DISRUPTO BLOG

One thing we’ve always wanted to do with Steepster was start a tea of the month club. The idea was simple: every month we’d introduce people to delicious and unfamiliar loose-leaf teas from all around the world. Subscribers would learn about tea culture and discover new tea companies with each monthly box.

But there were so many moving parts to making this subscription happen: to do it right, we had to set up a payment gateway and merchant account, integrate recurring billing and work with CRM and support tools to identify and respond to any problems that arose. And that’s aside from working with tea companies, sourcing and tasting the tea, packaging it up and shipping it out. When we first started Steepster, we had a team of three, bills to pay and other commitments. We would’ve had to put in a disproportionate amount of time and energy up front.

Since then, we’ve grown to a team of eight. We’ve worked with big media clients, startups and met and talked to loads of interesting creative folk. We looked at the problems we faced with Steepster and saw that there were others with similar challenges. They were big companies struggling to keep up with complicated platforms and technologies. Online communities trying to figure out how to sustain themselves in ways other than advertising. Individuals trying to turn their hobbies into something they could do for a living.

The more we thought about the subscription format, the more it made sense for a lot of these people. If you’re a small team who’s operating a blog or community site, or individual pursuing a hobby in your spare time, running a full online store is usually out of the question. Think about the logistics of even selling things on eBay and Etsy: you have to be on call, waiting to fill orders. There’s a lot of uncertainty—you could go days without any traffic and then suddenly get a flood of orders in a few hours because you got linked to on Boing Boing. With a subscription, on the other hand, you know exactly how many people are signed up for each cycle. You can plan ahead. You can order things in bulk. Negotiate discounts. Set aside a few days in a row to pack and ship orders.

We began looking for solutions. This has to exist already, we said, there has to be an easy way to run a subscription program. But there wasn’t. All the existing solutions were either fatally incomplete or required a deep technical understanding.

So we decided to build it ourselves. We’ve been working on it for the past few months, and we’re excited to put it out into the world today. It’s called Memberly. Memberly helps creative people and businesses run their own subscription programs.

For starters, we automate the billing, let you manage communications with your customers from one place, and enable you to set up a gorgeous subscription page without touching a single line of code. We’ve also been building out tools to ease fulfillment, and we’ll continue to improve the experience. That way, providers don’t have to worry about the technology or site experience, and can instead focus on what’s unique to them.

We’re also thrilled to announce that we’re our own first customer. The Steepster tea of the month club becomes a reality today, with our new Steepster Select subscription, powered by Memberly.

Along with Steepster Select, we’re launching with Little Otsu Living Things, a quarterly subscription of illustrated books from Little Otsu, a Portland-based independent publisher. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out more subscriptions, both physical and digital, product and service, with other providers in categories like food, art, music, photography and more. If you have something to offer, we’d love to talk.

Our goal is to help people make a living doing what they love. If you want to start a subscription service, you don’t need to make a huge upfront investment in the technology anymore. All you need is something you’re passionate about and the drive to deliver it to your customers. Here are the tools. How will you use them? If five hundred people subscribe to you, what kind of value will you bring into the world?

Head over to member.ly and tell us.

We’re teaching another class at General Assembly. Our first, called “Making it in Midtown” was about pitching your startup to media companies. This next one’s called “Design for Entrepreneurs and Hackers.” Here’s a brief description of the class, which will meet once a week for four weeks (we’ll post a link once you can start signing up for it):

Design for Entrepreneurs and Hackers

Even if you don’t have the word “designer” in your title, you’re already making design decisions. This class is for entrepreneurs presenting mockups, engineers building prototypes and those within a startup responsible for evaluating products. You’ll come away from the class with a deeper understanding of design and a set of tools and guidelines you can apply immediately toward improving your product.

Sound like you? Post a response here or send an email to jack@disrupto.com and tell us: what are some specific things you’d like to see us address in this class?

Update (5/23): the class is now open for registration