https://youtu.be/TPohBnAnAYQ

Gabe Weisert is the managing editor of Zuora.

Zuora is a publicly-traded company in the New Your Stock Exchange (ZOU) focused on creating software for subscription-based businesses.

Gabe Weisert started his career as a content marketer, he has written for the Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Post, Forbes.Com, Huffington Post, Daily Beast, and Yahoo! Travel.

The subscription model is nothing new, newspapers have been using it for hundreds of years. But the model has been expanding to many industries. Today many of us have Netflix, Amazon Prime, works spaces like We Work, use brand name cars like Cadillac, bicycle-sharing like Bixi, car-sharing like Communoauto.  We are moving to a subscription economy with great benefit to the end consumer as to the companies who manage to persuade us to use their services.

From a personal finance point of view, this is great. You don’t clutter your house with stuff (think of movies DVDs or audio CD), you get a greater selection of products and you pay less.

The Book Subscribed

A USA Today bestseller! Companies like Netflix, Spotify, and Salesforce are just the tip of the iceberg for the subscription model. The real transformation–and the real opportunity–is just beginning.

Subscription companies are growing nine times faster than the S&P 500. Why? Because unlike product companies, subscription companies know their customers. A happy subscriber base is the ultimate economic moat.

Today’s consumers prefer the advantages of access over the hassles of maintenance, from transportation (Uber, Surf Air), to clothing (Stitch Fix, Eleven James), to razor blades and makeup (Dollar Shave Club, Birchbox). Companies are similarly demanding easier, long-term solutions, trading their server rooms for cloud storage solutions like Box. Simply put, the world is shifting from products to services.

But how do you turn customers into subscribers? As the CEO of the world’s largest subscription management platform, Tien Tzuo has helped hundreds of companies transition from relying on individual sales to building customer-centric, recurring-revenue businesses. His core message in Subscribed is simple: Ready or not, excited or terrified, you need to adapt to the Subscription Economy — or risk being left behind.

Tzuo and Gabe Weisert show how to use subscriptions to build lucrative, ongoing one-on-one relationships with your customers. This may require reinventing substantial parts of your company, from your accounting practices to your entire IT architecture, but the payoff can be enormous. Just look at the case studies:

  *  Adobe transitions from selling enterprise software licenses to offering cloud-based solutions for a flat monthly fee, and quadruples its valuation.

  *  Fender evolves from selling guitars one at a time to creating lifelong musicians by teaching beginners to play and keeping them inspired for life.

  *  Caterpillar uses subscriptions to help solve problems — it’s not about how many tractors you can rent, but how much dirt you need to move.

In Subscribed, you’ll learn how these companies made the shift, and how you can transform your own product into a valuable service with a practical, step-by-step framework. Find out how you can prepare and prosper now, rather than trying to catch up later.

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