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You’ve heard of Dollar Shave Club?

The scrappy startup which started marketing by putting ironic videos on social media that spoke directly to the burgeoning millennial male who just had to shave every day? Sick and tired of the Gillette/Shick cabal, which comes out with a new razor every few years or so, and charges an arm and a leg for the razor and the blades. What a pain in the ass to keep buying blades when they ran out every few weeks or months?

Dollar Shave Club promised better shaves, and a better price, delivered on a regular basis. All you had to do was to go onto the website and sign up, and then the product would just show up automatically. The charges would happen automatically and you never needed to worry about having blades in whenever you needed them.

I think it launched, and exploded with users in a few years, and was then purchased by Unilever for $1B. That’s right. A blade delivery service that specialized in delivering a single product to a specific market when from $0 valuation to $1B in a few years.

While the success of Dollar Shave Club can be linked to timing — and product — and price — the real innovation here is the automatic replenishment. Since then, many many beauty brands are offering this kind of auto-replenishment service, hoping to lock customers into a subscription service that will continue to deliver the product on a regular basis to customers.

Where the subscription model used to only pertain to printed materials, the model has now exploded far beyond that — almost everything can now be sold by subscription. Software, which used to be packaged, is not more likely sold as a subscription — why not pay Microsoft $99 a year to have the full suite of Office products on your desktop which are automatically updated whenever bugs and security patches are found instead of spending $600 on a set of DVDs which sit on your desk after they are installed?

The subscription model is everywhere and growing — subscription businesses have grown over 100% a year for the last 5 years, with no end in sight. If you don’t already have a subscription service for whatever you are selling, you should seriously look into it now — if you haven’t already. However, even though the subscription model is quite lucrative — there is still a fairly high…