How Startups Generate Recurring Revenue Without a Subscription Model

You can encourage repeat business without shoving a square peg into a round hole

Joe Procopio
6 min readOct 29, 2020

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Are you going to hit your revenue targets this year?

There’s never been a worse time to have to answer that question, but there’s never been a better time to create more predictable revenue forecasts.

The key to solving the forecasting puzzle is, of course, establishing a consistent and growing run rate. In other words, if your revenue target for the next 12 months is $1 million, your focus is on a consistent number of $83,333 per month, every month.

But no business has consistent revenue — unless of course they have recurring revenue. That’s the pot of gold at the end of the traction-and-scale rainbow, and subscription pricing models seem like the natural means to those ends.

One problem. As I wrote a couple weeks ago, subscription pricing doesn’t work for every product or service. Subscription models only make money in cases where the customer’s demand cycle fits the timing of the subscription model.

Most products and services don’t fit that model. So what do you do?

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Joe Procopio

I'm a multi-exit, multi-failure entrepreneur. AI pioneer. Technologist. Innovator. Humanist. Write at Inc.com and BuiltIn.com. More about me at joeprocopio.com