Launch HN: Withfriends (YC W19) – Memberships for Small Businesses
Hi HN!

We’re Joe, Martha, and Kunal; co-founders of Withfriends (https://withfriends.co).

Withfriends runs membership programs for small businesses. Bars, theaters, barbershops, can use Withfriends to convert their customers to become monthly-paying members. Members receive simple & automated benefits, and small businesses earn additional revenue.

We’ve started by focusing on music venues and event organizers. All three of us come from a lifetime of organizing events, primarily in NYC. Joe and Kunal started a music venue and collective art space in Brooklyn, called The Silent Barn. Kunal started one of the first video game galleries, called Babycastles. Martha and Joe used to run a newsprint listing called Showpaper, which aggregated shows from hundreds of venues every week. We know that culture in cities is defined by the beloved small businesses around us, we know how cultural funding works and where it falls short. With our own businesses, we saw that by changing how we asked for support, we could radically change the volume of people funding our venues, and by automating member benefits, it was easy to facilitate them. After testing an early iteration of the product with a handful of organizers, we decided to bring these insights to a larger audience as Withfriends.

How does it work? We found that people are most willing to purchase a membership when asked in the checkout flow, with their credit card already out. Instead of asking business owners to promote memberships as an entirely new product, we integrate with the point of sale to sell memberships as an add on to any purchase. This makes selling memberships as easy as selling tickets for any small business, so they can start today. Withfriends uses point-of-sale APIs to make this possible, and automates member benefits directly in the POS, like presale and discounts. Any business can write in custom member benefits in addition to Withfriends benefits, but we have data from over 100,000 purchases to date on the platform, so we start each business with a proven set of membership tiers and benefits specific to their business as soon as they sign up. We’re taking infrastructure that has been proven by large institutions like museums, and making it accessible to any small business organizer anywhere, whether they have a staff of 50 or only 1.

We already are working with over 85 small businesses around the country, and have 5500 members supporting them. We've generated an average of 40% additional revenue for our businesses. We’re making $6k in MRR, and our membership revenue is growing 30% month over month.

Much of our initial traction last year was from our own networks, relying on an invite-only approach to new sign-ups, and we activated each and every membership program by hand. This taught us a lot, but since joining Y Combinator we’ve been focused on preparing for the public by automating the setup flow. Now anyone can become an organizer on Withfriends in minutes, and start growing their members with every upcoming event. This has allowed us to jump from 7 small business sign-ups per month before Y Combinator to over 70.

When we began, we took a 5% fee of the membership revenue, and charged ~$1 per ticket when an organizer uses our native ticketing. That pricing is the same as other ticketing or fundraising platforms, but none of them offer businesses the 40% revenue boost that Withfriends creates for our customers. Since then, we've built an integration with Eventbrite that allows organizers on Eventbrite to easily sell memberships too - in that case, we only earn membership fees. We believe memberships are our strength, so we're testing new pricing that focuses on membership revenue entirely. By making memberships for small businesses easy and successful, we’re thrilled to help them grow and become more sustainable.

It’s an honor to be able to share this idea with the Hacker News community and we’d love to hear what you all think. If you have any music venues or event organizers that you would like to be a member of right now, we have a referral program open which you can access at this link (https://withfriends.typeform.com/to/P80RQX) and we’ll buy you a membership and some tickets once they sign up!

Look forward to hearing from you all,

Joe, Martha, Kunal