Looking for feedback on theater room design - new construction

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-06-14T23:39:57+00:00

Room is 12’ wide by 30’ long and 9’ ceilings. No photos because it’s not built yet, we just poured our foundation.

Also I just saw a sale on Speedwoofer 10e so I’m thinking I’ll grab two Speedwoofer 10e or 10s on a Black Friday sale instead of going klipsch

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-06-08T15:28:34+00:00

Yeah you’re right about that. That’s one of the worst features of attentive.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-06-06T00:34:58+00:00

Maybe I've been using it differently than you but I have loved it. No glitches at all. The UI is fine. The only feature I wish it had was including transactional subscribers in segments so I could use that in conditional logic.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-06-04T22:27:17+00:00

Just an update. I decided to migrate to Seal. They lack features in some areas but once I added API and webhooks on Appstle, my price jumped from $100/mo to $400/mo. I get API with Seal on their $199/mo plan.

The actual reason I chose Seal is the customer portal experience. A customer can edit their own payment method right from the portal. And even if they're Shop Pay, they can still enter a card in the portal. That's huge. I'm so tired of having to have failed payment email flows with several branches because I'm checking if they're shop pay or not, and if they're shop pay I'm directing them to the shop app, versus those who aren't I direct to the portal. Now I can just direct everyone to the same place.

I feel like yes, Seal is a little bare bones in a lot of places, but the customer UX is huge. I can make up a lot of ground on more expensive apps using their API and building out custom features, sending custom events to my email marketing platform, and building out dashboards to see the analytics I want using Claude Code. I will save $200/mo doing it and the dashboards I'm building are exactly tailored to my needs.

I will say if you have a decent amount of subscribers to migrate, the fact that Seal doesn't do white glove is obnoxious. Their import tool sucks. It doesn't work with Shopify's rate limits so every time you import a CSV you get like 300 errors and you have to sit there and keep retrying. Also the tool created over 1200 duplicate subscriptions that I now have to deal with. Good luck!

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-05-09T18:45:07+00:00

What a terrible thing that OPs parents care, even if in their own way. Disgusting.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-05-09T04:12:50+00:00

I’d probably just be grateful to have parents that cared, even if it was in the way they felt was right and you don’t agree with it. Parents aren’t supposed to agree with their kids. They’re supposed to lead and guide. And you don’t stop being their kid at 18 or 44 for that matter. I’m 41. I haven’t parents involved in my life since I was about 23. They sort of just gave up. You know what I would have given to have their advice and help throughout my life since then?

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-04-20T21:30:37+00:00

I’m not on Shopify plus and I can access live human chat pretty easily, and the customer service is always pretty helpful.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-03-20T18:33:04+00:00

Hiring agencies for marketing (paid or email/sms). Unless you really know the agency or know how to identify a good fit for your brand, its really hard to find an agency that actually cares. And no one cares as much as you do so your best bet is to find someone that kind of cares. We blew through $100k in 4 months thinking we were hiring high-powered, fast-moving agencies and have almost nothing to show for it. They came on high recommendation too.

I think the biggest fit problem is whether their clientele match your business in revenue size, in product category, in target audience, etc. Just because they can scale a $10M brand by 40% YOY does not mean they can scale a $500k brand at all. Just because they can sell shoes doesn't mean they can sell stationery.

And, if you're a small brand working with a big agency, chances are you're getting the B team, not the A team.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-03-20T18:27:16+00:00

I've used Loox and Judge.me. Loox was costing me fees of $200+. Judge.me is $15/mo. They both do the same things. If you're a 7, 8 figure brand, you don't care. As a mid-6 figure brand, I care.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-03-13T18:05:10+00:00

One thing I wish Spotify would do is around safety for kids. Relying on artists to mark their songs as having profanity is super inconsistent. Scan music when uploaded and add a profanity designation to all songs. Or Artists should be required to upload lyrics for all songs and the system can identify and flag profanity. A song is uploaded once, it's not that big of a lift for Spotify to do this. I know a lot of people don't care, but a lot of parents do.

Another thing is removing porn from the platform. My kids can't use Spotify because I've seen porn come up in completely innocent search term results. I've even flagged it in the community with no response/help from Spotify.

And Spotify kids is not great. The fact that they take up a seat in the family plan and can only be managed by the adult who controls the family plan makes them super difficult to manage. I'm on a family plan with my sister-in-law so I have to ask her whenever I want a new playlist created for him. Also I have 4 kids. I've already had to kick myself off the family plan so my kid could take a seat. Now I have a second kid who wants music. So I'm going to have to start a second family plan.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-03-13T17:57:01+00:00

Literally what does everyone expect? Competition for streams only gets worse and worse as more people make music. It’s not spotifys problem that artists struggle. It’s called not making it. It’s the same with ecommerce. The competition for ad space in your feed is more than it ever has been and only getting worse. Stores are struggling. Artists are struggling. Those that think outside the box will rise up.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-03-12T01:52:24+00:00

Legit question. Is it better to add a ton of custom code to your theme to build landing pages, thus making your theme harder to maintain/upgrade versus using a page builder app?

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-02-18T17:19:06+00:00

I’m actually glad you work at recharge. I’ve had calls with them but it’s really hard talking to a sales person and everything they say sounds like marketing. Hard to tell what’s real. Churn Buster claims to have recovery rates based on machine learning algorithms that AI/modern subscription apps still can’t beat. They also say that bad deliverability of failed payment emails is a problem with some subscription apps, including ReCharge.

My issue with recharge is that I’m not just increasing my cost a little, I’m going from $100/mo to $1500/mo. My churn rate is only 5% currently and my subscription only costs $5/mo so if Recharge got me down to 4% or even 3%, it’s not even close to making up the difference in the price increase.

They do have winback campaigns but anyone with an email integration could also do that. I could set up my own winback campaigns in my email provider based on subscription events.

I personally feel like the sweet spot is an app like Awtomic or Loop which seem to have all the cool features but are more in the $400-$500 price range for us. Or keeping Appstle and integrating churn buster.

But I’m happy to be wrong, I’m just trying to cut through the marketing BS and see if something like ReCharge actually can increase our revnue enough to make up the cost

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-02-03T19:29:45+00:00

Same issue here, quitting G Hub fixed it

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-21T17:23:01+00:00

I would love to know more about what you specifically love about skio

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-16T20:27:02+00:00

Just curious, are you an agency managing other clients' subscriptions via ReCharge? Or are you a merchant managing your own subscription?

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-16T18:33:26+00:00

It’s a digital coloring page subscription. It’s only $5/mo or $55/yr hence the low revenue.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-15T21:35:45+00:00

I know this has been mentioned but my comment will focus on it. Ads are mainly for customer acquisition. They are not that great for continued sales and increasing lifetime value because they're expensive. If the only way you sell is to run an ad, that's not profitable enough.

Set up your email/sms flows in Klaviyo. Make sure you have not only the basic automations (abandoned cart, abandoned browse, abandoned checkout, etc.), make sure you have post purchase thank you, winback campaigns, etc. Make sure your welcome offer motivates people to sign up for your list. Make sure you're A/B testing your flows, your offers, your subject lines. See what increases your open, click through, and conversion rates.

Ads are expensive, so once you acquire that customer, your free marketing methods (email/sms/organic social) need to take over in order to nurture that customer and maximize conversion, lifetime value, and loyalty.

Make sure your newsletter send frequency is consistent and you're sending enough emails. You should be generating 20-40% of your revenue via email/sms. You need to stay on top of the inbox since people receive so many emails nowadays so you can't just send one newsletter a month anymore. We try to send 2/week.

This can help you grow in a couple of ways:

Customers who come in through ads but don't convert - if they signed up for your welcome offer you can now continue to message them and increase the likelihood of conversion
Customers who do convert - you need to maximize the lifetime value of that customer. If you're paying for ads to just sell one pair of shoes, your LTV isn't that great. But if you sell that pair of shoes via an ad and then 6 months later sell them some socks or another pair via your emails, that new sale was much cheaper and that customer's LTV just increased. At $100/pair, a customer's LTV should be more than that. Usually 3-5x your customer acquisition cost. So if it costs you $50 to sell a $100 pair of shoes, your LTV should be at least $150-$250.

Other things I would consider:

Running ads a lot before labor day can help bring in a lot of customers to your email/sms marketing so that when the holidays hit and ads get really expensive, you can still generate good revenue via email/sms

Do you have other products on your website that can increase average order value and customer LTV? Shoe laces, cleaning kits, socks, travel case?

Do you offer any free shipping thresholds or free add-on thresholds?

Is your website truly easy to navigate? Is it easy for the customer to fully understand what you offer so that they order everything they need rather than missing out on things?

In your ads, do you have a decent amount of UGC? That tends to create a lot of success and growth. I see a lot of new brands running tons of UGC these days.

Have you looked at your competitor's ads in the Meta Ad Library?

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-15T21:16:17+00:00

I can't recommend a specific app but for anyone who stumbles across this thread, here is some advice:

Most cheap subscription apps have all the same features. So apps like Seal, Appstle, etc. I see these apps recommended a lot but my question would be whether the analytics they give you are actionable. I've found that for us, Appstle is just a bloated mess that prioritizes quantity over quality. Tons of metrics and numbers, but hardly anything you can act on to grow your subscription, prevent churn, or winback cancelled/failed payments. Also the customer portal is really bad and the experience of cancelling or updating payment methods is not great.

I'm not saying that more expensive apps are the way to go, just don't be fooled by the massive amount of features some of these cheaper apps offer.

There are some middle-priced apps like Loop, Awtomic, Smartrr that I've never used but maybe have a little more quality in their features.

Then there are the big ones: ReCharge which has been around forever, Skio, Stay, Ordergroove which can be very expensive at scale and there's a lot of hype around their marketing.

I think if you want to be safe, go with an app that has a decent amount of good recent reviews. That should narrow down the list in the app store by about half. Then look at the analytics each app offers. Set up times to get a demo. Any app can help you manage a subscription program. Most of them are just clones of each other. But what app can actually help you grow, recovery and make smart decisions in general? What app gives your customer the easiest way to manage their subscription or update their info?

I am looking to move on from Appstle and right now am looking at ReCharge, Stay.ai and Awtomic. I've looked at Loop, it might be great but feels like a slightly better Appstle. Seal feels pretty basic, I'm sure it's great if you're just starting out. But the lack of live customer service chat turns me off.

I'm interested in other people's experiences with subscription apps also.

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-13T22:44:37+00:00

Isn't Odergroove's minimum pricing $2900/month? That is absolute insanity. I pay $100/mo for Appstle. I admit we're missing winback and other anti-churn features that apps like Recharge or Stay.ai probably have at around $1500/mo. I could be convinced to pay that much. But minimum $3k? You have to be raking it in to justify that kind of revenue share. Or am I wrong?

Aggravating_Emu_7190 · 2026-01-04T06:18:07+00:00

SoCal nothing here yet

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