Terms

"For us, it's a matter of keeping membership central to everything we do. It's not possible to juggle the idea of member; it needs to be the main focus of everything," starts Dan Carson the Head of Product at our company. "If you're serious about establishing a membership We believe that this is the most comprehensive set of attributes. We started out with WordPress as the only access point for those features, that's no longer the situation."

Dan clarifies that we're not going to eliminate any of 's original capabilities including integration with WordPress: "If that's how someone wants to build their member-only site, it's as possible as it was prior to us - we're simply giving them a more straightforward on-ramp."

"There are many users making use of third-party software, but not necessarily simply because they'd like. It's because they felt that it was the only option," Dan adds. "People maybe are using WordPress However, they've made a fairly basic website, or they have MailChimp and don't use 50% of the functions."

These people simply need an option to let people sign up and then be able to email them without all the bafflement of a cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they signed up to Mailchimp in 2014, and they still use it because it's what they use. However, are they the target market for where Mailchimp is headed?"

"We consider there to be people out there who would, if they could do it easily enough, could simplify all these different applications into one spot and then have it closely integrated, as in the sense that it could still do everything they required to perform," Dan says.

Our email software will come with all the features you want. In addition, he says: "We're not trying to provide enterprise-level marketing departments with tools. We're trying to help those who are looking for a low-cost and easy way to reach out and publish content to their audience."

For us, it's more about what products that you're using, but more about what you are doing. If you want people to to sign up to a newsletter, we can facilitate that process and save you money because now you don't have to pay for external tools.

It's dependent on everyone's individual 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 only one user. "Previously we'd exclusively creating for one of the groups. Today, we're building both of them," Dan says.

For a certain type of client, the 2014 version of MailChimp is what you need; it's the one that you've fallen in love with. "If I'm in the market for a straightforward website, I may prefer not to utilize WordPress. It's true that Squarespace isn't the best choice to run a subscription-based site. It's also not fully connected to membership at its core," Dan adds. We thought to ourselves, "What if you had a product completely designed around that idea?'.

This is our approach to podcasting and online communities as well. "We're not rebuilding Libsyn. We'll be building an easy version to use and does the majority of the things you want, and is integrated with your other tools and all at similar prices," Dan believes.

It seems to be the law of nature that the longer software is in existence, the more it wants to grow. It is always looking to get more complicated and complex.

Making new features available isn't necessarily bad, but it becomes unfavorable for clients if the customer they are building for is no longer you. "People are hungry for applications that can do what they want and isn't looking to become other than this. In jazz, often is the note you do not perform!" Dan laughs.

The process of making something easy is quite hard. Dan is in agreement: "It's about paring down to the essence of something. It's easy for us is to simply put everything in there and then make it an element and then customers could access it through an area where they can set it up." But we do not believe that's what our clients are searching for. Instead, we'd like to combine all our experience over a decade of developing membership tools, incorporating the feedback from our customers, and distill that down to simple-to-use tools.

"It's easy to undervalue the importance of tools that are simple. Making them easy to use is an underserved need. The majority of things are much more complicated than they should be," Dan adds.

The new dashboard

The most obvious change this quarter is the way we've organized the dashboard. Instead of having each option visible at the top level, with the capabilities divided according to feature, we took a step back and said, 'Why not organize everything according to what you're working on in the moment or moment?'.

Based on our experiences, and talking with people who manage membership-based businesses, you're usually doing something that is a part of the four categories including designing and creating your site, creating exclusive content, directing the members of your site, and growing the revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as an operator of membership is likely to fall into the four buckets. So we thought that was an appropriate approach to categorizing the benefits of ."

Website

This is designed for those who wish to develop a membership-based website. In the past, you might have had to make use of WordPress or something customized. Now you can use our native website builder. This first section is for building the site in the first place and then modifying the look. as well as setting up your public-facing content. "You're making a place for your audience to and visit," adds Dan.

Content

The second task is publishing the content. Modern-day membership businesses typically includes publishing exclusive content to members. This includes email, posts, downloads, and podcasts. "The second job is creating content or sharing exclusive benefits. It's all about generating the value the members receive from joining your club," Dan explains.

Members

The final task is to manage your membership. "Part of managing a profitable membership is having a really intimate relationship with your customers and that's a big reason they're a part of your team," says Dan. It's important to offer customer support to the people who are members, such as understanding their history in relation to you and solving if things aren't working correctly.

Revenue

"If you're constructing a membership website with , you're hoping to generate revenue and there's a myriad of tasks involved in that: setting up your website and determining what you should charge, and monitoring the health of your organization to find the things that are working," says Dan. The section on discounting is to boost retention and run acquisition campaigns as well as referral programs.

"We've introduced a variety of features over the years. The lack of organization caused it to be difficult to find the right things, particularly those who were new. We wanted to cut down on the amount of learning required," concludes Dan. This will provide a solid foundation for us going forward when we introduce new features, as we'll be able to more easily place things. This makes it much easier for you to find and discover these additions so you can benefit from them immediately.

Website builder

Another major development in this quarter focused on the website builder. "We'd began to create these tools earlier in the year and we were trying to thread the needle of the new capabilities, however, we didn't want to disrupt existing techniques of utilizing it ," says Dan. "We placed ourselves in the shoes of someone coming to specifically looking to build the membership-based website."

The process of joining and registering for the service is a lot quicker; we offer users with a more sophisticated beginning point, including default configurations, membership plans that have been created and the structure of the site already designed. The only thing you need to do is set up your Stripe account and you could start your site in a matter of minutes.

Now, the editing process is similar to the modern WYSIWYG (What It is You see Is What You Receive) website builder, directly interacting with the membership site. "You can type directly on the page, move objects around, conceal and reveal elements, and then you are able to see the layout at a moment's notice," says Dan.

Dan says that this is only the start for future website-builder improvements: "We had to redo the foundation of everything in this manner; now, we are able to step up the gas in terms of adding the new features."

We've introduced the concept of blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. At present, we've got a basic content block and a title banner block that can be text or an image that has the button. Now this framework exists, we're working on creating new block types and are creating different types of content on the page. The user will be able to arrange those in the right order on the page, and will be able to customize who is able to view these based on the membership plan people are subscribed to.

Dan adds: "It's everything you need to create a fully-featured membership site. The site is fully linked to subscriptions. Membership is the heart of everything." What you get is a website-building experience that is easier to get started, more intuitive, and in line with the expectations of modern users.

Final: A fresh way to use

"We previously described it before as the glue which holds the members together" Dan recalls. Dan. "But in the event that the machine is essential to the business you run having components bonded together does not always seem like a positive. In some cases, you'd like the parts to be joined as steel. You would like it to be one component, and not two pieces that are bonded together" says Dan. These two pieces that have been built at the same time and joined from the very beginning.

If you're someone with a thriving WordPress site or a million members who are on your MailChimp list that you'd like to just add subscriptions rather than start again, that's still perfectly achievable. There's still a tool available to drop in, to put it all together. However, we do not believe that's the only method people would like to build anymore.

" is for those who want a place for their people to come together online, a hub to their customers and members. Nowadays, everything you would need, including designing it to look and feel like your business and having all your information at one location could be what you make with it ," Dan concludes.