The state of things

Month zero.

1 August 2026 · Lir Aroyo

AfterBye has no members. Not a small number of members. None.

We are going to publish these numbers every month, including the months they do not move, and especially those. The feed stays honest when it is quiet, and this page will do the same. If you ever read a figure here that flatters us, something has gone wrong.

The ledgerTrue on 1 August 2026
Members0
Matches approved0
Introductions made0
Customers sent between stores0
What AfterBye earned0

Five numbers, published on the first of every month, whether they move or not. We will never publish a member's own figures, a projection, or a percentage calculated off a base small enough to flatter us.

What actually happened

The numbers above are all zero. The month was not.

01We read 66 stores by hand, one at a time, looking for brands whose customers overlap without competing.
02We wrote 45 letters to those founders. Each one names something we found in that specific shop, because a message that could go to anyone should go to no one.
03We threw away 27 of the names we started with. Some were too large for a founder to ever read the message. Some were retailers rather than brands, so a partnership would compete with their own shelves. Some sold things nowhere near what our first brands will sell.

And one detail worth more than the other three.

On the old list was an address belonging to a founder who died some years ago. His brand is still trading and his name is still on the site. A scraped list has no way to know that. A person who reads the store finds out in a minute, and then does not send the letter.

That is the entire difference between a network and a mailing list, and it showed up in week one.

What we are building

AfterBye is the brands' social network. Your brand gets a profile and a feed. You post what you are actually working on, you ask the things you cannot ask in public, and you meet brands that share your customer without competing with you. When two of you approve each other, you show each other's products after checkout and share the sale. Nobody appears beside anyone they did not choose.

None of that requires a crowd to be worth joining. It requires the first few people to be chosen carefully, and to be told the truth about how early it is.

What we will not do

We will not invent activity. No counters that tick, no brands listed as partners before they have said yes, no "someone just joined" while nobody has. We will not buy ads to fill the room, because a network that advertises for members is asking you to trust a room it could not fill by introduction.

And we will not quietly skip a bad month here. The first time this page goes silent because the numbers were unflattering, it stops being a ledger and becomes marketing.

Registration is open and the first partnerships are reviewed by hand.

Create your profile