Partner Spotlight: Withfriends

Partner Spotlight is a new series designed to highlight the vendors that partner with ABA to offer discounted products, services, and business opportunities to ABA members. Each installment, we interview a different partner to learn more about their organization and why indie bookstores matter to them. 

Withfriends helps indie bookstores get community support by making it easy to start and manage a membership program. Withfriends makes it incredibly easy to offer things like curated book-of-the-month clubs, exclusive member events, in-store discounts, online discounts, welcome swag kits, monthly book deliveries, and membership drives. They automate all the benefits you pick by integrating with most existing online and POS platforms that bookstores use! 

This week, Bookselling This Week spoke with Withfriends CEO, Kunal Gupta, and his co-founder, Gaurav Maken.

Though today their focus is on helping indie bookstores through Withfriends, Gupta and Maken both have a long history of helping small businesses succeed. 

Before founding Withfriends, Gupta spent about ten years running a music venue in New York that was an accidental incubator for local businesses.

“It was called Silent Barn. It was a music venue, but it was never just a music venue,” Gupta recalled. “Even in the tiniest Silent Barn incarnation, there was a music venue and then three or four other businesses running around it.”

Eventually the venue moved to a bigger space in Bushwick and was able to support many more indie businesses.

“It was beautiful,” Gupta said. “There was a library, someone making handmade synthesizers, a barber shop, even a catering service. Events would bring people in, and then they would encounter these other businesses. And often those businesses would outgrow our place and move to their own building.”

Soon, Gupta started selling memberships for some of the Silent Barn businesses, and that led to what would become Withfriends: a company devoted entirely to helping small businesses sell and manage membership programs.

“Around four or five years ago, more and more bookstores started to work with us,” Gupta explained. “And I just fell in love with that market.”

His business partner, Maken, took a different path to Withfriends. Since his mother was a librarian, books were a constant in Maken’s life, but before he started working with small businesses, he spent some time at Amazon.

“After college, I joined Amazon,” he explained, “and I was really good at that. But my heart wasn’t in it.”

So he left and joined a small startup: Instacart. 

“When I joined, we never thought it would be that big. But at Instacart, I discovered where my passion lies: in technology that helps small businesses,” Maken said. He left instacart, and started helping plant-based food companies build out their e-commerce side. Brands made over $5MM in additional sales with his help!

He continued to work with and invest in small businesses until he ran into Gupta earlier this year. The pair met by chance, but immediately hit it off.

“Gaurav was at a coworking space, and he’s like, ‘What are you up to?’ ” Gupta recalled. “I described my journey and he said, ‘Can I join you?’ ”

“When I learned what Kunal was working on, I was like, ‘I can rectify my Amazon mistakes. I love helping small businesses. And I love books.’ So I quit my job and we started working together,” Maken said.

The two are the sole employees at Withfriends, and together, their experience makes them perfectly situated to help stores grow through integrated membership programs.

While they continue to support some of their earliest customers (organizations that range from cat sanctuaries to chocolate shops), Gupta explained that these days, Withfriends mainly works with bookstores.

“There’s something magical about bookstores,” he said, “I love booksellers, and their communities support them in a way I’ve never seen in any other segment!”

Though more and more bookstores are leaning into subscription boxes and membership programs, setting them up independently can be intimidating. And with the holidays coming up, Gupta and Maken know just how valuable a bookstore’s time, staff, and resources are, so Withfriends promises quick and easy setup, integration, and automation.

In fact, Gupta and Maken can onboard a new bookstore within just a few hours.

“It’s super easy to join. The most you have to do is click a few buttons,” Maken explained. “One of the best things [about our work experience] is we get to know all the best practices. So we have some suggested membership tiers. We have perks that we already know work. And we have a menu with other things the store can choose from.” 

“We also make sure that those are always personalized to you. Because the beauty of the indie bookstore is that the staff's personality comes through, and we never want to take that away,” he said.

Once Withfriends is set up, it will automatically offer memberships to customers as they shop online, making it easy to passively gain members. They also provide posters and suggested language to help the bookstore attract interest and start selling memberships in person.

“There are also other things like discounts, member events, and sending merch or the Book of the Month to people.” Gupta said. “All that stuff has a high level of automation. We're aiming for people to spend about two to three hours a month on their entire membership program.”

The entire process is designed to be as stress-free as possible.

“Staff has very little to learn,” Gupta explained. “We provide all the technical glue so that you don’t have to be scared of growing your membership program.”

“We want to empower bookstores to reconnect with the reason they started bookselling,” Maken said. “The reality is that a lot of bookstores are stressing out about bills or about meeting next month's rent. We want to take some of that away by giving the community a chance to support them.”

“Your community wants to support you!” he said. “We’ve figured out exactly how that can happen. We know what works. Let us do it for you.”

Bookstores that are interested in Withfriends can visit their website to learn more. ABA Members are eligible for 50% off the monthly plan cost.

Withfriends is also hosting a webinar on October 16, 2024, at 12:00 pm PT, focusing on how indie bookstores can allow their community to support them with memberships. Register now!