MemberSpace

MemberSpace now directly integrates via SSO with the modern and beautiful forum community software Circle.so!

Whenever your members are logged into your website (via MemberSpace) they will also be logged into your Circle community.

Here's our help doc for more info: https://help.memberspace.com/article/215-how-to-set-up-circle-community-forum

You can now invite multiple admins to your MemberSpace account. If you have multiple websites connected you can actually invite admins to each site individually - which is great if you're running multiple membership teams or you're an agency doing MemberSpace installs for clients!

Here is more info from our help doc: https://help.memberspace.com/article/204-managing-multiple-site-admins

Duda was our #1 CMS on the waitlist so it naturally made sense to get this done. After exploring their platform more I was actually really impressed with their UX and focus on agencies and teams. When doing a trial run of MemberSpace there everything was impressively easy to set up because their controls and buttons were all so intuitive 👏.

WordPress is the largest website CMS in the world 😳 They have something like 30+% of all websites... so clearly we needed to be here. The problem is there are a TON of membership plugins on WP already but one common flaw we read and saw was a lack of high quality support. Our support team is our #1 feature and the thing most customers love about us . So we knew we had an opportunity here. Also WordPress was our most requested CMS integration so it was sort of a no-brainer 😄.

Wix is another one of the largest website build CMS platforms out there. They have been around a while and have a ton of features and apps. We had explored their existing membership solution (which was native) and it was SUPER limited so again it made sense to launch here.

After launching on Webflow back in June, we wanted to keep our momentum going and continue opening up our platform to other CMS software. We realized Weebly was a large platform with many live websites and pretty weak existing membership solutions so it made sense to launch here. Also the types of folks using Weebly were definitely more on the non-technical end of the pool which is fine with us since we're really focused on helping non-technical and nocode entrepreneurs 🤓.

We also added an option during onboarding for people to choose Custom HTML which is a catch all for any CMS we're not supporting or if folks are using their own custom system or a static site (like Jekyll).

Thanks to an email newsletter from our friends at Earnest Capital, we found Omer Khan who runs https://saasclub.io and The SaaS Podcast. He's now our head of marketing and doing a great job! It was amazing to be able to find someone of this caliber to help our team continue growing. If anyone is curious here is the job post page we created: https://www.memberspace.com/memberspace-head-of-marketing/

After a brief negotiation period we took funding from Earnest Capital. We still consider ourselves 95% bootstrapped since we didn't actually need the funding.

The reason we took it though was for the amazing mentorship network Earnest provides (https://earnestcapital.com/earnest-mentorship/). We also liked the idea of being with a group of like-minded folks who were also on the software journey with us - the initial Earnest Capital cohort of investment companies.

For my partner Ryan and I, we've built MemberSpace into a significant small business but we're figuring things out as we go since neither of us has experience at this level. It gives great peace of mind knowing everyone involved in Earnest has our backs and is there for us whenever we have questions or challenges.

Obviously taking money isn't for everyone and doesn't always make sense, but for us we know it was the right decision and it's already paying off 💪.

Up until this point, MemberSpace was only officially available on Squarespace. Technically it worked on any CMS or website but we didn't have help docs and our support wasn't trained on anything outside of Squarespace. That changed today when we opened the doors to the growing Webflow community :) We ended up launching on all the major CMS platforms shortly after this including Weebly, Wix, WordPress, and even have a Custom HTML option now.

I love listening to podcasts and figured it was a great medium for sharing the success and challenges other membership site founders have faced. We initially started by interviewing MemberSpace customers but eventually expanded to include anyone who had run a successful membership business. We figured that made sense since everyone has stories that could be helpful to other regardless of the membership software they are using.