It’s the first Friday of the month and you know what that means! It’s time for our monthly report sharing revenue stats, company updates, and engineering updates.

The Stats

Net Revenue came in at $718k! This is largely a result from a big Cyber Monday Promotion we ran. It was our biggest promotion yet.

Our customer base also grew and we crossed 9k this month! We are up to 9,706 customers.

Churn (both User and Revenue) is something we’re always keeping an eye on. Both user and revenue churn seem to be holding steady right around that 7–8% mark each month. To combat this, we’ve shifted the way our teams work a bit and are focusing on new customer onboarding and truly helping our customers succeed in their blogging businesses.

You may have already seen our handy Toolkits and you’ll start to see more courses and other resources to help you grow. We want you to stick around — not just for our benefit but for your own and for the benefit of the field of blogging as a whole!

Team

We added Haley Chamberlain to our Customer Success Team this month. Haley is from Boise, ID, is a runner and a yogi, says there’s no such thing as “too much coffee”, and has tons of experience blogging for her own wellness business. Expect to see more from her as you send in your questions!

Engineering Updates

We love sharing this part of our monthly report since it’s the one you’re always most excited about. And November is sure to be exciting for you. Here’s what’s new around ConvertKit:

Broadcast Reports Page Redesign

It’s the same great report page for your Broadcasts, but our amazing designer, Dylan, decided to fancy it up a bit and improve its readability. Check it out:

Filter Broadcasts by Status

We’re working on better filtering/organizing all around the app and this is a great place to start. You can now filter your Broadcasts by status: Draft, Processing, Queued, and Completed.

This is handy if you like to batch your work or have a team member load up your emails in advance. You can simply sort to see your Draft emails and schedule them to Queued!

Here’s a Knowledgebase article with more details: http://help.convertkit.com/article/391-filter-broadcasts-by-status

Create Custom Fields Through the API

You’ve been able to build custom fields for a while now within the app itself. We’ve recently updated things so you can create those same custom fields for your forms directly in our API.

API documentation can be found here: http://help.convertkit.com/article/33-api-documentation-v3

New Form Integrations Tab on Your Landing Page Settings

Settings was getting to be a crowded place, and we wanted to make things easier for you as you setup your Landing Pages. Now when you head to that page, you’ll see a Form Integrations Tab giving you your options on your integrations. It looks like this:

Which leads us to…. another integration!

Integration with Unbounce

Unbounce is an incredible landing page builder and we’ve partnered with them to allow you to connect your Unbounce landing pages directly to ConvertKit!

Here’s how: http://help.convertkit.com/article/405-unbounce-integration

That’s a wrap!

November was a big month for us and we have even more exciting features and team members coming your way in December. We’re planning on ending 2016 with a big bang — are you with us?!

ConvertKit Monthly Report — November 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s been another month of growth here at ConvertKit! We reached over 9k customers and continue to climb in monthly recurring revenue. Here’s the details before we move into some brand new features we’ve launched:

The Stats

We came just shy of $450k this month in MRR!! Monthly recurring revenue grew $35,893 (from $411,754 to $447,647).

Net Revenue came in $2k higher than MRR for the month of October.

Our customer base crossed 9k this month! We are up to 9,210 customers.

As we are focusing on our revenue goals and customer growth, strategizing ways to keep churn low is a major priority. We are currently improving our onboarding sequences and offering more one-on-one training with our customers. We’ve also updated and added several articles to our ConvertKit Knowledge Base.

After coming through a long period this summer where we were focused on scaling ConvertKit and fighting off spammers and other nefarious members of the web, we have some fun announcements to make. The last month as an engineering team we’ve been able to focus on features again, which feels pretty incredible.

There’s so much to cover that I’ll skip any more of an intro, let’s jump in!

Tracking unique broadcast link clicks

When telling you the click rate for links in a broadcast, it was always the total for all clicks. Well now it’s broken out to show you the click count for each link specifically.

This is especially useful when you include…

Bulk actions on link clicks

Have you ever wanted to tag everyone who clicked a link, but forgotten to setup the link click trigger and automation rule in advance? Plenty of customers make this easy mistake. Until now there wasn’t a way to perform an action after the fact on link clicks.

But now it’s really easy. Simply click on the subscriber count in the screenshot above, and you’ll be taken to the subscribers page, filtered down to only show those who clicked that exact link. Then select everyone and perform a bulk action to tag the subscribers (or add them to a sequence).

Date ranges on the dashboard graph

You can now change the dashboard new subscriber graph to show you a specific date range. Add completely custom dates, or choose from a preset of ranges from the last month, to all time. This will give you a much better picture of how your audience growth has been performing over time.

Custom fields in broadcasts and sequences

Since we rolled out custom fields support a few months ago you’ve been able to store any data you want on a subscriber, but it hasn’t been super useful…until now.

Now you can save country, last name, phone number, language spoken, or just about anything else in a subscriber profile and re-use it in your emails.

New account settings

We also took some time in October to redesign the account settings page. That involves re-organizing it, adding more clear help information, and splitting up the content into multiple tabs. One of the biggest things is that this redesign makes finding your past invoices much more discoverable.

Widgets in WordPress plugin

Upgrade to the latest version of ConvertKit for WordPress (with one click in your WordPress admin panel) and you’ll get the ability to embed forms in your sidebars by dragging in a simple ConvertKit widget. This latest update to the plugin also includes a handful of small CSS fixes for forms.

Improved spam protection

Finally, even though we haven’t been attacked (as much) this last month, we’ve still been putting a lot of effort into spam protection. We started using an additional service and further refined our spam detection and controls. It feels good to keep making this more robust each month!

Wrapping Up

It’s been another great month and we thank you all for your support! We are committed to serving our customers and continually making ConvertKit a better application.

ConvertKit Monthly Report — October 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Fall is upon us and so is growth. The month of September was filled with growth and improvements. We hope it’s been a good month for you too. As we grow, our customers grow. And that’s what’s most important to us. Posting our monthly numbers isn’t something we do because we have to, but because we want to share our stats with you intentionally.

The Stats

We crossed $400k this month!! As our revenue climbs, that means we are gaining more customers dedicated to growing their business. We feel honored to be apart of their entrepreneurial journey.

Net Revenue came in $18k lower than MRR for the month of September.

Our customer base crossed 8k this month! We are up to 8,364 customers.

Churn is always top of mind for us. As we are focusing on our revenue goals and customer growth, strategizing ways to keep churn low is a major priority. We are currently improving our on-boarding sequences and offering more training for new customers.

Part of our growth can be attributed to our Affiliate Program. Each Affiliate receives a 30% commission each month from everyone they refer. This past month, we paid over $46,000 in commissions spread across 125 affiliates.

Development

Our Engineers are some of the most talented people in the industry. They are working day and night to improve our features and app performance. David, our Lead Software Engineer, consistently posts in Engineering Updates if you want these updates in more detail.

CAPTCHAs

This past month saw many attacks from spammers. And a specific kind of spam called subscription bombing. In order to keep this from happening, we have put CAPTCHAs in place.

For your subscribers, the effects are pretty minimal. Based on the algorithms we use to determine when to display it, most of them will never see the CAPTCHA at all. They’ll go through the process just like they always have, with no inhibitions. A normal subscriber looks nothing like a robot to our system.

However, when you’re setting up a form on your website for the first time, you very well might see the CAPTCHA. This is alarming to many of our customers because they believe that all their subscribers are seeing this, but be assured that they aren’t. You can read more specifics about this here.

Improving deliverability

We’ve done a few different things here. First, we’ve switched out some IPs so that they’re not already on some blacklists. Second, we’re increasing our internal ability to modify sending domains and IPs (two big things that can get a message stopped for spam once reputation is damaged).

The other thing with deliverability is that we’re still small enough that we’ve often been able to help our customers directly over the past few weeks in the instances where messages didn’t hit the inbox.

Wrapping Up

Thank you all for your support! You are our number one priority and we strive towards better performance and high response times every day.
Have questions? Drop them in the comments below!

ConvertKit Monthly Report — September 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey :) Two quick things I want to talk about today: CAPTCHAs and performance.

CAPTCHAs

A few weeks back, there was a dramatic increase in a specific type of spam attack called subscription bombing. In brief, it works like this:

A bot grabs hold of an email address (an innocent one like david@convertkit.com) and launches an attack on it specifically by subscribing it to as many subscription lists as it possibly can. The victims here are then plagued by an onslaught of hundreds or thousands of emails into their inbox at a rate they can’t unsubscribe from fast enough.

The kicker here is that since the mailing lists are legitimate with good open rates and user engagement, these messages won’t get routed to the spam folder. Like other kinds of mail, they get dropped right where you’d want them if you’d intentionally signed up for that list.

It’s a mean attack. What I hate most about it is that it puts all of us in a position where we’re unintentionally responsible for flooding some poor soul’s inbox.

As a result, this has put us in a place that we’d prefer not to be: we now have to be a little bit more aggressive about making sure that humans — and only humans — are subscribing themselves to our users’ lists. While we also are working to improve the knowledge our machines have of malicious behavior and how to stomp on it, we also had to make some changes fast. And one of those is the CAPTCHA.

How CAPTCHAs effect you and your subscribers

For your subscribers, the effects are pretty minimal. Based on the algorithms we use to determine when to display it, most of them will never see the CAPTCHA at all. They’ll go through the process just like they always have, with no inhibitions. A normal subscriber looks nothing like a robot to our system.

However, when you’re setting up a form on your website for the first time, you very well might see the CAPTCHA. This is alarming to many of our customers because they believe that all their subscribers are seeing this, but be assured that they aren’t. I’m not going to share specifics of how we determine when to display the CAPTCHA screen, but I’ll say that there are enough commonalities between bots and customers setting up forms that you’re likely to get asked to verify your humanity.

I think we all have a love/hate relationship with CAPTCHAs. They can be a little arduous, hard to read, and anxiety-producing. But the improvements in the technology lately have helped reduced the strain on humans, and they’re a sensible, reliable way to protect your lists.

Performance

I wanted to give a quick shout-out to my engineers on application performance. The strides we’ve made in the past few weeks have been incredible, and I’m excited at our momentum as we continue to squash as many performance issues as we can.

To illustrate the positive trend, though, take a look at these two graphs. The first is illustrating response time over the past three days:

Compared with the same timeframe, two weeks ago:

Dramatic! They’re barely even on similar scales. I’m super proud of this team.

If you have questions, the customer success team and engineering team are ready for you. Email us any time at help@convertkit.com.

Engineering Update — Sept 23, 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A big reason why we publish these monthly reports is because we value transparency. We want you to know exactly what’s happening within ConvertKit. That includes sharing revenue numbers, the growth of our team and the hiccups along the way. Let’s get to it.

The Stats

Monthly Recurring Revenue has continued to climb, up 7.4% from the month prior. Growth is important to us, just like any company. But we are extremely focused on how to consistency improve our application and serve our existing customers.

Net Revenue came in just $1k lower than MRR for the month of August.

Our customer base continues to grow! We finished last month with 7,830 customers. We feel so lucky to be partnered with so many bloggers and entrepreneurs!

Churn is holding steady around the 8% mark as we grow and this is something we’re seriously focused on. Like any company with a recurring revenue model, churn is a major impact on our bottom line so we’re focused on reducing it. You’ll see things like a new onboarding checklist, new welcome sequences for new customers, and more.

The Team

You spoke, we listened. We have had some app performance issues this past month, which left several of your frustrated and worried. At the end of last month, we gathered in one location from 7 cities and 4 different countries to work and strategize how to make ConvertKit better.
We spent four days discussing app speed, features, and customer success. You will see our strategies play out over months ahead.

Development

Monitoring, measuring and improving performance

As we flood messages out of our system, and statuses on those broadcast messages come pouring back in (statuses like “delivered”, “bounced”, those kinds of things), we hastily do several of updates to make sure the interface can keep up, and so that we don’t accidentally send the same message twice. That, combined with sending out sequence emails, can sometimes cause some issues. It’s about evaluating, and sometimes our only window to really see what’s going on is while it’s happening. We’ll keep improving, and do the best we can to keep it going.

Heading off spammers

This is a taxing job. Sometimes emotionally — fraudulent accounts are draining. But, we’ve been working hard to reduce both the effects those that have already leaked through have created, and to prevent future spammers from joining or causing damage. We’re a little tight-lipped about some of this, because we’re big enough that fraudulent users are reading these words, and we don’t want to give any hints on how to weasel in.

Improving deliverability

We’ve done a few different things here. First, we’ve switched out some IPs so that they’re not already on some blacklists. Second, we’re increasing our internal ability to modify sending domains and IPs (two big things that can get a message stopped for spam once reputation is damaged). The other thing with deliverability is that we’re still small enough that we’ve often been able to help our customers directly over the past few weeks in the instances where messages didn’t hit the inbox.

Scaling Up

We upgraded our web servers and have been tuning them. We’ve upgraded database sizes and the power behind them as well.

Wrapping Up

That’s all for this month! We can’t thank our customers enough for their support. Our mission is to help you be more successful in your businesses.
Have questions? Drop them in the comments below!

ConvertKit Monthly Report — August 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It has been a crazy few weeks around here for the engineering team.

As no doubt some of you have noticed (okay, many of you — we see our own stats), we’ve been having some growing pains. And they’ve been hitting us in more ways than one! Not only are we now popular enough that certain kinds of fraudulent uses of our service are more common, but we’ve been seeing the issues with some downtime for the service as well. So I’m going to talk about that a little bit.

Companies that are growing experience downtime as they try to reduce bottlenecks. This happens at all levels of an organization. A few months back, one of our biggest bottlenecks was customer support — we were completely maxed out. Response times were way above the hours that they are now — they were into days and sometimes weeks. We had a large influx of new customers, and a number of problems in our processes if we wanted to keep that pace. To reduce the pressure, we switched tools (Intercom to Helpscout, which gave better metrics and let us respond thoughtfully instead of in a chat box), we hired a few people to help answer the volume, and we re-assigned an engineer at a time to be exclusively focused on the Customer Success queue for a week at a time. That helped, and most of the time many of your are experiencing response times on your questions that are far and beyond what they were at the beginning of the year.

Now, we’re starting to see some bottlenecks in the application itself. As many possible reasons as there were for bottlenecks in the Customer Success side of our organization, there are many, many, many more reasons for bottlenecks in engineering.

I’m gonna pause a second. I don’t want to come off defensive here. I think it’d be easy to read it that way, or like I’m making excuses. I’m not. Here at ConvertKit, we say Teach Everything You Know, and we say Work in Public. When we’ve been experiencing more downtime than normal, the working in public part is a little scarier. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable.

Okay, back to the thing. Especially these last few weeks, we’ve been hit hard. And it’s one of those things that feels like whack-a-mole. Continued pressure on all parts of the application reveal that what worked for much smaller numbers is now not holding up as well. This is fine — it’s part of growth — but in the meantime it’s stressful for everyone. Conversations within the engineering team get a little tense when we start talking about adding more application health alerts that might wake us up in the middle of the night. Conveniently we have a distributed team (Slovenia, Catalonia, Thailand and the US), so most of the time we’ve got someone who isn’t bleary-eyed able to check out what’s going on.

Anyway, that’s all the ancillary stuff. Let’s actually dive in a little to what we’ve been working on.

• Monitoring, measuring and improving performance
  You may remember about a month back when I said we’d been working hard on broadcasts and were getting them out a whole lot faster. The speed of those is awesome. So awesome, in fact, that it causes new kinds of fun. As we flood messages out of our system, and statuses on those messages come pouring back in (statuses like “delivered”, “bounced”, those kinds of things), we hastily do a bunch of updates to make sure the interface can keep up, and so that we don’t accidentally send the same message twice. That, combined with sending out sequence emails, can sometimes cause some issues — probably. It’s about evaluating, and sometimes our only window to really see what’s going on is while it’s happening. We’ll keep improving, and do the common sense things we can to keep it going.
• Heading off spammers
  This is a taxing job. Sometimes emotionally — fraudulent accounts are draining. But, we’ve been working hard to reduce both the effects those that have already leaked through have created, and to prevent future spammers from joining or causing damage. We’re a little tight-lipped about some of this, because we’re big enough that I know fraudulent users are reading these words, and we don’t want to give any hints on how to weasel in.
• Improving deliverability
  We’ve done a few different things here. First, we’ve switched out some IPs so that they’re not already on some blacklists. Second, we’re increasing our internal ability to modify sending domains and IPs (two big things that can get a message stopped for spam once reputation is damaged). The other thing with deliverability is that we’re still small enough that we’ve often been able to help our customers directly over the past few weeks in the instances where messages didn’t hit the inbox.
• Scaling up all the things
  We have a lot of levers we can pull, and we’ve been pulling them. We upgraded our web servers and have been tuning them. We’ve upgraded database sizes and the power behind them (a few times in as many weeks, actually).

In addition to that, we’ve set up some better ways to keep you informed on application health (these are a little aggressive right now — we’ve been telling you about almost every hiccup, which is a little overkill). We’ve also decided to bring in a couple of consultants for a while who can focus with us explicitly on scaling, performance and deliverability.

We had opportunity last week for our engineering team to spend some time all together in person. Out of that, we’ve set some goals that we’re all feeling pretty good about:

• Average response time for web of 200ms or less (as of 8/31, the last three months was 400ms, last month it was 700ms, and previous seven days was 372ms). “Web” is serving forms, serving landing pages, and the UI of the application itself.
• Average response time for API of 200ms or less (as of 8/31, the last seven days was 1200ms — don’t cry). API gets hit by form submissions, third-party plugins like Wordpress, and custom scripts.
• Reduce exceptions by half, then to hundreds at most per day (as of 8/31, we were at… thousands and thousands a day). This is mostly internal, but it is a situation that’s grown as the app has grown. Basically, we’ve been wading through a lot of notifications we set up for ourselves many moons ago, so this is just about reducing noise.
• Split up the application. We’re running right now on two different servers — API and Web — and we can split that out further. Doing that is going to help us monitor specific functions in isolation (delivering embedded forms, tracking links, serving the interface).

Some of that got a little technical, but I’m okay with that — it’s about working in public, so that’s a peek under the curtain. :) Cheers, all.

Engineering Update — Sept 2, 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’m happy to report on a few things we’ve taken care of these last two weeks that many of you have been asking us about. Without further ado:

• App performance
  We’ve had a couple of growing pains recently, and we know some of you felt them. We’re not finished, we know, but we made some serious strides this week in improving the performance of the application (especially around 6am Pacific — we know some of you had been experiencing a lot of crashes then). We were able to identify some of the underlying causes for the biggest slowdowns in the app and got them shored up. We’ll be moving on to some more specific areas in the coming weeks (I’m looking at you, slow subscribers page).
• Timezones
  When using the application, timezone inconsistencies have been a frustration point for some of our users. Last week, we released an update that unifies the presentation and timezone handling of all the places a date is displayed within the ConvertKit interface. The most obvious improvement for many of you is that the graph of recent subscribers on the dashboard now resets at midnight in your account’s timezone, instead of GMT.
• Mobile responsiveness for forms
  The behavior of our slide-in and modal forms on small screens (phones) has been a little… lacking. But no more. Our new designer, Dylan, examined and tackled the biggest bugs with those forms and has really cleaned them up. We think you’ll love the results. When we do upgrades to our forms, we version them. (Except for minor bugfixes.) We do this because we know that many of you have embedded the full HTML of your forms into your pages or applied styles within your own site to override some of our CSS. We’d never want to break that. That said, if you’d like to get the latest in mobile styles on your forms, you’ll need to upgrade your forms.
• Broadcast speed
  Look at me, burying the lead. I seriously saved the best for last, here. Over the next few days, you’re going to notice that your broadcasts process and send a whole lot faster. We’re rolling out our new code a little at a time to make sure all is right and good with the world, but by my next update I’ll have some metrics to share about the improvements we’ve made. We’ve been working on this particular project for a couple of months now, and it’s going to make a big difference.

We’re so excited about releasing these things for you. We think they’ll make a big difference.

Questions? Email us at support@convertkit.com any time!

Updates from the Engineering Team — July 22, 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Hey, everybody :)

We’re chomping at the bit to get faster broadcast delivery out to all of you, and we are almost there. And that makes us really happy.

“So then,” you wonder, “what’s next?” Great question. And I want to talk about the answers.

Roadmaps for the longer-term have a tendency to change, but we can see this far out today. What we decide to build next is always a mix of the features you ask for, the surprise features we want to delight you with, and the most efficient ways to get to our next goals. Now, here’s a little more on what’s coming soon:

• Increased Responsiveness for Forms on Mobile Devices
  Our forms adapt well to where they’re placed on your blog, whether it’s in the sidebar, in with your content, or in a header. Sometimes, though, they haven’t played as well on mobile devices. We’re robustifying the responsiveness of our forms for smaller screens, so you never have to worry about how your readers are accessing your site.
• Offset Sequence Emails by Hours
  Many of you have asked for this feature, and now we’re going to build it. Actually, we’re going to re-architect the way we send sequences so that we can enable it, which means it probably won’t be showing up in my update two weeks from now.
• More Insights Into Your Data
  There are a lot of kinds of reports we can build for you, but we’re going to start with an obvious one: that dashboard graph needs to let you select a different time range, so we’ll do that. After that, we’ll dive into both sequences and broadcasts and start exposing more of the info you’ve asked for on them.
• Filter Out Subscribers from Receiving an Email in a Sequence
  Right now, you can exclude subscribers from an entire sequence depending on what tags, forms, segments, or other sequences they are subscribed to. We’re going to be bringing that same power to individual emails in a sequence, giving you even more control over what you communicate to your subscribers.
• Continued Performance Boosting
  We always hold two things in tension on the engineering team: Delivering new features and maintaining the speed and performance of the app. So, while we work on those items mentioned above, we’ll also be working on a number of things in the background to keep everything running smoothly.

I might not always update you on our roadmap in a blog post, so if you’re curious can always follow what’s on our brains at convertkit.com/roadmap. We try to make sure it stays up to date.

With that, I’m going to get back to working on the speed of your broadcasts — seriously, I couldn’t be more excited about what we’re going to be delivering.

Notes from the Engineering Team — July 8, 2016 was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Instead of equity these investors — commonly referred to as “customers” — are given access to the ConvertKit software product each month.

This revolutionary new model of small monthly investments makes it accessible to investors who may not have tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on hand. Rather than deal with wire transfers, ConvertKit accepted credit card payments through the payment processing startup Stripe.

“With a beautiful product and 15–20% month over month growth, ConvertKit is in a great position to lead the blogging market…”

Alright, I can’t continue writing like a generic press release any more. If you haven’t picked up on it already, this is a joke. We didn’t raise funding (Want to know what we did instead? Read this article).

Instead we focused on serving our existing customers, got our expenses under control, and started focusing on profits. You know, like a traditional business.

This post isn’t to brag about what we’ve built or how we’ve accomplished the growth. Instead I just want to say thank you.

Thank you to our customers. We didn’t build the company — you did. $29 at a time you enable us to work each day on the product we love. We get to work remotely from our favorite cities around the world. Working to help bloggers turn pro and make a full-time living from their work.

So as you see blog posts or hear podcast interviews about what I did, or how the ConvertKit team accomplished X, I want you to know your part in it. We couldn’t do it without you taking a bet on a small company trying to change the industry.

The term “angel investor” makes it sound like the investor saved the company. Like an angel came down from heaven. For most investors I think that gives too much credit to their role. The company would have done just fine without them. It’s different with customers. We wouldn’t exist without you.

We’re proud to be independent and customer funded.

Thanks for being a part of the ConvertKit family and enabling us to build what we love.

Seriously, you’re amazing.

Originally published at nathanbarry.com.

Email marketing startup ConvertKit raises $1.8m from large group of angel investors was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The problem with webinars is the motives behind the webinar.

I’m tired of the same old thing happening over and over again. I sign up for a webinar that sounds like a great learning opportunity, but in the end the “teaching” (and I do mean that in the broadest, most non-educational way) is something only mildly helpful and then they ask me to buy something. As it turns out the whole reason for the webinar wasn’t to help me out at all — they just wanted to get in my face to sell something.

The whole thing feels self-serving to the webinar host and gives no real benefit to the customer at all. They use all their scare tactics to back me and the other viewers into a corner. “If you don’t buy X, you’ll never increase revenue.” “We don’t know when this will come around again.” “This kind of deal only happens once a year.” ….

I think scare tactics are stupid. Not only is it a dirty scam, it’s playing on people’s good nature and trust. So many people these days are trying to better themselves whether it’s in the personal lives or their professional lives. Sadly, they are just being preyed upon.

I’m over people tricking people. I have a friend who got scammed into a trial for a product. It was one of those “$1-one-click” upgrades that ended up costing him $75 a month! They didn’t do a good job of explaining the rate increase and he didn’t even realize he was being charged until a few months later.

That obviously left a bad taste in his mouth for that company. He will NEVER suggest them to a friend or speak well of their practices, let alone consider them for any other purchases in the future.

I never want to leave people feeling that way.

I don’t want to create a tactic to get a dollar today when I could create a mutually beneficial relationship over the next 10 years.

I Want to Think Long-Term

As a business, short-term thinking is only going to keep you in the weeds of daily tasks and frantic sales pitches just to keep your head above water. That kind of day-to-day living will never set the stage for a solid future. That’s why I think so many companies use webinars to lure potential customers into a pitch. They need quick money. They need to show an increase in sales and they will do whatever it takes to get there. It doesn’t matter to them how they come off to their audience or if they can keep them as a customer long-term as long as they make that $1 today.

At ConvertKit, we’re playing for keeps.

We believe that’s what sets us apart from other companies that offer webinars. We don’t want to scam somebody or create a tactic to get them to use our product. We actually want to give it away for free. And we do.

How ConvertKit Operates

At ConvertKit we give away almost $300 worth of stuff for free with our webinars. Along with the free entrance to the webinar itself, we give our audience a course to help them grow their revenue, an ebook, and a month’s trial of our service. To be exact and transparent (because that’s what we’re about), that’s $287 worth of our work that we give each person for FREE.

We don’t want them to pay for anything until they know for sure that the product is what is best for them and their business.

I know how it feels when someone is pitching me something with ulterior motives behind it. There’s such a slimy quality to it. We never want to recreate that feeling when pitching ConvertKit. We want to think of pitching as more of a human-to-human connection than human-to-revenue possibility.

We don’t want to tactic our way into getting people’s money. We want to communicate our way into relationship with customers.

During our webinars, you will never hear us create false scarcity or any of those other tactics you’ve heard people use to get you to buy something. In fact, we’ll be super transparent (there’s that word again).

Before I set up a pitch, I will always say, “Hey, just so you know — I’m going to talk about ConvertKit now and I’m going to make you an offer. BUT what I’m going to do differently is I’m not going to ask you to spend any money today. I just want you to try our product. If you end up trying it out and don’t like, that’s totally fine. You can still keep the course and ebook we’re giving you for free. I just want you to try ConvertKit because I believe it will actually help your business.”

Believing in the Product Makes It Easy to Give It Away

No matter how good a product is, if you give it away for free, people will try it. Even if it’s terrible, people will try it if you give it away. Just walk around Costco on Saturday — everyone is hitting up the end-isles for a bites of pre-packaged sausage biscuits and low-fat fruit spreads. The trick is with giving things away for free is actually having a good product that brings them back. The product has to 1. Give new value to it’s user and/or 2. Be better than what they already have.

You see, we believe our tools are going to be so helpful for our audience that once they give it a go, they’ll come back for more.

That’s why we’re not afraid to give ConvertKit away for free.

And if for whatever reason it doesn’t work for them, that’s ok. If someone doesn’t like our product, I don’t want them to give us money just to get money. But because we didn’t try to scam them into giving us hundreds of dollars for some course they don’t want, we at least now have context for a relationship with them in the future if our product ever does make sense to them.

Maybe ConvertKit wasn’t right for them at the time of our webinar, but who’s to say it wouldn’t be six months later. We’d rather have that context of a relationship set up with a customer so that one, three, five or 10 years from now, they will remember the good experience they had with us and get back in touch. Instead of falling into a scam and never being refunded for a product they didn’t even use, they’ll remember how we gave our knowledge, taught them what we know and gave our product to them for free and asked for nothing in return.

And that’s how we think long-term.

Feel the same?

If you’re like us and want to stay away from the gimmicks and tactics, you just might be ready to give all the things away too. Starting this new way of thinking can be a little daunting. I get it- it can be scary to just hand things over for free if you’re use to getting paid for them. So if you need a little guidance, a few examples, or a nudge to in the right direction, here’s a couple things to consider to help you on your way.

1. Think about your audience. What are their needs? Your giveaway should be something that can help them reach their goals.
2. Think about your products, services, and business in general. What do you have to give away? It could be something you’re selling right now, something you need to create, or it could even be your own time. Just make sure it’s something your audience can’t help but want.
3. What you giveaway should have a purpose. Coffee mugs, t-shirts, and posters are fun and can absolutely help spread your brand, but when you’re wanting to generate repeat customers, think about amping up what you give away so they can’t help but come back for more. Make sure it fits at least one of these guidelines:

• Something of value
• Teaches your core values
• Sets you up as an authority
• Creates trust with your audience
• Helps keep up communication with your audience

We’re always big on giving away webinars, courses, subscriptions, ebooks, and sometimes we even go old school and ship a real book. But don’t forget that the attitude behind the giving is just as important as the giving itself. So give with a big heart and teach everything you know. Now, have fun giving all the things away for free!

Why You Shouldn’t Use Webinars To Sell was originally published in Work in Public by Kit on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.