The Art of Surfing Subscriptions

Matt Scorringe knows surfing. As an elite level surf coach based in Mount Muanganui New Zealand he developed an approach that led him to coach athletes at the Olympic level. A former professional surfer himself, Scorringe has that unique ability to distill technical knowledge into easily digestible chunks for surfers at any level. This, coupled with his time helping World Tour surfers analyze their technique, helped him identify an opportunity in the marketplace.

‘There are so many surfers out there looking to improve who have never had access to the technical knowledge they need to progress’ he said.

‘Normally it's only reserved for the best, I wanted to change that’. As a result, he launched The Art Of Surfing Academy online in early 2020, aiming to take his knowledge to the wider surf community. His initial offering was an online membership that gave users access to content and seminars, which was well received, but then Covid hit and changed everything.

‘I knew content was going to be central to how I got my knowledge out there, but it initially it only enabled me to deliver it in a one-to-many fashion. It never quite delivered the level of personal insight that you need to progress at such a technically difficult sport as surfing. So during the pandemic I started using remote coaching tools to enable me to continue to coach people individually. I immediately saw how this was going to fundamentally change how I approached my membership. It enabled me to remotely analyze and coach anyone around the world and I believe that is going to be central to sport moving forward.’

“Working with NOAN enabled me to begin to join the dots in the roadmap, finally putting those pieces of the puzzle together into something coherent for my customers” — Matt Scorringe

Scorringe began to attempt to bring this new remote coaching into his experience, but it wasn’t as simple as just bolting on an upsell.

‘I knew that this new approach would shift not just how I coached, but also the value proposition of my entire membership. At the same time I had multiple tech platforms bolted together so I wanted to start from scratch, rebuilding the offering’ he said.

It was at this point he joined NOAN.

Like a lot of small business owners he had a few of the elements worked out but was struggling to put it all together ‘I had the brand, a lot of content and the value proposition - an Olympic surf coach in your pocket, but I needed a way to bring this all together and integrate it into a single membership.’

‘Working with NOAN and their experts enabled me to begin to join the dots in the roadmap, finally putting those pieces of the puzzle together into something coherent for my customers. To be frank, the toughest challenge was building something that also aligned with my capabilities. We have a small team so the last thing I wanted to have to build was something that would take a lot of hours and staff to deliver on.

‘I’m really happy with where we landed as it enabled me to deliver the value I know I can through my coaching whilst not being overwhelmed, work-wise.’

Leveraging NOAN's guided strategy development enabled The Art Of Surfing Academy to evolve drastically from where it was pre-pandemic. The high quality content and seminars are still there on theartofsurfing.com, but now there are two tiers of the membership with a gateway ‘taster’ experience of Scorringe’s remote coaching techniques that connects the two.

‘We established a super simple approach’ he said ‘that is really easy for me to message. The base level subscription gets you one yearly TAOS Review, which is a remote coaching analysis. This gives my members a taste of what they can get if they join our Remote Coaching Cycles. These are three month cycles of personalized coaching that they get with me.’

The TAOS Review – with set parameters of what users receive – is designed not just as a gateway experience, but also as a way to reduce annual churn in the membership. This approach has been paying off already.

‘We’re already seeing people who have used their TAOS Review message us and say they can’t wait to get their one the following year, so we hope this will really help us reduce our churn numbers over time’ said Scorringe.

NOAN helped Scorringe decide to move The Art Of Surfing onto a much simpler, easy-to-use platform, which ultimately reduced the amount of time his team took to deliver the experience.

‘With the platform changes we made and the simple and clear structure to the membership experience we’re set up to scale now, and having spent a lot of time trying to work out how to grow my business - that’s priceless’.