Terms

As we close out this year, I'd like to talk about the things we've done over the past few months at . Since then we've finished three cycles of six weeks, which we typically cool down during the intervals. There's plenty to go over and I'll dive right in.

Big batch projects

Six "big batches" projects, balancing betting on the future regular updates, based on client comments, as well as improvements on our technical infrastructure.

1. A new metrics experience

The previous version of the service had a "standard problem" set of SaaS indicators for customers to analyze their performance. We noticed over time that the metrics were not up to par in a couple divergent ways: being inaccessible to customers who aren't experts in data, and not offering enough information and for customers with strong analytical skills (or even their own internal analytics teams). These issues led to a lack of trust in the data we were surfacing.

Earlier this year we rolled out a brand new Data collection API and metrics layer to lay the foundations for a more subjective experience with metrics that is focused on member. This involved removing some older metrics, adding new ones, and improving their reliability and precise.

Our new Trials metrics dashboard

We continue to support some orders-based legacy metrics, while new metrics tend to be focused on trends and analysing business health over a longer duration.

They share a design framework based around analysing trends on a month-to-month basis. We believe this will be more suitable for businesses with recurring subscriptions that use . We chart these trends in time using segmented columns. Below, we have a table which breaks out each specific segment for each month.

Our new Churn metrics dashboard

It is possible to click on every particular cell segment for an overview of the graph of data for that particular month in addition to seeing all of the individual information points which make up the data (whether it's subscriptions or members).

Simply put, it is possible to follow the path that leads from cells to the atom. They were designed to help creators easily understand what's working in their lab, as well as where to double down.

The most recent trend indicators are the following: -- MRR. See the factors the are a part of your monthly recurring revenue: carryover from the previous month, renewals, new members, upgrade, downgrades, cancelations as well as failed the payment. Additionally, look at ARPM and LTV. Then, you can see the number of Paying members. Simple, check out the way your membership of paying members change over the course of time. You get the same segmentation as is available through MRR (upgrades, downgrades, etc). -- Net Revenue. An easy look at your monthly cash flow calculated from the total revenue less refunds. - Churn. You can spot potential problems lurking below the surface by seeing revenue churn broken down by voluntarily (cancellations) or involuntary (failed payment). You can also see rate and count for each of these segments (i.e. X payment that failed for the rate of Y percentage). - Trials. Review the results of your paid and free trials over the course of time. For a given month you will be able to see the amount of trials that were initiated, the number of expiring and which ones were have been converted into recurring memberships as well as the overall conversion rate of your trial. - Plan comparison. Select up to 5 plans to compare one another using any of the metrics listed above.

2. Comments and likes on blog posts

Posts allows customers to interact with their paid members directly, via email and publishing their own blogs. Posts can be utilized for a variety of reasons; for example, as a replacement for newsletters, to deliver benefits, or just to reach out and check-in.

New Comments feature

In order to better create space to facilitate dialog and build communities, it is now possible to make comments and likes available on posts (and likes to comments). They can enabled on a global or per-post basis. You can also lock a read-only state for after a discussion has taken its course.

You can deep link to comments, load new comments instantly without page refresh, display badges to show comments made by employees, and manage any abusive comments from malicious actors. Members are also able to enable notification notifications to their browsers when new comments are posted.

Posts remain an area of continuous investment for us and we're excited by the new possibilities for that this can provide for our customers.

3. Improved group subscriptions

Customers are able to sell groups of Subscriptions These include many seats, which are managed and paid for by a single contact. These are typically utilized in institutional settings or for corporate use.

We've iterated on this feature a lot over the years, but have made several major improvements based on observed usage and the customer's complaints.

The new interface for Group Subscription interface

Six upgrades were delivered for Group Subscriptions:

• Plan groups members are now able to self-serve upgrade from individual subscriptions to a group that was previously required to be manually done by an administrator.
• Managers changing: It's now possible for managers of groups to transfer over the administration of the group to another member as well. It's a lot easier for site admins too. Managers aren't allowed to take a seat and customers are able to specify whether the manager of the group membership is counted towards the total number of seats included with 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 externally (via checks or any other method) then we do not display auto-renewal choices in their account since it is managed by the site admin.
• Display seat utilization in admin: We improved our dashboards to better display the seat usage in all subscriptions to groups.
• Generic link for managing members To previously join a user to the part of their account that they can control their team, you needed to provide their unique URL with their ID. Now, there's an unidirectional routing URL, so creators can automate their customer support.

4. Updating our marketing site

Since we redesigned out marketing website at the beginning of 2020 , we've introduced many updates and features to our website, but haven't revisited to ensure that we ensure that our website was current and present our tale in the best method we could.

Changes made to .com

We conducted a complete content audit, reframed our positioning for products based on what we've learned, created new landing pages, enhanced our screen shots with more sophisticated branding, and updated our Customers page to highlight which specific features they're using.

Changes to .com

This all aims to bring out the modularity of and how we can be incorporated into a variety of use cases.

5. Performance improvement

is used by some really large creators, each driving millions of dollars in annual revenue along with hundreds of thousands customers. While we've been onboarding our customers We noticed that some areas of our administration became extremely slow and cumbersome in daily use, indicating the poor reliability of our system and level of craft.

A whole cycle has been dedicated for improving the performance of some key areas: Activities, Dashboard, Dashboard, CSV exports, and the view segmented of members who are free. The experience of using the account that has large audience has become more responsive as well as we're witnessing dramatically shorter load times, and a decrease in workload for our employees through our instrumentation.

6. Cancellation surveys

To provide more insights to creators on the reasons why customers are cancelling their subscriptions, we're distributing cancellation Surveys to be shown to subscribers after they have cancelled. This data is aggregated in the new view of cancellations.

's new Cancellation surveys feature

The data does not just help the creators regain those customers, but also provides feedback loops that help them understand the value of their membership program in the long run, and help align it with their customers' expectations.

Our new Cancellation surveys

This new view gives creators a view of two categories: cancelled subscriptions that haven't yet churned (and could be returned) as well as those that are fully expired and have been churned. Also, you can see the cancellation causes that are broken down in both segments. This data can be sortable and exported as an CSV just like all other information within .

Surveys are able to be turned on or disallowed, however it is disabled by default.

Small-scale batch and on-the-fly projects

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

• A preferred partners page on our site for marketing to showcase some of our best development partners and connect prospects with them.
• pagination on our blog to improve SEO and increase the amount of time spent on our site.
• A new safeguard for podcast RSS feeds served from ACast.
• assistance to Hungarian and Czech as localization options
• A brand new coupon targeting feature, so coupons can now apply to any/all of the following: new purchases, purchases made previously, for reactivating subscriptions that have expired, and when you upgrade your subscription.
• an API option that hides some text links hindering iOS app store approvals for some customers.
• new options for tax handling in Canada and clients are getting the correct amounts based on their revenue and nexus
• Cookies banners on the marketing site for EU and UK visitors to the UK and EU sites.

We also automated some internal software which we employ to move customers away from competitors such as Substack as well as Pico. In addition, we analyzed and further limited 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 aiding in documentation, customer support as well as marketing. Thanks to the team for their incredible work and hugh thanks to our partners and customers. We wish you a Merry Christmas!