# Withfriends (YC W19) Making subscriptions easy for every business ## Elevator pitch Withfriends makes it easy for businesses to sell subscription boxes. We do this with a Shopify integration that automatically generates subscription tiers from your customer data and upsells your customers into subscribers. - Canonical URL: https://wefunder.com/withfriends - Entity ID: wefunder:company:22838 - Last updated: 2026-06-11T23:52:25Z - Generated at: 2026-06-12T03:03:20Z ## Quick facts - 🤑 6% of business' customers become subscribers; boosting revenue by 60% - đź’Ş Our model reduces subscription churn by 50% compared to industry average - 🛍 3,400 members subscribed to 21 businesses - đź“Š $595k in annual GMV; $42k ARR - đź—˝ Founders have 10+ years experience as entrepreneurs in New York City ## Active fundraises - wefunder:fundraise:44021: 4(a)(6) open (USD) - wefunder:fundraise:16464: 4(a)(6) successful (USD) ## Story Click the slide for examples of subscription boxesClick the slide to see the features in actionClick for a link to the 2018 McKinsey ReportIn addition to our deck, here are some of the product shots from our upcoming Shopify App Marketplace listing. Examples are from our demo account; Thyme Teas.Checkout upsell and membership tiersSMS and email upsellCustomer analytics and membership tier onboarding interfaceSubscription box and member managementDiscount badge and automated Shopify fulfillmentSignup testimonials on social and subscription box discoveryđź”— Link to recorded Clubhouse pitch night on Startup Club ## FAQ 1. **What’s a jeweller?** - Jewellers are our network of cultural influencers - people who we know have deep connections with inspiring spaces throughout their respective communities. We use the metaphor of Gems for our accounts. The Jewellers find these hidden Gems and polish them so everyone can see how bright and powerful they are (i.e. how much support they have). Literally-speaking, they propose account leads, work with them (alongside our technical support team) to design and launch an exciting membership program,... 2. **How do you say you had 100k in added revenue when total revenue was 6k?** - Hi Jason! Good question! We've brought almost $110k now in new annual revenue for art spaces & music venues using Withfriends - the stats are live on our front page @ https://withfriends.co. Meanwhile, Withfriends earns money by taking 5% of that number for the company, plus 2.5% + $1 for every ticket sold. Does that answer the question? Finally, total revenue was $6K at the end of 2017, but total revenue now as of April 1st is more than double that at $13K, which you can compare against ... 3. **How many active revenue producing venues do you have so far?** - Hi Robert! 👋🏻 Thanks for asking. As of May 1st, ee have 83 businesses on Withfriends. 41 generate revenue ($150/mo average this quarter, $114/mo all quarters) by selling tickets and memberships, for which we take a transaction fee. In addition, 16 are fully set up, but haven’t publicized their launch, so many will generate revenue very soon. The remaining 26 are not fully setup and are like users in progress - we expect about a third to generate revenue. 4. **How can I further support Withfriends outside of investing?** - Hi Kevin! There are some great ways you can support Withfriends outside of investing. You can write a mail and introduce a friend who may invest to our founding team at team@withfriends.co, share our Wefunder investment page on your socials and let them know why you invested in us, or even introduce us to a favorite cultural space might be a fit for our platform! 5. **Hi, love what you're doing, and thinking of investing! Noticed the latest financial numbers were from March. Could you share your monthly revenue from March to October?** - Hi Ilona, excited that you're thinking about investing - and that you asked this question.  Here's the last 6 months of revenue on Withfriends.May: $1881.21June: $2544.05July: $2000.42August: $2176.89September: $2888.32October: $3944.32The last two months, we grew over 30% each month.  Our decisions across the next 6 months are anchored in the goal to grow 20% every month, breaking $10KMRR by June. ## Team - Joe Ahearn (Co-Founder & CEO) - Kunal Gupta (Co-Founder & CTO) ## Recent posts - Get to know Joe and the Withfriends story 🤩 (2021-04-30T15:35:51Z) ## Q&A - Q: Hi! I invested $2000 back in 2018 -- the parameters are $5M valuation cap and 80% discount rate. 1. Is there an easy way to calculate what's my share today and what it's worth at the valuation of the current round? 2. I am interested in selling my share at a discount. Is there any internal interest, or help to find buyers? - Q: Any updates on the company? Do you plan to go forward with the Wefunder round? - Q: I don't understand why Shopify business can't just do this themselves? Also, why can't small businesses just put up their own websites using wix.com for example and make their own subscription models? I don't see what's unique here and why your company is needed to do this. - A: Hi Michael, this is a great question. There are a few significant obstacles for any Shopify business running subscription boxes and memberships by themselves. The first is that Shopify literally doesn't offer recurring billing or membership management in their platform. So outside of managing the billing and orders entirely manually, a Shopify business needs a third party platform to manage payments, process orders, and automate benefits. And none of the plugins available are designed to treat these customers like the community members they are. And why not run it themselves, entirely? Well, almost every small business owner I've spoken to has thought of that, but it's an intimidating thought. Without automation, or any insights from the larger business landscape, it's essentially the same as starting an entirely new business. They need to trial-and-error the right pricing, they need to figure out a new marketing plan, and they need to dedicate an enormous amount of staff time to tracking and managing orders. Websites like Wix.com don't have integrated subscription tools and shipping benefits. These thoughts keep businesses from launching programs for months, years, or ever. It's possible that you're thinking of subscriptions that are built around content, so the shipping preferences and e-commerce benefit automation is less important, but even in that space, the success of a business like Patreon has shown how valuable a marketplace for subscriptions is, regardless of whether or not a creator could build there own. Businesses want to focus on creating excellent products for their communities, not building technology. We help them maintain that focus, by automating everything else. - Q: How much does it cost for stores/vendors/small businesses to join the network? Also, when it comes to packaging, are the small businesses supposed to come up with their own or pay to use withfriends? - A: Withfriends is dedicated to making memberships as accessible as possible to all sizes of businesses, and making the barrier to trying out a membership model as low as possible. To that end, Withfriends has no monthly fees, setup costs, or contracts. Our pricing is strictly commission-only; 10% of the membership fees. So it's on us to sell as many memberships as possible and the success is mutual for us and all the businesses in our network. Re: packaging - Withfriends serves as the infrastructure for automating payments, orders, managing add-ons and options - but we don't ship boxes for these businesses. We work with businesses already managing their own orders for one-time products, and we assist in turning those into recurring orders. Down the line, we're very interested in further exploring how we might help produce packing slips for the businesses to include with the shipment that help make the most of the member unboxing experience, and make it easier for members to share those moments with their friends. - Q: Love the concept and the market. Would love to get an update on sales trends. Also, would like to get a sense of the team and where you all are focusing on the most. This is a density / scale type business and needs continual momentum and effort to scale. It does look like the founders are parallel entrepreneurs, so any sense of what % of the teams time goes to this venture (vs other ones) would be helpful in assessing the opportunity. Thanks! - A: Hi Andy! Thanks for these great questions. Can you elaborate on your question about sales trends? Are you asking for information about new businesses creating memberships on Withfriends, new members buying those memberships on Withfriends, or details about which businesses/members have the most volume on the platform? The great thing about subscription boxes memberships is they don't require the same geographical density as brick & mortar, and our checkout upsell integration automatically sells members as long as the business is actively selling to their own customers. My and my cofounder, Kunal Gupta, have run previous businesses together before this one, but we don't currently split any time on other entrepreneurial projects. We're 100% focused on making Withfriends as successful as possible! - Q: There hasn't been an update for almost a year. How's the company doing? - A: Hi Dimitry! You should've been getting weekly updates from us until about 8 weeks ago, then we changed systems.  Let me see what went wrong there, it's alarming to hear that you haven't heard from us in a year. That being said, the previous updates were general --- and now we're switching to more squarely investment focused updates from this month onwards for our community investors (I'll be running them).  So I'll make sure you're updated regardless, it's quite a time. - Q: Hello - I notice the funding history dates back to 2015. is this the first CF on wefunder? Is it possible you guys will have another CF on wefunder? If so, will that be based on running out of funds or expanding operations. just wondering context around your funding history. What's the average investment of your 107 investors? Thanks - A: Hi there! CF investment has only been legally possible since mid-2016, and this is the first investment we've organized on Wefunder. (Earlier funding in 2015 was a  friends and family round put together at inception)We expect to include a CF portion in subsequent rounds as well, as often as regulation allows. The thesis of both Wefunder, and our team, is that we should make an honest opportunity available for the community we represent to be able to join every investment round we organize.   That being said, we believe the next CF round is not legally possible until December 2019.If we were to raise in 2020, we would do it to expand after having proven two things a) the basic concepts, when refined, are scalable and we've honed in on business fundamentals for customer acquisition and success that are sustainable b) we have more knowledge about the best strategies for expansion, especially the potential adjacent markets, for example, via an integration with a point-of-sale, so that we can learn which kinds of local businesses are the strongest fits for Withfriends.  Our plan for 2019 is based around those two goals! - A: Interesting question! The average investment of our 116 finalized investments at this time is $707, and if we remove the really large investments, it's $500. - Q: Re earlier question: Thank you for the quick response and sharing the latest numbers. And congratulations - that's really well done, great looking numbers! Shows you're on track! I have a few follow-up questions: 1. Where is the growth from - from new accounts, or do you see number of members growing over time in old accounts? I'm wondering if you're seeing the same x% of attendees to convert to members, and the rate staying the same, or if you convert more people over time. 2. Does the revenue come from a few very successful customers, or is it spread more evenly between larger number of customers? 3. I noticed it's a full ticketing + members solution, and if I understood correctly, you ask customers to switch their ticketing solution to yours. I also noticed you're investing most of the raised money in sales. When the spaces pay between 50-200usd a month, it won't pay for traditional sales people, so it may be worthwhile test how you could sell more efficiently. What's the biggest objection/roadblock to selling Withfriends to cultural spaces today? I'm just guessing here that switching systems may be lots of friction for non-tech people - have you tried selling just memberships, letting them keep whatever ticketing system they have? For example, you could offer a html block they could add to ticket confirmation, or a simple email for all event attendees, that sells memberships and links back to your site for purchase. That way you wouldn't have to convince them to change a system, but you could just give them an email that they could literally just test out with the next event. Anyways, congratulations for the great progress and good luck to the last two days of this fundraising! - A: Hi Ilona, Thanks for the thoughtful questions, and the support. -- Growth -- Recent growth is primarily based on activation of existing accounts. New accounts currently typically take a month to generate fees, then 2 more months to operate at their full pace. -- Conversion -- Conversion from audience to memberships has shockingly stayed consistent at around 20%. We have lots of product plans to improve that conversion, by making it simple to become a member when you're at a space. As far as onboarding accounts, growth right now is linear. That's because we're in private beta, and qualify each sign-up for a fit. In the next 6 months, we'll release an updated version - Withfriends will be drop dead simple to use. This will shorten time to maturity and increase the funnel size (as venues will be able to easily sign up and list memberships and events themselves). -- Breakdown --  It's top-heavy - 1/10th of our customers generate half the revenue. We've updated our strategies to focus on onboarding more of those, while we believe the ratio will remain - for each very successful customer we target and onboard, another 4 will sign up organically and will likely be the lower bracket. -- Sales Team --  Exactly! Here's how we do it - we incentivize artists and organizers (referred to as “Jewelers”) to onboard prime Gems (great culltural spaces) by offering them a percentage-based commission on how much money is raised by each Gem. Our full time employees then manage and advise this community of jewelers. Our biggest roadblock now is that activation of a venue from sign-up to launched takes too much time and work, which is because the product is not yet drop dead simple to use, a hurdle we plan to overcome within 6 months. -- Other Ticketing Software --  Exactly! We built an integration with a major and dominant ticketing company, and it's performing really well for large music venues on Withfriends. We created this integration because some cultural spaces are in contract with other ticketing supplies, and we'd hate for them to lose out on the benefits of a thriving membership program. We agree with your insight, and believe the best strategy is to sit squarely in the membership space over time.  So we're also building Point-of-Sale (e.g. Square) integrations to complement our ticketing integration, which will allow audiences to become members while they're paying drinks at the bar or buying merchandise, and receive even more member benefits.   This POS integration can also help us, over time, expand the kinds of customers we serve, to include the  6-7 million small local businesses that make up the backbone of American culture - and that are driven by loyal relationships - your favorite barber shop, nail salon, restaurants, breweries, record stores, bookstores, bars. Thank you! - Q: Hi, love what you're doing, and thinking of investing! Noticed the latest financial numbers were from March. Could you share your monthly revenue from March to October? - A: Hi Ilona, excited that you're thinking about investing - and that you asked this question.  Here's the last 6 months of revenue on Withfriends.May: $1881.21June: $2544.05July: $2000.42August: $2176.89September: $2888.32October: $3944.32The last two months, we grew over 30% each month.  Our decisions across the next 6 months are anchored in the goal to grow 20% every month, breaking $10KMRR by June. - Q: Hi, love what you're doing, and thinking of investing! Noticed the latest financial numbers were from March. Could you share your monthly revenue from March to October? - Q: How can I further support Withfriends outside of investing? - A: Hi Kevin! There are some great ways you can support Withfriends outside of investing. You can write a mail and introduce a friend who may invest to our founding team at team@withfriends.co, share our Wefunder investment page on your socials and let them know why you invested in us, or even introduce us to a favorite cultural space might be a fit for our platform! - Q: Hello, I'm MONTIER ROBERT; Private investor. I opted for the financing of projects to financially support all serious people with projects. Contact me if you need. Here is my mail:montierrobert12@gmail.com - Q: How do you say you had 100k in added revenue when total revenue was 6k? - A: Hi Jason! Good question! We've brought almost $110k now in new annual revenue for art spaces & music venues using Withfriends - the stats are live on our front page @ https://withfriends.co. Meanwhile, Withfriends earns money by taking 5% of that number for the company, plus 2.5% + $1 for every ticket sold. Does that answer the question? Finally, total revenue was $6K at the end of 2017, but total revenue now as of April 1st is more than double that at $13K, which you can compare against the $110K above to get a sense of the value we create for customers versus the value we capture to help us bring Withfriends to more customers. - Q: What’s a jeweller? - A: Jewellers are our network of cultural influencers - people who we know have deep connections with inspiring spaces throughout their respective communities. We use the metaphor of Gems for our accounts. The Jewellers find these hidden Gems and polish them so everyone can see how bright and powerful they are (i.e. how much support they have). Literally-speaking, they propose account leads, work with them (alongside our technical support team) to design and launch an exciting membership program, and then stay in touch with them month by month as they build up their base. In exchange Jewellers are compensated a with perentage of the fees that Withfriends collects from the accounts for as long as they continue to Jewell (continue to support) their respective Gems. We use terminology like this to redefine the formal commission-based sales model, as many of the people we are most interested in working with are approaching this with the intention of building sustainable support for their respective communities and wouldn't imagine it in that framework, but that is the model it's based on. You can see the language we share with Jewellers when first reaching out to them here - https://medium.com/@withfriends/jeweling-withfriends-9f4516f8fc1a - Q: Is this an ongoing investment? I see that the CF filing was submitted on 2018 - A: Hi Hj! Withfriends did an initial round on Wefunder back in 2018. Since then, our company has evolved quite a bit - expanding our market from arts & entertainment spaces to building tools that any small business can use to harness the power of recurring revenue. We also joined the prestigious accelerator, Y Combinator, adding a lot a technological firepower and education to our community-based backgrounds. This is a new, bridge round for us - part of a collection of campaigns from other Y Combinator alumni (http://wefunder.com/yc). We're about to go live in the Shopify App Marketplace, which will be a big moment for us. Securing this $250k raise will put us on track to grow massively over the next 12 months; by hiring another engineer to build more network features and being able to put funds into paid search marketing to compliment the organic growth from the Shopify App Marketplace. We plan to included a crowd-equity portion of any round we do in the future, because we want the growth of Withfriends to be accessible to the community it's built for.