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Robbie Kellman Baxter shares an episode from her popular podcast series Subscription Stories. In this episode, she interviews Bryan Welch, CEO of Mindful.org, on how to develop your niche to grow your subscriber base.

“You don’t have to be Netflix, Amazon Prime or LinkedIn to build a successful subscription model. In fact, many subscriptions make their forever promise to a small audience with highly focus on ongoing needs. Mindful Communications, the organization behind Mindful.org is dedicated to a very specific goal. Sharing the gifts of mindfulness through content, training, courses, directories, helping people enjoy better health, foster more caring relationships and cultivate compassionate society.

It’s because of this core focus, that Mindful has been able to develop deep expertise about how people want to engage in mindfulness. Expertise, which has provided a launching pad for a range of additional offerings, including a very successful corporate training business has become a larger source of revenue than the subscription itself. In other words, their niche focus has allowed them to be more impactful while generating multiple revenue streams to support their mission.

In this conversation with Mindful.org CEO Bryan Welch, we talked about how they built multiple revenue streams around a strong vertical with a small number of passionate members. This conversation was recorded as part of the D2C Direct-to-Consumer Summit that I co-produced with FIPP, the Global Media Association so you will read a couple of references to the conference.

Welcome, Bryan. We are so glad to have you at the conference.

Thanks, Robbie. It is great to be here.

Can you briefly explain Mindful.org’s mission?

We are here to share the benefits of mindfulness practices, which are primarily meditation. We share the practices through training, courses, magazine and websites. We have a global directory of teachers and events, and we do a lot of corporate training.

Where do subscriptions fit into your bigger strategic picture?

They are big components. They are probably the second-largest single source of revenue for us. Those include traditional subscriptions to the magazine, both print and digital but we also have premium subscriptions that include courses and access to other proprietary content and even coaching.”

Key points include:

• Expanding interest in fewer topics
• Connecting to customer passions
• The minute understanding of engagement

Access the podcast, Small Is Beautiful – Niching Down Your Subscription to Grow Faster with Mindful.org CEO Bryan Welch, on LinkedIn.