In this Behind The Tool, I had the pleasure of chatting with Oisin from Recharge. Oisin is a co-founder and the CEO of Recharge, the subscription platform category leader. Recharge, founded in 2014, recently announced that they had achieved $100,000,000 in ARR and have over 100,000,000 subscribers across their customer base.

It's very impressive and not many Shopify Apps get to this point. It was only right to interview Oisin and share some his learnings and stories!

It was a fantastic interview; we chatted about his story, some of the key entrepreneurial lessons he learned from building to $100,000,000 in ARR at Recharge and his overall thoughts on the current App Store trends.

Enjoy!

Oisin, Tell us about the founding story behind Recharge, where the idea came from and how you built the initial product.

Oisin: I was 30 years old at the time and I had a couple of failed startups and one that was somewhat successful. I was broke, living with my parents, and just knew that my entrepreneurial journey had to amount to more than that. I did a hard evaluation of my skills to figure out what I was good at, bad at, and what I loved doing. 

I realized two things: First, I need a great co-founder who can help me dive into the details. I was always great at seeing the opportunities, but I needed that person to keep me honest constantly and take me from 80% to 100%. Second, I realized it’s all about the market you choose. You can have the best idea in the world, but if you don’t choose a good market or a bigger market trend, it’s very hard to hit true scale. 

I met my co-founder at a barbeque in Santa Monica and we went through this period of cold calling a ton of people to figure out what to do. Mike and I complement one another; it’s a 1+1=3 type of thing with us.

So we had the foundations and just needed to find a market and opportunity. We showed a lot of humility and vulnerability at that point - cold calling, messaging people on Linkedin - and we got a ton of help. It was pretty amazing. 

We talked to tons of successful people, including Harley Finkelstein. At that point, Shopify had one hundred employees. It was small. Harley had convinced us that this commerce revolution was going to change everything. Before, you had to be this big brand, distributed everywhere with huge capital. Now, you can become an entrepreneur in your garage. You can create a physical product and sell it online via Shopify and Facebook Ads. 

He sold us on the opportunity in 2011. We initially started out as a development agency because we’re both software developers and product designers. We launched about six different products and Recharge happened to be the last one we launched. It just took off like crazy.

You can probably count on a few hands how many Shopify Apps have got to or will get to $100M ARR. Why do you think Recharge has been of the few to get there?

Oisin: There's always a blend of a little luck and skill and timing. When we launched, there were probably a dozen subscription apps. It wasn't like we had zero competition. In the beginning, we got really good at understanding how to strip all of the friction away for merchants to set up subscription programs. We started off as an easy plug-in that you could just throw onto your website and get going in under five minutes and we were the best at that.

The key thing for us was to be driven by what our merchants need and build tools that help them become more successful. If we build the best tools and solutions for our merchants, then our merchants will win and so will we.

At first, when we started Recharge was very much a simple subscription widget. Then we evolved to be more of an API platform with a really strong subscription management point solution, and now we’re a much bigger, more powerful, smarter subscription platform that takes merchants from converting customers to retaining them. We’re bringing together not just the subscription management piece of it, but also insights and analytics to power retention and growth for these brands. So really, it’s all about having a vision but also constantly talking and listening to your customers.

What do you think has changed in the Shopify App market in the last 8-12 months? What do you think will continue to change in the next 8-12 months?

Oisin: The trend that we’ve felt in the last 18 months or so is the hangover effect from COVID. We had this glut of money come into companies, and what we are now starting to see is high interest rates force companies to get lean and not just throw money at a problem. We’re also seeing the marketplace for D2C brands get more competitive. With competition, it’s more expensive for brands to get conversions and payback on their first purchases. We’ve seen companies become much more operationally capable and become more holistic with how they think about their customer lifecycle. 

Most consumers are buying products in the health & wellness, food, and baby categories, specifically to get a job done in their daily lives. The best companies now realize how to embed themselves in the consumer’s daily life.

The big trend that we’re seeing is merchants who don’t just want their products bought but brought into the consumer's ongoing lifestyle. That’s how they’re starting to define a good customer.

We also see the best D2C brands starting to get into wholesale and retail channels a lot earlier. They’re not thinking of themselves as only an ecommerce brand anymore. They’re thinking about how retail and ecommerce feeds into retail. I think in this next evolution of ecommerce, we’ll see a lot of successful D2C brands getting to $50M in GMV.