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When data is no longer asymmetrical enough to be valued in its own right, and artificial intelligence is in every nook and corner, what is the edge you promise to create for your b2b customers?
For my money, it’s in the unpublished expertise hiding in groups of leaders, who sense what’s waiting around the next corner and thinking about how to position for alpha. Not the intelligence but the insights. How do you get to the insights? By creating the trusted environment to extract insights so you can “distribute the future at the speed of trust” as I like to say.
It’s been a long time coming. I worked at Procurement Leaders and played a part in creating the environment, improving contract values as we increased customer value. Since then, I tested a membership model with Operating Partners and CFOs to develop the blueprint for the PEI Media membership model, showed Risk Leadership Network the value their members were looking for – enough to get investment and show them the way to the first million ARR and robust average contract values, and helped the Financial Services Forum rethink their product pricing and positioning. I’m involved in a few more but they are working under cover at the moment. If you’d like to get hold of insights about the Substribe view of premium memberships, just contact andy@substribe.co for a free initial consult
I have experience creating my own trusted environment at Substribe, but it’s been a journey and I’m still developing it. I’ve been hosting a regular meet up for b2b subscription leaders since 2018. At my latest SubsClub I was squeezing in extra chairs five minutes before we started. That doesn’t normally happen. Usually there are a few dropouts. This time was a full house.
Afterwards, I asked one of the regular members to score it on Must Have where 5 is nice to have, 10 is must have. The same question I help subscription businesses ask their customers. He gave it 9 out of 10. We spent 20 minutes talking about what would make it better.
I think that’s how you improve anything. You ask. You listen. You act on it.
If you’re not doing that with your own customers, that’s probably worth thinking about. You may be in the trap of obsessing about products and pricing and people, without tapping into the very thing that will drop the opinion-fest and help you create a pull for your customers and prospects.
I know the 9 is useful insights because the leader I heard it from has been involved in all 3 iterations of the Substribe meet ups.
Three iterations of the Substribe ‘SubsClub’
The first version was a lot of people in the room just because they were in B2B. Numbers for the sake of numbers. Too many perspectives, too much ‘it depends.’ Messy. People getting frustrated because half the room wasn’t relevant to the other half.
The second version was sponsored. It felt forced. The room was serving the sponsor’s needs, not the people in it. I was uncomfortable with it – yes it gave us some money but I felt like a sell out. The approach can work in some markets but there’s always a trade off. It led to internal tensions because it strikes at the heart of my values – at some point, sell your audience will come back to bite you.
This version is different. Every person is chosen deliberately. I know their business, I know what they’re working on, and I know what they can contribute. I think a proof point is the help I’m given – one finds me the room. Another helps at the social. Others share on socials afterwards. I think they do that because they’re getting value and they can feel this isn’t the usual model.
Because normally, if it’s free then you’re the product.
And that’s fine, if you’re not in the business of creating your own IP. If what you’re building is an audience for sponsors to access, that’s a legitimate model. As long as the sponsors still need you. And the audience is in need of the sponsors.
SubsClub is free because I’m building something with every session. Every conversation feeds the diagnostic, the framework, the research. I’m developing an independent model to optimise subscription performance, and the room is where that thinking gets tested and sharpened by the people who are actually living it. And I set out to make “it depends” the enemy to progress — what does it depend on? why is that a dependency? what are the first principles and foundations to build on?
Trusted networks are critical now
The subscription events circuit is running on a model that’s past its sell-by date.
Fireside chats where senior people hit copy and paste on anecdotes they’ve told dozens of times. Panels where five people say ‘it depends’ and everyone nods politely. These are war stories from businesses built on interfaces and workflow structures from the past that are dissolving as they come into contact with the present, like LLMs.
The old structures are on the ropes. The interfaces engineered to create workflow, the delivery mechanisms designed to make data sticky through design rather than value. All of it dissolving.
But the proprietary data underneath is solid. That’s the asset that matters. The question subscription leaders should be asking right now is what to do with that asset in a completely new environment. And the events circuit is still running panels and talking shops about the very structures that are disappearing.
It’s like driving a car and only looking in the rear view mirror, while patting yourself on the back.
I can see events coming up where someone will be on a panel talking about a transformation in a business that they weren’t operationally involved in. I understand why they’re doing it. It’s good for their profile. But the people in the audience deserve to know whether they’re hearing from someone who did the work or someone who’s borrowing the story. There’s a difference between being adjacent to a transformation and being the person – or one of the executives – who made it happen with the teams, the product, and the customers.
At SubsClub, I make sure you get the person who actually did the work. That’s a deliberate choice. And the reason I can make that choice is because I’ve been in these businesses myself. I was part of an executive team at an information and membership business where we improved revenue and increased customer value. I didn’t just observe. I was in the work. I’m still in touch with customers and members from that time, years later. That’s how long the relationships last when you’ve actually done the job.
I’ve sold subscriptions, renewed them, and built information products for corporates. When someone in the room talks about how a transformation worked or why a product isn’t landing, I know which questions to ask because I’ve been in those situations. That’s why the questions I ask land differently to the ones a moderator or a consultant would ask.
What happened last week
Three segments. Each doing something different. Each working because I know why every person is in that room, I’ve walked a mile in their shoes, and I know which questions open things up rather than getting rehearsed answers.
Jon Clay: Interactive expertise
Jon came in with deep knowledge on data product lifetime value from his MBA research – and his active experience in data and AI. Twenty senior practitioners interviewed across industries. Serious, rigorous work.
But this wasn’t a presentation. I pulled the room into the substance. Let’s get into what a use case actually is. What examples have people got from their own businesses? How do you monetise it? How is it changing?
Jon brought the knowledge. I brought a room full of the right people and knew when to break into his flow to connect his research to what the people around the table are dealing with every day.
That’s the difference between someone delivering content and a room full of experienced people sharpening ideas together. Jon’s expertise got clearer because of the room. The room got sharper because of Jon.
Neither of those things happens without someone in the middle who understands the substance well enough to know which questions matter.
Steffen Melgaard: A real transformation, decoded live
Steffen is a former investor who went inside With Intelligence because he could see what the business could become. That’s a different thing to hiring a typical transformation leader. He understood the value from the outside, then went in to build it from the inside with the teams, the product, and the customers.
I’ve seen this pattern before. When someone from the industry goes into an information business, they can see whether the problem being solved actually matters and whether it’s being solved effectively. If information can convert to intelligence to create insight.
But industry leaders will only join a company they can see the potential in. So the fact that they’re there is itself a signal about the business as long as they aren’t “the cleanest white shirt”. That’s part of the transformation arc, and it’s gold dust for a B2B information company and those looking for big bets.
I did two things to learn the story. One, I asked Steffen in the moment, so that it was spontaneous. And two, I deliberately steered Steffen away from it being the ‘With Intelligence’ story. Because that’s huge, but it’s in the past now. The question wasn’t ‘what did you do?’ It was ‘what would make this work anywhere else?’
That reframe matters to me. A case study from a stage is interesting. A room of peers pulling apart a transformation to work out which bits apply to their own businesses is useful.
Someone in the room had seen the CEO present at a larger event. But they felt this was different. Smaller room. The right people. And instead of a polished narrative, it was Steffen walking through the full arc, from the investment perspective to the operational reality, with people breaking in to ask how specific decisions were made and what they’d do differently.
There’s a distinction most businesses miss. You need the CEO who can do the investor pitch and the industry leader who went inside and made it happen. They’re different skill sets. Most events give you the CEO on stage. SubsClub gives you the person who did the work in the room with the people on the ground.
Work in progress: Live problem, experienced input
The third segment was deliberately different. Not a win. Not a polished case study. A live, unresolved problem brought to the room by someone working through it in real time.
The detail stays anonymous, but the shape of it was this: an information business sitting on a significant archive of proprietary data, trying to work out what to do with it. The plan as presented had gaps. I shared the Substribe Data As A Service DaaS assessment to prime the room.
This helped the room to steer away from saying, ‘it depends.’ The room said: go and get your archives sorted right now. They are your archives. They are your proprietary data that – for this use case – is essential. That’s not always the case.
Google worked this out 20 years ago when they got students to scan most existing content in libraries (thanks for the reminder, Karen Prevezer). And you’re going to have to market this properly, because the product won’t sell itself.
That clarity came from people who’ve done it.
Someone with years in strategic pricing at a major information business. Someone who leads marketing at a subscription intelligence company. Someone who’d just finished explaining how they built a data-led transformation. At least three different perspectives, all pointing in the same direction, all grounded in experience rather than theory.
The power of cross functional insights when they meet in a trusted space – not constrained by internal targets, P&L and … well… let’s be real, rivalry.
The pricing index
Some months ago I was in a conversation with someone who was describing their product portfolio. Most of it was solid but familiar. Then they mentioned a pricing index. It was almost a throwaway line. But I knew it was a gold mine. I’ve seen enough subscription businesses to recognise when someone is sitting on something and doesn’t fully realise what they’ve got.
So during last week’s session, I brought it into the discussion. Not primed, not set up in advance. I wanted the room to react to it cold. And the reaction was immediate. An ex-investor, a pricing expert, and a product specialist all honed in on it independently. ‘You’ve got something big there.’ And carrying on probing at the apres-SubsClub.
That’s social proof in a trusted environment. Not me telling them it’s valuable. Experienced people from different angles arriving at the same conclusion without being led to it. Now I want to help build it with them.
That’s what SubsClub is for. Surfacing things that are hiding in plain sight and getting the right people to validate them before you invest.
Getting to 10/10 ‘Must-Have Score‘
The 9 came from the quality of people in the room, the fact that every segment produced something useful rather than just interesting, and the interaction. Not a two-way conversation. Everyone going into their own perspectives and angles, relating what they heard to their own businesses, challenging each other on what would actually work.
What gets it closer to 10 is what happens in the days and weeks after the session.
The work-in-progress segment needs a sharper decision point. Not just ‘here’s my problem’ but ‘I need the room to help me decide this or warn me about that.’ And the person presenting needs to be operational enough to act on what they hear.
But the real gap between 9 and 10 is in the follow-on. The session surfaces the opportunity. The session identifies who should speak to whom and about what. Closing that gap, making sure the right conversations happen in the right sequence with the right people, is what working with Substribe as a client looks like. The session gives you the room. The client relationship gives you the progress.
Do you think you’re right for the SubsClub? Let me know why you think you can add value and what you’re looking to achieve… andy@substribe.co
Seeing this pattern in your business?
If this is showing up in your subscription business, it’s worth a conversation. 30 minutes, no pitch — just diagnosis.
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