This post is a public version of ANTENNA’s internal strategy; we have only sparingly omitted details. I’ve often found that the “startup canon” is very heavy on sweeping frameworks and light on raw, tactical insight — my hope is that this post gives other founders insight into our decision-making process as well as encourages potential founders to embark on their own journeys.

A Year in Review

ANTENNA is a data company that measures consumer behavior in the Media industry’s new subscription economy. I’ve heard others use the term “Nielsen for Subscriptions”.

We did some things well over the past year: Through our work over the past year, it’s become abundantly clear that the pain point we’re trying to solve is painful for our customers and unsolved.

• We built a fully distributed team with employees from California to the Netherlands.

• We built an MVP and took it to market.

• We acquired our first customers and revenue.

• We created something unique & best-in-class for its primary use case.

And we learned a lot about where we need to grow: Through conversations with hundreds of customers, investors, and other smart people, we learned exactly where we needed to improve. Those learnings are what shaped our focus over the next year (more on that below).

Overall, we feel really proud of the progress we’ve made and are full steam ahead! It’s been a whirlwind for the team and me, personally, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

What We’ve Learned

There are two themes that fill my thoughts during the day and my dreams at night.

1. Our data captivates everyone who sees it: We track purchase behavior and subscription metrics in the subscription media world. That means we can see subscriber growth, churn rate, and customer lifetime value across the market — something that no one has been able to do, accurately, to-date.

2. We need to convert this captivation into long-term client partnerships more rapidly: More partnerships means (a) more revenue, which funds the business and (b) more product learnings, which informs what we spend our time on. When we sign a deal, we have the privilege of speaking with senior decision-makers — we get to hear the most important questions directly from subscription media executives—priceless information for our business.

Where We’re Going

As a team, we’re focused on one thing: turning captivation into revenue. We’ve settled on four cornerstones of success over the next year — and we’re all-in.

1. Focus everything on our customers’ biggest questions

In our marketing materials, on our website, and elsewhere; we plan to shift from “here’s what we do” to “here’s how we help you”. It might sound obvious but there’s a huge difference. The former (“here’s what we do”) requires each potential customer to translate our product and its features into solutions. The latter (“here’s how we help you”) cuts to the chase and removes the guess work, making for a more straightforward sales cycle.

In any early stage startup, this is a difficult task. Not only do you have a cool, new product in-market but also you haven’t yet spent hours with your customers learning what they need.

One year in, we’re a bit smarter about our customers — streaming & other subscription media businesses—than when we started. So what are our customers’ biggest questions? The full list is too long for this post but here are three key questions:

• Can you benchmark our Churn Rate against competitors?

• Can you help us assess the trade-offs between ad-free & ad-supported subscription plans?

• Can you track how cord cutters funnel into the streaming ecosystem after they cancel their cable TV plan?

Expect to see us tackle our market’s pain points head-on in the future. We started ANTENNA not to build a product but to provide solutions to our customers’ problems. It’s time to lean into that mantra.

2. The “Streaming Wars” are so-called because there are winners and losers

If you want to succeed in a competitive environment, you must pay attention to the market around you. But, for the most part, subscription media is a new business model — to-date, most operators have been primarily focused on their own services; not their competitors.

At ANTENNA, we believe that understanding competitive positioning is paramount to one’s success. To us, subscriber growth and churn rate are just numbers — without accurate benchmarks they are neither good nor bad. In order to succeed, we must convince others of this fact.

• We’ll be releasing a quarterly Scorecard highlighting key market shifts as well as who’s winning & losing along a series of key performance metrics. You can already see parts of that coming together in the press.

• We’ll double down on sharing how big events like the Hamilton release on Disney+ stacked up to other similar events. We hope everyone in the industry can benefit from smart, well-executed strategies.

3. Focus our product development roadmap on the things that will get us to our immediate goal — turning captivation into revenue:

There are an endless list of priorities we could be focusing on but, as they say, “if everything’s a priority, nothing’s a priority”.

Here’s our product roadmap, in a nutshell:

• Cover more subscription media services: We want to serve the entire industry, whether that’s entertainment (e.g. HBO Max), sports (e.g. NBA League Pass), digital news (e.g. The New York Times), or gaming (e.g. Playstation Now). In order to do that, we must be able to provide them each with the most relevant data & metrics on their closest competitors.

• Build domain authority: A large part of measurement is trust. The entire reason measurement businesses exist is because others cannot obtain information about the market that you can. In the next 12 months, we’ll make a handful of improvements aimed at building the most reliable measurement service in the space, by an order of magnitude.

• Release a robust online analytics tool: Our customers should have all the data they need in just a few clicks. We’ll build a tool so that they can do that, without losing any of the context surrounding the data. Our biggest focus for this tool will be usage. We don’t want to spend money & time on an enterprise software tool that never gets used; unfortunately an all-to-common occurrence in the SaaS world.

4. Evolve our data strategy to keep our first-mover advantage

Our initial methodology does not require our customers to write integration code or provide us any data before they get value. This has been a huge driver of early success.

As the market evolves, our data strategy will have to evolve with it—what data will we need access to that we don’t have yet? Here are a few things we’re currently considering.

• How do we provide our customers with even deeper insight — the why behind the what? As we present our metrics & insights to customers, it’s inevitable that we receive even more in-depth questions in return. Answering those questions for our customers is a top priority.

• How do we serve all kinds of subscription services? We see a world in which consumers constantly make trade-offs between subscriptions — Netflix, The New York Times, Peloton, Headspace, and more. How do we connect all of those dots?

A Few Parting Thoughts

I sometimes can’t help but feel overwhelmed at the pace we’re running. With so much to do across sales & marketing, product development, data science, and engineering, and customer success — how will we get it all done?

But then I remind myself: that’s the fun of a startup.

More than anything, I feel like we’re on the cusp of company-defining breakthroughs. We are producing smarter insights than ever before, which lead to lots of press attention, and result in inbounds. With a bit of refinement, I am sure that we can achieve all we need so that our next year in review is as positive as this one.

A personal thank you to Jonathan Carson, ANTENNA’s Co-founder & Chairman for the feedback on this post — and beyond. I’d love to hear each and every one of your reactions to this post. Please email me at [email protected] if you’d like to chat.