Terms

"For us, the concept of membership sits central to everything we are doing. You can't moonlight as a member; it needs to be a focus," starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. "If there's a serious interest in joining it is our opinion that we have the greatest combination of options. While we started with WordPress as the only way to access these capabilities, this isn't the case."

Dan clarifies that we're not taking away the original features of the software for example, like integrating to WordPress: "If that's how you want to construct your member-only site, it's possible to do it as before - we're just giving them a more straightforward on-ramp."

"There are a bunch of users employing third-party applications however, not just because they'd like to. This is because it was the only option," Dan adds. "People may have WordPress, but they've just created a basic site, or they have MailChimp and don't make use of 50% of the functions."

The people who need to sign up simply require an opportunity to make it easier for people to sign up, and be able email them, without the fluff a cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they signed up for Mailchimp in 2014, and they still use it because this is where they are. Are they really the target market for where Mailchimp is going?"

"We believe there are individuals out there that would, if they could do it easily enough, could reduce all the applications into one spot and make it more closely integrated, as long as it still did all the things they needed to accomplish," Dan says.

Our email tools will have all the features that you want. In addition, he says: "We're not trying to help enterprise marketing teams. We're interested in serving creators who want an affordable and easy way to reach out and publish content to their audience."

It's for us less about the products you're selling, and more about the things you're trying to do. If you'd like your customers to be able to subscribe to your newsletter, we can make that easier and cheaper since you no longer need to purchase other tools.

This is dependent on the individual application, obviously. Certain people would like the capability to piece together several combinations, while others are concerned that it's expensive and more difficult to control, particularly as only one company. "Previously we'd exclusively creating for one of the groups. Now we're building for both groups," Dan says.

For certain types of client, the 2014 version of MailChimp is what you want; that's the one that you've fallen in the love. "If I want a simple site, I might prefer not to utilize WordPress. Even Squarespace could be too much for a subscription-based website. And it's not tightly integrated with membership at the core," Dan adds. Then we asked ourselves: 'What could you do if you created a product that was entirely designed around that idea?'.

We're the same way about podcasting or online communities too. "We're not going to be rebuilding Libsyn. We'll build an easy version to use and does 80% of what you want, and is integrated with all your other stuff all in one location for the same price," Dan believes.

It is the law of nature that the more time software has, the more it wants to grow. It wants to become more complicated and complex.

Making new features available isn't always a good thing, but it becomes unfavorable for clients if the customer that they're building to isn't you anymore. "People want applications that can do what they want and isn't looking to become other than this. As with jazz, there are times when it's the notes you don't have to play!" Dan laughs.

Simple things can be 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 create a setting and customers can access it through the settings section somewhere." However, we do not believe that's what our clients are searching for. Instead, we want to bring together all of our knowledge gained over the past decade of building membership tools, incorporating customer feedback and distilling that into simple tools.

"It's easy to overlook the power of basic tools. Being easy to use is one of the most unmet needs. The majority of things are much more complicated than they ought to be." Dan adds.

The new dashboard

The biggest change we've made this quarter is the manner in which we have reorganized the dashboard. Instead of having all options available at the top, with the capabilities separated according to feature, we took a step back and thought, "Why not arrange everything around the things you're trying to do during the time and then organize everything around that?.

Based on our experience, and speaking with those who run membership businesses, you're usually doing something which falls under one of four jobs that include designing and building your site, publishing exclusive content, directing your members or increasing the revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as an operator of membership is likely to fall into the four buckets. We thought it was the most sensible method of organizing the functions of ."

Website

is for people who want to create a membership site. In the past, you might have had to use WordPress or something specific to. Today, you are able to utilize our website builder natively. The first part is about creating the website from scratch and then modifying the look. And setting up your publicly-facing web content. "You're creating the place your users can go to," adds Dan.

Content

The other is to publish information. A modern-day membership business usually includes publishing exclusive content to members such as emails, posts or podcasts. "The next step is to create contents or sharing special advantages - it's about making the 'value' that customers get out of your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing the members. "Part of managing a profitable membership is having a really intimate relationship with your customers and that's a big reason why they're supporting you," says Dan. You need to be able be able to give customer service those who belong to your group, which includes knowing their past relationship of working with you, as well as troubleshooting the issues that are not working properly.

Revenue

"If you're building a membership website with , you're looking to create revenue and there's a myriad of tasks involved in that: creating your plan, understanding what to charge, and monitoring the health of your organization to find what's working," says Dan. The section on discounting is for retention and run acquisition campaigns and referral programs.

"We've introduced a variety of functions over time. In the absence of a system for organizing them, it made it difficult to locate things, particularly those who were new. We wanted to lessen the time to learn," concludes Dan. This will provide a solid foundation for us going forward as we add more innovative features. As we'll be able to more easily set things up - which makes it much easier for people to discover and find this new feature, and you'll be able to gain value from them immediately.

Web Builder

Another major development in this quarter was around the website builder. "We'd started to build the new tools in 2011 and we were trying to get the needle moving towards the new capabilities, but not disrupt the previous methods of using it ," says Dan. "We placed ourselves in the position of someone coming to specifically wanting to develop an online membership site."

Now, the process of enrolling and joining the service is a lot easier; we give users with a more sophisticated beginning point, including default configurations, membership plans that have been made and the design of the website already built. All you have to do is create your Stripe account and you could begin your website within minutes.

Today, the editor user experience resembles the modern WYSIWYG (What you see is What You Receive) website builder, connecting directly to the membership site. "You are able to type directly onto the webpage, change elements around, and hide or reveal elements, and then you will be able to view what the page looks at a moment's notice," says Dan.

Dan says that this is just the beginning for further website-building enhancements: "We had to redo the basis of everything in this manner, and now we can step on the gas in terms of adding the new features."

The concept has been introduced in blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. Right now we have a basic content block and a title banner block that could be textual or an image that has a button. The framework is now in place, we're working on creating new blocks, and creating various types of content to be displayed on the page. You will be able to arrange those on the page and you can customize who can see them based on what membership plan people are subscribed to.

Dan states: "It's everything you need to create a fully-featured website for membership. And it's all connected to subscriptions. Membership is at the core of it all." The result is a web-building experience that's easier to start with, more intuitive, and in line with the expectations of modern users.

Conclusion: A brand new method to use

"We have been described previously as the glue that keeps the members together" Dan recalls. Dan. "But in the event that an equipment is critical to your company, having parts glued together does not always seem like a positive. In some cases, you'd like that they are welded, like steel - you want that it be the same part, not two parts that are bonded together" adds Dan. Two pieces were built at the same time and joined from the very beginning.

If you have a thriving WordPress site, or even a million members who are on your MailChimp subscriber list, and want to use to simply add subscriptions rather than start over, it's achievable. We still offer the tool for you to add subscribers, and then piece it together. But we don't think that's the only option people have to build anymore.

" is for people seeking a platform for their community to gather together, and a place to their customers and members. In the present, all you like, from making it look like your business and having everything you have to share together could be what you make with it ," Dan concludes.