Anyone use Ghost's new members feature?
I've been looking into community building and the more that I research it the more I'm liking Ghost's new membership functionality. It's in beta, so that's scary, but seems really robust.
Anyone use it and have feedback on it? Curious to hear your thoughts.
i trust the ghost team... they've proven themselves time and time again. i think this product is going to be amazing!
Btw, we at PeerBoard.io are exploring an opportunity to integrate with Ghost so if you are interested in having a community board in a Ghost setup, can you please comment here or DM me.
Definitely interested in this in the long run. What would you say the value of PeerBoard is over a private Facebook Group?
Private Facebook group lives in an external silo and cannot be deeply integrated into your existing product/solution. That combined with Facebook mixing your content with ads/etc in the feed makes them a very bad choice for any sophisticated community that may expand into multiple layers of experience. Mighty Networks can be a better product for such a case, but it still is very siloed.
With Ghost or WordPress you can create a much richer experience you control and then embed us as a discussion board that looks and feels like a natural part of your product or service, with zero extra friction.
Well argued! I'll definitely check out PeerBoard more once I have a bigger community.
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If what you mean is how PeerBoard may work with Ghost, there's a plugin that can be installed into your Ghost setup to enable a new section of your website, showing a discussion board we power. Similar to what we already do with WordPress.
I’m trying to set up Ghost for a newlsetter too.
I’m running into a bunch of issues (no custom theme, emails aren't being sent, etc..) I’m about three days into it now and I think I might throw the towel in and try use Substack or Revue.
The main concern I have here is that you're tying your membership stack to your CMS. At Pico (trypico.com) we really strongly believe that the CMS should be a plugin to your CRM/Stripe stack, not the other way around. (Same goes with your email newsletters, etc.).
In other words: anchor your business around your free and paid users. Everything else should be modular.
Interesting approach–is it effectively buddypress, but for any system? And then can I use it as a newsletter, or is it sync with other newsletter services?
Yes but a bit more since our auth system is completely independent of the CMS. And yes, the newsletter signup part is integrated with payments/checkout/login (something we found to be key for checkout conversion – no reason to 'register' users twice).
I used the membership pricing for a time when I started my blog, then I ripped it out when my readers told me that seeing the price turned them off.
I use the free membership functionality to hide higher value posts to my members, it's almost like a hosted lite-ish lead magnet.
This is my blog worldclassremote.com I use a modified version of the premium Penang ghost theme, my blog is featured on their sales page.
Awesome, your site looks great! And makes sense. I actually started hacking away and heavily modified the default free membership theme, Lyra.
I was able to get pricing to be enabled, but it doesn't show unless I want it to show on subscription events. If you create custom pages and use redirects, you can get the best of both worlds. I'm going to run this basically as a privated Substack newsletter.
You can check out my site here gritlist.co and my modified Lyra theme on github
I'm curious too!
Hi there! I’m using the member features for only newsletters at the moment. What use cases do you need?
Yeah, that's what I'm planning on doing too, while having a digital archive. What's your newsletter? Any issues with the newsletter functionality I should be wary of?
Builder’s Report
I’ve moved the small archive there manually. If you had markdown texts already then it would have been faster. Just that like many things in Ghost its not obvious at first. There also doesn’t seem to be extensive stat tracking. Overall I enjoy the flexibility of the editor and I don’t really need tracking much right now.
Awesome, thanks!
👀 I'm curious too. We're planning to integrate MemberSpace with Ghost in the future so super interested to hear which parts of their native experience people aren't happy with...
I was seriously considering Ghost because of their Membership feature but I put it on hold for now. Here's what I don't like:
The only possible way to benefit from Paid Members is to connect a Stripe account. I don't have a registered business entity at the moment + I'm in a country that is not supported by Stripe.
Each post in the blog may have three access levels: for everyone, for subscribers, and for paid members only. The problem is that "for subscribers" can only be activated together with paid members. For me, it doesn't make sense because my readers will still see the Paid Membership pricing table. And the worst part is that it won't work at all because my Stripe is not connected. I imagine it will confuse my readers a lot.
I don't like the way they implemented the Newsletter feature. Whenever I write a blog post and want to notify my readers about it, they receive the whole blog post in their inbox instead of a short message with a link to proceed to my blog.
They don't have native comments functionality. I tried to integrate Disqus but didn't succeed. I wanted comments to be visible depending on the blog post visibility/access. I'm not a technical person so I couldn't solve it.
Hope it helps!
Awesome, thanks for the write up!
Let me know if I can help out at all if you do decide to use Ghost down the road! I'm technical and have learned a ton about how to get it to do my bidding over the past few days :D
Thank you for offering your help, appreciate it! :)
Re: point #2 – yep, I'm pretty sure there's a workaround for it. But all they need to do for users like me is to introduce one more "Enable subscribers only" toggle in the Settings 🤓
Ward, how far off is this? I'm dying to use ghost to power a blog for bettersheets, which is now using Memberspace.
Hard to saw Andrew 😬. Curious though - why aren't you using Ghost's native membership functionality for that?
In short: Hard to put into place their membership program.
Long:
I created news.influenceweekly.co with their $29/month plan. and I had a hard time morphing the template into my needs. I wanted to put a few searchable database pages behind a paywall, it took me a week to figure out how to use the theme to do that. And every change I made I was waiting minimum 15 minutes to upload and see changes. It was 100x harder than just doing plain html.
I ended up using ghost for a blog. It's fine for that. And I just noticed too that I'd be charged way way more for over 1k subscribers than I'm comfortable playing. I have 6k free subscribers already and am paying mailchimp to deliver emails. With ghost I'd get much less reporting and still have to pay mailgun, plus ghost (pro)
For Better Sheets, I went with plain html and your MemberSpace. It's working exactly like I want to work. It's just a Javascript line and using your backend. You've implemented all the off site things I need.
Your cart abandoment emails have made me money! (Thank You!)
To use ghost, I'd have to spin up a database. As far as I can tell. Or connect it with zapier, another monthly charge.
I am happy using ghost as a blog, for now. And looking again at the member feature later.
Not sure how technical you are @AndrewKamphey, but I'm new to using Ghost and had some frustrations too. That being said, now that I understand it better, I'm really liking it.
Monday I went through the painful process of setting up Ghost on AWS (I wrote a tutorial if you're interested). The free AWS tier means it's pretty cheap to run on a monthly basis.
This also means I don't have issues with 1k+ subscribers etc.
Today, I heavily modified the theme to do exactly what you mentioned–a newsletter behind a paywall. The theme I modified is on my Github if you want to try it out.
Also my newsletter Ghost site is gritlist.co if you want to see the theme in action (or subscribe for personal growth hacks!)
Glad to hear we're making you money Andrew 💪. So just FYI, technically you should be able to use MemberSpace with Ghost right now, it's just that we haven't tested it, don't have help docs, and haven't trained our support team on it. Since we're just a JS snippet added to the head of the site I don't see why it wouldn't work 🤷♂️ So if you want to give it a shot go ahead. Shoot me an email if you run into an issue: ward@memberspace.com
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Keep me posted on how it goes! I'm curious.
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Was your experience great? They have improved this feature a lot!
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What are the options that you'd prefer? I set up Ghost with self hosting on AWS so I don't feel too locked in. Because I want to do a newsletter I was comparing against Substack, which definitely locks you in.
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Nah, I actually got started from scratch haha. And yeah, egorevs does have a few valid points.
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Come check us out (trypico.com)! A little more plug and play than Memberstack.