The crowded world of subscription businesses offers ongoing opportunities to screw up your relationship with subscribers.

The key to scaling: building relationships with customers who’ll help you decide where to look for your next product.

“The first product just has to work or else you’re just not gonna have a company. But to be a big company, you have to have much more than just the product, it has to be the full experience and the full relationship that you have,” says Johan. “And then certainly you have to have the muscles on your team to be able to listen, evolve, test, and grow. So we’re obviously searching for companies… where the founders know so much about their customer that for the first few years, you have a very clear line of, you know, path forward. It’s not complicated. It’s just execution. And that’s hard to do. But you need to have a pulse on that customer.”

Instead of striving to meet the needs of every customer, entrepreneurs should focus on trying to understand the subscribers they’ve zeroed in on by being purposeful — instead of throwing a bunch of ideas against the wall to see which ones stick.

Growing with your consumers is key for reducing churn, but it’s also essential for identifying complementary products that can help a startup scale naturally. In our chat, Johan contrasted this with the relationship some box companies fostered after they bombarded subscribers with multiple products at once — a move that can lead customers to decide that the company just doesn’t understand them.

“We have a joke of how many box companies we’ve seen and… what’s in the boxes. And there are a lot of things that you don’t even need the first time, much less needing it every single month into perpetuity,” she says.

Johan, who is an investor in several subscription startups, said “It’s not good enough to be a really successful box company with like the same two things in the box. Because these people are going to churn out and at some point, it’s just not going to be good enough. So you have to evolve, you have to be targeting a category and a use case that’s broader, that’s going to evolve as your customer grows, and that you have the vision and the desire to grow with.”

The key to giving subscription startups a strong foundation to breathe and expand? Ironing out which customers to approach with new products.