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Dan Burkhart

Member of the Recurly board, Recurly

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Dan co-founded Recurly with a deep appreciation for the combination of commerce, marketing, business analytics, and excellent user experience design. Dan brings extensive experience from his background of 20 years in roles spanning internet marketing, product marketing, strategic partnerships, business development, and corporate development for eBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) and NBC Internet.

While at eBay, Dan led the Global Buyer Engagement team, the eBay Global Affiliate Program, and the eBay Portal and Partner organization where he learned vital lessons about the subscriber experience and subscriber retention. Prior to eBay, Dan was a Sr. Director of Business Development for NBC Internet, where he played a key role in growing the company revenue streams from $20MM to $120MM.

Dan attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School for his undergraduate degree in economics and received his MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA. He currently lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children. Outside of the office, Dan enjoys being a dad and taking full advantage of the many benefits of living in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Thousands of innovative companies across digital media, streaming, publishing, SaaS, education, consumer goods, and professional services industries rely on the subscription management expertise at Recurly to unlock transformational growth using the subscription model to develop long-term customer relationships thanks to vital subscription performance metrics.

Recurly’s all-in-one, integrated billing platform removes the complexities of automating subscription billing at scale by enabling teams to manage and optimize a seamless subscriber journey with ease. Category-defining subscription companies including Sling, Twitch, BarkBox, FabFitFun, Paramount, Lucid, and Sprout Social have chosen Recurly to manage billions of dollars in credit card payments for recurring revenues, future-proof their recurring billing and payment operations, and curb subscriber retention and win back millions of dollars in revenue recovery. Founded in 2009, Recurly is based in San Francisco, with offices in Boulder, New Orleans, and London. For more information, visit https://recurly.com.

Latest posts by Dan Burkhart

The Future of Subscriptions Looks Brighter Than Ever

Before we relegate 2020 to the past, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight one of the major economic trends we saw this year: an explosion in subscription commerce. This time last year, we accurately predicted that subscription commerce would continue to grow and evolve, but certainly none of...

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Recurly Secures Majority Equity Investment from Accel-KKR

Today, I am delighted to announce an important milestone for Recurly: we have been acquired by Accel-KKR, an industry-leading growth equity company. This transaction creates a new partnership which brings together a tremendous set of global investment resources with knowledge from a subscription commerce platform which powers the most recognized...

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Notification of Vendor Data Security Incident

On Friday, October 5th, Recurly was notified by a vendor, Apollo.io, of a security exposure created in their server environment. Recurly used Apollo to provide Recurly with sales lead and marketing services. Apollo informed us that they believe the data leak included Recurly data such as customer names and contact information....

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The Holy Grail of Subscription Commerce

These days, most entrepreneurs and investors are quite clear about the merits of the subscription model. From a business perspective, recurring revenue is a wonderful concept. When a subscription business is firing on all cylinders, recurring revenue compounds beyond the costs of customer acquisition, and the world is the proprietor’s...

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Company Values That Scale for Years

Recurly just turned seven years old. It seems like yesterday that we elected to found a company based on the belief that the world was moving towards a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model. We believed that lightweight, flexible, nimble billing systems would become a competitive requirement for companies seeking to align their offers with...

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Identify 'Sneaky' Revenue Churn In Your Subscription Business

Understanding the true cost of subscriber churn is one of the most critical KPIs any SaaS business can measure. Unfortunately, it is not always easy to identify the ‘true’ cost of churn because customers churn in different ways. Simple ‘Binary’ Churn Example In the simplest example, Company A charges $15...

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If You Only Knew - How Much Your Relative Churn Rate Matters

Churn is one of the most sensitive variables impacting the value of a subscription business. Your business is in a "drag race" with competitors to come out on top. How your churn rate differs from your competitors' can tell you a lot about the relative health of your business and...

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How to Improve Subscription Renewal Rates

Hyper-targeted ‘lifecycle marketing’ promotions are well worth the effort Monitoring your subscriber churn rate is a basic requirement for any subscription business. Managing the “flip side” of churn – your subscription renewal rate – is the next tactical function for any subscription...

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Learning From Hulu's Subscription Cancellation Flow

After all of our postings on limiting customer churn, every subscription business must face the fact that your customers will choose to unsubscribe at some point. It happens. However, there are some simple things that can be done to influence the decision-making process as your customers choose to leave you....

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Get Results: Account Updater for Recurring Billing

Results: Account Updater Reduces Credit Card Declines Disproportionately for B2C Merchants It is no secret that in the world of recurring billing, credit card declines are the bane of your existence. We recommend pursuing all available tactics to ensure that your decline rates are held to a minimum. However, when presented...

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Please Review Our New Terms of Service

At Recurly, we’re constantly making updates to our product to give you new features and an improved Recurly experience. With these new improvements come changes to our Terms of Service, effective April 9, 2014. This new policy allows Recurly to better accommodate new features and services by allowing third party...

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Credit Card Declines: Time of day is critical

DID YOU KNOW? Credit card decline rates increase 44% to 55% every day during the 'Wee Hours' of the morning? In the world of payment processing, there is a very predictable pattern of 'galloping' transaction volume throughout the day. This pattern of transaction volume also comes with a very predictable pattern...

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Payment Pitfalls - Part 1: When Refunds Go Bad

In this series, called Payment Pitfalls, we’re going to cover some of the most common mis-steps made by merchants that can get them into hot water with either their merchant acquiring bank, their customers and even the credit card associations themselves. The purpose of this series is to share some...

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Pro-Tips from GDC / Billing for Game Developers

Recurly exhibited at the Game Developer Conference this year in San Francisco. It was a new experience for us, but we were definitely energized by the game developer community and learned quite a bit about the unique billing challenges faced by game development studios. We...

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e-Commerce is a Continuum

In case you hadn't noticed yet, this year's holiday shopping season just took a definitive turn towards an 'extended dance version' of Cyber Monday. Cyber Monday appears to have just become the '12 Days of Commerce' right under our noses. Clearly, the word is out that the battleground for e-commerce...

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Second Data Center and Disaster Recovery

We’ve made a big investment in the future of Recurly. Recurly is closing out the year having made a tremendous amount of progress. Not all progress has been evident externally, as our entire Engineering organization has been focused on making critical changes to our application architecture and preparing for our...

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Summary of today’s events: hardware failure

At approximately 3:30 a.m. (PDT) we experienced an intermittent hardware failure, which prevented some transactions from processing. Our team was alerted and mobilized quickly. We had both failover and extra replacement boxes on hand. Working with our vendor we were able to restore the service and re-rack several replacement boxes....

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Credit Card Declines Crush Your Subscriber Economics

Over the past two years, Recurly has developed a unique approach to solving one of the nastiest challenges confronted by ALL businesses with recurring subscription models. Credit card errors and declines. Credit card errors drive subscriber churn All subscription based businesses experience unwanted credit card errors. We typically see between 5% and 15% of...

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How Recurly works for your business

Recurly has been providing subscription billing for businesses since early 2010. We now power recurring billing for over 825 companies worldwide, and we've learned a few important things along the way. Here is a quick recap of some important insights for your business. Recurring billing is more than just managing...

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Recurly Raises $6M Series A to Crush It

Today, we're proud to announce that Recurly raised $6 Million in a Series A round of investment to grow our company well into the future. We'd like to thank our new investors from BV Capital for sharing our enthusiasm for our business. In addition to BV Capital, our existing investors:...

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Announcing The Recurly Payment Gateway and New Pricing

Over the past two years, we have become increasingly aware that payment gateways have been designed to serve traditional e-commerce (one-time transactions) as their primary use case. In many instances, the features and capabilities needed to process payments on a recurring basis are sorely lacking. We have viewed this as both...

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Subscriber Economics: Why Customer Retention MATTERS

Internet marketing for most companies centers around the economics of customer acquisition. For most companies, it is thought of as a 'one-time event' leading to a conversion or sale. Subscription-based companies have the added benefit of receiving revenue over a longer period of time. In the financial world, a predictable...

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Announcing Multi-Currency Support for Subscription Billing

Most companies offering subscriptions on the web serve a global list of geographies. It is also very short-sighted to assume that potential customers will be willing to subscribe to your offering if it is only offered in your local currency. Can you imagine if Spotify rolled out in the U.S....

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How To Reduce Customer Churn With Better Payment Processing

Q: Who in your company is responsible for customer churn? If you had to pause and ponder the answer, or if you felt that it was everybody’s responsibility…then you’re not alone. When I was with eBay, it was far easier for marketing teams to...

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Guide to choosing a subscription billing provider

Subscription billing models come in a variety of different flavors and apply to many different categories of businesses. However, there are a few common factors that must be considered when selecting the best vendor to handle billing on behalf of your business. Step One: Define your own billing requirements –...

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Recurly 'Startup Offer' expiring in two weeks

We periodically run promotional offers to help encourage our customers to sign up and take advantage of a special pricing. Our 'Startup Offer' has been running for several months, and we just announced via an email that it will be coming to a close in two weeks, on April 4th,...

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Promote Subscriptions with Coupons and Discounts

Recurly now provides full support for promotions using coupons and discounts. Our simple interface supports percentage and dollar amount discounts on either a recurring or one-time basis, giving your business the flexibility to support multiple promotional scenarios. After speaking with our customers, we also included other features into our Coupon...

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Recurly Connects With MailChimp for Email Marketing Newsletters

Recurly's mission is to streamline the mechanics of your subscription business so that you can focus on building compelling products and services. Keeping your customers up-to-date on the latest developments in your business returns better retention rates and higher customer value over time. Recurly's new MailChimp integration automatically updates your...

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Recurly Add-On For Heroku Provides Easy Provisioning Of Subscription Billing

Today we're announcing the availability of our Add-On for Heroku users. This Add-On makes it simple for Ruby developers who are using Heroku to install the Recurly Ruby gem and offer subscription billing for their Heroku hosted applications. Heroku's Add-On catalog is HERE. Once...

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Support For Optional 'Add-Ons' Have Arrived

We’re pleased to announce that Recurly now supports optional ‘Add-On’ items to be added to any subscription plan. Add-Ons offer a tremendous amount of versatility to your subscription offers because they provide user-level customization resulting in better customer choice. We all know how customers love to choose from a variety...

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Top Ten Reasons to Use Recurly vs. Payment Gateway Subscription APIs

The short answer is: Flexibility and Total Cost Of Ownership We’re glad you asked - because this could save you many hours of development, and many curse words before learning the hard way – on your own precious company’s dime. Every payment gateway is designed to handle one-time transactions. Some...

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