Terms

"For us, it's a matter of keeping membership at the core of everything we are doing. You can't moonlight as a membership, it must be the main focus of everything," starts Dan Carson who is our Director of Product. "If are serious about membership We believe that this is the most comprehensive set of options. We started out with WordPress as our primary way to access these features, that's no longer an option."

Dan clarifies that we're not going to eliminate all of the capabilities that were originally available, such as integration with WordPress: "If that's how you want to construct your member-only site, it's the same as prior to us - we're simply offering an easier on-ramp now."

"There are a bunch of individuals using third-party tools however, not because they want to. It's because that felt like the only option," Dan adds. "People maybe have WordPress however they've made a fairly basic website or have MailChimp but they don't even make use of 50% of the features."

These people simply need a way to have people join and later be able to send them emails, without the fluff a cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they had signed up with Mailchimp in 2014, and they still use it because this is where they are. Are they really the primary market to which Mailchimp is headed?"

"We consider there to be individuals out there that, if it was easy enough, could reduce all the tools into a single place and then have it closely integrated, as long as it still did all of the tasks they wanted to perform," Dan says.

Our tools for email will include all the features that you want. He adds: "We're not trying to provide enterprise-level marketing departments with tools. We're interested in serving creators who want an affordable and simple way to communicate and share content with their target audience."

It's for us not so much about the tools that you're using, but more about what you are trying to do. If you want people to to join a newsletter, we can simplify and make it cheaper as you do not have to pay for external tools.

This is dependent on the individual application, obviously. Many people desire the ability to connect multiple integrations but others worry that it's costly and difficult to control, particularly as a single user. "Previously we were kind of only creating for one of the groups. Today, we're building both groups," Dan says.

If you're a particular type of user, the 2014 version of MailChimp is actually what you need; it's the version you fell in the love. "If I want a simple website, I may not want to use WordPress. It's true that Squarespace can be overkill for a subscription-based website. And it's not tightly connected to membership at its basis," Dan adds. We thought to ourselves, "What if you had a product that was entirely designed around that?'.

This is our approach to podcasting or online communities too. "We're not rebuilding Libsyn. We'll be building the basic version that's easy to operate and can do 80percent of the features you care about, integrated with your other tools all in one location for similar prices," Dan believes.

It appears to be the law of nature that the more time software has and the longer it is in existence, the more it would like to develop. It would like to be more complicated and complex.

The addition of new features isn't necessarily bad However, it is an issue for the clients when the person that they're building for has changed and is not you. "People are hungry for products that do exactly what they need and isn't trying to be any greater than the best that it can be. In jazz, often it's not the notes that you play!" Dan laughs.

The process of making something easy is quite hard. Dan says: "It's about paring down to what's important in. The easy thing for us to do is just throw everything on there and make it an option and let customers find it in a settings panel somewhere." We don't think that's what our clients are searching for. Instead, we want to bring together all of our experience over a decade of developing membership tools, incorporating feedback we've learned from customers and distill it into simple tools.

"It's easy to undervalue the power of basic tools. Being easy to use is an unmet need. Most things are more complicated than they need to be." Dan adds.

The new dashboard

The biggest change we've made this quarter is the way we have reorganized the dashboard. Rather than having every option accessible at the top and the options organized by feature, we stepped back and thought, "Why not organize everything according to what you're working on during the time and then organize everything around that?.

Based on our experiences, as well as talking to people who run membership businesses, you're usually doing something which falls under one of four jobs: building and designing your website, releasing exclusive content, directing the members of your site, and growing revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as a membership operator is going to fall into one of these four buckets. So we thought that was an appropriate method of organizing the functions of ."

Website

It is intended for users who would like to build a membership website. In the past, you might have had to make use of WordPress or a specific to. Now you can use our native website builder. The first part is about creating the website from scratch and then modifying the look. and setting up your public-facing information. "You're making a place for your audience to visit," adds Dan.

Content

The other is to publish content. A modern-day membership business usually entails publishing exclusive content for members. This includes emails, posts, downloads, and podcasts. "The other aspect is creating content or sharing exclusive benefits - it's about creating the value customers get out of your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing the members. "Part of running a successful membership is having a really intimate relationship with your customers - that's part of the reasons why they're backing you," says Dan. It is essential to provide customer service to the people who are members, such as knowing their past relationship in relation to you and solving the issues that are not working properly.

Revenue

"If you're constructing a membership website with , you're looking to create revenue and there are a lot of things to consider: setting up your plans and determining what you should charge, and monitoring the health of your business to see the things that are working," says Dan. The section on discounting is to boost retention and run acquisition campaigns, plus referral programs.

"We've added a lot of features over the years. The lack of organization made it difficult to locate things, particularly those who were new. We wanted to reduce the learning curve," concludes Dan. It provides a more logical framework that we can build upon as we add more exciting features. We'll have more intuitive places to set things up - which will make it easier for you to find and discover this new feature, and you'll be able to gain value from these features immediately.

Web Builder

Another major development in this quarter was around the web builder. "We'd begun to develop these new tools last year and were trying to thread the needle of introducing this new capability, but not disrupt the previous techniques of utilizing it ," says Dan. "We put ourselves in the shoes of someone coming to specifically looking to build the membership-based website."

The process of joining and registering for the product is much easier; we give users with a more sophisticated beginning point, including default options, plans for membership already designed and the layout of the website already built. All you have to do is sign up your Stripe account and you could start your site in a matter of just a few minutes.

The editing experience is that of a modern WYSIWYG (What You See is What You get) site builder. It is capable of directly interacting with your website for membership. "You can type directly on the page, move elements around, and hide or show elements, and you can see what it looks like immediately," says Dan.

Dan says that this is only the beginning of future website builder improvements: "We had to redo the foundation of everything in this way; now we can step on the gas to begin adding the new features."

We've discussed the idea of blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. Right now we have a basic content block and a title banner block that can be text or an image with a button. The framework is now in place, we're working on new block types and are creating different types of content on the page. It will allow you to organize them on the page and you will be able to customize who is able to view the content based on which subscription plan the user is subscribed to.

Dan adds: "It's everything you need to build a full-featured membership site. The site is fully integrated with subscriptions. The membership component is at the center of the whole." The result is a website-building experience that's easier to begin with as well as more user-friendly and in line with the expectations of modern users.

Final: A fresh way to utilize

"We have described before as the glue that keeps your membership together," recalls Dan. "But in the event that the machine is essential to your business and has parts that are glued doesn't always sound like something positive. There are times when you need the parts to be joined just like steel. But you want that it be the same part, not two parts glued together," adds Dan. Two pieces were built in tandem: membership was integral from the very beginning.

If you're someone with a thriving WordPress site, or even a million people who are on your MailChimp list that you'd like to create subscriptions, rather than starting again, that's still perfectly feasible. The tool is still available for you to add subscribers, and then connect it. But we don't think that's the only way people want to build any more.

" is for those looking for a space for their community to gather together, and a place to their customers and users. Nowadays, everything you would want, in terms of designing it to look and feel like your brand and having everything you have to share at one location could be what you make with it ," Dan concludes.