k-month

Tell us about what you’ve been up to! Has the business been growing?

Since last year the most exciting addition to the business has been a subscription service for our mobile app. Since we had such a huge user base, we wanted to hire additional mobile app engineers and invest in developing additional features. Now that the app provides a sustainable revenue channel we can do this.

Always run towards your fear, and you'll be unstoppable.

Being in the consumer electronics business is tough because R&D is very expensive, takes very long, requires a lot of capital, and on top is also seasonal. By unlocking a second revenue channel for the business we can now offset some of these challenges.

Also, I'm a strong believer in the narrative that making your hardware allows you to create the best experiences. So now we can truly integrate software + hardware and create something magical we couldn't otherwise do for our customers.

What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?

A lesson we learned this year specifically for e-commerce was to add 3rd party brands to our website. Up until today, we could only sell a customer a single product and we would be "done" at least for a couple of years until we released a new generation because there was just no reason to buy another one of our devices. However, we had so many website visitors (100k+ / month) as well as a huge email list (200k+). All these people loved and trusted our brand, we're interested potential buyers of music equipment but we had nothing to sell them. So we tried out adding some 3rd party products and this worked like wonder and way better than we could have ever hoped! 3rd party products now represent over 33% of our monthly revenue.

We also started offering protection plans for sale and expanded our accessories (screen protectors, etc.). All this adds up and allows you to up your digital marketing budgets since the return on ad spend naturally goes up.

What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?

We are right now looking at the crypto space because we feel like there are some really exciting opportunities for musicians in the future.

Besides this, of course, we plan to launch tons of new features for our apps, including a completely new category (practice tracking & practice motivation). We also have some updates for our hardware in-store, so all around, I'm excited for what's to come. I still feel like we only have reached 1% of our potential and are still at the start of our journey. This feels somewhat crazy to say after 7 years but you don't change the world overnight!

Have you read any good books in the last year?

My favorite thinker I started following the last 12 months is probably Balaji. If you haven't, you should check out his appearance on the Tim Ferris podcast.

In line with this, I love the Praxis Society project and want to give it a shoutout.

I'm excited to see communities forming that celebrate progress & achievement, and dream big in the physical world. It feels like the smartest people were all wandering exclusively in the digital world for the past 20 years but that is changing. I'm stoked!

Besides this, I'm re-reading Fountainhead at the moment and would highly recommend checking it out.

Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their business?

It's really hard to give broad advice since lack of growth could have so many different reasons. It might be due to poor marketing, a too-small market, a poor product & market fit, etc.

When faced with really hard challenges I often found I already knew what the problem was, but was avoiding dealing with it. There's a great article from Ben Horowitz about this.

"Do you run towards your fear or do you run away from it?"

So my advice: always run towards your fear, and you'll be unstoppable.