Terms

"For us, it's a matter of keeping membership central to everything we do. There is no way to be a side hustler in the field of membership; it has to be the main focus of everything," starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. "If there's a serious interest in establishing a membership it is our opinion that we have the greatest combination of attributes. While we started with WordPress as the sole entry point to those features, that's no longer an option."

Dan explains we're not removing all of the capabilities that were originally available, such as integrating into WordPress: "If that's how someone wants to build their website for membership, it's the same as in the past - we're providing a simpler on-ramp."

"There are a bunch of people out there who are making use of third-party software However, it's not always just because they'd like to. It's because they felt that it was the only choice," Dan adds. "People maybe already have WordPress, but they've just built a simple website or use MailChimp, but don't utilize 50% of its functions."

The people who need to sign up simply require a way to have people join and later be able email them, without the fluff a cloud enterprise version. "Maybe they signed up for Mailchimp in 2014 and they are still using it as that's where they are. Are they really the target market for where Mailchimp is headed?"

"We consider there to be individuals out there that, if it was easy enough, they would simplify all these different applications into one spot and then have it well-integrated - so long as it still did all the things they needed to perform," Dan says.

Our email tools will have all the features that you want. The author adds: "We're not trying to serve enterprise marketing teams. We're interested in serving creators who want an affordable and straightforward method to share information and distribute content to their audience."

It's for us more about what products you're selling, and more about what you are striving to achieve. If you'd like people to to join a newsletter, we'll help facilitate that process and save you money because now you don't require the expense of additional tools.

The decision is based on each individual's usage scenario, naturally. Certain people would like the capability to connect multiple Integrations, but some worry it's costly and difficult to control, particularly as only one company. "Previously we were kind of exclusively creating for one of the groups. Today, we're building both groups," Dan says.

If you're a particular type of client the new version of MailChimp will be the one you're looking for; it's the one that you've fallen in over. "If I'm in the market for a straightforward website, I may not want to use WordPress. It's true that Squarespace isn't the best choice to run a subscription-based site. The site isn't tightly linked to membership in the base," Dan adds. Then we asked ourselves: 'What if you had a product completely built around this?'.

That's our mindset for 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 covers 80percent of the features you care about, integrated with everything else, in one place for similar prices," Dan believes.

It is an innate law that the more time software has for, the more eager it is to grow. It wants to become increasingly complex and complicated.

Adding new features is not always a good thing however it can be an issue for the clients if the customer the company is building it for has changed and is not you. "People are hungry for products that do exactly what they want and isn't looking to become greater than this. Like in jazz, sometimes it's the notes you don't perform!" Dan laughs.

Making something simple is actually extremely difficult. Dan agrees: "It's about paring down to what's important in. One of the easiest things for us to do is just throw everything on there and then make it a setting and customers can access it through the settings section somewhere." But we do not believe that's what our clients are searching for. Instead, we want to combine all our experience over a decade of creating membership tools, incorporating customer feedback and distill it into simple tools.

"It's easy to overlook the importance of tools that are simple. Being easy to use is an underserved need. Many things are more complex than they should be," Dan adds.

The dashboard is updated.

The most obvious change this quarter is the way we've organized the dashboard. Instead of having all options available at the top and the options separated according to feature, we took a step back and said, 'Why not organize everything according to what you're working on in the moment?'.

Based on our own experience and talking with people 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, managing the members of your site, and growing revenues. Dan explains: "Everything you're doing as a membership operator is going be categorized into one of those four buckets. So we thought that was a logical way to organize the features of ."

Website

This is designed for those who wish to develop a membership-based website. Historically you may have needed to utilize WordPress or some other custom. Today, you are able to utilize our website builder natively. This is the first step in creating the website in the first place as well as customizing the appearance. as well as setting up your public-facing information. "You're creating the place for your audience to go to," adds Dan.

Content

The second task is publishing the content. The modern day membership company typically involves publishing exclusive content for members such as posts, emails or podcasts. "The second job is creating contents or sharing special benefits - it's about creating the value the members receive from joining your club," Dan explains.

Members

The final task is to manage your members. "Part of running a successful membership is having a really close connection to your members which is a major reasons why they're backing you," says Dan. It's important to provide customer service to these people, including knowing their past relationship with you, and troubleshooting the issues that are not working properly.

Revenue

"If you're building a membership website 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. The section on discounting is in order to increase retention and run acquisition campaigns, plus referral programs.

"We've introduced a variety of new features throughout the years. In the absence of a system for organizing them, it was making it too hard to locate things, particularly those who were new. We wanted to lessen the time to learn," concludes Dan. It provides a more logical framework for us going forward when we introduce new features, as we'll have more intuitive places to set things up - which makes it much easier for users to locate and explore this new feature, and you'll be able to benefit from the features right away.

Website builder

The other major change this quarter was around the website builder. "We'd started to build these new tools last year and wanted to make sure that we were introduction of this capability but not disrupt the previous techniques of utilizing it ," says Dan. "We put ourselves in the shoes of someone coming to specifically wanting to develop an online membership site."

Now, the process of joining and registering for the product is much faster; we provide users with a more sophisticated start point with standard options, plans for membership already made and the design of the website already built. The only thing you need to do is sign up your Stripe account and you could start your site in a matter of just a few minutes.

Now, the editing user experience resembles the modern WYSIWYG (What It is You see Is What You get) website builder, directly interacting with the membership site. "You can type directly on the screen, drag elements around, and hide or display elements and can see what it looks at a moment's notice," says Dan.

Dan says that this is just the start for future website-builder enhancements: "We had to redo the foundation of everything in this way; now we can step on 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 the basic block of content as well as a banner title block that can be text or an image that has buttons. Now this framework exists, we're working on new block types, creating different types of content on the page. It will allow you to place them on the page and you can customize who can see the content based on which members are enrolled to.

Dan says: "It's everything you need to create a fully-featured website for membership. The site is fully connected to subscriptions. The membership component is at the center of everything." What you get is a web-building experience that's easier to start with as well as more user-friendly and more in-line with what people nowadays expect.

Conclusion: A brand new method to utilize

"We have described previously as the glue which holds your group together," Dan explains. Dan. "But if the machine is essential to your business having components bonded together doesn't always sound like something positive. There are times when you need that they are welded just like steel. But you would like that it be the same component, and not two pieces that are bonded together" Dan says. Dan. Two pieces were built in tandem and joined from the very beginning.

If you're a person with an incredibly successful WordPress website or millions of users on your MailChimp list that you'd like to add subscriptions rather than start again, that's still perfectly feasible. We still offer the tool that allows you to plug in and connect it. We don't believe it's the only way people want to build anymore.

" is for people who want a place where their members can come together online, a hub for their audience and their users. In the present, all you like, from creating a look that reflects your brand and having everything you have to share at one location, is what you can make with it ," Dan concludes.