In the midst of the Coronavirus epidemic and the economic fallout for small businesses everywhere, Withfriends is more vital than ever. I’m excited to share some updates about what our team has been up to, but I want to begin with some numbers to help contextualize the scale with which Withfriends is currently impacting the small business landscape.

Impact on the small business community.

We have 112 active organizers, 261 who have run memberships, and 1057 who have signed up. These organizers are in 66 different cities, and 5 countries. You can now explore organizers by name, city, or by genres like Literature, Activism, or Food & Drink here: withfriends.co

Black Lives Matter

The crisis of racism in America asks people of all backgrounds to stand in solidarity with black people around the world, and to stand against structural racism. So we've been asking ourselves how Withfriends can help people build solidarity in a tangible way. 

We will try to strengthen black communities by highlighting black-owned businesses first, everywhere in our interface, including here. We hope this visibility encourages you and others to become members of black-owned small businesses, whether they’re around the corner, or around the world.

withfriends.co/black_lives_matter

Withfriends makes memberships easy.

It's been awhile and we've built a lot of new things, but the basic premise remains the same. Set up once, get members forever.

Every one of these organizers has connected a passive channel they’re already operating (automatic upsells for Shopify, Eventbrite, other events, their website or socials) and Withfriends converts an average of 1 out of 20 of their customers to members at $12/month. Additionally, 1 out of every 5 tips an average of $7 on the purchase. This is because people care deeply about supporting the small businesses around them.

You can see this in the passionate testimonials left by supporters.

Member Testimonials

This upsell behavior boosts revenue for a small business by 60% within the year, and has become a critical lifeline for these spaces during this time. You may already know those stats, but if you don’t know, now you know.

Small Business Testimonials

Here’s a video from one of favorite radical bookstores, Bluestockings:

Withfriends team activity.

Based on feedback from Y-Combinator at the end of February, Withfriends changed our team to apply more engineering resources to the platform. This is showing signs of success, and gave us the firepower to release new integration features every week in March. This was a time of massive upheaval and one in which we were organizing weekly gatherings with our users, trying to iterate as quickly as we could to their changing needs.  These features have been focused on the retail market, which we had already decided at the beginning of March would be our core focus, and this foresight has given us record membership growth in the retail market, even in the face of the collapse of the events industry. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the numbers are promising.  

Retail businesses grew impressively in March due to successful membership drives based around the lock-down, but that growth stumbled in April. Why? There were no drives, and retail accounts were not adopting our new membership-generating features. We focused heavily on automated drip campaigns and product improvements to fix overall feature adoption and saw improvements in May, specifically 23% growth in non-membership drive for retail businesses. 

The plan for June (and for the summer) is to focus all available resources on optimizing marketing content and product around the Shopify integration on-boarding experience.

Product Updates

Want to follow our weekly product updates? 

They’re now at withfriends.co/updates. Here are some recent highlights:

Receipt Page (+ Online Events)

Previously, following checkout, consumers would arrive on their user dashboard with a brief confirmation and additional details related to their purchase were emailed to them. Because of the proliferation of online events on the platform, the immediacy required of consumers to have direct access to customized information required us to redesign the post-checkout landing page. As with most events-related features, we would not have built this if online events was the only beneficiary.

The new design has added benefits, most importantly the ability to land the consumer directly into the value prop of the product (our cultural impact) and new discovery and referral tools. We have still yet to optimize these discovery or referral features, but the funnel is now there (10k visitors/month) to properly test future iterations and help the most enthusiastic supporters find other businesses they may like to support.

Mailing Address Collection

As more member benefits shift to being delivery-based instead of pickup at the venue, we added the ability for businesses to collect mailing addresses directly from their consumers during checkout.

Social Media integrations

Looking for ways to further automate membership sales for our businesses, we built and launched a Zapier integration that helps businesses automatically post testimonials left by supporters to their Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, or Twitter pages.

This also came with the development of a Testimonials dashboard for businesses to manage the various testimonials shared with them.

Shopify Integration

Like our Eventbrite integration, this has the advantage of a single click connect that will then continually sell memberships during the businesses' existing sales, offering instant discount incentives. We launched this in March, and then made design improvements in April that brought conversion from 1:40 on this channel to 1:20 and have recently added email follow-ups which have the potential to bring that conversion closer to 1:10.

Link Integration

Our new link integration adds a membership pitch to any link that a business shares online. Wherever they have the most traffic, they can use this link integration to convert those visitors into members.

Examples include:

• Replace the static links on your website to your socials, podcasts, merchandise, playlists, archives, or live streams
• Use this link integration for any featured content you promote in your newsletter
• Use this link integration when you share articles, product, event, or any other link you share on social media
• Replace the static links in your newsletter that go to your website and socials

See it in action while signing up for Patch from Gray Area.

Onboarding Questionnaire + Checklist

As we pivoted to the Retail market last month, we had to update the form we have organizers fill out when they sign up to be focused on retail rather than events. We previously used this space in the center of their dashboard to present them with one feature at a time; we’ve now opted for a recommended checklist of available features. This change is for both existing and new businesses, because all businesses are remaking their models now, and might find success in exploring new areas.

We hope you'll stay connected with us.

We feel extremely lucky to have such an inspiring investor community behind this project, so thank you all for keeping an eye on what we’re working on, and we always love to take a moment to catch up and hear from you directly if you have the time.

Want to drop by our virtual office? You find us in Gather Town most days.

We've created a Slack community for organizers on our platform that I would encourage you to join. Lately it's mostly grants and loans info, but also virtual events and music that everyone is listening to. You can join us on Slack, here.

Are there businesses you might recommend using Withfriends? Or businesses you’d like to be a member of yourself? You can try out our new referrals system here: withfriends.co/invite_members

Above all; stay safe, sane, and do everything you can out there to make the communities around you stronger than ever.

Best,

Joe Ahearn, CEO