Episode 115: It’s All About the Customer Experience with John Roman at BattlBox

John Roman, CEO of BattlBox, says that his background gives no suggestion that he would end up in the e-commerce subscription business. After finishing his time at college, John became a professional poker player, a field in which he was fairly successful. As he says, it paid the bills for four and a half years.

After leaving the poker circuit, he ventured into B2B technology sales at a publicly traded company, where he spent the next decade working. Toward the end of that run, he began investing in companies that came across his desk, and one of those companies was BattlBox.

Burning the midnight oil

The idea for BattlBox was conceived by a fellow student from John’s college days. John became involved about a month after the company was launched. He began in a limited advisory role, the plan being that he would consult with the BattlBox team for a couple of hours a month.

His role at the company quickly grew, and he soon found himself working 60 hours a week for BattlBox. The problem was that he still had his other full-time sales job. When he got to the point he was working 120 hours each week, he knew he had to choose one or the other.

John had an equity stake in BattlBox. The two companies were the same size, so he chose BattlBox, in part because it was just more fun.

Copying a health and beauty company

The idea for the company actually came from the wife of the founder, a man named Daniel Dabbs. She had a monthly subscription to Birchbox for health and beauty products. He watched his wife’s excitement every month when the box came, and he wanted that experience for himself.

Being an avid outdoorsman, he searched for a similar subscription service for outdoor and survival gear. He couldn’t find one, so he decided to run with the idea himself.

Offering different tiers

The company started by offering customers four tiers of boxes, starting at $50 a month and rising incrementally to $150. The team thought that most customers would join at the lowest level, but, to their surprise, when they looked at the numbers, the highest tier quickly became the most popular choice.

BattlBox has had to increase its prices over the years, and the top box is now $170. The distribution of tiers remains pretty steady. Today the top tier represents 46 percent of their base.

Finding top influencers

In the beginning, part of John’s strategy for customer acquisition involved finding influencers in the space and sending them boxes for free. They used the usual channels such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, but they were caught by surprise by a source they hadn’t considered.

The clue came from a pre-purchase survey to customers asking where they had heard about BattlBox. The survey presented a list with all the expected channels and “other” at the bottom. They noticed that a lot of people chose other, and in the text field, they cited a man named Brandon Currin, a YouTuber, as the source of their interest.

John and his team checked Brandon’s YouTube handle, compared it to their internal spreadsheet of influencer comp boxes, and realized that he was a paying customer doing online reviews on his own time. They reached out and started sending him free boxes, telling him to keep doing what he was doing. Eventually, they asked if he would move to Georgia and work at BattlBox full time.

Focusing on content

Bringing Brandon on board strongly reinforced the company’s focus on creating content to build a community and attract new customers. With Brandon full time, not only could he do his popular monthly reviews, but he could also help pump out all kinds of great content in the outdoor adventure space.

At the time, it was a one-man show. Brandon was the cameraman, video editor, audio editor, scriptwriter and host. As BattlBox continued to lean into content, they began to build a production team around Brandon to help with their community-building efforts.

All of this eventually led to a Netflix original series called Southern Survival — a show where they test gear on air to see if it is worthy of going into a monthly BattlBox. The series premiered in July 2020, during a time when the pandemic had e-commerce sales going through the roof, and BattlBox’s business was going through exponential growth.

Hands-on leadership

In order to expand its community, BattlBox launched a bulletin board for members based on the Reddit model. They eventually migrated it over to a Facebook group that currently has more than 7,000 members.

John and his leadership team are regular contributors to the community. Someone from the team will go in and interact with members almost every day. They have found that it holds them accountable to their customers because they have made them feel comfortable enough to call team members out by name if there is a problem.

Following the rules of e-commerce

BattlBox’s focus is general outdoor adventure content, which rarely includes a “buy now” kind of CTA, but they do also try to attract customers to their website. When that does happen, they follow the accepted e-commerce best practices.

The company has all the normal funnels in place and tries to close the customers like any e-commerce business would. There are processes in place to deal with product abandonment, cart abandonment and customer retention.

The typical customer stays an average of seven months, and the average lifetime value runs around $990. There are robust processes in place to try to mitigate both active and passive churn. This is an area they began to focus on pre-pandemic before all the talk in the industry.

They try to find out why a customer is leaving and offer them deals to get them to stay. However, John believes that if someone has decided to leave, he should make it as easy as possible. He says if you make it overly difficult, like forcing them to call a number, they will most likely never come back, and they might talk negatively about your brand moving forward.

Keeping people happy when they leave is all part of having a strong community.

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