For the six million UK wine drinkers who want to learn more but don't know where to start, Wine List is a way to discover great bottles while learning at the same time.
Good morning
We began our retention focus in July in an effort to booster retention figures across repeat months. We introduced our new wine course page, better explaining for new customers lifetime experience they'll get, and introduced specific tests for existing customers. Both experiments increased retention (by 10% points in each cohort) and so will be rolling them out this month.
We have £175k committed towards our seed round and have a lot of ongoing conversations. As is often the case, introductions always lead to the best conversations – so if you know of anyone looking to invest please do introduce me. The plan is to raise ~£300-400k from angels or a fund, and then raise the final amount via Crowdcube.
July was a slower acquisition month for us than forecast, in part this seems to be a summer slowdown but there were also things we can be improving on which I've highlighted in challenges below.
All the best
Josh
Top-line stats
- Active subscribers: 1,050 (up 5% from 1,000)
- New subs: 229 at £27 CPA
- July revenue: £46k (down 17% from £54k)
- Box 2 (B2) retention rate: 75% (down from 76%)
- Box 3 (B3) retention rate: 78% (up from 73% )
Highlights
- Retention experiment 1: Quiz 📈– this was the MVP for our future learning platform – a quiz that arrives a week after your Wine Roots course based on what you just learn. Of the cohort who received the quiz, B2-B3 retention was up to 85% from a 75% average. This is early validation for our interactive learning product
- Retention experiment 2: Surprise free bottle 🍷– everyone likes a surprise freebie, and we had some leftover stock, so we combined the two and sent 40 customers between box 2 and 3 a free bottle. All 40 of those customers stayed subscribed (against a based rate of 78%). We will be testing this again with a bigger cohort this month and measuring the cost of wine against future LTV.
- September margin will be 29% – we've built a backlog of high-quality, affordable wines which means our unit margin will be 29%+ from the September delivery. Four months ago, unit margin was negative, and so this is a huge step for us.