‘30 second’ summary
We are launching a time-limited ‘introduce a friend’ offer that could see you benefit by up to £2,000 per new user that you introduce to us. The reward money can be used for anything on the understanding that it helps your business. There is no limit to the number of new users that you can introduce. Ideally for us we will be connected with the potential new user before Christmas to plan for a go-live date in the first few months of 2025.
This way, instead of us spending money with Meta or Google on sales activity, we can spend it with you, keeping it within our community, helping us grow together.
All the important detail is below but if you have any questions or comments do message me on discord or via steve@growing-good.co.uk.
Some context
Blimey. We’re approaching two years since our first truly independent user, Barcombe Nurseries, went live on our platform in Feb 2023. Luckily there have been relatively few bumps in the road and overall we’re really proud of the progress we have made, both in terms of the ever-evolving capability within the platform and how our community of users has grown.
A tech business like Growing Good is expensive to bring to market and so far, we have invested as many £’s as possible in talented humans that write code and make the product better for you to use. Hopefully you can see that our speed of development is continuing to increase, and this Monday we welcome Karen to our team who is our first QA Engineer, she is professional quality assurance and will spend 100% of her time thoroughly testing new features that are due for release to you (she does this by building clever automation programmes rather than sat clicking a mouse like you and me) - evidence of the volume of work we are now handling. What we haven’t spent any money on is sales and marketing - this has been for a couple of main reasons, 1. budget has been limited and we have needed to prioritise, and 2. we have been purposefully very product-focused. A ‘build it and they will come’ type of mindset.
This has worked well for us to-date as user-numbers continue to grow organically. Just last week we ‘signed-up’ another 2 new, well-established box schemes that we’re very excited to have coming on board. We look forward to introducing them in the new year!
However, to make our model really work in the long term (i.e. relatively low fees for a very specialist product) we need to turn our attention to growing our user numbers further.
BUT…. we don’t want to spend our money on predictable sales and marketing channels - further lining the pockets of big tech and magic ‘AI driven lead-generation’ services, or sponsoring every event or podcast going (aside from the Oxford Real Farming Conference in Jan!). We want to spend the money on you, with you. To do that we have used our imagination to create a model that hopefully means we can all gain exponentially from attracting new users to GG to drive further investment in our business, and yours.
It’s an introduce a friend scheme with a twist.
Here’s how it works
You introduce a new user to our platform and we pay you real cash towards investment in your business. Proper money too - starting at £250 for introducing a start-up veg scheme to £2,000 for one that is well established.
The money is payable to you as soon as they go live and can be used on anything as long as you can explain how it will benefit your business (this can happen quickly, Emma from Shropshire Organics went live 7 working days after her demo call!). Your money can be spent on pure marketing - leaflet design and drops, digital marketing, new branding etc, or packaging, a new laptop, a fancy conveyor belt for the packing shed - absolutely anything, as long as it helps move your business forward.
To make your ‘pitch’ easier, we’ll also offer the new user a special ‘friend of GG’ offer; they won’t pay platform fees for their first 2 months (just paying the 1.25% payment processing fee) and will benefit from additional onboarding and web design support - we’ll make life as easy as possible to get their business online and looking its best with us.
The scheme will be open between now and the end of March 2025. To be eligible for the ‘Let’s grow together’ investment the new user you introduce must be onboarding by the end of March and be live by the end of May 25.
The more orders per week the new user has today, the higher your investment budget. There are no limits to the number of new users you can introduce, so a £1,000 reward could be made up of x4 start-up’s or x1 established scheme with more than 250 orders per week right now.
Orders per week of the new user | Investment reward per introduction |
Up to 49 | £250 |
50 to 149 | £500 |
150 to 249 | £750 |
250 to 499 | £1,000 |
500 to 749 | £1,500 |
750 and above | £2,000 |
Why does it work?
We’re spending less than a typical SaaS/tech firm would usually need to on ‘user acquisition’ - instead of regular advertising and ‘lead-generation’ channels, or hiring a dedicated ‘sales person’, we’d rather spend it on you.
We only spend money in return for new users - it’s 100% effective .
You benefit from helping us grow our user community in two ways;
1. via a direct injection of capital
2. by enjoying the improvements in our technology as we continue to invest in the product
We benefit because the investment boost we provide helps to grow your business and in turn our long-term revenue.
Why now?
We know from experience that this is the right time of year to be talking to prospective users - ideally the office work is done and switch is made before the 2025 growing season comes to life in the Spring.
We’re heading into our ‘year 3’ and need to focus on growing our community to make our model really work.
Our platform is now clearly more capable than any alternative on the market and we are in a position to make the onboarding process as smooth as possible - it should be an easy sell!
I know a few potential users, what should I do?
Firstly, make contact with them and put your best sales hat on! Feel free to explain the offer and context - once you have created some interest ask them to email me personally (steve@growing-good.co.uk) saying that they’d be interested to learn more and who it was that introduced them.
We’ll take it from there and be really nice to them! From our POV, that’s all you need to do, but, if you were keen to help support them through onboarding that would be really appreciated too.
We’ll confirm your reward based on their current order numbers and keep you informed of the likely go-live date.
You decide what you’d like to spend your money on (or if you’d like to ‘bank it’ if planning to introduce a number of new users)
You provide evidence of intended spending and once the new user is live we may the payment to you.