Rebel Book Club
Not Your Average Book Club
Last month we celebrated our 5th birthday!
📚 60 Books
🔖 18 Million Pages Read
💃🏼1000 Active Members
🌎 30 cities represented
🍸A lot of book-inspired cocktails
A big thank you to all of our curious, kind and action-focused members and everyone who have sharpened their reading habits with us so far.
June theme: Gender Bias
June book: Invisible Women
“I feel like a different person. I have a richer and different perspective on the world. I never read much non-fiction before I joined.” - Sarah
Join the club > rebelbook.club 🎊
First time we've tipped over this mark. Now to make them true fans and focus on retention.
500th Member 27th Feb, 2019 - 3 years 10 months
600th Member 27th August, 2019 - 4 years 4 months
700th Member 23rd October, 2019 - 4 years 6 months
800th Member 28th December, 2019 - 4 years 8 months
900th Member 3rd February, 2020 - 4 years 10 months
1000th Member 6th March, 2020 - 4 years 11 months
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Well done!
Today, we got the chance to talk to Indie Hackers about our road - and reading - so far. Check out the interview to learn more about how we got started and what challenges we’ve faced.
ps there was definitely some 'planning ahead' ;)
2019 Dashboard (Vs 2018)
🚗 Unique users 21k (7k)
📝 Applications 1918 (780)
🦸🏽♀ New Members 1020 (450)
⛔ Cancellations 626 (230)
💭 Meet-up attendees 2120 (775)
💷 Revenue £115k (£45k)
👸🏽 Active Members 802 (393)
🌃 Cities 5 (2)
📚 Game-changing books 12 (12)
2020-RBC TEAM VISION 👓
- Deliver better members experience.
- Communicate value of membership to potential RBC members.
- Start supporting literacy projects.
- Build brand partnerships.
- Accelerate our reading habits!
Revenue Milestone @Rebel Book Club
2015: £5,083 (8 months)
2016: £19,290
2017: £29,673
2018: £46,683
2019: £100,000 (Nov 27th)
More importantly, margin after costs:
2015: 35%
2016: 46%
2017: 46%
2018: 31%
2019: 25% (forecast)
No team costs until 2019...just for fun :)
We split small profits in first few years between investing back in RBC, tax + end of year bonus.
We start paying VAT in 2020 + PAYE/NICs so costs jump up. But with crowdfunding we can invest in people, membership experience, marketing and....books.
We reached our overfunding target of £150,000 after 25 days from 299 investors.
We plan to build up a stronger value proposition and membership UX using no code tools and then push in the new year to new cites and workplace partnerships.
Will be writing up what we've learnt during our fundraise journey over the last few months and share soon.
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Here's the story :) https://medium.com/@benkeene/crowdfunding-rebelbookclub-407c53fd27de
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Congrats Ben! Well done! Would like to hear more how campaign went.
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That's an amazing result, congrats!
For those interested, here's how our membership at Rebel Book Club has grown organically over the past 54 months.
'Active Members' = Total Paying Monthly Members + New Joiners - Cancellations
Month 1: May 2015 > 24 Members
Month 13: May 2016 > 100 Members
Month 35: March 2018 > 200 Members
Month 41: Sept 2018 > 300 Members
Month 45: Jan 2019 > 400 Members
Month 46: Feb 2019 > 500 Members
Month 52: Aug 2019 > 600 Members
Month 54: Oct 2019 > 700 Members
Reasons for growth spurts:
2015/16 - new idea energy / early adopters
Autumn 2018 - Moved from working on RBC in our spare time to 2 days/week
Jan/Feb 2019 - Automated applications + New Year surge
Aug-Oct 2019 - Fundraise push
The positive trend is that in any month we've always had more people join than leave.
So if we can improve the membership experience, conversion rate and new applications the business will grow nicely.
Any questions please ask and thank you for your interest. We'll be closing our funding round at £150,000 (currently £138,000) all SEIS > crowdcube.com/rebelbookclub
Ben & Ben
We reached our Crowdfunding target of £100,000 after 7 days with over 150 investors.
Now overfunding up to £150,000.
Exciting times.
Capital at Risk.
https://crowdcube.com/rebelbookclub
Got a great crowd of investors including publishers, private equity experts, growth marketeers, designers, & of course most importantly indie hackers including legends @bentossel
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Good job. How long did you spend preparing the crowdfunding?
What made you pick crowdcube over Seedrs?-
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Cheers Sam.
2 months prep.
Crowdcube = slightly cheaper (negotiated) + bigger investor community.
Wrote up our report here > https://medium.com/@benkeene/crowdfunding-rebelbookclub-407c53fd27de
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Great story. I am going for a Crowdcube campaign as well :)
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Thanks so much for sharing, Ben. Wish you all the best.
Been live https://www.crowdcube.com/rebelbookclub for 3 days and getting some good traction.
Half our investors so far are under 30, of which 70% (from our community) are women.
Doing a digital demo at 1pm today > https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_vhE_6WTeSAu6f-E9w6iUcg
Looking for Angels who want to help build the best book club in the world!
We know there's huge potential to scale this community and business and we're excited to make it happen. Read a bit more below about our business plan, Q&A and if you're interested, let's chat!
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