2023 A Year of remarkable growth


New publishers, features, compliance, markets and team expansion at Flip-Pay

This was a year of well coordinated, explosive growth for Flip-Pay and a significant refactoring of the business to take us into the future. We had planned for the year well in advance, but the level of growth and transformation took us all by surprise.

2024 is already shaping up to be another busy year in terms of customer deployments and it's only the beginning of January. Our products are excellent and the feature roadmap for this year will certainly catch the eye of the market.

For those of you who do not know what we do, Flip-Pay builds innovative content monetization solutions for the digital publishing industry. Ours is a SAAS platform that can be deployed in news, magazines, streaming, events, memberships and more. The end to end platform handles everything from the customer engagement, paywall, reg-walls, first party data capture, communications, customer self service tools, print and digital subscription management, payments, analytics, reporting, finance, newsletters and provides your staff with all the customer service tools to manage your growing subscription base. Our tech integrates with most payment processors, supports Google Pay / Apple Pay, has full localization features and can be deployed by your tech team quickly (or by our integrations engineering team, whose motto is, “if it has an API, we can integrate with it”).


Expanding our customer base and markets :

In 2023, we tripled the number of publishers and sites with whom we partner, while opening up new services and market sectors. See below for examples by market sector:

  • Multi-state regional - US based publisher located in 8 states, 28 markets, 41 print publications and 24 hyper local web properties. We deliver print, e-paper, identity, and soon voluntary contribution solutions for this forward-thinking and expanding publisher.
  • Global news brand - Deployed our voluntary contribution solution to 100 million unique visitors a month.
  • Comedy - Our edgiest comedy customer - Deployed a premium subscription and gifting solution with ad-free options.
  • Sports - 20 million visits per month. Deployed ad-free offering and also full membership, identity and digital consumables for a new Fantasy Football service launching in Jan ’24
  • Events - Non-Profit. Deployed our in-person and virtual events solution, along with identity and membership.
  • Magazines - Deployed a print delivery solution and digital subscription services for a UK & Ireland based lifestyle brand.
  • B2B Publisher - Deployed membership and digital content gating, with group / enterprise subscriptions.

The above select examples show the diversity of the types of clients we now work with and the flexibility of our platform to monetize any possible deployment and user journey.


Innovating for success : Exciting new features and services.

While 2023 saw continuous development of existing features, security and scale, we also added the following new features to our suite of solutions:

  • Voluntary Contributions - A Guardian-style contributions solution that can be rapidly customized and deployed to any title
  • Events - The ability to mix subscriptions / memberships with the sale of physical and virtual events.
  • Advanced Gifting - An all new GDPR-compliant gifting solution for publishers
  • Digital Consumables - Combine subscriptions with packs (bundles) of digital consumable elements. For example, access to video streams, podcasts, chat features, single topic articles (ie sports only) and more
  • Churn Dashboards - New acquisition and churn dashboard reporting designed to help minimize churn and maximize retention
  • PDF receipts and reporting - PDF invoicing supplied with email and also incorporated in our new self service member center.
  • Self Service Member Center - A self service tool that can be embedded into an existing accounts page or deployed as a modal - giving the consumer the power to manage their own subscriptions (and reducing load on customer service reps)
  • Redesigned API and JS deployments - Ground-up rebuild of implementation tools to make deployments faster, more secure and simpler to test.

As always, we are an engineering focused company which is driven by our clients requirements. We meet frequently with our customers, listen to their needs and this shapes our roadmap.

Our mission is to provide our clients with the latest toolset that removes the necessity to have multiple vendors and enables you to simplify your tech stack.


Growing our team : Welcoming new talent and expertise

In 2023 we tripled our headcount, not just in development, but also in testing, security, compliance, project management and finance.

We did not expand our sales team this year, as much of our business came in from referrals.

It is anticipated that the company will scale again this year to meet the growing demand for Flip-Pay worldwide and to support the new initiatives we have for Q1/2 2024.

The staff we hire has to fit into our culture and values. They need to be smart, good communicators, customer-focused, self-motivated and innovative. 90% of all staff have engineering backgrounds and are natural problem solvers.


Compliance : Refactoring the business for growth and scale.

As part of the growth plan, we also invested in formal and independent accreditation for a number of strategic compliance initiatives. This involved a complete re-think of how we plan and schedule our customer deployments. Everything changed in terms of security, development, testing, continuity, processes, policies and more. Within six months we had achieved the following formal accreditations.

  • SOC II - Type I
  • SOC II - Type II
  • ISO 27001:2022
  • GDPR / CCPA
  • PCI DSS

This year, we’ll also undertake the NIST CSF (Cyber Security Framework) and continue to operate under the above frameworks to protect both Flip-Pay, our partners and customer data privacy.


State of the market

Flip-Pay is seeing significant gains from a number of core customer categories :

  • Publishers moving from legacy providers like Naviga and Piano - where Flip-Pay replaces multiple products - lowering support and operational costs and simplifying the tech stack
  • Publishers looking to deploy content monetization journeys for the first time
  • Publishers looking to replace in-house organic legacy solutions
  • Publishers looking to deploy voluntary contribution solutions
  • Publishers using Stripe subscriptions, who need advanced features and flexibility
  • Advanced large publishers looking for heavily customized, boutique implementations into existing business models

This year we will add a new category, a completely self-service SAAS solution for smaller digital publishers/content creators - allowing them to get up and running quickly with pre-built models with everything required available right out of the box. This will support memberships, paywalls, contributions, reg-walls and events.


The road forward :

To summarize, in 2023 we saw significant growth in the business with lots of new and exciting digital publishers selecting Flip-Pay over other solutions in the market. The key takeaways from the feedback we’ve garnered is that our customers love our support, responsiveness, evolving toolset and attention to detail.

We planned for growth with a move to full industry standard compliance and a radical transformation of the tools we use for support ticketing, feature requests and more.

2024 will see the launch of self service products, a new advanced visual customer journey builder, new segmentation tools, a new transactional email builder and a whole new approach to the analytics dashboards to put more power at the fingertips of our users. We're also heavily integrating A.I. into our dashboards, which, once development is complete, we'll release more information about this.

As always, we'll continue to be driven by our customers needs and real world experiences. This year we'll formalize this by setting up virtual user groups to allow customers to communicate directly with each other. One of the things we've found is that publishers want to leverage ideas and think outside of their respective boxes. This will be a channel that supports and drives innovation and allows publishers to collaborate at a time of market uncertainty. We are still working out the details on this but plan to have this operational in Q2.

Finally, we'll be actively present and visible in the marketplace this year as we've avoided conferences, trade shows etc up until this point. With our momentum into 2024, now is the time to spread the word at a few select events to share and illustrate how we can drive results for publishers and why our customers like our tools and services so much.

It's an exciting time at Flip-Pay…we’ve built a great team and have fabulous and interesting customers (we call them partners) and have industry-defining innovations to deliver in 2024. We look forward to working with you.


Best regards,

Paul McCarthy-Brain
CEO