We're closing in on $3,000,000 in recurring community support by 2021! I'm going to begin starting every weekly update with this screenshot from our front page, so we can track that as it grows. Our Product Updates are now linked directly in our header, and since those are geared for features use, I'm going to use this space for a mix of metrics, team, and  business highlights - the things we're excited (and concerned) about as a company.

Product Hunt launch in review

Last week Withfriends launched on Product Hunt! I hope you already knew that, as we spent a lot of time on outreach. We got 200+ up votes and a lot of customers and fans said some really nice things about us. YC tweeted about us as well, we got a lot of support from the founder community - and we definitely saw a big bump in signups!

Signup source details

I’ll quickly note the distinction between All Signups and Qualified - we qualify business at 100+ customers/month, and who charge for their products. The chart and all subsequent discussions are focused entirely on Qualified Signups, which represent 40% of our overall signups. These are businesses we expect to launch and successfully run memberships programs.

The detail on these Qualified Signups is broken down here:

Referrals are in the lead, isolated primarily to Product Hunt, but with individual referrals from some supporters and existing customers. Email marketing (sourcing leads from BuiltWith around businesses using platforms like Shopify, or Square) are right behind that. Paid search is a close third, mostly from business searching for “membership programs” but also online store and stripe memberships. Organic search, social media, direct traffic, and paid social are potentially sources unto themselves, or potentially overlap with the larger sources. It’s hard to tell with our current tracking. 

Is there a business you’d love to be a member of? Let them know, with our new referral feature: withfriends.co/invite 

Our signup goals

Our goal is 100 qualified signups a month, with a marketing spend of $15k. We’re spending 30% of that, and have 30% of the signups; but without that boost from the launch, we’d actually be at 23 signups, and only 6 of those signups are directly attributable to our marketing spend. By October 1 (next Thursday) our goal is to improve the targeting and spend on Google Ads by removing poorly performing terms (namely, Patreon, which seems to only send us unhappy Patreon members looking to cancel their memberships).

Refining our signup page

In addition, we’ve made a number of improvements to withfriends.co that follow the presentation of our platform from Product Hunt, which we believe will double the sign up conversion. Combined, this has the potential to 5x our Google Ads (from 6 → 30), at which point we can boost the overall marketing spend, and hit that goal!

Increasing our marketing budget

To increase that marketing spend, we’ll need to secure an additional $100k in financing for the holiday season. There are a number of options available for us to explore on that front, which we’re actively pursuing at the moment. Is that something you’d like to participate in? Do you have advice for us around securing those funds? We’d love to talk with you - it’s going to a record-breaking season for eCommerce, and we want to make sure as many businesses as possible are aware of the role memberships can play in securing next year’s budget.

Bringing on a new cofounder

Most importantly, over the past weekend, a very talented engineer that we’ve been interested in working with has agreed to join our team as a Cofounder. We are excited to introduce you to them in October, but along with the increase in signups, this empowers us to make significant improvements throughout Q4 to our onboarding and revenue model, and will radically change our ability to accelerate the growth of Withfriends.

We look forward to sharing that growth with you all here!

Meanwhile, here are some of our favorite new businesses on Withfriends. Please welcome these inspiring businesses and their members into our community!

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