The sophistication of creators today is off the charts

The Memberful platform is growing: we’re making some significant additions to our core offering. Our Head of Product explains the thought process behind the latest development and how it fits into our design mantra.

“I think the people that thrive the most on Memberful are those that really see membership as a core part of their business,” starts Dan Carson, our Head of Product here at Memberful. “It's not an afterthought: it's for people who are serious about it.

“Our customers are some of the best-run membership businesses on the web,” he adds. Part of the reason for this is that Memberful was not designed to be a ‘bolt-on’; it’s supposed to be there from day one of your membership strategy. “That's a real difference from some other products out there, which focus on helping you design a website rather than specifically building an online membership experience,” Dan explains.

He continues to say that it’s crucial to choose a product that has the membership approach built into its very DNA. “Memberful has everything you need to run a membership business, in terms of building your audience, managing those subscriptions, running growth strategies like retention and referral discount programs and reducing churn.”

One of our new functionalities: free member registration

The development here is that the Memberful offering is expanding, to become “more of an all-in-one solution” he explains. This includes features like building a website – that you can regularly publish content to – plus sending emails to all of your audience. Dan adds that these were always something you could do to some degree; now it's a core offering.

“Memberful now provides a great solution for people in the early stages of building their audience and are looking for a single tool to do it all, as well as the flexibility and power to integrate with external tools as your needs mature along with your business,” he explains.

Creators today

So why the new offering? “The sophistication of creators today is off the charts in terms of growth strategies, how to offer discounts, referral programs, retention bonuses and reducing churn,” says Dan.

Creators today not only publish incredible content but excel at business management

“There are a huge number of things that you can do with Memberful that you can't do with other products. The level of expectation they have for the tools they use to run and grow their business is a lot higher. If membership is a core part of what you're trying to do, Memberful is an excellent option,” Dan adds.

Dan notes that there are still some structural differences between Memberful's approach and how many other players in the industry work. Here at Memberful, we give you complete control over your own Stripe account. This could mean more complexity in some situations but, “for a lot of businesses it’s worth it, because they have full control. If a member needs support, you can do something about it immediately,” Dan continues.

“If at any point in the future you need to move on from Memberful, you can take all of your data with you – just disconnect your Stripe account and that's it. You don't owe us anything and we’ll do everything we can to make the transition smooth,” Dan explains. The Memberful mantras of giving creators full ownership and independence are as true as ever.

Our design philosophy

“We design and build Memberful in a way that allows us to stay connected with our customers and to make sure we’re shipping real value as quickly as possible,” starts Dan. “Rather than devote months or years at a time towards speculative bets, we ship multiple features and improvements every six weeks, all year.”

“This allows us to respond to feedback quickly, or to double-back to an existing feature to add new capabilities if we’re seeing strong adoption. At the same time, we spend an inordinate amount of time ensuring that we’re building the highest quality software we can. We want Memberful to be the most reliable, easy-to-use, delightful piece of software you interact with on a regular basis.”

Building a new free registration in the Memberful dashboard

He explains that the customer happiness and product teams are going to keep their collective ears close to the ground in terms of understanding how it's working for people. “We’ll be collecting their feedback and using that to help decide where to go next and how to make it better.

He concludes that we already have some strong thoughts about what the next iterations will probably entail, but our own knowledge can only get us so far. And so we can’t wait to hear from you, our present and potential customers, to see what you think of the new way to use Memberful – and we look forward to working with you to develop the latest version of Memberful and to create something that you’ll love. “I'm excited!” Dan smiles.