Terms

Before we wrap up this year, I'm hoping to talk about the activities we've had the past few months at . We've now completed three six-week cycles, and our usual cool-downs in between. There's plenty to go over, so I'll jump right into.

Big Batch projects

We delivered six "big bunch" projects. They were balanced our bets on the near future. iterative updates based on customer comments, as well as improvements to our technical foundations.

1. A new metrics experience

There was a time when there was a "standard standard" list of SaaS metrics for customers to analyze their performance. Over the years we noticed that this was falling short in two distinct ways: being inaccessible to customers who aren't experts in data, and not providing enough detail and for customers with strong knowledge of data (or even their own internal analytics teams). The issues resulted in the lack of confidence in the information we provided.

Earlier this year we rolled out a new data collection API as well as a metrics layer that laid the foundation for an opinionated metrics experience focused on the importance of membership. This meant getting rid of some older metrics, adding new ones, and improving their reliability and precise.

Our new Trials metrics dashboard

We still support a few traditional metrics that are based on orders. However, new metrics tend to be focused on trends and analysing the health of your business over a long period of time.

These metrics share a design framework based around the analysis of trends on a monthly calendar basis, which we think will be more suitable for the recurring membership businesses that utilize . The trends are charted over time with segmented columns. We also have a table which breaks into segments for every month.

Our new Churn metrics dashboard

It is possible to click on every particular cell segment for an overview of the data charted over that month as well as, more importantly, see all of the individual data points that make up the activity (whether the activity is subscriptions or members).

Simply put, it is possible to go that leads from organisms down to the atom. These were created to assist the creators understand how things work as well as what's not working and the best places to go for a second look.

The most recent trend indicators are The new trend metrics are: -- MRR. See the factors the are a part of your monthly recurring revenue carried over from the prior month, the addition of renewals, new members, upgrades, downgrades, cancellations and missed payment. Also, you can see ARPM as well as LTV. - Paying Members. Dead simple, see the ways your list of members who pay you changes with time. The same sorting like you do with MRR (upgrades, downgrades, and so on.). - Net Revenue. It is a quick look at the raw cashflow for the month that is derived from your total income less refunds. - Churn. Find out if there are any issues that may be lurking beneath the surface with the help of revenue churn broken down by the voluntary (cancellations) or involuntary churn (failed the payment). It is also possible to see rates and counts for each segment (i.e. X missed payments with the rate of Y percent). - Trials. Examine the effectiveness of your paid and free trials over time. In a particular month, you'll be able to determine the amount of trials that were started, how many expired, and how many have been converted into recurring memberships and also the overall conversion rate of your trial. - Plan comparison. Choose up to five plans and compare them against each other by using one of the above metrics.

2. Comments and likes on posts

Posts allows customers to interact with their members who pay, via email and publishing their own blogs. This is used in many different ways; to replace newsletters or to provide benefits or just to reach out and check-in.

The Comments feature has been updated.

To better carve out space to facilitate dialog and build community, you can now enable comments and likes on posts (and likes to comments). These can be enabled on a global or per-post basis. You can also lock a read-only state for when a discussion has run its course.

It is possible to deep-link comments, load newly added comments in real-time without a page refresh, show badges on comments posted by staff members as well as moderate abuse by bad actors. Members can also enable browser notifications for the time that new comments are added.

Posts remain an area of active investment for us, and we're excited over the possibilities of new use cases this opens up for customers.

3. Improved group subscriptions

Customers are able to sell customers can sell Group Subscriptions that comprise several seats that are managed and purchased through a single person. This is often used for institutional or corporate settings.

It's been a subject of discussion many times over the years, but had collected several larger enhancements based on the usage we've observed and the customer's complaints.

The Interface for Group Subscription interface

We shipped six key upgrades to Group Subscriptions:

• Groups of plan: Members can now upgrade themselves from individual subscriptions to a group, which previously had to be handled manually by an admin.
• Changing managers It's now feasible to allow group leaders to turn over the administration of the group to another participant as well. It's a lot easier for site admins too. Managers don't take a seat: Customers can specify that managers of the group subscription will count toward the total seats that are included in the subscription, or not.
• No auto-renew on subscriptions that are paid for by an external source when the group's subscription is paid by external means (via check or other) the site will no longer offer auto-renewal within their account as this by definition is managed by the administrator of the site.
• Show seat usage within admin: We improved our dashboards, allowing us to display more clearly how many seats are currently used for all group subscriptions.
• Generic link for managing members: Previously to deep join a user to the section of their account in which they can control their team, you had to share their specific URL, which included the ID. It's now possible to share a general routing URL that the creators are able to automate their customer support.

4. Updates to our Marketing Site

When we overhauled our marketing website in the first quarter of 2020 , we've introduced a ton of enhancements and new features to our product, but haven't revisited to ensure that we make sure our website is up to date and to present our stories in the most effective way that was possible.

Qh6BWaqgriImc2tXwjGq New updates to .com

We completed a comprehensive content audit, reframed our brand positioning on the basis of the information we've gathered, designed new landing pages and enhanced our screen shots with more sophisticated branding, and updated the Customers page in order to emphasize what features are being used by customers.

Improvements to .com

The goal is emphasize the modularity of and how we can fit into so many different use cases.

5. Performance improvements

is used by some really big creators who generate millions in revenues each year with hundreds of thousands of users. While we've been onboarding our customers, we observed that certain areas of our administration were becoming very heavy and slow in everyday usage, which reflected poorly on our reliability as well as our level of craftsmanship.

The last cycle was dedicated to improving the efficiency of a few crucial areas: Activities Dashboard, Dashboard, CSV exports, and the segmented view of members who are free. The experience of using the account that has large audience has become much snappier, and we're seeing drastically shorter load times, and a decrease in worker load via our instrumentation.

6. Cancellation surveys

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

New Cancellation Surveys feature

This data not only helps creators win back those customers, but also provides an feedback loop to help them understand the value of their membership program over time, to help align it with their customers' expectations.

Our new Cancellation surveys

The new version of the view provides creators with the ability to see two different segments: cancelled subscriptions that aren't yet churned (and can be won back), and ones that are fully expired and have been churned. Also, you can see the cancellation causes that are broken down in both segments. The data is sortable and exported as an CSV similar to everything else within .

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

Small-scale batch and on-the-fly projects

These are the smaller tasks that were delivered alongside the larger work detailed above (not comprising bugs or support tickets). The typical timeframe is 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 on our marketing site, to showcase some of our most valuable development partners, and to connect them with potential leads.
• pagination of our blog in order for SEO improvement and to increase the amount of time spent on our site.
• new protection to podcast RSS feeds served from ACast.
• Support of Hungarian and Czech as localization options
• A new option for coupon targeting which means coupons are now able to apply to any/all of the following purchases, purchases made previously, when reactivating expired subscriptions, or when upgrading a subscription.
• an API option that hides specific text links which were restricting iOS app store approvals for certain customers.
• innovative tax-handling options new options for tax handling Canada which means that consumers are receiving the right amounts based on their revenue and nexus
• Cookies banners on the marketing site for EU and UK visitors.

Additionally, we automated several internal software used to transfer customers to other companies like Substack or Pico. In addition, we analyzed and also restricted the use of third parties' cookies in order to protect our customers' privacy.

Like all releases, these truly are a group effort, from researching and shaping to execution, aiding in documentation, customer support, and marketing. We thank the team for all their incredible work and hugh thanks to our customers and partners. We wish you a Merry Christmas!