The value of simple tools and how software development is like jazz

“For us, membership is at the core of everything we do. You can't just moonlight as a membership; it has to be a focus,” starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product. “If you're serious about membership, we think Memberful has the best combination of features. While we started with WordPress as the only entry point to those features, that’s no longer the case.”

Dan explains we're not removing any of Memberful’s original capabilities, such as integrating with WordPress: “If that's how someone wants to build their membership site, it's just as possible as it was before – we’re just offering an easier on-ramp now.”

Streamlining the Memberful navigation

“There are a bunch of people out there who are using third-party tools, but not necessarily because they want to. It's because that felt like the only option,” Dan adds. “People maybe have WordPress, but they've just made a fairly basic website, or they have MailChimp but they don't even use 50% of the features.”

These people simply need a way to have people sign up and then be able to email them, without the fluff a cloud enterprise edition. “Maybe they signed up for Mailchimp in 2014 and so they still use it because that's where they are. But are they still the target market for where Mailchimp is headed?”

“We think there are people out there who, if it was easy enough, they would simplify all these different tools into a single place and have it be more tightly integrated – as long as it still did all the things they needed it to do,” Dan says.

Our email tools will have all the features that you need. He adds: “We're not trying to serve enterprise marketing teams. We're trying to serve creators who want an affordable and simple way to communicate and publish content to their audience.”

For us, it's less about the products you have, and more about what you are trying to do. If you want people to be able to sign up to a newsletter, we can make that easier and cheaper because now you don't have to pay for external tools.

It's dependent on everyone's individual use case, of course. Some people want the ability to piece together several integrations but others worry that it's more expensive and harder to manage, especially as a single operator. “Previously we were kind of only building for one of those groups. Now we're building for both,” Dan says.

Managing member access to Posts and Pages

For a certain type of customer, the 2014 version of MailChimp is actually what you want; that's the one you fell in love with. “If I want a simple website, I may not want to use WordPress. Even Squarespace can be overkill for a subscription-based website. And it's not tightly integrated with membership at the core,” Dan adds. So we thought, ‘What if you had a product that was entirely designed around that?’.

That's our mindset for podcasting or online communities too. “We're not going to be rebuilding Libsyn. We're going to be building the basic version that's easy to use and does 80% of what you care about, integrated with all your other stuff, in one place for the same price,” Dan believes.

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

Adding new features is not necessarily a bad thing, but it becomes a bad thing for customers if the target customer they are building for is no longer you. “People are hungry for software that does just what they need and isn't trying to be any more than that. Like in jazz, sometimes it's the notes you don't play!” Dan laughs.

Making something simple is actually quite hard. Dan agrees: “It’s about paring down to the essence of something. The easy thing for us would be to just throw everything on there and make it a setting and customers can find it in a settings panel somewhere.” But we don't think that's what our customers are looking for. Instead, we want to synthesize all of our experience over a decade of building membership tools, incorporating feedback we've learned from customers, and distill that down into easy-to-use tools.

“It’s easy to underestimate the value of simple tools. Being easy to use is an underserved need. Most things are more complicated than they should be,” Dan adds.

The new dashboard

The most obvious change this quarter is how we have reorganized the Memberful dashboard. Rather than having every option visible at the top level, with the capabilities organized by feature, we stepped back and said, ‘Why not orient everything around what you're trying to do at any given time?’.

The new Memberful dashboard

Based on our experience, and talking with people who run membership businesses, you're usually doing something that falls into one of four jobs: building and designing your site, publishing exclusive content, managing your members, or growing revenue. Dan explains: “Everything you're doing as a membership operator is going to fall into one of those four buckets. So we thought that was a logical way to organize the features of Memberful.”

Website

Memberful is for people who want to build a membership website. Historically you may have needed to use WordPress or something custom. Now you can use our native website builder. This first section is for building the site in the first place, customizing how it looks. and setting up your public-facing content. “You're creating the place for your audience to go to,” adds Dan.

Content

The second task is publishing content. A modern-day membership business usually entails publishing exclusive content for members, such as emails, posts, downloads, and podcasts. “The second job is creating content or sharing exclusive benefits – it’s about creating the ‘value’ that members get from your membership,” Dan explains.

Members

The third task is managing your members. “Part of running a successful membership is having a really tight connection with your audience – that's part of the reason why they're supporting you,” says Dan.

Member management - downloading invoices

"You need to be able to provide customer service to these people, including understanding their history with you, and troubleshooting if things aren't working correctly," he adds.

Revenue

“If you're building a membership website with Memberful, you're looking to create revenue and there's a million things involved in that: setting up your plans, understanding what to charge, and monitoring the health of your business to see what's working,” says Dan. This section includes discounting in order to increase retention and run acquisition campaigns, plus referral programs.

“We've added a lot of features over the years. Not having them organized was making it too hard to find things, especially for new people. We wanted to reduce the learning curve,” concludes Dan. This provides a better framework for us going forward as we add more new features, as we’ll have more intuitive places to put things – this will make it easier for you to find and discover these additions so you can get value out of them immediately.

Website builder

The second big development this quarter was around the website builder. “We’d started to build these new tools last year and we were trying to thread the needle of introducing this new capability, but not disrupt the previous ways of using Memberful,” says Dan. “We put ourselves in the shoes of someone coming to Memberful specifically looking to build a membership website.”

Now, the process of signing up and getting into the product is much faster; we provide you a much more advanced starting position, with default settings, membership plans already 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 Memberful website builder

Now, the editing experience is that of a modern WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website builder, directly interacting with your membership website. “You can type directly on the page, move things around, hide and show elements, and you can see what it looks like immediately,” says Dan.

Dan explains that this is just the start for future website-builder developments: “We had to redo the foundation of everything in this way; now we can step on the gas in terms of adding the new capabilities.”

We’ve introduced the concept of blocks, which are essentially content modules. Right now we have a basic content block and a title banner block that can be text or an image with a button. Now this framework exists, we're working on new block types, creating different types of content on the page. You will be able to arrange those on the page and you can customize who can see them based on what membership plan people are subscribed to.

Building with blocks

Dan adds: “It’s everything you need to build a full-featured membership site. And it's all integrated with subscriptions. Membership is at the core of it all.” The end result is a website-building experience that is easier to start with, more intuitive, and more in-line with what people nowadays expect.

Conclusion: A new way to use Memberful

“We have described Memberful in the past as the glue that holds your membership together,” recalls Dan. “But if a machine is integral to your business, having parts glued together doesn't always sound like a positive. Sometimes you want them to be welded together, like steel – you want it to be the same part, not two parts glued together,” says Dan. These two pieces that have been built at the same time: membership was integral from the beginning.

If you're someone with a thriving WordPress site or a million people on your MailChimp list and you want to use Memberful to simply add subscriptions rather than start again, that’s still perfectly possible. We still offer the tool to drop in, to piece it together. But we don't think that's the only way people want to build anymore.

“Memberful is for people who want a place for their people to come together online, a hub for their audience and their members. Nowadays, everything you would want, in terms of making it look like your brand and having all of your content all in one place, is what you can create with Memberful,” Dan concludes.