Soapbox Project

It's been a long summer of broken legs + travel plans and community growth has been slow but engagement has been AWESOME. We had 4 member-hosted events in August, people have been keeping up with member matching, we've had incredible speakers on our fireside chats, and finally, we've crossed $400 MRR.

We have 75 paying members in our community and a little over 100 in all, which is another really exciting milestone!

(It's a fully paid membership community but a few people got in when we were first launching -- through events, referrals, and random other experiments.)

The community also looks a lot more polished so YAY.

I recently (in March 21) launched my paid membership community for social impact.

I'm trying out mini-experiments each month. In June, DESPITE HAVING A BROKEN LEG and being super out of it with painkillers and pain, I launched our most successful (in terms of engagement) experiment so far!

We offered 1:1 member matching (Soap Buds, as we lovingly called it because our community is Soapbox Project). 30 out of our 60 paying members opted in!

It's a simple Airtable form that just asks for your name, preferred email, and up to 3 interests (e.g. food waste, climate tech).

I sent the Airtable form via email and also embedded it in our Circle community. Once people started to fill it out, I manually matched folks according to their interests, sent them an email on who the other person is, linked them to their community intro post/reminded them to make an intro post, said what their shared interest(s) was/were, and how to meet.

I even set up a reservation system for our community lounge, a virtual Mixily venue inside our Circle community, in case people didn't have a Zoom link or Hangouts link they knew how to set up.

Finally, I rolled out a points system -- 5 points for opting in, 5 points for completing a chat, and TWENTY FIVE POINTS for writing about it in the community -- yay for user-generated content and an easy way to understand what people are looking for!

We now have a leaderboard embedded & I'll be getting coffee (or drink of choice) for the winner. We have a few other points incentives too.

I launched my community in early March & decided to close our 50 "Founding Changemaker" spots at the end of April. I pretty much got lazy and still haven't shut down my landing page for it, and somehow we not only reached our goal of 50; 7 extra people also sneaked in and it's GREAT!

We also have three potential churns. I've paused their accounts but they've both messaged me saying they don't know that they can commit to another community. TBD on how it goes - I've offered them to stay on for 2 more months to see if they want to re-engage in a bit or cancel entirely.

I launched my community earlier in March (see last milestone) and got 15? signups on the first day.

Then, basically silence for the next 3 weeks - something wasn't working.

I tweaked the messaging entirely. It used to be logistics-focused (e.g. this is what you'll get) and now it's more visionary, describing how you'll FEEL when you join our group of friends fighting climate change and multiplying our impact together.

Got 11 signups after tweaking the messaging!

We currently have 4,000 newsletter subscribers so I decided to test out our new Circle community!

It makes social impact and climate action easy for busy people - we have premium resources like templates, a job board, conversation starters, and more ways to make this subject approachable and actually make a meaningful difference.

Today is day 1 of launch and for the beta, we're doing $4.99 pricing (which will go up as we add features but locked in forever for our first 50 beta peeps). Got 10 customers so far and $50 MRR!

I'm really excited to see how this grows.

We just hit 20k pageviews (15k unique pageviews) and a 53% bounce rate!

Some things that worked:

• Press (got featured in the New York Times at the end of December: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/28/style/self-care/how-to-buy-less.html)
• Q&As with other sustainability founders and changemakers like the Imperfect Foods sustainability manager (www.soapboxproject.org/journal)
• Referral program, sorta (I don't think it played a huge part in our growth though)

I just went full-time on Soapbox Project in September 2020. It was actually a by-product of the pandemic, so I didn't feel like I was yet "ready" to take it on, but I knew I had to commit to it.

Fast forward to December, I finally made enough money to pay rent! (Spoiler: I'm living with friends until I get my own place, so my rent is cheap, but it feels really nice to say.)

I made $400 from sponsors this month for Changeletter, our newsletter that sends free bite-sized climate action plans. (It's the easiest way to fight climate change & I hope to see you there.)

Most of the sponsors came from a gift guide we made of 50 eco-friendly holiday gifts. I followed up with them via an email campaign and asked to meet/suggest collabs. It worked decently well!

Then, today, we launched an event to write letters to people who are currently incarcerated. We got 21 signups today alone & each ticket was roughly 10 bucks. We crossed over $600 bucks!