I've been building IRL communities for over a decade—music venues, art spaces, the kinds of places that make cities worth living in. I even created a membership platform to help event organizers get community support that went through Y Combinator.

While I was doing that, I started working with bookstores in 2020 and felt how important they were to society, and how killer the founders and booksellers were, and how much their communities were dying to support them with memberships. COVID got in the way of me working with them then, but in late 2024, I spoke with a dozen friends who run bookstores, and decided to create this company to focus on helping bookstores succeed.

So here we are. Withfriends helps indie bookstores create and sell memberships so their communities can support them directly.