Terms

As we close out this year, I'd like to talk about what we've been up to these past months . We've now finished three cycles of six weeks, and our usual cool-downs in between. There's plenty to go over, so I'll jump right into.

Big batch projects

Six "big batches" projects, balancing our bets on the near future. iterative updates based on customer comments, as well as improvements in our technological foundations.

1. A new metrics experience

The previous version of the service had a "standard issue" list of SaaS indicators for customers to evaluate their performance. As time went by, we realized that the metrics were not up to par in a couple divergent ways: being inaccessible to data-novice customers while also lacking sufficient detail those with solid analytical skills (or even their own internal analytics teams). These issues led to a lack of trust in our data that we were sharing.

This year we started rolling out a new data collection API as well as a analytics layer, which laid the foundations for a more personal experience in terms of metrics, focusing on membership. It meant removing some older metrics, adding new metrics and making them more trustworthy and precise.

Our new Trials metrics dashboard

There are still a handful of orders-based legacy metrics, while new metrics tend to be more about trends and analyzing the health of your business over a long time horizon.

They share the same design principles that are based on analysing trends on a month-to-month basis, which we think will be more suitable for businesses with recurring subscriptions that utilize . We chart these trends over time with segmented columns, while below we have a table which breaks into segments for every month.

Our new Churn metrics dashboard

Click on any particular cell segment for an overview of the monthly data graph, and importantly: see each of the details that comprise the activities (whether it's subscriptions or members).

It's easy to go that leads from organisms to the electron. The idea behind them was to aid the creators understand how things work, what's not, and where to double down.

The most recent trend indicators include: The new trend metrics are: MRR. Find out what factors are a part of the monthly recurring income: carryover from the previous month, new members, reactivations, upgrading, downgrades and cancellations as well as failed the payment. Additionally, look at ARPM and LTV. - Paying Members. Dead simple, see the ways your list of paying members change over the course of time. The same sorting like you do by MRR (upgrades and downgrades etc.). -- Net revenue. A simple look at your monthly cash flow that is derived from your total income minus refunds. - Churn. Find out if there are any issues that may be lurking beneath the surface, by observing revenue churn broken down by voluntary (cancellations) as well as involuntary (failed payment). It is also possible to see rates and numbers in each of these segments (i.e. X payment that failed for a rate of Y percentage). - Trials. Analyze the performance of both your paid and free trials over time. For a given month you'll be able to determine the number of new trials started, how many expired and which ones were converted to recurring memberships, as well as your overall trial conversion rate. - Plan comparison. Choose up to five plans and compare them against one another using any of the metrics listed above.

2. Comments and likes on posts

Posts let customers communicate with their paying members directly by email. They can also post on their own blog hosted by them. Posts can be utilized in many different ways; for example, as a replacement for newsletters for benefits to members, or just to reach out to check in.

The Comments feature has been updated.

To better carve out the space needed to encourage dialogue and to build community, we now allow comments and likes to posts (and likes on comments). They can enabled on a global or per-post basis. This includes a locked reading-only mode for posts the time that a discussion has completed its course.

You can deep link to comments, load newly added comments in real-time without a page refresh, and display badges to show comments made by employees, and manage any abusive comments from bad actors. Members can also enable the browser to notify them when new comments are posted.

Posts are an area of continuous investment for us and we're excited over the possibilities of new use that this can provide for clients.

3. Enhancing group memberships

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

We've iterated on this feature often throughout the years, and had collected several larger improvement ideas based upon the observed use as well as customer complaints.

The new interface for Group Subscription interface

We shipped six key upgrades in Group Subscriptions:

• Groups of plan members can now upgrade themselves from individual subscriptions to group subscriptions that was previously required to be manually done by an administrator.
• Managers changing It's now feasible to allow group leaders to turn the management of their group to another participant as well. It's a lot easier for administrators of the site to do the same. Managers don't take a seat customers can choose whether or not the person who manages the group subscription should count towards the seats that are included in the subscription or not.
• Auto-renew is not available on subscriptions that are paid for by an external source If a group subscription is paid by external means (via checks or any other method) then we do not display auto-renewal choices within their account as it is managed by the site admin.
• Display seat utilization within admin: We improved our dashboards so that they better show how many seats are currently used in all subscriptions to groups.
• Generic URL for managing members To previously join a user to the area in their account where they were able to control their team, you needed to provide their unique URL, which included the ID. Now, there's an unidirectional routing URL, so the creators are able to automate their customer support.

4. Updating our marketing site

When we overhauled our marketing site at the start of 2020 we've shipped numerous updates and features to our site, however we had not redesigned to keep our site updated and present our tale in the most compelling manner we could.

Updates to .com

We conducted a complete content audit, reframed our brand positioning on the basis of the information we've gathered, designed new landing pages and enhanced our screenshots with more refined brand names, and redesigned the Customers page in order to emphasize what features are being used by customers.

The

Enhancements to .com

This all aims to emphasize the modularity of the system, and also how it can integrate into many different use cases.

5. Improvements in performance

is used by some really large creators, each driving millions of dollars in annual revenue and hundreds of thousands of customers. While we've been onboarding our customers We noticed that some parts of our admin became extremely difficult to use and slow during daily usage, reflecting poor on our reliability as well as our level of craftsmanship.

We dedicated a cycle to improving the performance of a few key areas: Activities, the Dashboard, CSV exports, and the view segmented of Free Members. In terms of experience, navigating accounts with huge audiences has become more responsive, and we're seeing drastically decreased load times as well as worker load via our instrumentation.

6. Cancellation surveys

To provide more insights to creators on the reasons why customers decide to cancel their subscriptions we're sending Cancellation Surveys that will be displayed to members after cancelling. The data will be aggregated into the new view of cancellations.

The new Cancellation survey feature

The data does not just help creators win back those members, but it also helps create an feedback loop to help them understand the value of their membership program in the long run, and help ensure that it is in line with the customers' expectations.

Our new Cancellation surveys

This new view gives creators the ability to see two different segments: cancelled subscriptions that aren't yet churned (and can be won back) or were fully churned and expired. Also, you can see the breakdown in cancellation reasons for both segments. This data can be processed and exported in CSV. CSV similar to the other data in .

Surveys can be disabled or disabled, but is enabled by default.

Small batch, and on-the-fly projects

These are the smaller tasks that were completed alongside the more extensive tasks described above (not including bugs and support tickets). They generally range from 2 days up to two weeks of work and are driven by customer feedback and insight gained from our client-facing teams. We [email protected]

• a preferred partners page to our marketing site, to present our top development partners, and to connect the potential leads to them.
• pagination of our blog in order to improve SEO and increase time-on-site.
• New protection for podcast RSS feeds that are served by ACast.
• Support to Hungarian as well as Czech as options for localization
• A brand new coupon targeting feature that allows coupons to can be used on any or all of the following: new purchases, purchases made previously, in the event of reactivating expired subscriptions or when upgrading a subscription.
• An API feature that allows you to block certain text links that were hindering iOS app store approvals for certain customers.
• New options for tax management new options for tax handling Canada, so consumers are receiving the right amounts based on their revenue and the nexus
• Cookie banner on the website for marketing to EU as well as UK visitors.

We also automated some of our internal applications which we employ to move customers to other companies like Substack and Pico. Finally, we audited and then restricted our use of 3rd party cookies to improve privacy.

As with all of our releases, they really are a full group effort, from researching and design to the execution helping with documentation, customer service as well as marketing. Thanks to the team for their remarkable work done and many thanks to our partners and customers. Happy holidays!