The Next Chapter Withfriends

What an exciting moment to share Withfriends! We hit our first crowd-equity goal and are ready to nail our next milestone together. With the number of ticket-buyers soaring thanks to a new Eventbrite Integration running with Elsewhere and (le) Poisson Rouge, as well as new data insights and collaborative memberships on the horizon, it’s the perfect time to get involved.

Learn more about everything that’s been happening in the last month below!

We're Growing Really Fast!

Our reach has exploded! Nearly 20,000 ticket buyers to date, and almost half of that in the last 30 days! We’re lucky to be working with some fantastic venues, like Elsewhere and (le) Poisson Rouge, spaces that present work that connects deeply with their audiences, as well as almost 100 other organizations to date, putting on events every night of the week, showcasing the work of some of the most celebrated and cutting edge artists of our time.

Now, because of Withfriends, those audiences can finally show their appreciation and dedication to these spaces - and they have! Over 2600 supporters have brought more than $200K into culture, and this is a recurring financial foundation that will help these organizations grow for years.

We built this company, not only to create a new form a new model of revenue for arts organizations everywhere, but to empower grassroots groups everywhere to help change society around them. We’re proud that 12.5% of that money had a direct impact on affordability, environment, food justice, equality, and spirituality and hope to use our expanded reach to support even more of these causes.

Our roots are here in Brooklyn, but thanks to our fantastic Jeweler network we’ve begun working with movements in cities like Austin, Toronto, San Juan, Richmond, Miami, Chicago, and London.

During all this activity, we’ve been monitoring everything quite closely, and are starting to have some real solid data behind how all our early traction and experiments are playing out on a larger stage.

Our standard business income has been rising steadily with our sales, so no surprises, although there has been fluctuation with in ticket revenue as venues go in and out of season, or even close down, but that kind of fluctuation is expected to continue in this market.

Interestingly, we’ve experimented with a “time-based fundraiser” feature twice, which is represented by the significant peaks at the end of 2017, and in May of 2018, and both times it created a huge bump in revenue. It’s still in alpha, but it shows potential as a complementary tool for other venues to use. With funds from this investment round we’ll be able to continue developing this feature

Exciting New Eventbrite Integration

We released a powerful integration with Eventbrite, so that we could partner with large scale venues like Elsewhere and Le Poisson Rouge. It's working really well! Elsewhere has nearly sold out of memberships, and we've just doubled our lifetime history of ticket buyers in a single month. With this increasing scale of insight, we are learning quickly how we can craft the best membership programs possible for city culture.

We then met with the company Eventbrite - specifically the Music Venues and Partnerships teams, who seemed really excited about our work! They told us that memberships have been a growing and unmet need for many of their large music venue customers. Their team will connect us directly with their client venues around the country, they've shared special API access with us to make our integration even tighter, and they're guiding us towards getting listed as an official Eventbrite partner.

A new vision for collaborative cultural fundraising

Finally - we have a powerful new idea, emerging from talks with Nonsense, Ambient Church, Sammus, Park Church Co-op, Freedom Socialist Party, Death By Audio Arcade, Ambient Church, and the 50+ organizers on Withfriends.

We're working on a suite of features that has the potential to turn the cultural fundraising industry on its head, and transform it from a competitive, territorial landscape into a thriving, collaborative ecosystem. Just as Withfriends taps into a business’s existing support network, these tools tap into the existing relationships between venues, bookers, and artists, helping them to thrive together.

From more robust event management, to in-depth reporting tools, to special membership promotions, to discovery networks, these tools will help everyone in the arts industry- venues, bookers, and the performing artists at its core - to easily band together and tap into sustainable, grassroots cultural support withfriends - together, for the first time.

Become an investor today

To keep the momentum rising for all of these spaces and thousands more all over the world - now is the time to become an investor in Withfriends.

Invest Now

Joe Ahearn, Martha Hipley, and Kunal Gupta have been pioneers of cultural organizing for more than 10 years, and we are deeply committed to building excellent tools to help fellow cultural organizers thrive.

It takes people like us, and people like you - passionate believers in the vision for a sustainable, independent, diverse, and underground arts ecosystem in major cities throughout the world - to solve this very big problem.

Gentrification is rapidly erasing culture in the cities we love, and if we sit back now, it'll all be lost before we know it. Instead, we need to move as fast as possible, and get this tool that gives us the power to collectively own the future of our cities, into the hands of cultural organizers around the world.

When we started this company, we created it because we knew New York was tough. But as organizers lucky enough to have worked with spaces all over the world, we know that that gentrification is a global problem, and it's been inspiring to see people excited about our solution everywhere - from Mexico City to Toronto, from Berlin to Buenos Aires, to as far as Tokyo!

We need your help to deliver them this answer and help preserve their city’s culture.

Help us grow, so we can help them grow, and share in the returns.

If you've already invested - thank you so much - Please tell a friend today what you're helping to build, and get them involved as investors too!

If you're passionate about culture, and haven't yet invested, you can join us today, and become a community investor withfriends below.