Terms

"For us, it's a matter of keeping membership at the core of everything we do. It's not possible to juggle the idea of member; it needs to be the primary focus of your business," starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. "If there's a serious interest in establishing a membership, we think has the best combination of features. While we started with WordPress as the sole way to access these capabilities, this isn't the situation."

Dan clarifies that we're not taking away 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 possible to do it as in the past - we're giving them a more straightforward on-ramp."

"There are many individuals using third-party tools However, it's not always because they want to. It's because that felt like the only choice," Dan adds. "People might have WordPress however they've created a basic site or use MailChimp but they don't even utilize 50% of its features."

They just need a way to have people sign up, and be able to email them without all the bafflement of a cloud enterprise version. "Maybe they had signed up with 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 going?"

"We consider there to be individuals out there that, if it was easy enough, would be able to reduce all the applications into one spot and make it more tightly integrated - as in the sense that it could still do everything they required it to do," Dan says.

Our tools for email will include all the features you need. The author adds: "We're not trying to help enterprise marketing teams. We're trying to serve 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 that you're using, but much more about what you're striving to achieve. If you want people to be able to sign up to a newsletter, we can simplify and make it cheaper since you no longer need to purchase additional tools.

This is dependent on the individual usage scenario, naturally. Certain people would like the capability to connect multiple integrations but others worry that it's more expensive and harder to handle, especially when it's only one operator. "Previously we'd just developing for one of these organizations. Now we're building for both," Dan says.

If you're a particular type of customer the new version of MailChimp will be what you want; that's the version you fell in love with. "If I'm looking for a basic website, I may not want to use WordPress. It's true that Squarespace can be overkill to run a subscription-based site. And it's not tightly integrated with membership at the base," Dan adds. Then we asked ourselves: 'What if you had a product completely created around it idea?'.

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

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

The addition of new features isn't necessarily a bad thing However, it is a bad thing for customers if the target customer the company is building it for has changed and is not you. "People want products that do exactly what they need and isn't looking to become more than this. As with jazz, there are times when it's not the notes that you perform!" Dan laughs.

The process of making something easy is quite hard. Dan is in agreement: "It's about paring down to what's important in. One of the easiest things for us to do is add everything to the site and make it an option and let customers locate it on a settings panel somewhere." We don't think that's what our customers want. Instead, we'd like to synthesize all of our experiences over the last decade of building the tools for membership, including the feedback from our customers and distilling that to simple-to-use tools.

"It's easy to overlook the power of basic tools. Being easy to use is an unmet need. Many things are more complex than they ought to be." Dan adds.

The dashboard is updated.

The biggest change we've made this quarter is the manner in which we've organized the dashboard. Instead of having each option accessible at the top as well as the features divided by feature, we went back and asked, "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 generally, your work is something which falls under one of four jobs that include designing and building your website, releasing exclusive content, directing the activities of the members of your site, and growing the revenue. Dan clarifies: "Everything you're doing as an operator of membership is likely be categorized into the four categories. Therefore, we decided that this was a logical method of organizing the functions of ."

Website

It is intended for users who would like to build a membership website. It was common to make use of WordPress or a customized. Now you can use our native website builder. The first part is about designing the site in the first place, customizing how it looks. And setting up your publicly-facing web content. "You're creating the place your users can and visit," adds Dan.

Content

The other is to publish content. A modern-day membership business usually involves publishing exclusive content for members such as emails, posts, downloads, and podcasts. "The second job is creating contents or sharing special advantages - it's about making the value members get from your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing your membership. "Part of managing a profitable membership is having a really close connection to your members and that's a big reason why they're supporting you," says Dan. It is essential be able to give customer service the people who are members, such as being aware of their relationship of working with you, as well as troubleshooting the issues that are not working properly.

Revenue

"If you're creating a membership website with , you're trying to make money and there are a lot of things involved in that: setting up your plans and determining what you should charge and evaluating the performance of your organization to find what's working," says Dan. This is a section that covers discounting for retention, and running 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 caused it to be difficult to find the right things, particularly for people who are new to the site. We wanted to lessen the amount of learning required," concludes Dan. It provides a more logical framework to us as we add more exciting features. We'll have more intuitive places to set things up - which makes it much easier for you to find and discover the new features, so that you can get value out of them immediately.

Builder for websites

Another major development in this quarter was around the web builder. "We'd begun to develop the new tools in 2011 and wanted to get the needle moving towards 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 looking to build an online membership site."

In the present, enrolling and joining the service is a lot easier; we give our customers with an advanced starting position, with default configurations, membership plans that have been created and the structure of the website already built. All you have to do is set up your Stripe account and you could launch your website in minutes.

The editing process is similar to a modern WYSIWYG (What It is You see is What You Receive) web-based builder that is directly interacting with your membership website. "You are able to type directly on the page, move objects around, conceal and show elements, and you are able to see the layout at a moment's notice," says Dan.

Dan states that this is just the start for future website-builder enhancements: "We had to redo the foundation of everything in this manner; Now we're able to kick off the gas in terms of adding the new capabilities."

The concept has been introduced in blocks. They are basically content modules. We have at present an element of content that is basic and a title banner block that could be textual or an image with a button. Now this framework exists, we're working on creating new blocks, and creating various types of content on the page. The user will be able to organize them on the page and you are able to control who sees the content based on which membership plan people are subscribed to.

Dan says: "It's everything you need for a complete membership site. The site is fully linked to subscriptions. The membership component is at the center of the whole." The result is a site-building experience that's easier to get started easier to navigate, more intuitive and in line with the expectations of modern users.

Conclusion: A new way to make use of

"We have described in the past as the glue that holds the members together" Dan recalls. Dan. "But when a machine is integral to your company having components bonded together doesn't always sound like an ideal situation. In some cases, you'd like that they are welded just like steel. But you need it to be one piece, not two separate pieces that are bonded together" Dan says. Dan. These two pieces that were built in tandem: membership was integral from the beginning.

If you have your own successful WordPress site or a million people on your MailChimp subscriber list, and want to just increase subscriptions instead of starting all over again, 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 option people have to construct anymore.

" is for those seeking a platform for their community to gather together on the internet, as a central point to their customers and members. In the present, all you like, from designing it to look and feel like your business and having all of your content all together could be what you make with it ," Dan concludes.