Terms

"For us, it's a matter of keeping membership an integral part of all we are doing. It's not possible to juggle the idea of membership; it has to be the primary focus of your business," starts Dan Carson the Head of Product at our company. "If are serious about joining, we think has the most comprehensive set of attributes. Although we initially used WordPress as our primary entry point to those features, that's no longer the situation."

Dan clarifies that we're not going to eliminate the original features of the software for example, like integrating to WordPress: "If that's how one wants to create their website for membership, it's possible to do it as in the past - we're offering an easier on-ramp now."

"There are lots of users making use of third-party software, but not necessarily just because they'd like to. It's because that felt like the only option available," Dan adds. "People maybe are using WordPress however they've created a basic site or have MailChimp, but don't use 50% of the features."

They just need an option to let people join and later be able email them with no nonsense cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they had signed up with Mailchimp in 2014, and they continue to use it since that's where they are. However, are they the target market for where Mailchimp is going?"

"We think there are individuals out there that, if it was easy enough, could reduce all the instruments into one place and make it more well-integrated - so in the sense that it could still do all the things they needed it to do," Dan says.

Our email software will come with all of the features you require. The author adds: "We're not trying to help enterprise marketing teams. We're trying to help creators who want an affordable and easy way to reach out and publish content to their followers."

For us, it's more about what products you're selling, and more about what you are doing. If you'd like your customers to to subscribe to your newsletter, we'll help facilitate that process and save you money as you do not have to pay for other tools.

The decision is based on each individual's usage scenario, naturally. Many people desire the ability to integrate multiple integrations but others worry that it's costly and difficult to control, particularly as an individual operator. "Previously we were kind of exclusively creating for one of the groups. Today, we're building both groups," Dan says.

For a certain type of customer the new version of MailChimp is what you want; that's the one you fell in the love. "If I'm in the market for a straightforward web page, I'll probably not want to use WordPress. In fact, Squarespace could be too much as a website that relies on subscriptions. And it's not tightly linked to membership in the basis," Dan adds. So we thought, 'What would happen if there was a product completely built around this?'.

That's our mindset for podcasting, and for online communities too. "We're not building a new version of Libsyn. We'll be building the basic version, which is easy to use and does 80percent of the features you care about, integrated with your other tools all in one location for similar prices," Dan believes.

It seems to be an innate law that the longer software is in existence and the longer it is in existence, the more it would like to develop. It would like to be increasingly complex and complicated.

The addition of new features isn't always a good thing, but it becomes unfavorable for clients if the customer the company is building it to isn't you anymore. "People want applications that can do what they want and isn't seeking to do more than that. In jazz, often is the note you do not play!" Dan laughs.

The process of making something easy is very difficult. Dan is in agreement: "It's about paring down to its essence. The easy thing for us would be to simply put everything in there and create a setting and customers can find it in an area where they can set it up." We do not believe that's what our customers are looking for. We want to combine all our experience over a decade of building the tools for membership, including the feedback from our customers, and distill that down into simple tools.

"It's easy to underestimate the value of simple tools. Easy to use tools are one of the most unmet needs. Most things are more complicated than they ought to be." Dan adds.

The dashboard is updated.

The most obvious change this quarter is how we have reorganized the dashboard. Instead of having each option visible at the top level and the options organized by feature, we stepped back and asked, "Why not organize everything according to what you're trying to do during the time and then organize everything around that?.

Based on our experience, as well as talking to people who run membership businesses typically, you're doing work which falls under one of the following four areas: building and designing your site, creating exclusive content, directing the activities of the members of your site, and growing revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as member-based business is bound be categorized into the four categories. So we thought that was a logical approach to categorizing the benefits of ."

Website

is for people who want to create a membership site. Historically you may have needed to use WordPress or some other customized. You can now use our native website builder. This is the first step in designing the site in the first place, customizing how it looks. as well as setting up your public-facing information. "You're creating the place your users can and visit," adds Dan.

Content

The other is to publish information. The modern day membership company typically involves publishing exclusive content for members. This includes posts, emails or podcasts. "The next step is to create contents or sharing special benefits. It's all about generating the value members get from your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing your membership. "Part of running a strong member base is establishing a tight connection with your audience - that's part of the reasons why they're backing you," says Dan. It's important to offer customer support to the people who are members, such as being aware of their relationship with you, and troubleshooting the issues that are not working properly.

Revenue

"If you're building a membership website with , you're trying to make money and there's a million things involved in that: setting up your plans, understanding what to charge as well as monitoring the health of your business to see how it's performing," says Dan. This section includes discounting in order to increase retention and run acquisition campaigns as well as referral programs.

"We've added a lot of new features throughout the years. In the absence of a system for organizing them, it caused it to be difficult to find the right things, particularly for new people. We wanted to cut down on the learning curve," concludes Dan. This provides a better framework for us going forward when we introduce exciting features. We'll have more intuitive places to set things up - which will make it easier for users to locate and explore this new feature, and you'll be able to get value out of them immediately.

Builder for websites

Another major development in this quarter focused on the website builder. "We'd began to create these new tools last year and we were trying to make sure that we were the new capabilities, however, we didn't want to disrupt existing techniques of utilizing it ," says Dan. "We placed ourselves in the position of someone coming to specifically wanting to develop an online membership site."

The process of enrolling and joining the program is significantly easier; we give users with a more sophisticated beginning point, including default settings, membership plans already designed and the layout of the site already designed. What you need to do is sign up your Stripe account, and then you can start your site in a matter of minutes.

Now, the editing process is similar to an advanced WYSIWYG (What you see is What You Receive) web-based builder that is connecting directly to your membership website. "You are able to type directly on the screen, drag objects around, conceal and show elements, and you will be able to view what the page looks like immediately," says Dan.

Dan says that this is just the beginning of future website builder enhancements: "We had to redo the base of everything this manner; now we can step on the accelerator in terms of adding the new capabilities."

We've discussed the idea of blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. Right now we have an element of content that is basic and a title banner block that could be textual 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. You will be able to place them on the page and you can customize who can see them based on what subscription plan the user is subscribed to.

Dan adds: "It's everything you need to build a full-featured membership site. And it's all connected to subscriptions. The membership component is at the center of it all." The result is a web-building experience that's easier to get started, more intuitive, and in line with what the modern consumer expects.

Conclusion: A new way to use

"We have described before as the glue which holds your group together," Dan explains. Dan. "But if a machine is integral to the business you run, having parts glued together does not always seem like a positive. There are times when you need that they are welded as steel. You need it to be one piece, not two separate pieces joined," adds Dan. The two parts were built in tandem: membership was integral from the very beginning.

If you're someone with an incredibly successful WordPress website or millions of people who are on your MailChimp list that you'd like to add subscriptions rather than start all over again, it's feasible. We still offer the tool that allows you to plug in and connect it. But we don't think that's the only method people would like to construct anymore.

" is for people seeking a platform for their people to come together on the internet, as a central point for their audience and their members. Today, anything you could need, including making it look like your brand and having all of your content all together could be what you create with ," Dan concludes.