As you've probably heard, we've launched our open beta, with the most significant change being a 14-day free trial for new users. We've been wanting to do this for a while, for a few reasons. While Patreon has been great for building our community, users interested in LegendKeeper had to jump through a ton of hoops (10 hoops--we counted) just to try out LK. With the addition of the trial, we've lowered that to just 2-3 hoops (Lander -> Google/Email Login).
Already we're seeing a ton of new people trying out LK, which we are super stoked about. New users signing up with our new billing system also gives us a bigger cut of the revenue, which we can turn around and spend on making LK better.
Billing Systems
This week, Braden and Justin focused on getting our new Stripe integration into LK, with all the little in-app fixins' for trial status, opening your cart, managing your subscription, etc. Stripe is a payment platform that enables us to accept payments from users directly, without having to go through Patreon. Stripe Checkout made the visual parts of this pretty easy; it's like an all-in-one no-code shopping cart for your app. Their billing system also manages all of the subscription lifecycle stuff, and even handles stuff like prorating upgrades to yearly subs, canceling and pausing your subscription, etc.
Communications
Adam focused on our new marketing emails, blog posts, social media presence; all the million little pieces that go into actually *telling* people about LK, something we can do more confidently now that we can send people straight into a free trial. Justin also made some kickass assets for these moments, such as the awesome flag you can see in this tweet: https://twitter.com/legendkeeperapp/status/1482091883832791041
Moving Forward
Honestly for me (Braden here), while I'm excited about this change, I'm more excited about what comes after. This has been a big looming item on our to-do list (and we're still not done), but once it's out of the way, we can focus more on the product itself with even more feedback.
Seriously, there's SO MUCH STUFF I want to do. Boards need a big Justin makeover and more features, Atlas needs more annotation tools, templates and content need to be more easily shareable, the editor needs a fresh coat of paint, bugs need to be fixed, all in accordance with what you all need. The list goes on... Obviously, I'm proud of LK's current state, but I'm so excited to continue making LK better. I hope that our business model gives us the fuel to be able to innovate and improve for years and years.
Anyways, I'm just really stoked to work on LK--we all are. We'll continue to post updates on Patreon for a while, but now there's going to be a new generation of users that have never seen our Patreon page. One of my favorite things about Patreon is the comments, so we want to keep the spirit of that going forward. We've got a few ideas for that, which we'll execute in the next couple of weeks. And of course, the Discord is always a lively place to chat all things LK.
Anyways, thank you to every LegendKeeper user for your support. We would not have made it this far without you!
TEAM LK