ThreadBasket 2.0

We onboarded a bunch of new affiliates in January and February and it clearly paid off. Though it took a lot of time to find them and eventually onboard them, the minute we got a fairly big YouTuber on board, getting new affiliates of decent size was no longer a problem.

Thanks to our affiliates, we managed reach more than 3,000€ MRR! :)

We launched with a special offer for everyone who decided to grab annual plans. This turned out to be an excellent idea. The annual plans weren't just cheaper and gave people so much more value in terms of download credits.

They were also more attractive because we decided to test something that we had observed with JetBrains. We're not fans of discounts and promotions because we believe it promotes the wrong behaviours. So we decided to implement loyalty-based pricing for our yearly plans.

That means, every year you remain subscribed, your annual plan get cheaper. Depending on your plan, you can technically get 60% off the monthly plan if you stick around until the 3rd year.

This clearly seemed attractive to our most loyal customers. And it also give us a slightly more sticky product, helping to maintain stable revenue long term.

In May 2020 we finally moved into our private beta with a larger set of customers as well as prospective customers. The idea as to give people firsthand access for free, let them use the platform and also create some buzz within our social media channels.

We decided to pick a small group of our most loyal and highest-grossing customers from ThreadBasket 1.0 for the Alpha phase.

We ran the entire thing as a build-in-public project, except that it wasn't public, but simply a smaller circle. We knew we would get great feedback from our customers. And we did.

In October 2019 we started working on the new platform. To speed up development, we decided to use a Bootstrap template rather than trying to create everything on our own.

Being constrained by the theme actually turned out to make it a lot easier to create mockups, integrate other features and just overall get things done.

After a difficult year for our first business model "ThreadBasket 1.0", we had to make a decision. Having built our own Design API, we were in a position to finally build on top of it. So we decided to go for a business model which we new was time-tested, growing and feasible within our niche.

We knew that this new business model would allow us to play in a bigger market, differentiate ourselves from competitors and while delivering less revenue in the short term, we knew it would be more stable and predictable.

And that was what we needed.