We sat down with the CEO of Unbloat, Carolyn Horner, as well as Unbloat founder Jesse Pujji to learn about the brand’s all-natural gut health supplement. Since launching with Smartrr, Unbloat has built up a subscription-led community and has seen a 60% increase in subscription revenue over the last 180 days. Though it took a few wrong turns to land on the final product — and a bit of time to discover the brand’s true target audience — here’s how Unbloat grew to the exciting place it is today. 

Trust Your Gut When Building a Subscription Brand 

Anyone who has ever dealt with bloating, discomfort, and other digestive problems knows how debilitating they can be — and Jesse Pujji himself was no stranger to these gut issues. After launching a venture studio called Gateway X in January of 2021, Jesse knew he wanted to create a DTC subscription brand that specifically tackled gut health. 

His first step was creating a brand with a bold and aptly punny name: Poophoria. Poophoria had a variety of different products, including a digestive enzyme, a probiotic, and an herbal supplement. After a few months, Poophoria proved to fall short of Jesse’s vision as he quickly realized consumers didn’t want to be taking three supplements to solve only one issue. Instead, it seemed everyone wanted one comprehensive formula that they could easily take daily. This was the aha moment that led Jesse to Unbloat. 

Working alongside gastroenterologist Dr. Shilpa Mehra, the duo created a brand new formula that has now become Unbloat’s supplement. The formula packs in 40 all-natural ingredients to address a range of areas related to gut health — all in one daily capsule. The ingredients include 21 digestive enzymes, seven key probiotics, six herbal remedies, four essential nutrients, and two prebiotic fibers. 

Unbloat officially launched in March of 2022 before bringing Carolyn Horner onto the team soon after. 

“It’s an interesting origin story of trial and error and finally finding a product that stuck. In the early stages, Unbloat needed some extra assistance with marketing and logistics — so I dove right in, and earlier this year, I became the full-time CEO."
—Carolyn Horner, CEO of Unbloat 

Originally, Unbloat had an obvious audience in mind: anyone battling bloating. However, by monitoring analytics and customer feedback, a more specific demographic soon revealed itself after the product launched: women experiencing big hormonal changes. Hormones are known to be intrinsically linked to gut health, and women undergo significant hormonal shifts in both early motherhood as well as during menopause. Once Unbloat discovered and zeroed in on this niche, the brand scaled quickly. In November of 2022, Unbloat saw 200% month-over-month growth and has continued to grow 10% - 15% each month since. 

A Subscription Program Full of Engagement Opportunities

Just as other wellness products have found, subscriptions were an obvious offering for this routine health product that was already built with ease and convenience in mind. Though the team had originally launched Poophoria on Recharge, when it came time to find the best subscription software for Unbloat, Jesse no longer saw its value and was seeking a Recharge alternative that could offer a more intuitive customer account portal experience. Excited by what Smartrr had to offer, the team made the switch for the launch of the new brand.  

“Smartrr has been a game-changer for Unbloat,” founder Jesse Pujji said. “About 70% of our new orders this year opt for a subscription. When we launched just 12 months ago, however, the opt-in rate was about half! Using Smartrr allowed us to test our pricing and subscription bundles with just a few clicks so we could constantly optimize for AOV, discounts, and opt-in rates. Without this flexibility, our team couldn’t move as fast to learn and scale.”

In addition to 70% of Unbloat’s revenue coming from subscribers — and with the help of smart marketing decisions, like changing the default subscription option from a one-month pack to a three-month pack, AOV is up 23% in the last 180 days. Plus, Smartrr has directly reduced Unbloat’s cancellation rate by providing easy and attractive alternatives for customers.

“Not only has Smartrr helped us acquire more subscription customers — it's been key in retaining them, too. With Smartrr's cancellation flow feature, we've seen 40% to 50% of consumers who initially wanted to cancel their subscriptions choose a different option because they have the freedom to either skip, pause, or gift their subscriptions instead. Smartrr's team understands that consumers today crave flexibility, and they've designed a product that naturally does that. Our team is so excited to scale and launch new products on our store with the help of Smartrr this year.”
—Jesse Pujji, Unbloat Founder

All with the intention to increase customer lifetime value, Unbloat is on a mission to implement an enhanced post-purchase experience by leveraging more of Smartrr’s LTV tools such as gifting, loyalty, and referrals. While many of their subscribers have naturally adopted the recently-launched loyalty program and are actively engaging in the customer account portal to edit their frequencies, Carolyn explained that Unbloat also plans to dig deeper into promoting Smartrr’s loyalty rewards and referral program. Additionally, Carolyn intends to spread the messaging more broadly and intentionally to make the most of this feature, giving those engaged subscribers a reason to stay and interact with the Unbloat brand.  

The Shopify Tools Powering Unbloat

When it comes to Unbloat’s Shopify tech stack, the team utilizes a variety of other tools in addition to Smartrr. One such tool is Fondue, which Unbloat uses as a promotional tool to offer CashBack instead of just discounts. Since Facebook is the primary way that Unbloat scales (it’s responsible for about 50% of new customers), the brand has a variety of Facebook-specific tools — like Motion to analyze thumbstop ratio, Triple Whale for analytics, Pencil to piece together different ad concepts, and Foreplay to save other great ads, to name a few. Unbloat also uses and loves Replo for landing pages and Klaviyo for email marketing.    

Looking Ahead

When it comes to planning for the future, Unbloat is focusing primarily on CPA and continuing to strengthen retention. Additionally, the brand is looking to expand its product offerings, grow the team, and scale beyond this year’s revenue goal.