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Changelog

Follow new updates and improvements to Heartbeat.

Add a thumbnail to your videos

Your videos no longer have to open on whatever frame Heartbeat happened to grab. You choose the thumbnail now.

Pick a moment from the video itself and it plays as a 5-second animated preview starting from that frame. Or upload your own image if you already have a branded cover ready to go.

The thumbnail follows the video into courses, docs, pages, and anywhere else you've added it.

How it works

Open the video in Settings → Videos and click Edit thumbnail. You get two options:

  • Video frame. Scrub the player to the moment you want, or type an exact time in seconds. The thumbnail becomes a 5-second animated preview starting there.

  • Upload. Drop in a JPG or PNG. It shows in place of the video preview.

Hit Save thumbnail and it updates wherever that video lives. Change your mind later and the new pick replaces the old one everywhere. Learn more here.

First impressions start before anyone hits play. Now you decide what that looks like.


Heads up: Thumbnails apply to videos uploaded to Heartbeat. Videos embedded from YouTube, Vimeo, or Loom keep the thumbnail from their original platform.

Member Journeys and Leads table

Running a community is a long series of judgment calls about individual people. Who to invite onto the call. Who is drifting and worth a DM. Who has been highly engaged in a channel for six months without recognition.

Those calls are only as good as what you can see about one person

Until today the members list gave you a name, a join date, and a last-login date. But Heartbeat has been storing posts, comments, chat messages, lesson completions, RSVPs and purchases since you started your community; and Resources, Sign Up Links and public event RSVPs have been collecting emails from leads who never became members. None of it was assembled per person, until now.

Settings now has a People section with two tables, Members and Leads. Click any row in either one and you land on that person's journey.

Member Journeys

Every member's page has a Journey tab. It puts every post, comment, chat message, completed lesson, RSVP, purchase, plan change, failed payment and cancellation for one person into a single timeline, newest first.

The timeline groups activity before you read it, making it easily scanned. Entries link to whatever they are about, so clicking an RSVP opens the event and clicking a purchase opens the offer. Admin and system actions, like joining or leaving groups, appear as entries too, and name who made the change.

Above the timeline is a 12-month heat-map of that member's activity, shaded against their own busiest days rather than the community's, so someone quiet but consistent does not disappear into grey. Beside it sits the rest of their member data: when they joined, when they were last seen, the devices they use, their Access Groups, the answers they gave during onboarding, and a View in Stripe link for anyone with a payment history.

Answering "what has this person actually been doing" stops being a guessing game.

Leads

A lead is someone whose email address you hold who has not joined. They now have a table of their own under People, and a journey of their own.

Every lead sits in one of four groups:

  • Onboarding is partway through joining: started signing up, paid for an offer, or waiting on a waitlist that has not launched.

  • Hot did something high-intent in the last six months, like buying something or joining a waitlist.

  • Warm came to you and engaged, by unlocking a Resource or following a Sign Up Link, but has done nothing high-intent since.

  • Cold is an address you hold from an import or an invite, belonging to someone who never came to you at all.

The groups maintain themselves. Onboarding ends when someone joins or the window runs out, Hot cools to Warm after six months of quiet, and a high-intent action moves them back to Hot.

Leads come from Resources, Sign Up Links, waitlists, public event RSVPs, and purchases made by people who never joined.

If your community has been running for a while, this list is full the first time you open it, with first-contact dates going back years.

Lead captured workflows

A list of email addresses is only worth what you do with it, and until now doing anything with it meant remembering to. There is a workflow trigger for it now: On Lead Captured, which fires the moment somebody's email address submits.

You can point it at everything, or at one thing. Pick specific Resources, specific Sign Up Links, or specific events, so the lead magnet you promoted gets its own follow-up rather than the same message everyone else gets.

This is what pairs with a lead magnet or a public event. Someone downloads the guide or RSVPs to the workshop, the address lands in Leads, and the first email goes out without you being at your desk. The manual route is still there and still fine: Export CSV and send from whatever you already use.

Also shipped

The Revenue tab is easier to read. Same numbers, cleaner layout. MRR, total spend, active subscriptions and purchase count sit at the top, with the full purchase history underneath.

Publish a Resource as a lead magnet, free or paid

Hardly anyone pays for a membership the first time they find you. So if a membership is the only thing you sell, you lose everyone who wasn’t ready yet, and never find out who they were.

The communities growing fastest build steps between "never heard of you" and "pays me every month," and each step qualifies people for the next. The whole thing runs on content, which you already have.

Lead magnets are those steps. A Resource can now leave your community: publish it to its own link that opens with no account, then decide what happens when someone lands on it. They read it free, trade an email address for it, or buy it outright with a one-time price paid through your Stripe.

The guide you always end up sending people. The replay vault. The course you stopped running. Behind your login those only work on members. On a link, they work on everyone else.

How it works

Open Resources, build one as a draft, then hit Publish. Visibility comes first (Community only, Public only, or Everywhere), then access. Public access is Open access (anyone reads it), Email access (an email address opens it), or Paid access (a one-time price, optionally pay-what-you-want with a minimum).

Published Resources get their own public URL. Everything stays editable afterwards from the three-dot menu under Edit details, including making a community-only Resource public later.

On a paid Resource the email address is captured before payment, so a checkout someone abandons still leaves you a way to reach them.

Everywhere prices the two audiences separately. A Resource can be free for your members and $29 for everyone else, in one configuration, which makes what members already have visible to people who have not joined.

Leads, coming next

Every address you have ever collected in one list: event RSVPs, waitlists, sign-up links, abandoned checkouts, Resource unlocks. Most communities that have been running a while will open it to find years of contacts already there. It is not switched on yet and it is the next thing shipping.

Heads up: access inside a Resource is all or nothing. If you want a free sample of something you sell, publish the sample as its own free Resource and link across to the paid one.

If your library is straightforward to move we are upgrading it for you. If it needs more care you will see a prompt with a path forward in Resources.

Your content stays yours. Publishing changes who can reach it, not who owns it.

Earlier updates