Terms

"For us, membership is an integral part of what we do. There's no way to lightly offer an individual member; it needs to be a focus," starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. "If are serious about joining We believe that this is the best combination of features. We started out with WordPress as the only entry point to those options, this is no longer the situation."

Dan says that we're not going to eliminate all of's capabilities, such as integration with WordPress: "If that's how one wants to create their member-only site, it's as possible as it was prior to us - we're simply giving them a more straightforward on-ramp."

Streamlining navigation

"There are lots of users making use of third-party software, but not necessarily simply because they'd like. It's because that felt like the only choice," Dan adds. "People may already have WordPress, but they've just made a fairly basic website or have MailChimp but they don't even use 50% of the functions."

They just need a method to make users sign up, and later be able to send them emails without all the faff of a cloud enterprise version. "Maybe you signed them up for Mailchimp in 2014 and so they are still using it as that's where they are. Are they really an ideal target for the direction Mailchimp is headed?"

"We consider there to be people out there who were if it were easy enough, they would simplify all these different tools into a single place and make it more tightly integrated - as long as it still did all the things they needed it to do," Dan says.

Our email tools will have the functionality you want. The author adds: "We're not trying to help enterprise marketing teams. We're trying to help authors who need a cost-effective and straightforward method to share information and publish content to their audience."

It's for us not so much about the tools you're selling, and more about what you are striving to achieve. If you'd like users to join newsletters, we'll help you make it easier and less expensive since you no longer require the expense of other tools.

This is dependent on the individual use case, of course. Many people desire the ability to piece together several combinations, while others are concerned that it's more expensive and harder to handle, particularly when it's a single operator. "Previously we were kind of just developing for one of these organizations. Now we're building for both groups," Dan says.

Managing member access on Posts and Pages

For certain types of client, the 2014 version of MailChimp is actually the one you're looking for; it's the version that you've fallen in love with. "If I'm looking for a basic site, I might not want to use WordPress. In fact, Squarespace isn't the best choice to run a subscription-based site. And it's not tightly connected to membership at its core," Dan adds. So we thought, 'What could you do if you created a product that was entirely created around it idea?'.

We're the same way about podcasting and online communities as well. "We're not going to be rebuilding Libsyn. We'll be building the first version, which is simple to use and does the majority of what you need, along with your other tools all in one location for the same cost," Dan believes.

It appears to be a law of nature that the more time software has for, the more eager it is to grow. It is always looking to get increasingly complex and complicated.

This isn't necessarily bad However, it is an issue for the customers when the person they are building to isn't you anymore. "People are hungry for products that do exactly what they want and isn't trying to be any more than that. In jazz, often it's the notes you don't have to play!" Dan laughs.

Making something simple is actually quite hard. Dan says: "It's about paring down to its essence. One of the easiest things for us would be to simply put everything in there and create an element and then customers could locate it on an area where they can set it up." However, we do not believe that's what our customers are looking for. Instead, we'd like to synthesize all of our experiences over the last decade of developing membership software, taking customer feedback, and distill that down into easy-to-use tools.

"It's easy to underestimate the importance of tools that are simple. Easy to use tools are an unmet need. The majority of things are much more complicated than they ought to be." Dan adds.

The dashboard is updated.

The biggest change we've made this quarter is the way we've rearranged the dashboard. Rather than having every option available at the top as well as the features organized according to feature, we took a step back and said, 'Why not arrange everything around the things you're trying to do at any given time?'.

The new dashboard

Based on our experience, as well as talking to people who run membership businesses typically, you're doing work that is a part of the four categories including designing and building your site and publishing content exclusive to your site, managing your members, or increasing the revenue. Dan says: "Everything you're doing as an operator of membership is likely to fall into one of these four categories. Therefore, we decided that this was an appropriate method of organizing the functions of ."

Website

is for people who want to create a membership site. It was common to make use of WordPress or some other customized. Today, you are able to make use of our built-in website builders. The first area is dedicated to designing the site from scratch and then modifying the look. And setting up your publicly-facing information. "You're creating the place for people to go to," adds Dan.

Content

The second task is publishing the content. Modern-day membership businesses typically includes publishing exclusive content to members, such as emails, posts, downloads, as well as podcasts. "The next step is to develop contents or sharing special benefits. It's all about creating the 'value' that customers get out of your membership," Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing your membership. "Part of managing a profitable membership is to have a intimate relationship with your customers and that's a big reason why they're supporting your business," says Dan.

Member management - downloading invoices

"You need to be able provide excellent the best customer service for these individuals, including understanding their history with you, and troubleshooting if things aren't working properly," he adds.

Revenue

"If you're creating a membership website with , you're looking to generate revenue, and there are a million things involved in the process of creating your plan and determining what you should charge, and monitoring the health of your company to determine 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 functions over time. The lack of organization made it difficult to find things, especially for people who are new to the site. We wanted to reduce the learning curve," concludes Dan. This provides a better framework to us in the future as we develop new features, as we'll be able to more easily place things. This 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.

Web Builder

Another major development in this quarter revolved around the builder for websites. "We'd began to create the new tools in 2011 and we were trying to thread the needle of introducing this new capability, however, we didn't want to disrupt existing techniques of using it ," says Dan. "We put ourselves in the position of someone coming to specifically wanting to develop the membership-based website."

Now, the process of joining and registering for the program is much more efficient We offer you a much more advanced starting place, including basic options, plans for membership already designed and the layout of the website already built. All you have to do is create your Stripe account, and then you can begin your website within just a few minutes.

The website builder

Now, the editing user experience is similar to a modern WYSIWYG (What It is You see Is What You Receive) site builder. It is capable of directly interacting with the membership site. "You can directly type on the page, move elements around, and hide or display elements and will be able to view what the page looks like immediately," says Dan.

Dan states that this is merely the start for future website-builder improvements: "We had to redo the foundation of everything in this way; Now we're able to kick off the gas in terms of developing the latest features."

We've discussed the idea of blocks. Blocks are in essence content modules. Right now we have a basic content block and a title banner which could be textual or an image accompanied by buttons. This framework is in use, and we're working on new blocks, and creating various types of content to be displayed on the page. The user will be able to place them in the right order on the page, and will be able to customize who is able to view them based on what subscription plan the user is signed up to.

Building using blocks

Dan adds: "It's everything you need to build a full-featured website for membership. The site is fully linked to subscriptions. Membership is at the core of it all." What you get is a website-building experience that's easier to get started, more intuitive, and is more in tune with the expectations of modern users.

Final: A fresh way to use

"We have described it in the past the glue that holds your members together," recalls Dan. "But when the machine is essential to your company and has parts that are glued isn't always an ideal situation. Sometimes you want the parts to be joined as steel. You would like that it be one piece, not two separate pieces joined," adds Dan. The two parts have been built at the same time: membership was integral at the start.

If you're someone with a thriving WordPress website or millions of people who are on your MailChimp list that you'd like to create subscriptions, rather than starting again, that's still perfectly feasible. There's still a tool available for you to add subscribers, and then piece it together. However, we do not believe that's the only option people have to construct anymore.

" is a place for those who want a place where their members can come together on the internet, as a central point to their customers and members. In the present, all you want, in terms of making it look like your brand and having all your information together, is what you can create with ," Dan concludes.