What did you do to increase supporters?

Disclaimer: I never had a support only product.

I think you should place the CTA to support in more prominent places (not just the footer but the header of the newsletter). Preferably with social proof and clear benefits.

Check out the recent Growth Design's Signal case study on How to Ethically Boost Your Revenues by @louisxavierl and @danbe

• place it in a prominent place and don't make it look like an ad
• give them a reason WHY with clear user benefits
• make their contribution feel significant
• remove payment friction and reduce choices
• utilize social proof
• make the end experience memorable
• have a human touch at the end, a personal message from your team with a pic

I recently bought a Javascript course, even though I have stopped actively developing. It had two unique tactics that pushed me to purchase it, and I think it might be helpful to try in your case.

1. Personalized email that resonates with your audience
2. Regional pricing

Selling me the course started with a great email from the course creator.

This email resonated with me and probably with a lot of developers. I share his pain when it comes to asking for money, and I loved his course when he sent it out as a regular newsletter. The newsletter was amazingly valuable when he sent it out free of cost. So that email hooked me and got me to his website to check out what kind of offer he had.

The sales copy is excellent and again resonated well, but what made this a no-brainer was at the bottom.

This is the first time I have seen regional pricing on a course. Even though I have no current plans of getting back into development, I felt it only fair to contribute because I got insane value earlier with their content. And at that price, it was a pretty easy decision to make.

To be totally honest I often see people failing on platforms like Patreon/BuyMeACoffee (even people with a solid follower base of 50k+). Maybe you should consider changing your pricing strategy. If you really want to keep your main product free, one option would be a very generous free tier and a paid subscription for your „superfans“.

And even if you want to keep your product 100% free (without a premium tier), you can add a „Pricing“ sub-page (I often look for those first when visiting a new SaaS landing page). And on that page you show two „pseudo-tiers“:

1. BeeTrendy User (simple signup)
2. BeeTrendy Supporter (redirects to BuyMeACoffee or API-integration)