TL;DR - please visit our Product Hunt page today (Monday) to help us get featured by leaving feedback and up-voting our new release! Meanwhile, here’s our current updates.

If you’ve been following our product updates you’ve seen that we’ve been churning out integrations all summer to make it easy for any business looking for more sustainable forms of revenue to get started. The goal is to offer a completely automated membership experience for any business owner, so they can benefit from their community’s support, without having to worry about adding another thing to their intimidating 2020 task list.

Onboarding

Every business is unique, so we’ve redesigned the entire onboarding experience, from the moment they land on our website through their first three members. Visitors can now put in their city and business name, and get a customized value projection, tailored just for them. Signups enter their Facebook URL, and we generate the profile assets for them. The onboarding flow now includes simple login authentication for platforms like Shopify and Square, as well as instant engineer scheduling for more complex implementations like Toast, Clover, or Squarespace. The Square integration even generates your membership levels (pricing, discounts) directly from your actual customer behavior! Finally, our new onboarding sequence up-sells your past 3 months of customers immediately, so any business can go from visiting our site to their first 3 members in a matter of minutes.

Marketing

Amidst all these breakthroughs, our primary challenge continues to be reaching business owners in the first place. We’ve been running a month-long Google Ads campaign, to identify business owners already looking for membership solutions. There is a lot left to optimize here, but the results are promising. This looks like our best bet for 100+ signups/month, but will require additional capital throughout the fall to properly utilize; $100k at minimum through next March should be able to put us on the path to 5x our growth. We’re weighing our options on the best path towards securing those funds.

Hustle

We don’t want to 5x our growth, though - we want to 10x it and to do that we need to double our SEM targets with some serious hustle. We’ve tried a street team approach the last two weeks, visiting over 400 businesses on foot. This has given us an extremely valuable volume of insights on what POS systems businesses are using (mostly Square), common questions owners have (What are the member benefits? Answer: discounts), and what the small business landscape really feels like on the ground. The primary obstacle is reaching the actual owner/decision-maker, who is rarely on site.

So Kunal has built a powerful email lookup tool for any local business, initially to automate follow-up campaigns for our street team, but now we’ve rolled it out as a referral program to advocates, members, business owners. You can leave a testimonial about why a business is important to you, and we automatically send the business your note and encourage them to launch a membership program. It’s only been live for a few days, but the testimonials are already inspiring our thoughts towards further (tasteful) gamification of this behavior. By next week we’ll start to have real data about how businesses respond, and how visitors on the site utilize the referral tools. For example, a recent customer who decided not to buy a membership through our upsell, but instead wrote a testimonial for a different business they’d rather be a member of, or a user who spent the time to write up referrals for their favorite 10 businesses in Buffalo. There’s something really exciting here to bring to life.

Product Hunt

Finally, with all these new advancements, we decided it was time to spread the word on Product Hunt. If there was anything we could ask of you, who have supported Withfriends to date, it would be to go to our page on Product Hunt, up-vote it, and leave a comment about why you find what we’re doing so valuable. This will help more new business owners find out about and try Withfriends!

Thanks for all your support, we’re really proud of the $2.12 million in annual recurring revenue that we’ve added to the small business landscape to date, and couldn’t have done it without you.

Signing off Withfriends,

Joe & Kunal