Terms

"For us, membership is an integral part of all we are doing. It's not possible to juggle the idea of membership, it must be the primary focus of your business," starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. "If you're serious about membership We believe that this is the greatest combination of attributes. We started out with WordPress as the only entry point to those features, that's no longer an option."

Dan clarifies that we're not going to eliminate the original features of the software, such as the ability to integrate with WordPress: "If that's how you want to construct your website for membership, it's the same as before - we're just giving them a more straightforward on-ramp."

"There are a bunch of individuals using third-party tools, but not necessarily simply because they'd like. It's because they felt that it was the only option," Dan adds. "People might have WordPress however they've created a basic site or have MailChimp and don't use 50% of the features."

They just need an option to let people sign up and then be able email them with no nonsense cloud enterprise edition. "Maybe they signed up for Mailchimp in 2014 and so they still use it because it's what they use. But are they still the target market for where Mailchimp is going?"

"We consider there to be individuals out there that, if it was easy enough, they would simplify all these different tools into a single place and have it be more well-integrated - so the tool still does all of the tasks they wanted it to do," Dan says.

Our email tools will have all the features you require. He adds: "We're not trying to provide enterprise-level marketing departments with tools. We're trying to help creators who want an affordable and simple way to communicate and publish content to their target audience."

For us, it's more about what products you have, and more about the things you're striving to achieve. If you want people to to sign up to a newsletter, we'll make that easier and cheaper because now you don't have to pay for other tools.

This is dependent on the individual use case, of course. Some people want the ability to connect multiple combinations, while others are concerned that it's costly and difficult to control, particularly as a single user. "Previously we'd just building for one of those organizations. Now we're building for both," Dan says.

If you're a particular type of client, the 2014 version of MailChimp is actually the one you're looking for; it's the one you fell in the love. "If I'm looking for a basic website, I may not want to use WordPress. It's true that Squarespace could be too much for a subscription-based website. It's also not fully connected to membership at its base," Dan adds. Then we asked ourselves: 'What would happen if there was a product completely built around this?'.

We're the same way about podcasting, and for online communities too. "We're not going to be rebuilding Libsyn. We're going to be building an easy version to use and does 80percent of the features you care about, integrated with all your other stuff, in one place for the same price," Dan believes.

It seems to be the law of nature that the longer software is in existence, the more it wants to grow. It wants to become more complex and bloated.

The addition of new features isn't always a good thing However, it is an issue for the clients when the person that they're building for is no longer you. "People are hungry for products that do exactly what they need and isn't seeking to do other than the best that it can be. In jazz, often it's the notes you don't play!" Dan laughs.

Simple things can be very difficult. Dan is in agreement: "It's about paring down to the essence of something. It's easy for us to do is simply put everything in there and create a setting and customers can find it in a settings panel somewhere." We don't think that's what our customers are looking for. Instead, we want to synthesize all of our experiences over the last decade of creating the tools for membership, including feedback we've learned from customers and distill it to simple-to-use tools.

"It's easy to undervalue the importance of tools that are simple. Easy to use tools are an underserved need. Many things are more complex than they need to be." Dan adds.

The new dashboard

The most obvious change this quarter is the manner in which we have reorganized the dashboard. Rather than having every option accessible at the top and the options divided by feature, we went back and asked, "Why not orient everything around what you're working on during the time or moment?'.

Based on our experience, and speaking with those who manage membership-based businesses, you're usually doing something which falls under the four categories including designing and creating your site, creating exclusive content, directing the activities of your members, or growing the revenue. Dan explains: "Everything you're doing as an operator of membership is likely be categorized into one of these four categories. So we thought that was a logical way to organize the features of ."

Website

This is designed for those who wish to create a membership site. In the past, you might have had to use WordPress or some other custom. Today, you are able to make use of our built-in website builders. The first part is about creating the website in the first place and then modifying the look. And setting up your publicly-facing information. "You're setting up the space that your viewers can visit," adds Dan.

Content

Another task involves publishing content. The modern day membership company typically entails publishing exclusive content for members. This includes emails, posts as well as podcasts, downloads and posts. "The next step is to create content or sharing exclusive advantages - it's about making the 'value' that customers get out of your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The last task involves managing your membership. "Part of running a strong member base is establishing a tight connection with your audience - that's part of the reason why they're supporting you," says Dan. You need to be able to provide customer service to these people, including knowing their past relationship of working with you, as well as troubleshooting when things don't work as they should.

Revenue

"If you're creating your own membership site with you're hoping to generate revenue and there's a myriad of tasks to consider: setting up your website and determining what you should charge, and monitoring the health of your organization to find what's working," says Dan. This section includes discounting in order to increase retention and run acquisition campaigns and referral programs.

"We've introduced a variety of features over the years. The lack of organization made it difficult to find the right things, particularly for people who are new to the site. We wanted to lessen the time to learn," concludes Dan. This will provide a solid foundation for us going forward as we add more new features, as we'll find more intuitive ways to put things - this makes it much 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 focused on the website builder. "We'd began to create the new tools in 2011 and we were trying to make sure that we were introducing this new capability, without affecting the existing methods of using it ," says Dan. "We tried to put ourselves in the position of someone who is seeking to create a membership website."

Now, the process of enrolling and joining the service is a lot faster; we provide you a much more advanced start point with standard settings, membership plans already made and the design of your website designed. All you have to do is set up your Stripe account and you could launch your website in only a couple of minutes.

The editing user experience resembles a modern WYSIWYG (What It is You see is What You Receive) website builder, connecting directly to your website for membership. "You can type directly on the screen, drag objects around, conceal and display elements and are able to see the layout like immediately," says Dan.

Dan states that this is only the beginning for further website-building developments: "We had to redo the basis of everything in this way; now, we are able to step up the gas to begin expanding the features."

We've discussed the idea of blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. At present, we've got a basic content block as well as a banner title block which can contain text or an image with a button. This framework is in use, and we're working on new block types, creating different types of content to be displayed on the page. You will be able to organize them in the right order on the page, and are able to control who sees these based on the subscription plan the user is subscribed to.

Dan states: "It's everything you need to build a full-featured subscription site. The site is fully connected to subscriptions. The membership component is at the center of it all." The end result is a web-building experience that's easier to start with 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 previously described it in the past as the glue that keeps your membership together," Dan explains. Dan. "But in the event that the machine is essential to your company having components bonded together does not always seem like a positive. In some cases, you'd like them to be welded together just like steel. But you would like that it be the same piece, not two separate pieces joined," says Dan. The two parts were built in tandem and joined from the very beginning.

If you're someone with a thriving WordPress site, or even a million people who are on your MailChimp list and you want to just create subscriptions, rather than starting over, it's achievable. There's still a tool available that allows you to plug in and put it all together. We don't believe it's the only method people would like to construct anymore.

" is for people who want a place for their people to come together, and a place to their customers and users. Nowadays, everything you would need, including making it look like your brand and having all your information at one location and accessible to all, is what you could build with this software ," Dan concludes.