Pricing

Grover: Kiss goodbye to buying?

As a consumer, an increasing proportion of my digital life can be attributed to subscriptions. Photo editing, movie watching, music listening, ebook reading, blog hosting… and plenty more. But what about subscriptions for physical products? This is the realm of Berlin-based Grover. I paid a visit to their HQ, to dig a little deeper on the topic.

Gadgets as a service

There’s a big overlap between financing a big purchase, and renting it. Both help you spread the cost of such a spend. But the team at Grover want us to have a flexible way in which we can rent technology and hardware products for as long as we want, and give them back when we’re done.

Thom Cummings & Michael Cassau
Thom Cummings (left), CMO.
Michael Cassau (right), Founder and CEO.

There’s a lot to take away from this conversation! Clearly building and growing a hardware subscription business carries some unique challenges, but there’s also a large overlap between a lot of the aspects of a SaaS business. Some of the questions we dig into include:

  • How do you convert consumers to a subscription-oriented way of thinking?
  • What are some of the differences between SaaS and subscriptions for physical products?
  • Is there a limit to the transition to subscription models for consumers?
  • What kind of metrics are important for optimizing the Grover business?
  • How do you approach pricing such a product?

If you want to read more on the experience of using Grover, there’s a great piece in Vice’s Motherboard publication: I Rented All the Expensive Tech I Can’t Afford

Get the full interview below, or in your usual podcast app (I use Pocket Casts, it’s awesome): iTunes | SoundCloud

https://soundcloud.com/chartmogul/grover

Ed Shelley

Former Director of Content

@Mr_Ed

hardware interview podcast saas open mic