Terms

In the final days of the year, I wanted to let you know what we've been up to these past months . We've now finished three cycles of six weeks, and our usual cool-downs during the intervals. There's lots to talk about and I'll dive right in.

Big Batch projects

We delivered six "big batches" projects. They were balanced our bets on the near future. iterative updates based on customer feedback, and improvements to our technical foundations.

1. A new metrics experience

There was a time when there was a "standard problem" list of SaaS metrics that customers could use to evaluate their performance. Over the years we noticed that the metrics were not up to par in a couple divergent ways: being inaccessible to data-novice customers while also not providing enough detail and to customers who have strong data skills (or even their own internal analytics teams). These issues led to a lack of trust in the information we provided.

This year we started rolling out a brand new data collection API as well as a metrics layer to lay the foundation for an subjective experience with metrics that is focused on membership. It meant removing the old metrics and introducing new metrics, as well as making them more trustworthy and precise.

Our new Trials metrics dashboard

We still support a few old metrics based on orders, but the new metrics are focused on trends and analysing business health over a longer time horizon.

These metrics share a design framework based around analyzing trends on a calendar-month basis, which we think is a better fit for businesses with recurring subscriptions that use . We chart these trends in time using segmented columns. Below, we include a table that breaks down each segment of each month.

Our new Churn metrics dashboard

You can click on each specific cell segment to view the monthly data graph as well as, more importantly, see all of the individual information points which make up the data (whether the activity is subscriptions or members).

It's easy to go all the way from the cells to the electron. They were designed to help makers understand the process of creating, what's not, and where to double down.

The latest trend metrics are: -- MRR. See the factors the can affect the monthly recurring income: carryover from the prior month, the addition of the addition of new members, reactivations and upgrade, downgrades, cancelations, and failed the payment. Additionally, look at ARPM and LTV. -- Paying Members. Dead simple, see how your audience of paying members changes over time. You get the same segmentation as is available through MRR (upgrades and downgrades etc). The term "Net Revenue" refers to Net Revenue. A simple look at your total cashflow in the month that is derived from your total income minus refunds. - Churn. You can spot potential problems lurking below the surface, by observing revenue churn broken down by voluntary (cancellations) and involuntary (failed the payment). Also, you can see the rate and numbers for each segment (i.e. X missed payments with an amount of Y%). - Trials. Review the results of both your paid and free trials over the course of time. In a particular month, you can see the amount of trials that were initiated, the number of expiring and which ones were changed to recurring memberships and also your overall trial conversion rate. - Plan comparison. Pick up to five plans and compare them against each other by using one of the above metrics.

2. Comment and Likes on our posts

Posts allows customers to interact with their members who pay by email. They can also post to their own hosted blog. This is used in many different ways; for example, as a replacement for newsletters for benefits to members, or to simply reach out and check-in.

The new Comments feature

In order to better create space to facilitate dialog and to build community, you can now allow comments and likes to posts (and likes on comments). You can enable them at a global and per-post basis. You can also lock a read-only state for after a discussion has taken its course.

It is possible to deep-link comments, load newly added comments in real-time without a page refresh, and display badges on comments posted by staff members and moderate any abuse from bad actors. Users can also set notification notifications to their browsers the time that new comments are added.

Posts continue to be an active investment for us, and we're very excited by the new possibilities for that this can provide for clients.

3. Improved group subscriptions

customers can sell customers can sell Group Subscriptions These comprise multiple seats managed and paid-for through a single person. These are typically utilized in corporate or institutional settings.

The feature has been discussed many times over the years, but have made several major enhancements based on the usage we've observed and the customer's complaints.

The interface for Group Subscription interface

Six upgrades were delivered for Group Subscriptions:

• Plan groups members can now self-serve upgrade from individual subscriptions to a group subscription prior to this, but it had to be manually done through an administrator.
• Transferring managers It's now feasible for group managers to hand the management of their group to another member, and it's much easier for administrators of the site too. Managers aren't allowed to take a seat customers can choose whether the person who manages the subscription to the group should count towards the amount of seats in the subscription, or not.
• There is no auto-renew option on subscriptions that are paid for by an external source If a group subscription is paid for externally (via cheque or another method) then we do not offer auto-renewal on their account, since this by definition is managed by the administrator of the site.
• Seat usage is displayed in admin The dashboards we have created were improved. dashboards to better display the current utilization of seats across all group memberships.
• Generic URL for managing members: Previously to deep link a member to the part of their account that they could manage their team, you had to share their specific URL, which included their ID. Now, there's an unidirectional routing URL, so creators can automate their support for customers.

4. Updating our marketing site

After we revamped our marketing site at the start of 2020 we've shipped many new features and improvements to our website, but hadn't gone back to keep our site up to date and to tell our story in the most effective way possible.

New updates to .com

We conducted a complete analysis of content, revised our brand positioning on the basis of what we've learned, created new landing pages, enriched our images with refined brand names, and redesigned our Customers page to highlight the features that they're currently using.

The

Enhancements to .com

This all aims to to highlight the modularity value of our system and the way we could be incorporated into a variety of scenarios of use.

5. Performance improvement

is used by some really large creators, each driving millions in revenue per year and hundreds of thousands of customers. When we began to onboard these clients, we observed that certain areas of our administration had become extremely difficult to use and slow during daily usage, which reflected poorly on our reliability and quality of work.

A whole cycle has been dedicated to improving the efficiency of some important areas, including Activities, the Dashboard, CSV exports, and the segmented view of Free Members. Qualitatively the experience of navigating the account that has large audience has become much snappier and we're seeing dramatically decreased load times as well as workload for our employees through our instrumentation.

6. Cancellation surveys

In order to provide additional information to creators about the reason why they are cancelling their subscriptions, we're sending cancellation Surveys which will be presented to subscribers after they have cancelled. The data will be aggregated into an updated cancellation view.

The new Cancellation survey feature

This data not only helps the creators regain those members, but also creates feedback loops that assist them to understand the importance of their membership business in the long run, and help to align their business with their clients' expectations.

Our new Cancellation surveys

This view offers creators a view of two sections: subscriptions cancelled which haven't yet been turned over (and could be returned), and ones that have fully expired and churned. It also shows the cancellation causes that are broken down for each segment. This data can be sortable and exported as an CSV just like the other data within .

Surveys are able to be turned on or deactivated, but they are normally enabled.

Small batch, and on-the-fly projects

These are smaller projects that we shipped alongside the bigger tasks described above (not comprising bugs or support tickets). These projects typically span from two days to 2 weeks work, inspired by feedback from our customers as well as insight gained from our client-facing teams. We [email protected]

• A preferred partner page is added to our marketing site, to highlight some of our top development partners and connect them with potential leads.
• pagination on our blog in order to boost SEO and improve time-on-site.
• A new safeguard for podcast RSS feeds that are served by ACast.
• Support to Hungarian as well as Czech as possible localization options
• A brand new coupon targeting feature which means coupons are now able to be applied to any of the following purchases, existing purchases, when reactivating expired subscriptions, or even when you upgrade a subscription.
• an API option that hides certain text links that were restricting iOS app store approvals for certain customers.
• innovative tax-handling options in Canada, so clients are getting the correct sums based on their income and the nexus
• Cookies banners on the site of marketing for EU and UK users.

Additionally, we automated several of our internal tools that we use to migrate customers from other competitors like Substack as well as Pico. Finally, we audited and also restricted the use of third -party cookies to enhance privacy.

As with all of our releases, they really are a full team effort , from research and design to the execution help documentation and customer support, and marketing. Thank you to our team for their incredible work and hugh thanks to our clients and partners. Merry Christmas!