How automating memberships for businesses may transform our cities

Hey HN!

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us before!

Our company Withfriends makes it easy to sell memberships for your business.

We started it after we learned that people want to become members of local businesses.

We learned that by building a prototype and seeing 1 in 20 customers choose to support a business by buying a membership as an upsell during checkout - enough to increase revenue for any business by 60%!

We then joined YC, believing we were onto something huge.

But there were bad signs:

A) Practically no local business sells memberships, but Patreon exists B) Kickstarter funded a company for this market, then shut it down C) Withfriends was growing ok, but not startup growth

Here's the real pain point, in a quote: "We're looking to sell memberships, but we don't want to do anything new. Can you help us?"

Local businesses are spread thin. They can envision a membership program, but have no time to set it up or execute any part of it.

The best way to serve them is to completely automate memberships by integrating with POS and e-commerce platforms that they use.

This requires a lot of hacking. The code for our Eventbrite integration surprised the Eventbrite team. We invented our IndieCommerce integration live on screenshare with a bookshop. And so forth.

Once we got used to this method, we've built the following integrations in one month:

Square, Squarespace, Shopify, TeeSpring, ChowNow, Toast, Eventbrite, IndieCommerce, & Upserve

Now any business can connect their POS or e-commerce platform to Withfriends in 15 minutes, and start selling memberships automatically. We generate profitable memberships from their data, insert membership upsells into their checkout, and automate discounts for members.

That's what we launched here today, and we think this will help small business thrive.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/withfriends

Check it out here, and let us know what you think!