happy birthday, leap.club. it's our time to run!
we believe that our hard work (thanks to the amazing folks who’ve built with us) has opened up a massive opportunity for us: to build india’s (and hopefully the world’s) largest network for women. yes, we dream big. and because of our strong mission and all the member love we’ve received in the past 3 years, we feel that this opportunity now is a responsibility.
talk to anyone building a startup and 11/10 times they will compare the journey to a rollercoaster. it's the same for us. someone recently exclaimed that 1 year at leap.club = 5 regular years, and we couldn’t agree more!
now it's our turn to take the roller coaster experience up a notch and to scale. when we sit back and reflect on the last 3 years, it's easy to break into a reflective mood and talk about the wins and losses, but we want to keep it short this time and focus on the future.
1. better understanding and defining what leap.club is
we know that definitions keep evolving but this one defines us quite well as we have seen it play out in the last 3 years: leap.club is a place. it's not a verb, it’s not a thing to do, it's not just an app. it’s a place where women come together and win — both socially and professionally — by virtue of being there together.
we recently heard kunal shah say the same about cred in a podcast and couldn’t help but borrow the analogy!
2. ambitious scaling - let’s make the place bigger
networks don’t divide when you share them, they multiply.
we want to onboard more members onto leap.club; to exit 2023 with 100,000 members and get to 1 mil members in the next 3 years. during our journey from 0 to 13,000+ members we learnt that the value of the network increases exponentially when there are more members. we’ve seen this at an initial stage, and we’re sure our early members will agree. leap.club is where women discover their next job, a new friend, a business partner, a community with shared interests. all of this grows with more women. and this brings us much closer to our mission becoming a reality.
when we started building leap.club in may 2020, we launched a 1-pager website and invited women to join the waitlist for a new network. what followed was pretty incredible — we had nearly 1,000 women join the waitlist in the first month. this number went up to ~25,000 (all organically) over the next 24 months. we grew slowly (by choice) but executed impatiently to understand why members join, why they stay back, and what's important to them. it’s now our time to scale.
3. all our members are now members for life
each of our journeys look different and what we need from the community changes as we progress. today you might become a member to network with amazing women. a month from now, you may need a business partner, or want a new friend. a few years later, you want to mentor other women. we want leap.club to be the place you always come to at all these stages. with this in mind, we’ve removed the annual renewal fee and all our new and old members are now be members for life. we had around ~2000 members who churned in the last 3 years - we’re going back and renewing some of their memberships too and we hope they give us another chance :)
here’s to growing old together and building a bigger place while we are at it.
we read somewhere that only 2% of the companies that start make it to their 10th birthday. we hope to re-read this post 7 years from now, and get back to writing our goals for the next decade.
always 1% done.
- ragini, anand and all your friends at leap.club (the past, present and future)