Terms

"For us, the concept of membership sits central to everything we do. You can't moonlight as a membership; it has to be a focus," starts Dan Carson who is our Director of Product. "If are serious about joining it is our opinion that we have the most comprehensive set of features. We started out with WordPress as the only access point for those options, this is no longer an option."

Dan clarifies that we're not taking away any of 's original capabilities including integration to WordPress: "If that's how one wants to create their member-only site, it's the same as prior to us - we're simply offering an easier on-ramp now."

"There are many individuals making use of third-party software however, not just because they'd like to. This is because it was the only option," Dan adds. "People may have WordPress however they've built a simple website or have MailChimp, but don't make use of 50% of the options."

The people who need to sign up simply require an option to let people sign up, and be able to email them with no nonsense cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they signed up for Mailchimp in 2014 and they still use it because it's what they use. But are they still the primary market to which Mailchimp will go?"

"We consider there to be those who would, if they could do it easily enough, would be able to reduce all the tools into a single place and have it be more well-integrated - so the tool still does all of the tasks they wanted to accomplish," Dan says.

Our tools for email will include all the features you need. He adds: "We're not trying to provide enterprise-level marketing departments with tools. We're trying to help authors who need a cost-effective and easy way to reach out and publish content to their target audience."

For us, it's less about the products you're selling, and much more about what you're striving to achieve. If you want people to be able to subscribe to your newsletter, we'll make that easier and cheaper because now you don't require the expense of external tools.

The decision is based on each individual's application, obviously. Some people want the ability to integrate multiple integrations but others worry that it's costly and difficult to handle, especially when it's an individual user. "Previously we were kind of exclusively building for one of those groupings. We're now building for both groups," Dan says.

For a certain type of user the new version of MailChimp is the one you're looking for; it's the one that you've fallen in over. "If I'm looking for a basic website, I may choose not to go with WordPress. Even Squarespace could be too much for a subscription-based website. It's also not fully linked to membership in the core," Dan adds. So we thought, 'What could you do if you created a product that was entirely designed around that idea?'.

That's our mindset for podcasting or online communities too. "We're not going to be creating a brand new Libsyn. We'll be building an easy version to use and covers 80percent of the features you care about, integrated with your other tools and all at the same price," Dan believes.

It is an innate law that the longer software exists, the more it wants to expand. It would like to be more complex and bloated.

Making new features available isn't necessarily a bad thing however it can be an issue for the clients if the customer that they're building for has changed and is not you. "People want software that does just what they require and doesn't looking to become other than the best that it can be. As with jazz, there are times when it's not the notes that you play!" Dan laughs.

Simple things can be extremely difficult. Dan is in agreement: "It's about paring down to the essence of something. One of the easiest things for us is to add everything to the site and create an element and then customers could access it through the settings section somewhere." But we aren't sure that's the kind of thing our clients are searching for. Instead, we'd like to combine all our experiences over the last decade of building membership software, taking the feedback from our customers, and distill that down into simple tools.

"It's easy to underestimate the value of simple tools. Making them easy to use is an underserved need. Most things are more complicated than they ought to be." Dan adds.

The dashboard is updated.

One of the most noticeable changes this quarter is the way we've reorganized our dashboard. Instead of having each option available at the top and the options separated by feature, we stepped back and thought, "Why not orient everything around what you're trying to do at any given time and then organize everything around that?.

Based on our own experience and talking with people who run membership businesses, you're usually doing something that is a part of the four categories: building and designing your website, releasing exclusive content, directing your members or increasing the revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as a membership operator is going be categorized into one of these four buckets. We thought it was an appropriate way to organize the features of ."

Website

is for people who want to build a membership website. Historically you may have needed to make use of WordPress or a customized. Today, you are able to make use of our built-in website builders. This first section is for designing the site in the first place and then modifying the look. and setting up your public-facing content. "You're creating the place for your audience to visit," adds Dan.

Content

The second task is publishing the content. A modern-day membership business usually entails publishing exclusive content for members, such as email, posts or podcasts. "The second job is creating content or sharing exclusive advantages - it's about making value that your customers get out of your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The last task involves managing your members. "Part of running a successful membership is to have a close connection to your members - that's part of the reason why they're supporting you," says Dan. It is essential be able to give customer service the people who are members, such as understanding their history of working with you, as well as troubleshooting if things aren't working correctly.

Revenue

"If you're constructing an online membership site , you're looking to create revenue and there's a myriad of tasks to consider: setting up your website, understanding what to charge and evaluating the performance of your organization to find what's working," says Dan. This section includes discounting in order to increase retention as well as running campaigns to acquire customers as well as referral programs.

"We've introduced a variety of functions over time. The lack of organization made it difficult to find things, especially for people who are new to the site. We wanted to cut down on the learning curve," concludes Dan. This provides a better framework that we can build upon as we add more new features, as we'll find more intuitive ways to set things up - which allows people to discover and find this new feature, and you'll be able to get value out of these features immediately.

Builder for websites

Another major development in this quarter was around the website builder. "We'd began to create these tools earlier in the year and were trying to get the needle moving towards introducing this new capability, without affecting the existing techniques of utilizing it ," says Dan. "We put ourselves in the position of a person who was wanting to develop the membership-based website."

In the present, signing up and getting into the program is significantly easier; we give users with a more sophisticated starting position, with default options, plans for membership already made and the design of the site already designed. The only thing you need to do is create your Stripe account, and then you can launch your website in only a couple of minutes.

The editing experience is that of a modern WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Receive) website builder, directly interacting with your website for membership. "You can type directly onto the webpage, change elements around, and hide or display elements and are able to see the layout as soon as you open it," says Dan.

Dan says that this is only the start for future website-builder improvements: "We had to redo the basis of everything in this manner, and Now we're able to kick off the gas in terms of adding the new capabilities."

The concept has been introduced in blocks, which are essentially content modules. Right now we have the basic block of content and a title banner block that can be text or an image that has buttons. The framework is now in place, we're working on creating new blocks, and creating various types of content on the page. It will allow you to arrange those within the pages and can customize who can see these based on the membership plan people are subscribed to.

Dan adds: "It's everything you need for a complete membership site. It's also linked to subscriptions. Membership is the heart of everything." The end result is a website-building experience that's easier to get started as well as more user-friendly and is more in tune with the expectations of modern users.

Conclusion: A brand new method to utilize

"We have been described previously as the glue that holds the members together" Dan recalls. Dan. "But if the machine is essential to your business and has parts that are glued does not always seem like something positive. Sometimes you want the parts to be joined, like steel - you would like it to be one piece, not two separate pieces joined," says Dan. These two pieces that were built at the same time and joined from the very beginning.

If you're a person with your own successful WordPress site, or even a million members who are on your MailChimp list that you'd like to create subscriptions, rather than starting all over again, it's achievable. There's still a tool available to drop in, to piece it together. However, we do not believe that's the only way people want to build any more.

" is for people looking for a space for their community to gather together, and a place to their customers and users. In the present, all you like, from making it look like your brand and having all of your content all together could be what you create with ," Dan concludes.